Today we bring you the first Archives of History interview. We are very proud to say that the first interviewee is David Alegre Lorenz, one of the best historians of the war that exist in the current scene. However, David is not only that, but he is also a wonderful person who has given us the opportunity to speak with him.
We do not want to bore you with a long introduction. Just say that David Alegre is an associate professor at the University of Girona. He is specialized in comparative history and has innovated enormously in a field as “backward” as that of Military History. He has also edited a book «Torn Europe: war, occupation and violence (1900-1950)» together with Miguel Alonso and Javier Rodrigo. He is also editor of the University Magazine of Military History
This April 30 «Comunidades rotos» will be published and that is why we bring you this extensive interview with one of its authors. It touches on a thorny but necessary issue: that of civil wars.
Without further ado, we leave you with this wonderful interview.
Block I: the book
Q: How does it come about? broken communities? Did you get together at a certain moment and decided to carry out this work for a specific reason? In any case, and given such an extensive topic in the literature, how was the research process developed? The volume of work had to be enormous.
A: A good way to start the interview, no doubt. Personally, I am a firm supporter of thinking about this intimate part of our work as historians, the way it is developed, the stimuli, links and debts that make the works we read possible; I think it should be much more important to know and value all this intrahistory as a whole.
For me, broken communities It is a very special project in many ways.. I think it pays to be honest, especially since honesty should be one of the most important values in our guild, even if we don’t always keep it explicitly in mind. Javier Rodrigo, with whom I share the pleasure of being co-author of this work, is also a great friend, someone whom I consider a fundamental part of my circle of closest people, I could almost say without exaggeration that he is part of that family that life goes laying by your side This fact helps to explain the existence of broken communities as a project, the complicity that made it possible, the naturalness with which it arose and grew, and the way in which it changed and culminated in becoming what the reading public will be able to see in bookstores starting on April 30. However, before all that, Javier was my professor at the University of Zaragoza, when I was studying history, and also at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, within the framework of the Master’s Degree in Contemporary History. Lastly, and more importantly, Javier was the supervisor of my doctoral thesis, defended almost two years ago.
«Javier Rodrigo, with whom I share the pleasure of being co-author of this work, is also a great friend»
Therefore, we speak of a professional and personal relationship –two spheres often difficult to separate– of more than ten years where he has been a constant source of inspiration for me thanks to his teaching; to the reading of his research, leading in areas and methodologies almost unknown in Spain when he started, and that I have also ended up making my own through my own contributions, opening other case studies and fields of work parallel to his; to teamwork on various projects during the predoctoral period, during which I enjoyed great autonomy and a large and comfortable space where I could give free rein to my own concerns and initiatives together with my colleague Miguel Alonso, who will defend his thesis in less than three months and with whom I have gone hand in hand in many of the things I have undertaken so far. What I want to say – and I think this is the most important thing – is that the scope and ambition of a work like broken communities It is only possible and can only be explained within a network of complicities and affections that are the result of teamwork, personal debts, mutual respect for the work of those with whom you collaborate on a day-to-day basis, of teaching, but not less than the permeability and criteria of researchers in training or the ability to generate attractive research and to create a school. We will return to these issues throughout the interview, because I believe that in the world of culture and knowledge these are major issues that do not always receive the recognition they really deserve, and without them the humanities are incomprehensible.
Made this first necessary introduction, river communitiestas arose from that relationship of trust built between Javier and me over more than ten years, from the mutual understanding in our way of approaching the past and from the shared concerns regarding work issues. This, of course, does not mean full agreement on everything. In fact, it was Javier himself who invited me to take part in this project, which at first he had to undertake on his own, and he did so from the conviction that the future book would benefit from the participation of two historians, one senior for his career, despite his youth, and another junior but with a courageous and well-defined research profile. In this sense, the first steps in the definition of the joint project showed that where one did not arrive, the other would arrive, both in the detailed approach to the different conflicts included in the work and in the balanced treatment of the different periods and geographical areas. object of analysis.
Of course, broken communities It benefited from the active exchange of impressions between the two when focusing and writing the work, but also from the mutual readings and the additions that each one of us introduced with full confidence in the parts where the bulk of the work corresponded to the other. This allows us to say with all justice and pride that this is a work of the two in all its extension, and here we must thank two means that have made our work much easier: email and especially the applications of instant messaging, which has kept us in contact on a daily basis for several years now, and in a very evident way in the preparation of broken communities. And at this point, I repeat, I also want to highlight the role of our friend Miguel Alonso, who, without being a co-author of the book because he has to dedicate himself to other issues, has an important presence in it both because of the relationship that unites the three of us and because of the daily contact in our instant messaging group where moments of humor and complicity alternate with work, making it much more bearable.
From here on, the reading public will be the one to judge the result, but the work behind broken communities it is enormous and titanic, due to the amount of bibliography consulted and the great variety of scenarios that we address. In this sense, it must be recognized that without the existence of repositories of scientific articles on the Internet, it would possibly have been impossible to write this work, or at least it would have had a very different appearance. Also, giving birth to this book has been something extremely hard and complex by the phenomenon on which it focuses, civil wars.
So much so that at times it has been painful to the point of not being able to take it anymore, due to the amount of human suffering and mournful events that are gathered in the book, due to the effort involved in trying to understand and explain –not justify, of course– the processes and reasons why human communities can break down and violence can be exerted against the othera congener. broken communities It has ended up being an extremely demanding empathic exercise, which is why I believe and repeat that it would not have been possible without the four-handed work between two well-attuned authors with clear ideas. And here, I insist, the credit must be given to Javier, for having been able to see that approaching a phenomenon of such magnitude over a period of one hundred years with a certain solvency and balance perhaps required the help of more than one person. From this point on, the documentation and writing process for a work like this is very stimulating, it constitutes in itself an intense learning and discovery exercise, but it is also long and heavy.
Keep in mind that historians can rarely dedicate themselves exclusively to writing, in fact I would never recommend it for many reasons, the first of which is mental health. In this sense, anyone who has written a major work like this can attest to the great discipline required to undertake the final draft, the isolation that usually entails, the sacrifices that they entail for oneself and for those around him, including the students, who often serve as the first receiver of the ideas that are in the testing phase and that will later become part of the book.
Thus, there have been intense months of work since we began to work more in-depth on the project back in the early summer of 2018, and throughout the process there have been times for everything, where the impossibility of arriving with all the guarantees at our multiple obligations overwhelmed us, and where friendship and mutual support in the face of difficulties have been key to successfully completing this work.
For all this, as I said, broken communities It is a very special project. And as far as I am concerned, I have to admit that I am extremely grateful. First of all, I am in perpetual debt to Javier Rodrigo, for trusting me, for the opportunity and privilege of working with him on an equal footing and with full complicity for so many months, and also for believing that despite my youth I was prepared to respond to such a beautiful challenge on a professional and personal level. All this has made it possible to put our relationship on a new stage, to the point that in the process of writing the book he made me godfather to his son, Carlos, who has been with us since the end of this last summer, something that for me has been extremely special, as you can imagine. Nor can I forget our editor at Galaxia Gutenberg, María Cifuentes, for her trust, for her exquisite work, for her patience, for her exemplary love and commitment to knowledge and culture, and for how much I have learned these months by her side. . The enormous work behind the books we read is rarely sufficiently recognized, as I said before, that is why I wanted to answer this question in a much more personal way and that is why I want to give that special recognition to María, but also to the rest of the Galaxia Gutenberg team, Irene de Hoz, Blanca Navarro, Lidia Rey and Joan Tarrida, for their good work and their bomb-proof professionalism, never better said.
Ultimately, to end this question, broken communities was born from the conviction that civil wars are very poorly workedAt least from the point of view…