Spain: Cracks in the Column

It is amazing. Thirty years have gone by, yet books about the Spanish Civil War still sell. Every year, a dozen or so new volumes appear and almost always there is a best-seller among them. At least half their readers must have been born after the Civil War, yet the subject continues to fascinate them. Why? A guilty conscience among older people? Identification on the part of the young? A romanticism compensating the middle-aged for an uninvolved existence?

No one really knows. The world press, however, pays less and less attention to Spain. Strikes, repressive police action, student demonstrations, divisions among the clergy, the proclamation of an eventual new king, a consular treaty with Poland—none of these items seem to int...