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

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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 8
unarmed. According to the German Commanders, Rome was “not co-operating”; therefore, they needed to punish the city. The basic reason why retaliation had not taken place before was that previously the Germans had preferred to keep things quiet. They controlled communication; transportation had broken down in Rome, so the news of other partisan attacks did not circulate. The Germans relied on the myth of invulnerability and invincibility to keep the city quiet. But the attack in the via Rasella was too big. It happened in the middle of the day, in the centre of town. They couldn’t hide it. (In fact, another aspect of the myth is that if you ask anyone from that generation, they’ll tell you they were there, or were supposed to have been there, or a friend of theirs was there.) It couldn’t be kept quiet: it was a visible crack in the armour of invulnerability of the occupying army, so something had to be done immediately. In fact, some versions of this narrative claim that the partisans carried out the attack precisely with the aim of ensuring retaliation: “They did it on purpose. They did it so that the Germans will kill prisoners who belong to different parties, or so that the Germans would retaliate and it would start a rebellion”. Turning now to consider the question of memorial rituals around this event, it is clear that there is a tension between what is both a collective massacre – 335 people killed – and at the same time 335 individual murders. These two different ways of looking at it have different consequences. The collective massacre generates public memory, monuments, ceremonies; the 335 single murders generate personal memory, personal loss. Since the only thing that the victims had in common was that they were all men, the bearers of the memory afterwards were mainly women: wives, mothers - a few fathers, but it is predominantly a women’s story. And the tension between the monument and the personal memory emerged very quickly. Rome was liberated in June1944 Should there be a footnote to outline the condition of the city? Maybe not necessaryThe Allied Command proposed that since the victims of the massacre 9
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Page 5 and 6: moment of the attack; but as there
Page 7: So this is what is at stake in this
Page 11 and 12: value, as Ernesto de Martino says,
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Page 19 and 20: So what do young people see there?

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

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