A Roundtable discussion with: Professor Robert Gordon, Professor Filippo Focardi, and Professor Luisa Passerini
Chair: Guido Bartolini
Luisa Passerini (European University Institute)
Italian Memories in Controversy
Filippo Focardi (University of Padua)
I crimini di guerra italiani. Un’impossibile resa dei conti col passato?
Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge)
Decentred Memory: The Holocaust in Postwar Italy
The Second World War continues to be an inexhaustible source of academic research for the field of Italian Studies. Not only is this due to the enormous influence that World War II had on the political and cultural history of the Italian nation, for which it constitutes an almost mythical point of origin, but also to the controversies that, throughout the 20th century, characterised the collective memory of this event. This roundtable brings together three world-experts of the memory of World War II in Italian culture, Professor Robert Gordon, Professor Filippo Focardi, and Professor Luisa Passerini, who will reflect on the Italian memory discourse of World War II and its transformation through time. By providing indications about the diachronic development of specific segments of the Italian memory, addressing issues such as Fascism, the Holocaust, Italian war crimes, and the Italian Resistance, these three experts will offer a journey into Italian collective memory that will lead to the identification of both common threads and discrepancies in the public narratives that were used in Italy to narrate the past. The discussion about the transformation of Italian memory throughout the 20th and early 21st century will help us grasp better how memory narratives about World War II are constructed in our time and will enable us to think about how they may — or should — develop in the near future.
The event will comprise three presentations from the guest speakers, followed by a rountable discussion, and a Q&A with the public.
Luisa Passerini: Italian Memories in Controversy
For some decades, in Italy, silence and oblivion have been crucial aspects of the memory of the Second World War and the Resistance. My own research in the 1970s and 1980s engaged with these topics, not only by detecting the absence of certain themes in the oral memories of the Fascist regime (in contrast with the historiography on the interwar period), but also by putting silence in historical perspective. Such is the exemplary case of the silent reception of Mussolini’s speech by Fiat Mirafiori workers in Turin (15 May 1939) — an event that on the other hand left a deep mark in collective memory. However, since the 1990s, possibly in conjunction with European events but also with the publication of works like Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War (1991), silence became less important in Italian cultural memory than another aspect, i.e. conflict. In these decades, more and more studies came out—largely thanks to the diffusion of oral history and microhistory—documenting the counter-position of memories concerning fascism and antifascism. This tendency has been evidenced by John Foot’s important book Italy’s Divided Memory (2009) which shows how, in Italy, the history of the Fascist regime and certain aspects of the Resistance have been constructed as a memory battlefield. It is noticeable that this “civil war of memories”, which often unfolds through monuments, plaques and statues, has frequently reappeared in Italian history. It characterised the 1920s, the 1940s, and the late 1960s, and it is affecting today’s memory of colonialism. In the last decade, the attention of historians, and to some extent public memory too, has moved away from the themes of silence and oblivion and has rather focused on political violence, the link between the church and the state, and colonialism and race — reflecting the preoccupations and conflicts that are intrinsic to our time.
Filippo Focardi: I crimini di guerra italiani. Un’impossibile resa dei conti col passato?
L’Italia monarchico-fascista è stata responsabile di gravi crimini di guerra contro le popolazioni civili sia nelle colonie africane negli anni Trenta sia nei territori occupati durante la seconda guerra mondiale, in particolare nei Balcani. Nella memoria pubblica del fascismo e della seconda guerra mondiale elaborata e diffusa in Italia dopo il 1945 il retaggio dei crimini di guerra è risultato assente. L’autorappresentazione dominante da un lato ha infatti esaltato i meriti dell’Italia antifascista nella lotta contro l’occupante nazista e le azioni umanitarie dei “bravi italiani” salvatori di ebrei e, dall’altro, ha dipinto gli italiani nei panni delle vittime: sia vittime del fascismo e della “barbarie nazista” sia vittime della violenza slavo-comunista delle forze jugoslave di Tito (foibe). Nel mio intervento intendo approfondire innanzitutto le origini di questa master narrative, che sono da rintracciare a mio avviso negli anni cruciali compresi fra l’armistizio italiano del settembre 1943 e la firma del trattato di pace nel 1947. Passerò poi ad analizzare le ragioni della permanenza nel Paese di una memoria pubblica autoassolutoria restia fino ad oggi a fare i conti con i crimini di guerra italiani. Nel mio intervento analizzerò dunque gli effetti sulla memoria nazionale della cosiddetta “mancata Norimberga italiana” (ovvero della mancata punizione giudiziaria dei criminali di guerra italiani); mi soffermerò sull’azione svolta dalle istituzioni repubblicane per preservare un’immagine positiva del Paese ed evitare una resa dei conti con i crimini di guerra; e prenderò in esame lo iato che negli ultimi venti anni ha separato l’approfondimento storiografico dei crimini di guerra italiani, arrivato oggi ad un livello più che soddisfacente, e la società italiana la quale è rimasta ancorata ad una memoria autoindulgente e autoassolutoria, se non vittimistica, con venature segnate da un risorgente nazionalismo.
Robert Gordon: Decentred Memory: The Holocaust in Postwar Italy
My remarks will focus on how the Holocaust and its memory has been an awkward and somewhat unresolved presence in the cultural field throughout the history of post-war Italy and how this awkwardness has been both difficult and productive in various ways over this 80-year period. Emerging awareness of the Holocaust, often coming from outside Italy, put pressure on mainstream, apparently dominant national memory discourses, troubling them, complicating them, pushing them beyond their limits and borders, forcing open questions of responsibility, historical continuity and discontinuity, uncovering unacknowledged aspects of both the past and the present. Alberto Cavaglion summed up this position nicely, writing that in the 1950s in particular, the concentration camp survivor was the ‘convitato di pietra’ in post-war Italian memory of the war—Giorgio Bassani’s remarkable character Geo Josz came to embody this role. A comparable but converse awkwardness emerged when, from the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the Shoah (the spread of the term Shoah was itself a symptom of this) was transformed from the margins into a central position in the cultural discourse. At each end of this spectrum of use and distortion, attention to the genocide of Europe’s Jews was both historical and specific, and at the same time, a form of displacement, a code for other objects of memory and other moral, political and cultural questions. Michael Rothberg’s influential formulation of ‘multidirectional memory’ thus manifests itself in especially powerful local ways in the Italian case, in forms that demand dialogue with memory of the war, Fascism, the Resistance and colonialism (and more), as well as with the very notion of cultural memory itself.
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