After the Spanish Civil War : The Twentieth Century Through Five Antifascist Lives

Ninety years ago an international war against fascism was fought, and lost, in Spain. Through five diverse and interconnected lives, Helen Graham offers a window into this pivotal twentieth-century conflict and explores the value of history as a telling of truth to power in the face of current 'post-truth' advances.

Ninety years ago an international war against fascism was fought, and lost, in Spain. Defeat triggered a World War that drove back the Nazi empire and its collaborators, but the progressive dream of more equal societies which antifascists had fought for in Spain was afterwards paralysed by a conservative Cold War order everywhere. Helen Graham vividly tells this history through the interconnected lives of five diverse activists and creatives who defended democracy in Spain and were afterwards scattered across continents by continuing war, political repression and the Holocaust. With courageous imagination they transformed their losses into new ways of living and resisting. As the stakes rise again today, the urgency of reconnecting with these lives redoubles: in the face of 'post-truth' advances, this book testifies to forensic history as a form of resistance, and to the lasting importance of Spain's faraway war that remains forever near.