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The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

Austin Carson

in Secret Wars

This chapter analyzes foreign combat participation in the Spanish Civil War. Fought from 1936 to 1939, the war hosted covert interventions by Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. The chapter ... More

This chapter analyzes foreign combat participation in the Spanish Civil War. Fought from 1936 to 1939, the war hosted covert interventions by Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. The chapter leverages variation in intervention form among those three states, as well as variation over time in the Italian intervention, to assess the role of escalation concerns and limited war in the use of secrecy. Adolf Hitler's German intervention provides especially interesting support for a theory on escalation control. An unusually candid view of Berlin's thinking suggests that Germany managed the visibility of its covert “Condor Legion” with an eye toward the relative power of domestic hawkish voices in France and Great Britain. The chapter also shows the unique role of direct communication and international organizations. The Non-Intervention Committee, an ad hoc organization that allowed private discussions of foreign involvement in Spain, helped the three interveners and Britain and France keep the war limited in ways that echo key claims of the theory.Less

The third greatest man in Europe

FEARGHAL McGARRY

in Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero

This chapter examines Eoin O'Duffy's resignation as leader of Fine Gael in September 1934. It discusses his later decision to lead the League of Youth as an independent movement and his participation ... More

This chapter examines Eoin O'Duffy's resignation as leader of Fine Gael in September 1934. It discusses his later decision to lead the League of Youth as an independent movement and his participation in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Francisco Franco. The chapter highlights the failure of the Irish Brigade after less than two months in action, O'Duffy's efforts to make a hero out of himself and his troops, and their return to Ireland in June 1937.Less

Latemodernism’s Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

This chapter turns to travel narratives from global hot zones where the examination of everyday life reveals the emergence of a new form of warfare shifting the balance of power in Europe and Asia.

Patterns of Violence: Virginia Woolf in the 1930s

Sarah Cole

in At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland

This chapter makes the case for reading Woolf's works—from her first novel to her last, with a special emphasis on her three primary works of the 1930s, The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the ... More

This chapter makes the case for reading Woolf's works—from her first novel to her last, with a special emphasis on her three primary works of the 1930s, The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts—as a great theorist of literary violence. It places Woolf in two primary relations to her contemporary culture with respect to violence: deeply, intimately exploring and formalizing its registers of violence; veering away from her peers and constructing an entirely original set of patterns to accommodate the visceral facts of ubiquitous, mass violence. The first half of the chapter elaborates three major topics in the cultural history of violence in the 1930s: the widespread debate about whether violence is or must be a determining feature of humanity, versus the view that civilization might yet prevail (discussion of Freud, Russell, Leonard Woolf, and V. Woolf); the Spanish Civil War, especially as it was reflected and understood in England (discussion of various writers on the war, as well as visual artists such as Picasso and Capa); the logics of action, as expressed by fascists, and the crisis around pacifism in the 1930s (discussion of Mussolini, British journal Action, and the history and language of British pacifism). The second half offers a reading of a full range of Woolf's writings (The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse) culminating in a detailed account of violence in her final three works.Less

The New (Old) Order, 1936–1942

Sasha D. Pack

in The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Modern Hispano-African Borderland

This chapter examines the fate of trans-Gibraltar region during Spanish Civil War and the early stages of World War II. Although the insurgent army of Francisco Franco quickly took control of ... More

This chapter examines the fate of trans-Gibraltar region during Spanish Civil War and the early stages of World War II. Although the insurgent army of Francisco Franco quickly took control of northern Morocco and southern Spain and invited its Nazi and Fascist allies to the strategically crucial region, the Entente order of 1904 proved resilient. New evidence is introduced detailing the Franco movement’s success in marshaling anti-French, anti-Semitic, and pro-German sentiments to recruit Muslim support, promising the construction of a new Hispano-Moroccan bulwark in the western Mediterranean. Other new documents indicate how quickly this enthusiasm cooled, however, as it became clear that Nazi agents were preparing to seize a position in northwest Africa without giving consideration for Spanish interests, while the British and much of the Jewish community of Tangier remained supportive of Spanish interests in Morocco.Less

. Virginia Woolf and the Spanish Civil War: Three Guineas, Victoria Ocampo, and International Feminism

Gayle Rogers

in Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History

Chapter Four maps a feminist geography grounded in the collaborations between Victoria Ocampo and Virginia Woolf. It takes as its point of departure Woolf’s plan to “fight… English tyranny” in ... More

Chapter Four maps a feminist geography grounded in the collaborations between Victoria Ocampo and Virginia Woolf. It takes as its point of departure Woolf’s plan to “fight… English tyranny” in response to the death of beloved nephew Julian Bell in the Spanish war. She attempts to illuminate in Three Guineas (1938) the connections between fighting Spanish fascism and dismantling the English patriarchal system. I outline the ways in which Woolf, within an acrimonious and politicized British literary culture in the 1930s, comes to envision an intellectual space for cosmopolitan feminism and to attach it to Spain’s war. Here, she models the literary-political critiques and activism of her colleague Ocampo, with whom she conversed about fascism and masculinity as she composed Three Guineas, and an overlooked feminist editor and financier of modernism, especially through her review Sur in Buenos Aires. Ocampo also employed the form of the public epistle, marshaling Woolf’s feminism to fight battles far beyond those that Woolf conceived in her essay-letters. I follow Ocampo’s work through Argentina’s “Infamous Decade,” through her work with the North American writer and friend of Ortega’s Waldo Frank, through her autobiography, and finally through her dissidence and imprisonment during Juan Perón’s regime. Ocampo animated the cosmopolitan feminism that Woolf articulated, and their common ideals were staked in the 1930s to the survival of the Spanish Republic—the last, endangered hope for a European New Spain and its women.Less

The World Wars as Jewish Wars

Derek J. Penslar

in Jews and the Military: A History

This chapter demonstrates the effect of the mobilization of ideas and manpower on the Zionist movement during the two world wars as well as a smaller international conflict that adumbrated World War ... More

This chapter demonstrates the effect of the mobilization of ideas and manpower on the Zionist movement during the two world wars as well as a smaller international conflict that adumbrated World War II. During World War I, the Zionist movement sponsored the formation of Jewish units for the British armed forces, and although these units' military accomplishments were modest, they had a galvanizing effect on Jewish collective solidarity throughout the western world. A very different type of international mobilization sent thousands of Jews into the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Ideologically, these wars were perceived as serving Jewish interests, albeit often conflicting ones such as Zionism, on the one hand, and international socialism, on the other. Operationally, these were, for Jews, international conflicts, involving mass movements of Jews not only as refugees or inducted soldiers but also as volunteer fighters.Less

. Spain in Translation and Revision: Spender, Altolaguirre, and Lorca in British Literary Culture

Gayle Rogers

in Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History

This chapter examines the efforts of Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and several of their associates to create a European anti-fascist poetic community for which the bonds between the Auden ... More

This chapter examines the efforts of Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and several of their associates to create a European anti-fascist poetic community for which the bonds between the Auden Generation and the Spanish Generation of ’27 would be central. The frames for this work are the claims by Ortega, in several articles in English, and Altolaguirre, in his journal 1616: English and Spanish Poetry, that England and Spain shared a unique history that compelled cooperation; the attempts, led primarily by Spender, to channel Spanish voices of the conflict through British literary culture; and the battles over the political and cultural significance of Lorca’s assassination. Spender, one of Lorca’s earliest translators, found himself defending his view of the Spaniard’s mutable, populist figure against its misappropriation. With the aid of two Spanish collaborators, Spender influentially characterized him instead as an apolitical Spanish-European poet, and he edited the volume Poems for Spain, which intercalated British and Spanish voices on the war. At the same time, while Poems for Spain evinces the mutual influences of two literary generations, its publication in March 1939, when Franco’s victory was ensured, made it an elegy for the lost Republic. The awkward and ultimately failed literary endeavors taken up in this chapter underwent significant revisions both in Spender’s poetry and in later translations of Lorca.Less

Introduction

Matthews James

in Reluctant Warriors: Republican Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

This chapter is a conceptual and methodological introduction to the book. It examines the enduring interest in the Spanish Civil War from both an academic and popular perspective, and charts the ... More

This chapter is a conceptual and methodological introduction to the book. It examines the enduring interest in the Spanish Civil War from both an academic and popular perspective, and charts the development of military history to include studies of people at war at the lowest level. In this light, conscripts had a degree of agency, rather than as acting simply as pawns within a rigid military apparatus. The chapter also places the study of conscription within the existing historiography of the Spanish Civil War and elucidates on the scope and purpose of carrying out a comparative study. Finally, it introduces the sources used for this study and examines their strengths and limitations.Less

Commitment and the Scene of War: Max Aub and Spanish Civil War Writing

Jessica Berman

in Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism

This chapter situates the Spanish Civil War narrative into modernism and politics. It examines the works of Spanish writer Max Aub, whose six-novel Civil War cycle El laberinto mágico (The Magic ... More

This chapter situates the Spanish Civil War narrative into modernism and politics. It examines the works of Spanish writer Max Aub, whose six-novel Civil War cycle El laberinto mágico (The Magic Labyrinth, 1943–1968) is a narrative innovation of chronicling war. This type of modernist narrative serves as a politically committed hyper-verisimilitude—or what Max Aub calls “transcendental realism”—that produces fiction which inscribes the war's chaos, disruption of temporal order, and challenge to social and familial relationships within the narrative proper. These narratives develop particular modernist strategies to respond to the extraordinary events of the conflict, while at the same time displaying their partisanship. The chapter then questions this partisanship during the Civil War by exploring the role of multimedia propaganda. It looks into the films The Spanish Earth (1937) directed by Joris Ivens and L'espoir (1945) directed by Andre Malraux.Less

‘The hope of the world’: Spain in revolution and war, 1933–39

Matt Perry

in 'Red Ellen' Wilkinson: Her ideas, movements and world

The sheer scope and complexity of Wilkinson's involvement on behalf of Republican Spain is striking. Her attitude towards Spain was the result of entangled relationships with Spanish leaders, her own ... More

The sheer scope and complexity of Wilkinson's involvement on behalf of Republican Spain is striking. Her attitude towards Spain was the result of entangled relationships with Spanish leaders, her own party, her union, and more than the British Communist Party itself, and the Münzenberg-Katz circle. These pulled her in different directions in campaigning and ideological terms. What attracted Wilkinson to Spain was not so much the defence of a liberal democracy, though her antifascist commitment could not be doubted, but the ebb and flow of a great social movement. At moments, her writings on Spain exhibit a great intimacy and profound affinity with that movement and its revolutionary capacities. Yet the implications of her transnational networks and her advocacy of a Popular Front policy pulled her away from the base of that movement into the reception events for foreign visitors, the hotels filled with some of the world's most celebrated novelists and journalists. Foremost, Spain was an experience of defeat and nobody connected to it could escape its emotional cost or its challenge to one's political assumptions.Less

The Spanish Cockpit, 1936–1937

Zara Steiner

in The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933-1939

This chapter focuses on the years 1936–1937, when the struggle in ‘the Spanish cockpit’ led to the Spanish Civil War that was precipitated by the assassination of José Calvo Sotelo, a leading ... More

This chapter focuses on the years 1936–1937, when the struggle in ‘the Spanish cockpit’ led to the Spanish Civil War that was precipitated by the assassination of José Calvo Sotelo, a leading monarchist, by left-wing Socialists and the attempted coup d'état by a small group of army leaders to topple the Popular Front regime in Spain. It looks at how Spain became a battleground for fascism and communism, as well as the involvement of Germany, Italy, Soviet Union, Mexico, and France in the civil war. It also considers the support of Britain and France for a policy of non-intervention that successfully contained the struggle in ‘the Spanish cockpit’. Finally, the chapter examines the implications of the conflict for diplomatic affairs and Adolf Hitler's assault on the territorial status quo in 1938 that focused attention on central Europe.Less