Two men facing each other for destiny
Hanns-Erich Kaminski, author of the famous chronicleEls de Barcelona (on the beginnings of the Civil War in the Catalan capital, published in Paris in 1937 and now recovered by Adesiara with translation by Francesc Parcerisas and with a prologue by Aurora Madaula), was born in 1899 in Germany. He studied economics, philosophy and literature at the universities of Königsberg, Freiburg, Berlin and Frankfurt, until he enrolled in 1921 at Heidelberg and obtained his doctorate in 1922 with a thesis on dumping.
At 20 years old, Kaminski already spoke French, Italian and Spanish, in addition to his native German. Between 1922 and 1926 he traveled to Spain, Italy, France and Morocco. And in 1925 he published Der Faschismus in Italien [Fascism in Italy]. A journalist and intellectual, he soon forged an anti-fascist perspective critical of the division of the left and in favor of proletarian revolt. Between 1928 and early 1933 he lived in Berlin during the rise of Nazism. He went into exile in Paris on February 25, 1933, two days before the Reichstag fire.
Joan EstelrichJoan Estelrich's international outlook In the 1920s and 1930s, before the defeat of the Civil War, Estelrich promoted and directed the entity Expansió Catalana and the Fundació Bernat Metge (for the translation of Greco-Latin classics), both under Cambó's patronage, while collaborating with the League of Nations and, during the Republic, serving as a Lliga deputy in Madrid. The Italian historian Ivan Lo Giudice now recovers his fabulous international projection in the book La mirada internacional de Joan Estelrich (Lleonard Muntaner).
In Estelrich, the outbreak of the Civil War caught him in Budapest, and he never returned home due to the anarchist revolution in the Catalan rearguard. Like Kaminski, a fugitive from the Nazis, he settled in Paris after a stopover in Buenos Aires, where in September he attended the tense international congress of the PEN Club, which included figures from Zweig to Marinetti. On July 20, 1936, Estelrich had noted in his diary: "I, as a Catalan, must wish for the triumph of the government and, as a Spaniard, for that of the rebels." Unsuccessfully, he tried to convince the veteran leaders of the League to intervene to put an end to the war.
They are two parallel lives of two political men from culture, two intellectuals of action shaken by fascism and revolution; the German aligned with the proletarian left and the Catalan, with the conservative right. In a hypothetical world of dialogue, which neither existed then nor exists now, they could have coincided and sought bridges for conciliation. In the polarization of the 30s, they fell into opposite trenches. Today's polarization also augurs nothing good.
In Kaminski's book-chronicle, the author takes sides with few nuances, idealizes the people in struggle above the parties and atrocities –the FAI checas– that he does not see or does not want to see. He asks and lets himself be convinced. He praises "revolutionary order". When he has been in the city for a few weeks, he finds it natural to sit "at the table with all these people armed with rifles and pistols, like in a pirate novel". His is a romantic view conditioned by the German fascist experience. He attends Durruti's massive funeral and does not quite understand the strong nationalist inclination of the Catalans, about which he even notes that "the anarchist leaders are not exempt either", referring to Frederica Montseny, whom he finds "naive and a bit bourgeois"! His stay lasted between September and December. He also interviewed President Companys at the Palau de la Generalitat. His book came out a year before George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.
Estelrich was in favor of an open and orderly nationalism, tolerant and humanist. A pacifist from culture, who aspired to make a living in the field of ideas activism, connecting Catalan culture with the world. A "avant la lettre
" Europeanist, in 1922 he was already talking about overcoming Iberianism – then fashionable in intellectual circles – with "a European, universal integration, more useful and fruitful for all", a non-statist Europeanism, respectful of linguistic minorities, which his friend Josep Pla called naive.
With the end of the war, with his patron Cambó exiled in Buenos Aires, Estelrich adapted to the new regime and died unexpectedly in Paris in 1958, while serving as Spain's delegate to Unesco. Kaminski remained in Paris until 1939 and then, with a false identity, managed to reach Lisbon and from there go to Argentina, where he also died prematurely in 1963.
