Ghostly Solidarities: Eduard Claudius, Green Olives and Bare Mountains

Eduard Claudius’s novelistic account of the fall of the Spanish Republic,Grüne Oliven und nackte Berge[Green Olives and Bare Mountains 1944], frames the collapse of the emancipatory political and cultural aspirations of the Popular Front against the fraught political landscape of Europe on the eve of war. It appeals to the long tradition of popular resistance to oppression as a counterweight—a “countertime”—to the catastrophes of the late 1930s. Yet this countertime becomes increasingly displaced and disembodied with the foreclosure of a Popular Front politics, and Claudius’s novel becomes a meditation on the hardening of solidarity and discipline