Before talking about your five books, tell us what was the first thing that sparked your interest in the Spanish Civil War.
I think it’s due to the fact that I was born in liverpool in 1946 and liverpool had been badly hit by the bombing. so when I was a kid the conversation was always about the blitz and all the kid’s games were british vs german. I grew up with this kind of obsession with World War II and why it happened. when I went to university that’s what I really wanted to study. I got into oxford but in those days there was little opportunity to study much modern history.
You are reading: Best books on spanish civil war
after oxford, i had the opportunity to do a masters in reading, which was just about interwar europe. I was absolutely in my element and one of the courses was the Spanish Civil War. Initially, it seemed like a dream come true. it was like this pandora’s box that had it all. you have hitler, stalin, trotsky, mussolini, franco, baldwin, chamberlain, leon blum, fascism, communism, socialism, anarchism and liberalism, you name it, it was all there.
so you had all these different things to explore.
yes, and decades later I’m still studying it, although I didn’t realize at the time that I was going to end up dedicating my life to it. once i started reading about the spanish civil war i devoured everything i could find in english and that made me want to learn spanish. so i started hanging out with spanish and latin american students in college and learned enough spanish, and then i went to spain in the late 1960s and fell in love with the place.
I know you think that some of the best books are the ones written in Spanish, but for the purposes of this interview we are looking at books in English on the subject. helen graham’s spanish civil war: a brief introduction seems like a good starting point.
i think helen graham is probably the most insightful historian writing about the spanish civil war in english. this little book, an oxford university press paperback, which is a short introduction, is a remarkable work in that in a very short space she manages to deal with everything. despite spending 40 years researching this topic, I found that it sparkles with ideas. It gave me insights on things I hadn’t necessarily thought of before, and yet it’s still a very good book to read if you’re a complete beginner to the subject.
Which particular ideas did you find most interesting?
she is very good at the ramifications of how particular politicians dealt with particular issues. she is very insightful, especially on the whole issue of what was going on in spain in relation to a much larger european experience: the dark continent where terrible things were happening everywhere. she links them in an extremely insightful way. she’s very fond of photography and the way that visuals can be symbolic or emblematic of what’s going on in politics, and that’s something that seeps into the book as well. This is most evident in her upcoming book The War and Her Shadow, which I have also read. both books show how good she is at examining the meaning of certain images.
next is life and death of the spanish republic by henry buckley. I know it took you eight years to find a copy of this book. why was it so hard to track?
The book was published in 1940 and some copies were distributed to reviewers, but most of the copies were in a warehouse that was attacked during the bombing. maybe a few copies made it to bookstores, but most of them really blew up. and due to wartime paper restrictions, it was not reprinted. It is one of the great rarities of Spanish war literature. Although I have recently managed to print a Spanish translation in Spain and a Catalan translation printed in Catalonia but there is still nothing apart from the original copies available in English.
henry buckley was a very important figure in the civil war. What did he do?
See Also: NCERT Books for Class 8 Maths
He was a correspondent who was in Spain during the war. but it was actually for the first time in 1930 when he was very young. he was one of the few correspondents during the spanish civil war who really knew spain inside out. he was there throughout the experience of the second republic and met quite a few politicians. there were many great correspondents in spain during the civil war but only henry buckley and the american jay allen were in spain before the founding of the republic. they had been there since around 1930, so they knew the country very well.
many of the articles buckley wrote during the war are difficult to trace because he was an agency reporter. many appeared in the daily telegraph but almost all are unsigned. during the war he tended to move around a lot. He became close friends with Hemingway when he arrived in April 1937. Herbert Matthew, another great correspondent, and Robert Capa, the great photographer, were also part of his group. And in fact, Buckley himself was quite an important photographer and his Civil War photos are very important.
Towards the end of the war he met and married María Planas, a Catalan woman from Sitges near Barcelona. After Spain, Buckley was posted to Berlin, where he worked until two days before the outbreak of World War II, when he was expelled by the Nazis. He was briefly in the Netherlands during the German invasion, then in Lisbon, before becoming a Daily Express correspondent with the British forces. he was very badly wounded in anzio and then ended up going back to spain after the war and was a correspondent there more or less until he died.
what do you like so much about his book?
It really is one of the great books on the Spanish civil war, which is beautifully written and written by someone who knew all the main protagonists and makes wonderful portraits of them. but he also felt very deeply the great themes. it is a book that, ultimately, is very supportive of the republic, and rightly so, in my opinion.
your next choice focuses on federico garcia lorca, who embodies the poetic spirit of spain during the civil war. what does ian gibson’s book, the assassination of federico garcía lorca, tell us about the poet?
ian gibson then wrote the great biography of lorca, which is another wonderful book. This book on Lorca’s death was the first and was published by a Spanish publisher in exile in Paris in 1971 and won many international awards. as a literature student ian had gone to granada to do a thesis on lorca’s poetry. and she got hooked on the whole mystery of his death and what had happened and so produced this beautifully written book. It was such an international success that it was later released in English.
really writes like an angel. the book is effectively a detective story, and while odd bits and pieces have surfaced over the years, it remains to this day the definitive study. There is much written about Lorca’s death in Spanish as well. I have a couple of meters of books about Lorca’s death.
for those who don’t know, what was the mystery surrounding his death?
What was not known was exactly who had pulled the trigger and, of course, the biggest mystery was why. here was this man who was not dangerous to the rebel military. but he was someone closely associated with the republic and in 1934 he had declared: “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing”. his itinerant theater group la barraca, inspired by a social missionary zeal, brought culture to the towns, not only in andalusia but throughout spain. He had upset the local establishment by suggesting that the Catholic Moorish conquest of Granada in 1492 had been a disaster.
in many ways he was an innocent. when the war broke out he decided to go to granada because he thought he would be safer at home, but in reality when he got there it became clear that he was not safe. He took refuge in the house of a friend, Luis Rosales, who was also a poet, although a Falangist. Federico assumed that if he stayed with him he would be safe. but one day, when rosales was out, the civil guards came looking for him. He had been denounced by Ramón Ruiz Alonso, a right-wing politician. with the ok of josé valdés, the local commander of the civil guard, a true fascist and also a rather twisted individual who had been badly wounded in the stomach, was in extreme agony and eaten away by hatred, lorca was shot and, to death gibson’s book, no one really knew why.
ian unravels all this and does it beautifully. it gives the background of what lorca was like and why he was hated. He gives a fantastic picture of the social tension in Granada in the spring of 1936 and then writes this great detective story, following exactly what happened to Federico. he managed to track down people who were bragging in bars that lorca had been shot because he was gay! the story of the guys who did it is disgusting, but it’s a fascinating read.
your next book, guernica! guernica! a study of journalism, propaganda and history by herbert southworth, explores another of the key moments of the spanish civil war.
yes. author herbert southworth was always my inspiration. I think he probably knew more about the Spanish civil war than any man who ever lived. he was an absolutely remarkable man who was born in canton, a small town in oklahoma, in 1908. he worked in copper mines in arizona in the 1920s. i think he was one of the few anglos to do so because most of the workers were mexican and that was how he learned Spanish. He was initially self-taught, but managed to work his way through college in Arizona. Always fascinated by books, he went to Washington and got a job at the Library of Congress. when the spanish civil war broke out he was fascinated by the spanish republic and began to review the books that were coming out. and many books appeared almost immediately, as instant think-tanks on both sides. His criticism was noted by the Spanish Republican ambassador in Washington, who invited him, along with Jay Allen, to form a kind of unofficial information office. and through that he was reading everything that was available to him about what was happening in spain.
After the Civil War, he and Jay Allen continued to try to help Spanish refugees and when the United States finally entered World War II, Herbert volunteered and ended up in North Africa. after the war he bought a bunch of army surplus radio equipment and set up radio tangier and waited for the day he would go down frank. during that time he befriended many Spanish republicans. he also became a great expert on the Falangists and, through endless communication with them, he came to be recognized as an expert by them as well.
to summarize, he became a great collector of books on the spanish civil war, which he kept in the old french château where he went to live after morocco gained its independence and was forced to give up his radio. station. When he ran out of money he was forced to sell his collection to the University of California, where it can still be found today. but he couldn’t live without his books, so he started his collection again.
I met him in 1973 and he almost adopted me. my father had died and we ended up with a very strong personal relationship and I used to visit him a lot. I also have a large collection on the Spanish civil war and some of the jewels in my collection were given to me.
but back to his writing, herbert had this amazing memory that allowed him to collate almost everything he read. His first book, which unfortunately never came out in English, was published by the same Spanish publisher that published Gibson’s book on Lorca and was entitled El mito de la cruz de franco-the myth of franco’s crusade.
and that book inspired his book, guernica! guernica!
yes. his first book written in Spanish dissected various myths spread by Francoist propagandists and their impact. After the bombing of Guernica there was a massive and quite successful propaganda effort claiming that Guernica had not been bombed, but had actually been blown up by the Basques as part of a scorched earth policy to create a fake atrocity. Herbert had always hoped that his book The Myth of the Crusade would come out in English. although he never did it, he spent years revising it and in particular the guernica part. He chose it as the subject of the doctorate he did at the Sorbonne, and worked on it as a visiting researcher at the University of California.
the thesis became guernica! guernica! – a book not only about what happened but also about the myth. the full title of the book is, guernica! guernica! a study of journalism, propaganda and history and is about all those things. it is simply an amazing treasure trove of many aspects of the civil war. everything is seen through the prism of guernica, but there is a lot about the propaganda services of the nationalists, about how lies are spread. obviously he was interested in journalists, having been one and knowing most of the top journalists who worked on the Republican side.
There is much about the press that inspired my lifelong interest in journalists. I wrote a book about war correspondents during the civil war that I wrote for Herbert. it came out after his death, but the book was dedicated to him. so herbert’s book on guernica is one that i would always include in the top five books on the spanish civil war in any language. And he certainly had a lot of influence on other historians, particularly in Spain. in fact, helen graham’s book the spanish republic at war is dedicated to him.
one of those historians was hugh thomas, the author of your final choice, the spanish civil war
In my top five choices, I have included Helen Graham’s very precise and up-to-date short scholarly essay on the war. so I thought that since these are going to be five books aimed at people who are starting to be interested in the Spanish civil war or even people who would like to be interested in the subject, it would be a good idea to have a big colorful account. from the war. i was torn between thomas book and antony beevor book. both books are very similar, both very lively and well written. but even though thomas’s is a much older book, i think it wins by a short head.
has been revised several times. I was his research assistant at one point for the third edition, which was the largest revision. it is immensely colorful. I wouldn’t say that I agree with all of his views on aspects of the civil war in any way. but when I’m working on war, not a week goes by that I don’t pull it off the shelf to see what it says about a particular incident. It really is a remarkable achievement that when I go back and look at this book, which is now 50 years old, I find that its view of things is still fresh. I always find that I can get some inspiration from picking it up. And for anyone who has never read anything about the Spanish Civil War, this is an immediately gripping book that showcases all that the subject has to offer. there is that sense of the rich cornucopia of characters and themes which, as I mentioned earlier, is what got me interested in the subject all those years ago.
See Also: Joanne Fluke – Book Series In Order