At some point in the recent past, the term “historical memory” was pried loose from its originating theory and set adrift on the sea of prevalent discourses. There it floats, tugging previously unrelated issues in its tow. Since nothing happens without a reason, a measure of historical necessity must account for the broad diffusion of the concept. In Spain, the emergence of a public debate about the historical memory toward the turn of the twenty-first century was a belated adaptation of debates already prevalent elsewhere. To be sure, Spain had a fertile past to cultivate, and soon after the end of the dictatorship the theme of remembrance emerged as a natural continuation of the critique of the regime, which had seeped into the arts and the popular culture for over a decade. As a consequence of the duration and pervasiveness of the dictatorship, in Spain the historical memory has centered almost exclusively on the Civil War and the Franco era. Only recently, the extension of historical memory to earlier periods (for instance, the eighteenth-century War of Succession to the Hispanic Monarchy) has produced comparable levels of acrimony.

Spanish history has altered or suppressed enough aspects of the past to fuel intense debates. It is not scarcity of materials but rather the lack of ethical initiative that explains the country's intellectual lag. This can be seen in the mechanical extrapolation of concepts developed in other contexts. Proof of this dependence can be seen in the often implicit, and occasionally explicit, placing of Spanish experience under the interpretive auspices of extraneous models once they are globally established. For instance, the term “Spanish Holocaust” brazenly profits from the academic prestige of the most influential studies of memory. It is hard to avoid the impression that, in Spanish discourses on memory, the rhetorical cart often precedes the historical horse—that the universal expansion of the memory discourse after the 1960s, rather than a social demand for “recovering the past,” was responsible for the rise of the memory debates in Spain.