ABSTRACT
The historiography of Spanish Civil War and its origins has fallen into three categories: the work produced by the defeated Republicans, whether anarchist, socialist, communist or liberal; the out-pourings of writers in Spain, in some way or other at the service of the Franco regime; and lastly the work of ostensibly neutral foreigners, whether academics or journalists. The Spanish Civil War does not properly fit into the categories of fascism and anti-fascism. The long social crisis which led to the war might well, in an underdeveloped capitalist country which, like Spain, had lost an empire, have found its resolution in fascism. This chapter outlines the role of anti-fascism as a tradition and as subject of historiography in postwar West Germany. West German historiography in the 1950s largely worked on three lines: to exalt the 20 July as the German resistance and to play down all other more anti-fascist types of resistance as either little documented or questionable in their legitimacy.
