Andrea Hepworth

The transition of the memory of twentieth-century conflicts from survivor to cultural memory has become inevitable with the passing of the survivor generation. This article examines the role of different generations in the retrieval and commemoration of the traumatic past in Germany and Spain by focusing on two main areas: Firstly, it analyzes the debates surrounding the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the ongoing review of form and function of existing memorial sites in the city, as well as ongoing vandalism and trivialization of these sites. Secondly, it examines recent debates and protests in Spain surrounding the 1977 Amnesty Law by prominent artists and the wider public. These range from protests against the indictment of Judge Baltasar Garzón in 2010 for opening an investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime to demonstrations in November 2015 demanding an annulment of the 1977 Law, and to the recent Argentinean court case of Franco-era human rights crimes. Considering Pierre Nora’s notion that lieux de mémoire can be ‘material or non-material’, this article suggests that debates and demonstrations can act as a virtual space in which memory is viable. It analyzes the role of
the ‘generations of postmemory’, in particular the third and fourth generations, in forestalling silence and forgetting and changing existing rigid discursive patterns.

This article explores the reasons behind the destruction or preservation of sites of memory, using the examples of Carabanchel prison, which was built by forced labour between 1940 and 1944 to house political prisoners, many of whom were tortured and executed, and the Valley of the Fallen, which has been at the centre of intense debates concerning its future in recent times. I argue that political memory influences the official perception of places such as prisons as ‘disavowed places of memory’, which facilitates their destruction, whereas other places are embraced as symbols of cultural heritage. My study will show that the competing ways of attaching value to lieux de mémoire are, on the one hand, influenced by the political memory of the state in an attempt to shape national identity and, on the other, by the public attempting to give voice to a chapter of history in danger of being forgotten.

This article focuses on the Valley of the Fallen in Spain as both a site of memory and dismemory. The monument at Cuelgamuros was constructed as a burial site for the Francoist fallen and the commemoration of their victory between 1940 and 1958 with the help of forced labour, consisting of thousands of Republican prisoners. Not only did many of these prisoners suffer serious injuries or death, but, in addition, thousands of Republican remains were exhumed from mass graves throughout the country, transferred and anonymously interred at the Valley in 1959 over and above the authorized burial of Francoist bodies. The destruction of the mass graves in the process, as well as the transfer of the bodies, was instrumental in disguising committed atrocities, and must be viewed as an attempted ‘mnemocide’ of the Republicans. The interment of dictator Francisco Franco’s remains in 1975 at the basilica of the Valley certainly highlights the contested nature of this memory site. In this discussion, it will be argued that the Valley of the Fallen represents a site with blurred distinctions between a mass grave, a monument and an unacknowledged site of suffering for Republican prisoners, whose memories and stories continue to be silenced and unacknowledged at the site. The article will focus on the ‘dissonant heritage’ of the Valley, which has become a focal point of controversies and debates in recent years. It will further be argued that the unacknowledged ‘heritage of violence’ of the Valley has transformed the site into a contested lieu de memoire, and that debates about and clashes at the Valley of the Fallen reflect conflicts rooted in the past dictatorship and still existing in contemporary Spain.

The legacy of Argentina’s and Spain’s respective twentieth-century military dictatorships continues to impact contemporary society in both countries. The chapter analyzes the struggle for memory, truth, and justice in both countries and examines the effect of memory activists, such as the Argentinean Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Spanish ARMH, and activist lawyers on creating a transnational mnemonic space for the desaparecidos and their relatives of both countries. For the analysis, the study draws on scholarship on transnational social movements, human agency, and Trimçev’s concept of coordinating universalizing memory. The conclusion examines the limitations of transnational memory without a corresponding legal framework in the confrontation of national traumatic pasts.

The chapter examines the historical and geographical trajectory of Spaniards from France to the Nazi concentration camp of Neuengamme in an effort to draw attention to the travails of Spaniards at the camp—a fact that is not widely known. The journey and experience of Spanish prisoners at Neuengamme will mainly be traced through the analysis of the testimony of José López, one of the few survivors of the camp. The essay will further analyze the long-term manifestations of trauma brought about as a result of this imprisonment. This chapter attempts to place the stories, voices and memories of Spanish prisoners at Nazi concentration camps, and in particular those of the few Spanish survivors of the Neuengamme concentration camp, into the wider context of the political violence of war, exile, deportation and repression that many Spaniards had to endure before, during and in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on the “transnational turn” in memory politics, transcending the limitations of national boundaries. Scholars have further recognised a nexus between transnational and national politics of memory and local memory initiatives. How does that play out in Spain? Which global memory paradigms are of importance in Spain’s socio-political memory discourses? What are the differences between and limitations of memory initiatives at local and national level? This paper focuses on the mnemonic framework in Andalusia, Spain’s most southern autonomous community, and its historical memory initiatives. By drawing on
Ricoeur’s observation that justice extracts the “exemplary value from traumatic memories” and transforms “memory into a project,” the study argues that the ongoing validity of the 1977 Amnesty Law and the inadequacies of the 2007 Historical Memory Law left a legal vacuum that sparked interventions by local authorities to address this void. It takes as its point of departure the regional Law on Historical and Democratic Memory enacted by the government of Andalusia in
March 2017 and the memory initiatives centring on the former prison of La Ranilla, Sevilla. The study contends that regional communities such as Andalusia develop distinctive local collective memories by circumnavigating national memory politics and drawing on select localised and global paradigms, evident in the production and promulgation of official counter-narratives by the local governments.

Nearly thirty-five years after the end of Argentina’s last dictatorship and more than forty years after the end of General Franco’s reign in Spain, the ways in which the traumatic past is addressed in both countries remains contested. A network of improvised and mostly temporary prisons instrumental for the oppression of political opponents and state terrorism spanned both Argentina and Spain during their respective military rule. Afterwards, most of these sites of imprisonment were either returned to their former use as schools, garages and police stations without acknowledging their dark history, or destroyed.This paper explores, firstly, the transformation of Buenos Aires’ former ESMA (Navy Mechanics School) detention centre into a Space for Memory and Human Rights in 2004 and analyses the contention it continues to elicit. It, secondly, examines the fate of Madrid’s Carabanchel prison, its destruction in 2008 and the on-going lobbying by ex- prisoner and neighbourhood associations for a memorial centre at the site. The study analyses the tension, conflicts and overlapping of narratives of the past by human rights groups and the state. It further scrutinises the link between memorialisation and the impossibility of criminal persecution due to amnesty laws, which have been repealed in Argentina in 2005 but which are still in effect in Spain. By examining the positioning of different activist groups and their historical narratives with respect to the state, the study investigates the ways in which collective political and human rights activists influence and refocus our understanding of traditional discourses of memory transmission, diffusion, and appropriation.

The connections between Spain and Argentina are manifold—not only are both countries historically linked through the colonial period, but both also had to endure dictatorships in the 20th-century. The transformation of this traumatic legacy of dictatorship, however, was tackled quite differently in both countries. During the transition to democracy in Spain, the 1977 Amnesty Law was passed, which pardoned crimes committed during the 36-year dictatorship. By granting impunity without first addressing the transgressions of the past, the law inhibited the formation of the discursive framework pivotal to the public vocalisation of memories and overcoming of trauma. The law impedes bringing to trial the human rights violations by Francoist officials to this day.
      Conversely in Argentina, a truth commission was established a year after the 1976-1983 dictatorship ended, which enabled victims to publicly air their grievances. While the military had approved an amnesty law before the transfer of power in 1983, this was overturned by the democratic government in the same year. Subsequent Amnesty Laws, the 1986 Punto Final and the 1987 Obediencia Debida, were repealed in 2005. Instrumental in this was the continuous activism by the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo and other associations.
      This paper analyses the transnational entanglement and interconnection between Argentina and Spain in regard to their traumatic pasts. This is evident not only in the “Argentinean Complaint” initiated in 2010 by relatives of Spanish and Argentinean victims of Francoist crimes, but also by invoking the principle of universal jurisdiction in Argentina, which had previously been cited by Judge Garzón in Spain regarding Argentinean military officials. Furthermore, the study examines the transnational trajectories of activist protest movements such as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and their legacy on the historical memory movement in Spain.

The commemoration of traumatic events of the twentieth century has increased exponentially in the Western world in the past two decades. This paper focuses on memorialisation on Wellington’s waterfront; it analyses in particular three of the commemorative plaques at the site: the memorial plaque to those New Zealanders who took part in the Spanish Civil War (2011); the commemorative plaque to the Polish children of Pahiatua (2004); and the memorial plaque commemorating the arrival of the United States Marine Corps to New Zealand (1951/2000). The paper will analyse the ways in which memory, particularly that of conflict and trauma, has been represented at the waterfront and whether the site, with its multitude of memorial tablets, can be read as a lieu de mémoire.
      The study will question whether the concentration of memorials to numerous different conflicts in a confined space results in competing memories or in a cross-fertilising, dynamic process of dialogue which leads to more, rather than less, memory, as suggested by Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory. My discussion will also consider Robert Musil’s observation of the invisibility of traditional monuments and James Young’s suggestion that the construction of an official memorial marks the first stage of forgetting. The paper will investigate the function these memorials have in the collective memory of post-colonial New Zealand and question whether these differ from post-conflict memorials in Europe, for example in Germany’s capital Berlin.
      It will be argued that the histories represented at the waterfront are connected to this particular venue, forming part of local history; these memories are hence not competing. Although traditional monuments, as Young proposes, become parts of the landscape, I will argue that these become part of a local cultural landscape of Wellington’s waterfront and are invested with meaning by the ritual acts of inauguration and annual commemorative celebrations. These memorials form part of a repertoire of memory techniques which bring challenging and previously silenced histories into the public sphere and create new local layers of meaning in regards to the traumatic twentieth-century events they commemorate.

This study examines the role of the third generation in the retrieval and commemoration of the traumatic past in Spain and Germany by focusing on recent protests in Spain against the 1977 Amnesty Law and debates surrounding the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s notion that lieux de mémoire can be “material or non-material,” the paper suggests that debates and demonstrations can act as a virtual space in which memory is possible. It analyses the role of the “generations of postmemory” in preventing silence and forgetting and changing existing rigid discursive pattern by exploring literal and discursive sites of memory.