Europe’s – and Catalonia’s – sad history of exile

Exile has sadly been a fre­quent part of Eu­rope’s his­tory. For eco­nomic, re­li­gious and, above all, po­lit­i­cal rea­sons, many peo­ple have had to leave their homes and seek refuge in safe coun­tries. It is also the his­tory of Cat­alo­nia. When Re­pub­li­can troops re­treated 80 years ago, hun­dreds of thou­sands had to cross the Pyre­nees to save their lives and fu­tures, far from fas­cist Spain, which had won the Civil War. Among those who went were the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment and its pres­i­dent, Lluís Com­pa­nys. They were not the only ones, as the Basque gov­ern­ment and its Lehen­dakari (pres­i­dent) José An­to­nio Aguirre also fled, as did the gov­ern­ment of the Span­ish Re­pub­lic and its pres­i­dent, Manuel Azaña.

Exile is not just a re­al­ity that has a huge im­pact on peo­ple and fam­i­lies, it also rep­re­sents a cul­tural, sci­en­tific and human loss, from which coun­tries take a long time to re­cover. After the de­feat, many in­tel­lec­tu­als, writ­ers, jour­nal­ists, teach­ers, and sci­en­tists had to leave. The cul­tural im­pov­er­ish­ment was dev­as­tat­ing. Poets like An­to­nio Machado, mu­si­cians like Pau Casals, doc­tors like Dr Josep Trueta, had to save their lives in exile. Many of them went to refugee camps, in sub­hu­man con­di­tions. While those who sur­vived then had to con­front the tragedy of the Sec­ond World War. Franco asked Hitler to track down the Re­pub­li­cans who were in ter­ri­to­ries oc­cu­pied by the Nazis, and that was how the Ger­man po­lice ar­rested the Cata­lan pres­i­dent in Brit­tany, France. He was ex­tra­dited to Spain and after a brief war coun­cil, he was ex­e­cuted at Mon­tjuïc cas­tle in Barcelona. The ex­ter­mi­na­tion camps were filled with Re­pub­li­cans and Cata­lanists. Exile is part of the iden­tity of the peo­ples of Eu­rope. And sadly, Cata­lans, as a Eu­ro­pean peo­ple, still suf­fer from its open wounds. This month, we take a look at what exile meant for Cat­alo­nia in Feb­ru­ary 1939 in our fea­ture, Tales of Exile (pages 20-33). On an­other note, Caix­aFo­rum hosts the ex­hi­bi­tion ded­i­cated to the Ger­man painter Max Beck­mann. After know­ing great suc­cess as the “Ger­man Pi­casso”, he was then cen­sored by the Nazis. His work was dis­played in the no­to­ri­ous De­gen­er­ate Art ex­hi­bi­tion in Mu­nich in 1937, and af­ter­wards his life was also marked by exile.