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Alberto Mendez never experienced life as a successful author. The 63-year-old Spanish screenwriter and translator died 11 months after his first and only book, Los girasoles ciegos (Blind Sunflowers), was published in 2004, never knowing that it would make the Spanish bestseller lists for months on end, win several awards, and be adapted for the screen in 2008.
Mendez's immensely popular book hasn't yet appeared in English translation in the United States, but a translation was published in the United Kingdom last summer and was issued in paperback there just this month. The novel reflects Spain's current fascination with a collective act of memory, going back to the era of the Civil War and its long aftermath.
After the 1936 military coup (funded by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) against Spain's democratic republic in 1936, and three subsequent years of bitter war between the Nationalist and Republican sides, General Francisco Franco came to power. Establishing a triumphal rhetoric of nationalist and Catholic unity, Franco ruled for forty years, maintaining a regime characterized by human rights violations and oppressive censorship. After his death in 1975, Spain established its unique pacto del olvido, a "pact of forgetting," and abstained from any sort of transitional justice in its journey to democracy. In 1977, the government declared a blanket amnesty, liberated more than 400 political prisoners, prohibited the trial of previous government administrators, and locked up the documents of the secret police.
A desire to enter into modern global markets fueled Spain's collective amnesia even before Franco's death. In the 1960s, two-fifths of Spaniards worked in agriculture, many of them living in great poverty. In the heady post-Franco years, Spain re-created itself, using Almodóvar movies and a modern image of Madrid as symbols of its liberated image. In 1986, Spain, along with Portugal, joined the European Community of 12, which would later become the EU. In 2006, Spain was the world's ninth-largest economy measured at market exchange rates. In 2007, Spain's income per a person was 90 percent of that of the European Union members' average (up from 68 percent in 1986).
But collective forgetting is not as simple or as effective as some might hope, and Spain, despite its bustling economy, has been rife with tension in the past forty years, most visibly seen in Basque nationalist terrorism and in the unsuccessful but threatening military coup of 1981, but also in the establishment of fierce nationalist identities in Galicia, Catalonia, and Valencia. Only recently has Spain begun to critically examine its past. It has not been easy, however, even now.
In 2007, due to a change in government to the more liberal PSOE Socialist party, the so-called law of historical memory was passed, after two years of contentious debate. The law condemns Franco's abuses of power and attempts to make reparations to the families of his government's victims. The law also includes a commitment to the investigation of communal Republican graves—a source of great controversy. The debate has most heatedly surrounded the digging up of the graves of two of Spain's most celebrated Republican writers: Federico Garcia Lorca, whose remains lie in a communal grave in Víznar; and Antonio Machado, who died in Colliure in the last days of the Civil War, while fleeing to France. Some cry out for the need to leave the dead in peace, some cry out for truth, and others cry out for reconciliation and peace, claiming this action unnecessarily opens up old wounds.
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