nimh wrote:Finally, I read almost all of this book, except that I saved the last twenty or thirty pages for a trainride I was planning to make to the Domela Nieuwenhuis Museum in Heerenveen this summer (Nieuwenhuis being the legendary, fiercely loved and hated Dutch 19th century anarchist - it seemed like an appropriate trip to combine with finishing this book):
Hans Magnus Enzensberger - The Short Summer of Anarchy
So - I never made that trip - and eventually totally forgot about those remaining thirty pages. Until something reminded me the other day. Finished the book now after all. Great read. Very engaging; you can't help but feel the reverberation of the events inside yourself, and thus also grieve over Durutti's death when it comes. Yet a hagiography it is not in the least, exactly because of the style I already described: not a linear story, but a collection of testimonies, snippets from many different sources, from interviews with anarchist survivors, accounts from foreign observers, pieces of communist, anarchist or fascist agitprop - all presented side by side without commentary, except for eight brief thematic/chronological interludes.
As much as the book engages you in the subject of the Spanish civil war, described, through this technique, as a prism of varying, sometimes opposite experiences, what it teaches you is as much about the nature of sources as about Durutti's life. Reading Enzensberger's overview of accounts, presented without explicitation of what
he holds to be the truth, is an instructive experience - you find yourself looking up, for every single paragraph-long account of this or that event or occurrence, the name of the person in the index to see what corner he was describing it from; was he a communist supporter of the Soviets? A true-blooded anarchist? A disengaged observer? Is it recounted through the fog of memory? Was it taken from a newspaper back then, or a leaflet even - each with its own agenda? A hundred times you think, hey that could be ... then look up the name and go, oh, of course, in that case ... context is everything, in history. Enzensberger seems to have been concerned as much with telling us about that as about Durutti himself - a case study, kinda. As he notes, somewhere (sorry for my crappy translation):
Quote:The two books about the civil war that are considered the standard works on it both mention Durutti only on a few pages: but even the scarce amount of concrete information they provide is seriously at odds with each other. [examples snipped]. These discrepancies are no wonder and the historians can be reproached for them even less. Even the most dutiful research of sources will not be able to cut through the knot of what has been recounted; at most, one can use them to draw a "family tree" of the different versions. In such "family trees" one can observe how an obscure propaganda brochure is cited in a semi-academic work and thus acquires a certain respectability. From there, it turns up in serious treatises, in standard works and lexicons. The blind belief in the printed word is widely spread; as fact counts whatever has been cited often enough.
This continues right up to the accounts of Durutti's death. It was sudden, while he was visiting troops at the front, right there in Madrid where he'd led his unit to help fend off the fascists (admittedly without much success). He was shot. By a sniper from the top floors of the hospital building across the road, which the fascists still held, said the anarchist CNT-FAI's newspaper, repeated its leaders in speeches. By the communists, who feared his popularity and the way his principled position blocked their way to power, suspicious individual anarchists insisted. By one of his own men, one of the many who tried to desert from what was a ragtag undisciplined unit, when he was trying to stop him, rumoured Communist observers, a notion repeated in fascist propaganda. Through an accident, said the eyewitnesses, some only coming out with the truth long afterwards. When Durutti had stepped out of the car, his gun, an old, notoriously unreliable thing, got caught behind the door and went off. Bullet went straight through his lungs and heart.
One thing all the sources agreed on: Durutti left behind nothing. He had no possessions whatsoever. They could barely find a proper coat to bury him in. But the cavalcade in which his body was driven through Valencia, Barcelona, was surrounded by thousands, ordinary city folk, overmanned by grief - that, too, the sources seem to agree on.
