Entre la memoria y la reconciliación. El recuerdo de la República y la guerra en la generación de 1968

Abstract

Memories of the Republic and the Civil War among the post war generations, even among those actively involved in opposing Franco's rergime, appear today to be contradictory. On the one hando, there war an awareness of the need to revie the cultural ans intellectual tradition, wich had been destroyed by the war an the repression, in order to reconstruct civil society. On yhe other hand, to heal the wound opened by the war, wich the regime kept open throug propaganda and its own continuing existence, was an absolute political priority, even though it discouraged the young from Republican exile. From their point of view, the past should not be allowed to compromise the construction of a future democratic society, not founded in the legitimacy of Republican institutions, but rather in the reconciliation and the free will expressed by the Spanish people. The study carried out by the monthly journal Cuadernos para el diálogo documents how the coexistence of various biographies and vierse memories, the re-establishment of past values and a heightened awareness of recent history were not consedered as being incompatible with a political evolution from that past.