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

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the Roman Jews, for instance. And others said I should start with the 1938 Race Laws which instituted discriminations against the Italian Jewish populationI went one better: I began in 1870, when Rome became the capital of Italy. For the location of the massacre, in fact, is one reason why it is important. After all, it was not the worst Nazi war crime committed in Italy: there were much worse ones, with many more victims. It was not even the worst committed in Rome; over 1500 deaths resulted from the deportation of the Jews. And it is not an isolated case. In the Public Record Office in London there are records of the investigations of 145 massacres by British Forces in Italy, and that list is not complete. What makes the Fosse Ardeatine so resonant is that it happened in the country’s capital. And, in fact, it’s the only such massacre to have happened in a large metropolitan urban context, rather than a village or a rural area, in Europe. This is a metropolitan massacre, which creates an essential difference in the quality of the victims. In most other cases, the victims were relatively homogeneous, as homogeneous as a village population is. In this case, what makes it historically and symbolically powerful is the absolute heterogeneity of the victims. They were a cross-section of Italian society at large. Geographically, they came from all over Italy: I have travelled to Milan in the North and to Salento in the deep South to talk to the relatives of victims. They came from all over Italy, because people came from all over Italy to Rome: Rome was the magnet. Also, because it was a big city, they came from all social classes. There were aristocrats from Piedmont, and pedlars from the Jewish ghetto, and all the social classes in between, from the : professional middle classes – lawyers and doctors - to the urban working class - factory workers, construction workers. The victims’ ages too ranged from 14 to 74. The whole spectrum of political opinion was represented, beginning with the basic distinction between those who were involved in politics and those who were not. Most of the victims were taken from among the political prisoners that the Germans had ready to hand at the 4
moment of the attack; but as there were too few to make up the number they needed, they took people at random from off the street. When they still found a shortfall, they added the “Jews awaiting shipment”, as the British document quoted above has it, “to Germany”. So the dead included both the political and the non-political. And amongst the politically committed too the political range is as broad as it can be, from the monarchist Army officers, to the ultra-left Communists of Bandiera Rossa, a Left splinter group that lost 60 members to the massacre. There were Communists, Socialists, Liberals, Christian Democrats. Even a former member of Mussolini’s Cabinet was among the victims, a Jew who had become an anti-Fascist and worked with the Resistance. The people who died in the massacre were a cross-section of the city, and thus of the whole country. Today, history has been replaced (effaced) by myth, and above all by the question: who do we blame? This is what feeds the myth, a myth that is functional to a historical debate about the nature of the Resistance in Italy. Italy is the only nation that, fifty years after the fact, is still arguing over whether its freedom fighters were criminals or heroes; where it could be a matter for debate whether it was a crime to attack a marching unit of uniformed police attached to the SS, belonging to a foreign occupying army. In one sense, this could be seen as the flip side of a positive aspect of our national identity: Italians historically have not been a warlike people, and perhaps for this reason the attempt to construct the partisans as “war heroes” never fully succeeded. But also very important in the way in which this event has been remembered is the fact that those who carried out the attack were Communists, and whatever the Communists do, especially from the perspective of the nineties, is a crime. Anti-Communism reinforces the idea that this was a criminal action, a new attack. And the myth is a very tenacious one. When my wife at the hairdresser’s tried to persuade her neighbour that she was wrong, saying that her husband had just written a book 5
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Page 3: Now, this is not the way it happene
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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