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PALOMA AGUILAR. Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy. New York: Berghahn, 2002. xxii + 330 pp.
FRANCIE CATE-ARRIES. Spanish Culture Behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939-1945. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. 347 pp.
TOMASA CUEVAS. Testimonios de mujeres en las carceles franquistas. Ed. Jorge J. Montes Salguero. Huesca: Institute de Estudios Altoaragoneses, 2004. 913 pp.
SANTOS JULIÁ, ED. Víctimas de la guerra civil. 1999. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2004. 432 pp.
EMILIO SILVA, ASUNCIÓN ESTEBAN, JAVIER CASTÁN, AND PANCHO SALVADOR, EDS. La memoria de los olvidados. Un debate sobre el silencio de la represión franquista. Valladolid: Ámbito, 2004. 219 pp.
Exilio. Dir. PEDRO CARVAJAL AND JULIO MARTIN CASAS. Planeta D, 2002. 114 min.
Les fosses del silenci. Dir. MONTSE ARMENGOU AND RICARD BELIS. 30 Minuts/Televisio de Catalunya, 2003. 62 min.
La guerrilla de la memoria. Dir. JAVIER CORCUERA. Planeta D, 2002. 71 min.
Els nens perduts del franquisme Dir. MONTSE ARMENGOU AND RICARD BELIS. 30 Minuts/Televisio de Catalunya, 2002. 94 min.
THERE are two ways to interpret Spain's recent obsession with its violent twentieth-century past: as a symptom of collective pathology or as a sign of sociopolitical health. In the first reading, Spain is finally beginning to pay the price for its almost thirty-year long pacto del silencio or pacto del olvido, the elites' stubborn refusal to come to terms with the Civil War and Francoism, even after the country's transition to democracy in the late 1970s. Never properly buried, mourned or exorcised, the nation's ghosts have now come back to haunt it. In the second reading, Spain's democracy - increasingly stable and vibrant, having withstood an attempted coup, endemic terrorism, and political corruption - is poised to face its final challenge: working through its past, reconciling remaining differences, and establishing a truly national collective memory. Can one imagine a more convincing sign of the nation's rock-solid health than its vigorous civil society, which over the past five years has bred a host of grassroots collectives demanding that Spain condemn Francoist violence during and after the Civil War, and pay homage to the left-wing victims in the same way that Francoism long ago honored its fallen? In this version, the current...