Remembering the Great War: Historical Memory, Neutrality, and Commercial Visual Culture in Post-War Spain
Produced in Barcelona only a few years after the First World War, this remarkable archive offers a rare opportunity to examine how a neutral European nation interpreted one of the defining conflicts of the twentieth century. Unlike British, French, German, or American wartime publications, these Spanish chocolate cards were created outside the official propaganda of the belligerent powers. Instead, they reveal how the war was remembered, explained, and transformed into popular historical knowledge through commercial visual culture.
Issued as collectible puzzle cards inserted into chocolate products during the early 1920s, each set consists of eighteen cards which, when assembled, form the portrait of a political leader, monarch, military commander, or pioneering inventor associated with the Great War. The archive includes figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George V, Tsar Nicholas II, Sultan Mehmet V, Leon Trotsky, Raymond Poincaré, King Albert I of Belgium, King Peter I of Serbia, Emperor Taishō, and other leading personalities of the conflict. Complementing these are Alfred Nobel, Gustavo Zédé, Santos-Dumont, and Guglielmo Marconi, whose inventions in explosives, submarines, aviation, and wireless communication fundamentally reshaped twentieth-century warfare. Their inclusion demonstrates that the series sought not merely to commemorate political leaders but also to explain the technological forces that made modern industrial war possible.
The archive's most distinctive feature lies in the individual puzzle cards themselves. Around each section of the completed portrait are finely illustrated scenes depicting battles, military campaigns, diplomatic events, and technological innovations connected with the featured individual. Each completed puzzle therefore combines portraiture with historical narrative, inviting viewers to understand the war through the relationship between personalities, events, and technological change. The result is an innovative form of popular historical education in which commercial advertising and historical interpretation became inseparable.
The significance of this archive lies not only in its rarity but also in the perspective it preserves. Produced in neutral Spain shortly after the Armistice, the series provides a civilian interpretation of the conflict rather than an official national narrative. It presents Allied and Central Power leaders within the same educational framework and places inventors alongside statesmen, suggesting an effort to explain the war as a shared European catastrophe shaped by political leadership, scientific innovation, and military technology. As such, the archive offers an important comparative source for understanding how a non-belligerent society interpreted and remembered the Great War during the immediate post-war years.
As a coherent primary-source archive, the collection possesses exceptional research value for First World War Studies, European History, Memory Studies, Visual Culture, the History of Science and Technology, Advertising History, Print Culture, Material Culture, and the History of Education. More broadly, it demonstrates how commercial ephemera shaped public historical understanding, revealing the role of everyday consumer culture.
