EUROPE INSIGHT
The dispute
over the past.
Filippo Focardi
Political transition and memory
wars in Italy, from the crisis of the
First Republic until the present day.
Università di Padova, Department
of Political and Juridical Sciences
and International Studies (SPGI)
T
he dramatic political changes in Europe since 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the breakup of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Soviet control over Central
and Eastern Europe, had a significant impact on Italy. These changes ushered in a
phase of political transformation, which has since triggered a fierce struggle played out in
the field of collective memory. Today, thirty years later, the reference points of this public
memory have been radically modified, with the crisis of the tradition of anti-Fascism and
the Resistance, and the rise of two new narratives: the memory of the Holocaust, and anti-
totalitarianism. The latter condemns the crimes of both Nazism and Communism and places
them on the same level.
To evaluate the dynamic and the results of this process of change, we need to recall
briefly the background to the creation of Italy’s collective memory in the long earlier
period, from 1945 to 1989. After the end of the Second World War, Italy, like other European
countries that had endured the Nazi aggression, had built a national collective memory
based on two fundamental pillars: on the one hand, the almost exclusive attribution of guilt
for the suffering and the crimes committed during the war to Germany and the Germans,
playing down the country’s own responsibility in the affairs of the Axis; and on the other,
the exaltation of the myth of the Italian Resistance as a struggle which engaged the entire
population against the Nazi-Fascist oppressor. The merits of the “good Italians” were
placed in stark contrast to the faults of the “bad Germans”, who in reality had been allies
of the Italian Fascists for three years. By the will of all the National Liberation Committee
parties, from the Liberals to the Communists, who had led the struggle against Germany
and the Republic of Salò created by Mussolini in September 1943, anti-Fascism and the
Resistance movement became icons of the new democratic Republic and of the political
multi-party system born after the fall of Fascism.
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Observing Memories
ISSUE 3