Memories of fear and fear of memories: An approach to the Spanish Civil War and its legacy in rural communities of Southern Aragon

Abstract

By applying an ethnomethodological research perspective, and through the discourse analysis of individuals interviewed in rural communities of Southern Aragon, this article aims to analyse the main thematic dimensions of the narratives based on individual remembrances that configure the memory of fear surrounding the Spanish Civil War. At the same time, it examines the core expression of the fear of this memory by investigating the conflicting interrelationships between memory and the official and public historical discourse on this event. The main themes of the discourses on the risks associated with the war are death, hunger, and destruction, as well as the need to flee or hide from the enemy. The fear of memory is, at the same time, a post-war strategy for the reconstruction of the sense of community, a consequence of the war experience, and a resource for concealing opinions on current events based on past ones. Fear is thus both an object and subject of the memory of the Spanish Civil War; a duality that could be summarised in the complexities associated to the continuity, until the present, of the memory of (past) fear and the fear of (instituting) memory.