`A Cargo del Futuro' — Between History and Memory

Abstract

■ In this article I address conflict during the Spanish Civil War and the immediate post-war years by searching for any discernible social bases for the coalitions that confronted each other locally in a particular rural area in Catalunya. I try to address the real complexity of how civilians locally, and often violently, confronted their close neighbors and how this related to larger issues at stake. The careful reading of one document in this article enables an examination of the particular local expression of the civil war conflict, not just as a source of factual evidence but also as the expression of a particular kind of historicity, that of modernity. In the article I use the production of this document and the explicit aim of its author to confront present-day processes of the `Recuperation of Historical Memory' that are being produced by a wide range of political groups, public institutions and private initiatives in Spain, and which have attracted wide exposure in the media. This leads to a discussion of the issue of the different `regimes of historicity' that can emerge around the recuperation of memory and their political value.