The most recent issue of the journal History of Psychiatry features an article by Olga Villasante on "War Neurosis during the Spanish Civil War," focusing on the work of IB-member Gregorio Bermann (1894–1972), who "organized the frontline Neuropsychiatric Service at the Hospital de Chamartín de La Rosa (Madrid). Bermann wrote about his personal experience in the...
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This coming January, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is screening a series of Spanish Civil War films by Henri Cartier-Bresson and others: a first program on Jan. 20th, including Victoire de la vie (Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline, 1937, 47 min.) and L'Espagne vivra (Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1938, 44 min.), and a second program...
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They're done. After the much-publicized atttempt a year ago to locate the body of the poet Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated in August 1937, the autonomous government of Andalusia has declared that no new searches will be undertaken, El País reports. Officially the 70,000 euro search project aimed to recover the bodies...
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Stacey Guill, writing in the Hemingway Review, revisits Joris Ivens' pathbreaking documentary The Spanish Earth:
Ivens acknowledged the "artistic" or creative element to Hemingway's contributions during this period, recalling that Hemingway helped with "the general strategy of the film. He showed a quick comprehension and understanding of the documentary film...
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GREX, a research group at the Université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre, is looking for texts and testimonies from former members of the International Brigades who passed through the French and North-African internment camps between 1939 and 1944, with the idea of compiling an exhaustive inventory of camp testimonies. See the group's work in progress here.
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Jeffrey R. Ryan, a history teacher from Massachusetts, has just published A Volcano Heard Afar (Dorrance Publishing Co.), a novel whose protagonist is a US volunteer in Spain who, upon his return, becomes a victim of McCarthyism.
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The Center for Constitutional Rights reports:
two leading human rights groups filed papers urging a Spanish judge to open a criminal investigation into the role of former Bush administration officials, including torture memo authors John Yoo and Jay Bybee, for their part in creating a legal framework...
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"Obama decided long ago to turn the page on the abuses and illegalities of the Bush administration," the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights states in a Huffington Post column on the revelations about US pressure on Spain's judiciary in relation to torture investigations;
The U.S. was particularly...
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The Telegraph reports:
The Palace of El Pardo, an old royal residence set in hunting grounds on the northeastern outskirts of Madrid, served as el Caudillo's home following his victory in the Spanish Civil War until his death in 1975. But guided tours around the palace will no longer include...
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At a massive celebration of the International Human Rights Day, with performances by Sting and others, Baltasar Garzón received the Azucena Villaflor award--named after one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo--from Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. See BBC coverage here, and footage here and here.
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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