Transatlantic Studies: enticing like everything that is transcendent and puzzling like all synthetic notions designated by compound terms. What is puzzling about this one is the reversal of the natural order of meaning. Instead of bearing the phrase's semantic weight, as substantives typically do, here the word “studies” serves as a kind of suffix, almost as a qualifier of the adjective “transatlantic,” which alone denotes the object under consideration. Practically dispensable from the viewpoint of ordinary communication, “studies” nonetheless determines the pragmatic life of the concept by qualifying the cognitive object (whatever is or counts as transatlantic) as subject to a regime of academic programmability. Performative in J.L. Austin's sense (1975), the term “studies,” when invoked by the appropriate authority, institutes a discipline at the same moment that it names it. As it opens the umbrella of disciplinary legitimacy, the term shifts the cognitive object to an adjectival, subordinate position, turning it into a modulation of the self-founding and self-maintaining academic enterprise. Furthermore, the adverbial or prepositional particle “trans” adds a secondary mark of qualification. This prefix, meaning “across” or “beyond,” comprises a sense of adventure, of pioneering, and in a cognitive context applies to technological feats, to research at the frontier of knowledge. This specific connotation accompanies the spatial one in such terms as “trans-lunar injection,” a mystifying phrase for a fuel operation designed to bring a spacecraft to the Moon. But the particle “trans” may also connote the hazard and the menace of disturbed natural law, social normativity, or psychic balance, as in “trans-fatty foods,” “transgenic” crops or bacteria, “transgender” sexualities, “trans-Allegheny lunatic asylum.”

In the early 1930s, Élie Richard remarked of Catalans, ‘This is a peasant race that is becoming conscious of modernity’ (313). Richard was one of many French writers who visited Barcelona between the beginning of the century and the Civil War, but only he was able to capture the gist of the city's transformation in one sentence. Today, of course, we would not use the term race to designate ethnicity. Instead we would use the word people. Even so, the gap between the cultural reality that stared Richard in the face and the reality that meets the eye today is enormous. At that time, Barcelona was still a Catalan city bound to its hinterland by familial ties and by the steady flow of people, foodstuffs, and manufactured goods that sustained its growth through an osmotic relationship between the capital city and the territory. Today, Barcelona relates to Catalonia in an ambivalent, superficial way. Its primary connection is no longer kinship, history, or language, but the motorway and the weekend residence. At variance are many aspects of social and political life, to the point that it is justified to speak of a change of paradigm and not only of scale. I hesitate to call the new paradigm postmodern. My uneasiness with this term does not stem only from its proliferating connotations but above all from my suspicion that its usefulness for periodization is now exhausted, while the city's new historical cycle has just got under way. The implications of the ‘post-’ are particularly problematic in this case, because the present city does not activate all its historical resources but on the contrary seeks a rupture and a new beginning every so often, preferring short-lived illumination to the consciousness of what it experienced in the recent and not-so-recent past.

Some years ago I coined the term ‘after-image’ to designate temporally thick representations (Resina 2003). The term tries to account for the ghostly concurrence of phenomena originating in different temporal strata.

Why Latency?

As a biological metaphor that draws on theories of vitalism, latency presents an advantage over the psychoanalytic metaphor of repression, now trivialized to the point of meaninglessness. “Repression” implies an underworld of compacted experience that takes its cue from social space distribution: the lower suburbs and out-of-view districts and ghettos of modern cities, or, pushing the metaphor, the “closeted” lives of pre-twentiethcentury sexual minorities. Whereas the term is helpful in suggesting the relation between memory and space, it has difficulty accounting for temporal discontinuities and the anachronistic reappearance of phenomena. To explain leaps in time the theory of repression multiplies the psychic containers (subconscious, preconscious, consciousness) and resorts to another metaphor from the realm of physics, that of communicating vases: what the ego represses from consciousness reappears in the form of neuroses and manifests itself through various somatic outlets. In this view, the unconscious is like an everglade, with the fluid element seeping through apparently solid ground. Repression tends to ignore time, because the theory relies on the eternity of the unconscious, or what amounts to the same thing, the contemporaneity of memories.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Freud resorted to the concept of latency to explain the paradox between the delay between the onset of the cause and the manifestation of the effects, in other words, to bridge the conceptual gap opened in the mechanical idea of repression by the phenomenon of traumatic neuroses. Freud introduced the idea of latency in Moses and Monotheism, where he attempts to explain the long delay between the murder of Moses by the Jews and the ritualization of guilt feelings in Judaism and Christianity. Trying to find comparable phenomena, he turns to the traumatic accident with belated onset of psychic and motor symptoms, which he explains as follows: “The time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms is called the ‘incubation period,’ a transparent allusion to the pathology of infectious disease … It is the feature one might term latency” (109–10). Later in the same essay he posits the notion that such processes as can be observed in the life of individuals with regard to the formation of neurosis must also have developed in the human species.

In his classic study of aerial bombing, On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald denounced the failure of postwar German literature to address the trauma caused by the bombing of German cities toward the end of the Second World War. The lack of descriptions of the air raids was particularly disturbing to Sebald, who believed that only artistic representation can convey the terror of the firestorms in great cities laid to waste in a matter of hours. To be sure, there is no lack of graphic material showing the ruins of Hamburg, Cologne, or Dresden, and a Trümmerliteratur and Trümmerfilme appeared from the end of the war to around 1950. But these images were the laconic witnesses of a demoralized society on which the Nazi period still cast a shadow. Sebald missed a resolute engagement with the experience of the destruction itself, which, he claimed, had vanished from public discussion due to the presence of “an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression” (12). He was convinced that “there was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described” (10). He regretted the German authors’ inability to transform the immediate experience of the bombing into a reflective moral truth capable of being assimilated by the collective memory of Germans.

Various critics have challenged the notion of a fatalistic silence surrounding the bombings. Joachim Güntner, writing for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 7 December 2002, denied the existence of a literary taboo, although the audience for this subject was never large (“Der Bombenkrieg findet zur Sprache,” cit. Vees-Gulani 337). Others uphold the notion of a taboo but criticize Sebald's psychological approach as inadequate and supplement it with a political theory of repression. Where Sebald, apropos the work of Alexander Kluge, detected a paralyzing fatalism that looks onto the technological conditions of the destruction as a falling out from autonomous history “and back into the history of nature” (67), Wilfried Wilms considered that “a taboo on remembering is not only a private psychological affair, but also a political one” (181). For Sebald, fear of being accused of revisionism weighed on the German writers, who found it very difficult to present Germans as victims.

People often quote the sixth of Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, the one that warns that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” without fathoming its actuality. The “if” in this sentence is rhetorical, for Benjamin famously added: “And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (255). And, although we love that phrase, we rarely remember the one immediately preceding it. The one that calls for something like a permanent epistemic revolution: “In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it.” The dead, by which Benjamin clearly does not mean those honored by the victor but those sacrificed for the sake of the tradition, will certainly not be safe if our revolt is merely an excuse to leave things as they are, or, worse yet, to deflect toward conservative goals the sympathetic insight that alone can redeem the past.

Modern Spanish identity has always been a postcolonial identity. The reason for this is that Spain constituted itself as a nation after being severed from its sprawling body across the seas. Decapitated, the crowned head of the empire, the capital addicted to command and an extractive economy, reconstituted itself as the head of a nation state. Not without difficulty or violence. The twin processes of decolonization and nationalization were visualized for the first time in the emergency constitutional assemblies of 1812, the so-called Cortes de Cádiz, which declared the inhabitants of Spain's American possessions free co-nationals of the Europeans, while according them unequal representation (Fradera 66–8). The full-fledged ideological outgrowth of that foundational moment for the nation was the literature of the Generation of '98 and the so-called “problem of Spain” around which it coalesced. Concomitant with this problem was the formulation of the ethnicist doctrine of Hispanidad (meaning, roughly, the Hispanic world, or the Hispanic condition), based on the spiritual superiority and defining character of the Castilian language. In Spain, this language was proclaimed the state language in 1902, shortly after the loss of the colonies, and renamed Spanish in 1923, when the Royal Spanish Academy joined conceptually what had already been legislatively attached, namely state and language. This is how cultural hegemony substituted for political hegemony when the latter was no longer feasible.

Spaniards have now lived in democracy as long as they did under Franco's dictatorship. Forty years have elapsed since the first post-Franco elections. That amounts to two and a half generations by traditional assessments of the time of public influence of an age group. And the fact is that recent generations of Spaniards know about the Civil War roughly as much as their parents knew about the Republic: very little, if anything. And the little they know, they know it filtered through a precarious, uncertain memory. Memory deficiency, in this collective sense, means above all insufficient information, but the problem cannot be ascribed merely to a low flow of information but rather to lack of criteria in sifting and putting the pieces together. The filters were already in place and the censorship was much stronger when the transition was taking place. For the most part, those who tried to explain the transition against the grain of official discourses interpreted the events with the help of theories that were standard in left-wing political analyses at the time. Theories that seduced more than they explained; legitimated more than they clarified.

The transition, like the Civil War or Francoism, was not the solution of the previous conflicts but the synthesis of the historical dialectic, which became the new thesis, to put it in the Hegelian terms then in fashion. Expressed without the sepia color: contemporary analyses of the transition could not really be historicizing exercises, since they were steeped in the conflict they claimed to explicate. One of the best books on the subject, Jaume Lorés's La Transició a Catalunya (1985), suffered from the overvaluation of Marxism common at that time, while severely underestimating the importance of national identity that was to become hegemonic in Catalan politics over the following decades. Only four years after the publication of this book, Marxism was thrown on history's heap of discarded ideas.

Societies do not remember; people do. There is no such thing as group memory prior to or above the individual's precarious retention of the past. This is the reason why cultural memory is transmitted from mind to mind. Social memory is nothing but this exchange. Certainly, material culture contains clues to the past, as do documents of foregone eras; but artifacts no more remember than they speak. Even recorded voice, disembodied and detached from its origin, does not speak; it merely produces sound. Without consciousness there is no language. This trivial though frequently forgotten observation accounts for the seeming paradox that modern society forgets in direct proportion to its accumulation of objects from previous ages. Alienating the past in artistic and technical re-enactments, commodifying the experience of time, staging “history,” or museumizing its otherness is the clearest sign of a society's estrangement from its memory. It shows that society not only has forgotten the past but the present also.

Thus, when we speak of collective memory, we refer to the intersubjective constitution of our experience. Personal memory taps into a social fund of memories and modulates itself through them. But even as it does so, it remains anchored in consciousness. Outside of consciousness time does not exist, and memory cannot arise. The collective or “public” dimension means that social memory is not concerned with isolated anecdotes of private life but with events and experiences affecting everyone. As a common denominator of the myriad instances of remembered past, the collective memory cannot but be a convention.

To be compelling, memoirs must be located at the intersection of the personal and the collective. Jorge Semprún's books are for the most part autobiographical recollections whose interest arises from a self-conscious osmosis between the private and the public.

Intellectual activity, just as the life process, seems to be governed by the law of the pendulum. When satisfaction quiets the irritation of an organ, it establishes a state of organic apathy until a new irritant intervenes. A classic shibboleth affirms that the history of philosophy oscillates between Plato and Aristotle in a circadian rhythm measured not in hours but in centuries. After a half-century of dire warnings about the consequences of forgetting the past, skeptical and even contrarian discourses have emerged against the historical memory. Increasingly, people clamor against the excesses perpetrated in the name of memory by the identities that misuse it. An example of this reaction can be found in David Rieff's book, Against Remembrance. Written in the wake of the war in the Balkans, this essay popularized the more rigorous criticism of so-called memory studies pioneered by Charles Meier in the 1990s. Meier's intervention was opportune, considering the trivialization of the concept of historical memory and the race for victimhood status that accompanied the rise of memory studies. In the words of a guest speaker at Stanford, trauma affects everyone, since all of us have inherited some history or other. But if everyone inherits a history, or at least a story—and who doesn't?—surviving a genocidal experience or living under a murderous dictatorship ceases to be a requirement for admission to the club of the traumatized. If memory is inextricable from narcissism, a faculty in service to self-esteem, then mine is as good as anyone else's. And who can set limits to self-pity? Thus, it makes perfect sense to complain about the excesses of memory, although to do so by generalizing trauma inevitably trivializes it.

Beyond the exigencies of political correctness, it is important to weigh the consequences of the current memory surfeit to decide when the fatigue is motivated by legitimate concern with misuse and when by concealment of crimes and the hankering after impunity. We should not ask only, whom does memory serve? but also, who benefits from forgetting?

In the prologue to her novel, Quanta, quanta guerra…, published in 1980, Mercè Rodoreda observed bleakly: “Around the people of my time there is an intense circulation of blood and corpses. Because of this intense circulation of tragedy, in my novels, at times perhaps inadvertently, war, to a greater or lesser extent, is a theme” (14). This remark is often assumed to refer to the Spanish Civil War, which provides the novel with its obvious background, although this matter-of-fact statement speaks about a time, not a specific event—in Catalan, “my time” (“la meva època”) is colloquial for “my generation,” or, more precisely, the time of one's youth. This means, in effect, that Rodoreda saw her lifetime marked by an overabundance of corpses. But nothing in that phrase implies that she circumscribed her observation to her own country. It was not, or not only, in Catalonia that tragedy made the rounds. Rodoreda saw herself in the maelstrom as unintentional witness to the vast mid-century tragedy. That tragedy certainly included the Spanish Civil War, but also the massive exodus and inhumane internment in French concentration camps, which she was spared by being lodged with a small contingent of writers in the château of Roissy-en-Brie, an Auberge de Jeunesse some nineteen miles from Paris, courtesy of the French government. From there she moved to Paris, from where she fled on foot with the crowds that took to the French roads when the Germans marched in on 14 June 1940. Next, she lived in Limoges and Bordeaux, returning to Paris after liberation in 1944. It was there that she wrote one of the earliest literary pieces on the Nazi death camps, the short story “Nit i boira” (“Night and Fog”), published in 1947 in La nostra revista, a journal issued in Mexico by Catalan exiles. It was later reissued in the collection Semblava de seda i altres contes (1978).

“Niti boira” is remarkable not only for its anticipation of the title of Alain Resnais’ famous film with the script by Jean Cayrol, but also for the economy with which the author, who did not herself experience the camps, recreates the physical impressions and the moral deconstruction of an inmate, perspicuously placing his spiritual dismantling at the center of the concentrationary universe (to use David Rousset's coinage).

It is doubtful that a society's relation to its past can be sufficiently described in terms of memory. And little is gained by qualifying memory as historical. “Historical memory” is not just a redundant concept but also a flawed one. It is flawed, because, if we accept Pierre Nora's methodological distinction between history and memory, those two terms are mutually exclusive. But also, because, as currently used, their conflation confuses epistemic with ethical issues. In 1992, the same year that the last volume of Nora's Les lieux de mémoire appeared, Jan Assmann introduced a subtler distinction between cultural and communicative memory in his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. By “cultural memory,” Assmann means memory that orients itself to fixed points of reference in the past: symbolic figures, legends of origins or of conquest, and myths, which can also turn up in historical narrative, the difference being not so much in the nature of the objects as in the method by which they are enlisted for the practice of social remembrance. Cultural memory is not archival, documented history but history as remembered by people, the trace of the past in the popular imagination. By “communicative memory,” he means a form of remembrance that relates to a recent past, one whose references are broadly shared by contemporaries. This kind of memory depends on witnesses and disappears with them. It constitutes a history from below, objectified in social rituals, dance, myths, clothing, decoration, painting, landscape, architecture, and so on. When a generation disappears, a society's communicative memory is altered, sometimes in dramatic ways. Thus, as the age factor becomes more pressing and post-traumatic societies take stock of the limits of their communicative memories, there is usually a flurry of activity to record the testimonies of the surviving members of the relevant age group. This has been the case in Spain since the turn of the century, when discourse about the historical memory surfaced and became more urgent.

The fact that a great deal of the memory relating to the Civil War and the military dictatorship falls within the bounds of the communicative memory contributes to the confusion between epistemic and ethical approaches to the past. Such confusion is understandable and perhaps inevitable in the context of Spain's Historikerstreit, given the conditions of the country's exit from dictatorship and its inability to steer clear from that legacy in the supervening decades.

Xavier Benguerel's novel, Els vençuts (“The Vanquished”) (1969), begins with the evacuation of Barcelona in the last days of January 1939 and ends when Joan Pineda, the novel's fictional author, leaves the camp of Sant Cebrià (Saint Cyprien) in Roussillon. In the foreword to this work Benguerel comments on the paradox besetting the writer who hovers between objectivity and verisimilitude. Later, he would write in his memoirs: “In 1955, when I published Els fugitius, what was rigorously historical was objected to on grounds that it was ‘exceedingly literary.’ The way I have recently ‘imagined’ it in Els vençuts has been deemed absolutely verisimilar and logical” (Memòries 1905–1940, 301). The inversion of the reception between historical and fictional discourses calls for analysis of the status of historical truth in collective memory and of the role of testimonial fiction in revising epistemological routines in the present. In the case of Benguerel, the difference between the two texts mentioned is not in their adscription to this or that discursive modality (literary versus historical narrative) but in the method of composition and, above all, in the history of its reception. Benguerel wrote Els fugitius upon returning from exile in 1955, a time when the story of the losers in the Civil War could not gain a foothold in public life, and the experience of exile was lost on the generations that had grown up or lived in Spain after 1939 (Els vençuts 15).

At some point in the recent past, the term “historical memory” was pried loose from its originating theory and set adrift on the sea of prevalent discourses. There it floats, tugging previously unrelated issues in its tow. Since nothing happens without a reason, a measure of historical necessity must account for the broad diffusion of the concept. In Spain, the emergence of a public debate about the historical memory toward the turn of the twenty-first century was a belated adaptation of debates already prevalent elsewhere. To be sure, Spain had a fertile past to cultivate, and soon after the end of the dictatorship the theme of remembrance emerged as a natural continuation of the critique of the regime, which had seeped into the arts and the popular culture for over a decade. As a consequence of the duration and pervasiveness of the dictatorship, in Spain the historical memory has centered almost exclusively on the Civil War and the Franco era. Only recently, the extension of historical memory to earlier periods (for instance, the eighteenth-century War of Succession to the Hispanic Monarchy) has produced comparable levels of acrimony.

Spanish history has altered or suppressed enough aspects of the past to fuel intense debates. It is not scarcity of materials but rather the lack of ethical initiative that explains the country's intellectual lag. This can be seen in the mechanical extrapolation of concepts developed in other contexts. Proof of this dependence can be seen in the often implicit, and occasionally explicit, placing of Spanish experience under the interpretive auspices of extraneous models once they are globally established. For instance, the term “Spanish Holocaust” brazenly profits from the academic prestige of the most influential studies of memory. It is hard to avoid the impression that, in Spanish discourses on memory, the rhetorical cart often precedes the historical horse—that the universal expansion of the memory discourse after the 1960s, rather than a social demand for “recovering the past,” was responsible for the rise of the memory debates in Spain.

This book has been a long time in the making. Since the publication of Disremembering the Dictatorship in 2000, I have worked intermittently on the question of social memory in the Iberian Peninsula. I have done so from the dual subject position of someone who remembers daily life under Francoism in the ordinary, non-metaphorical sense of the term, and of the historian of culture who reconstructs the experience of others, of a generality of others, through acts of secondary witnessing. This combination of points of view is nothing extraordinary; I share it with hundreds, possibly thousands of others. But being aware of the duality helps me (and hopefully my readers as well) to situate my perspective and justify to myself the stresses and omissions, perhaps even to understand my transferential relation to that slice of the past that I study in not always explicit forms of remembrance.

Memory is a synonym for culture and also for life. I do not mean having good or bad memory, which is a matter of neurological endowment, but having long or short memory, which is a matter of experience. Older people live ever more in their long memories, which accounts for the poverty of their short ones. And so it is with societies. Young, barbarian ones remember little but vividly; they are prey to simple, intense representations and prone to mythography. Older, declining societies have civilized their past; they are the peoples with history. The past never goes away, never truly passes. Ernst Nolte's famous dictum about a past that does not want to pass is a truism not just for the Nazi era. At best, the past can be laid to rest, like a corpse, or an exhausted body. Forgotten does not mean “gone.” It merely means “out of mind.” This book is about a large and decisive part of the twentieth century in the history of Spain, a history that, for those of us born and raised under the dictatorship, began with the Civil War. In our childhood, everything referred back to it, the war was the big bang of our universe. Its genesis was presided by a powerful and remote figure with a mezzo-soprano voice who one fine summer day in A.D. 1936 had criedinto the warm, well-lighted republican abyss the command “let there be darkness.” For dark, or at least depressingly gray, was the Spain of Franco.

Thus begins Harald Weinrich's discussion of Dante's restoration of the memory of the dead in his book on forgetting. In this paragraph, Weinrich establishes three basic points that bear on the subject of historical memory. First, the link between memory and the human condition, which comes down, in essence, to the evidence that to be human is to fight not against death (which is a survival strategy common to all living creatures) but against extinction, which only humans are capable of comprehending. To struggle against extinction involves resisting obliteration after the catastrophe of death has taken place. And this is of course what the Dantean characters do in the beyond, when they entreat the Christian poet to remember their stories. Short of undoing death, the poet may hold back their disappearance at the cost of immortalizing their suffering. Thus, they meet their punishment in their own desire to become images of horror for all eternity.

The second point is that the rituals of burial (and, we should add, of mourning) are meant to ensure the smooth departure of the dead; in other words, to sever their emotional entanglement with the living and to secure their status as images in memory. And the third point is the role that certain public acts of memory fulfill in the body politic, warning the living not to forget, or vice versa, stimulating oblivion so that life, a certain quality of life, “can go on.”