On April 1, 1939, Francisco Franco proclaimed victory in a bloody civil war that had ravaged Spain for three years. Supported by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, the general had triumphed over a coalition of democratic and left-wing Republicans. Almost half a million Republican sympathizers fled the country, and many of those who did not leave fell victim to the dictator's purges. According to conservative estimates, the authoritarian regime executed twenty thousand people in the years after the civil war. Franco never officially joined World War II on the side of the Axis, though he was sympathetic to the cause of its members and lent his support in many ways. No wonder, therefore, that the Allies initially treated the Spanish dictator as a suspected friend of Mussolini and Hitler.

To General Franco's benefit, just a few years after the defeat of the Axis in 1945, Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, were identified as the new enemy and priorities consequently shifted. The anticommunist and business interests he shared with the Western powers now made the dictator and his regime at least an acceptable ally, if not necessarily loved and embraced. As a result, Franco was able to stay in power and rule Spain with an iron fist until his death in 1975. Western countries were willing to overlook Franco's many human rights violations and his Spanish version of a right-wing dictatorship.

Zwischen Apologie und Ablehnung looks at the late Franco regime from a Swiss perspective. Prieto bases his research mostly on newspaper and television reports, and his view is thus mainly based on what the Swiss media reported about Spain. The author acknowledges that this approach does not represents an histoire total, but it still encompasses many voices and groups in Swiss society. It is, as Prieto stresses, a history from below because it highlights the opinions and fears of common citizens, but it is also a history from above because media outlets often have ties to political parties or governments. The book therefore says as much, if not more, about Switzerland and its media landscape in the 1970s than it does about Spain. The look at Spain is, in other words, also a look at Switzerland's own struggles and democratic challenges.

Because of Swiss neutrality, the country kept normal diplomatic ties with Spain, but its policy toward Spain was more than just neutral. Shared anticommunism created, at least on the government level, some common political ground between Madrid and Berne. The two governments also cooperated in order to move against left-wing immigrant organizations in Switzerland and combat a feared communist “subversion” of Swiss society. This led to joint police agreements and a ban on public speaking by some Spanish dissidents in Switzerland. In 1974, the expulsion from Spain of prominent Swiss journalist Annemarie Schwyter, who was critical of the Franco regime, had little, if any, negative impact on the good relations between the two governments.

As Prieto points out, the Swiss relationship to Franco's Spain derived from a few important and distinctive areas of contact and joint interest—including the two countries’ common financial and business interests, the most obvious of which were the many Spanish immigrant workers, as well as the increasing number of Swiss summer tourists on Spanish beaches. The Spanish immigrant community in Switzerland reached a peak in 1970 when it numbered around a hundred thousand—a significantly-sized community in this small Alpine nation of six million.

The 1960s and 1970s were also a time of transition for Swiss society and media, with less state control and increasing numbers of critical voices and initiatives from civil society. Prieto gives the example of the popular Tagesschau, a national television news show that exhibited a progressiveness rarely encountered in the otherwise predominantly conservative, mainstream media environment. At the beginning of the 1970s, the Tagesschau, which was the most successful show on Swiss television at the time, used the left-wing language of the 1968 movement and repeatedly conceptualized the world in fascist and antifascist categories. Prieto underlines the fact that the rejection of “fascist” Spain was a way to solidify Switzerland's role as part of Western Europe. “This identity was based on the values of a social and parliamentary democracy and the resolute rejection of authoritarian forms of government, as well as on the condemnation of the mass murders of the recent past” (417), particularly the Holocaust. The idea of Spain as a pariah country and as an anachronism of World War II increasingly dominated Swiss media discourse about the country in this period.

The so-called Burgos trial in 1970, a show trial in Spain against sixteen members of the Basque separatist terror group ETA, illustrated this well. Among those accused by the military tribunal were two women and two priests, and reports of mistreatment to obtain confessions, and the demand from the military prosecutor for nine death penalties and several hundred years of prison sentences for the accused, caused an international outcry. The Franco regime became increasingly nervous and repressive, declared martial law, and fired at demonstrators—incidents that confirmed the poor reputation and image of Franco's Spain as a brutal dictatorship. The general's death in 1975 and Spain's slow, subsequent transition to democracy were clear turning points in Swiss views about Spain. A royal visit by the Spanish king in 1979 was highly successful and reduced much of the earlier Swiss skepticism about the intentions of the man intended to be Franco's successor. Spain's integration into Western Europe proceeded quickly, and it joined NATO in 1982 and the European Union in 1986.

Zwischen Apologie und Ablehnung is a very well-researched—but not reader-friendly—study. There is no introduction for a general audience on either Franco's Spain or on Switzerland; the quotations in French and Italian are left in the original with no translation; and the summary at the end of the book is no substitute for a strong conclusion. Nonexperts in the field may become lost, but experts will take much away from Prieto's research, particularly how the Swiss media of the 1960s and 1970s used portrayals of Spain as a way in which better to integrate Switzerland into Western Europe.