Re-framing the Spanish Civil War as ‘Cultural Trauma': When responsibilities get blurred after violence

Abstract

The aim of this article is to address to what extent some institutional form of remembering the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) as a collective trauma could be considered an instance of Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelzer´s notion of ’cultural trauma‘. Or to put it in other words, in which sense the notion of cultural trauma may cast a new light on one of the different ways in which the Spanish Civil War was remembered and retold during the transition to democracy (1977-83). Spanish society remembered the war as a collective trauma, so painful that it encouraged society to promote a ‘pact of oblivion’ toward victims of Francoist repression. According to this traumatic memory, the Spanish Civil War was a ‘fratricidal struggle’, whose outbreak was a consequence of the tensions that underlie Spanish history. It led to the blurring of distinctions between victims and culprits because both sides were considered equally responsible. Therefore, everyone could claim the ownership of suffering. However, this representation did not fit in with the historical records; it was a consequence of the social influence of some ‘memory makers’ that developed new narratives and re-defined the ownership of suffering. Because of this divergence between the historical record of the war and society’s traumatic memory of it during the transition to democracy, I would like to analyse the possibility of studying the nature of the latter by means of the concept of cultural trauma. After all, Alexander´s critique of psychoanalytical insight into collective trauma could be useful when analysing traumatic historical experiences where it is not clear whether the traumatic nature of those memories come from the events themselves or from the cultural frames that attributed significance to those events.