Cada tema con su loco. Paul Preston comenta con mucho respeto el nuevo libro de Henry Kamen, el gran historiador, The Disinherited: The Exiles Who Created Spanish Culture. Nueva historia sobre el tema capital del destierro de los españoles en su patria.

Vuelvo, pues a la carga con el paralelismo de fondo entre ese libro y mi De la inexistencia de España. Perdón por la inmodestia: Una de las formas más castizas de ser español es vivir en el destierro.

The Observer, 1 abril 2007, Spain’s extraordinary experience of exile

Henry Kamen’s The Disinherited is a wonderfully accomplished work which charts the remarkable Spanish cultural diaspora

Paul Preston

The Disinherited: The Exiles Who Created Spanish Culture
by Henry Kamen
Allen Lane £30, pp528

First there were the Conversos, Jews who became Christian to remain in Spain: then there were Moriscos, remnants of Moorish hegemony, who did the same. But no conversion to the prevailing faith could bring safety for long. Repressions and purges scattered their victims around the world, beyond the closed, brutal lands of Iberia. Indeed, Christianity itself proved no defence centuries later when the republican forces of civil war uprooted thousands of priests and condemned even bishops to flee far from home, dreaming of a beloved country some would never see again: a country of seemingly relentless inquisition and continual exile.

Here, four years after Spain’s Road to Empire, Henry Kamen returns with what in many ways is a companion piece. For while the empire road ran outwards and onwards, constantly extending the influence (and often ruthless power) of Madrid throughout the Americas, so the supposed nation at the dark heart of it all struggled for identity and self-belief. The questions were implicit, but insistent. Who are we Spaniards? What binds us together? Is there a true Hispanic culture, or only a void that cruelty and consuming passions compete to fill?

Superficially, perhaps, Kamen’s core thesis seems unremarkable. Those who left, down the centuries, were often sorely missed, their flight bewailed for stripping Spain of its philosophers, scientists, poets and artists, leaders of imagination who define national progress. Their expulsion became almost an excuse for failure. Spain knew what it was losing as they packed their bags. But what it didn’t realise was how the genius of the country was rekindled far away.

‘The experience of exile, for creative spirits, became almost a need, one that gave them liberty to find a context where they could achieve wholeness. The travail of not-belonging was a way through to discovering where one belonged.’

And that, on examination, is remarkable and unique. There are many varieties of European exceptionalism, but nothing that equals Spain’s exceptional ability to create a legendary identity without borders. Take Pablo Casals. ‘Dear friends,’ he said, as he rehearsed Beethoven’s Ninth in the Orfeo Theatre, Barcelona, and rumours of a military coup filled the streets, ‘I do not know when we shall meet again. As a farewell, shall we play the Finale?’

The reasons for flight or absence opened rich seams of creativity. They infused the life of distant countries such as Mexico and Argentina. They gave Puerto Rico its own distinct, fascinating identity and saw it blended into the evolution of Hispanic America, a West Side story without modern parallel. They helped turn much colonial life into a culture full of self-nourishment, far different in kind from the British who built their own empire, imposed their own traditions, and left. The influence of Spain across today’s Latin America does not particularly reside in anything Madrid says or does; rather, it lives because voices from Buenos Aires to Havana still rise to show that it lives. This empire, built on the outside, nourished by what it found, could never pack its bags and sail back towards San Sebastian; for, in the most cogent of ways, it had not really come from Spain to begin with. The disinherited? Maybe: but also people of talent or industry, building their own inheritances across distant horizons.

This is the bizarre boon from bloodshed and unresolved argument. But Kamen does not attempt to hide the obverse of bleakest tragedy. His account of 1936-1939 is unsparing because it does not betray ideological biases or choose favourites: rather it takes the killing on both sides – the 60,000 the republicans murdered, the 70,000 the nationalists killed in turn – as testimony to the madness of humankind, whether waving Communist or fascist flags.

The narrowly elected Popular Front, he asserts, helped bring about its own self-destruction; there was no willingness to seek compromise; the fanatics and anarchists were soon in charge. And, if you doubt that destructiveness, look at the writers, thinkers and academics killed or driven into exile. Nobody was safe. You could be Ramiro de Maeztu, a giant of conservative thought, murdered in Madrid. You could be Gregorio Maranon, doctor, historian and supporter of the republic, evacuated by British destroyer from Alicante (who later described how ’88 per cent of the university teachers of Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona had had to abandon Spain and escape in any possible way’). You could, of course, be Federico Garcia Lorca, slaughtered by Falangists in Granada, two bullets in the anus as a final flourish – or another homosexual poet, Luis Cernuda, who pined away in the cold winters of New England. ‘I am a very strange writer, without a country, without a people: subject more than most to the wind of oblivion which when it blows kills.’

The poignancy, as the war ends and Franco finally triumphs, is heart-rending. Five hundred thousand flee Catalonia over a handful of days, the ultimate exiles. But that is not the end to this story. Hundreds of thousands returned. And once the Generalissimo is dead, more sons and daughters of those who stayed in exile appear, builders of a new, inclusive, vibrant Spain.

Is that the final, unwritten page of Kamen’s wonderfully accomplished, beautifully told historical patchwork? It would be pleasing to think so. Yet only fools, blind to the past, can be blithe. The problems of the Basques and Catalans, racketing down the centuries, are in no final sense solved. Talk to Castilian right and Catalan left to sense the continuing divide. More, the passions of yesteryear surely lie just below the surface of the bland Europe that Brussels exports like Band Aid packs. Today’s Spain, ready at last to play its full part in shaping our continent, is still in the formative stages, still struggling to bury the ghosts. How many of the Jews are left? Just 20,000 – compared to 600,000 in France. Will the fresh influx of Muslims from Morocco reignite ancient flames? Nothing is over, here; nothing settled, or complete.

Kamen, wonderfully and loftily encyclopaedic, is controversial in Spain because he challenges the myths. But the myths, and the realities that run in parallel to them, matter in ways that continue to define Spanish separateness. My wife was stopped for a routine car check in Barcelona the other day and showed her licence to the traffic cop. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘Preston, Paul Preston’ … naming the great British chronicler of the Franco years. Wrong, yet also right in a piercing way. Policemen don’t talk much history at M25 patrol points: but ordinary, basic, decent Spain still bleeds and broods and obsesses over its past.