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Introduction: Debate – Public Memory, Political Violence and the Spanish Civil War

Eighty years after it began, the Spanish Civil War continues to divide opinion like almost no other topic in contemporary history. The overwhelming majority of serious historians are agreed on the horrors of the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, the cruelties and massacres of Stalin’s reign of terror, and other mass murders that disfigured the face of twentieth-century Europe, but in the case of the Spanish Civil War, they seem to be as far from agreement as ever, a situation reflected in the continuing role played by differing public memories of the conflict and its aftermath in present-day Spanish politics. Public monuments to the victims of National Socialism are present all over Germany, and political culture in the Federal Republic simply does not admit of any attempt to relativize the crimes committed by Hitler and his lieutenants. The public memory of the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy has experienced a degree of trivialization, even excuse, but no professional historian has tried to minimize its role in aiding and abetting the Nazis during the Holocaust, nor underestimate the considerable brutality with which it treated its opponents in Italy itself. Public memory in some countries has of course remained divided, as in the elevation by some politicians in Ukraine of the sometime Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera to the status of a national hero, or the positive manner in which the racist and exterminatory Croatian puppet state led by Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše was remembered by some extreme nationalists during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, but only in Spain have the deep divisions in public memory found an echo in the work of the historical profession. The Journal of Contemporary History has not stood aside from this controversy. In 2013 we printed a review article commissioned from the British historian Chris Ealham, which mounted a strongly critical attack on historians who argued that the undemocratic and unstable nature of the Spanish Second Republic was the cause of the Civil War. The review article also took in some recent work on the equally controversial topic of the mass murder of civilians during the war and