Life and death of Joan Comorera, the Catalan Lenin
Antoni Batista has written an important, rigorous book, with a sense of narrative and courageous from an ethical-moral point of view.
- Now Books
- 240 pages. 22.50 euros
The figure and biographical adventure of Joan Comorera embodies many of the greatness and misery of the first half of the 20th century: the brave and loyal political commitment, but also the obfuscated fanaticism of someone who conceives politics as a totalizing and dogmatic form of religion. Starting from Comorera, founder of the PSUC, a Catalan socialist and nationalist, a supporter of a Catalan communism not subaltern to the Spanish one and which would appeal to the proletariat and also to the incipient middle classes of the country, the history is better understood – the ideals and the hope and the heroic resistances, the betrayals and the betrayals and the sinister and incipient betrayals of the 20th century, so rich in monsters.
In the book The truth of the Comorera case. A story of espionage, harassment and betrayal, journalist Antoni Batista focuses on the most dramatically climactic episode in the life of the Catalan political leader. We are in the early 1950s. After being expelled from the PC (he who had managed to get the PSUC admitted as a Catalan Section in the Comintern), accused of "Titoism" and "nationalist deviationism" (Comorera wanted a Catalan communism not a branch of the Spanish, something that neither Carrillo nor Pasión wanted), people around the world, repudiated, slandered and threatened with death by his former comrades. Cornered, he enters Catalonia clandestinely, thanks to the help of the British secret services and the PNV (the best at balancing loyalty and strategy). Settled in Barcelona, he leads a discreet life with a false identity. However, soon after he is arrested by the Francoist police and is taken to the fearsome Via Laietana police station, where he is thoroughly interrogated by Antonio Juan Creix, the head of the Political-Social Brigade, who was preceded by a whole mythology of cruelty and terror.
So far, the setting (the convulsions and secrets of the Cold War, the iron fist of the Franco dictatorship), the atmosphere (dense, tense, oppressive) and the facts (a man who in the past was everything and now is nothing, a man who was a leader of the masses and who is now alone and abandoned by it). In Catalan political history, there is no more tragic character than Joan Comorera.
The relationship between two ideologically opposed men
There are three structural virtues of Batista's book. The first is the ability to do so, starting from the tragic story of the persecution, the arrest and the interrogation of Comorera, the author is able to display and articulate in a synthetic, vibrant and informative way the crucial episodes of his life, from his paper as a fully empowered advisor in the governments of Companies at the end of his life. nomadisme d'exiliat, passant per les struggles a l'interior del PC. The second virtue is the extensive documentation from which Batista has worked: personal witnesses accumulated throughout a lifetime as a journalist, but also and above all the materials from Creix's personal archive, with the transcripts of the interrogations and his version of the events. The third virtue is related to the second, and that is that Batista decides to divide the book's protagonism between Comorera and Creix. Thus, what could have been the hagiographic chronicle of a martyrology becomes the x-ray of the relationship between two ideologically opposed men, who find themselves in antagonistic situations - one at the height of his power, the other on the verge of total defeat - but who, even so, understand and respect each other. It must be made clear that if Batista decides to divide the protagonism of his book, it is not to relativize it ideologically, but to enrich it humanly.
Written with a sense of narrative and drama, instructive and nuanced from an ideological point of view and courageous from an ethical-moral point of view – pointing out Comorera's contradictions and showing Creix without reducing him to a monstrous caricature required courage – The truth of the Comorera case It is an important book. And it could be the basis for a miniseries, structured as Plutarchian parallel lives, which would serve to explain, in depth and with complexity and without a subsidiary mentality, the Catalan 20th century.
