The Civil War's Shadow

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was a rehearsal for World War II: Nazi Germany and Italy backed Franco while the Soviet Union backed the Republic. It produced extraordinary work from international writers — Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orwell's Homage to Catalonia — yet sent Spain's own best writers into exile or silence. After Franco's death in 1975 came a cultural explosion, the Movida, that finally let filmmakers like Almodóvar and a new wave of novelists write openly about the war and the long silence that followed.