Episode 67 with Sara J. Brenneis

Several thousand Spaniards were imprisoned in the notorious Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen. While there are many memoirs from survivors of the camp, only one published his account just a year after liberation, Carlos Rodríguez del Risco. In this episode, Prof. Sara J. Brenneis, who has just released a critical edition of this forgotten account, returns to the podcast to share Rodríguez del Risco’s unique and incredible story of how he went from Civil War fighter to exile in France to concentration camp survivor to Francoist. She also discusses how she rediscovered this important memoir and dealt in the critical edition with its more problematic aspects.

The Episode

The Guest

Sara J. Brenneis is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Spanish at Amherst College, affiliated with Film and Media Studies and European Studies. She is the author of Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain (Purdue UP, 2014), Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015 (U Toronto P, 2018), published in an updated Spanish edition by Marcial Pons Historia in 2024, and the critical edition of Carlos Rodríguez del Risco’s 1946 memoir Yo he estado en Mauthausen (Editorial UCA, 2024). In addition, she co-edited Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation (U Toronto P, 2020) with Gina Herrmann.

Additional Resources

sarabrenneis.com

Base de datos de deportados catalanes y españoles a los campos nazis

Suggested Readings

• Brenneis, Sara J. Españoles en Mauthausen. Representaciones de un campo de concentración nazi (1940-2018). Marcial Pons Historia, 2024.
• ———. “Research on Lockdown: Digital Scholarship in Madrid during the Pandemic.” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 45, No. 1 (2020): 109-23.
• Gómez Bravo, Gutmaro, and Diego Martínez López. Esclavos del Tercer Reich. Los españoles en el campo de Mauthausen. Madrid: Cátedra, 2022.
• López García, José-Ramón, ed. Escrituras del exilio republicano de 1939 y los campos de concentración. Madrid: Editorial Iberoamericana, 2021.
• Thomàs, Joan Maria, ed. Literatura i camps de concentració nazis: Joaquim Amat-Piniella, Primo Levi i Jorge Semprún en perspectiva comparada [Trilingual Spanish-Catalán-English edition]. Barcelona: Memorial Democràtic, 2023.