The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine. History, Myth, Ritual, and ...

At the same time, Rome was a middle-class city, and kept to the middle-class type of
mourning – control, and keeping it all inside.
There are many stories of repressed
weeping, of people who were unable to weep until years later; and then when eventually they
wept, these middle-class children would stare at each other, shocked at such a display of
emotion - especially shocked to see their parents fall victim to emotion.
Alongside the private mourning, however, there was the public monument. The monument
that was built is beautiful. In the ceremonies around it, the urge was to spiritualise, and to
make this appallingly concrete story abstract. How to do this at the height of the Cold War,
when suddenly the Communists were enemies and the Germans allies, was an especially
delicate question. The Communists were closely identified with the Resistance, to the extent
that for a long time there was almost a suppression of the non-Communist element; and while
the post-war Communists were on the whole happy to go along with this, because it gave
them a monopoly of martyrdom, on the other hand it put the Resistance in a left-wing ghetto,
and gave it a very ambivalent position in post-war politics. Meanwhile the armed forces – the
Carabinieri, the Army, the Air Force – were active in patriotic resistance, and they had a
number of victims at the Fosse Ardeatine; but these victims are hardly remembered. The
institutions of the Italian State prefer not to remember the fact that they were involved in the
anti-Fascist and the anti-Nazi war, for a number of reasons. In the event, the solution was to
depoliticise the whole official ceremony. Public memory fell under the sway of religion on
the one hand, and the military on the other hand - the institutions in charge of death.
Now
every year, on the commemoration date of March 24 th , there is a Catholic ceremony, a Jewish
prayer, and a couple of military manoeuvres. In the afternoon, the working-class organisations
go, with red flags flying. And in the middle were the individuals who didn’t know what to do,
weeping for their fathers, their brothers, their sons, not for heroes. But there is no mention, in
any of the official speeches, of who killed the people commemorated. They “gave their
lives”; they “sacrificed themselves.”
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