Sparking media attention world-wide, the International Center of Photography in New York will be opening its doors tomorrow for the exhibit featuring a selection of more than 4,000 negatives of Spanish Civil War material photographed by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (David Seymour). The two-volume exhibit catalog--which features essays by several...
Read more »
As the Jubilee Gardens, home of one of the many British memorials to the International brigades, is getting ready for a major renovation, the Dutch firm West8, which is in charge of the project, is pondering where to relocate the IB monument, LondonSE1 reports.
At last Wednesday's meeting Maarten...
Read more »
The Fall Newsletter of our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) has just come out. In this issue: news on the successful tour of the exhibit Antifascistas; the George Brown Commemorative Lecture; a new IB monument at Perth; reports the memorial ceremony at Jubilee Gardens and a lecture by Richard...
Read more »
The Spanish government has announced plans, La Jornada reports, to turn the Mexico-City house in which renowned surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900-1982) spent most of his post-Civil War exile into a culture-historical center that focuses on Buñuel's work but also allows for Spanish-Mexican artistic collaboration more generally. Buñuel's move from the US to...
Read more »
Kirkcaldy, Scotland. (Map.) Erected by Kirkcaldy District Council and Friends of the IBA, May 1980 and September 1986 (IBMT). More on NamesOfTheFallen. Recent Photos by Jack Deighton here.
Read more »
The first in a new series of posts highlighting monuments to the International Brigades worldwide. Canberra, Australia; S 35° 18.012 E 149° 07.201 (map). Inaugurated in 1993. From Waymarking.com:
The memorial is a wall of sandstone blocks with red brick courses. ... The bronze map was made by Dr Ross...
Read more »
Patrick Skene Catling, writing in the Irish Times, critically reviews a new biography of the man who worked with Willi Münzenberg and Arthur Koestler to organize the International Brigades, and who is said to have inspired the movie Casablanca:
Otto Katz (1895-1952) was a Stalinist agent of first-magnitude international stardom. He...
Read more »
In a strongly worded op-ed piece in today's Público, Carlos Jiménez Villarejo, former Chief Prosecutor for corruption cases, chides the Spanish Supreme Court for the cavalier way in which it recently dismissed Judge Baltasar Garzón's appeal. (More background here.) According to Jiménez, the Supreme Court should have given much more serious consideration to...
Read more »
Alex de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang speak to Little White Lies about the Balada triste de trompeta, which just won several prizes in Venice and is now showing at the San Sebastián festival:
Everybody in Spain has a father or grandfather who was involved in the war. Everybody...
Read more »
The Telegraph published an obit of the SCW vet classicist yesterday:
Though left for dead in a pool of blood, he somehow managed to make it to a dressing station, his will to live miraculously restored by the appearance of the journalist Claud Cockburn with a bottle of scotch.
More
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
Read more »
Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
Read more »
The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
Read more »
China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
Read more »
The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
Read more »
Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
Read more »
Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
Read more »
Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
Read more »
Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
Read more »
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
Search the Database