February 10, 2023 at 12:00 pm on the Microsoft Teams platform will be held the next expert seminar with prof. Filippo Focardi from University of Padova, Italy entitled "The political transition and memory wars in Italy after the crisis of the First Republic".
Abstract: The post'89 period represents an important watershed for Italy in terms of national public memory. The collapse of the parties that had animated the anti-fascist resistance and gave birth to the Italian Republic, together with the coming to power of Silvio Berlusconi with a center-right majority, triggered a harsh political and cultural clash in the mid-nineties for the redefinition of the Italian master narrative. Under the guise of a renewed anti-communism and pacification between the old opposing parties (Fascists and Antifascists), the governing right wing harshly criticized the memory of the Resistance as an axis of political legitimacy. In its place it has promoted a neo-patriotism as a reference value and an anti-totalitarian paradigm that equates the crimes of communism with the crimes of fascism. The attempt to dismantle the memory of the Resistance failed however, especially due to the opposition of the Presidents of the Republic (Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Giorgio Napolitano, Sergio Mattarella). In the same way, the equivalence between the so-called "boys of Salò", that is, young people who sided with Mussolini after the armistice of 1943, and the anti-fascist partisans has not succeeded. More successful was the attempt to include in the national public memory the commemoration of the Italian victims of communist crimes, with reference to the Italians of Venezia Giulia who were subject to the violence of Tito's Yugoslav communists. For this purpose, a specific commemorative date has been introduced on the 10th of February known as the Day of Remembrance. It has become a competitor to Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January). Also in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, a competition has been created between a cosmopolitan memory, based on the Resistance and the Shoah and which focuses on universal human rights, and a nationalistic memory that instead exalts the secular glories of the nation and recalls its sufferings.
Filippo Focardi is a full professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padua. His research interests include: the memory of Fascism and the Second World War in Italy; the question of punishing German and Italian war criminals; the relations between Italy and Germany from the 19th century to the present day. In recent years he has dealt with the policies of the memory of the European Union. Among his numerous publications, which have also been translated into English, French, Spanish and German, are: La guerra della memoria. La Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi (Laterza, 2005); Criminali di guerra in libertà. Un accordo segreto tra Italia e Repubblica federale tedesca 1949-55 (Carocci, 2008); Il "cattivo tedesco" e il bravo italiano. La rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Laterza, 2013); Nel cantiere della memoria. Fascismo, Resistenza, Shoah, Foibe (Viella, 2020). For his studies on the Second World War he received in 2014 the Baron Velge prize from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
