ABSTRACT
Within the context of the Spanish memorialist discourses about the consequences of the Civil War and Franco’s subsequent dictatorship, there is no scholarship that links resilience to memory. This chapter aims to fill in this gap by discussing the apparent impossibility of achieving a shared idea of a national identity in Spain. Through the analysis of Javier Cercas’ best-selling novel Soldados de Salamina about the Spanish Civil War, the author suggests that the novel proposes to overcome the entrenched, resilient positions that defend either forgetting the past or digging it up by exploring a third way towards reconciliation and the acknowledgement of the truth. While providing an account of the different perspectives on memory, the chapter suggest that Soldados de Salamina constitutes the sort of story that promotes understanding and the possibility of a consensual collective memory serving as the basis for the new integrative national identity.
