Reed Brody today in The Guardian:
Thirty-five years after the death of General Francisco Franco, Spain is finally prosecuting someone in connection with the crimes of his dictatorship, and of the Spanish civil war which came...
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Yesterday the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, together with other organizations such as the left Spanish labor unions, kicked off what is going to be a week of mass international protests against the persecution of Judge Baltasar Garzón for his attempt to investigate possible crimes against humanity committed during the...
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El País reports: The organizations for the recovery of historical memory on whose behalf Judge Baltasar Garzón initiated an investigation of Francoist crimes--an case that resulted in Garzón's being accused of overstepping his judicial boundaries, and facing a possible 20-year suspension--are now charging the Supreme Court Justice in question with overstepping his judicial...
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An interesting post at DailyKos linking Spain's memory of the Civil War with the situation in the United States:
After the transition to democracy, there was a Pact of Forgetting that was felt to be the only way to move forward. It allowed past Nationalists to participate in the nascent...
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From the AP:
The appeal claims the indictment is "contrary to law and implies a serious challenge to judicial independence."
More here.
While looking through the photographs of the Mexican Suitcase to write a text for the catalogue of the exhibition that will open next September at the ICP in NYC I identified some images that match some of the sections of the HCB documentary. In one instance there is a photograph showing both the camera...
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A fascinating initiative from the University of California at San Diego, together with a group of Spanish organizations, to create an online audiovisual archive of victims' testimonies:
It aspires to constitute itself both as an archive of the repression and as an archive of the multiple political cultures (communism,...
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Compiled by Peter Davison, reviewed by Juliet Gardiner for the Telegraph:
It is the portable Orwell, the condensed autobiography that Orwell never wrote, but maybe had his health rallied, he would have.
More here.
The new Henri Cartier-Bresson box set reviewed in the New York Times:
Two films made as fund-raisers for the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, “Victory of Life” (1937) and “Spain Will Live” (1938), make a provocative contrast with two documentaries made for CBS News on American life in 1969...
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In an interview with Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, the Chilean judge who tried Augusto Pinochet defends Baltasar Garzón's attempt to investigate crimes against humanity committed under Francoism.
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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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