Day 3: Saturday, October 15

Round Table Discussion

Christian Gundermann et al. — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:00:00 PDT

The wrap-up round table discussions will be held with senior faculty members from the Five Colleges who are experts in the politics of memory and will place Spain in comparative perspective.

Lunch Break

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 11:30:00 PDT

Panel IV: “Nazi Apostasy and the Market: The Intellectual Alchemy of Spanish Economic Liberalism”

Cornel Ban — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:45:00 PDT

During the 1970s and 1980s a small elite of economists based in the central bank and economic departments have been credited with embedding economic liberalism in Spain. Their ideas about state-market relations can be traced back to their graduate education in the UK during the postwar decades or before the Civil War. Yet my research also reveals that what is equally important for the triumph of economic liberalism in post-authoritarian Spain has been Friedrich von Stackelberg, an ex-Nazi economics professor recruited by the Franco regime in 1943 through the transnational epistemic networks linking the authoritarian regimes of Spain and Germany.

Panel IV: “Representations of Mauthausen at the Crossroads of Spanish Memory”

Sara Brenneis — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:00:00 PDT

Over 7,000 Spaniards were captured as political prisoners and held in the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen between 1940 and 1945; some 5,000 of them died in the camp. Since its liberation in 1945, Mauthausen has continued to resonate as a symbol of Spain’s historical memory – or lack thereof – of its role in World War II through a body of memoirs, documentary films and novels authored by survivors and non-survivors alike. In this presentation, in addition to providing a historical background of Spaniards in the camp, I will discuss the variety of written and cinematic representations of the Spanish experience of Mauthausen. In their evolution over the decades, these representations have become indicative of the cultural and political relevance of the Mauthausen of 1940-45 in questions of historical memory in the Spain of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.