This book has been a long time in the making. Since the publication of Disremembering the Dictatorship in 2000, I have worked intermittently on the question of social memory in the Iberian Peninsula. I have done so from the dual subject position of someone who remembers daily life under Francoism in the ordinary, non-metaphorical sense of the term, and of the historian of culture who reconstructs the experience of others, of a generality of others, through acts of secondary witnessing. This combination of points of view is nothing extraordinary; I share it with hundreds, possibly thousands of others. But being aware of the duality helps me (and hopefully my readers as well) to situate my perspective and justify to myself the stresses and omissions, perhaps even to understand my transferential relation to that slice of the past that I study in not always explicit forms of remembrance.

Memory is a synonym for culture and also for life. I do not mean having good or bad memory, which is a matter of neurological endowment, but having long or short memory, which is a matter of experience. Older people live ever more in their long memories, which accounts for the poverty of their short ones. And so it is with societies. Young, barbarian ones remember little but vividly; they are prey to simple, intense representations and prone to mythography. Older, declining societies have civilized their past; they are the peoples with history. The past never goes away, never truly passes. Ernst Nolte's famous dictum about a past that does not want to pass is a truism not just for the Nazi era. At best, the past can be laid to rest, like a corpse, or an exhausted body. Forgotten does not mean “gone.” It merely means “out of mind.” This book is about a large and decisive part of the twentieth century in the history of Spain, a history that, for those of us born and raised under the dictatorship, began with the Civil War. In our childhood, everything referred back to it, the war was the big bang of our universe. Its genesis was presided by a powerful and remote figure with a mezzo-soprano voice who one fine summer day in A.D. 1936 had criedinto the warm, well-lighted republican abyss the command “let there be darkness.” For dark, or at least depressingly gray, was the Spain of Franco.