Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought
- 2 Nostalgia and Commemoration
- 3 A Time to Remember: 1937–1962
- 4 The Legend Business: 1962–1996
- 5 Songs of the Lincoln Brigade: Music, Commemoration, and Appropriation
- 6 Breathing Memory
- 7 Epilogue: Patriot Acts
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Breathing Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Fields of Action, Fields of Thought
- 2 Nostalgia and Commemoration
- 3 A Time to Remember: 1937–1962
- 4 The Legend Business: 1962–1996
- 5 Songs of the Lincoln Brigade: Music, Commemoration, and Appropriation
- 6 Breathing Memory
- 7 Epilogue: Patriot Acts
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I want to show how different the past was. I want to show that even when times were hard, people found ways to cope with what was happening and maybe resist it. I want people today to be able to connect with the past by looking at the tragedies and sufferings of the past, the cruelties and the hatefulness, the hope of the past, the love people had, and the beauty they had. They sought for power over each other, but they helped each other, too. They did things out of both love and fear— that's my message. Especially, I want to show that it could be different, that it was different and there are alternatives.
Natalie Zemon Davis Visions of HistoryInterpretive Communities/Communities of Memory
When Moe Fishman traveled to East Germany in 1961, he went as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. He was also a printer, a husband, a father, and an activist, but it was his identity as a Spanish Civil War veteran that brought him to the reunion and charged his experiences. When Bill Susman started to weep sitting on a bench in Spain in 1977, or when Nick Pappas cried as he was flying over a battlefield, it was their history as antifascist volunteers in Spain that brought on the emotion.
In a similar way, the strong responses of Hannah and Martha Olson in Italy, or those of the individuals who attend commemorative events in the United States year after year, all arise in relationship to a specific history, or specific interpretations of that history. The vast majority of those attending recent commemorative events were not volunteers, nor were most of them even alive during the Spanish Civil War, but their ability to assign value to that moment, for innumerable possible reasons, brings them into the room and shapes their responses. “We choose the history that we celebrate,” Peter Carroll told me. “There's a lot of histories. We could be celebrating Roosevelt who didn't intervene. […] That's a history. That's a valid history for some people. It's not our valid history because we’re radicals. We’re already out there.” Peter's “we” was referring to those who have organized and staged the modern commemorative process, but it could as easily refer to the commemorative audience in general.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Radical NostalgiaSpanish Civil War Commemoration in America, pp. 215 - 261Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005