David Brendan O'Meara

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There is a simple standard by which Enric Marco’s lies were much less bad, much less sinful, than those of Juan Pujol or Ramon Mercader: Marco’s lies did not cause any deaths. Nonetheless, Marco received by far the harshest treatment in the press and public opinion when he was revealed to be an impostor. In part, this is because Marco’s rise to fame and his fall to infamy took place in the media whirlwind of the 21st century, while the others remained largely anonymous for much of their lives. (It’s important to note that Marco’s scandal exploded in the early 21st century, before social media, an almost genteel world by today’s standards, a world in which newspaper columnists could lead the national conversation.) But the negative reaction to Marco’s scandal was rooted in something more substantial than just his fifteen minutes of fame. It had to do with a phenomenon called “historical memory.”

In his book The Impostor, Javier Cerca uses the phrase “historical memory” 52 times (according to the search function on my Kindle).  It first appears in a paraphrase of one of Enric Marco’s self-justifying monologues:

He had said things that were not true, granted, he had embroidered or embellished or altered the truth a little, granted, but he had done it not out of egotism, but generosity, not out of vanity, but altruism, to educate younger generations about the horrors, to unearth the historical memory of this amnesiac country; he had been one of, if not the greatest advocate for the recovery of historical memory in Spain, the memory of the victims of the war and the post-war period…

As the book proceeds, Cercas frequently attaches “so-called” to “historical memory”, adding the skeptical qualifier to the phrase 28 of the 52 times he mentions it.  Here are five typical examples:

…the letter was sent to El País in January 2000, shortly before the great craze for so-called historical memory in Spain…

This wasn’t entirely due to Marco, of course: his presidency coincided with the rise of so-called historical memory in Spain, with a period of enormous interest in the recent past and in the remembrance and vindication of its victims…

The other prisoners or exiles or veterans of the Second Republic, the other stars of so-called historical memory, were mostly elderly and frail, their memories were failing, interviewing them was a chore…

…the years when he took on the role of hero and champion of so-called historical memory, Marco presented himself as an evangelist of the hidden or forgotten or unheeded truth…

It was the media who ultimately turned Marco — in Catalonia, though not just in Catalonia — into a rock star, a champion of so-called historical memory…

So just what is “historical memory” and why would Cercas feel obligated to mention it so frequently, more often than not preceded by a disparaging epithet? In  brief, “historical memory” is a shorthand phrase for an international movement that aspires to commemorate the bad as well as the good in a country’s history, especially in countries recently emerging from wars, violence and dictatorships. In this, it breaks sharply  with the conservative and triumphalist tradition of war memorials, which usually attempt to salute heroes, celebrate bravery, or honor those who fell in a noble cause, thereby instilling pride for the homeland and a resolute willingness to fight again. In contrast, the historical memory movement gives preference and distinction to the victims of past atrocities, provoking reflection, reconciliation, and tolerance.  

In this general sense, “historical memory” is quite admirable and relatively uncontroversial. I have visited museums that show, directly or indirectly, the influence of this movement, such as the Museo Casa de Memoria in Medellin, Colombia and the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City, which do the very important work of educating new generations about the horrors of the past. Both of these museums emerge from a value system we might call the pacifistic center-left, which opposes the violence of both the extreme left-wing and the extreme right-wing while expressing a profound concern for the poor and oppressed. In countries that have recently emerged from a dictatorship, however, the “historical memory” movement often has a more distinctly partisan slant: the phrase often refers to  the efforts of a leftist government to remove the symbols of the old right-wing dictatorship and replace them with memorials to the victims.

What about the phrase itself? It comes from the work of two French writers: the philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, who explored the idea of “collective memory” — or borrowed memory, where people remember what they have been told about the past, and the historian Pierre Nora, who investigated “the sites of memory” — the places and things that provoke historical memory, especially those that help construct the identity of the French nation. The arguments of Halbwachs and Nora are extremely complex and full of paradoxes, many of which have roots in the tension between memory (roughly, someone’s subjective experience of the past) and history (the objective investigation into the past). Nora, in fact, found it troubling that his subtle critique of commemoration had become, in the popular mind, a how-to manual for building new monuments.¹Paul Ricouer, Memory, History and Forgetting, p. 409

Javier Cercas, for one, finds the phrase “historical memory” endlessly annoying:

The expression “historical memory” is ambiguous and deeply confusing. At heart it entails a contradiction: as I wrote in “The Blackmail of the Witness,” history and memory are opposites. “Memory is individual, partial and subjective,” I wrote, “history is collective and aspires to be comprehensive and objective.”

Cercas points out that the German compound word Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the process of coming to terms with the past) would be much more accurate, for all its forbidding sonority. In any case, the phrase “memoria histórica” seems to have become, in the Spanish language, the normal way to refer to the ideas of Halbwachs and Nora, and also to the practice of building memorials with an emphasis on the victims of the past. It’s interesting to note that the Spanish version of Wikipedia contains a long article on “memoria histórica” with sub-sections detailing the application of the the movement and its ideas to Argentina, Spain, Colombia and Peru, while the link to the English version leads to a one-sentence note on historical culture, a related but rather different subject.

Although the phrase may not be common in English, the controversies are: in the United States, in the 2020s,  we are living through what is sometimes called a racial reckoning, filled with furious debates:  Who deserves to have a statue in a public place? Who deserves to be honored with their name on a university building? Which date was more important: 1619, the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, or 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence? Which version of history should be taught in public schools? Which objects, which places should inform our sense of national identity? Whose stories should we tell?

In Spain, around the year 2000, a similar movement was picking up steam, a reckoning regarding the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975). Although the Transition to democracy in the late 1970s had led to a remarkable flowering of intellectual, cultural and artistic life in Spain, it rather crucially lacked several very important things:

…there would be no thorough investigation into the recent past, no prosecution of the crimes of the dictatorship and no compensation for its victims.

This was not because the past had been forgotten, Cercas argues, but because it was remembered all too well:

In fact there was a pact of remembering, which explains why, during the Transition, all or almost all the political parties came together in order not to repeat the mistakes that, forty years earlier, had triggered the Civil War…

About a quarter century of after the Transition, for various possible reasons  (younger people who didn’t remember Francoism, less fear among the center and the left that the dictatorship might return, open travel throughout much of Europe and consequent spread of ideas, a desire to exhume the mass graves of the Civil War while some comrades of the dead were still alive)  there arose a movement to explore what happened in the years between 1936 and 1975, and especially — and this is the controversial part — to commemorate the victims of the dictatorship and those who fought on the Republican side in the Civil War. To conservatives, this must have seemed like a blatant partisan power grab on the part of the left: an attempt to throw out a set of heroes the right still venerated (Catholic, conservative and pro-Franco) and replace them with a motley collection of their old enemies (atheist, anarchist and communist).

Cercas aligns himself firmly with the initial goals of this movement, and its demand for truth and justice:

…the symbols of Francoism that still lingered on the streets and the plazas would be eliminated, the dead would be buried with dignity, a record would be made of the desaparecidos, the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship would be fully compensated.

All of these things were not simply reasonable, they were necessary.

In his opinion, however, the movement quickly transformed into something else, what he calls the industry of memory:

…the industry of memory is to genuine history what the entertainment industry is to genuine art; and just as aesthetic kitsch is the product of the entertainment industry, so historical kitsch is the product of the industry of memory. Historical kitsch; in other words: a historical lie.

If the “industry of memory” in Spain was a market for kitsch, a giant gift shop that sold cheap sentimental souvenirs, Enric Marco quickly became one of its leading salesmen. And what was the bit of kitsch that he sold? A figure of a hero: himself. He presented himself as an ordinary man who had survived the worst the right-wing had to dish out (defeat in the Civil War, a Nazi camp), and then lived an ordinary working-class life under the dictatorship while maintaining a role in the resistance. Now, in his old age, he was stepping forward to tell his story, to teach the young about the horrors of the past.

In one respect “historical memory” turns out to be not so different from the old tradition of patriotic commemoration: on both the left and the right, the public hungers for heroes. This can be a challenge for a movement such as “historical memory” in Spain, which sought to honor the victims of the past: although history can give us names and dates, memory needs stories, personal stories, which can best be told by by the survivors, and by a special subset of survivors, the witnesses. This was the role assumed by Enric Marco: an eloquent witness to some of the darkest moments of his nation’s history, at just the moment when the nation was clamoring to hear that testimony.  If it turned out that the stories he was selling hadn’t actually happened to him, well, they had happened to somebody. 

In his long interviews with Javier Cercas, conducted after his lies had been exposed and his fame curdled into infamy, Enric Marco claimed that he was telling the truth, even if certain details turned out to be invented or borrowed. He claimed to be a truthful witness in the way that a fictional character, like Padura’s Iván, can be exactly that: a representative of his generation, an amalgam of the lives of various people, a vessel for imaginative identification, a moral voice.  

This argument infuriates Cercas, the novelist who has set himself the task of writing a “novel without fiction” — a novel in which he has forbidden himself to make up anything. As mentioned earlier, Cercas fills many pages with his reflections on the differences between the real and fictional, reflections that do not seem to me to be very interesting. But of course there are differences, very important differences between the fictive and the factual. In journalism, and history, for example, the details of an individual life do in fact matter. They matter a lot. Journalists and historians have professional codes that prohibit them from inventing details just to make a better story. 

Another difference: fictional characters, because they live in another world, usually can’t cash in on their stories. Padura’s Iván, for example, finishes his manuscript alone and in poverty. His dedication, his effort to fully imagine the past ends up costing him everything, and his sacrifice lends moral weight to the complex, multi-perspective conclusion of Padura’s novel. Marco, on the other hand, always had his eye on the prize. He wasn’t seeking money, but rather attention and adulation. The prizes, the articles, the meetings with politicians and the solemn ceremonies were the coin with which he took his pay. If the stories he told were somebody’s truth (as cliches usually are), he always made sure the benefits of telling those stories flowed to Enric Marco Battle.

In any case, Marco’s excuse didn’t fly. Public opinion turned angrily against him as soon as his falsehoods were revealed. Why was the reaction so swift and negative? It wasn’t because Marco had crossed some philosophical frontier between fiction and non-fiction. For all the pages Cercas spends trying to pinpoint the location of that ethical boundary, in the end he finds a different and far more persuasive explanation for the bitterness of the public reaction. Cercas argues, convincingly, that the fundamental lie that Marcos told anyone who would listen was the very lie that many Spaniards had been telling themselves: 

…that they had always been democrats and, during the regime, had been clandestine opponents, official pariahs, silent resistants, dormant or active anti-Francoists, all hoping to hide the fact that they had been apathetic, cowards or collaborators…

And so, when Marco turned out to be an impostor, the public felt not just betrayed but threatened. It was easier to denounce Marco’s lies than to examine one’s own self-deceptions. Easier to excoriate the impostor than to look in the mirror.

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  Paul Ricouer, Memory, History and Forgetting, p. 409