Historias: The Spanish History Podcast

Spain’s own genre of music theater, zarzuela, is one of the country’s most distinctive cultural forms. In this episode, Prof. Clinton Young traces the evolution of the genre in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Spanish history, linking it to the development of the urban middle and working classes. We will listen to selections from several famous zarzuelas along the way, with Young analyzing how zarzuela contributed to Spain’s unique bottom-up nationalization process. Please see the episode webpage for a list of the selections.

The idea of democracy is central to Spanish political culture today, even as the question of exactly what form democracy should take is still highly contested. When did the notion of democracy first enter the Spanish political imagination and how did the idea evolve over time? In this episode, Professor Florencia Peyrou traces the development of Spanish democrats’ political thinking from the mid-nineteenth century through the chaotic Sexenio Revolucionario period (1868-1874) and beyond. Throughout, she presents democracy as a fluid concept that has had multiple meanings throughout the decades as democrats of all stripes navigated the insurrections, coups, riots and conspiracies of mid-nineteenth century Spain.

The usual interpretation of recent Spain history has been that the country was inoculated against the return of the radical right seen in other European countries because of the memory of the Franco dictatorship. However, the rise of Vox and other far right parties in Spain in the last couple of years has called this interpretation into question. Why are these groups gaining strength in Spain now and what links do they have with Spain’s experience with fascism under the Franco regime? In this episode, Professor Louie Dean Valencia-García puts the recent headlines about the return of the radical right to Spain in historical context and considers how new this resurgent far right really is.

Since at least the 19th century, Badajoz Province was the classic example of Spain’s most grievous ills: a harsh landscape where poverty, unemployment and landlessness were endemic. Dave Henderson traces the failed efforts of successive governments to tackle these problems and then explains how the Franco regime sought to take a different approach centered on irrigation, social regulation and land grants to politically reliable farmers. Did the Francoist plan transform the landscape and society of Spain’s poorest region? Henderson argues that it did, but in a manner far different from what government planners had envisioned.

Antonio José Martínez Palacios was one of the most promising composers of early twentieth-century Spain. From his humble beginnings as a musical prodigy from the provincial capital of Burgos, the composer (known as Antonio José) won praise for his choral works and orchestral pieces, drawing inspiration from his native Castile. But as a proponent of education and Republican values in a deeply conservative town, Antonio José was murdered by a Falange militia at the beginning of the Civil War in an execution that has been compared to that of poet Federico García Lorca. For some 40 years, the Franco regime banned performances of Antonio José’s music, but his oeuvre has been rediscovered in recent decades. In this episode, Robert Long, a musician and a professor of history at Elgin Community College, traces the life, death, silencing and recuperation of this composer through listening to and analyzing several selections of Antonio José’s music. We begin with the second movement (Balada: Lento y apasionado) of his Suite ingenua (1928).

The SS commando Otto Skorzeny was the most notorious Nazi to hid out in Spain after the Second World War. Yet, far from staying hidden, Skorzeny made frequent appearances in the Spanish media through the Franco period. In this episode, part of our series on Nazis in Spain, Prof. Joshua Goode of Claremont Graduate University explores how Skorzeny was able to reinvent himself to stay in the public eye as the Franco regime evolved. In so doing, Goode challenges the view that after the World War II the Franco regime always hid its previous connections to the Nazis. He also considers how the Francoist portrayal of Nazism shaped Spain’s incomplete confrontation with the Holocaust in recent decades.

This month, Daniel Hershenzon, author of The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce, and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean, discusses slavery and ransoming practices on both the Christian and Muslim sides of the early modern Mediterranean, focusing on the seventeenth century. Hershenzon presents Mediterranean slavery as creating an unintentional system of communication and economic exchange across geographical, political and religious boundaries. In this episode, we explore how friars, merchants, family members and rulers all participated in the ransoming process and consider one particularly complex case of prisoner exchange negotiations as an example of how the ransoming system worked.

Between 1940 and 1945, some 7,200 Spanish Republican exiles were held captive in Nazi Germany’s notorious Mauthausen concentration camp. In this episode, part of our series on the Nazis and Spain, Sara J. Brenneis, author of Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015, discusses examples of how the Spanish in Mauthausen were remembered in Spain, from the time of the Franco regime up until today. In each case, from prisoners who clandestinely kept records from inside the camp to accounts that made it past the censorship of the Franco years to recent works of “postmemory” such as a graphic novel and a twitter feed, Brenneis considers how historical context can shape the memory of this Spanish encounter with the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Immediately following the Spanish Civil War, Spain faced a terrible food crisis. Suzanne Dunai examines how the policies of the early Franco dictatorship brought on this crisis and how ordinary Spaniards, particularly women, dealt with it on a day-to-day basis. From ration cards to bartering, from canning to buying on the black market, Spanish women showed a remarkable resilience as they sought to feed their families in this time of devastating scarcity.

Like most other Europeans, the Basques of southern France had to endure a puppet government and Nazi occupation during the Second World War. What was it like to live under occupation? How did Basque culture influence the ways in which French Basques both collaborated with and resisted the Germans? For the third part of our series on the Nazis in Iberian history, Professor Sandra Ott takes an ethnographic approach to answering these questions, using the stories of individuals and families to reveal just how complex and difficult different individuals’ strategies for living under occupation could be. Danger, duplicity and revenge are all themes in these real-life tales fit for a spy novel.