Dionisio Ridruejo

Dionisio Ridruejo Jiménez (The Burgo de Osma, Soria, October 12, 1912-Madrid, June 29, 1975) was a Spanish writer and politician belonging to the generation of 36 or first generation Post -war poetics. Early Member of the Spanish Falange of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, during the Civil War was responsible for propaganda on the Francoist side. Embracer of an openly totalitarian speech, he met as a volunteer of the Blue Division during World War II; Upon his return he reproached Franco in a letter not to bet on fascism. Result of his tensions with the regime, he was imprisoned and came to exile; He would end up experiencing during the dictatorship an ideological transition that ended up placing him in critical positions with the dictatorship near social democracy or socializing liberalism.

Biography

was born on October 12, 1912 in the Soriana town of Burgo de Osma, son of a merchant of relieved position and a housewife, niece of her husband. It was the fifth of six brothers, of which The two elders died very soon. His father - fallen in 1915, when Dionisio was three years old - took over the branch that the commercial and banking business opened in Soria established in the Burgo, starting a proliferation system (promoting Up to 35 subsidiaries in Castilla) that lasted until Dionisio was twenty years old.

studied with the Marists in Segovia and then with the Jesuits in Valladolid and Madrid. He entered the María Cristina de El Escorial University to study the Law degree, in internship; ended it at the Madrid Central University in June 1935.

participant of the gatherings of the literary group of The Alegre Ballena , was one of the members who joined the so -called Spanish trade union movement founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, embryo of Falange Spanish (Fe). Of traditional and religious education, at twenty -one, in 1933, Dionisio joined faith, as one of the first followers of José Antonio Primo de Rivera (whom he met in 1935), and held political positions; You owe two verses of the letter of the Falangist anthem face to the sun i> Hymn to freedom ("forward... / to the fight that founds peace, / to the work that the earth wins / in the name of freedom").

As he will later say about his very much: "My knowledge of political and social realities was summary," and over the years they were taking "to conclusions far removed from my youth priori, rather received by influence that conquered by reflection."

Civil War

After the outbreak of the civil war, he joined the rebel side. At the end of 1936 the Falangist leader Manuel Hedilla appointed him Provincial Chief of Falange in Valladolid, replacing Andrés Redondo - brother of the late Onesimo Redondo -. At the beginning of 1937 he was briefly detained by Franco's orders - together to others like José Antonio Girón de Velasco or Javier Martínez de Bedoya - for the unauthorized distribution of a reproduced speech by José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

In June 1937, a Falangist delegation who traveled to Nazi Germany, an assistant in Hamburg to an act of the Kraft Durch Freude (KDF) organization and then had a brief reception with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in Berlin Friend from Antonio Tovar's youth (studied together at the María Cristina de El Escorial), Ridruejo gave this radio competitions he received from Ramón Serrano Suñer, Minister of the Interior, at the beginning of 1938, after the formation of the first Franco's Cabinet. Man next to Serrano Suñer, on March 2, 1938, he was appointed National Propaganda. José Antonio according to Stanley G. Payne, also treated during his control of the propaganda section to conserve the poetic forms of the late Falangist leader.

designated in June 1938 part of the commission of three members-along with Pedro Gamero del Castillo and Juan José Prade He opposed the excessive preponderance of the Church in the educational plans, contrary to the Minister of Education Pedro Sainz Rodríguez. With the ministerial restructuring of the beginning of 1939, he maintained control of the propaganda powers, but from then on the new position since the new position of Director General. His formal cessation - he had stopped exercising as such months - as general director of Propaganda took place by decree of May 1, 1941 of the Ministry of the Interior, and would end up publishing in the Official State Gazette simultaneously with the cessation of Antonio Tovar. He came to collaborate with the magazine hierarchy , as well as with the Falangist newspaper above Spain .

In October 1938 he made a trip to Ltalia Fascista, during which he held various meetings with hierarchs of the Mussolini regime. He signed an agreement with Dino Alfieri, the almighty Minister of Popular Culture, for which the bases for the co -production of commercial films between the two countries were established.

After the end of the contest he founded along with Pedro Laín Entralgo the magazine Escorial , bastion of the poetic movement known as Garcilasismo or entrenched poetry, of which he himself was part. He rescued from its pages the poetry of Antonio Machado (a lover of his native Land Soriana) and in October 1940 he wrote the prologue for an edition of the Complete Works of the poet who died in exile; the publication In 1941 of the work he generated tensions in the government, reaching Juan Vigón the censorship of this. However, the protection of the Falangist gathering Musa Musae, chaired by his brother Manuel Machado, served to prevent it.

Franco dictatorship, early years

Dionisio Ridruejo participated in 1940 in the foundation of the Falangist gathering known as Musa Musae Academy, where he read some of his works. On September 13 of that same year, Ramón Serrano Suñer part of Germany as a special envoy of Franco, accompanied by a group of inclined people in favor of National Socialism. This entourage included Demetrio Carceller Segura along with Miguel Primo de Rivera, Antonio Tovar, Manuel Halcón, Manuel de Mora-Figueroa and Dionisio Ridruejo himself. There he interviews with hierarcas and sees how they fight and how they organize cinematographically in the studies of The Universum Film Ag.

Ridiruejo at the San Sebastian North Station, in a welcome to volunteers from the Blue Division.

in an article of above published on October 29, 1940 - "The country as a synthesis" - Ridruejo came to define the phalanx as totalitarian, minority, exclusive and unitary. In 1941 He marched as a volunteer soldier to the Blue Division that went to fight the Soviet Union next to the German troops. "The years 1940 and 1941 were the most contradictory, torn and critical of my life." I>. On his return, he faced the regime of General Francisco Franco, because the dictator behaved as a revanchist ruler who, rather than following the lines of the Falangist revolution, gave himself to the most conservative currents and intended to destroy the adversaries. As Ridruejo himself wrote, Franco pretended "the supreme defense of our generation" while singing "the song of unconditional rights" and preached "a kind of sports revenge, giving the honorable task of power a category of payment of bonuses."

The truth is that the Block Division — without knowingly participating in most of the officiality, which is the most serious — feels a kind of messianic consciousness: we are almost all disillusioned phalangists, dissenting how things go in reactionary and still-minded Spain that has been organized. (...) Coldly considered—from a Ministry of State criterion—we are the price of neutrality.

Dionisio Ridruejo, Russian notebooks.

He exposed his discrepancy in person to Franco himself: he accused him of using the Falange to the point of treason, he explained that the command does not legitimize everything and that, instead of embodying the revolution, he intended to be an arbitrator between contradictory forces, only achieving an unpopular political regime that only administered hunger, yielded to ecclesiastical pressures, supported arbitrary justice and sustained itself thanks to an oppressive army. He concluded by saying that the "Regime sinks as a company even if it is sustained as a racketeer."

Ridruejo, like other division members such as José Manuel Castañón and Luis Romero, and despite his later democratic evolution, would maintain that the volunteers were not wrong back in 1941.

After sending a letter to Franco dated July 7, 1942, in which he reproached him for falsifying the Falangist ideal, he moved to the Sierra de Gredos, a place of retirement where he meditated on his idea of Spain, and wrote the series of poems, dated July 1942, Serranía.

Opposition to the Regime

Unhappy with the Regime due to its lack of a Falangist character, he broke with it in 1942. He immediately left the Falange and left all his public posts, as stated in a letter to Serrano Suñer, who, moreover, He called it "orthodox or utopian phalangist". He also commented later on the meaning that the event had then:

Act of value - unusual- had already been in the year 1942 his resignation from all his political positions; then, the defense of his discrepant political convictions, when the discrepancy was considered treason, without doubled in the face of the prosecution, the prison, the confinement or the exile; his incorporation into the Blue Division despite his precarious health, or his stay, sick, in the United States, explaining History of the Literature and of the And he did everything without vanishing or hurting, for simplicity was another of his constants: neither vanity nor false modesty. So, asked one day when he had his worth as a poet, he answered: "I have a decent poet." Again Lain told him to take him to the Academy: "No, I don't look academic.", replied.

This personal crisis, which he shared with many other Falangists, is reflected in his poem "Threshold of Maturity", written in 1943:

Remember, comrade, those days that are ageing us / those who have anticipated our discouraged prudence. / Don't cry, don't curse, don't get angry at your heart... / remember, just. Since you're already a man / behave like a man. / Remember those days: dying was as beautiful as living: / life and death were sources of such glories...! / You fought, yes, you fought. Just remember. It was all true. Love was that: / the molten anxiety of the only beauty... / And if you shall weep, pouring the ashes of your blood upon the ashes of evil and remote endeavor, / seek loneliness and surrender in silence.

He was exiled for almost five years to various cities, including Ronda and San Cugat del Vallés, in 1947. His re-education began. In 1947 he denounced the political situation in a Confidential report delivered to the General Franco.

In January 1949 his first chronicle appeared in the newspaper Arriba sent from Rome, a correspondent that he would maintain until his return to Madrid in June 1951. In 1950 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature Francisco Franco for his book In eleven years.

Since 1951 he has lived in Madrid giving lectures fighting to liberalize the Franco regime. In spite of everything, his belonging to the former Francoist fighters allows him a freedom of action that the former Republicans would never have been able to enjoy. He writes books, articles and paid journalistic collaborations that allow him to survive, despite the difficulties he is suffering. The team that he formed during his years as Falangist leader (Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Xavier de Salas, Juan Ramón Masoliver, José María Fontana, Samuel Ros, Román Escohotado, Carlos Sentís, Antonio de Obregón, Martínez Barbeito, Edgar Neville, Luis Escobar, Leopoldo Panero, Manuel Augusto García Viñolas, Pedro Laín Entralgo, Luis Rosales, Luis Felipe Vivanco, etc...), "the least sectarian of those who were formed during the war" according to him, was always there, in one way or another, to lend him a hand.. He then realizes that the only way to liberalize the Franco regime is to join the democratic opposition.

In 1956 he participated in the Acción Democrática platform. He is jailed for participating in a movement of young writers; there he collaborates with PCE militants without knowing it, since they keep their militancy a secret (among them are Enrique Múgica, Ramón Tamames and Javier Pradera). In 1957 he denounced the Spanish situation in a statement to the Cuban magazine Bohemia and for that he goes back to jail; When asked what kept Franco in power, he replied: «The fear of a bloody revision keeps him in power: it is a fear based on a bad conscience of having abused, of having gone too far. He is also supported by the broad syndicate of interests — not only economic interests but power and comfort interests — that he has cared for with great realism.

Accused of having founded the Acción Democrática political group, he was imprisoned again and subjected to two trials. He taught in the United States in the early 1960s. He will say in 1961 that he has not kept quiet because "I was wrong, that is, because he intervened once (no doubt insignificantly) in the Spanish historical process, I consider myself committed to that process."

In 1962 he attended the IV Congress of the European Movement in Munich between leaders of the opposition from the interior and from exile, baptized by the official press as the «Munich collusion»; a year earlier he had had to publish his book Written in Spain in Buenos Aires, which the censorship did not allow to be published in the Peninsula. After the meeting in Munich, he was unable to return to Spain and went into exile in Paris from 1962 to 1964. During this period he maintained a correspondence with his wife, published under the name Intimate Letters from Exile On June 24, 1964, he was tried by the Public Order Court for illegal propaganda, being sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of 10,000 pesetas.

In 1968-1969 he taught in Madison (Wisconsin) and at the University of Austin (Texas). Since 1971 he has lavished interviews in which he exposes his opposition to the Regime. He begins to collaborate in the magazine Destino on a regular basis.

In 1974 he refounded his old party with new names, calling it the Spanish Social Democratic Union (USDE), with reformist approaches that advocated a social democracy beyond the Christian democracy of his friend Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, with other socializing contacts. In fact, in November he was arrested with Felipe González, Antón Cañellas and José María Benegas. In May 1975 he spoke with Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez and Felipe González to constitute a Platform for Democratic Convergence.

Private life

He had somewhat tumultuous relationships with Marichu de la Mora (mother of film director Jaime Chávarri) and with Countess von Podevils (Hexe), which he broke up in 1943. He married Gloria de Ros on June 26, 1944 and they They went on their honeymoon to Palma de Mallorca. «In the castle of Bellver she met, two or three days after her arrival, with Manuel Hedilla, confined to the island for several years. In this interview, Ridruejo and Hedilla exchanged points of view on the politics of the moment and the truncated history of the Falange". The couple had two children, Gloria and Dionisio. She was his great support in the years of ostracism, since he began to show his discrepancies with the Franco regime, and from the mid-50s on in his fight to restore democracy in Spain. Together they translated from Catalan The gray notebook. Dietary , by Josep Pla The premature death of her husband made her take charge of the annotations of some of her poems, which were going to be published in Editorial Castalia.

Death

Ridruejo's health had always been delicate, although the exact reason was not known until days before his death, when it was learned that he suffered from coronary insufficiency. Interned at the Concepción clinic in Madrid waiting to be operated on for coronary insufficiency, he died at dawn on June 29, 1975. He was buried in the Almudena cemetery. Unlike many others who did not want to To acquire it, the respect that his solitary figure was able to earn from both Spains reaches a writer like Juan Benet, who collaborated with him and dedicated a very laudatory and informed article to his death.

News

Research on Dionisio Ridruejo has experienced a great boost in the 21st century. A valuable autobiographical volume, due to its writing and its clarity of analysis, Almost a Memoirs —which appeared assembled chronologically in 1976 by César Armando Gómez—, was completely rearranged by Jordi Amat in 2007: it left the shape of each of the texts that compose it, added some important family Memories as well as many fundamental documents (reissued in 2012). Francisco Morente Valero published a fundamental monograph in 2006: Dionisio Ridruejo: from fascism to anti-Francoism.

Jordi Gracia García, for his part, has dealt with Ridruejo in three books: the collection of autobiographical texts entitled Materials for a biography (2005), The value of dissent. Unpublished letters of Dionisio Ridruejo (2007) and The rescued life of Dionisio Ridruejo (2008), his biography. In addition, with Jordi Amat he has recovered some unpublished Intimate Letters from Exile (2012), letters addressed to his wife, Gloria de Ros. Apart from his quality as a writer, he defends his moral worth because he "assumes his political errors of youth and early maturity as ethical and biographical responsibility, and thus traces a very rare trajectory of reparation: his analytical capacity, his ethical veracity, his moral integrity and his gift of prose crystallize in a very rare historical figure. And he also died without being able to enjoy anything that he contributed to repair ».

Work

As a poet, Ridruejo can be ascribed to what Dámaso Alonso called rooted poetry: he cultivates classical strophism in most of his work and uses a pure and clear language. He possesses a great formal serenity typical of Garcilasista aesthetics and is a master in the form of the sonnet, for which he had a great facility. He was the juvenile author of two verses of Face to the sun . His poetic beginnings owe something to the Machadian model; His preferred themes are love, nature, religious and patriotic sentiments, and art and literature. In his later years he takes the intimate course of memories.

In addition to his poetry and prose, he wrote the dramatic piece in three acts Don Juan and an autobiographical text, Casi un memorias. With fire and with roots. The two volumes of his extensive travel guide Castilla la Vieja have become one of the classics of the genre.

Poetic work

• Plural, Segovia, Imprenta El Adelantado, 1935.
• First book of love, Barcelona, Yunque, 1939.
• Poetry of arms, Madrid, Hierarchy Editions, 1940.
• Fable of the maiden and the river, Madrid, National Editor, 1943.
• Sonnets to stone, Madrid, National Editor, 1943.
• In the solitude of time, Barcelona, Montaner and Simon, 1944.
• Poetry in weapons. Notebook of the Russian campaign, Madrid, Afrodisio Aguado, 1944.
• Elegías (1943-1945), Madrid, Adonais, 1948.
• In eleven years. Complete poetry of youth (1935-1945), Madrid, Editora Nacional, 1950. (National Literature Award, 1950).
• To date. Complete poetry (1934-1959)Madrid, Aguilar, 1961.
• Catalan notebook, Madrid, Editions of the Journal of the West, 1965.
• 122 poems. AnthologyBuenos Aires, Losada, 1967.
• Almost in prose (1968-1972), Madrid, Editions of the Journal of the West, 1972.
• Briefly. Leaves of an unpublished songbookMalaga, Litoral, 1975.

Prose work

• «In the seventy years of Don José Ortega and Gasset». Revista (Barcelona). 26 February 1953. (Cavia Mariano Award of 1953)
• Journals of Russia, Journal 1941-1942, last edition: Editorial Fórcola.
• Sometimes, Madrid, Aguilar, 1960, essays.
• Written in SpainBuenos Aires, Losada, 1962. CEC, 2008 ISBN 978-84-259-1425-6
• Castilla la Vieja, Barcelona, Destination, 2 vols. 1973 and 1974. Avila ISBN 978-84-944455-4-5 (hardship) and 978-84-944455-5-2 (soft cover); Burgos 978-84-944455-6-9; Segovia 978-84-945765-0-8; Soria 978-84-943632-9-0
• Diary of a truce
• Memories of an ImaginationUnpublished novel.
• Between literature and politics, Madrid, Seminars and Editions, 1973. ISBN 84-299-0043-8
• Almost a few memories, edition of César Armando Gómez, Barcelona, Planeta, 1976. Reordered later by Jordi Amat, he appeared in Barcelona, Peninsula, 2008, with new materials; the last edition is 2012. ISBN 978-84-9942-194-0
• Shadows and lumps, Barcelona, Destination, 1977.
• Materials for a biography, selection and prologue of Jordi Gracia, Madrid, Fundación Santander Central Hispano, 2005, ISBN 84-89913-63-3
• The value of dissent. Unpublished Epistle of Dionysius Ridruejoed. de Jordi Gracia, Barcelona, Planeta, 2007.
• Intimate letters from exile, Fundación Santander, 2012, ISBN 978-84-92543-36-6
• Catalonia, Madrid, Clave, 1967, 215 pp.
• Cities, Madrid, Prensa Española, 1983, 277 pp.
• Chronicles and Comments, 1943-1956, Aguilar, 1960
• In time. Memories of a truce, Barcelona, Arion, 1960, 182 pp.
• Diary of a truce, Barcelona, Destination, 1972, 242 pp.
• Ecos from Munich. Political papers written in exile, RBA, 2012, 240 pp.
• Spain 1963. Consideration of a situation, Paris, 1963, 42 pp.
• You're back. Letters (Max Aub and Dionisio Ridruejo), Madrid, Instituto Cervantes, 2018, 124 pp.

Theater

• Don Juan (1945-1946)
• The covenant with life, published in the journal Fantasy
• The foundation of the kingdom (new)
• Europe and the world today, Madrid, Guadarrama, 1959, 482 pp.