History or Myth?

The Spanish Civil War has never belonged entirely to historians. Almost from the moment the military rebellion began in July 1936, the conflict was being turned into dispatches, diaries, novels, poems, photographs, films, and paintings. Foreign correspondents crossed the frontier in search of the decisive struggle of their age. Writers joined militias, visited trenches, drank with political commissars, interviewed ministers, and watched cities under bombardment. Spaniards tried to explain to foreign readers what was happening to their country while also enduring the events they described.

The result is an unusual historical inheritance. Many readers first encounter the war not through an archive-based history but through George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, or Picasso’s Guernica. Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit, Arturo Barea’s The Forging of a Rebel, and Manuel Chaves Nogales’s Heroes & Beasts of Spain stand close behind them. These works have outlived most of the journalism produced during the conflict. They supply its most memorable human beings and scenes: Orwell shivering in an Aragon trench; Barcelona workers carrying rifles; Hemingway's Pilar recalling the execution of a village’s right-wingers; Barea censoring foreign correspondents while shells fall on Madrid; the screaming horse and dead child in Picasso’s mural; Robert Capa’s militiaman collapsing on a bare hillside.

Their survival is deserved. These writers and artists caught experiences that no operational history or table of casualties can reproduce. Yet their very power creates a problem. A scene that is vivid enough can come to represent events its author never saw. A fictional episode can enter historical writing as if it were testimony. A personal quarrel within the Republican camp can become the key to the whole war. An image intended to embody the suffering of Spain can detach itself from the precise circumstances of the town whose name it carries. A photograph may become famous because viewers believe it records the instant it appears to show.

The choice between “history” and “myth” is therefore too simple. Myth does not have to mean a deliberate lie. It can be a story or image that compresses a complicated reality until one part stands for the whole. Such a myth may preserve a profound truth, a partial truth, or even a factual error. The important questions are narrower. What did the author actually see? What did he hear from others? What did he infer from a limited vantage point? What did the novelist invent in order to make experience intelligible? And what happened when later readers forgot the difference?

Read in this way, Orwell, Hemingway, Borkenau, Barea, Chaves, Picasso, and Capa are neither substitutes for historians nor obstacles to history. They are evidence: extraordinarily rich, politically charged, formally constructed evidence. Later historians can check their claims and widen their field of vision, but they cannot make the participants’ accounts unnecessary. The most revealing history begins where the different kinds of witnesses disagree.

Different windows, not summaries

The first discipline required of a modern reader is to identify the kind of work in front of him.

Homage to Catalonia is a memoir written soon after Orwell returned from Spain. Its authority comes from personal presence, but presence in particular places: revolutionary Barcelona, a quiet sector of the Aragon front, and the Barcelona street fighting of May 1937. The Spanish Cockpit is a political travel diary based on Borkenau’s two journeys through Republican territory, one in August and September 1936 and another early in 1937. It is wider geographically than Orwell’s account but shallower in time at any single location. The Forging of a Rebel is an autobiography, written in exile, in which the war forms the final volume of a life extending from childhood in Madrid through military service in Morocco. It offers duration and social depth, but also the pattern imposed by retrospective narration.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel. Robert Jordan, Pilar, María, Pablo, and El Sordo are not witnesses who can be placed under cross-examination. The book’s action is tied to a real Republican offensive toward Segovia in May 1937, but Hemingway was not writing an after-action report. He combined observed settings, real personalities transformed into fictional figures, stories told to him by Spaniards, and the demands of tragedy. Picasso’s Guernica is further still from literal documentation. It contains no aircraft, bombs, streets, German pilots, Italian insignia, or identifiable Basque buildings. It is nevertheless the best-known representation of the bombing. Capa’s The Falling Soldier, by contrast, appears to make a precise documentary claim: this man fell at this place in this fraction of a second. Its disputed authenticity therefore affects its evidential status more directly than disputes over the meaning of a novel or painting.

These differences are not a hierarchy in which memoir is true, journalism somewhat less true, fiction suspect, and painting merely symbolic. Every form selects and arranges. Orwell reconstructed dialogue and organized months of experience into a narrative. Borkenau deliberately preserved his changing impressions, including generalizations he later recognized as mistaken. Barea turned a life into a trilogy. A historian also chooses scale, categories, causes, and representative episodes. The genres differ in what kinds of claims they make and in how those claims should be tested.

The works also describe different wars because the Spanish Civil War was not one uniform experience. Barcelona in December 1936 was not Madrid in November; an Aragon militia trench was not a Communist headquarters at the Hotel Gaylord; the social revolution in Catalonia was not the organized terror advancing behind Franco’s Army of Africa; the Republic of 1936 was not the increasingly centralized and exhausted state of 1938. Borkenau understood this particularly well. He retained the diary form because the changing hopes and disappointments produced by a revolution were, in his view, part of its history. He even warned readers:

“Mistaken generalizations have not been dropped.”¹

The warning should govern all these works: an exact picture of one moment can become false when treated as a timeless picture of Spain.

Orwell: the accuracy of a narrow field of vision

No English-language account has done more to shape the moral memory of the Republican side than Homage to Catalonia. Its power rests on the match between Orwell’s style and his experience. He notices what grand narratives leave out: the absurdity of drill without weapons, antiquated rifles whose sights cannot be trusted, sentries struggling to stay awake, the smell of a barrack room, the cold that becomes more immediate than politics, and the democratic manners of a militia in which an officer does not expect ritual deference. His Aragon front is made of lice, mud, excrement, bad food, sniping, rumours, and boredom, interrupted by terror.

This is history at ground level, and much of it is remarkably reliable precisely because Orwell does not try to make his sector more militarily important than it was. He admits that there was little fighting. He confesses how little he understood when he arrived. He had entered Spain with papers from the British Independent Labour Party and consequently joined the militia of the POUM, the anti-Stalinist Marxist party with which the ILP had connections. That accident of introduction became politically decisive. Had he arrived through Communist contacts, as he later observed, he might have been sent to an entirely different unit and written a different book.

Orwell’s most enduring claim is not about a particular rifle or trench. It is that the conflict within the Republican camp was real and consequential. In Barcelona, he first saw in December 1936, workers’ organizations appeared to possess the city. Formal class distinctions had been deliberately effaced. Shops had been collectivized; waiters and customers addressed one another as equals; militia uniforms filled the streets. When he returned from the front in April, much of that atmosphere had receded. Well-dressed civilians had reappeared, the police were more visible, and political tension was growing. The street fighting of 3–8 May then exposed the struggle beneath the change: between revolutionary institutions and a Republican state trying to recover control, and among anarchists, the POUM, Catalan nationalists, socialists, and Communists.

Orwell was right about the persecution that followed. The POUM was denounced as a fascist or Trotskyist agency, outlawed, and driven underground. Its leader, Andreu Nin, was abducted, tortured, and murdered in a clandestine operation organized by Soviet intelligence personnel with Spanish Communist collaboration. Orwell’s fear that he and his wife could be arrested was not paranoia. Friends and comrades disappeared into prison; he escaped across the frontier. Later archival research has strengthened rather than weakened his account of the lies used against the POUM and the criminal character of Nin’s murder.²

Yet validation of Orwell’s immediate danger does not make Homage to Catalonia an overview of the Republic. It is compelling and clear-sighted, but its reach is ultimately narrow—and it has often been mistaken for a general account of the war. Orwell himself supplied the necessary warning:

“Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.”³

The limitation begins with geography and language. Orwell spent most of his service on a quiet front. During the May fighting, he saw the city largely from street level and from a rooftop near POUM headquarters. His Spanish was limited, and he did not have enough Spanish or Catalan to read the Communist press for himself. He was wounded and left Spain in June 1937, with almost two years of war still to run.

More importantly, he interpreted the May Days principally as a conflict within the revolutionary left. From his position, the growth of Communist power and the assault on the POUM naturally dominated the story. This was a compelling street-level view, but one unable to encompass the state trying to reconstruct an army, restore public order, coordinate the war industry, feed swelling urban populations, and cope with refugees and military defeat.⁴ The confrontation at Barcelona’s telephone exchange was not simply a Communist plot to destroy a purer revolution. It grew from a struggle over who controlled communications and armed forces in a state at war. Sectarian maneuvering mattered, but so did institutional collapse, hunger, the demands of militarization, and the advance of Franco’s forces.

Nor was every effort to restore central authority evidence that Spain had become a Soviet satellite. Soviet arms gave the Communists leverage because Britain and France had denied the elected Republic access to normal arms markets while Germany and Italy continued to supply Franco. Spanish Communists and Comintern representatives did collude in repression, most notoriously in the murder of Nin. But the Republican government was not merely their instrument. When the surviving POUM leaders were tried in 1938, Communist pressure failed to produce a Moscow-style show trial. The court rejected the claim that the party had served Franco, observed legal procedure, and imposed prison sentences rather than executions.⁵ That distinction would be incomprehensible if “Soviet control” explained everything.

The book’s afterlife magnified its narrowness. Orwell died in 1950, just as the Cold War was hardening. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four made him the canonical witness against totalitarianism, and Homage to Catalonia was increasingly read backward through those later works. The suppression of the POUM became a parable in which the whole Spanish Republic stood for Communist betrayal. What had been written as a personal war diary was repeatedly made to prove “Communist control,” or even “Soviet control,” of Republican Spain.⁶

This was not Orwell’s message. He remained convinced that Francoism had to be defeated and later described Spain as Europe’s front line against Nazism. His testimony does something both smaller and more valuable than explaining the entire war. It shows what political language, comradeship, revolutionary equality, and organized falsehood looked like to a particular militiaman at a particular turning point. The error lies less in the book than in asking it to see beyond its horizon.

Borkenau: a revolution viewed twice

Franz Borkenau offers an illuminating comparison because his field of vision was both wider and more explicitly analytical. A former member of the German Communist Party who had worked within the Comintern apparatus, he arrived in Spain already disillusioned with Stalinism. He travelled through Republican territory from August to September 1936 and returned early in 1937. The Spanish Cockpit, published while the war was still being fought, combined dated observations with an attempt to explain the social and political forces behind them.

Its great advantage is the double exposure. On his first arrival, Barcelona seemed to display a workers’ revolution in material form. Red and black flags covered buildings, factories announced that they had been taken over, armed workers filled the streets, and conventional authority had almost vanished. Yet Borkenau also noticed continuity amid the spectacle. Trams, buses, water, and electricity still functioned. A hotel requisitioned partly for militiamen continued to receive guests. The burning of a church could resemble an administrative operation rather than a frenzy: firemen contained the blaze while a quiet crowd watched.

By the time of his second visit, the outward signs of revolution were fading. Uniformed police and conventional dress had returned. Food queues were longer, political distrust sharper, and Communist influence stronger. The anarchist and POUM vision of a social revolution fought through decentralized militias was losing ground to the demand for a centralized state and regular army. Because Borkenau had seen the city in both phases, he could describe the change that a single visit might mistake for an enduring condition.

His diary also preserves useful contradictions. Worker control could be efficient in one enterprise and chaotic in another. Revolutionary terror was real, but it did not always follow the simple image of an uncontrollable mob. Regular officers could possess technical knowledge yet remain politically distrusted, while enthusiastic volunteers could be sent toward the front with almost no training. His observations on collectivized enterprises, militia organization, and the atmosphere of the Republican rear remain valuable because the details often withstand comparison with other evidence.⁷

Borkenau was unusually candid about his method. He kept mistaken generalizations as well as accurate observations, distinguishing both from facts corrected before publication. The point was to show how a revolution changed the observer’s understanding as events unfolded. This honesty is a strength, but it does not neutralize perspective. His break with Communism made him exceptionally alert to the growth of Communist authority and to the conversion of revolutionary violence into police repression. It also disposed him to see the Spanish conflict as another stage in the totalitarian development he already feared. His arrest in Valencia after a Communist official denounced his manuscript understandably sharpened that conviction.

The result is a superb moving snapshot rather than a stable political map. Borkenau could travel more widely than Orwell, but brief visits encouraged national generalizations from local encounters. His sociological explanations sometimes become schematic, and his descriptions of “Spanish” character can sound like the inherited cultural stereotypes of an educated foreign traveler. As with Orwell, the proper correction is not dismissal. Borkenau’s biases tell us where to check him; they do not erase the factories, offices, roads, prisons, and conversations he actually observed.

Hemingway: when fiction becomes evidence

For Whom the Bell Tolls presents a different problem because its strongest claim is imaginative rather than documentary. The novel follows Robert Jordan, an American volunteer attached to Republican guerrillas, during roughly three days in the mountains northwest of Madrid. His task is to destroy a bridge at the precise moment a Republican offensive begins, preventing Nationalist reinforcements from reaching the battlefield. Around that mission, Hemingway constructs a tragedy of love, loyalty, courage, disillusionment, and approaching death.

The operation is fiction, but it is attached to history. The offensive resembles the unsuccessful attack on Segovia at the end of May 1937. The novel’s Republican general Golz draws on Soviet commanders in Spain; the journalist Karkov is recognizably Mikhail Koltsov, the celebrated Pravda correspondent who moved among the Soviet advisers and senior Republican leadership. The guerrilla setting incorporates information Hemingway gathered about partisan operations. Its picture of Communist and Soviet life at the Hotel Gaylord in Madrid remains especially illuminating, even though the conversations are invented.

Hemingway’s military truth often resides in friction. Blowing the bridge is technically simple; destroying it neither too early nor too late is almost impossible. Golz reduces the entire problem to a paradox:

“To blow the bridge is nothing … Merely to blow the bridge is a failure.”⁸

Orders may change. The attack may be postponed. Artillery, aircraft, infantry, staff, and guerrillas do not share one reliable clock. Information moves through frightened or ambitious people. A plan designed in Madrid encounters snow, horses, quarrels, sentries, bad luck, and the independent judgment of those expected to die for it. The novel is persuasive not because Robert Jordan can be found in an archive, but because the mission dramatizes the uncertainty that operational records tend to smooth away.

Its Spaniards are also more internally divided than a simple work of Republican propaganda would require. Pablo was once a formidable revolutionary leader; he has become fearful, possessive, and exhausted. Pilar remains brave but carries the memory of atrocities committed by her own side. Anselmo supports the Republic yet hates killing. Robert Jordan believes that discipline is necessary while recognizing incompetence, cruelty, and deception among his allies. The book does not pretend that antifascism purifies everyone who fights for it.

Yet Hemingway’s access was itself political. He enjoyed contact with senior Communist figures and Soviet advisers unavailable to ordinary journalists. That privileged circle could distort his view, encouraging admiration for Communist military discipline and acceptance of attacks on anarchists as the necessary price of winning the war.⁹ The dispute over José Robles, the Spanish academic and translator who disappeared after working for the Soviet military mission, exposed the cost. John Dos Passos, the acclaimed American novelist and author of The 42nd Parallel, came to Spain trying to discover what had happened to his friend. Hemingway treated Robles’s presumed execution as an unpleasant necessity or as evidence that he must have been guilty. The quarrel destroyed their friendship. The episode does not prove that every Communist in Hemingway’s novel is idealized, but it shows how loyalty to the cause shaped what he was willing to ask.

Barea, who knew Hemingway through the Madrid censorship office, thought the deeper limitation was social. Foreign writers revolved in their own circle of hotels, bars, International Brigade officers, news brokers, and other foreigners. Hemingway travelled with Communist and military contacts and worked on Joris Ivens’s film The Spanish Earth. His Spanish and his knowledge of bullfighting took him further into the culture than many visitors, but Barea still sensed a distance between nearly understanding Castilian meanings and inhabiting them. In 1941 he published an essay with the unforgiving title “Not Spain but Hemingway.”¹⁰

That judgment is too absolute. No novelist gives us “Spain”; Barea did not either. Hemingway created a deliberately concentrated moral landscape, and its power depends on concentration. The danger came when readers and historians treated the most unforgettable invention as a report.

Pilar’s account of the killings in Pablo’s town is the novel’s central example. After the local Civil Guards surrender, the town’s suspected fascists are confined in the town hall. Pablo arranges two lines of villagers across the square, armed with flails, clubs, pitchforks, and sickles. One prisoner after another is forced between them, beaten, and thrown over a cliff into the river. The scene grows from solemn punishment into drunken collective savagery. Its force lies not only in physical horror but in moral disintegration. Personal grievances enter political justice; spectators become killers; and people who hesitate are absorbed by the crowd. Pilar compresses the moral disaster into five words:

“We have begun badly.”

The setting unmistakably evokes Ronda, the Andalusian town above its famous gorge. Older general histories accepted the connection, describing Hemingway’s episode as close to what had happened there and repeating the story of victims thrown from the cliffs.¹¹ Literature appeared to have captured an atrocity whose essential outline history could confirm.

Local research has since broken that agreement. There is no substance to the claim that large numbers of right-wing prisoners were hurled into Ronda’s gorge. Murders did occur in Ronda, and the victims of revolutionary violence were real; they were shot, principally in the cemetery. The Gorge Story was broadcast by the rebel general Queipo de Llano on 18 August 1936 and later popularized internationally by Hemingway.¹² A Nationalist propaganda claim, transformed by a novelist into a scene of extraordinary moral complexity, acquired the authority of eyewitness truth and then returned to historical writing.

This does not make Pilar’s chapter worthless or dishonest. The social mechanisms Hemingway depicts—fear, vengeance, coercion, intoxication, the conversion of neighbours into political categories—belong to the history of revolutionary violence. The factual correction is nevertheless essential. The reality of murder does not authenticate every story told about its method, and moral truth cannot be used as a license to preserve a false detail. Indeed, the episode becomes even more instructive once corrected. It shows how myth is made: propaganda supplies the claim, literature supplies the unforgettable form, and historians impressed by its plausibility give it retrospective confirmation.

For Whom the Bell Tolls should therefore be read neither as a disguised memoir nor as historical decoration. It is evidence of how the war was imagined by a committed and unusually well-connected foreign novelist. It illuminates the strain of military operations, the ethics of political violence, and the psychology of men and women living under extreme pressure. Where it names a place without naming it, models a fictional character on a real person, or turns a reported atrocity into a set piece, the historian’s work begins rather than ends.

Barea and Chaves Nogales: putting Spaniards back into Spain

The foreign witness occupies a disproportionate place in the English-language memory of the conflict. This is understandable: Orwell and Hemingway are major writers, their books remained in print, and their outsider status helped them explain unfamiliar politics to foreign readers. It also reproduces the social world Barea observed in Madrid, where correspondents often circulated among themselves and Spain became a stage on which international ideological dramas were performed.

Arturo Barea was a Madrid-born Spaniard whose route to authorship ran through clerical work, military service in Morocco, trade-union politics, and finally the Republic’s wartime information apparatus. He did not come to the conflict as an already celebrated man of letters. His authority grew from having lived within many of the institutions and social divisions that foreign visitors encountered only after crossing the frontier.

The Forging of a Rebel changes the scale. Barea’s war cannot be detached from the Madrid neighbourhood of his childhood, clerical education, office work, labour politics, class aspiration, or military service in Morocco. The trilogy’s third part, The Clash, does not begin with an idealist crossing the frontier. It arrives after hundreds of pages showing how Spanish institutions and social relations were experienced from below. Colonial brutality in Morocco, the authority of the Church and army, unequal education, bureaucratic routine, working-class organization, and the frustrations of the Republic become lived continuities rather than background chapters.

During the war, Barea joined the Foreign Press Censorship Office and became its head in Madrid after the government left for Valencia in November 1936. This placed him at the junction between experience and representation. He helped decide what foreign correspondents could send while shells struck the city around them. He watched military secrecy, Republican propaganda, the demands of overseas editors, professional ambition, and genuine courage interact in the production of “news.”

One small episode captures the process. An English journalist wrote about Gloria, a lift operator who continued working in Madrid’s exposed Telefónica building under shellfire. Her bravery was real. Yet he turned her into a dark Spanish beauty wearing a red rose because London readers expected their portion of local colour—the familiar “Carmen” Spain.¹³ Nothing needed to be wholly invented. Stereotype entered through the details that made the true event marketable.

Barea was not outside this machinery. He was a censor and later the “Unknown Voice of Madrid,” broadcasting stories meant to sustain sympathy for the Republic. His great subject became ordinary endurance: street cleaners washing blood from the pavement, tram bells sounding during raids, telephone workers remaining at their posts, children collecting warm shell fragments, and frightened people continuing the routines of a city. Looking back on the stories he began writing amid the war, he recalled discovering:

“I could write honestly and with truth of what I had seen.”¹⁴

His aim was to reveal the war’s dark psychological and social undercurrents by giving voice to common people rather than beginning with theory.

That ambition makes The Forging of a Rebel an indispensable corrective to the foreigner’s dramatic visit. It also requires its own cautions. Barea wrote the trilogy in exile, after defeat, breakdown, the collapse of his first marriage, and conflicts with an increasingly Communist-influenced bureaucracy. The shape of a life is clearest in retrospect, partly because retrospect creates the shape. The book’s English text is itself a product of exile and collaboration. The volumes appeared between 1941 and 1946; Ilsa Barea translated much of the trilogy, and the later Spanish edition had to be translated back from English after the original manuscript was lost.¹⁵ The voice feels direct, but its route to the reader was complex.

Manuel Chaves Nogales offers another Spanish corrective in a more openly hybrid form. A Seville-born reporter and newspaper editor, he had written about subjects ranging from aviation and bullfighting to Soviet Russia and the rise of fascism in Europe before the Civil War. The verified English title of his 1937 collection is Heroes & Beasts of Spain; its Spanish title, A sangre y fuego: héroes, bestias y mártires de España, might be rendered more literally as By Fire and Sword: Heroes, Beasts and Martyrs of Spain. Chaves was a liberal democrat who described himself as both anti-Fascist and anti-revolutionary. He remained in Madrid as editor of a pro-government newspaper until the Republican government departed for Valencia, then went into exile.

The book’s nine stories deliberately blur report and fiction. Chaves said that he wanted to use either factual or invented situations to express his opposition to cruelty and stupidity. His characters wear literary masks, but the situations derive from events he saw or investigated. This is not an evasion of truth so much as a statement about method: invention may combine dispersed experiences into a representative human conflict. His stories refuse the comforting division between heroes on one’s own side and beasts on the other. Fascist repression, revolutionary murder, cowardice, mercy, accident, and moral courage cross political categories.

That independence preserved experiences, partisan narratives excluded. It can also slide into a symmetry that later research complicates. There were atrocities in both zones, and Republican killings cannot be explained away as propaganda. But the two repressions were not identical in origin, structure, or scale. Research conducted after the end of the dictatorship suggests that killings by the rebels and the Franco regime were roughly three times those in Republican territory. The generals planned terror as an instrument of conquest and postwar rule; violence in Republican areas followed the coup-induced collapse of state authority, was more reactive and fragmented, and was increasingly restrained as the government recovered control.¹⁶ Chávez’s moral position was uncompromising:

“An insuperable hatred of all stupidity and cruelty.”

That hatred is morally coherent. It is not, by itself, a complete explanation of the violence.

Barea and Chaves do not replace Orwell, Borkenau, or Hemingway with an authentic national voice. Spaniards were divided by region, class, religion, generation, and politics; no one of them could speak for the country. Their importance is that they alter the questions. Instead of asking only what Communism, fascism, or revolution meant to the visiting intellectual, they ask what happened to neighbourhood, work, family, language, and memory when Spaniards became categories in somebody else’s war.

Guernica: history without reportage

Picasso’s Guernica extends the matter of historicity from words to images. Including it does more than add a famous work of art to a discussion of famous books. The mural presents the question in its purest form: how can a representation that is visibly not a factual record become the defining historical image of an event?

The Republican government commissioned Picasso in January 1937 to produce a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition. He had not settled on his subject when, on 26 April, aircraft of the German Condor Legion and Italian Aviazione Legionaria attacked Guernica, the symbolic centre of Basque identity. The town had no effective anti-aircraft defences. Successive waves of bombers used high explosives and incendiaries, while fighters strafed people fleeing into the surrounding fields. The raid destroyed much of the town and killed many civilians. Early estimates ran as high as 1,654 dead; later research generally places the number in the low hundreds. The reduction is important, but it does not vindicate the Nationalist claim that retreating Basques had burned their own town.¹⁷

The denial began immediately. Franco’s headquarters blamed “red hordes”; the Spanish Church supported the story; later defenders claimed that the bombers had aimed at a bridge and missed because of the wind. Operational evidence contradicts both versions. The bridge survived, but the weather does not explain the systematic attack, and anti-personnel weapons and incendiaries made no sense against a stone crossing. Condor Legion commander Wolfram von Richthofen’s diary recorded Guernica as the target and then noted that it was burning.¹⁸ The historical event is therefore not mysterious in its essentials, even though casualty estimates, intentions, and language remain contested.

Picasso began his first sketch on 1 May, less than a week after the raid. Rudolf Arnheim’s The Genesis of a Painting reconstructs the mural’s development through dated sketches and studio photographs of the canvas as it evolved. His central distinction is exact: the bombing supplied the work’s substance, not its image.¹⁹

Nothing in the painting attempts to recreate the attack as a correspondent might. There are no Junkers bombers, no map, no Basque oak, no market square, and no visible perpetrators. Reports of the raid did not describe a bull or wounded horse of the kind dominating the mural. A mother holds her dead child; a dismembered warrior lies beneath the horse; women flee, burn, stare, and raise a lamp. Bodies and buildings occupy an impossible compressed space. The aggressor is known through effects rather than portrayed in action.

The near-monochrome palette increases the distance from reportage. Arnheim observes that there is no red blood, no stable distinction between fire and light, and no difference of colour between the living and the dead. Black, white, and grey reduce the scene toward an interpretive statement—closer to the visual representation of an idea than to an optical record.²⁰ This abstraction is why the mural can represent Guernica and also cities bombed before and after it. Its universality is not a departure from the historical event, but Picasso’s method of making one event carry the drama of Spain.

That breadth has encouraged a search for a code: the bull is Franco, fascism, brutality, Spain, or Picasso himself; the horse is the people, the Republic, or Nationalist Spain; the electric light is technology, interrogation, or the unseeing modern world. The sketches show that the figures and their relations changed as Picasso worked. Arnheim interprets the bull as a form of enduring, detached strength and the horse as suffering, but he does not reduce the mural to a key of fixed equivalents. Picasso himself frustrated interrogators by insisting that the bull was a bull and the horse a horse, though on another occasion, he allowed the bull an association with brutality and darkness.²¹

The refusal of a fixed code does not empty the painting of historical meaning. It warns against treating a symbol as if it were a one-to-one translation. The mural is, in Arnheim’s phrase, an “intricate tissue of thoughts,” not merely an outcry.²² It contains death, terror, helplessness, endurance, illumination, and accusation without assigning each idea to a single emblem. Its lack of visible bombers makes the suffering fill the pictorial field, but its title prevents that suffering from becoming wholly anonymous.

The title is crucial. Call the mural War, and it becomes a universal lament. Call it Guernica, and the broken bodies remain attached to a Basque town attacked by German and Italian aircraft in support of Franco. The name resists the very abstraction made possible by the imagery. Conversely, the imagery prevents the event from remaining a local episode in the northern campaign. Historical specificity and universal meaning hold one another in tension.

Arnheim’s analysis is itself a reminder that expertise has boundaries. Writing originally in 1962, he was concerned with visual thinking and the creative process, not with producing the final operational history of the raid. His brief account speaks principally of German aircraft and even describes the Republican government in January 1937 as “in exile.” Later research provides a more exact account of German and Italian participation, Basque politics, Nationalist denial, and changing casualty estimates. Arnheim remains invaluable for a different question: not exactly what happened on 26 April, but how an event became an image.

That transformation had immediate political consequences. Reports by George Steer brought the destruction to international attention, and Guernica made the Spanish pavilion famous. The bombing became the Republic’s greatest victory in the propaganda war, particularly because the victims were Basques, who were conservative and Catholic as well as allied with the Republic. Yet Western non-intervention did not change.²³ An image could conquer memory while failing to alter policy.

This is a myth in its most defensible sense. The painting is not accurate because it depicts the raid’s matériel; it is accurate because it rejects the aggressors’ attempt to make civilian destruction disappear. At the same time, viewers should not ask for aircraft types, responsibility within the Nationalist command, or a death toll. Guernica tells the truth of an event by refusing to look like a photograph of it. History must restore the names and mechanisms that universality leaves outside the frame.

The Falling Soldier: When the camera’s promise is disputed

If Guernica openly refuses literal reportage, Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier seems to promise the opposite. A militiaman in civilian clothes, cartridge pouches strapped across his chest, falls backward on a bare slope as his rifle escapes his hand. There is no enemy, wound, or battle in the frame. Yet the camera appears to have isolated the precise border between life and death. That apparent immediacy made the photograph one of the defining images of modern war—and made the question of authenticity unusually consequential.

The photograph first appeared in the French magazine Vu on 23 September 1936 alongside a second image of another militiaman falling at what looks like almost the same spot. Vu did not identify the location or describe the circumstances. When the better-known frame appeared in Life in July 1937, however, its caption claimed that Capa’s camera had caught a Spanish soldier at the instant a bullet passed through his head near Córdoba. Reproduction supplied what the image alone could not: a battlefield, a cause, and a death. As it passed through magazines and histories, the photograph became more famous under the short title The Falling Soldier than under its more specific traditional title, Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936.²⁴

The controversy is often compressed into one question—was the photograph staged?—but at least three questions are involved. Did the militiamen pose or perform manoeuvres for the camera? Did this particular fall coincide with a real bullet strike and death? And are the accepted place, date, and identity correct? A posed exercise could have been interrupted by genuine gunfire; conversely, a real-looking fall need not have occurred in combat. Evidence about one question does not automatically settle the others.

Doubts entered wide circulation in 1975 through a recollection that Republican troops had staged manoeuvres for photographers when there was no fighting nearby. The most elaborate defence of the photograph reconstructed Capa’s sequence of pictures and identified the man as Federico Borrell García, an anarchist militiaman from Alcoy known to have died at Cerro Muriano on 5 September at the age of 24. Distinctive cartridge boxes were linked to the Alcoy militia, Borrell’s brother recognized him, and a homicide detective interpreted the curled fingers of the falling man’s limp left hand as evidence that he was already dead rather than consciously breaking a rehearsed fall. Significantly, even this defence allowed that the men may initially have been fooling, posing, and firing for Capa before hidden enemy fire suddenly made the scene real.²⁵

A later topographical investigation attacked the traditional account at its foundation. Comparison of the hills visible across Capa’s surviving series placed the photographs not at Cerro Muriano but near Espejo, roughly fifty kilometres away. Borrell died at Cerro Muriano, reportedly while taking cover behind a tree; no such tree appears in the photograph. More damagingly, there was no combat at the proposed Espejo location when the pictures must have been taken. The battle there began only on 22 September, one day before Vu published the photographs in Paris. If the landscape identification is right, the image cannot show Borrell dying at Cerro Muriano, and it is very unlikely to show anyone killed in battle at Espejo on that occasion.²⁶

Relocation does not, by itself, reveal exactly how the man fell. The two photographs of different men collapsing in nearly identical framing, together with other frames of militiamen apparently performing for the camera, make some degree of arrangement highly plausible. They do not preserve what occurred immediately beyond the edges of the sequence. The prudent conclusion is therefore narrower than either complete vindication or a solved fraud: the familiar caption cannot now be repeated as established fact, the identification as Borrell is badly undermined, and the traditional battlefield-death interpretation remains unproven.²⁷

That uncertainty does not make the photograph historically unimportant. It changes what it can prove. Even if staged, it remains evidence of how Republican resistance was pictured, how magazines converted an ambiguous frame into a report of a specific death, and how photographic form creates belief. But it could no longer serve as evidence that the pictured man was killed at that moment. A novelist may invent an episode and still convey an experiential truth; a painter may abandon optical realism and state the terms of the transformation. Photojournalism makes a different pact. Its force depends upon the viewer’s belief that, whatever the composition or caption may omit, the event before the lens actually occurred.

What later historians change

The best later histories do not decide which literary witness “was right” and discard the rest. They change scale. Local archives, military records, diplomatic correspondence, demographic work, oral history, and research into mass graves allow historians to place a participant’s truth inside structures no participant could see.

The international structure is the largest omission from the books considered here. Orwell experienced the shortage of weapons and understood the political leverage Soviet aid created, but his narrative could not show the diplomatic system that produced it. Britain and France sponsored Non-Intervention in August 1936, barring arms supplies to Spain. Germany and Italy signed while continuing to aid the rebels. The arrangement, therefore, operated overwhelmingly against the Republic. Soviet intervention was important and politically costly, but it took place within an unequal contest in which Franco received sustained state support from two fascist powers while the democracies helped deny the Republic an ordinary market for arms.²⁸

This larger field changes the interpretation of Republican politics. Militarization and centralization were not simply ideological victories by Communists over anarchists and dissident Marxists. They were also responses to battlefield defeat, shortages, the breakup of the prewar army, uncontrolled armed groups, refugee movements, and the need to feed cities and coordinate production. Communist influence cannot be understood without the arms that arrived from the Soviet Union; neither can it be understood if Soviet influence is allowed to swallow every Spanish institution and decision.

Research on repression supplies another necessary correction. Eyewitnesses saw bodies, arrests, burning churches, clandestine prisons, executions, and fear. They could accurately describe an atrocity while misunderstanding the system around it. The violence in Republican territory was appalling, especially during the collapse of authority in 1936. But the rebel command had conceived exemplary terror before and during the coup as a means of eliminating political and social opposition. That terror continued through conquest and after victory as state policy. Local studies, many of which were only possible after Franco’s death, indicate a quantitative as well as qualitative difference.²⁹ “Both sides committed atrocities” is true; if used as the final conclusion, it is radically incomplete.

Later history can also correct earlier history. The Ronda gorge demonstrates that professional historians are not immune to narrative seduction. The episode entered important general histories because Hemingway’s authority and the undeniable reality of Republican killing made it plausible. Its correction emerged from later local research. Historiography is not a tribunal delivering one permanent verdict; it is a method of revising claims when the evidential ground changes.

The same principle applies to numbers at Guernica. Reducing an early casualty estimate is not denial, just as confirming Nin’s NKVD-directed murder does not prove that the Soviet Union controlled the entire Republic. Good history resists package deals. A reader need not choose between accepting every Republican claim and accepting Francoist propaganda, between believing Orwell on the POUM and adopting his whole political map, or between recognizing Hemingway’s insight and defending his geography.

How to read the witnesses now

A useful reading begins by mapping the witness. Dates, places, language ability, political connections, access, and intended audience establish what the author was in a position to know. Orwell’s weeks in Barcelona cannot testify directly to Andalusia; Hemingway’s access to Soviet circles gives him information and a social filter; Barea’s censorship work reveals how news was produced but also implicates him in that production. “Eyewitness” is the beginning of a question, not the end of one.

The next step is to separate the levels of statement. A writer may describe what he saw, repeat what someone told him, infer a hidden cause, and offer a general theory within the same paragraph. The physical condition of Orwell’s rifle belongs to a different evidential class from his judgment about the Soviet Union. Borkenau helpfully marked some of his generalizations as changing impressions. Modern readers should extend that distinction to every source.

Genre then determines the test. A memoir can be checked against other witnesses and records without assuming perfect recollection. A diary can preserve immediacy while reproducing rumours. An autobiography can reveal a social world while giving a life more coherence than it possessed at the time. A novel should not be raided for facts as if its invented characters were informants, but neither should it be excluded from cultural and emotional history. A painting can become evidence for public memory, propaganda, and artistic response without becoming a photograph. A photograph demands a further distinction among what the camera observed, what the photographer arranged, and what editors or captions later claimed.

Finally, the memorable scene deserves the hardest scrutiny. The more perfectly an anecdote summarizes an argument, the more likely readers are to repeat it and the more important it is to verify. Ronda’s gorge, the revolutionary Barcelona frozen in December 1936, the Communist hotel, the screaming horse, and the falling militiaman each make a part stand for a whole. Some survive checking, some require narrowing, and some turn out to be myths. Their emotional force is not evidence of falsehood, but neither is it evidence of fact.

This approach preserves what is best in the witnesses. Correction need not drain experience from history. We can reject the literal Ronda story and still learn from Pilar’s terrible account of crowd violence. We can qualify Orwell’s politics while trusting his trench. We can use Borkenau’s changing impressions precisely because they changed. We can recognize Barea’s retrospective construction while hearing the Madrid tram bells he remembered under bombardment. We can insist on German and Italian responsibility at Guernica while allowing Picasso’s victims to stand for more than one town. We can recognize Capa’s photograph as an icon without treating its traditional caption as verified history.

History and myth

The Spanish Civil War attracted writers because it seemed to force history into moral clarity: fascism against democracy, revolution against reaction, truth against propaganda. Those conflicts were real, but nobody experienced them at the scale at which they were named. Individuals encountered a cold parapet, a censorship desk, a village square, a hotel bar, a prison cell, or the sound of aircraft. Literature turned those fragments into intelligible wholes.

That act of construction made the war memorable. It also ensured that memory would be uneven. Orwell made the internal struggle of the Republican left visible to generations that might otherwise have forgotten it. Hemingway gave Republican sacrifice a tragic international language, while helping a false story about Ronda cross the boundary into history. Borkenau captured a revolution changing before his eyes. Barea and Chaves restored Spanish lives obscured by the foreign ideological pilgrimage. Picasso made the destruction of one town impossible to erase, even as his mural transcended everything a picture of that town could literally show. Capa’s falling militiaman demonstrates how the camera’s seeming transparency can turn a contested caption into collective memory.

Modern historians give us a war larger than any of these works: more Spanish, more international, more materially constrained, and more asymmetrical in its systems of violence. Yet a history composed only at that scale would lose what the writers preserved. The answer to “history or myth?” is therefore not to choose one shelf. It is to read across them, asking each work to answer only the questions its form, position, and evidence allow.

The Spanish Civil War reached the world as both an event and a representation. We understand it best when we refuse to confuse the two—and refuse, with equal care, to imagine that they can ever be completely separated.

Bibliography 

Arnheim, Rudolf. 2006. The Genesis of a Painting: Picasso’s Guernica. Berkeley: University of California Press. First published 1962.

Barea, Arturo. 2018. The Forging of a Rebel. Translated by Ilsa Barea. London: Pushkin Press.

Beevor, Antony. 2006. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. London: Penguin.

Borkenau, Franz. 2016. The Spanish Cockpit: An Eye-Witness Account of the Political and Social Conflicts of the Spanish Civil War. Christie Books. First published 1937.

Chaves Nogales, Manuel. 1937. Heroes & Beasts of Spain. New York: Doubleday, Doran.

Graham, Helen. 2005. The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Graham, Helen. “Introduction.” In Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell. London: Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2021.

Hemingway, Ernest. 1940. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. n.d. “Robert Capa: The Falling Soldier.”

Orwell, George. 2021. Homage to Catalonia. London: Macmillan Collector’s Library. First published 1938.

Preston, Paul. 2007. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. New York: W. W. Norton.

Preston, Paul. 2013. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: W. W. Norton.

Susperregui, José Manuel. 2016. “The Location of Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier.” Communication & Society 29 (2): 17–43.

Thomas, Hugh. 2013. The Spanish Civil War. London: Penguin.

Townson, Nigel. “Introduction.” In The Forging of a Rebel, by Arturo Barea, 7–13. Translated by Ilsa Barea. London: Pushkin Press, 2018.

Whelan, Richard. 2002. “Proving That Robert Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’ Is Genuine: A Detective Story.” Aperture, no. 166.

Notes

1. Borkenau 2016, introduction to the diary.↩︎

2. Orwell 1938, chaps. 10–14; Graham 2005, 64–66; Preston 2007, 302–05.↩︎

3. Orwell 1938, chap. 14; Preston 2007, 407.↩︎

4. Graham, “Introduction”; Graham 2005, 63–67.↩︎

5. Graham 2005, 107–08; Preston 2007, 304–06.↩︎

6. Graham, “Introduction”.↩︎

7. Borkenau 2016, entries for August 1936 and January 1937; Beevor 2006, 111–17.↩︎

8. Hemingway 1940, chap. 1; Thomas 2013, account of the Segovia offensive and bibliographical note; Preston 2007, 191.↩︎

9. Beevor 2006, 245–47.↩︎

10. Barea 2018, The Clash, part 2, chap. 6; Townson 2018, introduction.↩︎

11. Thomas 2013, 245; Beevor 2006, 87–88.↩︎

12. Preston 2013, 171–72.↩︎

13. Barea 2018, 663.↩︎

14. Barea 2018, 694–96; Townson 2018, introduction.↩︎

15. Townson, “Introduction,” 7–13..↩︎

16. Chaves Nogales 1937, 1–7; Preston 2013, xiii–xviii.↩︎

17. Graham 2005, 70–71; Beevor 2006, 231–34.↩︎

18. Beevor 2006, 232–34.↩︎

19. Arnheim 2006, 17–19.↩︎

20. Arnheim 2006, 25–26.↩︎

21. Arnheim 2006, 23–24, 43, 127 n. 23.↩︎

22. Arnheim 2006, 23–24, 43, 127 n. 23.↩︎

23. Beevor 2006, 240–41, 249.↩︎

24. Whelan 2002; Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Robert Capa: The Falling Soldier.”↩︎

25. Whelan 2002.↩︎

26. Susperregui 2016, 17–43.↩︎

27. Whelan 2002; Susperregui 2016, 17–43.↩︎

28. Graham 2005, 38–41.↩︎

29. Preston 2007, 356; Preston 2013, xiii–xviii.↩︎