José María Pemán

José María Pemán y Pemartín (8 May 1897 – 19 July 1981) was a Spanish journalist, poet, playwright, novelist, essayist and monarchist intellectual. Politically, Pemán was also a member of Francisco Franco's Falange movement.^[1]

José María Pemán y Pemartín was born on 8 May 1897 in Cádiz. Originally a student of law, he entered the literary world with a series of poetic works inspired by his native Andalusia (De la vida sencilla, A la rueda, rueda, El barrio de Santa Cruz, and Las flores del bien). In the 1930s he became a journalist. He was elected to seat i of the Real Academia Española on 7 December 1939, he took up his seat on 20 December 1939. He was the director of the royal academy from 1939 to 1940 and 1944 to 1947.^[2]

Pemán often blurred literary genres, and developed a unique style that may be described as equidistant between classicism and modernism, not unfamiliar to readers of ABC and El Alcázar.

As a dramatist, he wrote historical-religious verse (El divino impaciente and Cuando las Cortes de Cádiz y Cisneros), plays based on Andalusian themes (Noche de levante en calma), and comical costume dramas (Julieta y Romeo and El viento sobre la tierra).

Pemán adapted many classical works (including Antigone, Hamlet, and Oedipus). He displayed his narrative skill in a series of novels and short stories (including Historia del fantasma y doña Juanita, Cuentos sin importancia, and La novela de San Martín). He was also a noted essayist.

In 1955 he received the Mariano de Cavia prize for journalism. In 1957, he won the March de Literatura prize. He was the personal advisor to the Count of Barcelona from 1969 until the title's dissolution. In 1981, a few months before his death he was named Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece.

Pemán was one of the few prominent intellectuals to support Francisco Franco and the Falangist movement. Franco named Pemán as head of commission on education, during which time Pemán purged 16,000 teachers, many of whom were sent to prison and hundreds of whom were ordered to be executed.^[1] This ensured his professional success during and after the Civil War, and also damaged his international reputation.

Pemán wrote a set of unofficial, popular lyrics for the Marcha Real, which Franco had reinstated as Spain's national anthem in 1939 in its original form as a purely instrumental piece, despite some popular misapprehensions concerning the official status of Eduardo Marquina's lyrics. Despite never being published in the BOE (Official State Bulletin), Pemán's lyrics continued in use after Franco's death by a few who remained nostalgic for the Franco era during the period of the transition to a democracy.

Pemán was a supporter of the (Spanish: contubernio judeo-masonico-bolchevique) Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevist Conspiracy, a conspiracy theory based on the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In a 1937 radio address, Pemán evoked (Spanish: Limpieza de la sangre), the purity of the blood, statutes of blood purity that were the legal discrimination mechanism used against Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians by the Spanish Inquisition, in which Pemán called the Spanish civil war a "magnificent struggle to bleed Spain."^[1]

Peman's Poema de la bestia y el angel (1938), considered his most influential work, drew on the anti-Semitic Protocol of the Elders of Zion.^[1]

• Romeo and Juliet (1940)
• Lola Montes (1944)
• Madness for Love (1948)
• The Duchess of Benameji (1949)
• The Captain from Loyola (1949)
• Congress in Seville (1955)

• Arakis ISP (in Spanish)