Javier Cercas on Spain's battles with memory

Photos from the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939 by modificata da HominisCon dall’originale . CC BY-SA 4.0

We started this examination of memory and forgetting with Pedro Almodovar’s film on the Spanish civil war, as well as Spain’s ongoing historical-memory movement. The reality is countries remember when they can — and what they can.

That’s a point Javier Cercas, a Spanish writer and professor of literature at the University of Girona, recently made about Germany, in conversation with Yascha Mounk of Persuasion. “It is not completely true that Germany, for instance, changed everything after the war,” he said. “I mean, Germany only began to look seriously at its past in the 70s. That’s the moment in which a new generation of Germans began to digest Germany’s own terrible past. Spain was similar, in fact.”

The Professor suggested that Spain’s civil war, which the history books say raged from 1936 to 1939, didn’t last three years but 43, right up to Caudillo Franco’s death in 1975.

With r…