Silence, memory and dark documents. Oblivion and stories about the repression during the Civil War

The aim of our paper is to approach the memory of a traumatic event - the repression that took place in Galicia during the years of the Civil War (1936-1939). We investigate the processes of forgetting, of narrating, of selection of remembrances and of reconstruction undertaken for that traumatic event which is to be considered in terms of "collective oblivion". To this end, we analyze the Galician case both from the point of view of Social History and from that of Literature. Thus we are interested in the construction of social memory -as opposed to official memory imposed by power - and the narratives that feed it -filled with silences, divided memories, mutilated memories etc. -, as well as in the memory constructed by literary authors through stories about the Francoist repression and its effects. As we shall see, both memories - the social memory and the memory constructed via literature - share features and are filled with silence and forgetfulness, but also dotted with complaint.