"In memoriam"...esquelas, "contra-esquelas" y duelos inconclusos de la Guerra Civil Española

Resumen

With the emergence of the so-called movement for the recovery of historic memory, Spanish society has begun to assume and confront its recent traumatic past: that of the Civil War and the Francoist regime. The movement was initiated by associations of relatives of those assassinated in the beginning of the war whose primary intention was recovering the remains of their loved ones from mass graves, but it soon incorporated the desire to voice the cultural and historical experiences of the defeated. Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the start of the Civil War (2006), and in the heat of the demands surrounding the mass graves and the frail institutional response that they received, the so-called «war of the obituaries» was fought out in the national and regional press. Tens of relatives of men and women assassinated by Francoist forces as far back as 70 years before began to publish these victims� death notices. Soon after, relatives of victims of the «other side» initiated the counter-publication of their death notices. This article analyzes the cultural need of surviving relatives to complete the rituals of burial and social recognition of their deceased loved ones whose traumatic deaths were kept alive for the duration of the Francoist regime.