ABSTRACT

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was not only a time of ferocious struggle. It was also a time of remarkable nonprofessional literary productivity. The anarchists, who until May 1937 were an influential political force in Republican Spain, were protagonists in this development which, in their minds, would complete the emancipation of the lower layers of society, the pueblo, in the field of culture. It is not surprising that the main nationalist topic that the anarchist literature established during the Spanish Civil War was the love for the great, archetypal national mother-Mother Spain. Before the Civil War, anarchist literature had already known allegories of a Great Mother, but these were Mother Nature or even Mother Anarchy. A drastic example of the connection between nationalism and racism is a poem by Flix Paredes, The Black Child. Light and dark, good and evil, life and death, sanity and decay, Spain and Africa the opposites could hardly be more clearly exposed.