Complutense University of Madrid - Second Spanish Republic and Civil War

Second Spanish Republic and Civil War

The first graduating class in the new campus was over 40% female students (a dramatic change from the traditional, male-dominated educational system which had until then been the norm in Spain). The last years of the Alfonsine monarchy and the early part of the Second Spanish Republic marked the "silver Age" of Spanish intellectualism, exemplified by the "Generation of '27", a diverse group of intellectuals which included the poet Federico García Lorca, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, philologist Dámaso Alonso and philosopher Julián Marías, amongst others, many of whom were students of the University of Madrid. A "silver Age" of Spain, it was, indeed, the Golden Age of the Complutense, which at the time counted with one of the most distinguished staffs of its 800-year history, its professorship including luminaries such as José Ortega y Gasset, Julian Besteiro, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Its administration at the time also reads like a list of the who's who of government, the administration being headed by alternating former and future presidents of the Spanish state. At the time, the University of Madrid's School of Philosophy was widely considered to rival the University of Berlin for the position of being the best in Europe, if not the world.

It was also during this time that the University enjoyed its greatest period in terms of visiting professors, serving as a safe haven to the Jewish intelligentsia of northern Europe fleeing the growing influence of anti-Semitic fascism. Unfortunately, those visitors, as well as many of the native professors, were forced to flee once again after the attempted coup led by Francisco Franco on 17 July 1936, which began the Spanish Civil War.

Ciudad Universitaria, que el buen pueblo levantó para mostrar a sus hijos fuentes de estudio y amor, ¿cómo les dirás mañana lo que en tus aulas pasó? Antonio Argaz, Muerte de Durruti (1936)

The campus served as one of the primary fronts during the Siege of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War; the International Brigades has its headquarters in the School of Philosophy, and its soldiers occupied all of the campus buildings, which were connected by a series of elaborate trenches. Ciudad Universitaria was literally the final bastion between Republican Madrid and Franco's troops; a small stream used to cross the area now occupied by the School of Communications, and a small wall which preceded it marked the border between nacionales and republicanos.

Throughout the course of the war the University campus witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of the conflict; the area was exposed to heavy artillery fire and bombardments, and even as the Nationalist troops began to make headway, the International Brigade forces held strong and literally fought from building to building, at times even from floor to floor of the campus, managing to hold out until the very last moments of the war. It was in the School of Pharmacy that one of the icons of the Civil War, the Catalan anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, would be killed (although controversy surrounds his death, with some claiming he was assassinated by the Communists, others noting he died at the hands of a companion whose machine gun went off by mistake – his death was publicly attributed to a sniper's bullet "for reasons of morale and propaganda"). Large part of the original of the University's rich intellectual patrimony was lost forever; although most of the 500-year-old library of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, founder of the University, was able to be evacuated. Renaissance manuscripts, amongst many other priceless documents stored in the University archives and libraries, were used by troops loyal to the Second Spanish Republic to fortify on-campus bunkers against the persistent enemy gunfire and to keep fires burning for warmth. Some of the survivors of the war would later recall, with some amusement, how many times their lives had been saved by the greats of Spanish literature, the verbal ingenuity of Cervantes quite literally saving their lives by stopping bullets halfway through the sizeable girth of his Don Quixote, and stacks of the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española providing cover from deadly shrapnel. One English volunteer, fighting in the French Commune de Paris Battalion, wrote:

When we next came back to University City we were put into the Philosophy Building. We built barricades with volumes of Indian metaphysics and early nineteenth-century German philosophy; they were quite bullet-proof. (...) Life here was quiet, orderly. On clear mornings, about eleven o'clock, we were bombed. A few shells came over late in the afternoons; the rest of the time we sniped, read, talked, studied Spanish, or dug trenches. (...) We explored the library; in the great reading-room anti-tank guns stood on the tables; the valuable books and manuscripts had been taken away, but there was plenty to interest us. (...) On a cold morning I found De Quincey's Lake Poets and rolled myself up in a carpet and read voraciously; the day passed in a stupor, I was with Wordsworth and Coleridge, in another place, another time... John Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain (1937)