I was moved by a scene in Atom Egoyan’s film “Ararat” (2002). One of the main characters, a young Canadian of Armenian descent, goes back to Turkey to see the land that witnessed one of the most horrendous genocides of the twentieth century. He contemplates the landscape and films it in video. His gaze is unable to read any signs in the landscape that may recall the horror. The still and bright images, without sound, are, however, disturbingly uncanny. You don’t need ruins to feel the trauma. Unlike other famous genocides, there are very few records of this one (www.armenian-genocide.org). With the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese army (1937) or the German slaughter of Hereros in Namibia (1904), it belongs to the wide category of dreadful events that have never captured international attention or, worse, whose existence has been emphatically denied.
The Spanish Civil War did attract the attention of the world between 1936 and 1939. It was seen as the scenario of a fight between freedom and fascism and later, as the preface to the Second World War. However, there are some resemblances between the Spanish War and less publicized massacres, such as the Armenian genocide. On the one hand, the landscape now hardly shows any hint of the terrible drama that shook the country only seventy years ago, at least for the untrained eye. On the other hand, half of the story has been buried deep under the soil and denied or played down, first by the dictator that won the war and later by several democratic governments. The extreme-right that defeated the Republicans took good care of its fallen and erased the memory of its enemies (including 100,000 people executed with or without trial). The oblivion of the vanquished has persisted until very recently, although some private initiatives are now trying to locate hidden graves and commemorate the people assassinated by the fascists.
My archaeological fascination for the Spanish Civil War comes from a triple astonishment: that such horrible, archaic events could take place so recently where I used to live (that evil was here, as Susan Sontag has put it); that the memory of those who fought for freedom and democracy has been forgotten so easily (no monuments, no tombs) and that the war’s material traces are, apparently, so inconspicuous – unlike many musealized battlefields of the Second World War, the Spanish battlefields seem to be known only by war amateurs and historians. In a sense, all my astonishment can be related to the disturbing banality of evil and to the nature of the archaeological record.
I got my PhD in what once was the most famous battlefield in the world: the university campus of Madrid. As a symbol in the 1930s, it could be compared to Sarajevo in the 1990s. If Sarajevo stood as a symbol of multiculturalism and resistance against the worst sort of ethnic nationalism, Madrid became the symbol of the struggle against fascism (No pasarán, “They won’t pass” – but they did). The university campus was the front-line during the three years that lasted the war. Thousands of people died there – including Italians, Russians, Germans, British and American soldiers. The campus was completely reconstructed after the conflict. What is left today? A colossal triumphal arch that commemorates the victory of fascism over democracy and the university’s logo – a swan that was the emblem of the fascist students in the 1930s. Not a trace or memento of the battle against totalitarianism. Trauma has been wiped out, sanitized from the urban landscape. Even for an archaeologist it is difficult to track down the remains of the war on the surface. Sometimes, when a new block is built or a ditch is dug things come to light: usually tons of debris (bricks, concrete, rusted steel) from the flattening of the old battlefield – the past percolating.

The Civil War also took place beyond the frontline in the form of mass executions, tortures to political enemies, reprisals, vendettas. Trenches and bunkers can still be located in the landscape by means of archaeological surveys and aerial photographs; they can be excavated and mapped. How can one excavate the road curb where the corpses of those killed by the fascist militias were thrown? Or the tree were a Republican hung himself just after the war, unable to bear the insults and harassment of the local fascists? Or the house of a torturer, whose children still live under the same roof? What is the nature of this archaeological evidence? You can touch the road, smell the tree or see the house and feel the horror unfolding if you know about the events.

Yet we need another sort of archaeological documentation. I think we always need another way of engaging with the recent past: by treating it like any other period in history (making inventories, restoring the archaeological remains, displaying ruins and artefacts with didactic panels) we are losing something of the troubled nature of this past – we are killing its aura. While archaeologists are missing the point, others are engaging in creative ways with the contemporary past: photographers and artists (Joel Sternfeld, Manfred Hamm, Mikael Levin, Camilo José Vergara) are turning their gaze to places where something happened. They are disclosing the trauma and violence inherent to things and places in ways archaeologists are barely starting to explore. Dealing with the remains of the Spanish Civil War by means of the usual archaeological procedures is an important step forward to bring them back from oblivion. But if we do not want to neutralize and make banal the materiality of this dark past, we have to look for other modes of engagement.