Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

10 Translating memories of war and
co-belligerency into politics:
the Italian post-war experience
Ilaria Poggiolini
The 1940s were the formative years for conflicting memories in postwar
Italy. During the second half of that decade different sets of memories
were linked to different political choices and translated into the
exclusive heritage of various political forces. The multiplicity of conflicting
memories remained intact because a general, that is, national,
process of recasting collective memories, as in the case of other defeated
countries, did not take place. This chapter provides an interpretation
of why no unifying national memory emerged in Italy after the Second
World War. It also suggests that a pattern of national amnesia versus the
‘counter-cultural’ left-wing form of remembrance of the Resistance took
its place.
The main argument of this chapter revolves around the question
of how the post-war Italian split between a political system dominated
by the Christian Democrats and a civil society penetrated by the
communists operated on the level of memory. Indeed, the rebirth of
the new democratic Italy was based on both amnesia and remembrance
of the Resistance. The latter inspired the Italian constitution
and the former, at the cost of fifty years of Christian Democratic hegemony,
made possible economic prosperity and Italy’s military security in
NATO.
While the moderate Italian governments capitalised first on the shock
of defeat and later on the ‘communist danger’ for their pragmatic political
usefulness, the left cultivated memories of the anti-Fascism experience in
the form of an almost exclusive heritage and, as a result, it was very slow
in re-examining them.
This chapter shows how, in a country where, arguably, a process of
nation-building has yet to be completed, conflicting memories of the
Second World War and the Resistance did not prevent a long-term process
of political reconciliation, but the myths remained separate, deepening
cultural and national divisions even further.
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