How do Spanish literature, film, and culture represent perpetrators in the context of the Civil War and Franco Dictatorship? Building on the ‘Ordinary Men’ thesis, the conference explores the concepts of complicity, bystanding, and perpetration in Spanish cultural memory.
This conference challenges the long-standing victim-perpetrator binary in Spanish memory culture of the Civil War and Francoist Dictatorship. It explores how Spanish literature, film, and culture represent perpetrators as ordinary actors shaped by ideology, obedience, and context. Building on the influential ’Ordinary Men’ thesis, the speakers and participants will examine how otherwise unremarkable individuals became active participants in violence, and how concepts such as Primo Levi’s ’grey zones’ and Michael Rothberg’s ’implicated subject’ can shed new light on complicity, bystanding, and perpetration in Spanish cultural memory. Topics include representations of perpetrators, bystanders, and implicated subjects in Spanish literature, film, photojournalism, and history, as well as comparative studies drawing on Holocaust research and other conflicts. The conference embraces different formats such as lightning talks, paper presentations, and roundtable discussions.
Welcome Coffee
Introduction
Susanne Zepp-Zwirner, University of Duisburg Essen (Germany)
Lorraine Ryan, University of Birmingham (UK) & College for Social Sciences and Humanities
Perpetrator Psychology in the Spanish Novel of Memory
Samuel O´Donoghue, Lancaster University (UK)
Introduction by:
Lorraine Ryan
Coffee break
Moderator: Ute Schneider, University of Duisburg Essen (Germany)
Lightning Talk
“Resentful Stories”: Agents and Spaces of Violence in Two Spanish Narratives
Adriana Rodríguez-Alfonso, University of Tübingen (Germany)
Los rostros del sublevado: reconstrucción, testimonio y contrapunto en la novela española reciente
Ana María Casas-Olcoz, University of Navarra (Spain)
Transgenerational implication. Palimpsestic memory and the legacies of perpetration in Sergio del Molino’s Los alemanes (2024)
Claudia Jünke, University of Innsbruck (Austria)
Perpetrators, Bystanders and Implicated Witnesses in Andres Trapiello’s Ayer no mas
Ursula Hennigfeld, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Germany)
Lunch break
Moderator: Lena Hein, University of Duisburg Essen (Germany)
Central eléctrica de Jesús López Pacheco: dialécticas de la España sumergida
Carlos van Tongeren, University of Granada (Spain)
Una aproximación a la ética de la maldad. La lógica del perpetrador en la cultura y política española durante y después del Franquismo
Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez, Stockholm University (Sweden)
La memoria del perpetrador en el aula de ELE: propuesta didáctica a partir de la película ‘Los Girasoles Ciegos’
Mariana González Boluda, University of Reading (UK)
Coffee break
Moderator: Lorraine Ryan
Lightning Talk
Ordinary Businessmen – Escribir contra la invisibilidad y la aceptación de los beneficiarios económicos en tiempos de guerra: La forja de un rebelde de Arturo Barea
Lena Hein, University of Duisburg Essen (Germany)
Cuando el colonialismo desordena la memoria: zonas grises entre la memoria republicana y la descolonización
Andrea Villar del Valle, University of Barcelona (Spain)
Perpetrator Memory and Gendered Violence: Francoism’s Legacy in Contemporary Andalusia
Africa Moreno, Memory Lab
Atocha: la extrema derecha a juicio en la España posfranquista
Lourdes Valls-Crespo, Charles University (Czech Republic)
Morning Coffee
Moderator: Matei Chihaia, University of Wuppertal (Germany)
Lightning Talk
Desafíos teóricos y políticos en la construcción de las figuras de perpetradores, victimas y bystanders: el riesgo de la esencialización
Daniel Feierstein, National University of Tres de Febrero (Argentina) & College for Social Sciences and Humanities
Perpetrators – Problems of definition and analytical emptiness
Christian Gudehus, Ruhr University Bochum (Germany)
Ordinary people in a time of freedom: Democratic revival and mob violence in Bangladesh
Rashed Uz Zaman, University of Dhaka (Bangladesh)
Coffee break
In Search of the Ordinary: Violence, Perpetrators and the Francoist Regime
Stephanie Wright, Lancaster University (UK)
Introduction by:
Susanne Zepp-Zwirner
Lunch
Moderator: Susanne Zepp-Zwirner & Florian Freitag, University of Duisburg Essen (Germany)
Unmaking Militarized Men
Lisa Renee DiGiovanni, Keene State College (USA)
Lightning Talk
El hombre común y la movilización de la masa
Antonio López Gómez Quiñones, Darmouth College (USA)
Perpetradores y pactos en la frontera borrosa de los territorios o comarcas “neutrales”
Jose Galan Ortega, Independent Scholar, Madrid (Spain)
The Spanish Generation X. Remembrance of WWII and fascism
Martin Gloger, SRH University (Germany)
Closing remarks
Susanne Zepp-Zwirner & Lorraine Ryan
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.