15-6-2006

 

The battle for Spain, by Antony Beevor

 

LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA

 

 

site: http://www.antonybeevor.com/                                  

                          

Tradução portuguesa: A guerra civil de Espanha, Bertrand Editora, Lisboa, 2006, ISBN 972-25-1527-6

 

 

June 04, 2006

History

Shame of the century

REVIEWED BY MAX HASTINGS

THE BATTLE FOR SPAIN: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

by Antony Beevor

Weidenfeld £25 pp560

Most nations are deeply suspicious of foreigners who write books about them. Thus, the most convincing tributes to Antony Beevor’s history of the Spanish civil war come from Madrid’s reviewers, whose applause kept this book at the top of their bestseller lists for months, well before its appearance here. A version of Beevor’s study was originally published in 1982. Access to the Soviet archives, together with a mass of new post-Franco material available in Spain, have caused him to rewrite extensively, to formidable effect. He is now able to document Stalin’s involvement in the 1936-39 “crucible of grief” in unprecedented detail, and a grisly story it is.

The Soviets supplied the Republicans with tanks and planes, together with the services of some 800 pilots and military advisers of lamentable competence, in exchange for most of Spain’s gold reserves. The preposterous coalition of leftists and anarchists of every hue that sought to deny power to Franco’s Nationalists was endowed with courage and ideals, but bereft of everything else: cash, military ability, discipline, diplomatic guile and, above all, willingness effectively to collaborate with each other.

When Stalin determined that Spain’s communists must secure a monopoly of power, the Republicans conducted a bloody power struggle in their ranks. It was executions, executions all the way: of alleged deserters, traitors, cowards, rivals in scores and even hundreds — most innocent, of course. Non-communist Republican units were often denied ammunition and medical care by communist ones. Who can wonder that they lost?

The civil war will never be studied with admiration by strategists. Both sides were pitifully incompetent. General Franco possessed political cunning, but his limitations as a commander drove his German and Italian mentors to despair. Only the support of Hitler’s Condor Legion, together with the follies of his enemies, enabled the nationalists to prevail. To these factors must be added the tacit support of the British Establishment. The willingness of Britain’s ruling classes in the 1930s to embrace almost any anti-communist force in Europe looks as ugly now as it did to the left then. The Duke of Alba, Franco’s ambassador in London, was a popular figure at the bar of White’s club; his portrait hangs in the Beefsteak club to this day. Alba’s influence in Britain, says Beevor, was immensely useful to the Nationalist cause in 1936-37.

If Stalin’s involvement poisoned the Republican cause in many eyes, and the balance of atrocities between the two sides was about even, Spain’s Nationalists were clients of the most dangerous forces in Europe. Harold Nicolson wrote about British attitudes: “The propertied classes in this country with their insane pro-Franco business have placed us in a very dangerous position.”

Few British readers of this book will pay close heed to the military detail. Fascination lies in the human drama, superbly captured by Beevor. Much that happened seems unbelievable. Hermann Goering made a fortune selling arms to the Republicans, even as his Luftwaffe was rehearsing against Guernica for its gala performances over Warsaw and London. After a bracing series of German air attacks on roads and railways packed with refugees, the Condor Legion reported of its planes: “The successes they had were excellent, and the pilots are gradually getting a taste for it.” The foreign volunteers of the International Brigades, who served the Republicans with passionate devotion, lost around 18,000 in Spain. Most had surrendered to their hosts their passports, which were sent by diplomatic bag to Moscow for use by Soviet agents abroad. Franco had spent years seeking to suppress the Riffs of Morocco, but in Nationalist uniforms the tribesmen became his most murderous auxiliaries. Among an ecclesiastical community of 115,000 that overwhelmingly supported Franco, 13 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 members of other orders and 283 nuns perished, most shot by the Republicans.

Franco and the Nationalists sought to overthrow the legitimate government of Spain by force of arms. Beevor notes the significant point that had the Republicans lost the prewar election they, too, would almost certainly have resorted to arms to contest the democratic verdict, and that had they won the war, the communists would probably have seized monopoly power with their usual ruthlessness. Stalin, incidentally, afterwards executed most of the Soviet advisers who had served in Spain. By 1939, he was pursuing his compact with Hitler.

Franco might have secured legitimacy in the eyes of posterity had he used his victory with moderation. Yet this was not in his nature. He failed to join the Axis in the second world war because the price he demanded for participation (an empire in Africa) was deemed too high by Hitler. He continued to kill his defeated foes even after 1945, when any political necessity was gone. Some 200,000 Spaniards are estimated to have died in prison or by execution during Franco’s decades of vengeance. Well into the 1950s, he would read death sentences over his coffee, marking each name with an “E” to confirm a victim’s fate, or with a “C”, to mark a gesture of mercy, whereby they were merely left to rot in his unspeakable prisons. When he wished to make a conspicuous example, he wrote: “garrote y prensa” (“garroting and press coverage”).

If I have a criticism of Beevor’s book, it is that Franco’s personality is underexplored. To study the nature of this banal monster, whom some foolish people on the British right still applaud as a benefactor of Spain, it is necessary to read Paul Preston’s devastating biography.

The civil war brought untold misery upon the Spanish. It was 1956 before they regained the standard of living they possessed in 1931. Franco ruled the country with a dead hand, garrotting away until 1975. America indulged his tyranny as the price of keeping Spain in the western camp for the cold war. Almost everyone involved in the civil war brought shame upon themselves, except for a slender minority who fought bravely and behaved honourably. Beevor’s book is a vivid chronicle of a dreadful time and place. Both sides deserved to lose, but Franco proved an especially repulsive victor.

FOREIGN LEGION

Antony Beevor is the latest in a long line of British historians lauded in Spain for their work — from Raymond Carr on modern Spain, through Hugh Thomas on the civil war and JH Elliott on the imperial period, to Paul Preston on Franco. Elliott received the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabel la Catolica, and Preston was decorated by King Juan Carlos as a Comendador de la Orden de Merito Civil.

 

A war for opportunists
(Filed: 18/06/2006)



Miranda France reviews The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor.

Spain has come a long way in the last century. Today, it is a diverse and dynamic nation with a strong economy, a secular, urban population and one of the world's best health services. Yet 100 years ago, life expectancy was 35, most Spaniards lived in rural poverty, often fearful of the Church, and 64 per cent of the population was illiterate. More than half a million Spaniards emigrated in the first decade of the 20th century.

Those left behind found themselves in a country almost paralysed by entrenched and irreconcilable beliefs: state centralism versus regionalism, authoritarianism versus individualism; Church against freedom of conscience; tradition against progress.

The Spanish Civil War was a crucible in which those competing convictions finally collided in such a brutal way that even now, 70 years on, many people refuse to talk about it. For a long time, Spaniards left the history of their war to foreigners, especially the British. Antony Beevor, Hugh Thomas and Paul Preston are read avidly in Spain. For many young Spaniards, it was Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom (1995) that first prompted them to confront this painful chapter in their history.

Since then, Spanish historians have been redressing the balance with a plethora of works on the subject and much painstaking research in local archives. The Battle for Spain draws on their industry, as well as on newly available Russian documents, in this updated edition of a book Beevor first published in 1982.

It is an admirably clear-sighted account. What Beevor does so well is to place the war in the context of Spanish history and world politics, showing how the causes were centuries old, and how the conflict was contorted by events outside Spain.

The casual cruelty of landowners, the strong appeal of anarchism among rural workers, the deep hatred of an arrogant Church, the humiliating loss of empire - all of these factors had long riven Spanish society.

Reforms were necessary, but when the republican Popular Front was elected by a narrow majority in 1936, they "proceeded to behave as if they had received an overwhelming mandate for revolutionary change". Their leaders' rhetoric was literally incendiary. President Azaña hinted that he would stand by if churches were set alight. "I want a Republic without class war," said the radical leader Francisco Largo Caballero, "but, for that, one class has to disappear."

The recent Russian revolution had made Spanish landowers jittery, while the middle classes, who would have supported a more moderate reform programme, were scared off by proposals to abolish religious orders, nationalise large estates and dissolve the army. After the nationalist rebel uprising led by General Franco, the global players weighed in with their own agendas. Britain and France denied the Spanish government aid because they did not want to foster communism, inadvertently driving the beleaguered republic into the arms of the Soviets.

Limbering up for the Second World War, German and Italian military commanders used Spain as a testing ground for new equipment and tactics. Carpet bombing was first used there, by the Luftwaffe, at Oviedo and Guernica, while the world's first Molotov cocktail was lobbed in Madrid. It was a war for opportunists, from the beggars in Madrid who stopped invoking "the love of God" and started appealing instead to "revolutionary solidarity", to Kim Philby, already a secret communist, who used his position as Times correspondent as a fig leaf with the nationalists.

What emerges most powerfully from the Russian documents studied by Beevor is how the violent antipathy between Soviet communists and Spanish anarchists undermined the republicans' efforts from the start. "It is impossible to win the war against the rebels if these scum within the republican camp are not liquidated," read one report. Moscow's conviction that "Trotskyist" anarchists were in Franco's pay sparked a distracting witch-hunt. Russian commanders established a concentration camp for these and other malefactors. Astonishingly, 4,000 men were imprisoned or tortured there. The republican government did nothing to stop this.

Other documents show how the Soviets reserved the best military kit and medical care for their own forces, while charging the republic a fortune for weapons and other services. Meanwhile, the volunteers of the international brigades made do without maps and with old or faulty weapons. Beevor concludes: "Franco did not so much win the war: the republican commanders, with the odds already stacked heavily against them, squandered the courage and sacrifice of their troops and lost it."

Beevor's understanding of warfare and tactics is second to none. The note he strikes here is brisk and businesslike, which is just as well considering the complexity of the material and limitations of space. One can understand his desire not to play "long-distance psychiatrist", but there could have been a few more human stories, especially on the nationalist side, to balance the military account. The occasional flashes of colour, whether provided by brigaders' diaries, or eye-witnesses, are very welcome, when they come. This is a great achievement, all the same.

 

 

A revelatory account of the Spanish civil war
(Filed: 11/06/2006)


Andrew Roberts reviews The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor.

The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 is causing much reflection in Spain at the moment, and perhaps it ought to prompt some here, too. The common perception of that devastating three-year struggle is of a crusade against Fascism in which idealistic young writers and workers from all over the world joined International Brigades in a brave but ultimately doomed struggle to save democracy. Their defeat presaged a world war.

Antony Beevor - the bestselling author of Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall as well as an earlier book on the Spanish Civil War - believes it is time radically to reinterpret the conflict. There have been several hundred learned treatises written about every aspect of the struggle, which Beevor synthesises here to alter substantially our view of what happened. There are also huge numbers of new documents available, such as the diary of the ruthless Luftwaffe commander in Spain, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, who wrote on April 28, 1937: 'Guernica must be totally destroyed.' Above all, there has been Russian glasnost.

The collapse of Soviet Communism has led to the release of archival material that proves conclusively just how Stalinist many of the key decision-makers of the Spanish Republic had become, and what they were planning to do if they won. From these reports back to Moscow, it is clear that victory over Franco would have led to the same gulags, mass executions and iron-gripped totalitarianism as existed in the USSR at the time. Instead, Beevor estimates, Franco placed up to half a million Republicans in 190 concentration camps at the end of the war, to slave away in labour battalions for decades. He puts the long-disputed figure of those executed after the surrender at around 50,000 to 70,000. The Caudillo would choose who lived and who died - and how they died - as he drank post-prandial coffee with his priest, José María Bulart. For those needing to be made an example of, he wrote 'garrote y prensa' (garrotting and press coverage) on the death warrant.

Far from being admired by the rest of the Republican army, the International Brigades were resented as foreigners and frequently used as cannon fodder to protect the lives of Spaniards. Some battalions were left on the front line for 150 days consecutively. Most soldiers did not know the extent of Stalinist penetration of their upper ranks, let alone the detailed plans to liquidate their anarchist, Trotskyist, socialist and liberal comrades-in-arms the moment that victory was won. The International Brigades even had their own concentration camp, Camp Lukacs, which held 4,000 inmates. It's all a very far cry from the wide-eyed idealism of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie. How George Orwell would have loved to have been able to read the reports to Moscow of the Comintern representative André Marty, which bear out the suspicions he enunciated in Homage to Catalonia. 'After victory we will get even with them,' Marty wrote of the Stalinists' Popular Front allies, 'all the more so since at that point we will have a strong army.'

Beevor tells the familiar but still terrible tales of the assault on Madrid, the Aragón offensive and the final battle of the Ebro with characteristic verve - helped by 11 excellent maps - but he is also very good on the political manoeuvrings of this most intensely ideological of conflicts. For the Left bears much of the responsibility for the ultimate destruction of the Republic it claimed to revere.

The Asturias Rising of October 1934, in which up to 30,000 miners attacked the Civil Guard and public buildings and assaulted a military garrison of 1,000 soldiers, was nothing less than an attempted provincial revolution. 'It was full-scale civil war, although limited to one region', concludes Beevor of the bitter street-fighting and the miners' execution of 40 priests and landowners. At one point the radical Left leader Largo Caballero said: 'I want a Republic without class war, but for that one class has to disappear.' The actual civil war did not break out for another 21 months, but it cannot be entirely blamed on the Nationalists when it did. (The slaughter of more than 3,000 priests led Pope Pius XII to proclaim to Franco on the fall of Madrid in March 1939: 'Lifting our hearts to God, we give sincere thanks with Your Excellency for the victory of Catholic Spain.')

Beevor shows how many bad generals there were on both sides, including Franco himself. The war was won by the Nationalists because they tended to make fewer egregious strategic errors. The Republicans took absurd risks - such as the Brunete, Teruel and Ebro offensives, the last comprising 80,000 men but only 150 artillery pieces - when a better strategy would have been to bide their time and to hope that the coming European war would force the withdrawal of the German and Italian contingents.

In the light of Beevor's discoveries in Moscow, it is worthwhile considering what would have happened if a Stalinist Spain, a satellite of the USSR, had emerged, as it easily might have done. By June 1941 it would have made more sense for Hitler to have invaded Spain than Russia, leading to the loss to the Allies of Gibraltar and the strategically vital western Mediterranean, which in real life Franco's neutrality effectively protected. Overall, however, Beevor's book leaves one feeling rather as Henry Kissinger did about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s: 'A pity they both couldn't lose.'

 

 

The TLS n.º 5383  May 31, 2006

 

In times of deceit

 

Uniforms and disguises of the fighters in Spain’s Civil War

 

 

Antony Beevor
LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA
902pp.
Crítica. 9.90euros.
84 84326 65 9

THE BATTLE FOR SPAIN
The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
526pp. Orion. £25.
0 297 84832 1
 
At the end of another Spanish Civil War – the one usually called the War of the Spanish Succession, from 1701 to 1716 – Francesco Conti wrote an opera to console his master, the Emperor Charles VI, for the loss of the Spanish Crown. Don Quixote in Sierra Morena represents Spain as the kind of country a ruler could do without: a troublesome place full of fanatics and dimwits. At the close of the work – in the version I have seen – the hero is alone on stage, inside the iron bars of a cage, railing at the rest of the world and denouncing its insanity. It could be a metaphor for the next two-and-a-half centuries of Spanish history, when, according to the standard account, Spain was confined in paranoid isolation, puzzled, like so many stage madmen, at other peoples’ madness. The “Tibet of the West” excluded the Enlightenment, resisted the influence of the French Revolution, revived the Inquisition, spurned industrialization, postponed aggiornamento, practised mañanismo, perpetuated the siesta, maintained the mantilla, clung to clericalism, sniffed at science. Painters, poets and novelists spread a fantastic image of Spain, where swart Gypsies and heavily moustachioed bandidos inhabited Moorish ruins. The country became the only Western victim of Orientalism, as though historical accident had washed Spain up on the wrong shore of the Mediterranean. Africa, alternatively, “began at the Pyrenees”.


There was never really any truth in this picture. Spain has a typical Western European past, as far as such a thing exists, and continued to be a representative part of Western Europe in the nineteenth century, experiencing much the same conflicts and changes as everywhere else, with differences of rhythm, intensity and distribution. But the conviction that Spain’s was an extreme case of exceptionalism became a commonplace. I can still recall vividly the first lesson in Spanish history I ever had as an undergraduate in England. The year was 1969 and Hugh Trevor-Roper was the lecturer. “Just as Europe”, he began, “has never learned anything from Spain, so no significant intellectual movement of European origin has ever taken root in Spain.” I knew this sonorous aphorism was overstated, but the prevailing orthodoxy made the exceptions seem proof of the rule.

The Spanish Civil War was the biggest, most widely acknowledged exception. It never seemed merely Spanish – especially not to the British, for whom, if they were on the left wing of politics, it became a mythic part of their own story. No other event in the modern history of Spain became canonical in accounts of global or even of European history, because Spain’s apparent self-exclusion from the mainstream meant that everything else in Spanish experience could be classified as peculiarly Spanish. Even, for instance, in sensitive, wide-ranging, comparative studies about European imperial management overseas in the nineteenth century, there is never anything about Cuba – not even in Henk Wesseling’s wonderful recent volume The European Empires: The Continental powers and the overseas world 1815–1919. Despite brilliant work by David Ringrose, Leandro de los Prados Escosura and others, Spain still hardly gets a mention in most books on early industrialization.

“Liberal” is a word other languages borrowed from Spanish, yet even the most educated readers outside Spain still know virtually nothing about the Spanish contribution to the origins of liberalism. Spain was one of the first countries in the world to have a genuinely democratic franchise but you would never learn that from most general studies of the subject. Little reference is made to Spain even in connection with areas of nineteenth-century European experience in which Spain’s share is well known – such as Romanticism, urbanization, reforms in public health and criminal law, the rise of socialism and anarchism, and the conflicts of absolutists against constitutionalists or of centralizers against particularists. Yet with the Civil War, Spain re-entered European and global history, as the curtain-raiser to an era of global ideological conflict and the mise en scène of the most savage and conspicuous of Europe’s ideologically inspired conflicts. That, at least, was what the propaganda of both sides said and what many participants believed. The war made young poets abandon their bicycles in English lanes and “explode like bombs”. It inspired agenda-laden art that appealed across cultural and national boundaries to patrons’ political commitment. Contributions came from some of Russia’s best movie-makers, some of the most avant-garde studios of Paris, and an American Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Technically, the Spanish war anticipated the Second World War. Politically, it seemed to reflect global divisions, as rival forms of authoritarianism clawed at each other on the streets and in the field, like the crude monsters of the horror films popular at the time. Spain became, in the eyes of beholders, a laboratory of struggle between Fascism and Communism, totalitarianism and democracy. In retrospect, the significance of the war seems to have grown even wider since those days; no longer just a representative and prophetic place of its time, the Spain of 1936–9 has become a cockpit in which universal truths were tried. At the highest level of generalization, the war generates reflections on human values and boundless problems of morals and memories. Antony Beevor illustrates this fact in the last words of his new history:

The Spanish Civil War is, however, best remembered in entirely human terms: the clash of beliefs, the ferocity, the generosity and selfishness, the hypocrisy of diplomats and ministers, the betrayal of ideals and political manoeuvres and, above all, bravery and self-sacrifice of those who fought on both sides. But history, which is never tidy, must always end with questions. Conclusions are much too convenient.

Of course, all wars, like all human dramas, can be made to illustrate universal themes. But an intriguing paradox underlies Beevor’s insights. Almost all the supposed peculiarities of Spanish history turn out, in the light of recent research, not to have been unusual at all.
Yet the Civil War, the one episode deemed widely or even universally representative seems – the more we learn about it – to have had little or nothing to do with broader movements in Europe and the world, or with other divisions and conflicts of its day. Rather, it looks increasingly like a uniquely Spanish event, rooted in quarrels peculiar to Spain, and unintelligible except in a strictly Spanish context. Foreigners who, at the time, saw it as their war, were deluded by propaganda – whether they were German or Italian “volunteers” against Bolshevism, or Catholic “crusaders” against atheism and secularism, or freedom-loving fighters against Fascism, or anti-Communist capitalists or anarchists, or anti-Stalinist Troskyists, or anti-Trotskyist Stalinists.

Ad hoc coalitions fought the war, drawn together by a mixture of accident and advantage, with little ideological consistency. Those on the side commonly called “national” included huge numbers of German and Italian “volunteers” and Moroccan recruits, attracted, like their modern counterparts – the Gastarbeiters and “illegals” who now swarm across the Strait – by rates of pay unattainable in Africa. So while the Nationalists proclaimed a “crusade” and reconquista, implicitly invoking bygone holy wars, the Republicans sang, with perhaps greater justification, their anthem, “We Are Fighting against Moors”. The money that paid for the “national” effort came, meanwhile, in large part, from US and other foreign investors. Meanwhile, if the Nationalists were not genuinely national, not all Republicans fought on the side called “Republican”. General Queipo de Llana, the loud-mouthed boss of wartime Seville, was actually a freemason – a member of an organization Franco loathed and clericalists decried – and ended his incendiary broadcasts with the cry, “Long live the Republic!”. My uncle Ramón was a Republican through and through, but fought on the same side as Franco because, he said, he “could not bear to rape a nun, burn a church or kill a priest”. No simple Left–Right cleavage divided the sides. Until the war stimulated recruitment, fortified identities, and demonized foes, there were virtually no Fascists and few Communists in Spain.

The Falange was a tiny organization and, though it aped Fascist rites, it had its own programme, more concerned with imposing family values and enforcing social uniformity than with enhancing the power of the State or celebrating the right of might. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, the historian who became President of the Republic in exile, was viscerally conservative, whereas some radical revolutionaries joined the Falange.

The Basque nationalists who fought for the Republic were mostly clericalist conservatives: their left-wing and secularist allies in other provinces virtually abandoned them to defeat out of distaste for their politics. Many liberals sided with Franco, because in Spain the liberal tradition has always been centralizing, whereas devolutionist agendas span Right and Left. The unwieldy nature of the movement Franco had to meld into effectiveness glared in the absurdly sesquipedal name he gave it in an attempt to cover up the gaps: “National and Traditionalist Movement and of the Juntas of National-Syndicalist Organisations”. The leftist “front” of socialists, anarchists, strict Marxists and Stalinists who defended the Republic was so various that its own quarrels rent it and doomed it to disaster. The nearest thing to a clear-cut division between the sides coincided with the cleft between centralists, who fought for Franco, and devolutionists, who supported the Republic; but even this fact was complicated by differences between Basque, Galician and Catalan nationalisms and Navarrese particularism, which allied with the centralizers for reasons peculiar to Navarrese tradition. Some on the Left were as centralist as Franco. Beevor quotes the cry of the beleaguered Republican leader, Dr Negrín, “Spain is the only nation in Spain!”. Nor could the war be explained by the division of military against militias: almost half the armed services sided with the Republic. Both sides betrayed most of their own supporters. The socialists refused to fire “a bullet for Málaga” because they hated its anarchist defenders. Stalinists ended up running a bunker-Republic after proscribing and purging the Marxists and anarchists. “Aren’t we all socialists?”, asked Orwell during the Left’s internecine battles in Barcelona. It was like asking, “Aren’t we all Christians?” at the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Franco ditched the traditionalists without whom he could not have won the war, and deceived the monarchists. I find it amazing that there are still liberal aristocrats of sentimentally monarchist persuasion in Spain, who – after sacrificing family members in the war and suffering horribly under the regime – still think Franco was on their side. The dictator mocked the “hispanic values” he claimed to defend by selling Spain out to trash capitalism and consumerism. I have never believed in the sincerity of his own conversion to Catholicism. “L’Espagne”, he seems to have thought, “vaut bien une messe.” Ultimately, of course, the war was unideological because most Spaniards were ideologically uncommitted: they were caught up in the bloodshed unawares, conscripted unwillingly, tempted into activism by opportunism, or terrorized into compliance with whichever side happened to control their home localities.

It was, however, the supposed international significance of the Spanish Civil War that first drew Antony Beevor to the subject. His first account appeared twenty-five years ago: essentially a military narrative, written with the lessons for the Second World War in mind. The updated version, which marks the seventieth anniversary of Franco’s so-called national uprising, is much more than an update. Except in the fluency of the writing, which is a constant joy of Beevor’s output, the magisterial handling of copious material, and the expertise the author displays in military history, the new book is so different that it could almost be mistaken for the work of a different writer. The Spanish version is the more complete, but the abridgement for an anglophone readership still contains much that is new.

Beevor seems to have read just about everything that has appeared in the period between the publications and to have taken almost all of it into account, though perhaps without doing justice to the many personal memoirs that have appeared, especially on the Nationalist side. Above all, he has used previously inaccessible documents from Russian archives in which he has done much pioneering work.

His account remains strongest as a narrative of military events. No other book on the same scale does such a good job in this connection. Here his argument is unchanged: the Republican command was incompetent from the moment when Franco was left to transfer his legions from Morocco, virtually unopposed, in support of the coup attempt of July 18, 1936. Political inhibitions made Republican military management even more ineffective. Russian “advisers” did not know how to work their own tanks. The Republic’s propaganda wing was a disastrous failure. Beevor shows that the Nationalists “concentrated their efforts on a select audience in Britain and the USA”. They were far better than their opponents at fabricating and placing atrocity stories. This ensured that the democracies stayed out of the war and that the flow of capital and informal aid to the Nationalists continued. So it was not so much that Franco won the war as that the Republic lost it. The top brass on the Nationalist side were not much superior to their opponents in generalship. Beevor takes careful account of the revisionism of Blanco Escolí, the great anatomizer of the myth of Franco as a great commander, and broadly accepts that the Generalísimo was feeble in the role, though he perhaps underestimates the extent to which the torturous pace of Franco’s conquests was politically prolonged: the victors needed time to “cleanse” conquered territory of their enemies as they went. The difference between the sides was not, according to Beevor, the superior professionalism or equipment of the Nationalists – the battles the Republican militias won proves that – but the inexorable logic of the international situation, which left the Republic effectively friendless, and ultimately starved of supplies. The foreign loan-troops and war matériel, which made up for the Nationalist forces’ deficiencies, “did not”, according to Beevor, “win the war”, but did prevent a Republican victory. The longer the fighting lasted, the more certain Nationalist victory became: Franco piled up weapons and loans, while the gold and silver of the Bank of Spain vanished, the Republican tanks ran out of fuel, and the rations for the defenders of Barcelona dwindled to about four ounces of pulses a day. In one respect, Beevor recognizes that foreigners miscast themselves as part of a war in which they were really intruders. For this was not a crisis of democracy. As Beevor points out, the Left started the war with shaky democratic credentials and rapidly forfeited even those. In a counter-factual passage Beevor imagines what might have happened had a democracy emerged. But there was no chance of such an outcome. A Republican victory after a long war would have turned Spain into a Stalinist satellite, perhaps prolonging dictatorship until the collapse of the Soviet empire. A quick Republican victory would have provoked another civil war: not against the Right, which would have been proscribed, emasculated and pacified – as Franco did with his old enemies – but between the warring sects and cults among which the Left was divided. The only point at which Beevor’s critical judgement seems less than perfect is in his discussion of the purges each side inflicted on the other: he tends to see the Left as more rationally selective in persecution than the Right. “Rarely”, he claims, “was an honest grocer molested or a priest who buried rich and poor alike.” That, I fear, is a romanticization.

The proof that the war was a peculiarly Spanish affair is that it baffled every foreigner who arrived, expecting to fight on a local front of an internationally familiar conflict. Stalin – we now know – sold weapons to both sides. Goering was implicated in clandestine and exploitative arms deals with Republicans. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini had much fellow-feeling for Franco, whom they supported partly to give their armies and aircraft an airing. By locating the war in its European and global context, Beevor misses an opportunity to stress the introspective Spanishness of the conflict. But he does a good job of exploding one of the traditional myths of Spanish exceptionalism.

There was no peculiarly Spanish way of making war. It was not quixotism that made militiamen scorn trenches: they had no tools to dig them. The violence and cruelties of the conflict were not the result of Spanish passions but of the universal demon of the battlefield: “fear in disguise”. People killed not out of a fatalistic Spanish indifference to death, but because of the hateful old wisdom: the dead do not fight back.

Ultimately wars become whatever myth makes them out to be: what people believe generates consequences and becomes a kind of truth. Thousands of foreign volunteers poured into Spain thinking that they were taking part in the defence of the international working class, “uniting the human race”. About 17,000 died. At least 5,000 Spaniards died as volunteers for Hitler in Russia, thinking they were continuing an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Though the experiences on both sides were disillusioning, many participants and onlookers forged new sympathies and realized that the real global struggle would not be of Left against Right, but of democracy versus the rest. The Spanish Civil War was not genuinely a prelude or part of either struggle, but erroneous interpretations had briefly fused it with both by confusing it with them. When the Second World War ended, it hardly seemed worth the Allies’ while to take on Franco. As the Cold War iced over the world, Spain was increasingly irrelevant. Briefly, until the 1960s, when the normal pattern of Spanish history resumed, and the country began to resemble the rest of Europe more closely, Spain really was as “different” as the the tourism-promotion posters said. So it gradually became possible to escape from the hindsight of the World War era and to see the Civil War as a peculiarly Spanish tragedy. Now we are in a new phase of the historiography of the conflict, dominated by a new kind of literature in Spain, in which the children and grandchildren of the victims of the war undertake journeys through memory in search of the dead. In this post-ideological world, Antony Beevor wisely deflects reflection away from the contexts both of Spanish exceptionalism and global Götterdämmerung, to draw human lessons. By applying the technique of the Annals of Confucius – recounting horrors in an unimpassioned tone – he has produced a moving masterpiece of the indictment of war.

 

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

 

The TLS n.º 5385,    June 16, 2006

 

Looking back on the Spanish Civil War

 

Sir, – Many of my age (b 1924) who came to awareness in the late 1930s saw the Spanish Civil War as the great defining conflict of our time, with all the evil on Franco’s side and all the good on the other. No such iconizing vision can stand up to the increasingly dispassionate historical study brought by the passage of time, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s careful review of Antony Beevor’s book on the war (June 2) makes it clear that the old simplicities cannot survive. And yet one clings to them – In his “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943) George Orwell wrote that “In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth”. This leaves out a good deal, including the monstrosity of German totalitarianism, but I persist in resonating to its basic truth. Or in other words, political judgements and historical verdicts do not inhabit the same universe; as we become ever more knowledgeable, the world we know becomes ever more bleak.
 
HOWARD KAMINSKY
301 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, Florida 33139.
 

 

Sir, – Having just finished a book (with Oleg Gordievsky) on Soviet intelligence operations during the Spanish Civil War, I would like to make a few comments on the recent review by Felipe Fernández-Armesto of Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain.

The Spanish Civil War, writes Professor Fernández-Armesto, “never seemed merely Spanish – especially not to the British”. Perhaps to some it didn’t seem so, but it was first of all Spanish, and only then international. The Western democracies, with Britain in the lead, abandoned Spain very early on in the conflict, having signed a non-intervention pact and thus forced the Republic into Stalin’s clutches. The British presence – on both sides – in Spain was very small in comparison with that of other countries (especially the German/Austrian and French presence in the Republican camp and the German and Italian presence on the Franco side). In fact, after the war only two prominent British figures emerged: George Orwell, who fought with the far-left Marxist POUM militia, and Kim Philby, a Soviet agent sent to Spain to assassinate General Franco. (After being wounded, quite by chance, young Kim was decorated by the Caudillo for bravery, which helped him to secure a career in the Secret Intelligence Service.) A number of other British volunteers who fought in Spain (one of them is still alive) returned home and became Soviet spies operating against the interests of their own country.

According to your reviewer, the Spanish Civil War “seemed to reflect global divisions, as rival forms of authoritarianism clawed at each other”, and was seen as “a laboratory of struggle between Fascism and Communism”. Really? Fernández-Armesto likes the verb “to seem”, but does he have any reason to imply that the Republican governments of Largo Caballero and then Juan Negrín were Communist? Does Antony Beevor hint at this in his book?

The reviewer writes that Mr Beevor “has used previously inaccessible documents from Russian archives in which he has done much pioneering work”. Perhaps, but it would be interesting if Professor Fernández-Armesto could give us an example of even one important but hitherto unknown fact that comes from any document found by the author of The Battle for Spain in the Russian archives.

I fully agree with the reviewer’s conclusion that the Spanish conflict helped people “to realize that the real global struggle would not be of Left against Right, but of democracy versus the rest”. Mr Beevor’s book has been well received in Spain, and I am sure that it is an important contribution to our general knowledge of events which took place seventy years ago, but it can hardly be called a revelation or be used by specialists as a fundamental source.
 
BORIS B. VOLODARSKY
Liechtensteinstrasse 12, A-1090 Vienna.

 

 

 

Antony Beevor: On the joys of history

The Left isn't going to like Antony Beevor's book on the Spanish Civil War, but he's used to controversy - his account of the fall of Berlin elicited heated protests from the Russian ambassador. Danuta Kean talks to him about the joys of digging in the archives, his despair about history students today and his brush with Jackie Onassis

Published: 21 May 2006

Antony Beevor is horrified, but, for once, it is not accounts of rape, torture or political betrayal uncovered in the archives of Berlin and Moscow that exercise the author of Stalingrad. What angers him is the state of British education, especially the teaching of history. "Britain is the only country in Europe, with the exception of Albania and Iceland, where history is no longer compulsory after the age of 14." His words are rapid as machine gunfire. "There is an extraordinary conviction, which has come partly from teacher training colleges, that history is elitist and reactionary and not worthy."

He leans forward, hands clenched tight. "I get letters from students, post-graduates even, saying, 'I am doing a thesis on the war on the Eastern Front. I haven't had time to read your book, so could you answer the following questionnaire?'" He throws his hands up in despair. "What is completely shattering is that most of these letters are illiterate. They couldn't string a sentence together. They couldn't spell, of course, let alone punctuate, and their sentence construction is wicked." He laughs in disbelief at the students' crassness. It breaks the tension. "There was not a moment for them to stop and think: what would a person who has written a book feel if they are told, 'I haven't had time to read this book, but could you fill in this questionnaire?'"

We are in the airy study of his Fulham town house, paintings cover the walls and a huge table, laden with books and papers, dominates its centre. We are meant to be discussing his latest book, The Battle for Spain, an epic history of the Spanish Civil War that has topped the Spanish book charts, unleashing a storm of debate, but a question about history in schools has touched a nerve.

It is one of many tangential diversions. Like his contemporary David Starkey, Antony Beevor has opinions and is not afraid to use them. But unlike Starkey, Beevor is no vituperative controversialist. Seemingly incapable of dissembling, he passionately engages in issues whether debating arcane facts of history, the rapaciousness of supermarkets - which as president of the Society of Authors he vocally campaigned against - or, as now, ill-informed government policy.

"This government has the lowest regard for history we have ever known," he says, exasperated. "One of the worst things about the state system in this country is that nobody really has to write essays. Students are incapable of putting their thoughts down in a coherent way and this is handicapping them for jobs in the future. The good thing about the history essay was that it taught you to assess the material you had and to put it together in a reasonable way, which is what you have to do for any report, whether you are a civil servant or working in a company."

His voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper and he leans closer. "Of course we are going to have high [university] drop out rates if students feel incapable and inadequate when writing. They are force-fed stuff for the GCSE and A Level system, but they are incapable of thinking for themselves or putting together an argument." His voice rises: "We have created a generation of educational nerds. They can think inside a box, but are totally incapable of getting outside that box."

The irony of Beevor attacking the education system is not lost on him. He may be a world-class historian, but he was a school failure, flunking A Levels in History and English due he says to "utter bloody-mindedness". There is a mischievous glint in his eye when I ask about his academic record, and he giggles like a guilty schoolboy. "It was the arrogance and innocence of youth that made me fail," he admits. "I was at Winchester in a completely bolshie mood. I didn't do any work at all."

From Winchester, he joined the army, where he served for five years as an officer with the 11th Hussars, a decision he now regards as a mistake. "Lives and careers are very strange things in the way that they can work out," he says, philosophically. As a child, he suffered from Perthes disease: from the age of four until seven he was on crutches. It left him with a feeling that he had something to prove. "My reasons for going into the army were less than glorious," he admits with characteristic honesty. "They were just purely to sort out a physical inferiority complex."

Ironically, the army redeemed him, because there he discovered two things: a love for writing and a passion for history, fuelled by the lectures of Sir John Keegan at Sandhurst. Keegan rejected the chessboard theory of battlefields, in which master chess players outmanoeuvre one another, and convinced Beevor that battles are lost, not won, and that the reasons for those failures lie in the stories of the men on the ground and the people back home.

His obsession with detail marks him out from other star names who seem less willing to spend years lost in archives: three for Stalingrad and four for Berlin. Ask him about his latest research and he can barely contain his excitement. Sometimes, what he discovers has a high cost. The terrible stories he uncovered for Stalingrad, his landmark account of the decisive battle of the Second World War, and for Berlin, the harrowing story of the fall of Hitler's capital and the brutality of the Red Army, still give him nightmares.

The Battle for Spain contains its own horrors, with outrages on both sides. The brutality of Franco's Nationalists is well known, but equally shocking is the murderous paranoia of the Communists and the blood-lust of the people unleashed after years of oppressive government. In Spain, it has reignited debate about the war and its painful legacy, not least because Beevor explodes the myth that the Republic was a virgin democracy violated by fascist forces and betrayed by its democratic neighbours.

"The myth of the immaculate Republic was something that really did need to be tackled, because it still exists in Spain," Beevor explains. It is an under-statement. The idea of the Immaculate Republic remains a rallying cry for the Left. To understand the impact, imagine a foreign historian revealing that the idea of plucky Britain facing the fascists alone during the Blitz is a myth.

"Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, whose grandfather was executed by the Right, refuses to believe it was anything else other than a virgin political entity ravished by the appalling Fascists," he says. "In the book, I do not in any way diminish the horrors of the Nationalist brutality, but the trouble with the myth of the violated Republic is that it automatically means everybody and every element within it shares the same reputation."

In place of the myth, Beevor shows a Republic in disarray. While the cruelty of Franco's Nationalists is shocking in its systematic viciousness, the Republic was hamstrung by incompetence and ideological infighting. The lack of political cohesion severely clouded the judgement of its leadership, leaving it isolated internationally and divided at home.

He explains the inaction of Spain's democratic neighbours France and Britain, and shows how it played into the hands of the Nationalists. He also reveals that Stalin was a less than willing accomplice, his craven self-interest ensuring the help he gave the Spanish socialist forces was too late and too little.

"The idea that the Republic had been betrayed by the democracies is ridiculous," Beevor says emphatically. Britain was in no position to help, its own air force was still flying biplanes and its army ill-equipped. "It would have been disastrous for Britain and France to intervene. That would have handed the plate to Hitler and Mussolini, because it would have given them the excuse to occupy Gibraltar, thus sealing off the Mediterranean."

That the Republic could have had a hand in its own downfall is a bitter pill for the Spanish to swallow, and Beevor admits he braced himself for criticism when the book was published there last September. It would not be the first time he has found himself revealing unwelcome truths. In Berlin his revelations about mass rapes by the Russian occupying forces led the Russian ambassador to accuse him of "slander, lies and blasphemy" against the Red Army. In Spain, he says in disbelief, "The coverage was simply staggering."

As so often in Beevor's career, his timing was impeccable. Post-Madrid bombings, The Battle For Spain arrived as a new generation looks to its past to understand the divisions of the present. Within a week of the book appearing, it was being discussed at the Spanish Cabinet meetings, all the ministers having read it.

The debate he unleashed, while healthy, has disturbed him. "I was alarmed by the questions of a lot of young Spanish journalists, who were saying Spain seems to be more split than it has been for so long, did I think that they face the risk of another war? I said, for goodness sake! Spain has achieved one of the great miracles of democracy. I couldn't understand this extraordinary excess of alarm, fear and unease. This has been very much since the Madrid bombings. There is unease in Spain at the moment about many of these aspects, which is why a debate is so necessary and so healthy."

Such soul-baring is a by-product of what he does, he believes, not an end and he is dismissive of historians who seek to prove pet theories with research. "The point of a historian is just trying to understand," he says. "I think it is an appalling idea that a historian should have a leading thought, where they have a theory and get material to suit their thesis." History is not science, he declares, it is a branch of literature, and to view it in any other way is not only wrong, it is dangerous.

He names a clutch of European rivals, whose work he regards as fatally flawed by the belief that somehow history can be evaluated in a test tube. Top of his hit list is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's psycho-history Hitler's Willing Executioners with its claims to scientific credibility. "It is a dangerous idea, because books like Goldhagen's will, on the basis of demographic profiling and a lot of archival research, start leaping to conclusions, or certainly drawing conclusions based on figures that are telling only half or a quarter of the truth. A scientific arrogance among historians is truly dangerous."

Arrogance is not among Beevor's qualities, and he is capable of dealing with the putdowns of rivals with a shrug of his shoulders. Besides, no putdown will ever match that of Jackie Onassis, with whom he worked on Paris After the Liberation, which he co-authored with his wife Artemis Cooper. Beevor had found "the perfect" jacket photograph of an American soldier sitting in a jeep looking very pleased with himself, surrounded by a French intellectual and a mother and child.

"The group said everything about the French-American relationship. I thought it was fantastic. I immediately sent it to Jackie with shall we say naive enthusiasm. Back came this wonderful printed pale blue card, with a white border and white cockle shell at the centre as her symbol. It said..." Laughing, he assumes an effete American accent: " 'Dear Antony, thank you for sending the photograph, but I think I should warn you that choosing a jacket photograph here in the States is a little akin to the Japanese tea ceremony.'" Authors meddling with jacket designs is a bête noir among publishers; Onassis had told him, albeit elegantly, to butt out.

Onassis was a revelation, he says fondly. Though he had expected a fashion icon, with all the vapidity that implies, what he found was a smart woman who took her role as editor at Doubleday seriously. "We only discovered how sharp she was right at the end," Beevor recalls. Though dying of Hodgkins lymphoma, Onassis continued to work diligently. Beevor and Cooper were under pressure to finish the book in time for the 50th anniversary of the liberation, but there were problems with the final chapter.

"I finished the last chapter, took it in to see Artemis and she said it doesn't work, but she couldn't see exactly why. Well, of course I threw my teddy into the corner, even though I knew she was right." Nobody else could work out what needed changing either. "We sent it to Jackie, and this was three weeks before she died, so she was very ill indeed, and she put her finger on it straight away. She was so professional, so elegant..." his voice trails away. It is a fond memory for a man who spends most of his hours among the horrors of other people's recollections.

'The Battle For Spain' is published by Weidenfeld at £25. To order a copy for £22.50 (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897

Antony Beevor is horrified, but, for once, it is not accounts of rape, torture or political betrayal uncovered in the archives of Berlin and Moscow that exercise the author of Stalingrad. What angers him is the state of British education, especially the teaching of history. "Britain is the only country in Europe, with the exception of Albania and Iceland, where history is no longer compulsory after the age of 14." His words are rapid as machine gunfire. "There is an extraordinary conviction, which has come partly from teacher training colleges, that history is elitist and reactionary and not worthy."

He leans forward, hands clenched tight. "I get letters from students, post-graduates even, saying, 'I am doing a thesis on the war on the Eastern Front. I haven't had time to read your book, so could you answer the following questionnaire?'" He throws his hands up in despair. "What is completely shattering is that most of these letters are illiterate. They couldn't string a sentence together. They couldn't spell, of course, let alone punctuate, and their sentence construction is wicked." He laughs in disbelief at the students' crassness. It breaks the tension. "There was not a moment for them to stop and think: what would a person who has written a book feel if they are told, 'I haven't had time to read this book, but could you fill in this questionnaire?'"

We are in the airy study of his Fulham town house, paintings cover the walls and a huge table, laden with books and papers, dominates its centre. We are meant to be discussing his latest book, The Battle for Spain, an epic history of the Spanish Civil War that has topped the Spanish book charts, unleashing a storm of debate, but a question about history in schools has touched a nerve.

It is one of many tangential diversions. Like his contemporary David Starkey, Antony Beevor has opinions and is not afraid to use them. But unlike Starkey, Beevor is no vituperative controversialist. Seemingly incapable of dissembling, he passionately engages in issues whether debating arcane facts of history, the rapaciousness of supermarkets - which as president of the Society of Authors he vocally campaigned against - or, as now, ill-informed government policy.

"This government has the lowest regard for history we have ever known," he says, exasperated. "One of the worst things about the state system in this country is that nobody really has to write essays. Students are incapable of putting their thoughts down in a coherent way and this is handicapping them for jobs in the future. The good thing about the history essay was that it taught you to assess the material you had and to put it together in a reasonable way, which is what you have to do for any report, whether you are a civil servant or working in a company."

His voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper and he leans closer. "Of course we are going to have high [university] drop out rates if students feel incapable and inadequate when writing. They are force-fed stuff for the GCSE and A Level system, but they are incapable of thinking for themselves or putting together an argument." His voice rises: "We have created a generation of educational nerds. They can think inside a box, but are totally incapable of getting outside that box."

The irony of Beevor attacking the education system is not lost on him. He may be a world-class historian, but he was a school failure, flunking A Levels in History and English due he says to "utter bloody-mindedness". There is a mischievous glint in his eye when I ask about his academic record, and he giggles like a guilty schoolboy. "It was the arrogance and innocence of youth that made me fail," he admits. "I was at Winchester in a completely bolshie mood. I didn't do any work at all."

From Winchester, he joined the army, where he served for five years as an officer with the 11th Hussars, a decision he now regards as a mistake. "Lives and careers are very strange things in the way that they can work out," he says, philosophically. As a child, he suffered from Perthes disease: from the age of four until seven he was on crutches. It left him with a feeling that he had something to prove. "My reasons for going into the army were less than glorious," he admits with characteristic honesty. "They were just purely to sort out a physical inferiority complex."

Ironically, the army redeemed him, because there he discovered two things: a love for writing and a passion for history, fuelled by the lectures of Sir John Keegan at Sandhurst. Keegan rejected the chessboard theory of battlefields, in which master chess players outmanoeuvre one another, and convinced Beevor that battles are lost, not won, and that the reasons for those failures lie in the stories of the men on the ground and the people back home.

His obsession with detail marks him out from other star names who seem less willing to spend years lost in archives: three for Stalingrad and four for Berlin. Ask him about his latest research and he can barely contain his excitement. Sometimes, what he discovers has a high cost. The terrible stories he uncovered for Stalingrad, his landmark account of the decisive battle of the Second World War, and for Berlin, the harrowing story of the fall of Hitler's capital and the brutality of the Red Army, still give him nightmares.

The Battle for Spain contains its own horrors, with outrages on both sides. The brutality of Franco's Nationalists is well known, but equally shocking is the murderous paranoia of the Communists and the blood-lust of the people unleashed after years of oppressive government. In Spain, it has reignited debate about the war and its painful legacy, not least because Beevor explodes the myth that the Republic was a virgin democracy violated by fascist forces and betrayed by its democratic neighbours.

"The myth of the immaculate Republic was something that really did need to be tackled, because it still exists in Spain," Beevor explains. It is an under-statement. The idea of the Immaculate Republic remains a rallying cry for the Left. To understand the impact, imagine a foreign historian revealing that the idea of plucky Britain facing the fascists alone during the Blitz is a myth.

"Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, whose grandfather was executed by the Right, refuses to believe it was anything else other than a virgin political entity ravished by the appalling Fascists," he says. "In the book, I do not in any way diminish the horrors of the Nationalist brutality, but the trouble with the myth of the violated Republic is that it automatically means everybody and every element within it shares the same reputation."

In place of the myth, Beevor shows a Republic in disarray. While the cruelty of Franco's Nationalists is shocking in its systematic viciousness, the Republic was hamstrung by incompetence and ideological infighting. The lack of political cohesion severely clouded the judgement of its leadership, leaving it isolated internationally and divided at home.

He explains the inaction of Spain's democratic neighbours France and Britain, and shows how it played into the hands of the Nationalists. He also reveals that Stalin was a less than willing accomplice, his craven self-interest ensuring the help he gave the Spanish socialist forces was too late and too little.

"The idea that the Republic had been betrayed by the democracies is ridiculous," Beevor says emphatically. Britain was in no position to help, its own air force was still flying biplanes and its army ill-equipped. "It would have been disastrous for Britain and France to intervene. That would have handed the plate to Hitler and Mussolini, because it would have given them the excuse to occupy Gibraltar, thus sealing off the Mediterranean."

That the Republic could have had a hand in its own downfall is a bitter pill for the Spanish to swallow, and Beevor admits he braced himself for criticism when the book was published there last September. It would not be the first time he has found himself revealing unwelcome truths. In Berlin his revelations about mass rapes by the Russian occupying forces led the Russian ambassador to accuse him of "slander, lies and blasphemy" against the Red Army. In Spain, he says in disbelief, "The coverage was simply staggering."

As so often in Beevor's career, his timing was impeccable. Post-Madrid bombings, The Battle For Spain arrived as a new generation looks to its past to understand the divisions of the present. Within a week of the book appearing, it was being discussed at the Spanish Cabinet meetings, all the ministers having read it.

The debate he unleashed, while healthy, has disturbed him. "I was alarmed by the questions of a lot of young Spanish journalists, who were saying Spain seems to be more split than it has been for so long, did I think that they face the risk of another war? I said, for goodness sake! Spain has achieved one of the great miracles of democracy. I couldn't understand this extraordinary excess of alarm, fear and unease. This has been very much since the Madrid bombings. There is unease in Spain at the moment about many of these aspects, which is why a debate is so necessary and so healthy."

Such soul-baring is a by-product of what he does, he believes, not an end and he is dismissive of historians who seek to prove pet theories with research. "The point of a historian is just trying to understand," he says. "I think it is an appalling idea that a historian should have a leading thought, where they have a theory and get material to suit their thesis." History is not science, he declares, it is a branch of literature, and to view it in any other way is not only wrong, it is dangerous.

He names a clutch of European rivals, whose work he regards as fatally flawed by the belief that somehow history can be evaluated in a test tube. Top of his hit list is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's psycho-history Hitler's Willing Executioners with its claims to scientific credibility. "It is a dangerous idea, because books like Goldhagen's will, on the basis of demographic profiling and a lot of archival research, start leaping to conclusions, or certainly drawing conclusions based on figures that are telling only half or a quarter of the truth. A scientific arrogance among historians is truly dangerous."

Arrogance is not among Beevor's qualities, and he is capable of dealing with the putdowns of rivals with a shrug of his shoulders. Besides, no putdown will ever match that of Jackie Onassis, with whom he worked on Paris After the Liberation, which he co-authored with his wife Artemis Cooper. Beevor had found "the perfect" jacket photograph of an American soldier sitting in a jeep looking very pleased with himself, surrounded by a French intellectual and a mother and child.

"The group said everything about the French-American relationship. I thought it was fantastic. I immediately sent it to Jackie with shall we say naive enthusiasm. Back came this wonderful printed pale blue card, with a white border and white cockle shell at the centre as her symbol. It said..." Laughing, he assumes an effete American accent: " 'Dear Antony, thank you for sending the photograph, but I think I should warn you that choosing a jacket photograph here in the States is a little akin to the Japanese tea ceremony.'" Authors meddling with jacket designs is a bête noir among publishers; Onassis had told him, albeit elegantly, to butt out.

Onassis was a revelation, he says fondly. Though he had expected a fashion icon, with all the vapidity that implies, what he found was a smart woman who took her role as editor at Doubleday seriously. "We only discovered how sharp she was right at the end," Beevor recalls. Though dying of Hodgkins lymphoma, Onassis continued to work diligently. Beevor and Cooper were under pressure to finish the book in time for the 50th anniversary of the liberation, but there were problems with the final chapter.

"I finished the last chapter, took it in to see Artemis and she said it doesn't work, but she couldn't see exactly why. Well, of course I threw my teddy into the corner, even though I knew she was right." Nobody else could work out what needed changing either. "We sent it to Jackie, and this was three weeks before she died, so she was very ill indeed, and she put her finger on it straight away. She was so professional, so elegant..." his voice trails away. It is a fond memory for a man who spends most of his hours among the horrors of other people's recollections.

'The Battle For Spain' is published by Weidenfeld at £25.

 

 

 

Literary Review

   

 

 

Allan Massie

A DIVIDED IBERIA

The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
By Antony Beevor (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 526pp £25)

 

Antony Beevor began the first version of this book thirty years ago. It was published in 1982 under the title The Spanish Civil War. Since then a vast quantity of new material has become available, as a result of research and publications by Spanish historians, and the opening of Soviet files. The revision has been on such a scale that this may properly be regarded as a new book.

The author remarks that he has found that ‘the huge increase in information available today has tended to swell the number of vital questions rather than reduce them’. This may be, he adds, ‘due to the author losing some of the more passionate concerns of youth’. Perhaps he has. But the previous point is nevertheless valid. However straightforward the issues in Spain might once have seemed, to idealists of left and right alike, they now, seventy years after the outbreak of the war, seem confoundedly complicated.

To offer one example: The Nationalists declared they were fighting against international Communism. The British Government adopted the policy of non-intervention, partly so as not to irritate Hitler and Mussolini, but principally because of its fear of Communism. Yet it was the Nationalists’ launching of the Civil War that gave the hitherto small Spanish Communist Party an opportunity it could hardly have looked for without the war. Objectively (to employ a term beloved of Thirties Marxists), Franco made a Communist Spain possible, even if by his military victory he prevented it from coming into being.

Who was responsible for the war? Clearly Franco and the Fascists. Everyone knows that. Well, yes, indeed. But in the run-up to the elections of February 1936, the Socialist leader, Largo Caballero, an old trade unionist, declared: ‘If the right wins the elections, we will have to go straight to open civil war.’ As it happens, the left won by the narrow margin of 150,000 votes. This should have given them pause. Instead ‘the left, ignoring the narrowness of their victory – less than 2% of the popular vote – proceeded to behave as if they had received an overwhelming mandate for revolutionary change’.

That must have suited the Communists? Not at all. Caballero, carried away by his own rhetoric, began to alarm his new Communist friends. His inflammatory and revolutionary speeches at mass meetings around Spain calling for the elimination of the middle class were contrary to Dimitrov’s Policy. (Some wit at the time coined the slogan ‘Vote Communist and save Spain from Marxism’.)

So if the right started the war, the left provoked it – may even, foolishly, have welcomed it.

The rest of Europe saw the Spanish war as primarily an ideological struggle. Spain was where Fascism (alternatively, Bolshevism) would be checked. This was why Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union intervened. It was why thousands of foreigners flocked to fight for the Republic, and hundreds for the Nationalists. And, indeed, because the warring parties were identified by their position on the left–right spectrum, those who saw it as an ideological war were not mistaken. It was in reality a European war, and a prelude to that of 1939–45.

But it was also a private Spanish war, and Beevor never allows us to lose sight of this truth. The question to be decided was the nature of the Spanish State, not just its political complexion. Was Spain to continue to be a centralised state with all political power reserved to Madrid, or were the different provinces to be permitted varying degrees of autonomy? For many this was the essential question. It was why the Basques, despite their intense Catholic faith and the comparatively advanced capitalism of their economy, ranged themselves on the side of the Republic despite its hostility to both the Church and private property.

It was a terrible war: cruelty, treachery and barbarity practised by either side; astonishing courage and perseverance displayed by both also. It should be said that Beevor makes it clear, undeniably so, that the atrocities committed by the Nationalists far exceeded in number, if not in horror, those committed by the Republicans. Prisoners were shot almost as a matter of routine, often in violation of the terms of their surrender. Throughout the war and afterwards, Franco’s vindictiveness and indifference to human life were repellent. Beevor finds that many of the stories of ‘Red’ atrocities – in particular the raping of nuns – had little basis in fact. On the other hand he fully confirms the duplicity and unscrupulousness of Soviet policy and the Spanish Communist Party.

The Nationalists won the war. Franco was confirmed in power as dictator. Among the losers were the Falange, the Spanish Fascist Party, gradually pushed to the sidelines by the Caudillo, who had never been a party member. Franco was an autocrat and traditionalist, never, except for temporary tactical reasons, attracted by the Fascists’ commitment to some form of social revolution.

In the long run, of course, the Nationalists and Franco have lost. Spain today couldn’t be less like the Spain of their dreams. Catalonia is semi-independent. If the terrorist group ETA’s ceasefire holds, the Basque Country will at last enjoy similar status. The Church has lost its authority. Censorship has disappeared. The Fascist who murdered the poet Lorca and said he shot him twice in the arse because he was a homosexual would be appalled – and it would serve him right – to find gay marriages being legally performed. But the old Popular Front has lost too. Modern Spain is a liberal capitalist democracy, one in which, with extraordinary tact and good sense, a veil has been drawn over much of the bloody and miserable history of the first half of the century.

This is an enthralling book. The narrative is masterly, wonderfully clear as a guide through the labyrinth. It is even-tempered and full of good sense. One might ask for a little more characterisation of some of the huge cast, and it is mildly irritating to find in the notes that books written in English appear with the title and publication date of their first Spanish edition. But as a guide to the terrible battle for Spain, it is admirable.

 

 

 

History

Failure of the brave new Spain

 

THE BATTLE FOR SPAIN The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
by Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld, £25; 568pp

 

FOR MANY YEARS, THE defence of the Spanish Republic was “the last great cause”. This was not just because it involved the selfless struggle of Spaniards and international volunteers against fascism but also because the Republic was an attempt to drag Spain into the 20th century.

In a Europe disillusioned with capitalism, Republican Spain seemed an exciting experiment, the first step towards an egalitarian world.

The anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti told a reporter: “We are not afraid of ruins, we are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.”

In recent years, a Cold War historiography, emanating from the US and using Soviet documents, has endeavoured to portray the Republic in sinister terms. Antony Beevor is altogether more balanced, but also sets out to take some of the shine off the idealisation of the Republic. In this updating of his 1982 work The Spanish Civil War, his two big contributions are to rethink the military conflict and his judicious use of the Russian material. As might be expected of any book by Beevor, the job is done in clear prose, peppered with fresh perceptions, especially where strategy, tactics, and soldiers are concerned.

Given the complexity of the subject, however, occasional judgements are questionable. There can be no doubt that Beevor is right that the Republic tried to do too much too quickly. Given the situation in 1931, however, it is harsh to blame the Socialist Party and its urban middle-class allies for trying.

The Republican-Socialist coalition wanted to create a modern Spain, destroying the influence of the Church, eradicating militarism and helping millions of starving labourers through agrarian reform. This inevitably raised the expectations of the urban and rural proletariats while provoking the bitter enmity of clerics, soldiers and the landowning and industrial oligarchies. Within hours of the Republic being declared, monarchist plotters had begun planning a military coup, which took place on July 18, 1936.

The plotters were unhindered in the spring of 1936 largely because, as Beevor points out, the Prime Minister, Santíago Casares Quiroga, viewed General Emilio Mola, the leading conspirator, as Chamberlain did Hitler. This is typical of the insights that glitter throughout.

The coup provoked the collapse of the state infrastructure, since functionaries — from diplomats to policemen — tended to favour the rebels. The vacuum was occupied by unions and leftist organisations. Essential services were organised with astonishing speed although difficulties of food distribution were provoked by the fact that the militias had commandeered all available transport.

But Beevor suggests that the disappearance of bourgeois attire that so pleased George Orwell had as much to do with hot weather as with the hunting down of the middle classes for wearing hats.

Beevor is most thought-provoking on military detail. The problems of ordinary soldiers are brought vividly alive: anarchists regarded comrades who stayed awake on sentry duty as fools; International Brigaders had to sort through boxes of cartridges to find something that might fit their rifles; Russian “advisers” were often as inexperienced as those that they were supposed to advise. Senior Soviet offices were apoplectic about the anarchic behaviour of the Spaniards but their dispatches were often as redolent of impotence as of iron control. They had no prior experience of people who disagreed. Beevor describes one commissar nonplussed to find that not only were those he dealt with not Communists but in a variety of parties.

Most original are the criticisms of Vicente Rojo, seen by most commentators as the outstanding strategist of the war.

Beevor sees him as rigidly adhering to French First World War notions and overly influenced by Stalinist advisers. There are devastating critiques of his diversionary attacks at Brunete, Belchite, Teruel and the Ebro, as “prestige operations” imposed by the Russians. Teruel is seen as a damagingly futile attack on a strategically useless area.

Certainly all of these operations assisted Franco’s ambition of annihilating the Republic’s forces. In contrast, the defence of Valencia is described as the Republic’s greatest victory.

The involvement of Hitler and Mussolini meant that, from July 27, 1936, the war was a battle of a wider European civil war. Stalin decided to assist the Republic and foreign help rendered the politics of both zones horrendously complex. This was particularly true in the Republican zone, where bewildering political rivalries were bedevilled by the interference of Soviet advisers.

It is here that the Russian documents produce both fascinating and distorting insights. To fight Franco, Hitler and Mussolini while various leftwing factions wanted a revolution was daunting. Communist calls for discipline were music to the ears of liberal Republicans and moderate Socialists. The role of the Russians has to be seen in terms of the time, not with hindsight about the horrors of Stalinism.

Beevor produces much disturbing material on the vicious discipline imposed on the International Brigades by the Frenchman André Marty, something rarely mentioned in memoirs by volunteers.

Marty was a murderous thug but it is not true that he admitted shooting 500 brigaders. He was alleged to have said this to the central committee of the French Communist Party on October 15, 1937. He actually said, totally untruthfully: “During all the time that I participated in the work there, checking everything personally, I can say that there were only two cases of executions.”

However, a Francoist propaganda pamphlet changed this to: “The executions that I ordered did not amount to more than 500.” There can be no doubt that Marty was violent, paranoid and abusive but he was guilty only of between 10 and 20 deaths.

Beevor may not believe that fighting for the Spanish Republic constituted the last great cause, but anyone who reads this intriguing book will understand Albert Camus’s words: “It was in Spain that men learnt that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward. It is this, without doubt, which explains why so many men throughout the world regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.”

 

The Beevorised version

Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain, a revamped discussion of the Spanish civil war, succeeds brilliantly, says Piers Brendon

Saturday June 24, 2006
The Guardian

The Battle for Spain
by Antony Beevor
526pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25

Like the bitter conflict in Iraq today, the Spanish civil war was pathologically vicious. Religious fanaticism, political separatism and foreign intervention inflamed the violence in both cases. But it was aggravated in Spain by other factors, notably virulent class hatred. Half the nation went to bed hungry each night and anarchists said that "the sins of the old corrupt system can only be washed away in blood". The affluent were no less ferocious. One Salamanca landowner boasted that on the opening day of the civil war he lined up all his labourers and shot six of them "pour encourager les autres".

The "Red Terror", which creamed the scum off the top (to paraphrase Stalin's ambassador), reminded some of barbarian massacres. Among the victims were 6,500 clergy and 280 nuns. And such was the hatred felt for the church, a medieval institution with an auto-da-fé mentality, that some priests were buried alive after being made to dig their own graves. Meanwhile Franco proved to be, as HG Wells said, every inch "a murderous little Christian gentleman". He approved a process of limpieza (cleansing) and altogether slaughtered some 200,000 people, four times as many as the Republicans. Nationalists cried "Long live death". The psychopathic General Queipo de Llano, who also encouraged rape, promised to hunt down Republicans without mercy and "if they're already dead, I shall kill them again".

So Antony Beevor's revised history of the civil war, which vividly anatomises a state and a society in the process of disintegration, is a tract for our times. It is also an odd volume. First published in 1982, it was regarded as a competent but not especially original account of the war. It told a chronological, nuts-and-bolts story that held the reader's attention. It was well illustrated - indeed, the first edition had more and better photographs than the present book. And it contained some telling anecdotes - manhunts conducted by Falangist aristocrats were known as reforma agraria because they finally gave the landless peasant a piece of ground for himself.

However, the first edition was overshadowed by Hugh Thomas's masterpiece, which had itself been recently revised and enlarged. Other works also eclipsed Beevor. There were classic novels by Hemingway, Malraux and Barea. There were brilliant documentaries by Orwell and Koestler. There were unbeatable first-hand records, ranging from Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth to Ronald Fraser's Blood of Spain. There were ground-breaking academic works by Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and others. In fact, the Spanish civil war, widely regarded at the time as the dress rehearsal for the second world war, had produced a vast palimpsest of historical writing. Unusually, too, as Beevor remarks, the losers have had the last word - which must trouble the shade of Franco, who professed himself (rather like Blair) "responsible only to God and to history".

Far from being intimidated by all this competition, Beevor has refashioned his book, more than two decades later, to take advantage of it. But he has not only stood on the shoulders of giants, he has conducted research in German and Russian archives to throw fresh light on the story. So although the present work replicates the structure and often echoes the language of its predecessor, it is more an improved recipe than a reheated dish. There are important additions. New characters appear, such as the Soviet General Smushkevich, who secretly commanded the entire Republican air force. Silent corrections are made, not least over statistics. Whereas Beevor first said that Queipo de Llano captured Seville with 300 men, he now says 4,000. Whereas he first said that 1,654 people were killed at Guernica, he now says between 200 and 300.

Above all, he has Beevorised the book, given it the richness of detail and the narrative drive that made Stalingrad such a success. By its very nature, though, this is not a battle book. Its author cannot consistently display his greatest strength, the depiction of exciting military set-pieces. Instead he has to spend inordinate amounts of time explaining the fiendish complexities of Spanish politics, typified by the alphabet soup of initials identifying the various factions, and setting the struggle in its international context. In fact he does this well, pointing out that American trucks, petrol and credit were as vital to Franco as Hitler's aircraft and Mussolini's tanks. He also shows how Britain's non-intervention policy assisted the fascist cause. This was a farrago of hypocrisy masterminded by Anthony Eden, who held exquisitely aloof from what the left regarded as a crusade for democracy and what he called "the war of the Spanish obsession".

Beevor is alert to the key role that propaganda played in the conflict. It operated at every level, from grotesque atrocity stories - La Pasionaria allegedly killed a monk with her teeth - to the organised mendacity whereby nationalists blamed the bombing of Guernica on Asturian dinamiteros. Posters, described as "soldiers of paper and ink", were ubiquitous - though when German International Brigaders put up the slogan "We Exalt Discipline" French recruits posted precautions against venereal disease. Truth was a fatal casualty. In order to sustain false claims made as fighting commenced, battles were often continued long after they were lost. Furthermore, the communists invariably blamed defeats on treachery instead of incompetence, let alone on Russian weapons so antique that one consignment was named "the battery of Catherine the Great".

The spread of Stalinist paranoia to Spain resulted in a hideous purge within the Republican ranks. Communists treated political allies, such as anarchists and "Trotskyites", as ideological foes, to be tortured, murdered or locked up in lunatic asylums. This internal convulsion did more to ensure Franco's victory than his own unimaginative generalship. But some suspected that he advanced so slowly in order to crush opposition as in an "olive oil press". Certainly one of his aides said that they had "to kill, to kill, and to kill" all reds, "to exterminate a third of the masculine population". Beevor aptly quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "A civil war is not a war but a sickness."

Piers Brendon's books include The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

 

EL PAIS

La guerra inacabada  

 

Publicado por Antony Beevor en 1982, este libro sobre la Guerra Civil española, inédito hasta ahora en castellano, ha sido ampliado y revisado. Se trata de una obra de síntesis, clave para

entender el conflicto.

 

SANTOS JULIÁ

BABELIA - 10-09-2005

 

Al final, habremos salido ganando. Ya era raro que una estimable historia de la Guerra Civil española, muy crítica del estalinismo, muy comprensiva hacia el anarquismo, escrita por un británico y publicada en 1982, no hubiera encontrado en España quien la tradujera y editara. Saturación, tal vez; o quizá sospecha de que las historias generales habían agotado sus posibilidades o, como afirmaba Stanley Payne, que la Guerra Civil ya no atraía a primeras figuras de la historiografía mundial, o por la razón que fuera, lo cierto es que The spanish civil war, de Antony Beevor, pasó inadvertida para los editores españoles.

Pero como no hay mal que por bien no venga, La Guerra Civil española que ahora se ofrece -por cierto, en una excelente traducción- es una versión sustancialmente mejorada de la que apareció en inglés hace más de veinte años. Beevor ha incorporado a su anterior trabajo nueva documentación, procedente sobre todo de archivos rusos y alemanes, ha seguido con encomiable atención lo que él mismo califica de inmenso trabajo de historiadores españoles en archivos locales y ha escrito así, manteniendo su estructura y matizando y enriqueciendo sus análisis políticos, un libro nuevo, basado en un amplísimo manejo de fuentes y vacunado por completo de las patrañas del sedicente "revisionismo" que tanta mentira ha acumulado en años recientes.

Un libro que se lee, y esto no sorprenderá a quienes conozcan sus tan celebrados Stalingrado y Berlín, la caída, extraordinariamente bien, tanto por nuevos lectores como por los ya familiarizados con la inmensa bibliografía sobre la Guerra Civil. Así es porque, desde el primer momento, Beevor recrea el clima político de la época como si fuera un presente que a todos interpela, en el que se debaten problemas y se juegan destinos que a todos nos afectan y nos importan. La estructura del libro, el ritmo de la acción, los apuntes sobre los personajes, el terror blanco y el terror rojo, la revolución, las pugnas entre partidos, la intervención extranjera: todo, aunque pertenezca a "otro país", vuelve a hacernos presente la guerra como si aún subieran llamas de los incendios de aquellos años.

Pero es en el relato y en el análisis de las acciones militares donde brilla el mejor Beevor, el que sigue día a día, hora a hora, el desarrollo de la acción y el que elabora el balance definitivo sobre la estrategia de los militares profesionales republicanos, apoyados, hasta la ruptura final, por el partido comunista. La República, como ya aconsejó su presidente al nuevo Gobierno nombrado en mayo de 1937, no tenía más alternativa que fortalecer su defensa en el interior para no perder la guerra en el exterior y forzar así una paz negociada. El Estado Mayor, y muy particularmente el general Vicente Rojo, con la aprobación y el impulso de Juan Negrín y -hasta su salida del Gobierno- de Indalecio Prieto, intentaron una y otra vez la ofensiva que rompiera por el centro el frente enemigo para aliviar la presión sobre otras zonas en peligro. Fue un error catastrófico. Primero, Teruel, después el Ebro, dan la razón a Beevor cuando afirma que para dirigir la guerra de modo eficaz la República tenía que haber combinado una estrategia defensiva con ataques cortos, rápidos, de tanteo, en puntos distintos, que hubieran sembrado la confusión en el enemigo.

No fue así: los dirigentes políticos y militares de la República prefirieron lanzar ofensivas en campo abierto, para romper el frente y aprovechar la ventaja de la sorpresa, sin tener en cuenta su evidente inferioridad aérea y su escaso equipamiento de artillería. De esta forma, cuando el avance llegaba al punto máximo y quedaba paralizado, grandes contingentes de soldados se ofrecían como fácil blanco a los aviones italianos y alemanes y a la superior artillería del enemigo. Porque, y éste es otro de los convincentes análisis de Beevor, Franco tampoco sabía hacer más guerra que la del carnero, la de acometida frontal: al cabo, todos dependían de la doctrina militar francesa. La lentitud de su avance, la exasperante -para sus aliados: Hitler, Mussolini- capacidad para desaprovechar ocasiones favorables, habría podido servir a los intereses de la República si un ejército reconstruido por el Gobierno de Negrín hubiera forzado, gracias a una defensa inexpugnable, una salida negociada a la guerra.

Que la estrategia militar republicana no fue la mejor de las posibles queda claro en su quiebra final y en la terrorífica construcción de "la España nueva". Beevor acierta de nuevo al no cerrar su historia con el desfile de la victoria de los insurgentes y al dedicar los últimos capítulos al "gulag de Franco", a las cárceles, la represión y el exilio, a eso que el autor llama "guerra inacabada". La guerra, en efecto, no terminó el 1 de abril de 1939, que fue sólo el día de la victoria de los generales insurrectos. Como Dionisio Ridruejo escribirá en Le Monde a propósito del "delito continuado" que sirvió de pretexto para llevar a Julián Grimau en 1963 ante un pelotón de fusilamiento, España sufrió durante años sin fin un "état de guerre continu", un estado de guerra continuado: quien quiera saber por qué no perderá el tiempo leyendo este libro, llamado a ocupar un lugar de primera línea entre las historias generales de la Guerra Civil.

 

 

EL PAIS

 

17-9-2005

 

Vuelve el 36

 

Antonio Elorza:

 

Cada diez años vuelve a visitarnos el espectro de la Guerra Civil. En 1996 fue especialmente cordial y tuvo como momento estelar la visita y homenaje a los veteranos de las Brigadas Internacionales. No se les hizo demasiada propaganda, el programa a que se vieron sometidos fue de rigidez cominterniana y, sin embargo, la acogida popular fue muy emotiva. Recuerdo la inmensa ovación que ofrecieron los estudiantes de mi facultad a un pequeño grupo al que invité para que relatasen sus experiencias en la guerra y la ulterior del estalinismo. Lo encabezaba Lise, la viuda de Arthur London. La concesión de la nacionalidad española a los brigadistas pareció una señal de que la reconciliación se había alcanzado.

Al borde ya de una nueva conmemoración, no es seguro que el clima de cordialidad vaya a reproducirse. Los preliminares anuncian una clara polarización en los juicios, y sobre todo una detestable deriva de signo demagógico, inclinada a los intereses y a la sensibilidad de la extrema derecha. En los años que siguieron a la muerte de Franco, los nostálgicos se conformaron con devorar los libros de Vizcaíno Casas. Ahora el problema es más grave. El PSOE en el Gobierno hizo muy poco por fomentar la memoria histórica, que jugó espontáneamente a su favor cuando en 1993 alguien puso en circulación la especie de que una victoria del PP significaba el retorno del franquismo. No se ocupó de fomentar la explicación a los españoles de la grandeza que en su fracaso representó la democracia republicana, ni siquiera del papel desempeñado por los socialistas en la construcción del régimen. Cuando siendo ministro Semprún hubo una tímida y contradictoria colaboración de Cultura en el homenaje a Azaña en Montauban, el excelente libro resultante ni siquiera fue traducido al español. Hasta Prieto ha sido objeto de un olvido deliberado. Menos mal que una serie de investigadores pusieron por su cuenta en marcha esa aspecto esencial de la memoria que es el análisis de la represión franquista. La importancia de su aportación es cada vez mayor, pero la justa condena del franquismo deja en la sombra la explicación del periodo republicano y por tanto abre la puerta a la equidistancia que plantea Bennassar en el último artículo de Claves: la responsabilidad de ambos bandos es comparable, y el plus del franquismo reside en la represión.

Ahora bien, el revisionismo no surgió de la pluma de historiadores, sino de la acción panfletaria de un pequeño grupo de publicistas que desde hace unos años viene vendiendo con éxito una visión apocalíptica de nuestros años treinta, orientada a encandilar a la derecha. No encontraron obstáculos. Recuerdo cuando en estas mismas páginas se recogió la afirmación de uno de ellos, cargando en un libro contra el mito de las Brigadas Internacionales sin haber visitado siquiera su archivo en Moscú ni conocer los principales libros recientes sobre el tema. Luz verde para el elogio. De acuerdo con esta visión maniquea, el papel desestabilizador de Octubre del 34 resulta desligado del contexto europeo y español, y sin más es presentado como inicio de la Guerra Civil. Como si el general Sanjurjo no se hubiera sublevado ya en el 32, el austriaco Dollfuss no existiera y Gil Robles fuese Adenauer. El quinquenio republicano queda reducido a un museo de horrores, que además sirve para descalificar agresivamente al actual Gobierno. Solamente queda celebrar el regreso de Franco como artífice de una modernización autoritaria. Primo de Rivera ya le precede en esta revalorización póstuma.

Es de esperar que los historiadores intenten escapar de esa tela de araña. No se polemiza con un panfletario. El magnífico libro de Anthony Beevor sobre la Guerra Civil, utilizando esta vez de verdad los archivos de Moscú y la reciente bibliografía sobre el conflicto, es un ejemplo de cómo explicar la lógica de la guerra, no limitarse a contar batallas, y también de cómo entender que si hubo muchas más víctimas en el sector republicano, por la represión de la guerra y de la posguerra, ello no es fruto de la casualidad, sino de una vocación de exterminio que impulsaba ya antes del 18 de julio a los militares sublevados: la "operación quirúrgica" de que habla Franco en noviembre de 1935. Otra cosa es que libros como éste logren contrarrestar el efecto sobre la opinión pública de la cascada de panfletos.

 

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 05.07.2006, S. 7

Explosive Angst
Antony Beevor kann den Spanischen Bürgerkrieg kaum erklären

RICCARDO BAVAJ

Antony Beevor: Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg. Aus dem Englischen von Michael Bayer und anderen. C. Bertelsmann Verlag, München 2006. 653 S., 26,- [Euro].

"A mixed bag": So hat vor über zwanzig Jahren der Historiker Stanley Payne seinen zwiespältigen Eindruck von Antony Beevors Gesamtdarstellung über den Spanischen Bürgerkrieg auf den Punkt gebracht. Keine neuen Perspektiven, aber solides Handwerk. Von analytisch sehr unterschiedlicher Qualität, aber insgesamt klar und prägnant geschrieben. Ähnliches läßt sich über die Neuauflage sagen, die anläßlich des siebzigsten Jahrestages des Bürgerkriegbeginns auf den Markt kommt. Anders als 1982, als Beevors non-fiktionales Debütwerk erstmals erschien, ist dem Autor seit seinen Bestsellern "Stalingrad" (1998) und "Berlin - The Downfall 1945" (2002) die Aufmerksamkeit einer breiten Öffentlichkeit gewiß.

Auf Anregung seines spanischen Verlegers Gonzalo Pontón will er die Erstfassung gründlich überarbeitet haben. Dazu liefert Beevor jedoch nur spärliche und etwas widersprüchliche Angaben. Einerseits habe er das Buch "völlig neu" geschrieben, andererseits unterschieden sich beide Fassungen lediglich in "Einzelheiten und Quellen". Tatsächlich verfügte Beevor über einen ganzen Mitarbeiterstab, der die jüngste, vor allem spanisch- und englischsprachige Forschungsliteratur sichtete sowie russische, deutsche und schwedische Archive durchforstete. Die erheblichen Erkenntnisfortschritte der beiden vergangenen Jahrzehnte schlagen sich nur bedingt in der Neufassung nieder. Der Aufbau beider Fassungen ist überwiegend streng chronologisch, weil der Logik narrativer Geschichtsschreibung verpflichtet. Gewonnen hat das Buch an Genauigkeit, Zuverlässigkeit und Plastizität. Alte Daten wurden revidiert und andere hinzugefügt, wenig aussagekräftige Zitate entfernt und zahlreiche instruktive Quellen eingearbeitet.

Beevor erzählt die Geschichte des erbitterten Kampfes zweier ideologischer Blöcke, der Volksfront und der Nationalen Front, die in sich freilich, vor allem was das republikanische Lager angeht, ausgesprochen heterogen waren. Vom Pronunciamiento im Juli 1936 über das Trauma von Guernica bis zu Francos Einnahme von Barcelona und schließlich von Madrid Ende März 1939: Das wird, mit Blick für regionalhistorische Besonderheiten, mal nüchtern, mal moralisch wertend beschrieben, nur selten unterbrochen durch systematische Kapitel wie das zum Engagement von Intellektuellen für die "last great cause". Die propagandistische und ideologische Dimension des spanischen "Kulturkriegs" (Helen Graham) wird allerdings ebensowenig in ausreichendem Maße behandelt wie seine Vernetzung im Geflecht der internationalen Beziehungen. Nicht viel erfährt der Leser etwa über die Motivlage Hitlers, an dessen ausschlaggebender - in der Vergangenheit teilweise umstrittener - Bedeutung für Deutschlands Intervention aber nicht der geringste Zweifel gelassen wird. Einen etwas tieferen Einblick gewährt Beevor in die lange Zeit unklaren Hintergründe der sowjetischen Haltung im "internationalen Stellvertreterkrieg".

Am schmerzlichsten vermißt man eine überzeugende Gesamtanalyse der zahllosen Schlachten. Gerade im letzten Kapitel, in dem der Autor zur Deutung anhebt, zeigt sich, daß gute Militärgeschichte mehr sein muß als die chronistische Wiedergabe von Kampfhandlungen und strategischen Operationen. Aus Mangel an historiographisch tauglichen Kategorien kann Beevor kaum das enorme Ausmaß an Gewalt und Brutalität plausibel erklären, das sich in jenem Mikrokosmos europäischer Radikalisierung manifestierte. Daß Gewalt "häufig das Produkt eines verzerrten Ausbruchs der Angst" und im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg deswegen so explosiv gewesen sei, weil viele ihre Angst so stark unterdrückt hätten, vermag die spezifische Gewalttätigkeit dieses Krieges ebensowenig zu erklären wie die kryptische Bemerkung, daß "ideologische und religiöse Beschwörungsformeln" Gewalt hätten "abstrakt" erscheinen lassen und daß viele dazu "ermuntert" worden seien, "ihre Identität und individuelle Verantwortung in eine Sache mit entweder mystischer oder übermenschlicher Aura einzutauchen". Die Unzulänglichkeit dieser Deutungsversuche wird verstärkt durch die teilweise ungelenke Übersetzung des Buches.

Wer also an einer Darstellung des Spanischen Bürgerkriegs interessiert ist, die sich durch militärhistorischen Sachverstand und ereignisgeschichtlichen Detailreichtum auszeichnet, ist mit Beevors Buch gut bedient. Wer aber auf mehreren, sozial-, geistes- und kulturhistorischen Wegen durch das "spanische Labyrinth" von 1936 bis 1939 geführt werden möchte, sei - neben dem voluminösen Standardwerk von Hugh Thomas und der intelligenten Analyse Raymond Carrs - auf die perspektivenreichen Darstellungen Helen Grahams, Paul Prestons und Walther Berneckers verwiesen.
 

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