Remembering the thirteen roses: thinking between history and memory.

Abstract

Remembering the Thirteen Roses: Thinking between History and Memory examines the execution of thirteen young, communist women, named the Thirteen Roses, on August 5, 1939, to show how Spaniards in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have assigned meaning to and represented the memories of those who opposed Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Through the analysis of poetry, fiction, journalism, theater, and film, my dissertation documents the ways the Roses’ memory has been recycled and transformed over time from the remembrance of a historical event to a polysemic literary and cultural trope. This trope, in the postwar years, embodied communist political ideals but, with the passing of time, was converted into a symbol for democracy and, later, into a depoliticized tale of human suffering. The development of the Roses trope alerts us to the mechanics of collective memory, a concept coined by Maurice Halbwachs to explain how ‘memory’ is a socially constructed notion that is experienced within a group. The recollection of the women’s execution serves as a case study for how society manipulates and assigns different meanings to collective memories over time, highlighting the manner in which collective memory is both a cultural and discursive construct. Memories, like that of the Roses, intersect and negotiate specific political, historical, social, and cultural objectives in a social context. Remembering the Thirteen Roses combines history, memory studies, and literary scholarship to deepen our understanding of Spain’s recent social and political movements in favor of the recuperation of historical memory of the Spanish Civil War, as it is reflected in the ever-evolving representations of one tragic event.