Exciting, how could it be otherwise, was reading Life and Times of Manuel Azana Santos Juliá historian. Since I learned of his appearance, in 2008, edited by Taurus, I respect and unsuccessful attempts to get it. In April last year, I finally had the pleasure of buying anything less than a few meters from the birthplace of Azaña, when I spent a month at the University of Alcalá de Henares.
While in the city read the first chapters Alcala, it was not until the recent year-end holiday I could do, as the ancients said, to my taste and flavor. Getting off the plane broke down my computer what made me change my original plans of work. Among other things, I had more time to read. A friend handed me the book by Carmen Aristegui Marcial Maciel on flying over enough to know some ugly details of the life of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ to the reporter through a series of conversations with those who knew him closely, with full finishes defining arguments in the only way possible in a society that aspires to justice: a criminal. If it is because I kept reading the recesses bored Biographical who was close to not a few men of power in Mexico (what the full body paint and, incidentally, the country ...) but I took care of adequately circulate among some unsuspecting were near.
Despite its five hundred pages, I read the book, Julia Santos, however, to run in a few mornings and the result exceeded my expectations even though it is a fascinating character and a time written by one of the most talented English historians today. If it is true that the enemies of Franco, was the most vilified Azaña (to the extent of being called a thief, cynical, cowardly, hateful, slave to the interests of international communism, perverted ...), the most landmark of presidents Second English Republic is now which has a broader reassessment and justified.
Julia's book allows us to get up close with a large appliance documentary and a smooth prose, the life and thought of who was a remarkable politician, a special speaker and a lucid writer, from his birth in the street of the Image of the birthplace of Cervantes in 1880, until his death in 1940 at sixty years of age, shortly after the end of the war, in the French town of Montauban, besieged by Franco's agents do not rest until they died.
The vicissitudes of the system Republican ideas better than anyone else who played their expectations and failures, its evolution as a thinker and politician, and finally the end of his life can not but be emotional. But the book also because it Juliá, very sober historian, turns again and again in the emotion with which he lived Azaña policy and the importance it had in the way of passing ... (Listen to yourself the overwhelming discourse of war to copy link at the bottom of this post .)
reproduce a paragraph that at least gives an idea of \u200b\u200bhis work and his political fate, "ana it was all in the government, held not in the strength of a major party with broad social attachment, but in his unexpected ability to hold together a disparate coalition of parties that his was not just a minority. Under these conditions, your program to rebuild the state and society from the core was launched sustained in the clarity of his word, in the kind of illumination that his speech awoke from his audiences and their partners in government and a parliamentary majority that did not belong. He himself describes those years of government as a revolution carried out in a regime of liberty and parliamentary means. The same wrote in exile Antonio Ramos Oliveira when attributed the failure Azana to having tried to make a revolution in a system of freedom. This mirage, Aldo Garosci defined as having neglected the problem of power was reinforced by their 'ascenssió rapidíssima, brilliant', as he wrote Plá, by the apparent ease with which the Government won the presidency. " (P. 341)
Life and Times of Manuel Azana eventually led me, back and in the city, two more books waiting for their hour-and yet a third party was not covered-and that, caught up in the subject, not I could not stop reading. The first one, the memories of the last days of the war he wrote Fernando Rodriguez Miaja, nephew who served as Secretary General Jose Miaja, the famous defender of Madrid ", exiled in Mexico since the end of the war. A friend from Asturias served as liaison between him and me, and last August I had the opportunity to visit their offices in the Rue de Tiber, Colonia Cuauhtemoc. This is a man of 92 years retained an enviable vitality.
Sano, acute, to say that agile Miaja Rodriguez, who lived through the war first person and then fled from Spain in the last minute, and whose life was radically changed because of it, refers to the conflict and its aftermath with an open mind and a generosity that they wanted and many descendants of exiles in Mexico. The book, published more than a decade, has the value of the evidence relating to end of life and full of interesting passages, told with grace and narrative vigor. One of its purposes is to clarify certain passages in the life of Miaja some historians, including Hugh Thomas, have been told erroneously or inaccurate. Don Fernando gave me also a copy of the book with a foreword by himself than on his uncle recently published in Oviedo, Miaja. The general who defended Madrid, Juan José Menéndez García (an issue apparently financed by the author).
The day I finished reading the memoirs of Rodriguez Miaja The law of the series, which ultimately does not give me breath, I stood before the war poets Four by Ian Gibson (Planeta, 2007), which I read immediately. The theme could not be more interesting: the biographies of Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca and Miguel Hernandez from February 1936 when the Popular Front wins the elections, in which the collapse of the right "democratic" end up leading a failed military coup that will give way to the armed conflict, "until the death of each, three of the four cases as a result of the military uprising war.
Although he knew the circumstances of Lorca and Machado, it is interesting to compare the development of the four destinations from the same historical moment. It is impossible not to be indignant over and over again with the circumstances in which Lorca was taken prisoner and killed, and the sad way in which spent the last few months and the death of another Machado side of the border with France. Of all the images from the book, I really like that with which Juan Ramon describes the poet's flight Campos de Castilla, who crossed the border in the middle of the crowd, "poor, miserable, collectively, more of a beef herd human persecution. " (P. 185)
As I write this post 'm already embarked on The Valley of the Fallen, a memory of Spain , Fernando Olmeda (Ediciones Peninsula, 2009), on architectural monstrosity located in the Sierra de Guadarrama Madrid in which lie the remains Franco and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the English Falange. No other public works so visibly embodies the nature of a dictatorial regime dark, tinged with Church and Army, which was founded on the extermination of the defeated enemy.
Towards the end of the stay at the University of Alcalá in late April this year, a dear friend, Professor Georg Pichler, my partner suggested we write residence, Brenda Escobedo, and I visit El Escorial, one way, try to see the monument to Franco but that day apparently because of the recent landslides in a monumental mercy placed on the facade, visitors were not allowed. Our Austrian friend in the car was carrying a copy of the book Olmeda, I found on sale in the Escorial monastery bookstore and bought it for a reading that has finally arrived.
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's voice on the network, http://bit.ly/eb3BfK
Fernando Rodriguez's book Miaja called Testimonials and remembrances. My memories of the last months of the war in Spain (1936-1939) , was cared for by Alexander Antuñano and appeared in 1997 in author's edition.
photos I have borrowed from the network. One of them, which is reading, of El Pais Digital. Machado's photo is in Valencia, probably in 1938.
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