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

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the reprisals to be carried out within 24 hours of the bomb outrage. According to a June 1944 report in the British Home Record Office: At 14.00 hours, 24 th March, 1944, the persons to be shot were transported by lorries, in relays, to the Ardeatine Caves, were in batches of five. They were taken inside the cave, and shot in the back of the head by SS men. At the termination of the massacre, it was found that 335 persons had been shot, which exceeded the original ratio of 10:1. The caves were then mined. No warning of the reprisal was given to the public, and enquiries by the German authorities to find the persons guilty of the bomb outrage were not completed until long after the massacre had taken place. Now this is quite an accurate account (actually, the bomb was not thrown from a window, but that need not concern us now). The point to be emphasised in this report is that no warning of the reprisal was given to the public. It was carried out immediately, within 24 hours, and the concern of the German authorities was not to punish the perpetrators, but to punish the city. So it had to be immediate and as stern as possible. The other story is a personal anecdote. I had just been awarded a book prize for my book on the Fosse Ardeatine, and I called my wife who was at the hairdresser’s. So she told the people in the hairdresser’s the news, and the lady sitting next to her said, “What was the book about?” “The Fosse Ardeatine”, my wife told her. “Oh,” said the lady, “I know all about it!” (This is what everybody always says. You mention this episode, and immediately, memories and emotions flare up.) “I know all about it. It was the fault of those partisans who threw the bomb, and then went into hiding. And the Germans looked for them. I remember the bills that they posted all over the city. ‘If the perpetrators turn themselves in, we will not retaliate. But if they do not turn themselves in, we will kill ten Italians for each German’”. 2
Now, this is not the way it happened. There was no warning to the population, no attempt to catch the partisans, no invitation to them to surrender themselves to avoid the retaliation. But this lady’s version of the story is the prevalent one in public memory; it is the way people remember it. In claiming that she actually remembered seeing the bills, despite the fact that they never existed, this lady was one among many; the story as she reported it is completely pervasive. What I’d like to explore, then, is the meaning of this intensely remembered and dramatically mis-remembered event, asking how we are to understand the gap between what happened and the many ways in which it has been remembered. . It is particularly striking that although the facts have all been a matter of record for half a century, they have been consistently ignored; what people remember is the myth of the German search for the cowardly partisans who hid away and allowed the hostages to be killed. A space opens up between the historical and judicial record (not to mention the accurate memory of a number of first-hand witnesses, including the survivors, the families and the relatives of the victims) on one side, and the distorted, exaggerated, mythicised, common sense memory on the other. In this space, there is all the complexity of national identity, of the foundations of Italian democracy, of the politics of memory, and of the interplay of institutional and personal memories. In the title of this paper I called up four terms: History, Myth, Ritual and Symbol. These things of course cannot be wholly separated, but they will serve as angles from which to look at the question of the meaning of this tragedy. History, first of all. When I began to be interested in this event, and started telling people that I thought of doing an oral history of the Fosse Ardeatine, many reacted with advice and suggestions for additional things to do. Many people told me I should do the deportation of 3
Page 1: The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine
Page 5 and 6: moment of the attack; but as there
Page 7 and 8: So this is what is at stake in this
Page 9 and 10: unarmed. According to the German Co
Page 11 and 12: value, as Ernesto de Martino says,
Page 13 and 14: So the bodies were recognised throu
Page 15 and 16: They didn’t; but their heterogene
Page 17 and 18: It never happened. They didn’t wa
Page 19 and 20: So what do young people see there?

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