Abstract
The article sheds light on the biographies of Tyrolean and South Tyrolean members of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and compares them with the official image of anti-fascist resistance in the region. The authors demonstrate that the commitment on behalf of the Spanish Republic was largely removed from the regional history of resistance. They identify the reasons for this situation as lying both in the ideological circumstances of the Cold War and in the predominance of a spatially narrowly focused tradition of local history-writing. However, the life-histories of the International Brigade members substantially expand the regional history of resistance by making evident the existence of an early form of socialist anti-fascism, whose history involved precisely the spiritual and physical overcoming of the region.