La despolitización de la memoria histórica del exilio republicano en democracia: excepciones, paradojas y el caso de Jorge Semprún

Abstract

This article studies the uses of the Republican past that the Spanish socialist governments of Felipe González engaged in through their promotion of culture and their cultural policies. We argue that the their policy for the recuperation of intellectual figures gave continuity and increased the tendency already started by the first governments of the transitional period, namely the award of prizes and honours, the creation of cultural institutions, and the backing and financial sponsoring of conferences and publications. Such use of the past played a significant role in the symbolic construction of a modern and European image of 1980s Spain, one carefully distant from its authoritarian past. But in order to work, this use of the past required for the concepts, individuals, collectives and institutions constituting it, to be conveniently empied out of their original ideological and political complexity. As a result, monarchy and republic, who were the winners and who the defeated ones of the Civil War, became interchangeable terms, post-political and ideologically malleable concepts. According to the semiotics of transtional Spain and the Spain of the 1980s, the illustrious exile intellectual or politician was a signifier whose signified became reduced to a prestitious past that could best be capitalized with minimum input from the individual in question carrying the sign. As a
result, the evidence of political and cultural agency leading to effective intervention and influence in the course of the Transition and of democracy on the part of this collective is scarce. The second part of the article is precisely devoted to the analysis of one exception to this rule, that of Jorge Semprún. Using his two books of memoirs written in Spanish, Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez and Federico Sánchez se despide de ustedes, we reflect on the ideological evolution of the author and the way it merged with that of the hegemonic left in democratic Spain. The article finishes by pointing to the paradox of how the trivialized visibilization of the Republican past that characterized democratic Spain until the end of the socialist governments of Felipe González created the conditions for the appearence of antagonisms that would in the end be responsible for its demise as a hegemonic discourse of the national past.