Trotz allem zeichnen sie: Der Spanische Burgerkrieg mit Kinderaugen gesehen.

Seventy years after the insurrection of Spanish military forces against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic, several political, cultural and scientific initiatives have set out to reinforce the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War. An objective historical debate about the war was impossible in Spain under the Franco regime and quite difficult during the transition period to a democratic state because of the ongoing conflict between Francoists and democrats, which led to an attempted military coup against the new Spanish democracy in 1981. The stable democracy Spain now enjoys allows us to revisit the history of the Civil War from a republican and democratic point of view, in order finally to offer a just remembrance of the war's victims on the Republican side, something which has been neglected for decades. This paper explores the representation of the Spanish Civil War in children's drawings, which were collected by several institutions, among them the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana. The existence and preservation of these drawings is the result of unique circumstances. The Spanish Civil War was the first conflict in which modern arms were intentionally used against the civil population on a large scale, so that children became eyewitnesses of military attacks. The government of the Republic organised the evacuation of the civilian population, especially children, from the war zones, using an existing system of school colonies. Guided by their educators, these children started to reflect on their new experiences - the bombardments, the evacuation, the separation from their parents, but also the games, lessons and other activities in the school colonies - in their drawings. These drawings had a double purpose. On the one hand, they were designed as a therapeutic measure to help the children to overcome the traumas produced by the war. On the other hand, these drawings were used as propaganda in order to convince the Western democracies to support the legitimate Spanish government and to stop their policy of non-intervention, which only favoured the military rebels and their supporters, National-socialist Germany and Fascist Italy. Today, the children's drawings of the Spanish Civil War represent a valuable and direct testimony of different aspects of this conflict: life before the war, the breakdown of the Lebenswelt of the children, the presence of the war in daily life, humanitarian support and evacuation, organisation and life in the school colonies and the politicisation of the children. Nowadays, children who suffer the horrors of war continue to draw their experiences. The only difference with the drawings of the children of the Spanish Civil War is that today there is more blood, weapons are more powerful, and society is indifferent and has become accustomed to coexisting with injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]