Publication: Re-framing the Spanish Civil War as ‘Cultural Trauma': When responsibilities get blurred after violence
Authors
Perez Baquero, Rafael
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Publisher
University of Bucharest
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UBR publishes all content and gathered data under the CC-BY license (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license).
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.
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