Reconsidering a Lost Intellectual Project: Exiles’ Reflections on Cultural Differences
This book explores an aspect of the complex cultural history of 20th-century exile: the influences of transnational experiences on the views of emigrants and exiles concerning their own academic, scientific and intellectual cultures. These essays focus on the reflections of people who left their countries during the period of 1933–1945. Many of them reconsidered their own past in the old country and compared it with their actual experiences in the adopted homeland. The individual cases presented here share a similar theoretical framework. The book is divided into two sections: the first one focuses on the German and Spanish lost project, and the second one deals with the East European projects – focused on Polish and Rumanian examples above all.
From the perspective of transnational history, Merel Leeman analyzes the cases of two special exiles: George Mosse and Peter Gay. Spaniards’ American projects is the main topic of Carolina Rodríguez-López’s analysis of Spanish scholars in the US. Natacha Bolufer focuses on associations and newspapers like Liberación which paid special attention to Spanish leftists suffering from Franco’s political measures. José M. Faraldo looks at the cases of refugees from Eastern European countries – mainly from Romania and Poland – who escaped to Spain after the fall of the axis in 1945. Mihaela Albu describes the diversity and plurality of Romanian exiles in the Western world, in diverse countries of Europe and also in the US.
This book aims to encourage the dialogue and comparison among diverse exiles.
Carolina Rodríguez-López is Assistant Professor at Complutense University of Madrid. Her research interests include the history of the university (education institutions and academic elites alike), intellectual history and cultural transfers (mainly academic exiles) and historiography trends. Her publications include Tradición, autoridad y monarquía. Pío Zabala y Lera y su España bajo los Borbones (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2009) and La Universidad de Madrid en el primer franquismo: ruptura y continuidad (1939–1951) (Madrid: Dykinson, 2002).
José M. Faraldo is Profesor Investigador (Ramón y Cajal Program) at the Complutense University of Madrid. His researches focus on communism, nationalism, visual and popular culture and comparative history of the European resistance to fascism and communism. His publications include La Europa Clandestina. La Resistencia contra las ocupaciones nazi y soviética (1938–1948) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2011) and Europe, Nation, Communism: Essays on Poland (New York, Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 2008).
"National sided historiographies have failed to produce a comprehensive narrative of the complexities embedded in historical processes. Exiles have systematically been excluded from the official governmental representation of the past in many countries of Europe. In this regard, Spain is one of the most significant cases as most exiles they are still in a no man's land because to recover their intellectual projects inevitably pushes us to rethink and to reassess our naturalized understanding (still pretty much heir of the Francoist academia) of Western history over the 20th Century. Thus we can conclude that Reconsidering a Lost Intellectual Project contributes to fill an important gap. It success is on its diversity of approaches. Therefore Rodríguez López and Faraldo have edited a beautiful volume that sheds new light on a field where transnational historians still have a major task ahead. Nationalistic power interests are quite reluctant to accept any approach to History that displaces the construction of a national mythology. This volume challenges the attractiveness of reducing exiles testimonies into a plea for the mere recovery of their legacy or their appropriation for political interests."
- Pablo Valdiviam , history.transnational.
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