Paper short abstract:

In contemporary debates on memory of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, claims for justice and reparation collude with demands of silence. Speaking out hidden memories calls researchers and relatives to position, bridging intimate and public divides, to confront ethical and political dilemmas.

Paper long abstract:

More than 75 years have gone by since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War that gave way to one of the longest dictatorships in Europe. Commemoration was one of the main pillars of the Francoist regime, dividing Spanish society between winners and losers, acknowledging to the first the right to honor their dead, and forbidding to the latter any possibility to publicly mourn them. Memory of the war and its aftermath became a major taboo after the death of Franco, with the Pact of Amnesia established as a prerequisite for democracy. Family transmission of traumatic past events, including disappearing of relatives, imprisonment and other forms of repression, was in many cases absent. Public transmission of the events was also scarce, even in educational contexts. Since 2000, the opening of unmarked mass graves memory has become a major issue in the Spanish political agenda. Claims for truth, justice and reparation have arisen in the last decades from bottom up social movements articulated mostly, but not only, around the exhumation of unmarked mass graves. Exhumations offer a valuable insight to unveil contemporary displays of intimate processes, such as mourning and memory transmission, bringing intimate feelings into a public scene. Often, relatives discover facts that had never been disclosed to them. Exhumation processes allow too to go in depth into unexplored postmemory building processes. Demands to know what happened calls into the keyrole of survivors, witnesses and perpetrators as makers and keepers of narratives. Speaking out hidden memories calls both researchers and relatives to position in the contexts in which such events are taking place, bridging intimate and public divides, and facing them with the dilemma of survivors deciding whether to disclose traumatic memories or not.