Representation of the battle in the air: republican pilots in the Spanish civil war

Abstract

This article aims to approximate to the specific collective memory of a group of Spanish Republican aviators who wrote about their experience of the Spanish Civil War. There is scant scholarly work on the memory of these pilots´ experiences of the war, and existing work tends to concentrate on the testimonials of the combat pilots. In this article, I explore this understudied memory thorough its cultural vectors with the express intention of showing how this memory was defined and socialised. I aim to contribute a new form of analysis which will avoid abstractions and define the difficult relationship between individual and collective memory. This article also aims to outline the particularities of how this group of aviators perceived and remembered their experiences of the Civil War.

Departing from the hypothesis of the effective existence of a collective or group memory, which is confirmed and consolidated by writings and the spaces of socialisation, I have examined fifteen memoirs, bulletins edited by distinct associations established by Republican pilots and oral sources from those involved in said associations. The evidence gathered from this study leads us to two conclusions. Firstly, we observe a group memory which is centered on the experience of flight and combat, conceived as a normalised anthropological ritual, whereby the beauty of physical and mechanical aeronautics, emphasised throughout their memoirs, bolster a collective memory distanced from defeat, which overshadows, over time, the acts of self-discovery and psychological introspection. Secondly, the group memory of these pilots exemplifies the importance of telling or writing a collective story whose vibration and narrative force reflect the passion for flying that permeates these texts. A rather ironic finding, considering that these texts purport to sublimate past and present emotions.