Books, photographs, speeches, pamphlets, postcards, posters, battle sketches, political organization charts, poems, drawings and vignettes, even a deck of cards or a children’s coloring book, are vestiges of the tragic history of frentism, war, brutal repression and exile that marked the history of Spain in the 20th century, and of its fit into a European context full of violence. This is what the exhibition shows Intolerance, Spain in a turbulent Europe 1914-1945, which will remain open in the Madrid Student Residence until April 12, and which traces the rise of totalitarianism in Europe and its violent spread from the start of the First World War in 1914 to the end of the Second in 1945, taking Spain as its focus.
Democracy seemed to have emerged victorious from the brutal war that devastated Europe between 1914 and 1919, however, in the following decades a “vehement repudiation of the democratic system and the ideas of freedom on which it is based” spread, as John Ramsay Muir noted in 1930. The historian Miguel Martorell, curator of the exhibition, takes the words of the British politician and thinker as a starting point in this tour of a selection of the documentary collection of the José María Castañé collection—close to 5,000 pieces donated to the Student Residence, after taking an important part of its collection to Harvard University. The archive of the Madrid center also contributes materials to the exhibition, which includes a section on the liquidation of the Free Teaching Institution, the purge of teachers, and the exile to which many of them were forced.. “We wanted to show what degrees of barbarism intolerance reached in the not-so-distant past,” Martorell, also the author of the careful publication that accompanies the exhibition, stressed last Friday.
The Great War occupies the first section, in which the total breakdown of values that the large-scale destruction entailed, and also the October Revolution, is realized. In Russia, an alternative model was proposed, with the expansion of communist parties throughout the continent. “In the face of uncertainty, many opt for radical rejection,” Martorell pointed out.
The works of three painters and draftsmen capture the pre-war climate and the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain. These are the drawings from 1936 in Madrid (among others, the funeral of Calvo Sotelo on July 14) by the French Argentine Chas Laborde (1886-1941), which are shown together with the colorful traces of the war in Barcelona by the anarchist cartoonist José Luis Rey Vila (1900-1983), who signed his works as Sim, and the war drawings, with clear and well-defined lines, by Carlos Sáenz de Tejada (1897-1955) that exalt the combatants of the Francoist side. The quote from the painter José Moreno Villa, reproduced on one of the walls of the room, portrays that desperate struggle: “I believe that few governments in the world will have had a revolution, a war and a foreign invasion at the same time. Few like this one from Spain, cunningly called red by its enemies, deserves the total and effusive assistance of the Spanish people.” Martorell emphasized that the State largely lost its monopoly on violence in 1936 and 1937, and was weakened by the revolution in the rear of the Republican side.
The decisive support for the Francoist troops of Nazi Germany and Italian fascism and the relentless propaganda war is perfectly captured in objects as varied as a deck of cards called Spain and its flags or some children’s sheets to color. “The international dimension of the war in Spain is key,” the commissioner stressed. Thus, the presence of Italian soldiers in the Spanish war, close to 80,000, appears in the magazines and newspapers gathered in Intolerance. Also included is the connection of the Franco Women’s Section with the Fasci Femminili and the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the photo albums of the National Socialist Party in which Himmler’s time in Spain is documented in detail, and the Blue Division that took Spanish soldiers to the front of the Second World War. “Between 1936 and 1943, National Socialist Germany had a notable presence in Spain,” explains Martorell.
The images and documents about the Argelès-sur-Mer concentration camp, where the Republican Spaniards who fled across the border with France were detained, open the last two sections of the exhibition in which the brutal repression of the regime and the persecution of the Republican side are addressed. “Franco’s order was to extirpate the enemy to create a homogeneous society,” Martorell stressed. “Savage anti-communism is linked to integral nationalism. Those that do not fit must be extirpated.” The documents on executions and cases opened by the Franco government show the broad and deep repression. For example, the exhibition displays some pages with the letterhead of the Basque government reused to prepare the political files of citizens in Bilbao, who must prove which side they have been on. “Everyone was suspicious,” Martorell added.
But Intolerance It also includes the resistance that university students promoted from within Spain as early as the 1940s. The University School Federation (FUE), of which Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, Manuel Lamana, Carmelo Soria Espinosa, Albina Pérez and Álvaro Llopis were part, challenged the regime with the publication of the collection of poems Captive Townwith 10 poems by Eugenio de Nora, one by Pablo Neruda and drawings by Álvaro Delgado de Ramos, although the book was signed by “Poet without a name.” Printed in Paris, although it was listed as made in Spain, it had a circulation of about 200 copies that circulated from hand to hand. The original drawings and one of the copies close Intolerancetogether with the speech given by Fernando de los Ríos in Mexico in 1945 before the Republican Cortes: “…there was only one hope for Europe: the possibility of having understood the truth of the Spanish drama, the historical dimensions of the Spanish drama and having prevented what was then slowly consummated in so many towns from being consummated in Spain.”