Lorca's grave commemoration and the ethics of recovery in the era of mass death, a case study of the Spanish Civil War

In August of 1936 the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered by a killing squad loyal to Franco, his body deposited into a mass grave near the village of Alfacar in Spain. The scandal surrounding his murder and the disappearance of his body led to the attempted recovery of his remains in 2009, thirty four years after the death of Franco. This belated reclamation of the disappeared poet's remains was hastened by the Law of Historical Memory of 2007, a law enacted by the Spanish Parliament in order to facilitate and fund exhumations of mass graves throughout Spain. These exhumations were of the victims of the Franco regime, a matter of the memory of justice. By addressing the Law of Historical Memory, this thesis takes the resting place of Federico Garcia Lorca to illustrate the moral and ethical consequences of recovering and reforming history. Lorca's grave is what Pierre Nora would call a "lieu de memoire", a place of memory. As a contribution to the field of memory studies, my thesis studies the politics and ethics of recovery in an era of mass death, often thought to have begun after World War One. By drawing a distinction between exhumation and recovery, I explore the conditions under which commemorative acts, including exhumations on behalf of the vanquished, are founded upon moral and ethical principles. My study is largely inspired by Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History", specifically thesis VII, according to which not historical understanding but history itself belongs to the victor. If historicism is the belief that our understanding of a society or culture is derived from its history, then the victor, who writes history controls historical understanding. The recovery of memory in Spain on behalf of the vanquished allows us to consider the creation of an alternate history that confronts the past rather than forgetting and repeating the past.;Key Words: Federico Garcia Lorca; Walter Benjamin; historical memory,' Spanish Civil War; commemoration; morality; ethics...