Participation in a European Memory of Totalitarianism

The transnational dimension of Sepharad consists mainly in the creation of a European space of totalitarian repression and persecution. Nearly all of Sepharad’s stories or chapters are situated in two historically and geographically defined settings: the European continent of the 1930s and 1940s, with the rise of fascist and communist totalitarian regimes, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, the Holocaust and the Gulag, on the one hand, and Spain around the turn of the millennium, on the other hand.

Geographically and culturally speaking, Europe, in this book, is the European mainland, the interconnectedness of which is highlighted by the focus on border places and stations – such as those of Cerbère or Gmünd, the occasional meeting place of Kafka and Milena Jesenska – and, above all, on trains. Trains and journeys by train constitute an important motif, the nature of which is, in the first instance, symbolic. As Philippe Mesnard points out, the use of certain motifs to facilitate testimony of extreme violence by referring to it in a metonymical way is a common practice in testimonial literature.Reference Mesnard³ In Sepharad, trains clearly evoke the deportation of Jews in occupied Europe, and by extension symbolise the horrors of a dark period in European history, as is suggested in the chapter ‘Copenhagen’: ‘The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains’.Reference Muñoz Molina⁴ Most train travels in the book, however, are of a less sinister character, and the references to them end up drawing a rhizomatous map of the continent stretching from Leningrad to Spain, France to Hungary, and Denmark to Greece.

This focus on Europe becomes even more visible in the few chapters that are situated outside of the continent, but turn out to be strictly related to European history. In ‘Sepharad’, a stroll in New York leads the narrator to discover the tomb of Federico García Lorca’s father, who died in exile in the United States, and to visit the Hispanic Society, where he is struck by a painting of Velázquez. ‘Tell me your name’ alludes to Spanish America and its history of repression and exile through the character of Adriana Seligmann, a Uruguayan exile in Spain. However, the narrator seems more interested in her account of her grandfather’s exile from Germany in the 1930s than in Seligmann’s traumatic experiences in her own country and in Argentina.

Sepharad’s focus on a particular period in European history increases the coherence of a work characterised by a high degree of fragmentation and multiplicity of themes, settings and characters. However, by limiting its scope to a European memory of persecution, violence and exile during the peak of totalitarianism, it restrains from denouncing forms of violence and repression occurring in other times and places – or even in Europe, such as the conflict in the Balkan region in the 1990s. In the novel, one of the non-fictional characters, José Luis Pinillos, in a conversation with the narrator pleads for such an opening-up of the perspective:

Although Pinillos – whose desire to bear witness to the deportation of Jews that he witnessed as a soldier on the Eastern Front is echoed throughout the novel – is attributed a strong moral authority in Sepharad, Muñoz Molina does not follow his suggestion to broaden the scope of testimony. Apart from Pinillos’ quotation, Sepharad contains no mention of contemporary genocidal conflicts, nor of any other politically or ideologically inspired armed conflicts, (civil) wars or forms of (state) repression and persecution comparable to the politics of oppression and extermination by the fascist and Stalinist regimes in twentieth-century Europe.

From the perspective of Spanish memory studies, Muñoz Molina’s focus on a European memory of totalitarianism, which includes Spain, implies an important shift in a research field which, until the turn of the century, had been concerned almost exclusively with national memory. As Pablo Valdivia has pointed out, such lack of interest in the memory shared with Europe can be considered to a certain extent as a continuation of the ‘isolationist’ discourse of the dictatorship, which tended to stress the differences between Spanish and European culture and, particularly with respect to the Holocaust, Spain’s alleged neutrality in the Second World War. As for Stalinist repression in the Soviet Union, leftist intellectuals had been reluctant to write about it for fear of blackening the reputation of the Communist Party of Spain.Reference Valdivia¹ Because of its interest in transnational memories, Sepharad, according to Valdivia, is a ‘perfect example’ of Rothberg’s model of ‘multidirectional memory’.Reference Valdivia¹

If Sepharad offers, unquestionably, a fascinating exercise in transnational memory literature, I would hesitate to consider it a model of multidirectionality. Multidirectional memory, as conceived by Rothberg, requires memories to be mutually unsettling.⁶ In the case of Sepharad, however, as has been observed by Antonio Gómez López-QuiñonesReference Gómez López-Quiñones⁷ and Hans Lauge Hansen,Reference Lauge Hansen⁸ as well as by Valdivia, the principal aim is to bring Spanish culture closer to Europe, and to open up European memory and memory literature to a Spanish audience. Such a transnational perspective certainly has an unsettling impact on national memory discourse, as I will show in the next section. However, the inverse question on how the narration of Spanish history can contribute to European memory, is barely raised, either in the novel or in the critical reception. The title of the book, though, which makes reference to the Hebrew designation for the Iberian Peninsula and thereby evokes the anti-Semitic politics of the kings of Castile and Aragón and their expulsion of the Jews at the end of the fifteenth century, may be considered a mark of multidirectionality, since it establishes a direct link between Spanish history and the Jewish memory of exile.

As I will argue in the following sections, the transnationalisation of memory in Sepharad is conditioned, and to a certain point restrained, by two factors: in the first place, the strong relation with the Spanish context of enunciation and the local debates on memory; and second, the tension between a transnational, ‘multidirectional’ perspective on memory and the desire to narrate universal experiences of victimisation.

Transnational Memory of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism

Muñoz Molina’s account of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s incorporates Spain as part of a territory of persecution and violence. Spain’s memory of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship are at the heart of the book at least as much as the Holocaust and the Stalinist repression. Several stories concern the long-term impact of the war and the repression against the defeated, often from a transnational perspective related to experiences of exile. For instance, ‘Oh you, who knew so well’ narrates the story of Isaac Salama, a Sephardic Jew in Hungary who managed to escape from the Nazi camps thanks to the Spanish citizenship that was granted to descendants of the Sephardim under a 1924 decree, and who made Tangier his home after the war. The female narrators of ‘Cerbère’ and ‘Scheherazade’, as well as the female character in ‘America’ are daughters of socialist or republican militants who suffered social repression or exile during the Franco regime and were separated from their families. The character of ‘America’, who after the war ended up in a nunnery where she took the name of Sister María del Gólgota, migrates to New York at the end of the story.

Unlike the references to the lives of the victims of Nazi and Stalinist persecution, which are based on written documents and testimonies that are often literally quoted, several of these ‘Spanish’ stories draw upon oral testimonies from witnesses the author identifies in the Author’s Note at the end of the book. In comparison to the chapters referring to victims of the Holocaust and Stalinism, in which narration and essayistic reflection alternate, these chapters take the form of narrative fiction, with psychologically and ideologically more elaborate, but also more ambiguous, characters. It is striking that several of the stories set in a Spanish context draw the attention to contrasts or discrepancies between the moral behaviour of individuals and the strongly institutionalised ideologies to which they adhere. Whereas figures such as Primo Levi, Evgenia Ginzburg or Margarete Buber-Neumann are quite unequivocally approached as victims or even martyrs, the characters representing victims of Francoist repression are, from a moral point of view, often more ambivalent. In ‘Cerbère’, a leftist militant forced to flee Spain after the fall of Madrid and confronted with his wife’s refusal to accompany him, builds a new life in the border city of Cerbère, leaving his wife and daughter behind in extreme poverty. In ‘Scheherazade’, a story based on the testimony of Amaya Ibárruri, daughter of the Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri (better known as ‘La Pasionaria’), the reader is led to empathise with the feeling of uprooting of its narrator, who spent part of her life as an exile in the USSR and only returned to Spain when she was over the age of 50. Readers might even be likely to admire her loyalty to the socialist ideals supported by the Second Republic. Most probably readers will identify less, however, with the narrator’s lack of critical attitude towards Stalinist politics and her condoning of its totalitarian nature, as is illustrated in the following passage, which echoes official Soviet discourse:

Extracts like this are open to different readings and have thereby contributed to the disparate reception of Sepharad in Spain. While some readers might find the association of the legacy of the Second Republic with the disavowal of the totalitarian nature of Soviet communism anachronistic or overly tendentious, others may appreciate the way in which it breaks down the taboo on criticising Stalinist repression. Moreover, the quoted fragment can just as well be read as a persiflage of a certain right-wing discourse in democratic Spain, which equally underlines the economical realisations of the regime and downplays its infractions of human rights.

I argue that Muñoz Molina – who was one of the first authors in Spain to tackle the issue of historical memory in his work and to denounce the politics of cultural and literary oblivion in the post-Franco era – in Sepharad tries to invert the stereotypes of dominant memory discourse and to counter its tendency to mythologise figures of resistance. One of the ways of doing this is to adopt a perspective that transcends both the Spanish context and the time frame of the Civil War, taking into account the further psychological and ideological evolution of characters. An interesting example of Muñoz Molina’s tendency to counter standard memory discourse is the already-mentioned José Luis Pinillos, one of the Spanish characters whose moral integrity is most emphasised in the book. Two chapters relate to Pinillos’s experiences as a soldier of the ‘Blue Division’, a unity of Spanish volunteers in the German army during the Second World War whose history symbolises the close relation between the Franco regime and German fascism. Unlike the narrator of ‘Scheherazade’, whose loyalty to the USSR influences her judgement on Stalin’s regime, Pinillos distances himself from his former fascist engagement in his testimony of the night on which he first witnessed Jewish persecution in the Baltic city of Narva:

This fragment shows, as does the quoted passage of ‘Scheherazade’, how the use of first-person testimonial discourse allows Muñoz Molina to avoid making direct judgements on the political and ideological profile of his characters or their affirmations. Nonetheless, Pinillos’s critical self-evaluation clearly grants the character a certain moral authority within the novel, which I read as an appeal for a less politically polarised and more humanistic stance toward memory in Spain.

Sepharad has provoked some very critical reactions because of its lack of explicit judgement, its refusal to establish a hierarchy between different forms of victimisation and violence, and more particularly its attacks on communism. Erich Hackl, in what Rothberg would consider a ‘competitive’ vision of memory, interprets the fact that the book refers to cases of Francoist, Nazi and Stalinist persecutions as an equation on behalf of the author of these historical realities, which leads him to accuse Muñoz Molina of historical revisionism: ‘today’s Spain was built on the impunity of the crimes committed by the Francoist regime, and therefore to me it seems of bad taste to jump from impunity to lack of differentiation’.Reference Hackl¹¹ Michael Rothberg, in an attempt to map out the discursive field of public memory, proposes a four-part distinction ‘in which multidirectional memories are located at the intersection of an axis of comparison (defined by a continuum stretching from equation to differentiation) and an axis of political affect (defined by a continuum stretching from solidarity to competition …)’.Reference Rothberg¹² I will go into the location of Sepharad on the axis of political affect later in this article. But, for the moment, I would like to illustrate how Sepharad, in spite of its lack of differentiation of forms of extreme violence on historical and political grounds, avoids the opposite pole of equation by its creative use of empathy and focus on alterity.

Empathetic Imagination

As David Herzberger and Sarah Gilmour point out, Muñoz Molina resorts to empathy as a means of bridging the gap between the reader and the subject of each traumatic experience. According to Herzberger, empathy functions as a disruptive element in the novel: as a disturbing response to another person’s traumatic experience, empathy causes an unsettlement in the reader which ‘generally works to impede closure in discourse by disarticulating identities and “selves” that have been beset by trauma’.Reference Herzberger¹³ Gilmour stresses the difference between empathy, which ‘recognises the alterity of identification’, and sympathy, which relies upon an essentialism of identification.Reference Gilmour¹⁴ Her article contains a quite thorough analysis of the strategies of ‘empathetic imagination’ used in the work both as a creative instrument during the writing process and an invitation to the reader. These strategies draw on the figure of a ‘narrator’ or ‘intra-author’ – a term used by Martín GalvánReference Martín Galván¹⁵ – situated in a ‘liminal space that bridges [the] distance between self and the other via the conscious employment of empathy’.Reference Herzberger¹³ Empathetic imagination resorts to narrative strategies that explore liminality between narrative levels and instances, such as forms of metalepsis: the blurring of borders between stories and narrative levels within stories via recurring objects or motifs, such as the insomnia suffered by the intra-author as well as by several characters and narrators. Another recurring strategy consists of the manipulation of the narrative voice: within one story, narration can shift between the three persons (I/we – you – he/she/them), creating an ‘empathetic circle’Reference Herzberger¹³ which unites readers, narrators and characters in a separate universe emphasising connections between them. Similar manipulations can be observed on the level of text construction by the intertwining of stories, which stimulates associative reading and empathetic identification. This occurs in the following passage, where the narratives of the Belgian-Austrian Jew Hans Mayer/Jean Améry, a person who is told he is HIV-positive and one of Kafka’s characters converge:

In Sepharad, the concept of identity is deconstructed throughout the novel, but particularly in the chapter ‘You are…’, where the unicity and stability of personal identity is thoroughly questioned. Identities, it is stated, can be real or imagined: ‘You are every one of the different people you have been, the ones you imagined you would be, the ones you never were’.¹⁷ They can be claimed by the individual or imposed upon him by others, as is the case with Hans Mayer’s Jewish identity:

Only one factor is presented as constant in this ever-changing identity and that is the very feeling of uprootedness and estrangement:

In this sense, Sepharad presents a radical questioning of the ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust and other collective traumas: they are situated on the extreme end of a scale of forms of marginalisation and victimisation that are ultimately related to a conceptualisation of identity in terms of estrangement. Empathetic imagination, while showing respect for the alterity of experiences, brings the reader closer to them. However, one passage in the novel, which contains a harsh assault on two icons of Spanish communism and antifascism, also points to a form of critical self-reflection by Muñoz Molina with regard to the question of empathy:

The irony in the passage not only attacks left-wing short-sightedness, but it also raises questions as to the power of empathy, and maybe more importantly, as to its moral limits.

Towards a Universal Experience of Victimisation

Other ethical questions regarding the range of empathy have been asked by critics, particularly with respect to the role of non-political forms of victimisation and social exclusion in Sepharad.Reference Gómez López-Quiñones⁷ Indeed, Muñoz Molina’s interest is not exclusively in forms of collective persecution and political repression, nor is it limited to the decades around the Second World War. Some of the stories are set in the present and deal with themes more related to everyday life, such as illness, life in a neighbourhood in central Madrid, various forms of migration, love and adultery, or the death of a loved one. Apart from some recurring characters and motifs (such as conversations in trains), the most important unifying elements are the broader themes of social marginalisation, alienation and victimisation, as well as the focus on the experience of trauma and exclusion from the perspective of the victim. Besides forms of ‘forced alienation in human society’,Reference Herzberger¹³Sepharad contains other forms of social exclusion, such as the estrangement of the urban migrant, the isolation of persons with an illness, or the incapacity of sharing the grief of a loved one.

The transnationalisation of memories in Sepharad is, then, also part of a strategy of universalisation of the experience of exile and social marginalisation from a ‘humanising’ perspective, based on a strategy of empathy with the victims. This may explain why the novel shows little interest in the historical circumstances related to the Shoah and the persecution of political opponents by Franco, Hitler and Stalin. On the other hand, as has been pointed out, the work refuses any comparative view of memories in terms of ‘competitiveness’ or ‘hierarchies’ of horror and tends to stress similarities of experiences over differences. Indeed, if the strategy of empathetic imagination places Sepharad somewhere in the central part of the continuum between equation and differentiation – although arguably closer to the equation end of the continuum – on the axis of political affect, the book appears without any doubt at the extreme end of solidarity. According to Rothberg, the combination of solidarity and equation is known to produce ‘a form of liberal universalism with multicultural accents’ which risks ‘downplaying historical heterogeneity, with uncertain effects for political mobilisation and moral vision’.Reference Rothberg¹² Although Sepharad, by means of its prominent conception of identity in terms of alienation, avoids a strategy of radical identification, its focus on a universal experience of victimhood does imply memory is dehistoricised and depoliticised to a considerable degree.

In short, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad is a clear example of transnational memory, in which transnationality is mobilised mainly with the purpose of broadening and unsettling Spanish national memory. By focusing on the human experience of victimisation, the work privileges a universalist, dehistoricising approach over the politically oriented approach of multidirectional memory.