Search

Il saggio si propone di mettere a confronto le diverse dinamiche e i diversi effetti che le due guerre mondiali hanno avuto sulle memorie e l'identità degli italiani.

The introduction explains how, in the volume, authors have placed a particular emphasis on some case studies which were considered particularly useful to bring to light uneasy questions, such as the one of contested memories; in particular, the case of Italy and of Germany have offered an emblematic ground to further investigate the controversial and often painful idea of ‘reconciliation’. Moving often from the study of cultural memories of the two World Wars in these national realities, the authors have become more and more convinced that to acknowledge the existence of these contested memories is the first step to take to encourage the negotiation of a truly shared ethic of memory. Therefore, the introduction addresses uneasy and troubled questions: do winners and losers, victims and executioners, share the same right to remember? Are all executioners the same? Or can you distinguish among them? And is it ethical or moral to distinguish among them? And can you apply the same arguments to the winners? Are they all good? Needles to say, to ask these questions does not mean to revise history, it does not mean to be ‘revisionists’ or, even worst, to deny and to refuse to acknowledge what happened: condemnation of nazism cannot but be unquestionable, the exterminations camps stay as a historical fact and a shame, and you cannot absolve the dictators of the 1920s, 1930s and later years in Italy, in Germany, Spain, Portugal or the former USSR. Similarly, the partisan wars must be remembered as founding experiences deeply pervaded by national and transnational values of freedom and independence. All these memories must stay as lasting and untouchable values. And yet, this does not exempt us from the responsibility to remember also the shadows, to retrieve what, in time, has been removed, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes strategically; we have to face the uneasy debate on the dangers pervading the preservation of an idea of memory suffocated by all rituals and detached from historical sense, that is the dangers embedded in a strictly codified, even sanctified memory.

In questa raccolta di saggi di autori di diverse nazionalità si indagano le varie modalità che la memoria dei due conflitti mondiali ha assunto nei diversi paesi ed epoche e nei diversi media. In particolare l'A. si sofferma sulla produzione cinematografica di Wajda che nella sua lunga carriera ha trattato a più riprese tutti gli aspetti della seconda guerra mondiale, così drammatica per la Polonia. Dalla resistenza (Pokolenie) e le vicende del ghetto di Varsavia (Samson, Korczak, Wielki tydzien), alla insurrezione della capitale (Kanal), e infine con il film Katyn la tragedia della strage della elite militare ed intellettuale polacca da parte dei sovietici.

L'imaptto delle guerre mondiali sulla toponomastica urbana in Italia e il rapporto fra memoria "scritta" e memoria "visuale" (monumenti, luoghi del ricordo)

The chapter tries to define a few functional guidelines for a comparative reading of American narrative during and about WW1 and WW2, some more closely linked to America itself, others having a wider scope, centered on the new way of writing about war proposed by western literature since the end of WW1. In the celebrative war novel genre, the experience of war is, as a matter of fact, told to confirm the “mythical” quality of war experience. The anti-rhetorical novels of the first post war period reveal this very crisis, and, in this way, force on the reader to reflect on the fact that, after this very war, the world, and those who inhabit it, are going to be different. American authors, similarly to European ones, will feel the need to bear witness to war, will admit the difficulties in finding a voice to give it, because this new war annuls all preceding categories of identification, makes language lose its meaning; they will produce a formal reconsideration that on the one hand, will be in debt of the new avant-gardes, and on the other of the new forms of communication. This last is, in fact, a very important element, particularly if put in relation to the fact that many American authors who eventually wrote novels on war came to Europe as war correspondents. New Journalism, radio transmission, photography and, later, cinema start being tools that characterize the new way in which war is described and have an impact on the new narrative forms.