How well do we remember our own history?

The Mysteries of History

by Franco's Crypt

J

I read this book about Spain, a Catholic country with a complicated 20th century history, during a three month sojourn in the Republic of Ireland, a country with a similar history. The setting and the text combined to help me, as a historian, to realize that in these nations the attempt to make a just remembrance of the past is not only an academic exercise. It is a project essential to contemporary domestic tranquility. Toward the end of my Irish visit, the death of Nelson Mandela on Dec. 5, 2013, introduced a third country’s complexities to my reflections.

Jeremy Treglown, a British scholar and writer with extensive residency in contemporary Spain, wishes to refute a thesis that nothing of intellectual or creative worth emerged there during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939 to 1975). Treglown worries that Anglophone readers linger in their own language’s excellent literary and cinematic reflections on the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 and its aftermath. He also feels that Spaniards themselves are too inclined to assume that meaningful reflection on the war began again only during the post-dictatorship years. In a sense, he writes for two audiences, strongly encouraging Anglophones to immerse themselves in Spanish language and literature and urging Spaniards to become more familiar with their own heritage.

Treglown’s approach in Franco’s Crypt is microscopic rather than macroscopic. He wants his international readership to see behind the Spanish Civil War’s role as a prelude to World War II, so he focuses narrowly on specific events within Spain itself. Knowledge of the war’s course is assumed. An introductory section broadly surveying the conflict and the ensuing dictatorship would have been helpful, even for readers who know the war itself, as well as readers not so familiar with Spain.

The Civil War remains painful for Spaniards to discuss but they live amid its physical mementoes. In a moving section, Treglown describes the efforts to find the hidden graves of people massacred during the conflict. He juxtaposes this account with vivid descriptions of the public monuments to Franco’s supporters and the burial place of the dictator himself. All the graves must be acknowledged if the war is to be fully understood. Treglown recognizes that many Spanish people do not want to persevere in opening the hidden graves, but he hopes that the effort will continue.

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