Spanish Culture Behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939-1945

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Bucknell University Press, 2004 - History - 347 pages
By the end of the Spanish Civil War in March of 1939, almost 500,000 Spaniards had fled Francisco Franco's newly established military dictatorship. More than 275,000 refugees in France were immediately interned in hastily constructed concentration camps, most of which were located along the open shorelines of France's southernmost beaches. This book chronicles the cultural memory of this war refugee population whose stories as camp inmates in the early 1940s remain largely unknown, unlike the wide dissemination of the literature and testimony of the survivors of Nazi death camps. The hidden history of France's seaside camps for Spanish Republicans spawned a rich legacy of cultural works that dramatically demonstrate how a displaced political community began to reconstitute itself from the ruins of war, literally from the sands of exile. Combining close textual analyses of memoirs, poetry, drama, and fiction with a carefully researched historical perspective, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire Investigates how the most significant literature of the early post-civil war exile period appropriated the concentration camp as a discursive vehicle.

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Contents

I
9
II
13
III
21
IV
34
V
53
VI
85
VII
100
VIII
129
XI
189
XIII
211
XIV
235
XV
260
XVI
285
XVII
290
XVIII
326
XIX
338

IX
145
X
167

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Page 156 - I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.
Page 198 - Pero el cadáver ¡ay! siguió muriendo. Le rodearon millones de individuos, con un ruego común: "¡Quédate hermano!" Pero el cadáver ¡ay! siguió muriendo. Entonces todos los hombres de la tierra le rodearon; les vio el cadáver triste, emocionado: incorporóse lentamente, abrazó al primer hombre; echóse a andar...
Page 157 - This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental fabula, heterotopias . . . desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.
Page 177 - ... no aglutina; ni el llanto ni la sangre. Y ¿para qué sirve la sangre derramada si no junta los labios de la casta? Disolvente es la sangre en esta tierra lo mismo que las lágrimas, y ha clavado banderas plurales y enemigas en todos los aleros. Los ídolos domésticos hablaron vanidad.
Page 198 - Al fin de la batalla, y muerto el combatiente, vino hacia él un hombre y le dijo: «No mueras, te amo tanto!» Pero el cadáver ¡ ay ! siguió muriendo. Se le acercaron dos y repitiéronle: «No nos dejes! ¡Valor! ¡Vuelve a la vida!
Page 157 - Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to 'hold together'.
Page 173 - Los caballos negros son. Las herraduras son negras. Sobre las capas relucen manchas de tinta y de cera. Tienen, por eso no lloran, de plomo las calaveras. Con el alma de charol vienen por la carretera. Jorobados y nocturnos, por donde animan ordenan silencios de goma oscura y miedos de fina arena.
Page 34 - Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.
Page 120 - A few years ago we had been called the martyrs of Fascist barbarism, pioneers in the fight for civilization, defenders of liberty, and what not; the Press and statesmen of the West had made rather a fuss about us, probably to drown the voice of their bad conscience. Now we had become the scum of the...