The School Image of The Spanish Civil War and the Second World War as an Instrument for Collective Memory Manipulation

A Comparative Case of History and Civics Textbooks from Early Francoist Spain and People’s Republic of Poland During Stalinism

Abstract

This article compares the school image of the wartime past (the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War), created during the transformative early postwar phase of Francoism in Spain and Communism in Poland. Demonstrating the political usefulness of the narratives on war was crucial to the consolidation of both regimes. Legitimisation of the new regime called for emphasising the war effort, not only in defeating the enemy but also in its struggle for social issues. For school-taught history, the early years of both dictatorships marked a period of breaking with prewar educational concepts, introducing and testing new ‘revolutionary’ pedagogical solutions. This article not only explains the aspirations of political rulers to rebuild the students’ memory but also contributes to our understanding of the textbook authors’ perception of the recent past. It analyses the meanings of terms specific to mythical stories, such as nation, power, heroes and their deeds, or wartime struggle.
The initial phase of People’s Poland and Franco’s Spain was thus a period of ‘identity formation’. Those in power sought to create a homogeneous ‘imagined community’ with the leading party, where the right to rule was legitimised by the victory in the recent war. One of the tools used was the manipulation of the collective memory of the students.
The following cross-national study of Spanish and Polish teaching materials, which employs the analysis of over 90 primary sources in the form of History and Civics textbooks, seeks to elucidate the similarities and differences in the pursuit of educational politics in the two Cold War enemy camps. Comparative studies enable the discernment of phenomena that may not be readily apparent in the context of a single country’s research.
This study seeks to establish which narratives were used to mark the textual boundaries of war heroes’ behaviour that should have served as a moral compass for students in their epistemological orientation in the ‘new world’. Questions are posed concerning which discursive strategies were used in the early stages of both dictatorships to memorise the path to victory. This analysis seeks to establish whether, and how, the textbook narratives differed and whether they abounded in arguments that were universal for the consolidation of totalitarian power. The conclusion summarises the usefulness of studying narratives concerning both wars when examining collective memory and group identity.