Crossroad of Divided Memories. Talking About Fascism and Communism in Post-Cold War Italy
The lecture focuses on historical and public debates over the totalitarian pasts of the 20th century in post-Cold War Italy. A longtime geopolitical crossroad hosting the biggest and most influential Communist party of the Western bloc, Italy had to face after the Second World War both the memory of the endogenous fascist regime and the challenge of integrating Soviet-backed left-wing forces into the United States-led Western coalition. Until 1991-92, mainstream political parties and public intellectuals managed to forward a social memory of the totalitarian past based on the compromise between selective remembrance, light condemnation, and tacit forgiveness. After the end of the Cold War and amidst rising internal tensions, the Italian public opinion was confronted with the simultaneous emergence of alternative and even conflicting memories over fascism and communism. The lecture will get through the main points of conflict by analyzing the genesis and the public use of the two new national memorial days: the Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 (celebrated since 2001) and the Remembrance Day of the Italian exiles from former Yugoslavia on February 10 (Giorno del Ricordo, celebrated since 2004). These two close dates have marked since then the emergence of previously unknown memory clashses between two conflicting agendas: the one instrumentalizes the Jewish genocide in order to keep alive the antifascist memorial narrative, while the other one attempts to contrast Stalinist crimes against Fascist and Nazi ones.
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