Remembering Gernika, 87 years on

"Gernika was already a symbolic town before it was bombed on 26^th April 1937 in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, which had resulted from a failed military coup. It was a symbol of the civil liberties of the Basque region, home to an oak tree that had served as a meeting site for its structures of governance throughout the Middle Ages and hence its spiritual centre. Following the outbreak of war in July 1936, the aerial bombardment of urban centres and civilians had become common. Preceding Gernika, there were aerial bombardments of Oxtandiano and Durango, as well as fleeing civilians on the roads out of Malaga; Madrid had been subjected to aerial bombardment multiple times since 27 August 1936. Eventually Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia and many other cities would also become targets; to give a sense of the scale, 15 urban centres along the Catalan coast were bombed in the space of a few weeks between December 1938 and January 1939.

Yet it is the bombing of Gernika that became the iconic instance. A lot went into this, not least the presence of a group of international journalists who were nearby and rushed to Gernika to see the aftermath of the attack for themselves. Picasso’s painting was partially inspired by and based on their reports. However the ancient symbolism of Gernika as their spiritual capital was central to how the bombing was interpreted in the town and in the wider Basque region. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing a false version of events was spun by the Francoist side, who worried about losing the support of key collaborators. They denied that the German and Italian air forces had been involved in the attack, instead accusing the Basques of setting fire to their own town. This blatant propaganda and deceit added to the symbolic weight of the destruction, as did the international press articles by the journalist George Lower Steer. Picasso’s painting, which was unveiled at the Paris Expo in the summer of 1937 and subsequently toured Europe and America in support of the Spanish Republican cause, added another layer and transformed ‘Guernica’ into a household name.

Given that Franco continued to deny that the bombing had taken place, it remained impossible for those living inside Spain to publicly mark or memorialise the attack on Gernika during his dictatorship; for years, it was also illegal to own a reproduction of Picasso’s painting. However following Franco’s death and Spain’s transition to democracy, not only was Guernica ‘repatriated’ from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Museo Reina Sophia II in Madrid—but the inhabitants of Gernika could also finally commemorate the attack on their home. This year, civil society organisations in Gernika are hosting their 34^th annual Culture & Peace Convention alongside a public memorial ceremony on April 26^th.

The bombing of Gernika was neither the first nor the last of its kind, nor were the propaganda battles that it inspired, as demonstrated by the work of Cambridge Heritage Research Fellow Dr. Erin O’Halloran, whose project, Gernika as Orient, connects the attack and the painting to colonial violence in the Middle East. Today the heritage of Gernika and the horror of the bombardment of civilan populations which it came to symbolise should loom large, and so today we remember Gernika."

The Cambridge Heritage Research Centre produced a series of videos on the subject