New information from military files indicates that Chilean President Salvador Allende--whose remains were recently exhumed--may not have committed suicide on September 11, 1973, the day of Pinochet's military coup, Pascale Bonnefoy reports in today's New York Times:
The file, which was reported by a program on state television Monday night, contains...
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The Guardian's Giles Tremlett covers the controversy surrounding Spain's newly issued national biographical dictionary, in which the biography of Franco was assigned to a well-known apologist for the dictator (a term that said apologist refused to apply to his subject). An increasing number of academics and politicians are calling for a withdrawal...
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Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive magazine, honored Lincoln vet Clarence Kailin in a Memorial Day editorial.
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Last week in Brussels I had a public debate with Jordi Gracia, who holds the chair of Spanish literature at the University of Barcelona, about the nature of Spanish culture during the Franco dictatorship and the place of Republican exiles in Spanish cultural history. The exchange was sparked by Gracia's book on the topic,...
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The legal route for the investigation and persecution of crimes committed by the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War seemed to have reached a dead end with the suspension of Judge Baltasar Garzón last year. Yet this week an organization of Italian residents in Barcelona will being a suit for crimes against...
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The presentation last week of a new, monumental biographical dictionary in Spain has raised important questions about the relationship between the State and the projects it sponsors, as well as the persistent strength of Francoist nostalgia among the Spanish Right. The massive, 50-volume project--initiated in 1998 by the conservative government of José María...
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A judge on Spain's national criminal court has issued arrest warrants for military officials from El Salvador who played a leading role in that country's civil war. They are accused of "meticulously planning and carrying out the killings of six Jesuit priests in 1989," Elisabeth Malkin reports for the New York Times:
In a slide show to mark Memorial Day, The Nation has published a 1937 letter from a brigadista. See the slide show here (slide 4).
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Leonora Carrington, the last living Surrealist, long-time friend of Spanish Republicans, and later wife of Robert Capa's friend Cziki Weiss, died in Mexico City this week. The Times has a long obituary:
Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist and onetime romantic partner of Max Ernst whose paintings depicted women and half-human beasts floating...
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I’ve been away for some days, and haven’t had time to catch up with the press coverage of the 15-May movement in Spain. But one of the messages I found in my cluttered inbox upon my return contained this link to photos of the violent disbandment of the peaceful protesters that took place today...
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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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