The research project intends to apply the ‘Ordinary Men’ thesis, that posits that within certain historical contexts, individuals who may be considered ordinary and morally unremarkable can become active participants in acts of extraordinary violence and atrocity, to Spanish perpetrator memory. In his book on the phenomenon of perpetrators, Becoming Evil, James Waller makes the observation that most of those who perpetrated the Holocaust were not evil but ordinary everyday men. Waller argues that situational factors such as peer pressure, obedience to authority, and socialisation within a culture of violence can override individual moral inhibitions, leading otherwise ordinary individuals to commit acts of genocide. This reality is unsettling because it counters our general mental tendency to relate extraordinary acts to correspondingly extraordinary men (Waller 2002, p. 8). Hannah Arendt concluded that Eichmann was an ambitious functionary. These works form the basis of the ‘Ordinary Men’ thesis, which is based on the idea that the perpetrator is a comprehensible human being and that perpetration itself is not merely accreditable to psychopathy but to the complex combination of agency and volition, supra-individual forces, and the prosaic motives of greed and ambition.
Lorraine Ryan and her tandem partner Susanne Zepp-Zwirner, University of Duisburg-Essen, intend to apply this ‘Ordinary Man’ approach to Spanish perpetrator memory as revealed in cultural texts. This work is based on the assumption that this approach offers a compelling framework for understanding the behaviours of individuals implicated in perpetrating violence during the Spanish Civil War. During the Spanish Civil War, individuals who might otherwise be considered ordinary citizens found themselves thrust into a maelstrom of political upheaval, ideological fervour, and intense social polarisation. Within this context, situational factors akin to those identified by Waller played a role in shaping the actions of perpetrators. The Civil War era witnessed the emergence of paramilitary groups, political militias, and partisan factions, all vying for control and advancing their respective agendas through violence. In such an environment, ordinary individuals, motivated by allegiance to their cause, fear of reprisals, or a sense of duty, could readily become active participants in acts of brutality against perceived enemies.
Dr Lorraine Ryan
University of Birmingham (UK) | Hispanic Studies
E-mail: lorraine.ryan@college-uaruhr.de
Lorraine Ryan is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). She is an award-winning international researcher in the fields of Spanish literature, memory studies, and gender. She has published two monographs, Memory and Spatiality in Post-Millennial Spanish Narrative and Gender and Memory in the Novels of Almudena Grandes, and various articles on collective and cultural memory in Spain, Spanish women´s writing, and masculinity in journals such as the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, MLN and Romance Quarterly. She has served as Director of Postgraduate Research for the Department of Modern Languages.
Lorraine Ryan has won the USA´s most prestigious prizes in Modern Languages: In 2013, she was awarded the prestigious AATSP's (American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese) Outstanding Scholarly Publication Award, and in 2019, she was awarded second prize in the Annual Adela Zamudio Competition for best published article, organised by the organisation Feministas Unidas. On both occasions, she was the first academic outside of the USA to receive this honour.
Prof. Susanne Zepp-Zwirner
University of Duisburg Essen | Spanish and Latin-American Literatures
E-mail: susanne.zeppzwirner@uni-due.de
Prof. Susanne Zepp-Zwirner
University of Duisburg Essen | Spanish and Latin-American Literatures
E-mail: susanne.zeppzwirner@uni-due.de
Susanne Zepp-Zwirner studied Spanish, Portuguese, and French Philology (Continental and Latin American), Comparative Literature, and Modern German Literary History at the University of Wuppertal, where she became a research associate at the Institute of Romance Studies in 1997. She received her PhD in Romance Philology from Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) in 2002. From 2003 to 2015, she served as Deputy Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig. From 2011 to 2023, she was Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and French Philology at FUB, and in 2022 and 2023, she served as spokesperson for the board of the Selma Stern Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. Since summer semester 2023, she has been Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In 2023, she was awarded the Order of Isabella the Catholic of Spain.
Her research focuses on Spanish, Latin American, Portuguese, and French literatures, literary and cultural theory, Jewish literatures, and law and literature. She is co-editor of the journal Romanistisches Jahrbuch and chaired the German Hispanists’ Association from 2019 to 2023. She has held visiting positions at Tel Aviv University (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), EHESS Paris (France), and the Fundación Duques de Soria (Spain). In summer 2025, she was Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College (USA). She is a Henriette Herz Scout and serves on the election committee for research awards of the Humboldt Foundation.