Barcelona in 1936--by George Orwell
from Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell.
This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and
yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have
obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that
matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had
joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it
seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of
Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since
the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period
was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something
startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the
working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by
the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the
Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of
the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.
Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every
shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised;
even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters
and shop-walkers looked you in the
face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had
temporarily disappeared. Nobody said
'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and
said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos
dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my
first experience was receiving a lecture
from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they
had all been commandeered, and the
trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The
revolutionary posters were everywhere,
flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements
look like daubs of mud. Down the
Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to
and fro, the loud-speakers were
bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the
crowds that was the queerest thing of
all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically
ceased to exist. Except for a small
number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically
everyone wore rough working-class
clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and
moving. There was much in this that I did not
understand, in some ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a
state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I
believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that
the entire bourgeoisie had either fled,
been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realise that great
numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were
simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.
Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a
gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings
were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops
were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat
was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar and
petrol, and a really serious shortage of
bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far
as one could judge the people were
contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still
extremely low; you saw very few
conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. #Above all, there was a
belief in the revolution and the
future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human
beings were trying to behave as human
beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist
notices (the barbers were mostly
Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were
coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the
hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something
rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the
hackneyed phrase of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind,
all about the proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on
the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of
these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it,
begin singing it to an appropriate tune.
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