Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Setting the framework
- 2 Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War
- 3 War, death, and remembrance in Soviet Russia
- 4 Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and disabled soldiers
- 5 Children as war victims in postwar European cinema
- 6 From survivor to witness: voices from the Shoah
- 7 Landscapes of loss and remembrance: the case of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles
- 8 The Algerian War in French collective memory
- 9 Private pain and public remembrance in Israel
- 10 Personal narratives and commemoration
- 11 Against consolation: Walter Benjamin and the refusal to mourn
- Index
- Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
4 - Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and disabled soldiers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Setting the framework
- 2 Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War
- 3 War, death, and remembrance in Soviet Russia
- 4 Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and disabled soldiers
- 5 Children as war victims in postwar European cinema
- 6 From survivor to witness: voices from the Shoah
- 7 Landscapes of loss and remembrance: the case of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles
- 8 The Algerian War in French collective memory
- 9 Private pain and public remembrance in Israel
- 10 Personal narratives and commemoration
- 11 Against consolation: Walter Benjamin and the refusal to mourn
- Index
- Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
Summary
But in the black corners
in the blackest ones, they lie down
to weep for the fallen,
mothers who gave them milk,
sisters who bathed them,
brides once of snow
but now in the black of mourning,
and now with fever;
dazed widows,
shattered women,
letters and photographs
which portray them as they were,
there, eyes bursting
from seeing them so much and so little,
from so many silent tears,
from so much absent beauty.
The traumatic collective memory that most Spaniards have, even today, of the Civil War is explained not only by the events of the war of 1936 to 1939, but also by the experience of millions of Spaniards in the aftermath of the conflict itself. During the last weeks of the war as many as half a million Spaniards on the losing side fled to escape the justifiably feared repression of the victors. Most of the exiles who crossed the French border were confined in appalling conditions in refugee camps in the south of the country. Some managed to escape the German invasion of France and went on to Latin America, and above all Mexico. Yet many Republican veterans remained in France and joined the Resistance, so suffering a second experience of war even before they had had time to recover from the first. Two decades after the end of the Civil War, some 300,000 Republicans remained in exile.
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- Information
- War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century , pp. 84 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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