Spain's brain drain Raymond Carr THE DISINHERITED:
Spain's brain drain Raymond Carr THE DISINHERITED: THE EXILES WHO CREATED SPANISH CULTURE by Henry Kamen Penguin, £30, pp. 508, ISBN 9780713997672 © £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 England, by the 18th century, had ceased to drive large numbers of English citizens into exile. Exiles there were whose private conduct made them unacceptable in English society. Oscar Wilde was a homosexual, Byron an adulterer, Shelley an atheistic philanderer. Few Spaniards were driven abroad for their sexual transgressions. But for Henry Kamen political exile has been a permanent feature of Spanish life, starting with the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.
In the long struggle for power and place between liberals and reactionaries which began in 1808, the losers were driven into exile in Paris and London, where they conspired to overthrow the governments which had persecuted them and drive their persecutors into exile in their turn. In the disturbed conditions of military pronunciamentos and popular rebellions, politics in Spain was a dangerous profession.
In 1820 General Riego staged a liberal pronunciamento against the absolutist monarch, Ferdinand VII. When Ferdinand regained power in 1823 Riego was executed and his corpse dragged through the streets of Madrid by a donkey. As liberal prime ministers, Asquith and Lloyd George did not suffer such a fate at the hands of King George V. Between 1870 and 1921 four Spanish prime ministers were assassinated, a record for Western Europe. Kamen emphasises that in the descent of the Second Republic into anarchy in the summer of 1936 the cream of the conservative liberal intelligentsia sought refuge abroad, in fear of death at the hands of extremist uncontrollables or party militias as self-appointed agents of political cleansing. On 26 August Melquiades Alvarez, the former leader of the Republican Reformist party, now disillusioned with the Republic, was imprisoned and murderered. His old colleague Azana, now President of the Republic, was appalled and contemplated resignation.
Kamen's first two chapters treat the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and the Moors in 1609, as the first flood of exiles. But as permanent exiles they were quite distinct from the political exiles created by what Paul Preston has called the politics of revenge practised by Franco. General Navarez, a would-be military dictator of the 1860s, is alleged to have said on his deathbed, 'I have no enemies. I have shot them all.'
For Kamen the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors was an ethnic cleansing unparalleled in Western Europe until modern times. In 1492 Spain contained the largest Jewish community in the world. Subject to vicious popular pogroms, many had converted to Christianity in order to save their lives by becoming what were called 'new Christians'. But 'old Christians' maintained that their conversion could not be sincere since their blood was impure. In popular culture they even had tails to prove it. While there were any practising Jews left in Spain, these conversos would be tempted to relapse, so all non-converted Jews were expelled. Since no Jewish community as such remained in Spain, Jews could not make the contributions to culture they made, for instance, in Amsterdam, where Jewish communities survived. Converted Jews did make a contribution to Spanish culture. Saint Teresa had Jewish blood, but she wrote as a Christian Catholic mystic. What remained was what Kamen calls a corrosive antiSemitism. Jews came back into Spanish history when Republican politicians blamed Ferdinand and Isabella for expelling a dissident community that would have brought their country into the modern world. This doubtful hypothesis has been accepted by some modern historians.
The contribution of the Muslim Moors was of a different order. 'Islamic civilisation,' Kamen argues, 'made an indelible impact on Hispanic culture.' After the invasion of 711, the Moors occupied fourfifths of Spain; it took almost 800 years to reconquer Spain for Christianity, finally achieved with the capture of Granada in 1492. This long occupation could not fail to leave its mark on every aspect of culture, from philosophy, great buildings and splendid ceramics to everyday life evident in the numerous Arabic words in Castilian for vegetables and food generally. But as Kamen admits, Spain's Islamic legacy had long been neglected. English tourists in the 18th century lamented that the locals had let the Alhambra fall into ruins. It was American romantic historians like Washington Irving and George Ticknor who popularised Islamic Spain. The Spanish diplomat and novelist Juan Valera, on a visit to Washington in 1884, became familar with their names, but confessed he had not read them. The only American whom he had read was Henry James, whom he dismissed as 'all right but not in any way noteworthy'. Americans were friendly barbarians but culturally inferior to Spaniards. This intellectual hubris was to receive a severe blow in 1898. The Spanish fleet was blown out of the water by America's technologically advanced warships; in the subsequent peace treaty Spain lost the remnants of its once great overseas empire.
The contribution of exiles to Spanish culture is the central thesis of Kamen's book. Between 1830 and 1870 liberal exiles in Paris brought home in their baggage what they had learned from writers as diverse as Lamartine and Hugo, and thinkers such as the utopian socialist Fourier and the resolute reactionary de Maistre. That these imports influenced Spanish culture is indisputable; but Kamen does not justify the claim of his subtitle, that exiles created Spanish culture. Cervantes, the greatest and most influential Spaniard of all time, fought abroad but was not an exile but a prisoner of war in Algiers, nor was the popular novelist Galdos, the Dickens of Spain.
The shock of the humiliating defeat of Spain by the US in 1898, called simply 'The Disaster', produced a profound change in Spanish culture. It gave rise to a home-grown native intelligentsia that resembled that of Russia, as self-appointed diagnosticians of backwardness and prophets of regeneration. Foreign influence was, as always, still strong; but Spain was no longer the cultural satellite of France. The men of the so-called generation of 1898 were disciples of the obscure German philosopher Karl Krause, who died in 1832. Whereas the French were frivolous rationalists, the Germans had the serious ethical purpose necessary for the regeneration of Spain. Dismissed from their university posts in 1867 as heretical liberals, they founded the Free Institute of Education which would breed, in up-todate secondary schools, a modernising elite. Their models included the elite public schools of Britain with their emphasis on clean living and sport, and the tutorial system of Oxford and Cambridge. The secretary of the Institute had an interview with the formidable Platonist Dr Jowett, Master of Balliol. The philosophes of the 1900s, unlike mid-century liberals, were less concerned with the economic policies that might bring prosperity. That was the job of politicians, engineers and capitalists.
In Russia, Westerners battled with reactionary, nationalist Slavophiles. In Spain Ortega y Gasset was a Westerner, with his slogan that if Spain was to escape backwardness it could modernise by learning from Europe. To imitate Western modernisation because it had given the US victory in 1898 seemed to Unamuno, the Christian existentialist, a false path. For him, in an age of crass bourgeois materialism, Spain was, in the words of the German poet Rilke, the 'spiritual reservoir of Europe', with a universal message for the world at large. Hence his obsession with Cervantes: spirital values were embodied by Don Quixote, materialsim by his servant Sancho Panza. Unamuno is the Dostoevsky of Spain, with a religious message for a corrupt Europe. The westerniser, Ortega, at ease with fellow French and German intellectuals, is the Turgenev or Herzen of Spain. What is important is that both Ortega and Unamuno had written their major works before they went into exile. Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life, its profundities admired by Isaiah Berlin, was published in 1911. Ortega's main admired books, dismissed by Berlin as the work of a shallow elitist, came out in the 1920s.
Exiles could have no significant effect on the cultural consequences of 1898, since after the 1880s there was no old-fashioned exile community. In casting its web to include the output of the post-1898 intelligentsia, The Disinherited becomes a history of Spanish culture in general rather than a treatise on exiles. Kamen does the same for the cultural output of artists by distinguishing between involuntary exiles driven abroad and voluntary exiles who choose to live abroad. Picasso settled in Paris in 1904. He did so because it was the artistic capital of Europe where he could flourish and become a millionaire. He only became a political exile with the civil war and his conversion to communism. Salvador Dali, a gifted painter, can be considered as an economic migrant settling in California and Paris where there was a rich clientele for his post-surrealist works. In London he had a short interview with Freud, who, confronted with Dali's glaring eyes and bristling moustaches, dismissed him as a fanatic. 'Small wonder,' the aging Freud murmured, `that they have a civil war in Spain if they all look like that.'
Kamen is particularly illuminating on Spanish musicians. With no infrastructure of great orchestras in Spain capable of doing justice to their works, they made their names in Europe. It has long been my belief that it was the poverty of Spain's cultural infrastructure, not so much Catholic obscurantism, though this did not help, that accounts for the failure of modern Spain to produce great philosophers or scientists. In 1900 well-endowed Cambridge housed more eminent philosophers and scientists than the whole of Spain. The great neurologist Ramon y Cajal would win a Nobel Prize because his researches required only a modest microscope and cheap chemicals.
The return to the 19th-century pattern of the mass creation of exiles by the victors of civil wars came with the last and most cruel of Spain's civil wars between 1936 and 1939 and the practice by Franco, as victor in the war, of the politics of revenge on an unprecedented and savage scale. Thousands of Spaniards went into exile in France and Latin America. Never before, Kamen writes, tad such a systematic flight of the educated classes occurred'. While they opened Spain to a wider world, in the strictly cultural sense exiles had little to offer themselves. They produced no great works of literature comparable with those of their Latin American hosts. To Mick Jagger, Borges was a cultural hero. He would not have found such an icon in the Spanish diaspora. Spain itself was not the cultural desert the exiles claimed it to be: home-grown novelists like Cela, who was to win a Nobel Prize, Delibes and Eduardo Mendoza were the writers Spaniards read, as every visiting lecturer soon realises when he asks his audience to name novelists they admire.
Kamen's book ends in 1975 with the death of Franco and the dismantling of his dictatorship. By 1978 Spain had become a democratic monarchy based on universal suffrage. Inflexible in their resolute republicanism — those who had returned to Franco's Spain were traitors to the cause — exiles who remained in Mexico and Argentina were increasingly isolated from everyday events in Spain and often at odds with the domestic opposition.
Only two long-term exiles played a crucial role in the transition to democracy: Santiago Carillo, the communist leader, and Josep Tarradellas, the veteran Catalan nationalist. The transition was the work of younger politicians who had stayed at home. They had contacts with democrats abroad — the Spanish socialists with the German socialists, for example — but were not exiles. No prime minister since 1975 has lived long in exile. There were now no exiles other than the terrorists of ETA. Spain ceased to export masses of Spaniards. With a low birth rate and a decreasing native population it imported the poor of Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe to supply the cheap labour that would keep capitalism a going concern.
As a consequence, Spain is on the road to becoming a multicultural society, though less markedly so than Britain. There was a minority community of anti-Western Islamic immigrants. Spain was the last European country to recognise the state of Israel. This combines with the antiAmerican traditions of the Left. After coming to power the socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapartero immediately withdrew the Spanish contingent from Iraq to the intense annoyance of President Bush.
Henry Kamen, like many distinguished modern historians, has taken to journalism. In his column in El Mundo he treats subjects as varied as prostitution and climate change. He is a zealous destroyer of the myths created by historians over the ages and those created by his professional colleagues. His readers may relish his lively biographies of the multitude of Spaniards who have contributed to Hispanic culture. They may not always agree with his conclusions. But he gives them an interesting if bumpy ride.