The writer Javier Cercas helped launch Spain’s historical-memory movement. In his new book, he asks whether score-settling and sanctimony have come to distort the nation’s past and poison its future.

The price of Spain’s transition from Fascism to liberal democracy was a political amnesia about Franco’s victims.

By Giles Harvey @ NewYorker.com, Jan. 6, 2020

[....] Today, the means by which Franco’s legacy was buried has become the subject of contention. Around the turn of the millennium, the children and grandchildren of Franco’s “disappeared”—the tens of thousands of Republicans put to death during the Civil War and the dictatorship—started calling for the exhumation of mass graves and a reckoning with the past. The “historical memory” movement, though largely spontaneous, was catalyzed by a few figures, chief among them the novelist Javier Cercas, one of contemporary Spain’s leading writers.

At the time, Cercas was not an obvious candidate for the role of galvanizing truthteller. His early work was heavily influenced by the postmodern gamesmanship of American writers such as Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme [....]

Having drawn such a resounding response, Cercas might well have been tempted to go on producing work in the same moral key. Instead, he has spent much of his post-“Soldiers” career arguing against the very tenets of historical memory: what started out as a legitimate campaign for reparative justice, Cercas feels, soon degenerated into a pageant of sanctimony and opportunism [....]