Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
***********
Fanny, Queen of the Machine Gun
December 4, 2011
By Yvonne Scholten-->
Fanny Schoonheyt, born in Rotterdam in 1912, was the only woman among the contingent of Dutch volunteers to take up arms in defense of the Spanish Republic. There were other Dutch women in Spain during the Civil War, to be sure, but they generally worked as nurses. Fanny was already in Barcelona at the outbreak of the war and participated in those July days of 1936 in the defense against the military coup. In a letter to a friend in Rotterdam she later described how she and her comrades entered the military barracks from the roofs and how they confiscated the arms found there: “I wore a rather conspicuous yellow shirt and it is a miracle they didn’t shoot me. But perhaps be they were so surprised to see me they forgot to react.” Surprised to see a girl, is the supposition, although in those days a lot of young Spanish women came into action. Fanny immediately joined the antifascist milicias and as early as July/August ‘36 left for the Aragón front, where she stayed till November when she was wounded.
Fanny Schoonheyt at the front, in an officer's uniform of the Republican Army. (Private archive Marisa Gerecht-López.)
At the front Fanny quickly became famous for her exceptional technical knowledge and her bravery. Almost all Barcelona newspapers—from the CNT’s La Noche to the widely read Vanguardia—published long interviews with her, calling her “la reina de la ametralladora,” the queen of the machine gun. Still, her comandante at the front assured she was “a very feminine woman,” while the interviewer of La Noche described her as tall, blonde (“a real blonde, not peroxide”) with eyes “as blue as a Nordic lake.” Fanny herself was rather averse to what she called “this adoration” and later, when several Dutch newspapers translated the Spanish interviews, she complained in letters to her friend about “all this nonsense” being written about her.
Fanny came to Spain at the end of 1934, trying to make a living as foreign correspondent. In Rotterdam she had had a job as secretary of the prominent Dutch newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. She was an ambitious young woman, trying hard to be invited to join the editorial staff—an almost impossible aspiration in this still exclusively male world. Still, her job provided her with an entry into the cultural and intellectual circles of Rotterdam, where she met writers, painters and filmmakers such as Joris Ivens (who in 1937 would shoot The Spanish Earth, although at that point Joris and Fanny did not meet).
Earlier in 1934 Fanny had traveled to the Soviet Union. As so many young people and intellectuals in the ‘30s she was intrigued and attracted by the fame of the Bolshevik Revolution—although she had not the slightest idea of what was really going on in the USSR. She published a series of articles about her visit to Leningrad, where she was invited as art critic. Fanny was a rather talented pianist, but she likely wasn’t too interested in theoretical questions. In these articles she struggles in a naive way with the question what “revolutionary art” should be, and although she does not come to any definite conclusion, she is keen enough to predict the brilliant future of one of the composers she discusses: Shostakovich.
At the end of ‘34 Fanny decides to leave Holland, which she finds “dusty, musty, flat and boring.” She heads to Catalonia to look up the Surinam-born Dutch novelist Lou Lichtveld, one of the writers she has met in Rotterdam. Lichtveld (who, as it happened, also composed the score to one of Joris Ivens’s films) lives in Barcelona, where he is working about the colony of German/Jewish refugees who have fled the Nazi regime. In the broad Spanish political spectrum Lichtveld’s sympathies are on the anarchist side and he is a fervent anti-Catholic. His daughter, in her eighties now, vividly remembers her childhood in those turbulent days, the strikes and demonstrations in Barcelona—and especially the day she and her sister, on their way home from school, saw a chapel that was set on fire. As soon as they got home, the girls burned their doll’s house in a spontaneous act of anticlerical solidarity.
Fanny Schoonheyt at the front, Aug-Sept 1936. Copyright EFE/Juan Guzmán.
Fanny did not stay with the Lichtveld family for very long; she soon found a place of her own in the old center of Barcelona. But she never realized her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent for a Dutch paper. The letters to her friend in Rotterdam indicate that she was not doing well and had kidney trouble. She writes a lot about daily life in Barcelona, inviting her friend to join her on a trip to Ibiza (which she described as the cheapest place on earth), but she never once mentions Spain’s political turmoil. Nor does she give any sign of political commitment herself.
In fact, this is one of the many mysteries surrounding Fanny’s life: When, where, and how did she become politically engaged? Less than a year later, after the outbreak of the Civil War, writing to the same friend in Rotterdam, she is a convinced antifascist and a member of the PSUC (the United Socialist Party of Catalonia), the Catalan branch of the Communist Party. What happened in the interim?
I long thought that Fanny became politicized during the few weeks she worked as a press agent for the Olimpiada Popular, the alternative Olympic Games to be held in Barcelona in July, and on whose organizing committee sat a good number of German and Italian political refugees. When Franco’s coup interrupted the Games, several of them joined the milicias and formed the kernel of what later became the International Brigades. I supposed Fanny’s decision to join the armed Republican resistance against the coup had been a spontaneous one, motivated by a sense of solidarity with the people she had been working with in those weeks. But a conversation with Marina Ginesta in 2007 made me change my mind.
Marina, one of the last survivors of the SCW, is over ninety by now and still a beautiful woman. A photo depicting her on the roof of the Hotel Colon in Barcelona has become an icon of the SCW. During the war she worked as a translator, among others for Koltsov, the famous Pravda-reporter. Marina told me Fanny’s political activism had started much earlier: She had met Fanny at the end of ’35 or the beginning of ‘36 at the meetings of the Communist Youth in Barcelona. “It was hard not to notice her,” Marina told me. “She was tall, blonde and she smoked cigarettes! No woman in Barcelona at that time would have dared to light a cigarette in public. She paid no attention to us, young ignorant Spanish women, I even had the impression she looked down on us. The older men respected her a lot and the younger men… you can imagine.” Marina’s testimony undermined my earlier hypotheses. Could Fanny have lived a double life of which her Dutch friends were unaware?
Fanny Schoonheyt died in 1961, age 49. I have been fascinated with her since the mid-1980s, but reconstructing her life has not been easy. Reliable sources are few and far between. Apart from a handful of letters, Fanny left no personal papers; in fact, I suspect she purposely tried to erase all traces of her Spanish past. Even her daughter, who was born in 1940 in the Dominican Republic, had no idea that her mother had fought in Spain. The most extensive information about this period of her life is to be found in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague. Between 600 and 800 Dutchmen participated in the Spanish Civil War and for almost all there is a personal dossier, compiled by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice. A special Royal Decree of summer ‘37 deprived them all of their Dutch nationality. Probably a third of them were killed in Spain; of those who returned—stateless—to Holland, many ended up in German concentration camps.
As it turns out, the Dutch National Archive contains an extensive correspondence about Fanny between the Dutch consul in Barcelona and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Several remarkable points jump out. In the spring of ‘37 the consul writes that Fanny has become an officer in the Spanish Republican Army. This is the time the militias, where anarchist influence is strong, are being dismantled, and the new army of the Republic, the “Ejército Popular” is being build. It is also the time of increased Soviet influence in the Army.
We don’t know what rank exactly Fanny held in the Republican army; Spanish military historians claim there never was a foreign woman officer at all. However, the uniform she is wearing on one of the few photos taken of her during the war is not the uniform of a simple soldier. Several sources affirm that Fanny was “directora” in the “campo de instrucción premilitar” at Pins del Valles, a little village not far from Barcelona where new recruits got their instruction. Remarkably, during the whole war Fanny never entered the International Brigades; she always operated in the realm of the Ejército Popular and the PSUC, the Catalonian Communist Party. Regardless of the specifics, hers was an exceptional career for a foreign woman.
How involved was Fanny in the internal political conflicts that divided the Republican camp? In his Homage to Catalonia George Orwell describes the horrible days of May ‘37, when left-wingers in the streets of Barcelona engaged in a deathly struggle, ending up with the elimination of anarchists and POUMists (wrongly called “Trotskyites”) and the violent death of POUM leader Andreu Nin. Orwell mentions the Barcelona’s central square, the Plaza de Catalunya, whose “principal landmark … was the Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the P.S.U.C., dominating the Plaza”: “In a window near the last O but one in the huge ‘Hotel Colón’ that sprawled across its face they had a machine-gun that could sweep the square with deadly effect.”
New of Fanny's having been wounded in La Vanguardia of June 17, 1937. Click on the image to see the whole page.
In the course of my investigation I became more and more convinced that Fanny Schoonheyt had has been one of the PSUC machine-gunners at the Plaza. After publishing my biography of Fanny in the fall of 2011, ALBA’s Sebastiaan Faber sent me a photo depicting Fanny, flanked by two men, standing with her back to a pile of sandbags in front of what looks like the façade of the Hotel Colón. The picture, taken by the famous Catalan war photographer Agustí Centelles, reinforces my supposition that Fanny played a significant role in the “hechos de mayo”. Interestingly, the picture forms part of the exhibit “Centelles in_edit_oh!” which opened in New York in October. In the show, Fanny is misidentified as Fanny Jabcovsky aka Fanny Edelmann, the equally legendary miliciana from Argentina who passed away this year, age 100. (I am still hoping to identify the two men at Fanny’s side, and welcome any suggestions anyone might have on the matter.)
Centelles’ portrait of Fanny is part of a series of at least three photos taken at the same place and time. A cropped version of one of the other images—this time with Fanny smiling—appeared on June 17th, 1937 in La Vanguardia. “La gran luchadora antifascista conocida por ‘Fanny’ gravemente herida,” the headline reads. The great antifascist fighter known as Fanny, the paper states, has been seriously wounded in a car accident near Tarragona.
This is the last piece of information concerning Fanny I found in the Spanish newspapers. What she did between June 1937 and the summer of 1938 is still an enigma, although some intriguing clues can be found in a book by the American journalist Isaac Don Levine. In The mind of an assassin (1960), a reconstruction of the life of Ramón Mercader, the Catalan secret agent who murdered Trotsky in August 1940, Levine describes how Mercader, during a hospital stay in June 1937, meets another convalescent patient: “a tall, blonde Dutch girl, Fani Castedo, prominent in the communist movement. Ramon had an affair with her. His room became a meeting place for some of the most notorious communists in Barcelona as well as Soviet NKVD operatives hospitalized in the establishment.” Unfortunately Levine does not indicate where he got this information. The name Castedo is traceable to a Catalonian painter prominent in the PSUC, a friend of Fanny’s who after the defeat of the Republic disappeared to the Soviet Union. Had she adopted his name as an alias? Had Fanny entered the NKVD’s spider web?
In the late spring of 1938 Fanny tries to get her Dutch passport renewed at the consulate of the Netherlands in Barcelona. Her request is denied. She tells the consul she wants to go back to Holland—an obvious lie. The summer of 1938 finds her in Toulouse, from where she resumes her correspondence with her friend in Rotterdam. She tells here she is in Toulouse “on duty” and will go on to Paris to obtain a pilot’s license. She is reticent about the exact nature of her activities, but she does tell her friend about a man she has fallen in love with, Georges Vieux, who works at Air France in Toulouse.
Georges, a highly qualified aeronautical technician, was likely involved with the informal aid Air France provided to the Spanish Republic. He regularly traveled to Barcelona, and is there on December 31, 1938, when Barcelona is heavily bombarded by Italian aircraft. “I almost lost my Georgie,” Fanny writes to her friend from Paris, where she is desperately trying to get her pilot’s license; her lessons are continuously postponed because of bad weather. On January 6, 1939, only a few weeks before the fall of Barcelona, she tells her friend she is still determined to go back to Spain, “whatever happens.” Meanwhile, it is not at all clear why Fanny was bent on getting her pilot’s license and what she would have done with it. Was she paid by the PSUC leaders to become some sort of private pilot at the moment a hasty evacuation might be needed? As it turned out, many PSUC leaders were hastily evacuated, with Soviet help, at the end of the Civil War.
There are many questions and just a few answers. Georges Vieux disappears from the scene altogether; I was not able to find a single trace of what happened to him after the war. Fanny stays in Paris till February 1940. How she makes a living is a mystery. A little agenda covering the year 1939—one of the few personal belongings she left behind after her death—contains a long list of more or less well known antifascist artists, painters, musicians, writers. In February 1940 she arrives in the Dominican Republic, then under the dictatorship of Trujillo. She is on the lists of the SERE (Servicio de Emigración para los Repubicanos Españoles), the agency that helped Spanish refugees to leave France. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the non-aggression agreement between Hitler and Stalin, life for communists everywhere had become unbearable. The Communist Party was outlawed and many Spanish refugees ended up in French concentration camps. Fanny, who continued to be stateless, did not choose to go to the Dominican Republic; refugees were simply assigned a destination. Trujillo had his particular reasons to admit several thousands of Spanish and Jewish refugees to his country, among which “improving the race” (with “white” European blood to counterbalance the “blacks” coming from Haiti) seems to have been an important one.
Interview with a hospitalized Fanny in "La Noche," Aug. 25, 1937. Click on the image for a larger view in pdf.
In April 1940 Fanny gives birth to a daughter, whom she will later tell that her father was a Spanish Republican fighter, named Julio López Mariani, who died on the same boat that brought Fanny to the Dominican Republic. From the documents of that time and from the research I did in Spain no such man ever results; most likely Fanny “invented” a father for her child. Regardless, from that moment on she calls herself Fanny López. She contacts the Dutch consul in the Dominican Republic and tries once again to renew her Dutch papers. The Netherlands by then is occupied by the Nazi’s, and Rotterdam has been destroyed in a massive bombardment. Fanny has good reason to hope that the information about her Spanish past has been lost in the shuffle. Unfortunately for her Dutch bureaucracy is still working and her application for Dutch nationality is denied once again. It is just because she gains the personal sympathy of the Dutch consul, Leonard Faber, that she is able to survive. Later on she starts a quite successful career as photographer. Remarkably enough she avoids almost all contact with Spanish Republican refugees that have settled in the Dominican Republic, and who according to all Dominican historians have had a determinant influence on Dominican cultural and intellectual life.
From the moment she arrives in the Dominican Republic Fanny seems bent on blurring her revolutionary past. Of course in a dictatorship it is always better to be extremely careful—and Trujillo’s rule was particularly brutal. But she becomes even more taciturn after 1947, when she is compelled to leave the Dominican Republic—the precise circumstances are unclear—and is allowed to move to Curaçao, then still a Dutch colony. Of course in the Western hemisphere in the 1940s and ‘50s there was little reason to boast of a revolutionary, communist past. But an additional reason for Fanny’s avoiding contact with her Spanish Communist comrades could have been her relation with Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin. Had that chapter of her biography become public information, her life would become even more complicated. Evidently, however, it did not: the FBI files on Spaniards in the Dominican Republic are extremely detailed, but Fanny is not mentioned.
Fanny’s silence about her Spanish past has puzzled me for a long time. When I first met her daughter, I was surprised to realize that she had not the faintest idea of her mother’s life before her birth. When I told her that her mother had been famous as “queen of the machine-gun” and the bravest girl of Barcelona, she was flabbergasted. Did Fanny hide her past only for opportunistic reasons? While in Paris in 1939, she met several Spanish artists who had been members of, or sympathetic to, the POUM. Did they open her eyes to what had really happened in those terrible May days of 1937? Did they tell her about the destructive consequences of Soviet “help” to the Republic? In other words, did she realize that in many ways she had made the wrong political choice?
Her old Dutch-Surinam friend Lou Lichtveld met her again in 1955 in Willemstad, Curaçao. She was “cool,” he said. She did not even invite him to her home. But Lichtveld had a different explanation: It was all due to the Dutch “fascistoid” government that still refused to grant Fanny her Dutch nationality: “She was stateless, so she had to be very careful.” In 1957 Fanny finally returned to Holland. She was in bad shape, her health was deteriorating quickly. On the eve of Christmas 1961 she died from a heart attack.
Yvonne Scholten is a Dutch writer and freelance journalist who has worked as a foreign correspondent in Italy and other countries. Her biography of Fanny Schoonheyt appeared with Meulenhoff in Amsterdam in 2011.
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog-The Civil War Begins: Savage Coast (Costa Brava)
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
***********
The Civil War Begins: Savage Coast (Costa Brava)
March 9, 2012
By Muriel Rukeyser-->
Edited by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
On July 18, 1936, at the age of 22, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) traveled to Barcelona, on assignment for the British magazine Life and Letters Today, to report on the People’s Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular). An anti-fascist alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Olympics, the popular games were canceled when the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War interrupted the opening ceremonies. Rukeyser was on a train with the Swiss and Hungarian Olympic teams, as well as tourists and Catalans, when it was stopped in the small town of Moncada as the civil war began and a general strike was called in support of the government.
The passengers were stranded for two nights as the people of Catalonia defended themselves and their government from the military coup, the fascists escaping through the hills surrounding them. Rukeyser arrived in Barcelona just as the city established “revolutionary order” and witnessed the first militias marching to the Zaragoza front. Though she was evacuated only a few days later, Spain would prove to be a profoundly radicalizing and transformational experience, one she would describe as the place where “I began to say what I believed,” and as “the end of confusion.”
Rukeyser would write about the Spanish Civil War for over forty years, in nearly every poetry collection, in numerous essays, and in fiction, weaving the events of the war and the history of anti-fascist resistance into an interconnected, multi-genre, and radical 20th-century history. The most complete rendering of her experience is her unpublished, autobiographical novel Savage Coast (Costa Brava), which she wrote immediately upon her return to New York City in the autumn of 1936 and edited throughout the war. The novel, which remained unfinished in her lifetime, with her last editorial choices in pen, will be available for the first time from the Feminist Press in January 2013.
The passage below is the first excerpt of the novel to be published. The scene begins after two precarious days in Moncada, all communication cut off by the general strike and the fighting. For the foreigners stranded on the train, the only sign that the government still stands is the intermittent radio. Helen, the protagonist, her lover Hans, a long distance runner and political exile from Nazi Germany, and an American communist couple, Peter and Olive, whom she befriended on the train, have watched the collectivization and defense of the republic with solidarity and excitement, hoping to get to Barcelona with the Olympic teams.
I have made the changes indicated by Rukeyser in pen. Other than that, the text is printed as the author left it.
—Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
They were speaking with difficulty, as if they had been drinking for a long time. As they paid for the food, little coins rolled and fell, and they slapped their hands on the money drunkenly to keep it still. They were surprised at the shifting darkness in the dim room, the immense rolling distance from the table to the door, the faces (like weird fish shining deepseas down) of the girls.
In the street, the elastic waves of sunlight arrived in a flood, shocking them, beating at the temples, insistent.
They looked up toward the church. Butcher’s closed; fruit store, closed; grocer’s closed; a block away, though, a crowd had gathered, filling the street-corner.
“Probably opening houses,” said Olive.
Helen wanted to go up. She remembered their retreat from the church the night before. All these houses must be opened now, she thought. “They must have started this section, last night,” she reminded Olive. “The boys were ramming in the door.”
They passed the door on their way up. It was broken, half-open, lettered C.N.T., F.A.I. Through one smashed shutter they could see the overturned tables, ransacked shelves, broken crucifixes of the parochial school.
The crowd was standing still. It was not carrying guns. Only two men at the corner, and one who stood in the middle of the crossing, had rifles in their hands.
Across the street, a long robin’seggblue bus stood surrounded by people who put their hands on the bullet-scratches, traced the long roads cut in the enamel with their fingers. Two boys with a can of white paint were daubing large letters on the snub hood and on the rear of the bus.
GOBIERNA.
“That must be the Government bus for the Swiss,” said Helen. There was a spick round hole in the windshield. The heavy glass caught sunlight on the hole-rim; bright stripes of light ran outward in a sunburst.
Peter followed her startle, calculating. “That couldn’t have missed the driver,” he remarked.
The boys went soberly ahead with their lettering, and the crowd, pressing about the truck, commented, told stories about the road, crossed and re-crossed, shouting to women leaning from windows.
Helen looked at her hand. On it was printed, in a violent after-image, the bullethole and glassy light.
But the crowd was backing, to clear the street. A car cruised down and guns stood out from every window.
The man in the road raised his clenched fist.
He wore a red band around his arm.
The driver’s fist was already held out of the window, his elbow resting on the windowframe. And all the other men, in the car and on the streetcorner, raised clenched fists.
In a wonder, as if the car had come to save them, as if this were her dream that she was dreaming now, Helen raised her arm and shut her fist.
“The first we’ve seen!” Said Olive. The tears rose to Helen’s eyes, sprung; and stopped.
“Long live soviet Spain,” Peter answered, completing her thought, all his wish clear in the words.
Order, like a steady finger, covered the street. The crowd looped back, remaining on the sidewalk. The second car came, lettered P.C.—Partit Communista—and the shouts and fists came up as it passed. The long black car was full of men, and the driver and a woman sat in front, smiling and holding their tight hands to the people.
Helen turned to Peter, “How beautiful it is now!” she said. She looked as if she had just slept. She found the same safety in his face.
“Now it’s all right,” he answered, and took her arm and Olive’s. They walked to the edge of the crowd, and cars kept passing like shouts, with lifted fists. Another man stood on the curb, stopping the cars for passwords. The last one started in second, clashing its gears, hurrying down the road. He stepped back and smiled at the Americans. His eyes were the absolute of black, night tunnels of distance. They smiled.
Peter stopped. “Communistos hoy?” he asked.
The man’s eyes slid smiling. “Si, compañero,” his proud singing voice rose. “Today and Tomorrow.”
“It’s later than we think,” Peter quoted.
Helen’s face flared. “I want to go back,” she insisted. “I want to tell Hans.”
“Yes,” said Peter. “This is all right.”
An ID card for participants in the Olimpiada Popular in Barcelona, summer 1936.
“Now I’d like to get to Barcelona,” Helen pushed out. “This is what it meant. I’d like to see a city like that,”
“It’s not like France, is it, Peter? You know,” said Olive, abruptly, “it’s the first time this has seemed at all real to me. It’s the only thing I’ve felt, really—except for that moment when they shut the door this morning.”
The hurrah of gunfires started in the hills, and ran for a minute.
One of the bitches, the sickly one, ran up the station street wagging her hand in the other direction.
“Down there,” she panted, wagging. “The Swiss are leaving—”
They started to run down the street. Peter was alongside the bitch, he could see the sad bruised eyes were swollen, the wrinkles were almost erased.
“Upset?” Peter ran alongside.
“Well,” she said, and the fret and suffering obscured her voice, “it’s the Swiss—they’re getting out of this hellhole.”
Helen slowed down with them. The words fell icy on her, she had moved so far from that state. Now, with a shock, she saw the sick, pathetic woman plain, and behind her a whole intelligible world she melted into, like a weak animal protectively colored. And with a counter-shock, Helen remembered her own impatience, a tourist spasm, when the train had for the first time stood interminably long in the way stations. The words had wiped that frantic itch for comfort away. But she was, in mood at least, prepared for GENERAL STRIKE, and it could change her effectively at once. The bad leg was all that stood of the past now. There was no time for it. It was later than that. Nothing but the knot of Swiss, waiting on the corner, their battered suitcases and knapsacks heaped ready.
. . . .
The truck was ready, full of Swiss, backed to the station, engine running. The automobiles were lined up. The chorus filled one and left room in the other for the French delegate and his secretary. Another open truck stood empty.
A tall yellow-faced man stood beside it. “This is for anyone connected with the Olympics, and then for anyone who cares to try the drive with us,” he said, in French and English. His long face was like intellectual metal, yellow and refined sharp; and further lengthened by the high V of baldness which ate into the fair hair, baring the skullridges.
“Who is coming?” he asked. The truck began to fill. Olive was on its floor as the suitcases were thrown in. “Is there much danger?”
The tall man looked up. “There is steady fighting; but we have a guard.” A thin boy with a white handkerchief around his head climbed in. He smiled with all his teeth, he patted his rifle. Olive made room for him, and he took his place at the front of the truck, leaning on the roof over the driver.
“Then it can’t be like this,” she said, and called to Peter and Hans to stop loading.
Helen climbed in. She pulled the suitcases over from the center of the floor.
Olive was busy. She was sure now. She up-ended all the bags.
“Stack them around the outside,” said Olive, setting them straight and close. “We’ve got to have some walls. We’ve got to have some order.” Her face was clear and active at last.
They built a wall of baggage for the truck on both sides. In front, valises and the driver’s box reached breast high. Olive was in charge, she moved everywhere, quickly, with Helen.
“All right,” she said. The tall man nodded, and helped the others in. The bitches came running. Mme. Porcelan, attended by the pock-marked Swiss, brought baggage. They climbed in.
“Ready?” asked the tall man in a father’s voice.
The driver was ready. Another guard climbed into the seat, holding his gun out the window. From the truck, the muzzle could be seen, and the oily gleam of the barrel.
“Slowly, through the town,” the tall man said.
Hans and Helen were beside the guard. He reached out behind the guard and took her hand for a moment.
The boy smiled and looked at his gun. “Everyone is safe,” he said. He was very handsome.
Peter and Olive were crushed against them. Helen was glad to feel their weight. They are very good friends to have, she thought. The space left between the walls of suitcases was narrow.
The truck started, blowing its horn. As it turned down the main street, Helen could see the women who had listened to the yodeling, standing in the same place. Hans’s fist was up, saluting the town. She clenched her fist, and the women in the street replied. There was a flash of vivas, and the little tunnel blacked out the street.
Their truck led the way to the top of the hill. Halfway up, at a sharp curve, the town petered out in a ravel of old houses and meat-stores. The truck made a half-turn, backed, and stopped.
“God!” said Peter fiercely, “what’s the matter?”
“He’s just turning,” Olive suggested.
“He could make the turn—” said Helen.
The street was barred by children; they leaned against the walls, dodged across the road, sat on the curb. Their streaked faces were full of curiosity, and all their heads turned together like newsreel heads of tennis-match spectators, as horns began to blow. The two cars and the other truck pulled up the hill.
“We probably all have to start together,” said Peter.
The yellow man got out and called the drivers together.
His face was the most disciplined face Helen had ever seen, one end of civilization. Down one temple the skin was thin, as if an old burn had left it fragile, and the blood showed dark beneath. He was speaking to the drivers in an extreme of conviction.
Peter pulled her elbow. His face had knotted with the delay, and he was contagiously wound tight. The three of them felt undercut and excited by the same shock of drunkenness they had felt in the café.
“Look at the baby,” he said, as if he were telling a joke.
She followed his finger. The little boy was no more than two years old, and was sitting on the curb. He was staring at the trucks and masturbating absentmindedly.
“Infantile—Infantile—”
“Auto-eroticism,” Helen supplied.
“Not at all,” he said gravely. “Vive le sport!”
Olive howled and the athletes turned in surprise. The yellow man looked up as he finished speaking to the drivers; he crossed to the space in front of the trucks, and held up his hand. The thin lavender mark was streaked, distinct on his temple.
“We are starting now,” he said in a direct, high voice. “We know we can rely on you to work with us, so that everything will go well. From our reports, the road should be well-guarded and quiet now; but you must remember to watch constantly for snipers, and to duck if the truck is fired at.
“Above all, we count on you to maintain with us discipline and proletarian order. If there is too much trouble, we will stop on the way; but, whatever happens, the strictest order must be kept. The guards are not to fire until it is necessary; until they see”—he pointed to his own— “the whites of their eyes.” He looked at the passengers, and raised his fist.
“To Barcelona!” He was in his car, leading the way down the cryptic road.
Their fists came up. Peter danced from one foot to the other in an anguish of excitement. He laughed and exclaimed, pompously and dramatically, in the voice of Groucho Marx: “Of course they know this means War!” Olive and Helen laughed with him in one long shriek. The other truck was starting.
Everyone stopped laughing and looked down the road. The red hill stood above them, the pylons marched over it; it was a different view of the cliff, and the profile of the red sand-cut was clear for the first time. The hill looked entirely new. This was unknown country. The truck got underway, shifting high immediately, racing full-speed and roaring into the open road.
. . . .
Far down the hill the tracks extended, minute and vulnerable. The train stood grotesque, stiff, the only motion being the thin black fume above the waiting engine. The fume rose straight and sacrificial in the still air.
But up here, faces were whipped by wind, beaten with the speed of flying. The open truck ran out into wide country. The high significant hills stood: the farms waited: only the truck raced checkless on the roads.
To those faces, upon those eyes, it was the land racing, the world, high, visionary, unknown.
They were tense, held high, the eyes seemed wider set, like the abstract wide eyes of dancers. All the faces looked up the road.
On either side, the long grass, the wide farm-swathes, the walls of farmhouses.
The truck stopped where a car was headed across the road. The driver showed his pass-slip to the guard, a woman in overalls and rope sandals. A band about his forehead meant a suffering wound or a badge or a notion to keep the hair back, it matched the band that was around the head of the young guard standing in the truck.
Then they knew they had not reached their full speed. That barrier marked the town limits; now they were entering contested country.
The guard sitting with the driver leaned out and shouted up a word of encouragement. Then they let the motor out. The illusion of great speed was partly the product of a fierce dream, standing on the leaping floor, holding to each other and the walls, receiving the iced wind on skin, used to the stagnant heat of the trains.
But the truck itself was moving fast.
At the right, the blue-and-white Ford sign was a grotesque. And here, along the farmwalls, bales of hay, stacked solid for protection.
The overturned wagon at the door, its front near wheel still spinning.
The black bush on the hill.
Barricades.
And all these rushing past, the speed of fear, the hands in the doorway, the fists on the hill all raised, clenched, saluting.
Put on coats, they thought, the cold will strike you dead! Watch the road, the black eyes are wild concern, the fingers loose the trigger to point to the wild eyes, crying with that pointed gesture: Watch for guns!
On exposed rides, passing the pale houses, the tiled roofs, red now, now darker, shadowdark against the low sun, fear passes, the faces clear and become fresh and happy, filled with this youth that speed gives, the windy excitement of fear, the exploration opening new worlds with a lifted arm.
A quarter of a mile down the road, they saw the men waiting for them.
And all the sky drawn colored toward the sun.
The men grew larger.
Racing down the stretch, the fields slanted away from them, precious and quickly lost, the pastures gleamed under rich lights like grass-green jewels, the house stood lovely and forbidden.
The floor of Europe leaped shaking beneath their feet.
The men stood before them, signaling. Guards.
“Slowly, now. Watch closely.”
Air relented on the cheeks. Everything was displayed clearly and minutely, even during speed, standing so high; and now, the dust on the roadgrass, the purpleflowered fields, farmhouses, mules, were rotated past methodically. The railway tracks slanted across their view again, and the ominous culvert reared above them, broad and solid stone.
The guard raised his gun to his shoulder. He pushed the handkerchief tight around his head.
Darkness ran over the truck safely. They were on the other side, where the road was fenced with steep sandslides.
The flaring trees at the top. The deathly bushes, yard-fences, a man sliding down, his legs braced stiff, come down to take the pass.
And another clear run, the road straight, the country-side changing, farm giving way to smaller garden, large estates replaced by factories, closed and empty, but well-kept and waiting as on holidays.
So many windows.
Watched the walls as they had watched the bushes. Each thought: guns! There is no way to watch, raking a wall of windows, for a narrow bore. Instinct, the pure ruler quality, wipes away remembrance, the countryside of the mind replaced from a moving car. In a shock of speed.
They watched; waited for city.
A nightmare gun-bore stood black and round in the brain.
They had expected city.
They saw nothing but street: a passage, impossibly long, bending from country road, where the barriers were far placed and long dashes could be made, to an avenue through glimpsed suburbs, and now this, which must be city, if the mind were free to look, but which seemed only street, broken by barricades at which the truck stopped, and the fringes could not be noticed, the faces, the piled chairs, corpses of horses. Then a spurt of speed, wind, and tight hands; and immediately, a gap in the road, blind; after that second, recognized.
At such moments, the sides of the road may be discerned.
The sidewalks, the rows of houses, blocks of lowlying buildings
And ahead? A wall.
The passengers drew in their breath as the men before it turned, the levers held in their hands, and the man with the gun came forward. For the levers chopped the street. The street was lifted to make this wall. The cobblestones were built high.
On the barricade, the red flag.
Again, as the guard stopped them with his fist, their fists came up.
From then on, the fists remained high.
The streets were those of an outlying district. Every man on them raised his fist, timed to come up as the truck passed.
The guard kept his gun up.
Now, from the windows, white patches flew, hanging truceflags of white, lining this street which was taller as they raced deeper into the city.
The barricades, were up.
The barricades, recurring every hundred yards. Here, a young soldier, helmeted, behind a machine gun, trained on the highway.
Speed, two minutes, blindness, the road.
Another stop; another wall, a glimpse of street-corners.
And the children who played, the families who passed walking, all their fists lifted. The movie house on one side; the sudden heat blown from the church burning on a square. The piles of firewood heightened in flame: vestments, statues, gaudy cloth, images to be carried head-high.
The truck swung down a wide avenue, and far to one side, the quadruple black-and-white spires of the Sagrada Familia rose intact.
Stores, promenades, evening.
And everywhere, the million white, the flags pendant from the windowsills, the walker in the street who lifts his hand.
The hands lifted from the truck, held tight and unfamiliar in perpetual sign.
They lost themselves, travelers exposed in this way, totally unforeseen, strange. This was a city they had read on pages in libraries and quiet rooms, leaving the books to find a hard street, bitter faces, closed silent lips at home.
But there the boy stood, his face raised in recognition, his hand, like all theirs raised.
The car swung ahead.
The bullet cracked.
From the confusion as they all bent, head and shoulders low in a reflex of dread, Helen looked up to Hans’s unmoved head, either risen immediately or never changed.
The truck wheeled sharp, on two wheels, to the left, and they caught at arms and hands in confusion, straightening now, recovered.
Avenues opened wider and wider, the plane-trees, the oranges, the palms. Cars passed them now, and each time they blew, One-two-three, stopping to race the cars loaded with guns, spiked with guns. Each car carried the white letters of its organization: U.G.T., C.N.T., F.A.I.
The chopping of pavingstones was loud at the streetcorners.
And now, down the long Rambla, past riddled barracks, shell-torn carnivals, bomb-pocked hotels. The dead cafés, their chairs piled on the sidewalk, before the drawn steel curtains.
Wind, fast wind increasing; the long view of a brick-orange fortress, impregnable and high. The high column, the long blue stripe of sea.
And the truck turning.
Avenues opened into a great circle, a public square, mastered by two tall pillars, holding subway stations, statues, overturned wrecks of cars, candycolored posters, full-rounded walls, cafés, the guarded front of an immense building out of which streamed warmth and talk, files of young people streaming.
The truck circled, slowing.
It stopped at the building’s entrance.
The travelers jumped one by one.
Hans dropped catquick down, and swung his arms up for Helen. She placed her hands on his cable wrists, and jumped. It was then that the four pains in the right palm were noticeable, and, looking down, the four blood-dark crescents were seen, the mark of the clenched fist, clutched during the voyage.
A guard in a blue uniform, rifle slung at his back, was standing with them.
He smiled at the hand.
They answered.
She asked, “and this?”
The building was large. It streamed warmth.
He looked at the travelers.
“Hotel Olimpiada.”
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, editor of Savage Coast (Costa Brava) (Feminist Press, 2013), is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is completing her dissertation on Muriel Rukeyser and the Spanish Civil War.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
***********
The Civil War Begins: Savage Coast (Costa Brava)
March 9, 2012
By Muriel Rukeyser-->
Edited by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
On July 18, 1936, at the age of 22, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) traveled to Barcelona, on assignment for the British magazine Life and Letters Today, to report on the People’s Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular). An anti-fascist alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Olympics, the popular games were canceled when the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War interrupted the opening ceremonies. Rukeyser was on a train with the Swiss and Hungarian Olympic teams, as well as tourists and Catalans, when it was stopped in the small town of Moncada as the civil war began and a general strike was called in support of the government.
The passengers were stranded for two nights as the people of Catalonia defended themselves and their government from the military coup, the fascists escaping through the hills surrounding them. Rukeyser arrived in Barcelona just as the city established “revolutionary order” and witnessed the first militias marching to the Zaragoza front. Though she was evacuated only a few days later, Spain would prove to be a profoundly radicalizing and transformational experience, one she would describe as the place where “I began to say what I believed,” and as “the end of confusion.”
Rukeyser would write about the Spanish Civil War for over forty years, in nearly every poetry collection, in numerous essays, and in fiction, weaving the events of the war and the history of anti-fascist resistance into an interconnected, multi-genre, and radical 20th-century history. The most complete rendering of her experience is her unpublished, autobiographical novel Savage Coast (Costa Brava), which she wrote immediately upon her return to New York City in the autumn of 1936 and edited throughout the war. The novel, which remained unfinished in her lifetime, with her last editorial choices in pen, will be available for the first time from the Feminist Press in January 2013.
The passage below is the first excerpt of the novel to be published. The scene begins after two precarious days in Moncada, all communication cut off by the general strike and the fighting. For the foreigners stranded on the train, the only sign that the government still stands is the intermittent radio. Helen, the protagonist, her lover Hans, a long distance runner and political exile from Nazi Germany, and an American communist couple, Peter and Olive, whom she befriended on the train, have watched the collectivization and defense of the republic with solidarity and excitement, hoping to get to Barcelona with the Olympic teams.
I have made the changes indicated by Rukeyser in pen. Other than that, the text is printed as the author left it.
—Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
They were speaking with difficulty, as if they had been drinking for a long time. As they paid for the food, little coins rolled and fell, and they slapped their hands on the money drunkenly to keep it still. They were surprised at the shifting darkness in the dim room, the immense rolling distance from the table to the door, the faces (like weird fish shining deepseas down) of the girls.
In the street, the elastic waves of sunlight arrived in a flood, shocking them, beating at the temples, insistent.
They looked up toward the church. Butcher’s closed; fruit store, closed; grocer’s closed; a block away, though, a crowd had gathered, filling the street-corner.
“Probably opening houses,” said Olive.
Helen wanted to go up. She remembered their retreat from the church the night before. All these houses must be opened now, she thought. “They must have started this section, last night,” she reminded Olive. “The boys were ramming in the door.”
They passed the door on their way up. It was broken, half-open, lettered C.N.T., F.A.I. Through one smashed shutter they could see the overturned tables, ransacked shelves, broken crucifixes of the parochial school.
The crowd was standing still. It was not carrying guns. Only two men at the corner, and one who stood in the middle of the crossing, had rifles in their hands.
Across the street, a long robin’seggblue bus stood surrounded by people who put their hands on the bullet-scratches, traced the long roads cut in the enamel with their fingers. Two boys with a can of white paint were daubing large letters on the snub hood and on the rear of the bus.
GOBIERNA.
“That must be the Government bus for the Swiss,” said Helen. There was a spick round hole in the windshield. The heavy glass caught sunlight on the hole-rim; bright stripes of light ran outward in a sunburst.
Peter followed her startle, calculating. “That couldn’t have missed the driver,” he remarked.
The boys went soberly ahead with their lettering, and the crowd, pressing about the truck, commented, told stories about the road, crossed and re-crossed, shouting to women leaning from windows.
Helen looked at her hand. On it was printed, in a violent after-image, the bullethole and glassy light.
But the crowd was backing, to clear the street. A car cruised down and guns stood out from every window.
The man in the road raised his clenched fist.
He wore a red band around his arm.
The driver’s fist was already held out of the window, his elbow resting on the windowframe. And all the other men, in the car and on the streetcorner, raised clenched fists.
In a wonder, as if the car had come to save them, as if this were her dream that she was dreaming now, Helen raised her arm and shut her fist.
“The first we’ve seen!” Said Olive. The tears rose to Helen’s eyes, sprung; and stopped.
“Long live soviet Spain,” Peter answered, completing her thought, all his wish clear in the words.
Order, like a steady finger, covered the street. The crowd looped back, remaining on the sidewalk. The second car came, lettered P.C.—Partit Communista—and the shouts and fists came up as it passed. The long black car was full of men, and the driver and a woman sat in front, smiling and holding their tight hands to the people.
Helen turned to Peter, “How beautiful it is now!” she said. She looked as if she had just slept. She found the same safety in his face.
“Now it’s all right,” he answered, and took her arm and Olive’s. They walked to the edge of the crowd, and cars kept passing like shouts, with lifted fists. Another man stood on the curb, stopping the cars for passwords. The last one started in second, clashing its gears, hurrying down the road. He stepped back and smiled at the Americans. His eyes were the absolute of black, night tunnels of distance. They smiled.
Peter stopped. “Communistos hoy?” he asked.
The man’s eyes slid smiling. “Si, compañero,” his proud singing voice rose. “Today and Tomorrow.”
“It’s later than we think,” Peter quoted.
Helen’s face flared. “I want to go back,” she insisted. “I want to tell Hans.”
“Yes,” said Peter. “This is all right.”
An ID card for participants in the Olimpiada Popular in Barcelona, summer 1936.
“Now I’d like to get to Barcelona,” Helen pushed out. “This is what it meant. I’d like to see a city like that,”
“It’s not like France, is it, Peter? You know,” said Olive, abruptly, “it’s the first time this has seemed at all real to me. It’s the only thing I’ve felt, really—except for that moment when they shut the door this morning.”
The hurrah of gunfires started in the hills, and ran for a minute.
One of the bitches, the sickly one, ran up the station street wagging her hand in the other direction.
“Down there,” she panted, wagging. “The Swiss are leaving—”
They started to run down the street. Peter was alongside the bitch, he could see the sad bruised eyes were swollen, the wrinkles were almost erased.
“Upset?” Peter ran alongside.
“Well,” she said, and the fret and suffering obscured her voice, “it’s the Swiss—they’re getting out of this hellhole.”
Helen slowed down with them. The words fell icy on her, she had moved so far from that state. Now, with a shock, she saw the sick, pathetic woman plain, and behind her a whole intelligible world she melted into, like a weak animal protectively colored. And with a counter-shock, Helen remembered her own impatience, a tourist spasm, when the train had for the first time stood interminably long in the way stations. The words had wiped that frantic itch for comfort away. But she was, in mood at least, prepared for GENERAL STRIKE, and it could change her effectively at once. The bad leg was all that stood of the past now. There was no time for it. It was later than that. Nothing but the knot of Swiss, waiting on the corner, their battered suitcases and knapsacks heaped ready.
. . . .
The truck was ready, full of Swiss, backed to the station, engine running. The automobiles were lined up. The chorus filled one and left room in the other for the French delegate and his secretary. Another open truck stood empty.
A tall yellow-faced man stood beside it. “This is for anyone connected with the Olympics, and then for anyone who cares to try the drive with us,” he said, in French and English. His long face was like intellectual metal, yellow and refined sharp; and further lengthened by the high V of baldness which ate into the fair hair, baring the skullridges.
“Who is coming?” he asked. The truck began to fill. Olive was on its floor as the suitcases were thrown in. “Is there much danger?”
The tall man looked up. “There is steady fighting; but we have a guard.” A thin boy with a white handkerchief around his head climbed in. He smiled with all his teeth, he patted his rifle. Olive made room for him, and he took his place at the front of the truck, leaning on the roof over the driver.
“Then it can’t be like this,” she said, and called to Peter and Hans to stop loading.
Helen climbed in. She pulled the suitcases over from the center of the floor.
Olive was busy. She was sure now. She up-ended all the bags.
“Stack them around the outside,” said Olive, setting them straight and close. “We’ve got to have some walls. We’ve got to have some order.” Her face was clear and active at last.
They built a wall of baggage for the truck on both sides. In front, valises and the driver’s box reached breast high. Olive was in charge, she moved everywhere, quickly, with Helen.
“All right,” she said. The tall man nodded, and helped the others in. The bitches came running. Mme. Porcelan, attended by the pock-marked Swiss, brought baggage. They climbed in.
“Ready?” asked the tall man in a father’s voice.
The driver was ready. Another guard climbed into the seat, holding his gun out the window. From the truck, the muzzle could be seen, and the oily gleam of the barrel.
“Slowly, through the town,” the tall man said.
Hans and Helen were beside the guard. He reached out behind the guard and took her hand for a moment.
The boy smiled and looked at his gun. “Everyone is safe,” he said. He was very handsome.
Peter and Olive were crushed against them. Helen was glad to feel their weight. They are very good friends to have, she thought. The space left between the walls of suitcases was narrow.
The truck started, blowing its horn. As it turned down the main street, Helen could see the women who had listened to the yodeling, standing in the same place. Hans’s fist was up, saluting the town. She clenched her fist, and the women in the street replied. There was a flash of vivas, and the little tunnel blacked out the street.
Their truck led the way to the top of the hill. Halfway up, at a sharp curve, the town petered out in a ravel of old houses and meat-stores. The truck made a half-turn, backed, and stopped.
“God!” said Peter fiercely, “what’s the matter?”
“He’s just turning,” Olive suggested.
“He could make the turn—” said Helen.
The street was barred by children; they leaned against the walls, dodged across the road, sat on the curb. Their streaked faces were full of curiosity, and all their heads turned together like newsreel heads of tennis-match spectators, as horns began to blow. The two cars and the other truck pulled up the hill.
“We probably all have to start together,” said Peter.
The yellow man got out and called the drivers together.
His face was the most disciplined face Helen had ever seen, one end of civilization. Down one temple the skin was thin, as if an old burn had left it fragile, and the blood showed dark beneath. He was speaking to the drivers in an extreme of conviction.
Peter pulled her elbow. His face had knotted with the delay, and he was contagiously wound tight. The three of them felt undercut and excited by the same shock of drunkenness they had felt in the café.
“Look at the baby,” he said, as if he were telling a joke.
She followed his finger. The little boy was no more than two years old, and was sitting on the curb. He was staring at the trucks and masturbating absentmindedly.
“Infantile—Infantile—”
“Auto-eroticism,” Helen supplied.
“Not at all,” he said gravely. “Vive le sport!”
Olive howled and the athletes turned in surprise. The yellow man looked up as he finished speaking to the drivers; he crossed to the space in front of the trucks, and held up his hand. The thin lavender mark was streaked, distinct on his temple.
“We are starting now,” he said in a direct, high voice. “We know we can rely on you to work with us, so that everything will go well. From our reports, the road should be well-guarded and quiet now; but you must remember to watch constantly for snipers, and to duck if the truck is fired at.
“Above all, we count on you to maintain with us discipline and proletarian order. If there is too much trouble, we will stop on the way; but, whatever happens, the strictest order must be kept. The guards are not to fire until it is necessary; until they see”—he pointed to his own— “the whites of their eyes.” He looked at the passengers, and raised his fist.
“To Barcelona!” He was in his car, leading the way down the cryptic road.
Their fists came up. Peter danced from one foot to the other in an anguish of excitement. He laughed and exclaimed, pompously and dramatically, in the voice of Groucho Marx: “Of course they know this means War!” Olive and Helen laughed with him in one long shriek. The other truck was starting.
Everyone stopped laughing and looked down the road. The red hill stood above them, the pylons marched over it; it was a different view of the cliff, and the profile of the red sand-cut was clear for the first time. The hill looked entirely new. This was unknown country. The truck got underway, shifting high immediately, racing full-speed and roaring into the open road.
. . . .
Far down the hill the tracks extended, minute and vulnerable. The train stood grotesque, stiff, the only motion being the thin black fume above the waiting engine. The fume rose straight and sacrificial in the still air.
But up here, faces were whipped by wind, beaten with the speed of flying. The open truck ran out into wide country. The high significant hills stood: the farms waited: only the truck raced checkless on the roads.
To those faces, upon those eyes, it was the land racing, the world, high, visionary, unknown.
They were tense, held high, the eyes seemed wider set, like the abstract wide eyes of dancers. All the faces looked up the road.
On either side, the long grass, the wide farm-swathes, the walls of farmhouses.
The truck stopped where a car was headed across the road. The driver showed his pass-slip to the guard, a woman in overalls and rope sandals. A band about his forehead meant a suffering wound or a badge or a notion to keep the hair back, it matched the band that was around the head of the young guard standing in the truck.
Then they knew they had not reached their full speed. That barrier marked the town limits; now they were entering contested country.
The guard sitting with the driver leaned out and shouted up a word of encouragement. Then they let the motor out. The illusion of great speed was partly the product of a fierce dream, standing on the leaping floor, holding to each other and the walls, receiving the iced wind on skin, used to the stagnant heat of the trains.
But the truck itself was moving fast.
At the right, the blue-and-white Ford sign was a grotesque. And here, along the farmwalls, bales of hay, stacked solid for protection.
The overturned wagon at the door, its front near wheel still spinning.
The black bush on the hill.
Barricades.
And all these rushing past, the speed of fear, the hands in the doorway, the fists on the hill all raised, clenched, saluting.
Put on coats, they thought, the cold will strike you dead! Watch the road, the black eyes are wild concern, the fingers loose the trigger to point to the wild eyes, crying with that pointed gesture: Watch for guns!
On exposed rides, passing the pale houses, the tiled roofs, red now, now darker, shadowdark against the low sun, fear passes, the faces clear and become fresh and happy, filled with this youth that speed gives, the windy excitement of fear, the exploration opening new worlds with a lifted arm.
A quarter of a mile down the road, they saw the men waiting for them.
And all the sky drawn colored toward the sun.
The men grew larger.
Racing down the stretch, the fields slanted away from them, precious and quickly lost, the pastures gleamed under rich lights like grass-green jewels, the house stood lovely and forbidden.
The floor of Europe leaped shaking beneath their feet.
The men stood before them, signaling. Guards.
“Slowly, now. Watch closely.”
Air relented on the cheeks. Everything was displayed clearly and minutely, even during speed, standing so high; and now, the dust on the roadgrass, the purpleflowered fields, farmhouses, mules, were rotated past methodically. The railway tracks slanted across their view again, and the ominous culvert reared above them, broad and solid stone.
The guard raised his gun to his shoulder. He pushed the handkerchief tight around his head.
Darkness ran over the truck safely. They were on the other side, where the road was fenced with steep sandslides.
The flaring trees at the top. The deathly bushes, yard-fences, a man sliding down, his legs braced stiff, come down to take the pass.
And another clear run, the road straight, the country-side changing, farm giving way to smaller garden, large estates replaced by factories, closed and empty, but well-kept and waiting as on holidays.
So many windows.
Watched the walls as they had watched the bushes. Each thought: guns! There is no way to watch, raking a wall of windows, for a narrow bore. Instinct, the pure ruler quality, wipes away remembrance, the countryside of the mind replaced from a moving car. In a shock of speed.
They watched; waited for city.
A nightmare gun-bore stood black and round in the brain.
They had expected city.
They saw nothing but street: a passage, impossibly long, bending from country road, where the barriers were far placed and long dashes could be made, to an avenue through glimpsed suburbs, and now this, which must be city, if the mind were free to look, but which seemed only street, broken by barricades at which the truck stopped, and the fringes could not be noticed, the faces, the piled chairs, corpses of horses. Then a spurt of speed, wind, and tight hands; and immediately, a gap in the road, blind; after that second, recognized.
At such moments, the sides of the road may be discerned.
The sidewalks, the rows of houses, blocks of lowlying buildings
And ahead? A wall.
The passengers drew in their breath as the men before it turned, the levers held in their hands, and the man with the gun came forward. For the levers chopped the street. The street was lifted to make this wall. The cobblestones were built high.
On the barricade, the red flag.
Again, as the guard stopped them with his fist, their fists came up.
From then on, the fists remained high.
The streets were those of an outlying district. Every man on them raised his fist, timed to come up as the truck passed.
The guard kept his gun up.
Now, from the windows, white patches flew, hanging truceflags of white, lining this street which was taller as they raced deeper into the city.
The barricades, were up.
The barricades, recurring every hundred yards. Here, a young soldier, helmeted, behind a machine gun, trained on the highway.
Speed, two minutes, blindness, the road.
Another stop; another wall, a glimpse of street-corners.
And the children who played, the families who passed walking, all their fists lifted. The movie house on one side; the sudden heat blown from the church burning on a square. The piles of firewood heightened in flame: vestments, statues, gaudy cloth, images to be carried head-high.
The truck swung down a wide avenue, and far to one side, the quadruple black-and-white spires of the Sagrada Familia rose intact.
Stores, promenades, evening.
And everywhere, the million white, the flags pendant from the windowsills, the walker in the street who lifts his hand.
The hands lifted from the truck, held tight and unfamiliar in perpetual sign.
They lost themselves, travelers exposed in this way, totally unforeseen, strange. This was a city they had read on pages in libraries and quiet rooms, leaving the books to find a hard street, bitter faces, closed silent lips at home.
But there the boy stood, his face raised in recognition, his hand, like all theirs raised.
The car swung ahead.
The bullet cracked.
From the confusion as they all bent, head and shoulders low in a reflex of dread, Helen looked up to Hans’s unmoved head, either risen immediately or never changed.
The truck wheeled sharp, on two wheels, to the left, and they caught at arms and hands in confusion, straightening now, recovered.
Avenues opened wider and wider, the plane-trees, the oranges, the palms. Cars passed them now, and each time they blew, One-two-three, stopping to race the cars loaded with guns, spiked with guns. Each car carried the white letters of its organization: U.G.T., C.N.T., F.A.I.
The chopping of pavingstones was loud at the streetcorners.
And now, down the long Rambla, past riddled barracks, shell-torn carnivals, bomb-pocked hotels. The dead cafés, their chairs piled on the sidewalk, before the drawn steel curtains.
Wind, fast wind increasing; the long view of a brick-orange fortress, impregnable and high. The high column, the long blue stripe of sea.
And the truck turning.
Avenues opened into a great circle, a public square, mastered by two tall pillars, holding subway stations, statues, overturned wrecks of cars, candycolored posters, full-rounded walls, cafés, the guarded front of an immense building out of which streamed warmth and talk, files of young people streaming.
The truck circled, slowing.
It stopped at the building’s entrance.
The travelers jumped one by one.
Hans dropped catquick down, and swung his arms up for Helen. She placed her hands on his cable wrists, and jumped. It was then that the four pains in the right palm were noticeable, and, looking down, the four blood-dark crescents were seen, the mark of the clenched fist, clutched during the voyage.
A guard in a blue uniform, rifle slung at his back, was standing with them.
He smiled at the hand.
They answered.
She asked, “and this?”
The building was large. It streamed warmth.
He looked at the travelers.
“Hotel Olimpiada.”
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, editor of Savage Coast (Costa Brava) (Feminist Press, 2013), is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is completing her dissertation on Muriel Rukeyser and the Spanish Civil War.
From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog-The Spanish Holocaust: Reframing the Civil War
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
*********
The Spanish Holocaust: Reframing the Civil War
June 13, 2012
By Sebastiaan Faber-->
Victims the Nationalist massacre at Badajoz.
Paul Preston. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: Norton, 720 pp. (Buy at Powells and support ALBA.)
Names matter. How we label events from the past does not just reflect how we view those events, but actively shapes our understanding of them. One could go so far as to say that historical events don’t actually exist as events until they are labeled. We now know the messy decade of civil and military violence that held Mexico in its grip from 1910 to 1920 as the Mexican Revolution, for example, and refer to the forty years’ worth of intricate military, diplomatic, political, and cultural world history between 1948 and 1989 simply as the Cold War. Labels, to be sure, are indispensable; they help organize the unmanageable chaos that makes up actual history. But names are never gratuitous: they always frame how we think of the past as well. This is especially crucial when it comes to categorizing armed conflict, which calls for the identification of victims and attackers, the innocent and guilty. Consider the difference in this respect between “The War between the States,” “The War of Northern Aggression,” “The War of Secession,” and “The American Civil War.” While it is generally the winners who get to determine how wars enter the history books, the perspective of the losers is not erased, and often survives in competing labels. Finally, of course, the names we give to historical events are themselves subject to change. (It took a second global conflict for la Grande Guerre to become the First World War.) Often, name changes respond to changed power relations, political interests, or sensibilities—and are likely to cause disputes.
For the conflict that broke out in Spain in the summer of 1936 as the result of a failed military coup, the term “civil war” stuck early on, in Spain and the rest of the world. This was in part because its prospect had already been invoked for several years as a threat hovering over the increasingly polarized country. But once the fighting began, the “civil war” label faced fierce competition. On the Left, some preferred to call the conflict The Spanish Revolution, or, denying the Nazi-aided Nationalists their Spanishness, a War of Independence. The Nationalists, meanwhile, rhetorically dressed up their illegitimate coup as an alzamiento or “rising,” and referred to the war as a holy struggle, a cruzada. Until the 1960s, these were the terms officially used in Francoist textbooks, monuments, and government documents. (One multivolume account of the war was titled History of the Spanish Crusade.) As Herbert Southworth was first to show, the regime’s late adoption of the term “civil war” was part of a deliberate policy change that attempted to bridge the gap between official Francoist historiography and that of the democratic West. But the switch was only possible because, by then, Franco’s regime had been strengthened by economic growth and international recognition and it felt less need to compensate rhetorically for the obvious illegitimacy of its origins.
Names matter, indeed. Paul Preston’s choice of The Spanish Holocaust, his latest and most ambitious account of the massive violence unleashed in the wake of the 1936 coup, is as polemical as it is well-pondered. It reflects a conscious attempt on Preston’s part to reframe how we think about the war in Spain and its long, bloody aftermath. Referring to the hundreds of thousands of Spanish deaths as a holocaust has three immediate implications. First, it underscores the massive scale of civilian suffering. Second, it directly links Spain’s Nationalists to the Nazi regime, stressing that Franco’s reign of terror, like that of Hitler and Goebbels, was carefully planned and systematically executed. Third, it calls attention to the motivations behind the violence in Spain. Preston presents convincing evidence that the massive killings perpetrated by Nationalist forces were not just driven by political differences of opinion, but also by an immense amount of cropped-up hatred and disgust filtered through notions of racial inferiority. The military Nationalist leadership saw Spain’s workers and peasants not just as dangerous subversives or fellow citizens gone astray, but actually as subhuman, mentally and morally deranged creatures whose physical extermination was necessary for the good of the country.
This last point is one of the most important contributions to Spanish Civil War historiography of Preston’s monumental study. If the Spanish Civil War is still generally considered to have been a class conflict, Preston reframes it as in part an ethnic one. He establishes clear links between the political ideas of the rebel military leaders (in particular their cockamamie belief in the existence of a global Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy), their decades’ worth of experience as officers in the ruthlessly repressive Spanish colonial army in North Africa (whose populations were routinely subjected to acts of unspeakable cruelty that included torture, mutilation, and rape), and their treatment of their fellow citizens during the Civil War. “The leaders of the rebellion,” Preston writes, “… regarded the Spanish proletariat in the same way as they did the Moroccan, as an inferior race that had to be subjugated by sudden, uncompromising violence.” The overarching purpose, however, was fundamentally economic and political: to insure that the interests of the establishment—the Church, the landowning class, and the Army—“would never again be challenged as they had been from 1931 to 1936 by the democratic reforms of the Second Republic.” Since these reforms included the establishment of workers’ and women’s rights, secular public education, literacy campaigns, and land reform, it is no exaggeration to say that the coup aimed to stop modernity itself in its tracks. The supporters of the Nationalists had reached the conclusion that the defense of their interests required “the eradication of the ‘thinking’ of progressive liberal and left-wing elements”; or, in General Emilio Mola’s words, to “eliminate without scruples or hesitation all who do not think as we do.”
The Spanish Holocaust draws on Preston’s vast research, as well as scores of recent historical studies, to establish the most accurate possible estimates of numbers of Spanish victims—statistics that, ever since the outbreak of the war, have been notoriously subject to manipulation and distortion. Almost 200,000 men and women were murdered extra-judicially behind the lines. Another 200,000 men fell at the front. Around 20,000 Republicans were executed by the Franco regime in the postwar years. Thousands more died as bombing victims, refugees, and inmates of prisons and concentration camps. And none of these statistics take into account the immense suffering endured by the survivors.
Paul Preston in 2009. Photo Colin McPherson, colinmcpherson.photoshelter.com
These numbers are important and shocking. But the value of Preston’s book is the rich historical context he provides for them. The first four chapters cover the five Republican years (1931-36) to explain the gradual but deliberate build-up of hatred and political tensions. The bulk of the book, organized in eight central chapters, deals with the violence during the war. The long final chapter narrates the “continuation of the war by other means” during Franco’s almost forty-year dictatorship, built on the conviction that only harsh punishment for the defeated, not reconciliation, could be the basis of a “healthy” and “true” post-war Spain. For decades, the country lived in the grips of a perverted justice system that branded loyalty to the Republican government as treason, and largely relied on denunciations from ordinary citizens.
A brief epilogue ponders the long aftermath of violence in political, psychological, and cultural terms. The regime’s “powerfully sustained attempt to brainwash its population” in the years following the war, Preston writes, “inflicted a great long-term damage on Spanish society”: “To this day, its powerful residual effects hamper the ability of mainstream contemporary society to look upon its recent violent past in an open and honest way that could facilitate the necessary social and political closure.” This is not only due to the fact that the memories of suffering on the Republican side were not allowed into the public sphere. The “near-hysterical reaction” of some sectors of today’s Spain to the recovery of historical memory, the exhumation of unmarked graves, and the investigation of past crimes also “derives from the fact that there were…many historical memories among the victors and their descendants that had to be repressed by the need to safeguard a false memory”—including the haunting memories and feelings of guilt among those who had committed atrocities. This is what Preston’s colleague Helen Graham has referred to as Francoism’s “lasting toxicity.”
Preston covers the violence on both sides of the war. One of the sections that has received most attention in Spain is his analysis of the infamous execution of almost 2,500 right-wing prisoners at Paracuellos del Jarama (the responsibility of which Preston places at the feet of, among others, the young Communist leader Santiago Carrillo). But Preston makes clear that, on the whole, the killing on the Republican side was quantitatively and qualitatively very different from that on the Nationalist side. Here three points merit emphasis. First, that the “repression by the rebels was about three times greater than that which took place in the Republican zone.” Second, that the violence on the Republican side was essentially reactive to that on the Nationalist side. (“It is difficult to see,” Preston writes, “how the violence in the Republican zone could have happened without the military coup which effectively removed all of the restraints of civilized society.”) And third that, while the killings by the Nationalists were not only condoned or actively planned by the rebel military authorities, those in the Republican zone happened outside the control, and against the will, of the government, which put a stop to them as soon as it could. Violence in Republican-controlled territory was partly driven by notions among the “extreme Left, particularly in the anarchist movement,” about the need for elimination of the class enemy and “purification by fire” as first steps toward a new, more just society. (For Preston, “the outburst of revolutionary fervor and an orgy of killing” in some of the areas in which the coup failed, “would demonstrate once more that Spain’s harshly repressive society had produced a brutalized underclass.”)
As Graham wrote in The Independent, this book, years in the making, happens to appear at an opportune and complicated moment. The movement for the “Recovery of Historical Memory,” which over the past dozen years has exhumed hundreds of mass graves and emphatically defended the rights of the victims of the Franco regime, now faces one of its greatest challenges. The trials that resulted in the disbarment of Judge Baltasar Garzón, who attempted to seek truth and reparation through Spain’s criminal justice system, allowed for unprecedented scenes: victims of Francoism telling their stories of suffering to Spain’s highest court. But the Court’s sentence closed off all possibility of a judicial satisfaction to the victims’ demands.
Preston’s Holocaust, too, opens up the public sphere to individual stories of suffering. The many hundreds of horrifying stories that make up the bulk of this book serve as illustrations to the larger picture, to be sure; but they also recognize and honor their protagonists, who all appear with their full names, as citizens entitled to our attention and a place in Spain’s historical memory. As Graham writes, “Preston’s study is history as a public good, a substitute for the truth and reconciliation process that has not taken place in Spain.”
Meanwhile, the reception of this book in Spain has been predictably uneven. Preston, after all, tells truths that many are not interested in hearing, and he does so in great detail, with scholarly rigor (the notes run 120 pages), and in an accessible, efficient prose. This leaves little recourse to those flatly opposed to the revelation of some of the darkest pages of Spain’s recent past. The journalist Jorge Reverte, writing in the center-left newspaper El País, dismissed the book as “a hyperbolic and unbalanced narration,” claiming that Preston’s sympathy for the Republican side determined his partisan assessment of the crimes he describes. In fact, Reverte unwittingly proved one of Preston’s key points: The persistence in Spain and elsewhere of myths about the war and Francoism, which allows the public to identify the notions of “objectivity” and “balance” with a “neutral” condemnation of both sides as equally violent and therefore equally reprehensible and equally guilty. “To this day,” Preston writes, “General Franco and his regime enjoy a relatively good press,” thanks to “a series of persistent myths about the benefits of his rule,” including the false notions that he saved Spain from Communism or engineered its later economic boom. “Recognizing that the initial massive violence was generated by the military rebels themselves,” Helen Graham echoes Preston, “remains the biggest taboo of all in democratic Spain’s public sphere.” (The whole notion that scholars like Preston, Graham, Angel Viñas or Julián Casanova should be labeled as “pro-Republican historians” is quite curious: Should we also be referring to, say, Richard Evans or Martin Gilbert as “pro-Allied historians” of the Second World War?)
Preston admits in his preface and acknowledgments that writing this book was one of the most difficult tasks he has faced as a scholar—not only because of the scale of its aspirations, but because of the book’s depressing, painful subject matter. Like most of us non-Spaniards who dedicate our lives to understanding the Iberian Peninsula, Preston is driven as much by a thirst for knowledge as by affection and respect for his subject. Forcing himself to research and describe the appalling cruelties that Spaniards were capable of inflicting on each other must have been grueling. Gerald Brenan, another staunch British Hispanophile, famously wrote his seminal Spanish Labyrinth (1943) as a form of therapy, a way to deal with the anxiety caused by the endless flow of distressing news from Spain. After seeing the results of the rebels’ rage in the hospital of Toledo, the UP correspondent Webb Miller told Jay Allen that “he came close to going off his rocker.” One can imagine that the same is true for Preston. But it was worth it: He has produced an indispensable, important book.
Sebastiaan Faber teaches at Oberlin College and is Chair of the Board of ALBA.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
*********
The Spanish Holocaust: Reframing the Civil War
June 13, 2012
By Sebastiaan Faber-->
Victims the Nationalist massacre at Badajoz.
Paul Preston. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: Norton, 720 pp. (Buy at Powells and support ALBA.)
Names matter. How we label events from the past does not just reflect how we view those events, but actively shapes our understanding of them. One could go so far as to say that historical events don’t actually exist as events until they are labeled. We now know the messy decade of civil and military violence that held Mexico in its grip from 1910 to 1920 as the Mexican Revolution, for example, and refer to the forty years’ worth of intricate military, diplomatic, political, and cultural world history between 1948 and 1989 simply as the Cold War. Labels, to be sure, are indispensable; they help organize the unmanageable chaos that makes up actual history. But names are never gratuitous: they always frame how we think of the past as well. This is especially crucial when it comes to categorizing armed conflict, which calls for the identification of victims and attackers, the innocent and guilty. Consider the difference in this respect between “The War between the States,” “The War of Northern Aggression,” “The War of Secession,” and “The American Civil War.” While it is generally the winners who get to determine how wars enter the history books, the perspective of the losers is not erased, and often survives in competing labels. Finally, of course, the names we give to historical events are themselves subject to change. (It took a second global conflict for la Grande Guerre to become the First World War.) Often, name changes respond to changed power relations, political interests, or sensibilities—and are likely to cause disputes.
For the conflict that broke out in Spain in the summer of 1936 as the result of a failed military coup, the term “civil war” stuck early on, in Spain and the rest of the world. This was in part because its prospect had already been invoked for several years as a threat hovering over the increasingly polarized country. But once the fighting began, the “civil war” label faced fierce competition. On the Left, some preferred to call the conflict The Spanish Revolution, or, denying the Nazi-aided Nationalists their Spanishness, a War of Independence. The Nationalists, meanwhile, rhetorically dressed up their illegitimate coup as an alzamiento or “rising,” and referred to the war as a holy struggle, a cruzada. Until the 1960s, these were the terms officially used in Francoist textbooks, monuments, and government documents. (One multivolume account of the war was titled History of the Spanish Crusade.) As Herbert Southworth was first to show, the regime’s late adoption of the term “civil war” was part of a deliberate policy change that attempted to bridge the gap between official Francoist historiography and that of the democratic West. But the switch was only possible because, by then, Franco’s regime had been strengthened by economic growth and international recognition and it felt less need to compensate rhetorically for the obvious illegitimacy of its origins.
Names matter, indeed. Paul Preston’s choice of The Spanish Holocaust, his latest and most ambitious account of the massive violence unleashed in the wake of the 1936 coup, is as polemical as it is well-pondered. It reflects a conscious attempt on Preston’s part to reframe how we think about the war in Spain and its long, bloody aftermath. Referring to the hundreds of thousands of Spanish deaths as a holocaust has three immediate implications. First, it underscores the massive scale of civilian suffering. Second, it directly links Spain’s Nationalists to the Nazi regime, stressing that Franco’s reign of terror, like that of Hitler and Goebbels, was carefully planned and systematically executed. Third, it calls attention to the motivations behind the violence in Spain. Preston presents convincing evidence that the massive killings perpetrated by Nationalist forces were not just driven by political differences of opinion, but also by an immense amount of cropped-up hatred and disgust filtered through notions of racial inferiority. The military Nationalist leadership saw Spain’s workers and peasants not just as dangerous subversives or fellow citizens gone astray, but actually as subhuman, mentally and morally deranged creatures whose physical extermination was necessary for the good of the country.
This last point is one of the most important contributions to Spanish Civil War historiography of Preston’s monumental study. If the Spanish Civil War is still generally considered to have been a class conflict, Preston reframes it as in part an ethnic one. He establishes clear links between the political ideas of the rebel military leaders (in particular their cockamamie belief in the existence of a global Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy), their decades’ worth of experience as officers in the ruthlessly repressive Spanish colonial army in North Africa (whose populations were routinely subjected to acts of unspeakable cruelty that included torture, mutilation, and rape), and their treatment of their fellow citizens during the Civil War. “The leaders of the rebellion,” Preston writes, “… regarded the Spanish proletariat in the same way as they did the Moroccan, as an inferior race that had to be subjugated by sudden, uncompromising violence.” The overarching purpose, however, was fundamentally economic and political: to insure that the interests of the establishment—the Church, the landowning class, and the Army—“would never again be challenged as they had been from 1931 to 1936 by the democratic reforms of the Second Republic.” Since these reforms included the establishment of workers’ and women’s rights, secular public education, literacy campaigns, and land reform, it is no exaggeration to say that the coup aimed to stop modernity itself in its tracks. The supporters of the Nationalists had reached the conclusion that the defense of their interests required “the eradication of the ‘thinking’ of progressive liberal and left-wing elements”; or, in General Emilio Mola’s words, to “eliminate without scruples or hesitation all who do not think as we do.”
The Spanish Holocaust draws on Preston’s vast research, as well as scores of recent historical studies, to establish the most accurate possible estimates of numbers of Spanish victims—statistics that, ever since the outbreak of the war, have been notoriously subject to manipulation and distortion. Almost 200,000 men and women were murdered extra-judicially behind the lines. Another 200,000 men fell at the front. Around 20,000 Republicans were executed by the Franco regime in the postwar years. Thousands more died as bombing victims, refugees, and inmates of prisons and concentration camps. And none of these statistics take into account the immense suffering endured by the survivors.
Paul Preston in 2009. Photo Colin McPherson, colinmcpherson.photoshelter.com
These numbers are important and shocking. But the value of Preston’s book is the rich historical context he provides for them. The first four chapters cover the five Republican years (1931-36) to explain the gradual but deliberate build-up of hatred and political tensions. The bulk of the book, organized in eight central chapters, deals with the violence during the war. The long final chapter narrates the “continuation of the war by other means” during Franco’s almost forty-year dictatorship, built on the conviction that only harsh punishment for the defeated, not reconciliation, could be the basis of a “healthy” and “true” post-war Spain. For decades, the country lived in the grips of a perverted justice system that branded loyalty to the Republican government as treason, and largely relied on denunciations from ordinary citizens.
A brief epilogue ponders the long aftermath of violence in political, psychological, and cultural terms. The regime’s “powerfully sustained attempt to brainwash its population” in the years following the war, Preston writes, “inflicted a great long-term damage on Spanish society”: “To this day, its powerful residual effects hamper the ability of mainstream contemporary society to look upon its recent violent past in an open and honest way that could facilitate the necessary social and political closure.” This is not only due to the fact that the memories of suffering on the Republican side were not allowed into the public sphere. The “near-hysterical reaction” of some sectors of today’s Spain to the recovery of historical memory, the exhumation of unmarked graves, and the investigation of past crimes also “derives from the fact that there were…many historical memories among the victors and their descendants that had to be repressed by the need to safeguard a false memory”—including the haunting memories and feelings of guilt among those who had committed atrocities. This is what Preston’s colleague Helen Graham has referred to as Francoism’s “lasting toxicity.”
Preston covers the violence on both sides of the war. One of the sections that has received most attention in Spain is his analysis of the infamous execution of almost 2,500 right-wing prisoners at Paracuellos del Jarama (the responsibility of which Preston places at the feet of, among others, the young Communist leader Santiago Carrillo). But Preston makes clear that, on the whole, the killing on the Republican side was quantitatively and qualitatively very different from that on the Nationalist side. Here three points merit emphasis. First, that the “repression by the rebels was about three times greater than that which took place in the Republican zone.” Second, that the violence on the Republican side was essentially reactive to that on the Nationalist side. (“It is difficult to see,” Preston writes, “how the violence in the Republican zone could have happened without the military coup which effectively removed all of the restraints of civilized society.”) And third that, while the killings by the Nationalists were not only condoned or actively planned by the rebel military authorities, those in the Republican zone happened outside the control, and against the will, of the government, which put a stop to them as soon as it could. Violence in Republican-controlled territory was partly driven by notions among the “extreme Left, particularly in the anarchist movement,” about the need for elimination of the class enemy and “purification by fire” as first steps toward a new, more just society. (For Preston, “the outburst of revolutionary fervor and an orgy of killing” in some of the areas in which the coup failed, “would demonstrate once more that Spain’s harshly repressive society had produced a brutalized underclass.”)
As Graham wrote in The Independent, this book, years in the making, happens to appear at an opportune and complicated moment. The movement for the “Recovery of Historical Memory,” which over the past dozen years has exhumed hundreds of mass graves and emphatically defended the rights of the victims of the Franco regime, now faces one of its greatest challenges. The trials that resulted in the disbarment of Judge Baltasar Garzón, who attempted to seek truth and reparation through Spain’s criminal justice system, allowed for unprecedented scenes: victims of Francoism telling their stories of suffering to Spain’s highest court. But the Court’s sentence closed off all possibility of a judicial satisfaction to the victims’ demands.
Preston’s Holocaust, too, opens up the public sphere to individual stories of suffering. The many hundreds of horrifying stories that make up the bulk of this book serve as illustrations to the larger picture, to be sure; but they also recognize and honor their protagonists, who all appear with their full names, as citizens entitled to our attention and a place in Spain’s historical memory. As Graham writes, “Preston’s study is history as a public good, a substitute for the truth and reconciliation process that has not taken place in Spain.”
Meanwhile, the reception of this book in Spain has been predictably uneven. Preston, after all, tells truths that many are not interested in hearing, and he does so in great detail, with scholarly rigor (the notes run 120 pages), and in an accessible, efficient prose. This leaves little recourse to those flatly opposed to the revelation of some of the darkest pages of Spain’s recent past. The journalist Jorge Reverte, writing in the center-left newspaper El País, dismissed the book as “a hyperbolic and unbalanced narration,” claiming that Preston’s sympathy for the Republican side determined his partisan assessment of the crimes he describes. In fact, Reverte unwittingly proved one of Preston’s key points: The persistence in Spain and elsewhere of myths about the war and Francoism, which allows the public to identify the notions of “objectivity” and “balance” with a “neutral” condemnation of both sides as equally violent and therefore equally reprehensible and equally guilty. “To this day,” Preston writes, “General Franco and his regime enjoy a relatively good press,” thanks to “a series of persistent myths about the benefits of his rule,” including the false notions that he saved Spain from Communism or engineered its later economic boom. “Recognizing that the initial massive violence was generated by the military rebels themselves,” Helen Graham echoes Preston, “remains the biggest taboo of all in democratic Spain’s public sphere.” (The whole notion that scholars like Preston, Graham, Angel Viñas or Julián Casanova should be labeled as “pro-Republican historians” is quite curious: Should we also be referring to, say, Richard Evans or Martin Gilbert as “pro-Allied historians” of the Second World War?)
Preston admits in his preface and acknowledgments that writing this book was one of the most difficult tasks he has faced as a scholar—not only because of the scale of its aspirations, but because of the book’s depressing, painful subject matter. Like most of us non-Spaniards who dedicate our lives to understanding the Iberian Peninsula, Preston is driven as much by a thirst for knowledge as by affection and respect for his subject. Forcing himself to research and describe the appalling cruelties that Spaniards were capable of inflicting on each other must have been grueling. Gerald Brenan, another staunch British Hispanophile, famously wrote his seminal Spanish Labyrinth (1943) as a form of therapy, a way to deal with the anxiety caused by the endless flow of distressing news from Spain. After seeing the results of the rebels’ rage in the hospital of Toledo, the UP correspondent Webb Miller told Jay Allen that “he came close to going off his rocker.” One can imagine that the same is true for Preston. But it was worth it: He has produced an indispensable, important book.
Sebastiaan Faber teaches at Oberlin College and is Chair of the Board of ALBA.
The Labor Party Question In The United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Worker Party That Fights For A Workers Government
Click on the headline to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for an online copy of his 1940s documents on the labor party question in the United States in his time.
These notes (expanded) were originally presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a panel forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall 2012 bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.
I had originally expected to spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences, particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work of radical around the stillborn Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the scope of the early work and that of those radicals in the latter work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum presentation. Thus these notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor Party work in this space as well.
*********
The subject today is the Labor Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]
For revolutionaries these two algebraically -expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What we mean, what we translate this combination as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need, desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need that party pronto.
That program, the program that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power. Today such demands focus on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.
Now there have historically been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become the driving economic norm in America, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including some integrated black and white locals), a National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious predecessors.
Things got serious around the turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the capitalist s in the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.
The most unambiguous work of creating a mass labor party that we revolutionaries could recognize though really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder (Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this movement. Cannon, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced chagrin).
Moving forward, the American Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, excepting 1940, and even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)
That is a summary of the historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).
America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we, however, are not able to recruit directly then we have to look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade union workers were to be found who still held to the old labor traditions.
Now I don’t know, and probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative “Justice” Labor Party archives indicate, is about what happened when those efforts started.
[A reference back to the American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences, that some vague popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]
Earlier this year AFL-CIO President Trumka made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.
And that last sentence brings up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power). He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay) government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary instrument. Enough said.
These notes (expanded) were originally presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a panel forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall 2012 bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.
I had originally expected to spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences, particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work of radical around the stillborn Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the scope of the early work and that of those radicals in the latter work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum presentation. Thus these notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor Party work in this space as well.
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The subject today is the Labor Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]
For revolutionaries these two algebraically -expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What we mean, what we translate this combination as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need, desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need that party pronto.
That program, the program that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power. Today such demands focus on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.
Now there have historically been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become the driving economic norm in America, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including some integrated black and white locals), a National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious predecessors.
Things got serious around the turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the capitalist s in the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.
The most unambiguous work of creating a mass labor party that we revolutionaries could recognize though really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder (Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this movement. Cannon, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced chagrin).
Moving forward, the American Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, excepting 1940, and even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)
That is a summary of the historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).
America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we, however, are not able to recruit directly then we have to look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade union workers were to be found who still held to the old labor traditions.
Now I don’t know, and probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative “Justice” Labor Party archives indicate, is about what happened when those efforts started.
[A reference back to the American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences, that some vague popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]
Earlier this year AFL-CIO President Trumka made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.
And that last sentence brings up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power). He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay) government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary instrument. Enough said.
From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days- The Communist League-Circular of First Congress to Members, June 9, 1847
Click on the headline to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
The foundation article by Marx or Engels listed in the headline goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space. Just below is a thumbnail sketch of the first tentative proceedings to form a communist organization that would become a way-station on the road to building a Bolshevik-type organization in order fight for the socialist revolution we so desperately need and have since Marx and Engels first put pen to ink.
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Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League
A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)
Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"
Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."
The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.
Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."
The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.
The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.
The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.
Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."
The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.
Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.
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Markin comment on this series:
No question that today at least the figures of 19th century communist revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, are honored more for their “academic” work than their efforts to build political organizations to fight for democratic and socialist revolutions, respectively, as part of their new worldview. Titles like Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Peasants Wars In Germany, and the like are more likely to be linked to their names than Cologne Communist League or Workingmen’s International (First International). While the theoretical and historical materialist works have their honored place in the pantheon of revolutionary literature it would be wrong to neglect that hard fact that both Marx and Engels for most of their lives were not “arm chair" revolutionaries or, in Engels case, smitten by fox hunts. These men were revolutionary politicians who worked at revolution in high times and low. Those of us who follow their traditions can, or should, understand that sometimes, a frustratingly long sometimes, the objective circumstances do not allow for fruitful revolutionary work. We push on as we can. Part of that pushing on is to become immersed in the work of our predecessors and in this series the work of Marx and Engels to create a new form of revolutionary organization to fight the fights of their time, the time from about the Revolutions of 1848 to the founding of various socialist parties in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.
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The Communist League-Circular of First Congress to Members, June 9, 1847 [333]
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Written: June 1847;
Source: MECW Volume 6, p. 589;
First published: Gründungs dokumente des Bundes der Kommunisten (Juni bis September 1847), Hamburg, 1969;
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The Congress to the League
Dear Brothers!
The First Congress of the League, which was called last February by the Central Authority (Halle) [334] and opened on June 2 here in London, has concluded its deliberations. In view of the whole position of our League, its sessions could not be public.[335]
But it is incumbent on us, members of the Congress, to make them public for you in retrospect, by at least giving you a survey of our proceedings.
This is all the more our duty as the Central Authority in office up to now had to render account to us, and we, therefore, have to tell you how far the Congress was satisfied with this rendering of account. We must also do so, because we have added an article to the new Rules which makes all legislative decisions of the Congress subject to the vote of the individual communities ; hence, for this part of our decisions at least, there are two reasons why we owe you a statement of the grounds for them.
After checking credentials the previous Halle had first to give the Congress an account of its conduct of office and to report on the state of the League. The delegates declared themselves completely satisfied with the way in which the Halle had looked after the interests of the League and had made a start with its reorganisation. That point was thereby disposed of. We take the following brief summary from the report of the Central Authority and from the original letters submitted to the Congress.
In London our League is strongest. Freedom of speech and of association immensely facilitates propaganda and gives opportunities to the many able members to use their character and talent for the greatest good of the League and the cause. For this purpose the League uses the German Workers’ Educational Society, and also its branch in Whitechapel. Members of the League also take part in the Fraternal Democrats,[336] the French communist discussion clubs,[337] etc.
The previous Paris Halle itself realised in how much better a position the London League would be to take over the central leadership of the affairs of the League. The security of all documents and of members of the Central Authority itself is nowhere else as great as here. During its proceedings the Congress had opportunity enough to see that the London communities have a sufficient number of competent people who can he entrusted with the supreme executive authority of the League. It therefore decided that the Central Authority should remain in London.
In Paris the League has much declined in recent years.[338] The regional and Halle members have for a long time occupied themselves only with quarrels about formalities and alleged breaches of the Rules instead of looking after the affairs of the whole League or of its regions. In the communities similar time-wasting, superfluous and divisive trifles were dealt with. At most they discussed the old questions which have been talked over again and again, ever since Weitling’s Garantien, to the point of boredom. In the Paris League itself there was no sign of the slightest progress, not the slightest concern with the development of the principle, or with the movement of the proletariat as it was proceeding in other localities of the League, and outside the League. The consequence was that all those who were not satisfied with what they were offered inside the League looked outside the League for further enlightenment. This need for enlightenment was made use of by a literary knight of industry and exploiter of workers, the German writer Karl Grün. This individual had sided with communism when he noticed that there was money to be made by communist writings. After some time he found that it was dangerous to continue to declare himself a Communist and found occasion to resign in the new book b,,, Proudhon on the economic contradictions, which he himself had translated into German. This Grün used the economic statements in this otherwise quite insignificant book as the basis of lectures which he gave in Paris for League members. These lectures were attended by two kinds of people: 1. those who had already enough of communism in general; 2. those who hoped perhaps to get from this Grün enlightenment on a number of questions and doubts never resolved for them in the community meetings. The latter were fairly numerous and consisted of those members of the Paris communities who were the most useful and the most capable of development. For a. time this Grün succeeded in dazzling even a number of these with his phrases and his alleged immense learning. The League was thus split. On one side was the party which had exclusively dominated the Halle and the region, the party of the Weitlingians; on the other side were those who still believed one. could learn something even from Grün. These soon saw, however, that Grün expressed definite hostility to the Communists and that all his teaching was quite unable to replace communism. Heated discussions took place during which it became clear that almost all League members remained loyal to communism and that only two or three defended this Grün and his Proudhonist system. At the same time it was revealed that this same Grün had defrauded the workers, as was his wont, by using 30 francs, the sum collected for the Polish insurgents [339] for his private purposes, and had also wheedled several hundred francs out of them for the printing of a miserable pamphlet about the dissolution of the Prussian Provincial Diet. But enough; the majority of Grün’s former listeners stayed away and formed a new party which was mainly concerned to develop further the communist principle in all its implications and in its connection with social relations. By this split, however, the organisation of the League fell to pieces. In the course of the winter the Central Authority sent an emissary who restored the organisation as far as possible. But soon the quarrels arose again; the three different parties and principles were irreconcilable. The party of progress succeeded with the aid of the Weitlingians in removing from the League the three or four stubborn Grünians who had declared themselves openly against communism. But then, when it came to the election of a delegate to the Congress, the two parties clashed in the regional meeting. The split became incurable, and in order at least to achieve an election, the three communities in which the party of progress was most strongly represented resolved to separate from the two communities on which the main strength of the Weitlingians rested and to elect a congress delegate for themselves at a general meeting. This was done. The Weitlingians were thereby provisionally removed from the League and the number of League members was reduced by one third. After examining the reasons advanced by both parties, the Congress declared its agreement with the action of the three communities, because the Weitlingian party had everywhere held up the League in its development; this had also been experienced both in London and in Switzerland. The Congress resolved unanimously to remove the Paris Weitlingians from the League and to admit the delegate of the Paris majority [Engels] to the Congress.
Hence, the number of League members in Paris has been greatly reduced; but, at the same time, obstructive elements have also been removed, and, through the struggle, minds have been quickened to renewed activity. A new spirit is making itself felt, and a completely new energy. The police persecutions seem more or less to have ended; they were in any case not directed against the party which is now victorious and from which only one member was expelled, but struck Grün’s party almost alone, proof that information of the Prussian Government was at the bottom of the whole persecution, as will be shown presently. And if the government has dispersed the public meetings at the Barrière, this too mainly hits the Grünians who made loud speeches there and inveighed against the Communists, because here, of course, the Communists could not freely reply to them. Hence, the League is in far better shape in Paris now than at the time when the Halle resigned. We are less numerous but we are united and have capable people there.
In Lyons the League has regular members who seem to be very active for the cause.
In Marseilles we are also established. We have received the following letter about the membership there: “The position of the Marseilles League is not too good. Encouragement by letters would not help much; we shall try to arrange for some of us to go there this autumn and to organise the League anew.”
The League has succeeded in gaining a firm footing in Belgium. Brussels has a competent community whose members are Germans and Belgians and who have already founded a second community in large among the Walloon factory workers. In that country the prospects for the League are quite encouraging, and we hope that at the next congress Belgium will already be represented by several delegates.
In Germany we had several communities in Berlin which this spring were suddenly dispersed by the police. League members will have seen from the newspapers that a meeting of workers directed by League members was cancelled by the police, an enquiry was held, and as a result several leading members were arrested. Among the arrested was a certain Friedrich Mentel, a tailor born in Potsdam, about 27 years old, of medium, stocky build, etc. This man, who had formerly been in London and Paris, and in the latter place had belonged to Grün’s party and turned out to be a maudlin sentimentalist, and had, by the way, in the course of his travels got to know the situation in the League pretty accurately, was unable to stand up to this little ordeal. This time too it was seen that the weak-mindedness and vagueness of such sentimentalists can find final satisfaction only in religion. Within a few days this Mentel let himself be completely converted by a priest and twice during his arrest took part in the farce of Holy Communion. A Berlin member writes to us as follows: “...he told in court about the communities in Paris, London, Hamburg and Kiel (all of which he had visited himself) and gave the addresses to which Herm. Kriege sent his Volks-Tribun to Berlin. To somebody else, he said to his face: ‘Did 1 not sell you these books? Did we not go to meetings at such and such an address? Are you not a member of the League of the just?’ And when the answer to everything was ‘No’, Mentel said: ‘How can you answer for this before God the Almighty and All-knowing?’ and other such stupidities.” Fortunately, Mentel’s baseness did not succeed in confusing the other accused, so the government had no alternative but to let the arrested be acquitted for the time being. Clearly, this Mentel’s denunciations are closely connected with the persecutions of the German Communists in Paris. We can only congratulate ourselves that the Grünian Mentel regarded the Grünians themselves as the real leaders of the League and denounced them. Thereby the real Communists were in general protected from the persecutions. Naturally, the entire Berlin circle was disorganised by these events. However, knowing the competence of the members there, we are hopeful that the reorganisation of the League will soon be effected.
Hamburg is also organised. But the members there have let themselves be somewhat intimidated by these persecutions in Berlin. The contacts were not broken for a single moment, however.
The League is also established in Altona, Bremen, Mainz, Munich, Leipzig, Königsberg, Thorn, Kiel, Magdeburg, Stuttgart, Mannheim and Baden-Baden. In Scandinavia it is also already established in Stockholm.
The position of the League in Switzerland is not as satisfactory as we might wish. Here the party of the Weitlingians was dominant from the beginning. The lack of development in the communities in Switzerland was particularly evident, on the one hand in their inability to bring the long-standing struggle with the Young Germans[340] to a conclusion, and on the other hand in their religious attitude to the Young Germans and in the fact that they let themselves be exploited in the vilest manner by most despicable knights of industry, such as, for instance, the solemn Georg Kuhlmann of Holstein. As a result of police measures the League was so disorganised in Switzerland that the Congress decided to take extraordinary measures for its reconstitution. The success and the nature of these measures can, of course, only later be made known to the communities.
Concerning America, we must wait for more detailed news from the emissary whom the Central Authority has sent there, before a precise report can be given of the final shape of the League’s conditions there.
From this report and from the League letters produced two things emerge: firstly, that when the London Halle took over the leadership, the League was indeed in a difficult position, that the previous Central Authority’ had not at all attended to the duties incumbent on it; that it had utterly neglected to hold the whole together, and that in addition to this disorganisation of the League, elements of opposition had gradually germinated even in the individual communities themselves. In these circumstances, which threatened the existence of the League, the London Central Authority at once took the necessary measures: sent out emissaries, removed individual members who were jeopardising the existence of the whole, re-established contacts, called the general congress, and prepared the questions to be discussed there. At the same time it took steps to draw into the League other elements of the communist movement who until then had stood aside from it,[341] steps which were highly successful.
After settling these questions the Congress had to make a review of the Rules. The result of these deliberations lies before the communities in the new Rules, all the articles of which were accepted unanimously, and which the Congress moves should be finally adopted. In justification of the changes made, we make the following observations:
The change of name from League of the just to Communist League was adopted because, firstly, the old name had become known to the governments through the infamous treachery of that Mentel, and that in itself made a change advisable. Secondly, and chiefly, because the old name had been adopted on a special occasion in view of special events [342] which no longer have the slightest bearing on the present purpose of the League. This name is therefore no longer suited to the time and does not in the least express what we want. How many there are who want justice, that is, what they call justice, without necessarily being Communists! We are not distinguished by wanting justice in general — anyone can claim that for himself — but by our attack on the existing social order and on private property, by wanting community of property, by being Communists. Hence there is only one suitable name for our League, the name which says what we really are, and this name we have chosen. In the same spirit we have altered the traditional names Gau and Halle, which we took over from the political societies and the German character of which produced a disturbing impression given the nature of our anti-nationalist League which is open to all peoples; these names have been replaced by words which really mean what they should mean. The introduction of such simple, clear names serves also to remove from our propagandist League the conspiratorial character which our enemies are so keen to attach to us.
The necessity to re-call the Congress, now called for the first time, to re-call it regularly and to transfer to it the entire legislative power of the League subject to confirmation by the communities, was unanimously recognised without discussion. We hope that in the provisions laid down in this respect we have hit on the points which mattered and through which the effective work of the Congress is ensured in the interest of the whole.
As to the omission of the headings, which insofar as they contained legal provisions are replaced by certain articles of the Rules, and insofar as they contained general communist principles are replaced by the Communist Credo, this gives the Rules a simpler and more uniform shape and has at the same time led to a more precise definition of the position of each particular authority.[343]
After the Rules had been dealt with, various proposals were discussed which had been prepared either by the Central Authority or put forward by individual delegates.
First of all, there was discussion of one delegate’s proposal to call a new congress in six months time. The Congress itself felt that, as the First Congress, which has been called and had met at a time when the organisation of the League was flagging, it had to regard itself above all as an organising and constituent assembly. It felt that a new congress was needed to deal thoroughly with the most important questions before it; since at the same time the new Rules had fixed the next congress for the month of August, so that there would be barely two months interval, and since it was also impossible to defer the Second Congress until August 1848, it was decided to call this Second Congress for Monday, November 29 of this year, here in London. We did not let ourselves be deterred by the bad time of the year any more than by the new costs. The League has survived a crisis and must not fight shy of an extraordinary effort for once. — The new League Rules contain the necessary provisions for the election of delegates and so we hope that a large number of circles will send delegates to the Second Congress.
The proposal of the same delegate to set up a special fund for emissaries also found general approval. — The point was made that our League has at its disposal two kinds of emissaries. Firstly, those who are sent out at the expense of the League with special missions to certain localities, either to establish the League in areas where it does not yet exist, or to organise it again where it is in decline. These emissaries must necessarily be under the direct control of the Central Authority. — Secondly, workers who are returning to their own homes or have to make other journeys. Such workers, often very capable men, could be used to the greatest advantage of the League for visits to many communities not far from their travel route, if they are reimbursed on behalf of the League for the additional expenses caused thereby. Such occasional emissaries can, of course, only be under the direct control of the circle authority and only in special cases be placed under the control of the Central Authority. Hence, the Congress decided to instruct the Central Authority to demand from every circle authority a certain financial contribution every three months and from these contributions to set up a fund for sending out emissaries of the first kind. Further, to instruct the circle authorities more than previously to use capable members leaving on journeys as occasional emissaries in the manner described and to pay the additional travelling expenses in advance from their own funds. In very special cases the circle authorities can apply to the Central Authority for a contribution for this purpose; whether this financial application is granted, is, of course, decided by the Central Authority. Every emissary is responsible to the authority which has supplied him with funds and must report to it.
All of you will see how necessary it is to organise propaganda through emissaries and to subject it to central leadership. We hope that our decisions, taken after mature consideration, will meet with your approval and that they may be attended by good success for the cause.
The next question was that of the organ of the League; it was recognised without discussion how necessary such a publication is. It was also readily understood that the paper could appear only in London, and that it should not appear more often than weekly and not less often than monthly. — Title, motto and format were agreed and you will be acquainted with them through the specimen number to be published in July. A commission is in existence to act for the editorial board pending the journal’s publication; then an editor, who also has already been appointed, will take over the direction in co-operation with the Commission. This considered, the Congress came to the question of costs. Firstly, various things are needed to complete the printing equipment, in particular an iron press, for which the Central Authority was instructed to call for a contribution from the circles. But then the costs were calculated. It was found that at 2 pence,=4 sous,=2 Silbergroschen,=6 Kreuzers for every weekly issue of one sheet the number of subscribers required to cover the costs would be greater than we can rely on with certainty at present. A monthly paper without an editor would be able to exist with fewer subscribers, but would not fulfil the League’s requirements. But whether we would be able to get the number of subscribers needed for a weekly paper was, as we have said, too uncertain for us to enter into the necessary engagements. We therefore resolved as follows: To start with, a specimen number will appear in July free of charge. Then the individual communities will have to send word through their circles how many members they have, for the Congress has decided that at least as long as the journal is a monthly, every member pays for one copy, but every community receives only one, and the remainder are distributed free. League members must, moreover, make enquiries regarding the number of copies which can with certainty be sold in their area, gather subscribers and report on this, too. Then in November, taking account of the notices received by the Central Authority, the Congress will take further decisions and if possible launch the journal before the New Year. In the meantime the London printing press will be used to print pamphlets. [344]
Finally, the question of the Communist Credo. The Congress realised that the public proclamation of the principles of the League was a step of the greatest importance; that a credo which in a few years, perhaps months, might no longer suit the times and no longer correspond to the spirit of the majority, would be as harmful as a suitable credo would be useful; that this step had to be considered with particular care and must not be taken too hastily. Here, just as on the question of the League organ, the Congress became aware that it could not act definitively but only in a constituent role, that it had to give new food to the re-awakening life in the League by discussion on the plan of a credo. Hence, the Congress resolved to draft this plan and to submit it to the communities for discussion, so that proposals could be formulated for amendments and additions to be submitted to the Central Authority. The plan is appended. We recommend it for serious and mature consideration by the communities. We have tried on the one hand to refrain from all system-making and all barrack-room communism, and on the other to avoid the fatuous and vapid sentimentality of the tearful, emotional Communists[345]; we have, on the contrary, tried always to keep firm ground under our feet by the constant consideration of the social relations which alone have given rise to communism. We hope that the Central Authority will receive from you very many proposals for additions and amendments, and we will call on you again to discuss the subject with particular zest.
This, dear Brothers, is the survey, the outcome, of our deliberations. We would very much have liked to have definitively settled the items before us, to have founded the League organ, to have proclaimed the communist principles in a credo. But in the interest of the League, in the interest of the comm[unist] movement, we had to set limits to ourselves here, we had to appeal anew to the majority, and to leave it to the second Congress to carry through what we have prepared.
It is now for you, dear Brothers, to prove that you have the cause of the League, the cause of communism, at heart. The League has emerged victorious from a period of decline. Apathy and laxity have been overcome, the hostile elements which had arisen in the League itself have been eliminated. New elements have joined it. The future of the League is secure. But, dear Brothers, our position is not yet such that we can for one moment relax our efforts; all wounds are not yet healed, all gaps have not yet been filled, many painful effects of the struggle we have gone through can still be felt. Therefore the interest of the League, the communist cause, still demands of you a short period of the most strenuous activity; therefore for a few months you must not even for a moment weary in your work. Extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary effort. A crisis such as our League has gone through, a crisis in which we had first to fight the fatigue caused by the heavy pressure of German and other police harassments and, even more, caused by the hope of an early improvement in social conditions apparently receding ever further from fulfilment; a crisis, furthermore, in which we not only had to fight the persecutions of our enemies, of governments either dominated by or allied to the bourgeoisie against us, but in which we found enemies in our midst who had to be fought and rendered harmless, with regard only for the threatened position of the League, for the menacing disorganisation of the entire German-speaking Communist Party, without any consideration of persons; Brothers, one does not recover from such a crisis overnight. And even if the existence of the League, the strength of the organisation, is re-established, there will have to be months of unceasing work before we can say: We have done our duty as Communists, our duty as League members.
Brothers! In the firm conviction that you will feel the importance of the situation as much as we do; in the firm conviction that you will nevertheless be fully equal to these difficult circumstances, we confidently appeal to you, to your enthusiasm for the cause of the community! We know that the bourgeoisie’s infamous lust for gain leaves you hardly a moment to work for the cause; we know that it presses down to the lowest limit even the miserable wage it gives you for your hard work; we know that just now famine and the slump in business weigh on you especially heavily; we know that it persecutes you, imprisons you, ruins your health and endangers your lives if you find time and money despite all to work for the interest of the community; we know all that, and in spite of everything we have not hesitated for one moment to appeal to you for new financial sacrifices, to call on you to redouble your activity. For we ourselves would have to withdraw from the whole movement, blushing and ashamed, if we did not know that the men who elected us to decide on the good of the whole, will vigorously and unhesitatingly put our resolutions into practice; if we did not know that there is no one in our League for whom the interest of the Communist Party, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the victory of the community is not his very own, his dearest interest; if we did not know that people with sufficient determination to organise a league which exposes them to great dangers are also determined and steadfast enough to defy these dangers and to make this League great and mighty over the whole of Europe; if we did not know, finally, that such people are the more courageous, the more active, the more enthusiastic, the greater the obstacles they face.
Brothers! We represent a great, a wonderful cause. We proclaim the greatest revolution ever proclaimed in the world, a revolution which for its thoroughness and wealth of consequences has no equal in world history. We do not know how far it will be granted to us to share in the fruits of this revolution. But this we know, that this revolution is drawing near in all its might; this we see, that everywhere, in France as in Germany, in England as in America, the angry masses of the proletariat are in motion and are demanding their liberation from the fetters of money rule, from the fetters of the bourgeoisie, with a voice that is often still confused but is becoming ever louder and clearer. This we see, that the bourgeois class is getting ever richer, that the middle classes are being more and more ruined and that thus historical development itself strives towards a great revolution which will one day burst out, through the distress of the people and the wantonness of the rich. Brothers, we all hope to live to see that day, and even if last spring we did not get the chance to take up arms, as the letter of the Halle predicted we might, do not let that disconcert you! The day is coming, and on the day when the masses of the people with their solid ranks scatter the mercenaries of the capitalists: on that day it will be revealed what our League was and how it worked! And even if we should not live to see all the fruits of the great struggle, even if hundreds of us fall under the grapeshot of the bourgeoisie, all of us, even the fallen, have lived to be in the struggle, and this struggle, this victory alone is worth a life of the most strenuous work.
And so, farewell!
In the name of the Congress,
Heide [Wilhelm Wolff]
Secretary
The President,
Karl Schill [Karl Schapper]
London, June 9, 1847
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