After the Spanish Civil War

The Twentieth Century Through Five Antifascist Lives
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-37104-9
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 350 Seiten

Ninety years ago an international war against fascism was fought, and lost, in Spain. Defeat triggered a World War that drove back the Nazi empire and its collaborators, but the progressive dream of more equal societies which antifascists had fought for in Spain was afterwards paralysed by a conservative Cold War order everywhere. Helen Graham vividly tells this history through the interconnected lives of five diverse activists and creatives who defended democracy in Spain and were afterwards scattered across continents by continuing war, political repression and the Holocaust. With courageous imagination they transformed their losses into new ways of living and resisting. As the stakes rise again today, the urgency of reconnecting with these lives redoubles: in the face of 'post-truth' advances, this book testifies to forensic history as a form of resistance, and to the lasting importance of Spain's faraway war that remains forever near.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Graham, Helen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

About this book; 1. The century and its lives: journeys towards the new; 2. Survivor's leave: Gustavo Durán (1906–1969); 3. Stories to get by: Margaret Michaelis (1902–1985), Rudolf Michaelis (1907–1990); 4. Crossing the lines: Bill Aalto (1915–1958); 5. The wager of a whole life: Lucía Sánchez Saornil (1895–1970); 6. Radical hope.

Über Autor(innen)

Graham, Helen
Helen Graham is a distinguished historian of twentieth-century Spain. She has published widely in many languages on the Spanish Civil War as the pivotal transnational conflict against fascism, including The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005, 2026). In 2025 she won the Walter Benjamin International Memorial Prize.