In Europe (47 page)

At the end of his life, José Antonio tried desperately but fruitlessly to close the lid on the chest of demons he had opened. Franco kept the tightest control over the story of his own life; in that regard he was an uncommonly gifted manipulator. His military career during the days of the republic, the coup, the bloodbaths after the civil war, the defeat of his political allies in the Second World War, the American plans to liberate Spain in 1945 (scotched by Churchill at the last moment) and a dictatorship covering almost forty years; Franco got away with it all.

And so too with José Antonio's legacy. Up to the moment of the coup itself, Franco was not interested in the Falange Española. That interest was only aroused when the movement began growing by leaps and bounds. Within a few weeks, more than half of Franco's volunteer troops consisted of Falangists. Ultimately, more than 170,000 Spaniards would join the Falangist militia. At the same time, after José Antonio's death, the movement went increasingly awry. The party bosses flaunted fascist symbols, donned extravagant uniforms and terrorised the cities in stolen limousines.
The party organs even began adopting the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was cited eagerly and often.

Franco had no difficulty in co-opting this runaway movement within the space of only a few months, and incorporating it into his new Falange. Suddenly the general spoke with pride of his close ties with José Antonio, suddenly an entire body of myth had been created around the Falangist pioneer and his ‘natural heir’ Franco. In reality, the general had not lifted a finger to free José Antonio from his cell; it had not been in his interests. In fact, when the perfect opportunity to free him with the help of the German Navy presented itself in October 1936, Franco raised so many objections that the operation was called off. And when his Falangist rival was executed, the general kept that fact under wraps. Franco's propaganda machine made skilful use of José Antonio's prolonged absence. In private, Franco even suggested that José Antonio may have been handed over to the Russians, ‘and it is possible that they've castrated him’. Only in November 1938 was his death publicly confirmed.

In his cell, immediately after the outbreak of the civil war, José Antonio wrote an analysis of Spain's future, should the nationalists win that war. ‘A group of generals of honourable intentions but of abysmal political mediocrity … And behind them: Old Carlism, intransigent, boorish, antipathetic; the conservative classes, fixed on their own interests, shortsighted, lazy; agrarian and finance capitalism, that is to say: the end for many years of any possibility of building a modern Spain; the lack of any national sense of long-range perspective.’

His Falange became the stalking horse for all this. In the end, it was also to become the longest lived right wing totalitarian movement in Europe; from the first small groups to its dismantling in 1977, forty-six years in all.

BARCELONA IS LIKE A SLOVENLY WOMAN WITH BEAUTIFUL EYES. AN
unattractive city with lovely neighbourhoods and sometimes gorgeous buildings. A glorious city with terrible neighbourhoods. A city, too, that has trouble coming to terms with itself. When you walk through Barcelona's city centre, there are three things that strike you.

First there is the stunning uniformity, even for a tourist haven. The shoemakers, barbers, greengrocers, news-stands, cafés and haberdasheries, the endlessly varied mercantilism that once dominated Las Ramblas, have been replaced almost entirely by boutiques and souvenir shops. The news-stands all have the same assortment of papers, magazines and other printed matter, almost all the bistros serve the same brand of instant paella, the souvenir shops all offer an almost identical collection of bric-a-brac.

Secondly, there is the absence of Spain. Barcelona is French, Italian, Mediterranean, and above all itself. Graffiti, manuals, children's books, newspapers, all of them are in Catalan, even the instructions on the ticket machines. The Spanish nation? There will be none of that here, thank you.

The third, striking phenomenon is the absence of historical markers. Like the Spanish nation, the twentieth century here has simply been glossed over. During the last century a great deal of fighting has gone on in a great many European cities, and all of them deal differently with their bullet holes. In what was once East Berlin they are still to be found, especially on street corners and in doorways, though their number is dwindling fast. Ah, one realises then, back in 1945 there must have been a troublesome sniper over there. In Barcelona you must look very closely
to uncover any of that. On Las Ramblas, for example, in the doorway of a clothing shop on the corner of the Carrer Deca Canula, the faint signs of a gun battle are visible behind layers of plaster. Or at the Telephone Building on the Plaça de Catalunya: today an office building with a cafeteria and a shop selling mobile phones, but back then the centre of all communication and the site of a historic battle. But only if you examine the outside of the building will you see the shadows of a few direct hits. Not a hole in sight, not a plaque to be seen. Nowhere is so much war so carefully dusted away.

In late December 1936, the English writer and adventurer Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, had the feeling of having entered a city where the working class was truly in control for the first time. He had come to Barcelona to volunteer for militia service. By that time the city had been in the hands of the revolutionaries for five months, and under the anarchists a thousand collectives had blossomed forth. All the walls were covered with revolutionary posters. Almost every building of any size had been occupied by workers and festooned with red or black flags. Every café and every shop had been collectivised. No one said ‘señor’ or ‘don’, everyone addressed the other as ‘comrade’ or ‘you’. Tipping was forbidden. ‘Well dressed’ ladies and gentlemen were no longer seen, everyone wore work clothes, blue overalls, a militia uniform. There were almost no bullfights in the city any more. ‘For some reason all the best matadors were fascist.’

‘All this was queer and moving,’ Orwell wrote. ‘There was much in it I did not understand, in some way I did not even like it, but I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’ He signed up with one of the militias of the radical leftist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, the POUM, a choice he barely thought about at the time but which was to have far-reaching consequences. In the POUM militia, all orders were up for discussion. The training most badly needed – how to take cover, how to handle weapons – was never provided. The youthful recruits were taught only to march. ‘This mob of eager children, who were going to be thrown into the front line in a few days’ time, were not even taught how to fire a rifle or pull the pin out of a bomb.’ Later he would discover why: there was not a single rifle to be found in the whole training camp. Only with great difficulty was Orwell
finally able to arrange a weapon for himself: a rusty German Mauser dating from 1896. But, as he wrote matter-of-factly, a modern mechanised army was not something one could organise from one day to the next, and had the republicans waited until their own troops were well trained, Franco would have encountered no resistance at all.

The front line Orwell was sent to lay within sight of Zaragoza, a narrow strip of lights ‘like the portholes of a ship’. Little happened in the months that followed, except for the occasional attack by night. ‘In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy. In the winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy at last.’ In lieu of ammunition, the opposing parties exchanged volleys of words: ‘
Viva España
!
Viva Franco
!’ Or: ‘
Fascistas – mari-cones
!’ In the long run a special shouting unit was even set up, and on the republican side this catcalling was raised to a fine art. Orwell describes how, on an icy cold night, someone from a neighbouring trench shouted to his fascist neighbours across the way only what he – ostensibly – was having to eat. ‘“Buttered toast!” one heard his voice echo through the dark valley. “We're just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!”’ No one on either side had actually seen toast or butter for weeks or even months, but mouths watered along both sides of the front.

In April 1937 Orwell returned to Barcelona: in three and a half months the city had completely changed. Now there were normal avenues along which the rich, dressed in elegant summer attire, drove their shiny cars, and along which officers in the well tailored khaki uniforms of the People's Army strolled, the automatic pistols that were almost impossible to find at the front hanging from their belt clips. It was as though there had never been a revolution. The bourgeoisie had simply put on overalls and laid low for six months.

What shocked Orwell the most was the hardening of the political climate. At the front he had never noticed any rivalry between anarchists, communists and other political factions. In faraway Barcelona, however, it seemed that a systematic campaign had been set rolling to discredit the anarchist and POUM militias, in favour of the People's Army. No more heed was paid to the muddied soldier home from the front. The radio and the communist press passed along the most malicious rumours about
the ‘poorly trained’ and ‘undisciplined’ militias, while the People's Army – in accordance with the best practices of Soviet propaganda – was systematically referred to as ‘heroic’. In actual fact, it was the militias which had held the front lines for more than six months, while the soldiers of the People's Army were receiving their training behind the lines.

Like so many international volunteers, Orwell had no idea at first what kind of a war it was in which he found himself. He had simply gone to Spain to fight ‘against the fascists’ and had ended up more or less by accident in the POUM militia. It was only there that he saw that a revolution was underway
within
the republic as well, that because of that war the anarchists had been forced to surrender one revolutionary ‘asset’ after the other; in this internal struggle, the communists were not on the side of the revolution; on the contrary, they were on the side of the extreme right. In both Madrid and Barcelona, countless battles were fought for control over certain organisations and committees. The number of killings back and forth steadily increased, and slowly the anarchist ministers lost their grip on their followers.

These internal tensions came to a head in spring 1937. Ever since the coup, the Telephone Building in Barcelona had been in anarchist hands. An anarchist collective listened in on all telephone conversations, and if a conversation did not please the listener, the connection was simply broken. At one point that became too much, even in revolutionary Barcelona. On Monday, 3 May, the communist police commissioner and his men tried to storm the building. That resulted in a gun battle, and soon barricades were thrown up. The communists moved into Hotel Colón, diagonally opposite the Telephone Building.

There was grim fighting in the streets in the days that followed, with the communists and the police on one side, the anarchists and left-wing radicals on the other. The POUM, which had a considerable following in Barcelona, was one of the first to man the barricades. In the end, in a radio broadcast, the anarchist minister Frederica Montseney ordered her people to stop fighting. The local anarchists were enraged, ‘they pulled out their pistols and shot the radio to pieces,’ an eyewitness said. ‘They were absolutely furious, but they obeyed nonetheless.’

According to the most widely held view, this civil war in miniature was little more than the police's way of getting even with the anarchists.
Those who fought alongside the anarchists, however, said it was more than that: it was the clash between those who wanted the revolution to continue, and those who wanted to control it and slow it down. The communist press granted the affair even greater import. They claimed it had been part of a plan to bring down the government, a conspiracy cooked up by the POUM. Even worse: it was a fascist plot to sow discord and ultimately cripple the republic. The POUM was denounced as ‘Franco's fifth column’, a ‘Trotskyite’ organisation of infiltrators and turncoats in close contact with the fascists.

Eyewitnesses from the Telephone Building tell a different story. There was nothing like a planned conspiracy, they say. No backup troops were brought into the city beforehand, no supplies stockpiled. There were no preparations whatsoever, and there was no plan. It was nothing more than a street brawl, said Orwell, who had been in the thick of it, ‘a very bloody riot, because both sides had firearms in their hands and were willing to use them’.

For the communists, however, this ‘plot’ remained a good excuse to stamp out their anti-Stalinist rivals. A few weeks later, the whole POUM leadership was arrested. The POUM itself was declared an illegal organisation, all of the POUM's offices, hospitals, assistance centres and bookshops were seized and its militias disbanded. A general manhunt began for former POUM supporters, who were often militia members just back from the front. Hundreds if not thousands of POUM members, including at least a dozen foreign volunteers, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Orwell escaped this witch-hunt by the skin of his teeth. His commander and comrade, the Belgian engineer George Kopp, was less fortunate. Kopp had given up everything to fight against the fascists in Spain, he had spent the whole winter at the front, during the brawl in Barcelona he had acted as a mediator and saved dozens of lives; his reward was to be thrown into prison by the Spanish and Russian communists, with no charges brought and no trial held. Orwell and his wife moved heaven and earth to have Kopp released. During the first few months they received a few letters from him, smuggled out of prison by others who had been released. Those letters always had the same refrain: dark and filthy cells, too little to eat, chronic illness, no medical care. At last, the letters stopped arriving, and the Orwells
assumed that Kopp had disappeared forever into one of the secret prisons. As by miracle, however, he survived the ‘international solidarity’.