English Presentation
Project Week Barcelona 2015
Fadri Hediger / Philippe Huber
George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War
George Orwell was born on June 25, 1903 in British India as Eric Arthur Blair. He was one of the most
influential English writers, essayists and journalists in the 20th century. He used the pen name
George Orwell. He died in London in 1950. Orwell descended from an English-French teakwood
family. He had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril. The first year of his
life Orwell lived in India. Afterwards he moved to Oxfordshire, but his father, who was a British
colonial officer and who was responsible for the opium crops, remained in India.
When he was six years old, he went to an Anglican church school where he stayed for two years.
Afterwards, he visited a boarding school for the British upper class where he recieved good marks. In
this period of life he wrote the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" and published it in 1952. Thanks to
a stipend by the King himself he could visit the renowned Eton College.
What did Orwell do in the time from 1922 to 1927?
He worked for the British colonial police named 'Indian Imperial Police' in Burma. He wrote about
these experiences and adventures in the essays 'A Hanging’ and 'Shooting an Elephant'. As a result of
his health problems and his critical attitude to the colonial police, he returned to England.
In the time between 1927 and 1937 Blair lived in France and in England, where he had several parttime jobs such as a dishwasher, as a bookshop employee or as a tutor. In 1933 he wrote "Down and
out in Paris and London" under his new pen name George Orwell. The year after he wrote down
experiences from Burma in his novel "Burmese Days". In 1937 he documented the situation of the
working families in the industrial area in the north of England in the report "The Road to Wigan
Pier".
English Presentation
Project Week Barcelona 2015
Fadri Hediger / Philippe Huber
2762 volunteers from England went to the Spanish Civil War, one of them was George Orwell. He
had sympathies for the republican side for the left in England and so in 1937, he fought with the
party POUM against the rebels under General Francisco Franco near Barcelona.
The major problems were not the enemies, but the cold, the hunger, the lack of hygiene and their
bad weapons from World War One.
Afterwards the Stalinists deactivated his militia with force of arms and black propaganda. Thereby
Orwell got injured by a shot through his throat. But he could escape from Spain and reached a safe
place. During the Spanish Civil War he had several contacts with famous personalities like Ernest
Hemingway, André Malraux and Leopold Kohr. Plenty of his former colleagues died or were put into
prison. In 1928 he wrote his experiences and the analysis of the Spanish Civil War in a gripping book
named 'Homage to Catalania'. In this book he particularly described the street fights and the terror
of the Stalinists.
What was Orwell’s role in the Spanish Civil War?
He was a clear opponent of Stalinism and had sympathies for the anarchist and revolutionary
communist groups (POUM). He really approved of the social revolution and converted into a
democratic Socialist. In his opinion, Socialism is: Freedom, human dignity and solidarity. On the
other hand, he distanced himself from communism. The Spanish Civil War was the basis for his
criticism of totalitarianism.
In the time of World War Two, after 1939, he worked as a book critic. From 1941 to1943 he worked
with the BBC as an English language producer but he produced war propaganda above all.
Afterwards, Orwell worked as a war correspondent for the 'Observer' in Germany and in France.
In 1945, George Orwell published the tale "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story", which is a satire that shows
the failure of the Russian Revolution due to the betrayal of socialist ideas by the Stalinists.
This work was a reckoning with the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union and it was also his literary
breakthrough. In the Cold War the book was used in Europe and the USA as a work against
Communism. Its most famous sentence is maybe "All animals are equal, but some are more equal
than others."
In 1948 he published an 'utopia in the shape of a novel: ’1984’. 1984 became one of his most famous
works and was a satire on a gloomy vision of the future. He showed the terrible picture of a
totalitarian surveillance society (=Orwell-State).
In 1950 Eric Arthur Blair died of tuberculosis.