As the author of an important nonfiction—academic—book about the way the experience of Spanish deportees to Mauthausen has been represented in Spanish culture over the past seven decades, what do you feel about Cercas’s playful blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction? It’s become his signature move. SJB: I’ll be honest. As a reader, I’ve enjoyed Cercas’s books— he knows how to build tension around these “real stories,” as he calls them. But as a scholar of the Spanish deportation to Mauthausen, I’m much more conflicted about the way Cercas plays with fiction and history in his novels. Whatever sense of responsibility he feels—and I know he feels some, because he has written more earnest pieces about the Spaniards in Nazi camps elsewhere—flies out the window in the interest of a thrilling story in The Impostor. But I also think the only way to counteract Cercas’s imprecision is to make sure we continue to tell the true history behind these important historical moments—the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish deportation, the transition to democracy—because we share that responsibility as scholars, writers and filmmakers. Fiction writers dance between fiction and nonfiction—it makes for a good read—but historians and cultural critics should feel more of an urgency to stick to the truth. Of course, a good story is a good story—whether it’s invented or real. Cercas knows that. Cercas, in his book, extols the work of academic historians and criticizes the way the witnesses, activists, and the media have “killed” actual memory by sentimentalizing and commercializing it. (“[T]he memory industry proved lethal to memory,” he writes in a passage you cite.) As an academic, where do you stand on the relation between the authority of scholars’ accounts and the value of other accounts? SJB: I really think all of these accounts have value. Ideally, scholars give us a clear sense of the history and the context of the events. But other, more personal accounts give us a sense of how the topics we’re interested in as scholars are perceived in the real world, for lack of a better term. This is why I included so many different kinds of texts in Spaniards in Mauthausen: because the way people remember the past is colored by fiction, nonfiction, films, memoirs, even social media. When we look at these different materials alongside one another, it’s important to sort the invention from what we can corroborate as truthful, but those more commercial accounts can lend nuance to what might otherwise be a dry reporting of the facts. So, when I look a popular novel or a Twitter account that deals with the Spaniards in Mauthausen alongside a more academic text about the topic, I’m getting two sides of the story that often complement each other. This is how history comes to life, how it grabs people’s attention, and we can’t simply discount these popular works because they might not be wholly accurate. I’d hope that once someone gets interested in a topic like the Spaniards in Mauthausen from one source, they’d seek out another book or film to learn more. Eventually, perhaps they’ll land on a more academic source, but not at the expense of reading these rich and fascinating survivor stories. Sebastiaan Faber teaches at Oberlin College.
Paris and Barcelona remember the IB The 80th anniversary of the “Despedida” of 1938 was the occasion to remember the International Brigades in both Paris and Barcelona with two different international conferences. Both initiatives brought together an impressive list of scholars who presented cutting-edge research on a wide range of subjects. The Paris conference, “Solidarias 2018,” took place on October 24-26 and focused on the role of foreign women in the Spanish Civil War. Organized by three French universities and the Amicale des Combattants en Espagne Républicaine (ACER), it included three full days of conference papers and two documentaries. Over 48 participants came together from eight countries, mainly from France and Spain, but also Belgium, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Holland and Germany. The venue for the first two days of the conference was a homage to the IB in its own right as it was on the same plot of land at 4 Avenue Mathurin Moreau where all volunteers passed through on their way to Spain between 1936 and 1938. ALBA was well represented in the conference by two board members, Josie Yurek and Bob Coale, the latter presenting a paper on Fredericka Martin, whose rich collection is one of the backbone collections of the Lincoln archives. The success of ALBA was evident at several points in the procedures when scholars from different countries repeatedly made references to the holdings in the Tamiment Library—proving, if need be, that the project the veterans set up decades ago has effectively become a center of study for researchers around the globe. Two of the keys to this success are ALBA’s lively website and the Tamiment’s online holdings catalogue. A second international conference took place in Barcelona on Friday October 26. “History and Memory of the International Brigades, an East-West perspective” was sponsored by the European Observatory on Memories of the University of Barcelona. There, fourteen participants from six countries spoke on the memory of volunteers from the United States, the former Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and Poland, as well as initiatives for preserving the IB legacy developed around Spain. The keynote speaker was the French historian Rémi Skoutelsky, whose provocative paper disproved those who compare the IB in Spain to the wave of young Islamist fundamentalists who have headed to Syria in alarming numbers, over 1,000 from France alone, to fight for ISIS. Another groundbreaking study was presented by Rocío Velasco de Castro, from the Universidad de Extremadura, whose intensive study of Muslim volunteers in the IB attempts to fill a void created due to difficult access to source material and a certain reluctance to accept that not all Arabic-speaking combatants were fighting for Franco. As it turns out, several of them volunteered from the US and served with the Lincolns,. The one-day conference was filled to standing-roomonly capacity, proving that the subject sparks great interest in Spain today. In addition to academic conferences, on Sunday October 28, the precise 80th anniversary of the Despedida, the City of Barcelona held its official homage to the IB at the Barcelona monument to the Lincoln Brigade in the district of Horta-Guinardó. The Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, opened the event with a moving tribute to all IB volunteers. Following her were other official representatives from Catalonia and Madrid, as well as delegations from the Amigos of Madrid and those of Catalonia, including Lluís Martín Bielsa, the president of the Catalonian Amigos, who 80 years before as a young Guardia de Asalto had been on guard during the Despedida parade in Barcelona. Two official IB associations were also invited to speak. ALBA was again represented by Bob Coale while Claire Rol-Tanguy, daughter of Henri Rol-Tanguy—former commissar of the 14th IB and commander of the French resistance during the liberation of Paris in 1944—spoke on behalf of the ACER. The well-known Catalan actor Lluís Homar read three Hemingway poems on war and the iconic troubadour Paco Ibáñez closed the ceremony with his rendition of the anti-Franco poem by Rafael Alberti “A galopar.” Afterwards, numerous organizations and government institutions payed tribute by laying flowers at the foot of the Lincoln Brigade monument.
December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 11