English Texts

to the work of prisoners who were working out their
sentences, always, of course, under the strict supervision
of the prisoner warders. The correspondents were
prisoners who took on the task of collecting the news
worth writing about at each penal centre, which
made them eligible for an “extraordinary redemption”
later. Thus, censorship and propaganda came from
the heart of the Franco penal system, and the prisoners
were subtly forced to be accomplices in it.’
We know that Uberto M.B. worked on Redención.
And that when they were released from gaol, the two
cousins decided not to return to their home town, Lebrija,
in the province of Seville. It was natural that the stigmas
of a Marxist past and their time in prison should lead
them to go first to Barcelona and in the late seventies
to end their days in Badia del Vallès. The testimonies
we collected about them tell us little about their activity
on the Republican side and still less about their years
in prison. Their behaviour is usual in many of those
ex-convicts who took the road of rootlessness by hiding
a supposedly ominous past for ever. The traces they
have left in the different archives consulted leave no
more than these few facts either. The two also worked
in the prison archive and were in charge of the technical
publication of ’s book, Musa redimida, Madrid 1940,
an anthology of poems by prisoners under the working
out sentences system we have already mentioned.
Of Uberto M.B.’s contributions to Redención we can
only single out his thematic unit devoted to praising
the cooperation of the women’s prisons service on
the reeducation of prisoners and its influence on the
Women’s Section and the Falange. Of particular interest
for an X-ray of the system is one which sets out the
parallels between the illumination by the Jesuit Pérez
del Pulgar of Señora Romana Roldán de Polanco,
president of Frentes y Hospitales and representative
of the Falange Española de las Jons, and the illumination
by the Benedictine Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel – this
character published a brief tome on the work of the
iconoclastic hordes, Los mártires de la iglesia, which
was in fact written by the journalist now known as
Cándido – of Señora Pilar Primo de Rivera, president
of the Women’s Section and also a member of the
Falange Española de las Jons. Both ladies visited
the prison and its workshops and were presented with
a crucifix each from the ones manufactured by the
convicts in their re-education programme.
That is all we have been able to find from trawling
archives, magazine collections and libraries. The people
who knew them during the years they worked in
Barcelona all insist on their refusal to talk about the
past beyond a few vague references. That faded past
on which the different groups engaged in reconstructing
our historical memory are trying to shed light is not a
product of chance either. The violence of this reeducation
system was programmed precisely to wipe
out any trace of any history that did not fit that of the
winning side. The survivors who had been involved in
iconoclastic actions – many of them were shot, even
though they had committed no violent crimes, simply
for having dressed up as priests, mocked the local
patron saint or smacked the head of a cardboard altar
boy placed at the door of the church to beg for alms –
were specially re-educated through the application
of the de-Marxisation campaign dreamt up by the
famous psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nájera. In his
book Los campos de concentración franquistas
Javier Rodrigo describes it in these words: ‘A good
proof of the intention to re-educate dissidence and
its practical implementation are the investigations,
recently brought to light, by Doctor Vallejo-Nájera into
the biopsychism of Marxist fanaticism and the purity
of the “Hispanic race” in the international prisoners
in San Pedro de Cardeña. With psychiatry at the
service of ideology and with a series of psychological
and, we fear, physical studies, his conclusions were
nevertheless fairly predictable: Marxists were potentially
mad or congenitally retarded, mentally feeble and
therefore the eugenics required to revive the feeling
of Spanishness consisted of locking up and separating
the imbeciles. The difference is that the “race” in this
case was of an ideological nature. As Carl Geiser
points out in his memoirs, an assistant measured
their skulls, the length of their noses and the distance
between their eyes to “scientifically” classify them
and demonstrate the mental, but also physical, natures
of the madness brought about by leftwing thought.
Ricard Vinyes has interpreted those examinations
and analyses of the prison population from an
audacious, brilliant perspective: how the Franco
world structured through a “pseudo-philosophy of the
social degeneration of the dissident” a global vision
of the enemy and therefore of its own political being,
based on Manichean precepts such as the opposition
between superior and inferior, truth and error, Good
and Evil.” In Cautivos, Javier Rodrigo’s book on the
same subject, he writes: “Re-education was, in fact,
another transversal element of the concentration
camps, about which we can give two examples that
liken the Franco camps to the ones usually considered
totalitarian. The brainwashing of the Polish prisoners
of war (the 250,000 or so captured on the Eastern Front
after the Russian invasion that began on 17 September
1939) in the Soviet camps of Kozelsk, Ostashkov and
Atarobelsk is comparable to what had been done
just one year earlier in San Pedro de Cardeña with the
International Brigade prisoners. Not in the methods,
infinitely more brutal in the Soviet camps – which aspired
to the totalitarian creation of a new man – but in the
background of a culturisation and sacralisationdogmatisation
of politics, according to which ideology
can be changed through conversion. The interest of
Hitler and Himmler in using Russian prisoners of war
in their own army from 1944, as well as Stalin’s contempt
for them, are also comparable to Franco’s attitude
towards his prisoners of war: either they were “deluded”
and had to be “Hispanicised” to make them useful
to the national community, or they were cheap,
profitable labour, or simple “red scum” worth less
than the bullet that would put an end to them.’
And it is at this point that we have to go back,
turn the discourse of this story in another sphere and
place, the one corresponding to the Ute Meta Bauer
entry in F.X. Archive It is obvious that the intersection
comes from interest in the archive, the mechanisms of
constructing it, its politics. Bauer’s work asks about
the mechanisms of representation of the archive itself.
In one of her latest works as curator, in (Insight) Archivo
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