Geoff Dyer, writing in The Guardian, reflects on recent war accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger, David Finkel) and, more generally, on the strengths of fiction vs. non-fiction when it comes to transmitting the reality of warfare:
If there were ever a time when the human stories contained within...
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More coverage, this time in the Guardian, on the exhibit of Spanish Civil War friends Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington (see earlier post). Includes video.
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The AP reports: In a written defence put forward by his lawyer, he requested that he be acquitted citing a legal precedent that prevents a trial taking place if it is opposed by the public prosecutor’s office. The precedent mentioned is the so-called “doctrina Botín,” named after Emilio Botín, the current CEO of the...
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Earlier this year Magnum, the photo agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and "Chim" Seymour, sold its photojournalism archive (more than 185,000 prints) to a private investment company owned by Michael Dell, which in turn has handed it over to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. The HRC...
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Spain's dictator Francisco Franco, who won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 with significant help from Hitler Germany, repaid the favor two years later by handing the Nazi regime "a list of every Jew in his country in order to facilitate efforts to locate, deport and destroy them," today's Ha'aretz reports, based on...
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From today's New York Times:
With a drug war raging around them and an unreliable judicial system in place, Mexico's human rights activists have their hands full as they grapple with a growing new class of victims: themselves. (...) The new reality is...
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The Filmstage reports that James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano, will be producing a film on Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn for HBO, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, and directed by Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being).:
Gellhorn, considered one of the greatest war correspondents of all...
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The fundamental study by a Benedictine monk on the role of the Catholic Church in the Spanish Civil War, Hilari Raguer's Gunpowder and Incense, translated by Gerald Howson, can now be read in its entirety online. "The history of the Catholic Church in Spain," Paul Preston writes in the prologue,
parallels that...
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Just uploaded to YouTube: "Contra la impunidad" (Against Impunity), a nine-minute video put together by Pedro Almodóvar's production company, in which a number of well-known Spanish actors and intellectuals (including Pilar and Javier Bardem, Juan Diego, and Almodóvar himself) read first-person narratives of victims of Nationalist and Francoist repression. The video emphasizes that...
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Joanna Moorhead, writing in The Independent, reveals that the two Hungarian photographers of the Spanish Civil War were in love:
He was the legendary war photographer, a man who alternated dodging death on battlefields with a glamorous, star-studded life-style; she was a self-effacing, left-wing intellectual who preferred to stay out of the limelight, hidden...
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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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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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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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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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