Conflict and War Correspondents

bell tolls: It was the first major conflict to be covered on the spot, at the front lines, by journalists and photographers, according to Deutsche Welle. As an ideological conflict between the right and the left, it attracted not just run-of-the-mill war correspondents but a number of the most important writers and cultural figures of its day, all of them determined to cover what one of them, the journalist Claud Cockburn, called "the decisive thing of this century."To bring the conflict and its coverage to life I chose to write about two of the most celebrated artists involved in it: Ernest Hemingway - whose most successful book, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," was based on his war experience - and Robert Capa, whose reputation was established by the extraordinary photographs he took during it. Why did you choose these perspectives when writing about the Spanish Civil War Amanda Vaill Amanda Vaill: I've long been attracted to the ways in which culture changed over the course of the 20th century, and the Spanish Civil War seemed to offer an especially dramatic look at that. To provide the Spanish viewpoint, without which I couldn't have written the book, I included Arturo Barea, whose career as a writer began as a result of his dangerous and courageous work in the war. Finally, I took as an inspiration something Hemingway said: "It is very dangerous to write the truth in war." Each of these men and women was trying, after his or her fashion, to tell the truth about something very complicated, and the ways in which each succeeded, in their work and in their lives, was a story I wanted to write. And to counterbalance these men - because the Spanish Civil War was also the first conflict in which women served in the military and as combat journalists - I wrote about the three women involved with them, each of whom did work that was just as outstanding: Martha Gellhorn, Gerda Taro, and Ilsa Kulcsar. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.