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

Rasella had not come out, they would take, for each German who had been killed in
the attack, 11 Italians, 11 or 13, I don’t remember now.[int. Rome, April 22, 1998.
That is the basic myth, which you can collect at the hairdressers’ in your neighbourhood or
among the students in your school. On the other hand, since this myth has been challenged,
at least in terms of public discourse, alternative narratives have emerged. There is a whole
series of misunderstandings which are politically motivated, mythically motivated, humanly
motivated and, of course, ideologically motivated.
Myth, here, functions as an
interchangeable set of stories that all support a preconceived conclusion: “The Communist
partisans are to blame”. So once it is clear that there never was a question of subordinating the
massacre to the delivery of the partisans, the new version of the myth is: “They should have
turned themselves in anyway whether they were asked to or not, whether they knew of the
retaliation or not”. Or, one especially popular these days: “They should have known what the
consequences would be. The Germans are like animals. They’re like wild beasts. If you
provoke them, they will react.”
Part of this myth, in fact, is the anti-German stereotype: “The Germans are beasts. The
Germans are machines”. But the Germans are human, and what they did was not a knee-jerk
reaction, it was a carefully thought-through political decision. The myth that the partisans
“should have known” is based on another assumption: that this was the only armed action in
Rome in which Germans were killed. This is absolutely not true. This is the 43 rd attack that
took place in Rome against the Germans.
The belief that there really was no resistance in
Rome, so via Rasella was an isolated event, a provocation in an otherwise tranquil city, is a
myth with a meaning. It is both in harmony with the stereotype of the lazy fatalistic Roman,
and functional to making Rome the Conservative capital of a Conservative government: since
there was no Resistance in Rome, the suggestion is, it was only a few madmen who planted a
bomb. Actually, there was a great deal of resistance, both active and passive, armed and
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