The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria, 27 January 2001

Abstract

The article examines the first official, national Holocaust memorial day in Italy, the so-called Giorno della memoria (Day of memory), marked on the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 2001. It looks at the ways in which the day acted as a filter for issues of national collective memory and identity, in particular state and public negotiation of the legacy of Fascism, as well as addressing broader issues of Holocaust remembrance. The article looks first at the origins of the Giorno della memoria in political and in legislative terms. Then it sketches in the events of the day itself, at national and local levels, in political, educational and cultural terms. This is followed by an analysis of media coverage and contemporary commentary, showing how various lines of interpretation addressed general issues related to the Holocaust and specifically Italian historical, ideological and contemporary questions.

Performing wartime memories: ceremony as contest at the Risiera di San Sabba death camp, Trieste

“…Of late the brava gente myth has been countered by critical accounts of the actions of Italian military and occupation forces (Del Boca 2005;Doumanis 2005;Rodogno 2006;Walston 1997). But complicity in the Holocaust remains largely unconfronted (Gordon 2006;Steinberg 2002;Zuccotti 1996). The Risiera was, of course, a product of German occupation, yet its existence potentially implicates not just those individual Italians who collaborated in its operations, but also the wider society within which it was located.…”

“…Exhibits and interpretative material on site, however, emphasise the connection with Auschwitz, to which most of the Risiera's Jewish prisoners were transferred (Bon 2000; . The Risiera now also hosts the civic ceremony for international Holocaust memorial day on 27 January, marked in Italy as the Giorno della memoria (Gordon 2006). Yet Jews probably numbered only around 1,200 amongst the 20,000 detainees held in total at the Risiera (Villani 2005).…”

Silencing the Good: Memory, Forgetting and the Belated Reputation of Giorgio Perlasca

“…The transfer in symbolic ownership and the competition over the definition of Perlasca's figure make sense in the broader process of transformation of Italian public memory that took place in the 1990s and early 2000s. As new political actors ‐ including Alleanza Nazionale ‐ emerged, the crisis of the post‐war narrative of identity accelerated, and a “war of memory”) characterized those years: the national calendar was substantially changed with the creation of new national days (Cossu, ), including a Holocaust memorial day on January 27 (Gordon, , ); efforts were made by the President of the Republic Ciampi to reshape the memory of the Italian Resistance against Fascism in more inclusive terms (Cossu, ; Thomassen & Forlenza, ); overall, the transformation of memory was played out with reference to both the national dimension (which often involved the recognition of marginal memories and involved “communicative history”: Torpey, 2003) and the transnational and global one, with an attempt to align national and European memory (Sierp, ) and a newly emerging cosmopolitan memory (Levy & Sznaider, ) for which the Holocaust served as a central paradigm.…”

From lines to networks: Calendars, narrative, and temporality

“…The three other dates, which cannot be connected to the same network, seem to suggest juxtaposition and, in the most extreme cases, the inclusion of substitutes for the dominant narrative. This seems especially the case for 27 January (Holocaust Memorial Day; see Gordon, 2006), and 10 February (a day of remembrance that, while falling on the anniversary of the signature of the peace treaty in 1947, is mostly aimed at remembering the exodus of the Italian minority from the territories of the former Yugoslavia and the killings that took place in the region after 1943; see Ballinger, 2003; Cossu, 2009; Zamparutti, 2017). 27 January has brought into the commemorative system (and commemorative practices effectively reflect this innovation) a reflection that has explicit humanitarian and cosmopolitan tones, with the Holocaust offering a paradigm for commemoration that does not belong to the victorious narrative centered on the Resistance, the Liberation, and the Republic.…”