Resumo de Blood Of Spain

The Spanish civil war is, for me, the great tragedy of
twentieth century history. In quantitative horror it pales beside the Holocaust
and many other events, but it has all the classical elements of tragedy: a
combination of inevitableness and contingency, the gradual closing of
possibilities, and human and organizational flaws aplenty. And it is not one
tragedy but many: the failure of the social revolution and its destruction by
the communists; the dilemmas of the Basque and Catalan bourgeoisie, caught
between the military and the social revolution; the folly of Non-Intervention;
innumerable personal tragedies; and the final obliteration of hopes and
aspirations, of plans and alternatives, beneath the grim tide of Francoism.

Blood of Spain succeeds better than anything else I have read on
the civil war in capturing these tragedies. Formal histories lack immediacy,
while personal accounts offer only a single perspective; Blood of Spain
is an oral history of the war built around the memories and stories of hundreds
of people from all political allegiances and all walks of life ? combatants and
non-combatants, men and women, rich and poor. It joins short segments of direct
quotation with narrative links to produce personal accounts of individual
episodes; these are supplemented with quotations from newspapers, laws, and
political texts. The result captures something of how the war affected those
caught up in it and what they felt and thought ? some individuals are followed
throughout the war ? but individual accounts are also grouped so as to place
key events and themes within a broader perspective.

Rather than trying to cover the whole country, Fraser concentrates on
particular areas: Madrid, Catalonia
and Barcelona, Seville
and Andalusia, Asturias/Vizcaya,
and Old Castile. Otherwise, Blood of Spain
covers the whole sweep of the war, from the first uprising in July 1936 through
to the end at Alicante
and the fate of the conquered (and the conquerors) in the immediate aftermath
of the war. It closes with fifty pages of material in the same style on the points of rupture during the years leading up to the civil war ?
land, religion and the petit bourgeoisie, Catalan and Basque nationalism, the
relationship of the libertarians (anarchists) to the Republic and of the
communists to the Popular Front, and the role of the army.

Blood of Spain is an ideal complement to a more traditional history
of the civil war, but it could be read by itself, even as an introduction for
the reader totally unfamiliar with the war. Sections of chronological narrative
and summaries of the history and background provide links between the personal
accounts, and the volume has a good set of maps, a chronology, a glossary of
Spanish terms, and a list of organizations. Blood of Spain is one of
the most effective works of oral history I have read and one of the
best books on the Spanish Civil War.

Resumos Relacionados