The life of a Barcelona at war

Thousands of bombs fell on the capital of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. La Vanguardia wrote on 27 November 1938: 'For the space of 24 hours, bombs once again rained down on Barcelona. Ten consecutive times the aeroplanes of the fascist invaders massacred the civil population and produced hundreds of victims in central districts of the city, where no military target, factory or barracks could provide a pretext. Hundreds of victims, most of them women and children!' But despite the cruelty of a fratricide war in which, for the first time, the Italian air force bombed cities in order to see the effect of terror on the population, the people of Barcelona tried to overcome all the horror by attempting to cultivate a sensation of normality, which was more a public manifestation of clinging to life than an intimate determination to keep death at bay. These photographs have never before been exhibited; they are taken from the archives of La Vanguardia newspaper which reproduced them between 1936 and 1939. They belong to a time of war in which the newspaper was seized first by the Generalitat and then by the Government of the Republic; this is, then, obviously material that was censored by the authorities. Looking at these photographs, we cannot help remembering recent images of the markets of Baghdad and the streets of Basra, with people trying to recover the usual pace of the passing of the days before their pulse rate was once again accelerated by the explosion of bombs.

Màrius Carol