In 2003, Jorge Semprún, the communist resistance fighter, writer, and minister of culture in democratic Spain, gave the Holocaust commemoration speech in the German Bundestag. Having been a “red-Spanish” prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp, the experience of political persecution stood at the center of his talk, which at the same time paid tribute to the ten thousand Spanish internees in German concentration camps, of whom more than half did not survive. It is precisely due to the magnificent literary works of Semprún that European historical consciousness has been well aware for decades of the suffering of Spanish antifascists in Buchenwald, while the Mauthausen camp, where the great majority (seven thousand) of them were incarcerated, has not received the same attention. This is the starting point for Sara Brenneis's extensive research on the memory and representations of their fate from wartime to the present day.

Given the impressively wide array of sources—photographs and films, archival material and printed press, memoirs and novels, theater plays and social media narratives—the author wisely opted for a strictly chronological order of presentation. This, at the same time, allows her to build up a strong argument that focusses on the twisted roads of memory production and to point out its lacunae, detours, and repetitions. The first chapter offers a fascinating account of the production of evidence of Nazi crimes in the Mauthausen camp, of resistance and solidarity networks among the Spanish prisoners, and finally of their testimonies in the first postwar trials. To give but one example: it is not common knowledge that much of the photographic material that Alain Resnais used in his famous 1956 documentary film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), which for decades marked the visual memory of what would later be called the Holocaust, stemmed from Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen. And it might not be by chance that he chose precisely this title for his film, which some years earlier had served as the title for the first fictional account of the Spanish Mauthausen experience, written by the young exiled Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda (Nit i Boira, Mexico 1947). Hers and other nonfictional testimonies were published right after the war, but circulated only among the Spanish Republican exiles, or sometimes were read in secret inside a country ruled by a fascist dictator who after World War II—and to the horror of his democratic opponents—was left in power by the Western Allies due to Cold War political reasoning.

There is a certain inherent political logic, then, that it was only in the last years of Franco's waning regime that the topic of Spanish prisoners in Nazi camps came to the forefront, firmly embedded in the context of anti-Franco and pro-Catalan national resistance. It was with Llorenç Soller's documentary Sobrevivir in Mauthausen and, most of all, with Montserrat Roig's seminal study on Catalans in the camps that this small, but significant chapter of Spanish history in the twentieth century became known to a wider Spanish public. This development was again followed by prolonged silence about almost everything related to the Civil War, which marked the first decades of Iberian democracy, until the memory of Mauthausen became part of the wider field of Spanish politics of memory, which has produced a new wave of memoirs, films, and controversies starting in the late 1990s.

It is not quite clear why Brenneis, who in other chapters extensively and eruditely discusses her various sources, mentions only in passing the one book that presents a fictionalized contribution to this fierce debate: Javier Cercas's 2014 interpretation of the fake Mauthausen survivor (and president of the Mauthausen Amical organization) Enric Marco. Maybe this is because the basic argument of Cercas's multilayered novel—the political pitfalls of memory politics—is too close to Brenneis's own strictly academic reasoning, but maybe the reasons lie deeper. Cercas's book is also a political statement about the complicated Spanish dealing with its past—a topic that Brenneis is very much aware of but is not at the core of her interpretation. Her explicit aim is to reinscribe the Spanish Mauthausen experience into a wider history of the Holocaust or, more precisely, of Holocaust memory—thus her convincing, detailed analysis is very much informed by the relevant literature from the field of memory studies. But at the same time, she misses the political dimension of her story, which, to start with, was never really forgotten if we consider the memory and history writing of European communism and communist resistance. A certain danger may exist that by focusing on the different layers of memory, one tends to gloss over the deep political divisions at play—divisions that are still very much with us today.

To be clear: this critique is not an argument against an inclusive and empathic memory of all victims of persecution in its various forms, as proposed, for example, by Michael Rothberg—on the contrary! But just as it is important to precisely define the specificity of the German murderous attack on all Jews, it is just as necessary to keep in mind its political foundation: an exclusive, anti-Enlightenment, and anti-equality ideology that first had to destroy its political opponents, first and foremost the workers’ movement within Germany, and then subsequently within occupied Europe, before it could carry out its genocidal program. Its Spanish variant could concentrate on the annihilation of the political enemy because the Jews had been expelled from Spain centuries before. The entanglement and the differences between the various victim groups of German fascism were something that the Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen were well aware of, as Sara Brenneis shows repeatedly in her important reading of their cultural heritage.