After the Civil War Making Memory and Re-Making Spain since 1936

The Spanish Civil War was fought not only on the streets and battlefields from 1936 to 1939 but also through memory and trauma in the decades that followed. This fascinating book reassesses the eras of war, dictatorship and transition to democracy in light of the memory boom in Spain since the late 1990s. It explores how the civil war and its repressive aftermath have been remembered and represented from 1939 to the present through the interweaving of war memories, political power and changing social relations. Acknowledgement and remembrance were circumscribed during the war's immediate aftermath and only the victors were free to remember collectively during the long Franco era. Michael Richards recasts social memory as a profoundly historical product of migration, political events and evolving forms of collective identity through the 1950s, the transition to democracy in the 1970s, and in the bitterly contested politics of memory since the 1990s.

Introduction: cultural trauma in Spain; Part I. Setting the Scene: 1. War memories since 1936: political, moral, social; 2. Democracy, civil war, and intimate violence in the 1930s; Part II. Memories of War during the Franco Years: 3. Repression and remembrance: the victors' liturgy of memory; 4. Repression and reproduction: social memory in the 1940s; 5. Memory and politics: from Civil War to Cold War; 6. Memory and migration: flight from the countryside during the 1950s; 7. Commemorating Franco's peace: the 25th anniversary of the victory; 8. Contesting Franco's peace: transformation from below in the 1960s; 9. Transition and reconciliation: politics and the Church in the 1970s; Part III. Memories of War after Franco: 10. Transition and consent: the presence of the past, 1975–80; 11. 'The level of our times': memory and modernisation, 1981–96; 12. Collective identity and the ethics of memory, 1996–2007; Conclusion: the history of war memories in Spain; Sources and bibliography.

Michael Richards is Associate Professor of European History at the University of the West of England. His previous publications include A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge, 1998) and The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War (as co-editor, Cambridge, 2005).