The Transformation of Spain


Book Description




Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain


Book Description

In the waning days and immediate aftermath of World War II, Nazi diplomats and spies based in Spain decided to stay rather than return to a defeated Germany. The decidedly pro-German dictatorship of General Francisco Franco gave them refuge and welcomed other officials and agents from the Third Reich who had escaped and made their way to Iberia. Amid fears of a revival of the Third Reich, Allied intelligence and diplomatic officers developed a repatriation program across Europe to return these individuals to Germany, where occupation authorities could further investigate them. Yet due to Spain's longstanding ideological alliance with Hitler, German infiltration of the Spanish economy and society was extensive, and the Allies could count on minimal Spanish cooperation in this effort. In Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain, David Messenger deftly traces the development and execution of the Allied repatriation scheme, providing an analysis of Allied, Spanish, and German expatriate responses. Messenger shows that by April 1946, British and American embassy staff in Madrid had compiled a census of the roughly 10,000 Germans then residing in Spain and had drawn up three lists of 1,677 men and women targeted for repatriation to occupied Germany. While the Spanish government did round up and turn over some Germans to the Allies, many of them were intentionally overlooked in the process. By mid-1947, Franco's regime had forced only 265 people to leave Spain; most Germans managed to evade repatriation by moving from Spain to Argentina or by solidifying their ties to the Franco regime and Span-ish life. By 1948, the program was effectively over. Drawing on records in American, British, and Spanish archives, this first book-length study in English of the repatriation program tells the story of this dramatic chapter in the history of post--World War II Europe.




Franco's Crypt


Book Description

An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Franco's Spain True, false, or both? Spain's 1939-75 dictator, Francisco Franco, was a pioneer of water conservation and sustainable energy. Pedro Almodóvar is only the most recent in a line of great antiestablishment film directors who have worked continuously in Spain since the 1930s. As early as 1943, former Republicans and Nationalists were collaborating in Spain to promote the visual arts, irrespective of the artists' political views. Censorship can benefit literature. Memory is not the same thing as history. Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe-wrongly-that under Franco's fascist dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In his groundbreaking new book, Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936, Jeremy Treglown argues that oversimplifications like these of a complicated, ambiguous actuality have contributed to a separate falsehood: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget the evils for which Franco's side (and, according to this version, his side alone) was responsible. The myth that truthfulness was impossible inside Franco's Spain may explain why foreign narratives (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia) have seemed more credible than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de España was, as its Spanish name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to make a more public attempt to "reclaim" its modern history of fascism. How it is doing so, and the role played in the process by notions of historical memory, are among the subjects of this wide-ranging and challenging book. Franco's Crypt reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's actually there-monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, video games-and considers, in a captivating narrative, the totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.




Franco's Spain


Book Description

A sibling of interwar Europe's other fascist regimes, Franco's Spain survived them all, growing to old age in an era of liberal democracy in Western Europe. It weathered the explosive social movements and student disillusionment of the 1960s and lingered into the 1970s, its earlier fascist ideology attenuated almost out of recognition, with simple survival its greatest preoccupation. Francois Spain looks beyond the mythology surrounding the origins of the dictatorship to provide a critical overview of the regime -- from its emergence after a bloody uprising against a democratic government; through the "high period" of Francoism with its poverty, hunger and fear, followed by a complex period of change and economic growth; to the final demise of the dictatorship, amid open opposition and internal defections. Economic and social conditions are as integral a part of the story in Franco's Spain, as politics and international relations find their place alongside purely domestic issues. The book also peers beyond the grave, examining the transition to democracy after the dictator's death in 1975.




Unearthing Franco's Legacy


Book Description

Unearthing Franco's Legacy addresses the debate in Spain resulting from the discovery and exhumation of mass graves created by General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.




The Franco Regime, 1936–1975


Book Description

The history of modern Spain is dominated by the figure of Francisco Franco, who presided over one of the longest authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Between 1936 and the end of the regime in 1975, Franco’s Spain passed through several distinct phases of political, institutional, and economic development, moving from the original semi-fascist regime of 1936–45 to become the Catholic corporatist “organic democracy” under the monarchy from 1945 to 1957. Distinguished historian Stanley G. Payne offers deep insight into the career of this complex and formidable figure and the enormous changes that shaped Spanish history during his regime.




Franco and Hitler


Book Description

Was Franco sympathetic to Nazi Germany? Why didn't Spain enter World War II? In what ways did Spain collaborate with the Third Reich? How much did Spain assist Jewish refugees? This is the first book in any language to answer these intriguing questions. Stanley Payne, a leading historian of modern Spain, explores the full range of Franco’s relationship with Hitler, from 1936 to the fall of the Reich in 1945. But as Payne brilliantly shows, relations between these two dictators were not only a matter of realpolitik. These two titanic egos engaged in an extraordinary tragicomic drama often verging on the dark absurdity of a Beckett or Ionesco play. Whereas Payne investigates the evolving relationship of the two regimes up to the conclusion of World War II, his principal concern is the enigma of Spain’s unique position during the war, as a semi-fascist country struggling to maintain a tortured neutrality. Why Spain did not enter the war as a German ally, joining with Hitler to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British navy, is at the center of Payne’s narrative. Franco’s only personal meeting with Hitler, in 1940 to discuss precisely this, is recounted here in groundbreaking detail that also sheds significant new light on the Spanish government’s vacillating policy toward Jewish refugees, on the Holocaust, and on Spain’s German connection throughout the duration of the war.




Buying Into Change


Book Description

Buying into Change examines how the development of a mass consumer society under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939–1975) inserted Spain into transnational consumer networks and set the stage for Spain’s transition to democracy during the late 1970s. This transition is broadly significant to both a Spanish public still struggling to redefine their society after Franco and to scholars who have long debated the origins of Spain’s current democracy, yet many aspects of it remain largely unexamined. Buying into Change incorporates mass consumption into our understanding of Spain’s democratic transition by tracing the spread and social impact of new foreign-influenced department stores, of imported innovations such as modern mass advertising, and of consumer magazines that promoted foreign products. Initially, these enterprises backed Franco’s conservative policies, and the regime in turn encouraged consumption in order to improve its image both domestically and abroad. Spain’s new globally oriented commerce ultimately sold retailers and shoppers not just foreign ways of buying and selling but also subversive ideas. Imported 1960s fashions brought along countercultural notions on issues such as gender equality. And as Spaniards consumed more like their foreign neighbors, they increasingly viewed themselves as cosmopolitan and European and identified with liberal political conditions abroad, undermining Francoism’s doctrine of national exceptionalism, thus laying the social foundations for democratization and European integration in Franco’s wake.




Franco


Book Description

General Francisco Franco, also called the Caudillo, was the dictator of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. His life has been examined in many previous biographies. However, most of these have been traditional, linear biographies that focus on Franco’s military and political careers, neglecting the significance of who exactly Franco was for the millions of Spaniards over whom he ruled for almost forty years. In this new biography Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez looks at Franco from a fresh perspective, emphasizing the cultural and social over the political. Cazorla-Sanchez's Franco uses previously unknown archival sources to analyse how the dictator was portrayed by the propaganda machine, how the opposition tried to undermine his prestige, and what kind of opinions, rumours and myths people formed of him, and how all these changed over time. The author argues that the collective construction of Franco’s image emerged from a context of material needs, the political traumas caused by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the complex cultural workings of a society in distress, political manipulation, and the lack of any meaningful public debate. Cazorla-Sanchez's Franco is a study of Franco’s life as experienced and understood by ordinary people; by those who loved or admired him, by those who hated or disliked him, and more generally, by those who had no option but to accommodate their existence to his rule. The book has a significance that goes well beyond Spain, as Cazorla-Sanchez explores the all-too-common experience of what it is like to live under the deep shadow cast by an always officially praised, ever present, and long lasting dictator.




Spain


Book Description

This comprehensive survey of Spain’s history looks at the major political, social, and economic changes that took place from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. A thorough introduction to post-Civil War Spain, from its development under Franco and subsequent transition to democracy up to the present day Tusell was a celebrated public figure and historian. During his lifetime he negotiated the return to Spain of Picasso’s Guernica, was elected UCD councillor for Madrid, and became a respected media commentator before his untimely death in 2005 Includes a biography and political assessment of Francisco Franco Covers a number of pertinent topics, including fascism, isolationism, political opposition, economic development, decolonization, terrorism, foreign policy, and democracy Provides a context for understanding the continuing tensions between democracy and terrorism, including the effects of the 2004 Madrid Bombings