Chamberlin, Foster P

English

Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS): Digital Commons

Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 
Journal of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 
Volume 44 
Issue 1 Iberia in Entangled and Transnational 
Contexts 
Article 23 
2019 
Review of James Matthews ed. Spain at War: Society, Culture, and 
Mobilization, 1936- 44 
Foster P. Chamberlin 
Boğaziçi University, fosterpchambers@gmail.com 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs 
Recommended Citation 
Chamberlin, Foster P. (2019) "Review of James Matthews ed. Spain at War: Society, Culture, and 
Mobilization, 1936- 44," Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies: Vol. 44 : Iss. 1 , Article 23. 
https://doi.org/10.26431/0739-182X.1346 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs/vol44/iss1/23 
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contact andrew.lee@nyu.edu. 
Chile’s among Latin American nations. As one would anticipate, most beneficiaries 
were Nationalists, including Ramón Serrano Suñer, who travelled to Marseilles 
clandestinely on the naval vessel Tucumán, but Argentine policy also helped some 
Republicans. 
The volume concludes with Manuela Consonni’s unusual tribute to Renzo 
Giua, a young Italian who died in Spain in 1938, “with guns blazing” (270). She 
combines his personal story with that of the clandestine resistance to the Fascist 
regime in Italy. Giua’s own story mostly consists of lengthy extracts from texts 
written “by those who knew him very well or very little” (271), as well as some 
letters he wrote to his mother. She borrows the structure from Hans Magnus 
Enzensberger’s biography of Buenaventura Durruti, but her claim that Giua’s story 
resembles Durruti’s is unconvincing.  
As Rein and Thomàs point out in their introduction, written in December 
2017, the Spanish Civil War remains a “source of contention of controversy” (1), 
with debate still swirling around the Valley of the Fallen and the callejero of 
Madrid. Much has happened in the subsequent two years, including the 
dramatic/anticlimactic exhumation of Francisco Franco from the Valley of the 
Fallen broadcast live over many hours on October 24, 2019. Whether this will lead 
to the repurposing of this Francoist monument is, in the extremely complex current 
political situation, very much an open question. What is beyond doubt is that the 
production of scholarship devoted to this seminal event in Spain’s— and 
Europe’s— twentieth-century history will not slacken any time soon. 
 
Adrian Shubert 
York University 
 
 
Matthews, James, ed. Spain at War: Society, Culture, and Mobilization, 1936-
44. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. xii 263 pp. + 14 ill. 
 
 James Matthews, who previously won acclaim from the Association of 
Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies for his Reluctant Warriors: Republican 
Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the Spanish Civil War 1936-
1936 (2012), can count this new edited volume as another achievement. Matthews 
gives this collection cohesion by bringing together twelve other scholars who can 
all speak and provide depth to one unifying topic. Namely, the volume’s object is 
to allow the reader to understand what the experience of the Spanish Civil War was 
like for everyday people—soldiers and civilians—on both sides of the conflict. In 
so doing, Matthews hopes to demonstrate the agency that these participants 
exercised, bringing social and cultural analysis to the fore where political and 
military history have previously dominated the study of the civil war. Thus, he 
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understands the volume as “new” military history, that is, as part of the movement 
to develop a “dialogue between military history and social and cultural history;” 
although, not all chapters are in dialogue with the work of military historians (2). 
What this volume certainly does do is provide “the grassroots perspective of the 
experience of war and mobilization between 1936 and 1944” (3). Since each 
chapter presents a different grassroots perspective, the result is a fairly 
comprehensive overview that covers the war from its inception to aftermath and 
spans over a dozen topics, from economics to gender, children to food. Each chapter 
adheres to Matthews’s mission of foregrounding the social and cultural aspects of 
the war rather than the politics, battles, and generals, such that the chapters combine 
to create a new narrative of the war entirely focused on subaltern actors. Since 
Matthews also provides a brief overview of the course of the war in the 
introduction, a reader with no prior knowledge of the war could gain a unique 
grounding in it through this volume, which suggests that the work should be ideal 
for undergraduate classroom use. 
Matthews frames the civil war as a “total war” since the volume’s chapters 
demonstrate that it affected every aspect of life. Regrettably, however, the 
collection’s authors do not use the material they present to spell out an explicit case 
for why the civil war was a “total war,” even though many seem to provide further 
evidence for Roger Chickering’s argument that the civil war should be considered 
as such. Although less emphasized in Matthews’s introduction, many chapters do 
make the argument that the Republic did not lose the war solely because it did not 
receive substantial aid from the Western democracies (although the authors do not 
deny that this was a very important reason), but also because the Republic was 
much less successful in mobilizing its population to fight the war than were the 
Nationalists. While this conclusion echoes the previous work of scholars such as 
Michael Seidman, the authors in this volume provide further abundant evidence to 
support the thesis, showing that the Republicans faced disorganization and disunity 
in almost every facet of mobilization, including conscription, desertion prevention, 
espionage, finance, and provisioning. The treatment of each of these varied topics 
can only be about fifteen pages given the number of chapters in this volume, but 
each one provides a few suggestions for further reading as well as endnotes so 
readers can easily find more information. One last achievement of the collection 
should be mentioned. Matthews brings together Anglophone and Spanish scholars 
as well as both veterans of the field and relative newcomers. The reader can see 
how pioneers of the social history of Spain like Seidman and Adrian Shubert paved 
the way for the innovative new directions that the younger cultural and gender 
historians featured in this collection are taking in the field. 
 The volume’s many chapters are logically organized into sections focusing 
on the initial mobilization of the militias, the later mobilization for total war, the 
situation in the rearguard, and then finally the aftermath of the war. Matthews and 
200
Michael Alpert begin with the Republican militias, and although they acknowledge 
that the militias were the key to foiling the coup that set off the civil war, the authors 
then paint a picture of almost total disarray in which the disunified, poorly equipped 
and inexperienced militias proved no matched for the Army of Africa’s disciplined 
veterans. The contrast with the Nationalist militias, as described by Mercedes 
Peñalba-Sotorrío, could hardly be starker. While Peñalba-Sotorrío proves that the 
tensions between the Falangist and Carlist militias were very real, it is clear that 
they were both more effective in battle and more willing to unify than their 
Republican counterparts. Ultimately, she concludes that the fusion of the Falange 
and the Carlists into the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de 
Ofensiva Nacional Socialista was a victory for the Falange that left the Carlists with 
little authority. 
The next section of the volume concerns mobilization after the initial phase 
of the war. Matthews begins by considering the conscript experience on both sides 
of the conflict. While it is no surprise that the Nationalists were more effective in 
getting their conscripts to fight than the Republicans, Matthews shows that the 
reality of conscription was not as simple as militarized, authoritarian coercion on 
the Nationalist side and more respect for freedom and human rights on the 
Republican side. The Republicans began conscription later than the Nationalists 
and had looser discipline at first, but late in the war the Popular Army resorted to 
tactics as extreme as mass executions to try and force conscripts to stay at the front. 
Not only were the Nationalists able to keep their conscripts better supplied, they 
proved better at providing what Matthews calls “psychological comforts” (59). 
Small measures such as offering goods for purchase, a mail service, and regulated 
prostitutes, all of which the Nationalists made available more effectively than the 
Republicans, went a long way towards making obligatory military service tolerable. 
Despite these measures, desertion and self-mutilation were serious problems for 
both sides, as Pedro Corral’s chapter documents. Yet here again, the Nationalists 
dealt with these issues harshly yet consistently, relying on summary military 
justice, whereas the Republicans went from Popular Courts to summary executions 
to offering an amnesty. One would think that the Republic would have had less 
trouble with its spies, which were supposed to be among its most enthusiastic 
adherents, but Hernán Rodríguez Velasco demonstrates that this was not the case. 
Like other aspects of the Republican war machine, its spy network was dogged by 
disorganization and underfunding, and most spies turned out to be more motivated 
by personal rather than political reasons, giving more intelligence away about their 
own side when they were captured than they had gathered on the enemy. 
Ali Al Tuma’s chapter considers another little-studied group of participants 
in the war: the Moroccan regulares. Al Tuma exposes the deep-seated prejudice 
that the Republicans held against the “moros” and reveals that this prejudice 
remains present in scholarship on the civil war to this day in the form of the almost 
201
universally held assumptions that the regulares were brutal fighters only in Spain 
for the money. Al Tuma demonstrates that while the regulares did commit some 
atrocities, especially early in the war, how many of these acts were committed is 
actually unknown. His study of veterans’ testimonies also reveals that while 
economics were certainly a draw, regulares were also motivated by a desire to fight 
those whom they perceived as “Godless Reds.” In addition, while talk of a 
“Moorish invasion” made good propaganda for the Republicans, it might have been 
at least partially counterproductive since Republicans developed a habit of killing 
Moroccan prisoners. No wonder the regulares were thought to be willing to fight 
to the last man. 
 The chapters on the war effort in rearguard areas provide still more evidence 
that the Nationalists were better able to manage their affairs than the Republicans. 
Of all the authors in this volume, Seidman makes this claim most forcefully in his 
chapter on economics and monetary policy. He convincingly argues that the 
Nationalists’ conservative monetary policy convinced international business that 
Francoist Spain was a safe place to invest, and consequently the Nationalists were 
able to raise much-needed funds on credit. The Germans and Italians were not the 
Francoists’ only creditors; the Spanish bourgeoisie greatly aided the war effort as 
well. In contrast, the Republicans were never able to convince investors that their 
property would be safe. The Republic turned to hyperinflation as a way to 
compensate for its lack of funds, but this only encouraged capital flight and 
hoarding. Whereas bank deposits and industrial output actually increased in the 
Nationalists’ militarized economic system, the Republic found it impossible to 
collect taxes and economic productivity plummeted. Seidman highlights these 
differences between the Nationalists and Republicans, but Ángela Cenarro 
demonstrates that in regard to their social policies there were many similarities 
between the two sides. Both tried to mobilize women for the war effort by 
channeling them into caregiving work and sought to found a new social order 
through state intervention. 
Suzanne Dunai and Verónica Sierra Blas make clear how deeply the effects 
of the war were felt even far from the front lines through examining food and 
children, respectively. Suzanne Dunai argues that, like so many other aspects of its 
war effort, the Republican failure to provision its population adequately with food 
undermined that population’s willingness to continue supporting the war effort. She 
points out that while Madrid and Barcelona did not experience a famine during the 
war, there was a food crisis, and residents considered their monotonous diet 
unacceptable after enjoying increased food variety in the preceding decades. 
Regarding children, that tens of thousands were evacuated during the war is well 
known, but Sierra Blas shows how such experiences affected children’s memories 
by examining the letters and artwork the children made as a way to face their 
202
trauma. She concludes that these traumas defined a generation as many had to cope 
with them for the rest of their lives. 
 In the section on the aftermath of the war, Franocist Spain is compared to 
the fascist states of Italy and Germany rather than to the Republic. Ángel Alcalde 
finds that the Francoist state, like these other fascist regimes, honored its veterans 
but left many in a state of impoverishment.  As for Republican veterans, they often 
had to endure a concentration camp in either Spain or France. Xosé M. Núñez 
Seixas examines the Spanish “Blue Division,” which fought for the Axis on the 
Eastern Front in the Second World War. He questions the usual assertion of military 
historians that the Blue Division was simply anticommunist and not linked to the 
Nazi’s larger genocidal project by examining the actions of the “Blue Division” in 
the rearguard. He determines that while division members were not involved in 
mass killings, this was because the Spanish did not participate in the most brutal 
fighting and partisan warfare rather than because they lacked the racial ideology of 
the Nazis. Ian Winchester examines what the composition of the Francoist ideology 
was regarding masculinity. In a creative, Foucaultian reading of training manuals 
and instructional pamphlets, he argues that the compulsory military service, which 
continued after the civil war had ended, was a way for the regime to imbue young 
men with a conception of masculinity that followed the conservative sexual mores 
of the Church while also emphasizing discipline, obedience, and subordination—
characteristics that were important for maintaining a docile citizenry. 
 Taken as a whole, the most refreshing aspect of this edited volume is that it 
truly concentrates on the social and cultural experience of the war for everyday 
people, thereby avoiding the polarized politicization of the war’s history that has 
plagued scholarship on the subject for so long. The reader will find little here on 
the war’s charismatic generals and politicians, the heady days of anarchist 
revolution, or the romanticism of the International Brigades. After all, as Matthews 
informs us, less than ten percent of the war’s combatants were volunteers. While 
most scholarship has focused on that ten percent, telling the story of the other ninety 
seems like as worthy a goal as any for the historian, a goal at least as worthy as 
determining whether the anarchists or the communists did more damage to the 
Republic or comparing the body counts of different massacres in the Republican 
and Nationalist rearguards. This volume shows that most of those impacted by the 
war were not primarily motivated by any ideological concern. Historians will paint 
a more representative and ultimately more moving picture of the war if they, rather 
than engaging in the polarized debates of old, ask questions directly related to the 
experiences of low-ranking participants: how did the war affect the lives of ordinary 
Spaniards and how did they seek to cope with those effects? Spain at War  
 
 
203
demonstrates that there are historians today on both sides of the Atlantic seeking to 
answer such essential questions. 
 
Foster Chamberlin 
Boğaziçi University 
 
 
Brenneis, Sarah J. Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi 
Concentration Camp, 1940-2015. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. 
xii + 365 pp. + 10 ill.  
 
Following the liberation of German concentration camps by Allied forces, 
accounts and testimonies emerged from Jewish Holocaust survivors and led the 
discourse surrounding the experiences of the victims of Nazi policies. Since then, 
representations of the Shoah have included these testimonies, but have also 
extended to include novels, documentaries, Hollywood films, and the creation of 
Holocaust Studies programs and research centers in academe. The importance of 
documenting, studying, and continuing the discussion of the tragedy of the 
Holocaust cannot be understated. In Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representation of 
a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015, Sara Brenneis contributes significant 
scholarship to Holocaust Studies at large, and Spanish cultural studies, specifically. 
Despite the many texts about the Holocaust, both historical and fictional, the 
experiences of Spaniards who survived and witnessed the atrocities have been 
largely overlooked. Through the introduction and subsequent five chapters of 
Spaniards in Mauthausen, Brenneis argues for the recognition of the experience of 
the Spanish deportees who lived and died in concentration camps in order to 
provide a more inclusive depiction of the Holocaust. Brenneis considers a wide 
variety of texts spanning seven decades—from high cultural productions to popular 
cultural materials—that range from survivors’ first-hand memoirs to postmemory 
works from the second and third generations. 
As the title suggests, Brenneis’ study centers on representations of the 
Spanish experience in the Mauthausen labor camp and its subcamps where a 
majority of Spanish victims (most of whom were Catalan) were transported (5). 
The introduction situates Spain’s position within the larger context of World War 
II and the Holocaust, including Franco and his government’s complicity in the 
detainment of the more than 7,000 men who fought for the Republic in the Spanish 
Civil War. Importantly, the introduction differentiates the Spanish prisoners from 
the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Because of their positions as non-Jews, 
Spanish survivors “agreed that they held an often-privileged position in the camp, 
one that was radically different from the treatment of the Jewish prisoners there” 
(17).  
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Review of James Matthews ed. Spain at War: Society, Culture, and Mobilization, 1936- 44

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