Democratic Memory

Five dialogues focused on elements that have been significant for building an image and a use of the past of war and revolution: popular rebellion in the 1930s in the urban spaces of large industrial European cities, including Barcelona; the meaning given to the ruins of war in democracy; decomposing Picasso’s Guernica; bringing exile and diaspora back to the centre as well as the legacy of unfinished forced disappearances and impunity that this expresses.

This is the goal behind each session, where two specialists will be discussing the stated topic and opening up a debate among the public.

Presented and moderated by: Ricard Conesa (historian and researcher in contemporary history at the University of Barcelona).

The ruins of war

21 April, at 7 pm

STÉPHANE MICHONNEAU (a lecturer at the University Lille 3, France), MARTA MARÍN (a lecturer at the University of Toronto, Canada)

What has to be done with the ruins of the Civil War? The relationship we establish with the ruins of war depend a great deal on the relationship we establish with the traumatic past of the civil conflict. Francoism involved implementing an ambitious policy for conserving several ruins, under conservation criteria strictly linked to promoting the propaganda of the dictatorship, as in the case of Belchite. There are more and more projects today, in Catalonia, Aragon and Madrid’s old front lines in northern Europe. Despite all that, these attempts are encountering difficulties of every kind that need to be analysed.

The Guernica variations

26 April, at 7 pm

GUILLERMO G. PEYDRÓ (film-maker and PhD in History of Art); LIDIA MATEO (lecturer at the Centre for Human and Social Sciences)

Picasso’s Guernica is one of the most striking images of the horrors of war and of the use calculated brutality on the civil population. Based on the film Les variacions Guernica, of Guillermo G. Peydró, we’ll be reflecting on the use that UNESCO made of cinema on art after the Second World War to establish the new values of a European construction questioned today and noting several formulas of possible resistance to the banalisation of images. Because Guernica, today, speaks to us more of cultural tourism and consumer society than it does of civilian suffering, and it would be appropriate to draw conclusions from that.

Urban space, political protest and repression in nineteen-thirties Barcelona

4 May, at 7 pm

CHRIS EALHAM (a lecturer at the University of Saint Louis) and JORDI FONT (the director of Memorial Museum of Exile)

It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Barcelona became the cradle of several popular movements and struggles that turned it into the unofficial capital of the workers’ struggle. Chris Ealham and Jordi Font will be discussing elements to help us to remember the popular movements of the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War and pay tribute to the contribution of the most humble and marginal sectors of society in building Barcelona’s collective image and its recent history.

The exile of 1939 in a Europe of diasporas

12 May, at 7 pm

FRANCESC VILANOVA (a lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona), CÈSAR CALMELL (a lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona)

The Republican exile of 1939, which led to the forced departure of thousands of people, as well as the Second Republic’s legitimate institutions, was yet another chink in the long chain of diasporas, exiles, forced migrations, displacements of populations etc., that afflicted Europe during the 20th century. Now, when a democratic Europe believed it had left behind the nightmare of armoured borders and refugee camps, the Dover Strait and Idomeni remind us that history can repeat itself in many ways and never positively.

Regimes’ sources of impunity: from nazi Germany to francoist Spain

19 May, at 7 pm

RAINER HUHLE (a member of the UN’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances), MERCEDES GARCÍA ARÁN (a lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona)

There have been considerable changes of fortune in the efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice in Germany over the eighty years that have passed since the end of Nazism: from the collective Nuremberg trials to the latest individual prosecutions of members of concentration camp staff, in the midst of which there have been long periods of relative impunity. Both the achievements and the failures in the fight against the impunity of Nazi crimes have depended on the various contexts of the country’s external and internal policies as well as the disputes over legal issues: the law to be applied, types of crimes, procedural problems, statutes of limitations etc. An analysis of these issues from the German context also invites reflection on the differences and parallels with the case of Spain.