Memory and World War II: An Ethnographic Approach

Memory and World War II

Memory and World War II An Ethnographic Approach

Edited by Francesca Cappelletto

Oxford • New York

English edition First published in 2005 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Francesca Cappelletto 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Memory and World War II : an ethnographic approach / edited by Francesca Cappelletto.— English ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 1-84520-204-X ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-204-0 ISBN-10: 1-84520-205-8 (pbk.) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-205-7 (pbk.) 1. World War, 1939-1945—Psychological aspects. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Social aspects—Europe. 3. Memory—Social aspects. I. Title: Memory and World War 2. II. Title: Memory and World War 2. III. Cappelletto, Francesca. D744.55.M46 2005 940.53’01’9—dc22

2005010970

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13 978 1 84520 204 0 (Cloth) 978 1 84520 205 7 (Paper) ISBN-10 1 84520 204 X (Cloth) 1 84520 205 8 (Paper) Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks. Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn.

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Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Foreword by Michael Lambek

xi

1

Introduction Francesca Cappelletto

2

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War: Memories of Violence, Local Identities and Cultural Practices in a Greek Mountain Community Riki Van Boeschoten

3

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre: A Basque Controversy Sandra Ott

4

World War II comes to an Istrian Village: Atrocities and Memories Rudolph M. Bell

5

Public Memories and Personal Stories: Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres Francesca Cappelletto

1

39

65

87

101

6

Memory and Cultural Schema: Linking Memory to Political Action 131 Roger Petersen

7

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland Longina Jakubowska

8

Historians: Private, Collective and Public Memories of Violence and War Atrocities Stuart Woolf

Index

155

177

195

Acknowledgements The book was published with financial support from Università degli Studi di Verona, Consorzio per gli Studi Universitari in Verona, and ESU-ARDSU.

The cover image shows Marzabotto women at the trial during which Walter Feder was condemned. As it has not been possible to identify who holds copyright on this image, the publisher takes the responsibility to pay incidental charges to reimburse the copyright holder, should this be required.

Contributors Rudolph M. Bell, History Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Francesca Cappelletto, Department of Psychology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Verona, Italy Longina Jakubowska, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Sandra Ott, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA Roger Petersen, Political Science Department, MIT, Boston, MA, USA Riki Van Boeschoten, Department of Anthropology, University of Thessaly, Greece Stuart Woolf, Department of History, University of Venice, Italy

Foreword Michael Lambek

War wreaks havoc and havoc has a long wake. The chapters in this exceptionally interesting volume are soundings in the wake of World War II conducted at a variety of European sites. Some chapters explore the immediate consequences of the war in particular communities or regions and bring the dislocations forward to the present, while others begin in the present and address how the past is remembered now. The book is thus situated at the intersection of anthropology and history (with a little political science thrown in) and provides a multi-sited ethnography of the memory of war in Europe.1 History is remembered and memory, too, has its history. Why is memory of World War II so important in Europe just now? Some authors point to the breakup of the Soviet regime and later on the fall of the Berlin Wall as the opportunity to address issues kept congealed, as it were, during the ‘Cold’ War – a ‘war’ that was itself one of the significant consequences of World War II. As might be expected, the effects of this defrosting of memory are quite different in East and West. Other authors mention the reimagination of Europe and its parts entailed by the expansion of the EU. There is also the fact that those with first-hand experience of the war are nearing the ends of their lives. Whether or not members of the first generation still require resolution, it is the next generation that anticipates the final shifting of the burden of responsibility. The transition from first to second-hand memory is nearing completion and is a phenomenon to be understood in it own right. Laurent Vergne (1994) quotes Jorge Semprun: ‘Soon there will no longer be witnesses pestering the experts with their tales.’ But of course just as often it is the experts who pester reluctant witnesses to come forward. The factors that make witnesses either reluctant or eager to speak – that is, to speak and be heard – is a theme that runs through these essays. There is nothing worse than making the effort to speak of terrible things and being ignored. The role of the empathic listener is critical both in the immediate context of speech and in what listeners then do with what they have heard. In some of the cases recounted here the authors serve as that critical ‘first’ listener; in others, the account has been much rehearsed and is no longer an original act. As noted below by Stuart Woolf, the authors, as

xii • Foreword listeners, must balance empathy, respect and solidarity with critical interrogation. Each author strives to achieve this in his or her own way, ways that must differ with the particular context of the tellers and the told. Observing their attempts (and adding solidarity and criticism of one’s own) can provide a particularly edifying experience for the reader. Several times we are told that remembering is not simply a process but an act. This insight is not encumbered here by the models proposed in sociolinguistics, speech act theory, or performance studies. I do not offer this as a criticism; I think the reason is clear, and it is a testament to the fact that in these instances the what – that which is the subject of narration – overwhelms the how or when of the narrating, in effect refusing the terms of entextualization proposed by Ricoeur (1971). The authors emphasize the taming of event or experience in cognitive schemas and narrative frameworks, and, in the case described by Sandra Ott, even in a traditional form of Basque theatre, but equally significant for them is the untamed force of the original event, that which escapes entextualization or objectification and so needs to be attempted again and again. These are accounts of events that for the most part have not reached satisfactory resolution and so cannot be contained within the formal properties of narrative. The telling cannot simply replace the told because what propels the telling – the what of experience or memory – as each author begins to reveal it, is still too powerful to be kept within the bounds of a fixed, stable or static text. In their own acts of textualizing and theorizing these unruly memories it is exceptionally interesting to observe how the authors construct a balance between repetition and closure. Francesca Cappelletto cites Fentress and Wickham to the effect that there is no record of the process of change within memory itself since such change ‘is cancelled out the moment it takes place’. This brings to mind Stephen Mitchell’s comparison of memory to wandering in an unknown city; as we turn each corner, the original view is blocked and each successive look backwards replaces the preceding one (1993).2 This metaphor is not completely adequate to the perdurance of early events, but it does illustrate the curious and absolutely decisive fact about memory that it can remember every kind of change except changes in itself. This is why Freud’s formulation of the screen memory is so critical. Thus the view memory has of the past may appear dim, but it always appears to us as direct; we cannot recollect any fundamental changes in the way we remember the object. Even the re-remembering in the Italian communities compellingly described by Cappelletto does not contradict this principle. This gap in memory, this peculiar obstruction of vision, is one of the reasons why memory needs to be contextualized by historical research (just as history needs to be informed by memory). Another lesson to keep in mind is that there is no original immaculate experience undistorted by culture that lies at the foundation of memory. Thus Longina Jakubowska’s chapter demonstrates how the memory of the Polish gentry is struc-

Foreword • xiii tured by class interests in which the very measuring of their early experiences emerges from their position as landlords. These points invite a critical perspective on memory but also a view of memory itself as a critique of the past. It is possible that through memory events grow not only dimmer but sometimes also sharper, that with time they can be seen with increasing clarity, a clarity that may not have been available at the outset. Here Rachel Seiffert’s image of the photographic ‘dark room’, explored in her fiction of the same name, affords a useful metaphor. This book offers a distinctively European perspective on the war, in large part both about and by Europeans. North Americans are used to identifying war memories with dislocation, exile, migration and resettlement. These chapters are significant for focusing on memory that becomes imbricated within places from which people have not relocated and, in some instances, for comparing the salience of memory and memories for those who moved and those who stayed. Thus, the editor sees the two key questions of the volume as the plurality and often contested nature of social memories and the modes of transmission between individual and collective memories (and back) in processes of socialization. The accounts especially invite us to consider that, in Cappelletto’s words: ‘Resistance was a complex phenomenon, itself part of a Civil War, not rarely fought by persons on both sides belonging to the same social group’. Here the usual dualistic categories of friends and enemies, victims and perpetrators, are much more ambiguous but the violence even more insufferable and far less easily resolved than when it is understood to come from outside. This tension emerges in virtually every chapter in this volume, refracting in communities from Greece to France into such questions as whether there were better and worse partisans, or in contrary readings of the partisans’ acts as heroic and disinterested or stupid and cruel. In the Polish and Lithuanian cases it is the Russians (Soviets) rather than the Germans (Nazis) who become the targets of resistance. The chapters come from a Europe in which the borders are open for other Europeans (and conversely increasingly closed to the surrounding peoples, whose World War II experiences and memories do not make a showing here. How do North Africans remember the war and how do memories of African participation affect immigration?3). This is a Europe in which Germans are omnipresent and in which Austrians are still able to avoid coming to terms with their role in the war. We have no chapters about communities within either of these countries, nor from the point of view of those who were part of the fascist movement in Italy. Need it be inevitable and what are the consequences that studies of memory address only the victims and not the perpetrators?4 The chapters here are also quite different from Holocaust accounts and serve as necessary complement to them. They do not focus on the experiences of those who

xiv • Foreword fled the war or on those who were caught in the death camps. It is again striking for a North American reader to have a book about the trauma of the war that, for whatever accidental reasons, does not include a single specifically Jewish account. Moreover, a troubling, if perhaps understandable, feature is the ostensible absence of concern expressed by the subjects of these essays for the disappearance of their Jewish, Romany or otherwise socially handicapped neighbours. In this light it is a signal contribution of Riki Van Boeschoten’s chapter to show how, in the case of northern Greece, actions taken during the war, and acts of remembering after it, reproduce, transform and address patterns of social relationship that were in effect before the war. It is equally striking that the memories in question (again with the partial exception of Van Boeschoten’s chapter) stem generally from the end of the war, from, in a sense, a last great trauma, an event whose magnitude appears to occlude what preceded it. We don’t hear about the hardships of life in wartime Italy, Poland, or Lithuania, but rather about the cataclysmic events that ended it.5 This is one way in which memory differs from, and possibly fails to serve, history. This is a difference too from written accounts, in which linearity is essential. Think, for example, of the compelling memoir of the war years by Christa Wolf (1980). Each of the chapters addresses in one form or another the ethical questions implicitly or explicitly raised in remembering significant events. Who was responsible? What did I do? What was done to me? What didn’t I do that I might have done? Several address conflicts over accountability and blame, especially concerning partisan and resistance movements. Issues of good and evil here are too personal and hence never as unambiguous for members of local communities as they become in the master narratives of the nation-states that emerged or revived in the wake of the war. So the conflicts of memory occur differentially at multiple levels: within the self, between local factions, and between community and national memories and forms of remembering. There is great agony and great passion here. A deeper ethical question lies in the conditions of human dignity and the challenges to dignity entailed in violence. Here the authors instruct us in the various means by which people attempt to establish dignity, and especially in how dignity must somehow, and paradoxically, include the recognition and transcend the effects of humiliation, of actual guilt and of survivor guilt, of suffering, and of rage. Thus, for example, the Istrian villagers of Rudolph Bell’s essay must ask themselves how you continue living with people when you remain uncertain about what they might have done to you or your family. There is also a somewhat more troubling ethical issue. If history is written by the victors, memory in these accounts appears to be the province not of losers specifically, but of victims. But of course victims cannot necessarily claim ethical privilege. It is a striking fact that memory is so often about victimhood of the self,

Foreword • xv not the other. In the accounts by the Polish gentry of their material losses and their self-ascription as a kind of race, not a thought seems to be spared for their neighbours, who, as subjects of a specific politics of race, lost a good deal more than their property. Memory of the sufferings of others is, of course, also widespread, visible in this collection in its displacement as survivor guilt among Italians. What the authors show so powerfully, so eloquently and so provocatively are the lingering effects of the war on European consciousness and imagination. And these effects are pervasive. Writing this foreword in northeastern Switzerland, I too am surrounded by echoes. My research has had nothing directly to do with the war, yet I have been surprised how significantly it recurs in the speech of people in this ostensibly neutral nation. One elderly farmer emphasizes in his life story how mobilization delayed and frustrated his plans for marriage and building a dairy herd. He adds darkly that the soldiers of his battalion had determined to eliminate the Nazi sympathizers in their ranks in the event of a German invasion. A younger woman describes her mother’s anxious observation from the heights of Appenzell of bombs dropping over Germany across the Bodensee. Many people were terrified of a Nazi invasion. A man recalls the pessimism that led his mother to have an abortion. From a quite different angle, a woman is fighting on behalf of the memory of her mother, who had been a German citizen recuperating in an Alpine tuberculosis sanitarium established by the National Socialists before the war. The mother committed suicide in her old age, a consequence, thinks the daughter, of her experiences in the camp. Not only were the German inhabitants interned, but at the end of the war the Swiss government apparently sent them a bill for the cost of their maintenance. Interestingly, no mention is made of the Jewish, French, Italian and other refugees from Nazism and fascism, who were fortunate enough not to be turned back, since most were without passports, but were also interned, and charged for the cost. None of these accounts, so far as I know, are part of any public or official narrative – or even the main counter-narrative – about the war in Switzerland.6 The persistence of these minute personal stories is striking, suggestive of the larger moral concerns that lie behind them. Finally, I would like to offer the theoretical provocation that although the memories described in this book are painful to their subjects, their existence needs also to be linked to broader theories of society. These memories echo an institution that was once critical in society’s reproduction and self-identification, namely sacrifice. This is a theme that emerges intriguingly in Roger Petersen’s chapter. It is found as well in national commemorations of the deaths of soldiers and civilians. I mean to suggest here more than the obvious functionalist argument that the romanticization or sentimentalization of heroic death is an instrument of state power, but rather the structuralist insight that sacrifice is entailed in social relationality itself and seeks

xvi • Foreword symbolic representation. It is a matter not of the production of actual blood sacrifice but of how society recognizes that fact about itself and perhaps in such a manner that it could transcend the literal reality of warfare. Of that eventuality the twentieth century does not appear to hold out great hope. Perhaps the memories left in its wake can provoke a different story.

Notes 1. My deep thanks to Francesca Cappelletto for both the invitation to write this foreword and for some very sensible comments on a first draft. 2. Another salient metaphor to this author – who believes that memory can only be described by means of metaphor (Antze and Lambek 1996) – is provided by editing at the computer. If I perform the ‘cut’ function on two successive pieces of text without first ‘pasting’, the former item is lost. 3. One can only wonder what scholars some decades from now will make of the memories of the Afghans, the Iraqis, the prisoners of Guantanamo, the relatives of the 9/11 victims, the Rwandans and Congolese. Current research on reconciliation in places like Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, and perhaps also in the Balkans, may also tell different stories about the aftermath of war. 4. I do not wish to imply that memories and experiences are not as diverse within Germany and Austria as they are in France, Italy or Greece. 5. Of course, this may be simply an artifact of the limitations of the essay format. Francesca Cappelletto has recently discussed the pre-war divisions of her Italian communities in a paper delivered to the Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (Vienna, September 2005), entitled ‘Political affiliations, social networks and forms of remembrance’. 6. The counter-narrative, offered now in a public report (Switzerland National Socialism and the Second World War. Final report of the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War, Zurich: Pendo 2002) and shared by many thoughtful citizens, challenges the images of Switzerland’s heroic self-defence and assistance to refugees as a nationalistic and patriarchal myth.

References Antze, P. and Lambek, M. (eds) (1996), Tense Past. Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, New York and London: Routledge. Mitchell, Stephen (1993), Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, New York: Basic Books. Ricoeur, Paul (1971), ‘The model of the text: meaningful action Considered as a Text’, Social Research, 38: 529–62.

Foreword • xvii Seiffert, Rachel (2001), The Dark Room, New York and Toronto: Vintage. Vergne, L. (1994), ‘La mémoire de la déportation pour faits de résistance: enquête auprès d’ancien résistants en Correze’, Mémoire présenté en vue du D.E.A. Anthropologie historique et sociale de l’Europe, unpub. Master’s thesis, University of Toulouse. Wolf, Christa (1980), A Model Childhood (Kinderheitmuster), translated by Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

–1– Introduction Francesca Cappelletto

Sixty years have elapsed since the end of World War II. In most European countries commemorations celebrating this event were patterned around a ‘grand narrative’ of nations united in a heroic struggle against German Nazism and Italian fascism. During the latter half of the twentieth century this narrative operated as the foundation discourse legitimating post-war democracies. Although over the last decade historians have increasingly questioned this narrative and have restored the visibility of past conflicts within nation-states, public memory conveyed through commemorations and school textbooks has largely perpetuated this image of a united and ‘patriotic’ war. This public memory is often at variance with memories transmitted through family networks, local communities and social groups involved in multiple ways in the historical events of the 1940s. Violence, either in the form of war atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and their local collaborators or in the form of armed conflicts between rival resistance organizations or again between armed men and civilians, forms an important part of these ‘private’ memories. Studies dealing with the memory of this violence have mainly focused on its most extreme form: the Holocaust. Although this literature has largely improved our understanding of the multiple ways in which people try to cope with an ‘unspeakable’ past and of the long-term effect of trauma on people’s lives, it has left out of focus a large part of human experience in the war: how ‘ordinary’ people in small-scale communities have lived through the experience of violence imposed on them either by foreign enemies or by their own neighbours, how they have tried to come to terms with that ‘raw’ past and to reconstruct their communities in the present. The authors of this volume tackle this issue from a wide range of perspectives, but all contributions have one thing in common: they all focus on small communities and on the processes through which they shape their memories in the ethnographic present. The volume presented here is based on anthropological-historical researches dealing with narrative reconstructions of war events at the community level. Memory is here conceived as an act of response to the perpetration of mass violence. It should be noted first that, in all communities that nurture war 1

2 • Francesca Cappelletto remembrances, the past is far away but yet as clear as though it were only yesterday. It is this happening yesterday which is being experienced today that forms the heart of many testimonies. People carry on plunging into the past, a wound which has not yet healed, even though speaking about it is seen as one way of ‘healing’, of ridding oneself of a burden which has become too heavy to bear. In many cases, we are dealing with a group memory that has been a struggle against forgetting the destruction accomplished by the perpetrators of violence. Past is perceived as both impossible to be forgotten and very difficult to be remembered and recounted. The ambivalence consists of an oscillating choice between a spoken and a wordless past. During the fieldwork and afterwards back home, ‘when one will continue to be engaged laboriously with the people you study, through imagination, recollection and reconstruction’ (Carrithers 1996: 231), our interlocutors have been the victims of misdeeds. We followed the common conviction that violence is a word mostly used by two categories of people, witnesses and victims, rather than by those who perform acts of aggression. In fact, the bearers of local memories, who are the subjects of this ethnographic dialogue, have been the victims of misdeeds: they are the ‘ordinary’ people and communities savaged by the eruption of violence. World War II was the arena of massive violence against defenceless civilian populations. According to Stuart Woolf (contribution in the present volume), it is ‘the increase in scale of the savaging of civilian populations’ that constitutes an unprecedented phenomenon, ‘a facet of modernity’. It is proper to associate the infinite number of ‘small’ massacres in Italy and elsewhere with the inconceivably large ones like Civitella (province of Arezzo, Italy, where about 150 people were killed by the Nazis in 1944), as both the former and the latter formed part of a deliberate policy of terrorizing people regarded as inferior. The policy of terror was part of a deliberately planned political project. In the years following the end of the war, in the scenario of the Nuremberg war trials, the perpetrators were floodlit, even more so after Eichmann was brought to trial. Since then the position of primacy in the processes of war remembrance has been occupied by survivors, to whom is attributed the social identity of the carriers of memory. Most of the contributors in this volume deal with the point of view of those people who have undergone the brutal, systematic violence of war, but also the emotional responses that violence left behind in those who survived and in their offspring. The purpose of this book is to comprehend their sharing and understanding of the long-past events of war, the meanings they now attribute to experienced facts, feelings and ideas relating to those dramatic events. The reconstruction of past events is itself a matter of interest, but above all we want to gain knowledge of the local ways of thinking about the historical period of

Introduction • 3 World War II, to discover how social actors deal with the indelible marks that these events have left on them and what significance they assign to them. Our object of interest is a specific social segment – the ‘mnemonic community’. It is made up of those who, communicating with each other, remember together experiences of which they were victims. The history of how these communities reacted to violence has never been written. The chapters published in this volume combine theoretical and ethnographic perspectives; their unifying factor is the ethnographic approach. The empirical analysis in the case studies is interwoven with a perspective which is interdisciplinary and comparative. A distinguishing feature of the book is its combination of scholars from various fields – political science, anthropology, social history and sociology – all of whom share the same analytical tool, that is the ethnographic approach, bringing together empirical observation and theoretical investigation. The theoretical position that underlies the volume is to combine the interpretative method with historical investigation in the study of long-term memory of extreme conditions. While recognizing the interconnection between history, memory and cognition, we decided to restrict the focus to memories of communities, leaving the macro-historical narratives in the background. We do not consider the latter as opposed to memory (in any relationship of superiority or inferiority), but we consider it possible to compare the emic and etic perspective: on the one hand, the dimension of thinking of local people – the bearers of memory – and, on the other, that of the ‘observers’, that is, of the ethnographers and historians. These two perspectives do not necessarily coincide. We decided to trace processes of remembrance from the grass-roots, inside level, rather than to analyse the forces that shape social memory from above. Some of our authors are concerned with what Maier (1994: 3) defined as the ‘hegemonic historical and political narrative’ at the local level, whilst still being aware that this dimension intersects with the national and supranational. War remembrance at the community level can be considered as a sum of histories, viewed from the ‘angle of small-scale, locally rooted social action’ (Winter and Sivan 1999: 59). Particular experiences and society in general, ethnography and history form a background to our conversation in which different disciplines are linked together.

Small Communities and the Process of War Remembrance The question we intend to address here is what we mean by the term community. A brief overview of individual chapters should make clear to the reader that our concern is not with traditional and relatively isolated rural communities such as those studied in the classical anthropological ethnographies of the 1960s. In

4 • Francesca Cappelletto contrast to these studies, our focus is not on the present but on representations of the past in the present. Some contributions, such as those by Bell, Cappelletto and Van Boeschoten, deal with communities which are in fact rural villages. But the members of these communities are bound together neither by space nor by continuity in historical time. Some of the survivors have moved away from their place of origin, as migrants or political refugees. The inhabitants of the Istrian village studied by Bell were separated by the end of the war: some moved to urban centres in Italy or the United States, whereas those who stayed behind shifted their citizenship from Italy to Yugoslavia and finally Croatia. The inhabitants of the Greek village studied by Van Boeschoten spent thirty years in exile in Czechoslovakia and had only recently returned to their home country. Although in this village the notion of community includes people who shared a common experience and a common memory, it also includes members of neighbouring villages, and, ideally, even those who persecuted them during the Civil War. The Italian village described by Cappelletto lost some of its members from internal migration but also witnessed the arrival of newcomers after the war. Both the former and the latter are included in the notion of community since they have all been taught the narrative and thus become ‘acculturated’ into the local history. In other contributions, the ‘communities’ in question are not villages at all, but rather social groups: the Polish gentry in Jakubowska’s chapter, the audience of Basque popular theatre in Ott’s chapter, the communities of emigrant and nonemigrant Lithuanians in Petersen’s chapter. What the members of these communities have in common are their local memories. Most of them are the actual survivors of war violence and their children, but they may even include the perpetrators of violence, as in Van Boeschoten’s contribution. Thus ‘community’ is intended here as a closely knit, though not homogeneous, entity, characterized by face-to-face interactions. They are in fact, more than anything else, ‘mnemonic communities’. We can define these ‘mnemonic communities’ as social groups with shared experiences, interests and identities who shape their memories in daily interaction by telling and retelling selected parts of a shared past and condemning to oblivion other parts of that same shared past. In this process and through their social networks they try to establish control over the memory of certain events and to legitimate actions of their group in the past and in the present. Yet this control is never able to ‘domesticate’ completely alternative versions of the past which emerge from individual narratives and often challenge or contradict the ‘approved’ versions of their own group. It would be wrong, however, to see this social structuring of memory as a process based on rational choice. Mnemonic communities are also ‘affective communities’ (Halbwachs), both because their past is a traumatic past and because their members are tied by affective bonds in the present. (Van Boeschoten 2004: 5)

Introduction • 5 Thus what binds the members of these communities together is not only the existence of a shared memory, but also the shaping of this memory as an active social process which attempts to interpret past events so as to render them meaningful. All researchers who are concerned with the subject of social memory agree in considering mnemonic acts as elaborations and interpretations (as well as re-constructions and removal) based on the prior knowledge and the experiences of the individuals, as well as on the current cultural framework shared by a social group. In most contributions the ‘community’ is constructed by a group of performers, who interactively share the telling of stories that dramatize representations of their past. In fact, community itself is built on narrative acts. In some ethnographic cases described in the volume, narration can assume the form of a ritual community performance, where participants have in common ‘the holistic sensation that they act with total involvement, when action and awareness are one’ (Turner 1987: 113). In some cases, community can be considered as the group of victims, whose history ‘diverges fundamentally from the history of the perpetrators’ (Maier cit. in Gillis 1994: 5). This applies in particular to Cappelletto’s study of the victims of Nazi massacres, where the survivors are bound together by the awareness that theirs is a struggle not to forget and not to be forgotten. The trauma of past violence is the fabric that holds together the members of these mnemonic communities. This ineradicable experience is the looking glass through which they view the world, the unbreakable bond which keeps them together and which creates the community. Its members are bound together by their incapacity to absorb a traumatic past and the desire to re-live it in common. Thus the community as intended in this volume is not defined by spatial boundaries, but rather by the continuity of narratives recounted through time. In some cases, these haunting memories can lead to extreme feelings of victimization. ‘Trauma has a social dimension […] it gives victims the feeling that they have been set apart and made special’ (Erikson 1995: 86; 194). They feel as though they are different from anybody else in the world, they cultivate ‘a sense of being apart’ (Erikson 1995: 194) because they have been through a unique, unforgettable, dramatic experience. ‘Trauma has both centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. It draws away from the centre of group space while at the same time drawing one back’; in fact communal trauma can take two forms: damage to the tissue of the social group, and creation of social climates (Erikson 1995: 185–6). Survivors and their children overtly mark the consciousness of distinctiveness since they ‘live’ a commitment, which is itself part of the sense of community. All through the book ‘community’ is an etic and emic term, to use the anthropological jargon, since it makes reference both to the ethnographer’s, outsider’s point of view, and that of the individuals that they are interacting with, the insiders’. The salient reason for using the concept of community is the fact that the social actors

6 • Francesca Cappelletto see themselves as being a mnemonic community with reference to past events: the filter which they look through when remembering. As highlighted in Cappelletto’s contribution, people may feel that they are different from all others because they have been violated by several agents in the arena of war: Nazis, fascists and partisans. Local history is then seen as different from the global events which marked the world outside the community. It is this world that wounded them. This feeling of victimization is a form of cultural selfrepresentation and a cognitive frame of memory that gives commonality to the vision of past experience. It is the core of ‘our own story’ that survivors have continued to tell since the war. Seen in this perspective, community is an element of identity, and as such it is part of the symbolic domain. This symbolic dimension of community may explain how the communal memory of Nazi crimes can become in time an ‘object’ which is deemed to be the most important property of the group (Cappelletto in this volume). The mnemonic community constitutes and maintains itself by guarding and protecting this cultural artefact. It is an ‘object’ with an evocative force, by which the community is actively engaged in marking off its boundaries from the outside world. But the symbolic dimension of community may also operate in a different way and is not necessarily linked to feelings of victimization. In the village of Ziakas, studied by Van Boeschoten, the inhabitants used their memories to reconstruct a sense of community by opposing the logic of violence which had divided their local area during the Civil War and to open a pathway for reconciliation in the present. In this process they included in their sense of community their former neighbours and enemies, by referring to notions such as local belonging, kinship and solidarity rooted in a more distant past. The small community approach enables us to get closer to the people’s actual life and thus see the victims of violence as active agents in their own story. This is the focal point around which Bell’s contribution is constructed. The memories cultivated by the inhabitants of an Istrian village are viewed through the lenses of their voices and testimonies. The interconnections of social relationships at work in the village, especially verbal exchanges and lifelong mutual familiarities, form the basis for communal recollections of war events. If mnemonic communities are constructed by recalling a shared past, they are not understood here as corporate groups, as politically and ideologically unified wholes (Bausinger 1993). The ethnographies contained in this volume suggest in fact that community does not mean the absence of conflicts and political rivalry within the local unit. On the contrary, divided memories often play an important part in the process by which people try to come to terms with their past and to metabolize the traumatic effects of past violence. It is this aspect which sets apart local memories from the grand narrative of the nation-state about a united resistance. In fact, local group memories may even develop into a counter-discourse con-

Introduction • 7 sciously opposed to that grand narrative. The guilt question (‘who is to be blamed?’) is often the pivotal question around which such divided memories are shaped. From a methodological point of view, it is here that the small community approach proves it value. It is only by getting down to the grass-roots level and observing the active shaping of memories in daily interactions that such aspects begin to emerge. This issue is clearly illustrated by the ethnographies discussed by Cappelletto, Ott and Van Boeschoten. These contributions show several ‘family resemblances’, both for the manner of ‘living ethnography’ and over interpretative issues. All three authors search into the logic of ‘closeness and sameness, distance and difference’ that are ‘both encapsulated in the notion of community’ (Rapport 1996: 116); community is considered in the light of the dynamics of inner division and cohesion. The authors are interested in the topic of divided memory in villages that experienced the lacerating conflicts of civil war. The focus is on the fractures that come to the surface in the communities of survivors which relate specifically to the responsibility for past misdeeds. In the Italian communities, the principal reason why the remembrance became so tortured was the fact that it was a ‘divided memory’. In the narrative heart of stories about the massacres of the Tuscan villages, the structure that sustained them was the theme of the partisans’ guilt. Some people unreasonably blame the partisans and claim a causal relation between resistance activity and SS reprisal. Other people, however, make no such claim; their narratives revolve around the Nazi-fascists’ guilt. This dissonance in the interpretations of past misdeeds actually threatens the very unity of the community of survivors. It also solicits an ethical and critical standpoint in the ethnographer. In the present volume some authors argue that in local representations of past violence the sense of belonging to a local community is intermingled with social and political conflicts which emerged during the war, but built, to a large extent, on issues of the pre-war period. It is this tension between solidarity and conflict that forms the core of these contributions. The anthropologist’s concern is to understand the meaning of the ‘guilty theme’ as a cultural element embedded in the context of the social life of the village, rather than a ‘primary’, purely ideological fact. It seems to originate from conditions existing before the war, such as ‘traditional’ intra-village conflicts, and from the process of the construction of memory in the years following the atrocities. In fact, the patterning of remembrance at community level has to be related to crucial elements, such as the polarized national climate of the Cold War: the left-wing groups of the resistance movement, and in particular the communist formation, which were the most numerous, were systematically ignored to the point that, during the 1950s, the communist and socialist parties were not even invited to the official annual celebration in Rome of the liberation of Italy (Santomassimo 2004).1

8 • Francesca Cappelletto Structural contexts and living actions are both illuminated in the small community approach. Our aim is to gain insight into the mechanisms of the formation and maintenance over time of remembrances within mnemonic communities.

The Critical Notion of Collective Memory Remembering brings together individual and social experience; the act of remembrance ‘is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past’ (Ingold 2000: 189). The notion of social memory is relevant here since a common aim of the chapters in this book is to gain insight into how long-term memory is socially transformed. Most authors are critical towards the notion of collective memory, and instead they adopt the terms of communal or group memory. Thus they avoid treating memory as a unanimous endeavour, and rather consider it as a form of intersubjective knowledge endowed with symbolic content. The attempt to construct a theory of collective memory, to concretize it and endow it with an existence of its own, was historically and originally linked to an operative concept of relatively short duration: the belief that society was an organism and social ideas shared by people in a given society constituted the Durkheimian ‘conscience collective’. That formulation managed to express what can be defined as the remembering behaviour of a society, which sometimes appears to be uniform and at other times conflicting, giving the impression that different generations, social classes and sexes have different attitudes to memory (Candau 1996). The theory of collective memory expresses the notion that a society really can have a ‘memory’. The notion of collective memory contributed to the development of many ideas on how to study the communal representations of the past. Halbwachs argued that ‘it is through membership of a social group – particularly kinship, religious and class affiliation – that individuals are able to acquire, to localise and to recall their memories’ (Connerton 1989: 36). One of the most lasting legacies of the contribution of the French sociologist is that it underlines the theme of how long trans-generational memory lasts. Memorable events are those which have a perspective point of view, both as regards time and space, and as regards the sharing of the memory (Sahlins 1985). The very act of transmission is a central focus of social memory. Another insight concerns the ‘affective component’ of remembrance, as it is ‘lived history’, experience of shared meanings, the way people of a given group ‘concretely’ think (Namer 1987: 56). Criticism of the notion of collective memory focuses on the fact that it is hypostasized, metaphysical; it is misleading, or at least it needs to be reformulated

Introduction • 9 (Funkenstein 1989), because it does not allow for cognitive variability inside the group nor its discontinuity: ‘rather than holism, the hallmark of the social is discontinuity, and no two people will have identical lives’ (Tonkin 1992: 106). Collective memory as a term is widely considered unsatisfactory, especially by anthropologists and oral historians; it fosters generalizations and describes a reality which does not in fact exist. Criticism of the term ‘collective memory’ is employed even in studies that continue to use it. For example, Winter and Sivan (1999: 9) have recently expressed themselves in favour of the notion of a ‘collective remembrance’ as it is more suited to a ‘social agency approach’. The use of the word ‘remembrance’, according to them, would weaken the terminology of ‘collective memory’, putting the accent on the individual at the expense of the social. What Halbwachs did not observe, absorbed as he was in the rhetoric of community (Candau 1996), was how individual memories can come together through the medium of actual social interaction – in telling stories, the exchange of recollection between individuals – to form a group memory. I am in agreement with Tonkin’s opinion that ‘the missing term in Halbwachs’ account is socialization’, which can be defined as ‘the ways and means by which we internalize the external world’ (Tonkin 1992: 105) and vice versa externalize the interior one. Seen in the light of this dimension of experience, memory and forgetting are communicative processes where the past is interpreted in the light of the present: memories are never simply records of the past, but interpretative reconstructions that are shaped by local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions and social contexts. As oral historians have made clear (Portelli 1999; Radstone 2000), memory has a mediated nature. The recollections that we analyse throughout the book are themselves events, rather than merely descriptions of events. Criticism of the ideological assumptions implicit in the identification of collective memory with the official memory of a given social group led originally to rethinking the concept itself. When we refer to ‘national memory’, for instance, and assume that it is founded on consensus towards memorial, as, it is asserted, ‘all the inhabitants of a nation cultivate the same historical memory’, a hegemonic position has been reduced to a simplified general statement. Social memory, on the contrary, is not a homogeneous, holistic social practice (Alvarez-Péreyre 1993), it reveals variations and discontinuity even within small social groups, such as those we analyse in the volume. Since the 1990s, in what constitutes a clear-cut change, the field of social memory has been considered to be the sphere of relations between cognitive practices and social practices which take place over time. Anthropology seems to have adopted the fundamental intuition of the constructive nature of memory from psychology. Cohen (1989) maintains that the cognitive psychologists, from Bartlett (1932) to Bransford and Franks (1972), have emphasized the role of shaping, interpretation and reconstruction based on prior experienced stored knowledge.

10 • Francesca Cappelletto From such a perspective, memory is not a direct copy of the physical information received through senses. Remembering is not just a process of passively receiving impressions, but of actively and creatively constructing a representation that requires effort and energy; it is not simply a reconstruction of the past but a weapon of the present, it casts light on the problems of the present (Watchel 1986; Rappaport 1990; Todorov 1995; Antze and Lambek 1996). Instead of collective, a useful working concept is group memory, which includes the notion of intersubjectivity. According to Geertz (1983), in its most basic meaning intersubjectivity has been considered as the way in which separate individuals end up conceiving of similar things in a reasonably similar way or not. Whilst the notion of collective is abstract, the intersubjective, it is argued, is incorporated: ‘incorporated memories’ are the plurality of those particular memories which make a social time–space into something familiar (Boyarin 1994). They are discordant when compared to the master narratives, but this does not make them less effective as a source of common action. The ‘politics of memory’ must be interpreted here as meaning a performance which has an effect on the world, in the way in which people look at the past and make a conscious decision as to how they remember it in the present. There are family likenesses between the concept of intersubjectivity and memory. Intersubjective communication means co-active situations based on empathy. According to the Italian anthropologist Leonardo Piasere (2002), intersubjectivity environments come from a hyper-complex base and their existence is made possible by what is known to neuroscience as resonance. The effect of resonance is to awaken a ‘recognition’ between different people, a coming into contact, of ‘all the spheres of one’s being: sensorial, cognitive, emotive, moral, motivational’ (Piasere 2002: 126). The phenomenon which the author calls ‘recognition’ takes place in an analogous manner to group mnemonic processes: they are reinforced in their co-active structure when there is a resonance effect which is passed from one individual to another and in this way spreads out among several people. Authors in the volume place particular emphasis on social interaction. This is the source of communal remembrance, which can be viewed as a network of interrelated knowledge. We are concerned with the micro-mechanisms that allow us to understand the interstices of the process of formation of war memory at the borderline between the inner and the outer world, the individual and the social, the private and the public. Issues and questions are projected in a relational landscape, for example as the means to understand how individual memory is incorporated into group memory, and, on a more general level, how local memory is incorporated into national memory. In the various chapters the implicit assumption is made that the community practices of remembrance are a work of interpretation. Remembrances are considered to be events which have been lived through by social actors who perform

Introduction • 11 them with aims that are related to the present. From this point of view, oral sources are a cultural document which organize the perceptions of the past, a form of thinking related to the way in which people interpret their own experiences. The perspective angle of the small community allows us to understand war memory as a process through which people jointly discuss the past.

At the Intersection of Several Approaches In the study of war remembrance – as of social memory in general – the complementarity of different perspectives of research becomes evident. I believe, with Winter and Sivan (1999: 19), that ‘interdisciplinary work requires a clear notion of the limits of each discipline’. But I would add that some characteristics of the phenomenon under study, the memory of war violence, call for a need for a combined effort. Memory is itself a topic at the point of convergence between, and to a certain extent overlapping, several domains: psychology, anthropology and history. It has been argued that how individuals remember is the object of interest of psychologists. The content that individuals remember is what anthropologists are concerned with. What individuals remember is again a topic to which historians have paid attention, but a new interest arose among historians ‘since they have begun to see their work as one kind of remembering, in the end, not fundamentally different to other kinds of recall’ (Bloch 1996: 361). The most important perspective of the volume is the anthropological and historical, with various nuances. As an example, Ott and Van Boeschoten have conducted fieldwork, though they make extensive use of historical documents too; Petersen has carried out interviews and gathered data on the social structure of the villages; Cappelletto’s ethnography is based on interviews and field notes she recorded when engaged with survivors and their children; finally, Woolf’s contribution is the most fully historical, generalizing contribution, which also includes a reflection on the results of anthropological work. The chapters integrate anthropology and history and the key unifying factor is the ethnographic approach, a method-theory of research that has been borrowed by several disciplines in the last decades. Such borrowing underlines the need for a dialogue/debate about different approaches. Born as a ‘speciality’ of anthropological research, ethnography has been conceptualized as one of the points of the ‘anthropological triangle’ (Sanjek 1996: 113). In its ‘classic’ meaning, to acquire and construct knowledge, anthropologists use contemporary fieldwork, place this documentation in the social context of people’s lives, and finally engage in a comparison between their documents and other experiences. In this volume, fieldwork and contextual documents have been widely used by authors to write their ethnographies. Interviews are conceived here as allowing for

12 • Francesca Cappelletto interpretative aims. The authors draw their inspiration from anthropological theories and methods. These have traditionally developed an interest in small communities, focusing on the perceptions and values of social actors. Following Halbwachs’ theory that the act of remembering has to be ‘socially approved and constructed through a process of interaction and accommodation’ (Bloch 1996: 362), anthropologists have begun to become more and more involved in the study of memory as a social practice, as it has been maintained before. Cappelletto, Van Boeschoten and Petersen point to the importance of reading the dynamics of remembrance within the context of the social life of the villages. It has been argued that the convergent methodological approach between anthropology and history originated in ‘a demand for improved contextualization’ (Sanjek 1996: 195). Studying the context means addressing aspects of social life, such as ‘political power and leadership, or family network’. Several contributions in this volume illustrate a convergence between anthropology, history and oral history. The ‘history from below’ approach, the angle of perspective of ‘ordinary’ people, binds together the concern of the three disciplines. War remembrance may be considered a form of resistance to hegemonic narratives, a sort of counterhistory that wishes to distinguish itself from the history of elites. It is important to note that the study of memory transmission is also an area of intersection between the chronological narratives of history and genealogical structures. A need for complementarity emerges also in relation to oral history, especially with reference to oral sources. Oral historians working on memory have endeavoured to demonstrate that the gap between oral and written documents is not so profound as is commonly believed. Recollecting voices from the past is a ‘substantial source of knowledge’ (Samuel and Thompson 1990). Interviews have been widely used by all authors and written recollections, sometimes heavily loaded with pathos, resulted from those encounters. Bell’s chapter is an example of the use of an oral historian’s methodology in the study of war remembrances, focused as it is on voices, fragments of people’s experiences reported in their living quality. In interpreting oral sources, the authors have followed the suggestion put forward by oral historians that memory has a mediated nature (Radstone 2000). The recollection is itself an event, rather than merely a description of events, since it unfolds over time and should be studied as a phenomenon in its own right. The recollection is not limited to describing or giving an account of the things that happened in the past, but is itself something that happens (Tonkin 1992; Portelli 1999). The errors of narrators in their reports of the facts – exaggerating or belittling them, or recounting events that never happened – can teach us a lot about ‘what the person wanted to do, believed he was doing, or now believes he did’ (Portelli 1999: 19). The collected chapters also make clear the differences between anthropology and oral history, both in terms of the type of materials selected and the method. In

Introduction • 13 the ‘traditional’ approach, the collection of life histories and autobiographical documents has been the main concern of oral historians. It consists of recording the sequence of significant stages in the spokespersons’ lives, especially concerning a given aspect of their existence. In Yves Lequin’s work, for example, the common memory of the workers of Givors (France) included memory of childhood, apprenticeship, working conditions, local struggles and strikes (Watchel 1986: 208). The materials presented in this volume are of a different nature, as they do not limit themselves to the act of listening and interviewing; rather, interviewing has been associated, to a certain extent, with ‘entering into the people’s everyday social activities and groupings, and the wider worlds they live in’ (Sanjek 1996: 196), as well as interpreting their actions and words. The approach adopted by authors in this volume is not so much one of being involved in ‘living with’, but is closer to the most recent trend in oral history, where oral traditions are considered as representations of the past. There has been a growing tendency for oral history to merge with social history and social anthropology in a shared interest in the ways of narrating the past, in writing ‘a history “from below” on family and community ways of life and values’ (Woolf in this volume). Elizabeth Tonkin (1992: 3), for instance, has produced a work in which, as she says, ‘“oral history” is treated as a profoundly social process which is also bound up simultaneously with different temporalities’. In such a perspective the narrators are connected both to their audience and ‘with the structure of their narrations’ (1992: 3–4). This stream of research is one of the voices of our dialogue.

Square Hats and Sombreros: The Social and Political Dimensions of Memory The authors are confronted with various levels of enquiry, which in some chapters can be intertwined. One path which the chapters take is that of the social patterning of recalling, as well as the political significance of the representation of the past. An assumption of the present studies is that memory should not be considered in a purely logical, ideological or existentialist way, and ideology, in turn, should not be considered as ‘a rationalisation, which is culturally variable’, but as an integral part of the social structure (Valeri 1977). I agree with Tambiah (1986) and Das (1992) that ‘the meaning attached to violence is differently construed in the popular consciousness of different sections of society’ (Das 1992: 16). This assumption should not be seen as a contradiction of the concept of ethnographic interpretation put forward by Geertz. Too easily in the sociology of knowledge, ‘varieties of consciousness’ are matched to ‘types of social organization’ and then ‘causal arrows’ are aimed ‘from somewhere in the recesses of the second in the general direction of the first – rationalists wearing square hats sitting in

14 • Francesca Cappelletto square rooms thinking square thoughts, they should try sombreros […]. It is a matter of conceiving cognition, emotion, motivation, perception, imagination, memory … whatever, as themselves, and directly, as social affairs’ (Geertz 1983: 153). The premise is that ‘ethnographic understanding of thinking’ is not opposed to historical and material realities. Sociological reconstruction is at the core of exercises in memory. Nevertheless, the recollection of what happened is permeated with the subjective consciousness of the memory. Some chapters relate to the issue of the ideological and political significance of the representation of the past, which implies referring to the relationship between memory and power. Longina Jakubowska’s article is concerned with the construction of the past of the privileged classes in Poland, a country where land reform at the end of World War II expropriated the group’s hegemonic power. It chronicles the process through which the nationalization of landed estates and the expropriation of the previous owners, following Poland’s entry into the Soviet sphere of influence, led to the State and the gentry constructing ‘contested versions in the representations of the past’. Through the analysis of autobiographical narratives of the Polish elite, the social, cultural and especially political shaping of memorymaking is examined in the changed post-socialist climate. The memory of the gentry, it is argued, is distorted at its very core; the same appears to be true of what Jakubowska calls ‘secondary memories’, that is the next generation’s recall (‘memories conveyed through and by their parents’). A further insight provided by this chapter is the way in which personal stories may be transformed into collective trauma to become ‘the basis for social action’. The specificity of Jakubowska’s enquiry is to place narrative memory between political drama and narrative enactments. The interdependence between local and global processes of remembrance is at the centre of the Italian case study. There are reverberations of antagonism between the local communities, which want their sufferings to be recognized, and the national institutions, which do not concede to this demand and do not pursue those who are responsible. Such a division exists in many European countries and beyond Europe as well: in the period of the Cold War individuals responsible for hundreds of massacres, even when they had been identified, were not brought to justice. In Italy in the late 1940s the judicial investigations were shelved for over fifty years in the so-called ‘closet of shame’ because it was feared that prosecutions might have implications for the planned reorganization of the army in the German Federal Republic and the latter’s integration into NATO (Franzinelli 2002: 10; 194). The hegemonic construction of narrative led to silence. Memory is not a neutral space; it may also be a location of struggle where there are political disputes (Maier 1994). The social context of political beliefs is central in understanding war remembrances. According to Ingold (2000: 14), ‘the anthropologist’s first concern is not to judge the truth of the proposition but to understand

Introduction • 15 what it means, given the context in which it is advanced’. As mentioned above, the paradox of people discharging Nazi responsibility and blaming partisans is to be evaluated within the context of social and political battles. In the chapters by Jakubowska and Ott a recurrent theme is that of conflict over memory and of the way in which people are active agents of remembrance since they can choose how to remember. The ethnographic materials presented by the political scientist Roger Petersen refer to the anti-Soviet protest in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1991, which related to the events of World War II. The author develops the theme of memory and social structure, comparing different groups of survivors, who, considered together, form a mnemonic community. It is a case study of the similarities and differences between the émigré and non-émigré recollections of the Soviet occupation across different types of community. The study is part of a broader research project which sought to identify in detail the kind of local community structure that sustained rebellion and resistance. Different sets of socio-structural variables are taken into consideration, such as social associational ties, political affiliation, economic organization, mobilization, the importance of social norms, the influence of state policies on group recollections. Here Petersen addresses the important theme of remembrance and socio-political context. It is implicit in his argument that, in order to understand the forms and content of memory, we cannot limit ourselves to a generic description of the social contours of remembrance, since what is needed is a detailed analysis of the traditional social life and structure of the period reconstructed through narratives. The specificity of Petersen’s contribution lies in his attempt to gain insight into how long-term memory affects political motivations and behaviour, connecting concepts from the domains of culturally oriented studies and political action. An aspect that deserves closer investigation and that the author himself considers ‘remarkable’ is the ‘lack of emphasis in the narratives on the German occupation’. Paradoxically, even when the persons interviewed underwent violence, such as deportation to concentration camps, their narrative rotates around the Soviet occupation. The author maintains that several reasons could explain the silence about the German occupation, which include the fact that the ‘Soviets remained as occupiers’ and that, ‘compared to the Soviets, the Germans and their occupation paled in comparison, and paled in memory’. The issue appears complex and puzzling if compared to other case studies. In the Tuscan villages, partisans’ violence certainly paled in comparison to Nazi violence (brutalities and massacres of the civilian population), but it is the partisans that are blamed, while the Nazis are absolved in the narratives of the majority of the population. If we confront the Lithuanian case with the Italian one, the scheme is apparently upside down, although in both cases it is principally the Germans that are paradoxically ‘absolved’.

16 • Francesca Cappelletto It seems important to underline again that the emic and etic points of view do not necessarily coincide. I am in tune with the opinion expressed by the anthropologist Pietro Clemente, who maintains that the massacre at Civitella ‘is a case for the Nuremberg trials or the Russell tribunal. It is not in any way possible to think of justifying the massacre of civilians because it was a reprisal for what were military actions. The barbarity of Germans is in no way justifiable, it is not comparable to the partisans’ actions.’ The version proposed as memory by the local community bewilders and even shocks the ethnographer; although it is needed to ‘give sense to their interpretations of events’. The latter attitude means broadening our cognitive criteria and ‘finding a place for them in our categories’ (Clemente 1994: 5). In order to understand local categories, a reflection put forward by Carlo Levi in the immediate aftermath of the war seems relevant. He suggested that the social organization of meaning stands as a central core in memory practices. During the years of the fascist regime, Levi was exiled for political reasons to Gagliano, a remote village in Southern Italy. Talking to the villagers, he realized that, in the awareness of the peasants of Gagliano, ‘the first World War, so bloody and close as it was, didn’t stand as a central experience […]. Peasants underwent the war, and now’, Levi says, ‘it is as if they had simply forgotten it […]. Nobody even mentioned the war; they didn’t remember those who died during the war […]. When questioned on the matter they answered briefly and with indifference […]. The war the peasants speak of with animation, with a present and living passion, the constant talk of the village, is the war of the brigands [fought against the army and the government of the North at the time of Italian unification nearly a century earlier]. This is the story they had already transformed into legend, fairy-tale, epic poem, myth’ (Levi 1999: 119–21). The Great War was not part of their memory. It may be argued that the same phenomenon carries a different weight in the memory of different social groups. A particular cultural framework makes a specific event acquire significance for a specific social group. It is such frameworks, and not the objective characteristics of the events, that determine the selection of what survives and what does not in group memory (Sahlins 1985): ‘the intersection of history and memory is central […] for events to become part of “history” they have to be experienced as significant’ (Hastrup 1992: 7). Past event are interpreted and re-interpreted according to the cognitive and emotional attitudes of social actors. In the Italian case study it emerged that in the indigenous representations the sense of belonging to a social unit and political sentiments and attitudes played a central role in shaping the memory of the massacre, especially the dimension of memory concerning the ‘theme of guilt’ (Cappelletto 2004). The relationship between politics and memory is deepened in the reflections of the historian Stuart Woolf. From a methodological point of view, this is an original contribution because more or less implicitly it dialogues with Cappelletto’s case study – about the theme of the divided memory of Nazi massacres – as well as with

Introduction • 17 Petersen’s case study about the theoretical perspective linking memory and politics. The accent on political patterning of remembrances highlights a different approach to the understanding of the almost unknown ‘mechanism of the overlaps and intersection’ between private and public memory. Woolf touches on the question confronted by Petersen, that is the diaphanous presence and ‘rapid omission’ of Nazi crimes in the current remembrances of Central and Eastern European nations after the collapse of communism. He maintains that this phenomenon is to be read in the context of a ‘hegemonic historical and political narrative’ that is ‘replete with political implications’. The articulate and clear insight developed by Stuart Woolf puts the accent on the issue of ‘the hegemonic narrative at the national level’. He argues that there is a close association between local, national and supranational narratives. It is exactly this linkage that requires closer examination, since there are ‘challenges and contradictions between the various levels’. The argument about memory and politics leads us to another burning issue of the volume, the representations of war violence.

Violence and Traumatic Memory War memory means memories of the period following acts of violence. In this volume authors are concerned with a specific type of memory, that is memory of war violence in small-scale groups. A common aim of the collected chapters is to explore the processes by which memories of extreme violence are socially transformed in small-scale groups. The study of micro-social relations enables us to understand war violence, its impact and its effects as a cultural phenomenon, by considering the ways in which the various social groups come to develop or maintain a network of perspectives which imply shared meanings (Hannerz 1992). Studying the memory of violent war events in our context means studying the memory from the particular perspective of the victims. It is a question of a longterm memory where there is a close connection between the cognitive and the affective-traumatic dimension. This memory is a consensual reality since violence has been suffered and afterwards shaped up not only individually, but mostly by the whole social group. As such it becomes an object of cultural interpretation. According to Oliverio (1994: 19), the characteristics of painful individual memories fundamentally differ from those of communal memory. In fact, ‘processes of interference, generalization, and oblivion may take place at an individual level, not at a group level. At an individual level, memories may be modified and formed, ‘specific memories may be lost as they are transformed into memories which are on a vaster scale, characterized by a more general meaning, which are capable of gathering together various information’. Similarly painful memories may pass into oblivion: according to Freud soldiers forget the traumatic aspects of war. Group

18 • Francesca Cappelletto narratives, on the other hand, do not have much generalisation. Perhaps there is no removal because there is a difference between suffering violence as an individual and as a group: in the latter case it is less likely that memories will be removed, in fact, these memories are fostered and renewed. Our ethnographic studies suggest, instead, that in those groups that underwent war violence the process of remembrance is both a private mourning and a public commemoration. Narrating and giving testimony is a ceaseless activity engaging both the individual and the whole social group. Here ‘telling may become itself an all-consuming life task’, a long-lasting ‘rumination’, ‘yet no amount of telling seems to do justice to their inner compulsion’ (Lamb 1995: 63). The kind of experience described throughout the volume is traumatic memory of violent events. Among social scientists, traumatic memory is not a consensual definition. Violence is a slippery concept; ‘it escapes easy definition and enters the most fundamental features of people’s lives’. Violence, in fact, ‘is a dimension of living’, has the quality of ‘the immediacy of its manifestation’ (Taussing 1987). As regards traumatic memory, several authors maintain that it is difficult and even impossible to conceptualize memory of violent events as a specific category of memory, because it is an outermost, extreme form of ordinary memory. On the contrary, the authors of Tense Past argue that it is fundamentally different from ordinary memory: traumatic memory is not a coherent story but a cascade of experiences, eruptions that create a specific ‘landscape’ (Kirmayer 1996: 185). Narratives of trauma reflect the quality of a dispersed, fragmentary experience; they are characterized by ‘disruptions, doubling and self-estrangement’ (Kirmayer 1996: 185). It is probably this disruptive quality that makes it impossible to find the words to record trauma. Words ‘cannot contain trauma’ because ‘the magnitude of suffering is understood to exceed what can be told in mere words […]. Narrative is an insufficient container or organizer for traumatic experience of constant horror’ (Kirmayer 1996: 185). And yet it is precisely trauma which needs words. Words may put together fragments of experience of the individual and the social group. The fact that traumatic memory can be wordless may be crucial in impeding the choral narration of the violent past, interpersonal communication and maintenance of social ties. However, our observations do not confirm this viewpoint. In the case of the communities that were victims of violence, the traumatic story has been elaborated by the group. It has been the means of facing the disruption created by the violence and of protecting the unity of the group. The communities in which we carried out our research define themselves in their recollections as peaceful, well integrated and living in harmony, when sudden, inconceivably horrible, unimaginable violence struck. The defenceless–powerful dyad is referred to in several testimonies and researches. One of the specific features of the mnemonic communities is that violence is perceived as a continuous experience; it is not an event to be situated in a closed

Introduction • 19 past. In a sense, time is not capable of containing fear and cruelty. Violence is followed by its traumatic wake, since the act of retelling becomes associated with the emotions of re-living. Violent experience coagulates into words and visual pictures that put the person in the emotional state to re-live the event. This experience may give rise to a prolongation of the ‘spectacle’ of violence. Survivors re-enter the past and the duration of the violence dilates into a measureless time dimension; in the mnemonic process deepness and temporality are significant factors (Casey 1989). Putting war violence into words and feelings is not an intermittent experience, an eruption followed by disappearance (Kanapathipillai 1992: 343); on the contrary, it is a persistent, intrusive, latent presence in the victims’ lives, so that they have the sensation of being trapped in the time of the atrocities. They perceive themselves as suspended between two dimensions: the desire to reject remembering, which is associated with the perception that it is difficult and even impossible to remember, and the desire to speak out, since the past is felt as an ineradicable burden. Violence is what is experienced as impossible to forget, but, at the same time, difficult and, sometimes, impossible to communicate. Sharing this dissonant coexistence in small group societies is itself a social fact, since this dynamic gives rise to the mnemonic community. Here remembering appears in its tangible, social dimension. Some ethnographic accounts refer to the social processes of inclusion and its counterpart exclusion from the ‘we’ of those who are considered responsible for violent acts. Violence is not recognized as a domestic element, embedded in the local relations. Locally the source of violence is conceived as something external, different from ‘us’, so that membership in the community of memory is characterized by having been the victim of violence, not of having committed violent acts. Intra-community violent relations have produced only silence (Connerton 1989). In fact, an aspect which is taboo is that of violence committed by neighbours, friends, co-villagers. In Bosnia this means friends who joined in with those who were committing violent acts (Sorabji 1994). In the Tuscan communities this means the local fascists who collaborated with the Nazis and acted as Nazis’ guide in the death cycles (Cappelletto 2004); local partisans were not regarded as ‘true ones’, such as ‘those in northern Italy’. One key element of traumatic experience is that it may extend over time when the agents of violence have not been recognized and condemned. According to the historian Charles Maier (1994), the reason why memories in communities that have been victims of Nazi crimes are concentrated on those past crimes and are not able to digest them is that the truth as to what actually happened still needs to be established: unpunished violence requires justice, and at local levels work to expose the guilty never ceases.

20 • Francesca Cappelletto A contribution by Cappelletto in the present volume argues that the search for the agents of massacres has been a constant thought in the minds of survivors and their children. This attitude is interwoven with silence, which is the outcome of the impotence in dealing with the human agencies of violence. The social dimension of group remembering has been considered by various authors in the literature. For example, the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky has clearly showed that the exercise of mass violence induces silence in those who witnessed it: ‘Those who commit violence invite admiration; they want to impress their followers, demonstrate their strength, intimidate other enemies and paralyze the survivors with fear. The death of one is a threat to others.’ These are the ingredients of the most extreme form of violence, the ‘absolute violence’. Its specific effect is to enlarge the dyad perpetrator/victim, creating a ‘figurative event’, a relationship among the slaughterers and ‘the spectators, the survivors, the future victims’ (Sofsky 2001: 73). As mentioned before, the authors of the present volume try to gain an insight into the relationship between narratives and violence. In the ethnographic materials presented by some authors, narrative is seen as an attempt to metabolize and ‘normalize’ the violent past. The relationship between narratives and violence has been recently deepened by James Young, in a book entitled Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust. Violent events, Young maintains, ‘demand their retelling’; narration creates a continuum which multiplies them and apparently causes them ‘to lose their “violent” quality’. ‘Insomuch as violence is “resolved” in narrative, the violent event seems also to lose its particularity – its facthood – once it is written. In an ironic way, the violent event can exist as such […] only as long as it appears to stand outside of the continuum, where it remains apparently unmediated, unframed, and unassimilated’ (Young 1988: 15). The core of trauma seems to lie in this process. Our ethnographic materials do not provide a single interpretation. Some indicate that even if the narratives were told by a group of survivors narrating for more than half a century, they would not metabolize, assimilate and act as mediators for violent events. These events maintain their discontinuity. It is possible that the way of retelling (groups of survivors) and the style (tales by means of images) act as crucial elements explaining why narratives within communities do not lose their facthood, and do not solve violence in a continuum outside time. Nevertheless, recounting is an attempt to face and digest a past of brutal, senseless violence. From the ethnographic materials presented by Ott and Van Boeschoten it emerges that narrating is a way to ‘normalize’ the violent past. There can be a specific stylistic form of narration that lends itself to evoking violent, extreme events. According to Assman (1999), memories which are continuously refined by their retelling become anecdotes. In this process a stabilizing energy moves gradually from the emotions of violence to the linguistic formulation.

Introduction • 21 Another ethnographic example has been presented by the oral historian Laurent Vergne in a study of memories of deportation. Here the anecdote is considered as ‘instantaneous’ knowledge that makes it possible for the survivors to narrate the extreme experience of the concentration camps. ‘Through bits of information, it is a way of reassembling a reality which is hard to describe and to portray’ (Vergne 1994: 76–7). The relating of minor matters (Huglo 1993) evokes a complex reality. This narrative method is of far greater importance than its linguistic substance. It is as if the anecdote were helping both the teller and the listener to control the dramatic intensity of the emotions brought forth by the tale. By means of anecdotes, documentary evidence is transformed and becomes a testimonial of barbaric violence and solidarity, so that it is transformed into being of value; here memory has an ethical dimension (Vergne 1994). In some contributions the theme of the relationship among violence, memory and emotions within a group is tentatively outlined, in others it is analysed by means of a detailed ethnography. What comes out are different ways of dealing with violence. One common denominator, however, appears to be the theme of violence from outside which explodes on to the scene like a violent storm carrying victims and destruction. In fact, war violence is not only a terrifying, overwhelming experience which belongs to the past, it is also a permanent invasion into the lives of individuals and the social group. The state of the victim opens out as time goes by, a sentiment is nurtured, and all this goes into creating the figure of the survivor-witness, who, only recently, has won for himself a social identity (Wieviorka 1998). The survivors are those who wish to communicate the experiences they have lived through: a survivor is ‘one who is touched by violence but manages to “get away” and lives to testify to the brute facts of violence’ (Das 1990: 306–7). Testimony is ‘the imperative to tell [that] can become itself an all-consuming life task. Yet no amount of telling seems ever to do justice to this inner compulsion’ (Lamb 1995: 63). Memory provides an advantageous viewpoint from which we can study the theme of violence. In fact, the intensity of the immaterial world of inner, psychic experiences (Todorov 1995) is to be referred both to memory traces and to subjective reflection which is left in the minds of the social actors by their subjection to violence. From an introspective, analytical point of view, the practice of violence heightens the importance of the body, its visibility to the senses (Riches 1986). The prevalence of the experience based on perception by the senses may prevent memory from settling down into judgement. In the ethnographic examples discussed here, remembrances show a tendency not to be metabolized or even faded. Instead, they remain alive and poignant in the minds and in the words of the social actors. According to Assman (1999), the metaphor of traumatic memory is a bodily one: to swallow, to chain again, to metabolize. This feature seems to originate in the

22 • Francesca Cappelletto reiteration of evocations when individuals gather together, as much as in the ‘incorporated’ nature of violence. In most mnemonic communities, the character of violence as an extreme experience, as well as the bestiality of violence, stand as central features of retelling. Survivors of Nazi crimes still suffer when evoking past violence; during the narrative session they live an inner struggle in the effort to comprehend whether they can tell or not the monstrous impact of violence on themselves. Violence can be considered in its fundamental meaning of ‘an action on the body’ in the context of the victim–perpetrator confrontation. Particularly in the case of war violence, ‘body becomes a privileged site for the inscription of signs of power’ (Spencer 1996: 559). The traces left by violence in the victims build up a bodily memory in which the narratives are constantly projected against a visual screen. Preserved images of the past are difficult to objectify and communicate, and yet they are massed and transmitted through the repetition of narrative year after year (Cappelletto 2003). Narratives such as these are filled up with flashbulb memory images consciously experienced by individuals as sudden eruptions of fragments relating to past events. The anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse has considered flashbulb memories as linked to the traumatic nature of ‘dramatic, frightening and surprising experiences’ (Whitehouse 1996: 710–11). In the ethnographic examples discussed here, violence is spoken about openly, vision and smell are rehearsed, but at the same time violence is also tabooed. This is the case in an Italian village, where the most outrageous episode of the carnage is retold by a stranger witness who is not a member of the community. He said that in one house the body of a pregnant woman was found; her belly had been cut open and the foetus was lying on the ground, still attached to the umbilical cord. This story has been silenced by the villagers. Violence is conceived by people as incomprehensible and senseless; when survivors let themselves speak out, the representations of past war events focus on cruelty and sadism, the joy the perpetrators in deliberately making people suffer. This ‘joy of violence’ seemingly forms the core of these extreme experiences, and that Primo Levi considered a specific character of the Third Reich. People we met in the victimized villages had a fundamental question in common: ‘why?’ This question is part of the tortured memory of many other victims. In the following passage the ‘usefulness’ of the senseless cruelty inflicted on the prisoners of the concentration camp is considered a self-justification of the brutal violence committed on a greater scale: ‘In Gitta Sereny’s interview of Franz Stangl, the former officer responsible for Treblinka, the writer asked Stangl, imprisoned for life in Düsseldorf prison: “Given that you killed them all … what sense was there in the humiliations and cruelty?”, to which he replied: “As a means to condition the men who had physically to execute the operations. To make it possible for them to carry

Introduction • 23 out what they had to do.” In other words,’ comments Primo Levi, ‘the victim has to be degraded before dying, in order to lighten the killer’s sense of guilt. This is an explanation not without its logic, but cries out to heaven: this is the sole utility of useless violence’ (Levi 1986: 101).

Narrating Past War Experience One of the major aims of the authors has been to listen to and interpret the sharing of stories during narrative sessions and the act of transmitting visions and values of war experience to younger generations. Narrations are considered from a theoretical standpoint that is neither the naive empiricist-mimetic position, where narratives are ‘primarily after-the-fact imitations of the experience they recount’, nor the anti-mimetic position, which emphasizes the fictional quality of ethnography where narratives transform, construct a world rather than refer to one (Mattingly 1998: 19, 25). Rather, we ally ourselves with a theoretical approach that combines ethnography and history. Narrative is considered instead as the socio-cultural practice, embedded in small local communities, through which individual remembrance enters into the ‘public’, common language. There are in fact many resemblances in structure between reminiscing and story-telling. Remembering is just about the same thing as making conversation, recounting, giving an account of past events, and these are all ways of socially accomplishing the processes of memory (Casey 1989; Middleton and Edwards 1990; Caruth 1995). Narration, retelling implicates the definition of memory itself. In the domain of social disciplines what is usually called ‘memory’ may consist in the actions of people who are (re)telling a story. It is never a ‘pure’ memory but is rather made up of fragments taken from different times and different social actors. Funkenstein rightly calls for a reconsideration of the concept of collective memory, pointing out that it ‘preserves symbols and monuments that no longer remind most members of the society to which the memory belongs of anything’ (Funkenstein 1989: 17). The same is true of personal memory, which is the ‘memory of memories’. The memory of an event crystallizes and becomes ‘externalized’ in a narrative content. In the narrative sessions on war events, the discursive interaction rests on a double basis: the individual mental basis of each narrator’s own consciousness (which involves feelings, emotions and knowledge) and the shared dimension, which conforms to the cultural imagination. The shared narratives are interactive events that dramatize representations of the past. The metaphor of the double landscape was coined by the cultural psychologist Jerome Bruner, who has been working for a long time on theories of narrative

24 • Francesca Cappelletto cognition. Through this metaphor he suggests that stories have an epistemological basis, in that structurally they ‘are concerned with how protagonists interpret things’, placing the external world in relation to the internal world (which we can call the world of images): ‘the events and actions of a supposedly “real world” occur simultaneously with mental events in the consciousness of the protagonists’ (Bruner 1990: 61). Many social scientists, from Frederic Bartlett (1932) to Mary Douglas (1987), have acknowledged that narration is the social construction of memory. It is realized through a cultural process, where emotions and interests that favour ‘the development of specific images’ (Bruner 1990: 66) are moulded. The act of narrating remembrances binds up the internal world of the mind and the external world of social relations. Remembrance is patterned by ‘external’ data, such as others’ remembrances, rumours, voices, information and the flow of knowledge and feelings that run through the group. Narrated memory is an intrinsically social act: ‘telling a story is […] a way of guiding the attention of listeners or readers into it. A person who can “tell” is one who is perceptually attuned to picking up information in the environment that others, less skilled in the task of perception, might miss, and the teller, in rendering his knowledge explicit, conducts the attention of his audience along the same paths as his own’ (Ingold 2000: 190). The theme of narrative and memory is approached in a more or less explicit way and from different angles by the authors in this volume. In Cappelletto’s contribution a topic that emerges is the historical calibre of war narratives because they accumulate and at times are modified from one performance to the next. There is the difficulty of running through the story of the group narratives and of their sedimentations in various layers, to use Schama’s geological metaphor (Schama 1995). A peculiar characteristic is that there is no perception of the process of change, because this process ‘is cancelled out the moment it takes place’. The tracks are being covered: ‘the stages through which the memory of real events becomes a set of images is not usually visible in the finished product. The very existence of this process of conceptualization is itself hidden. Successive superimposition conceals that the process has taken place at all. All that remains is the latest set of images’ (Fentress and Wickham 1992: 58). Narration is intended as both recounting and action. In Jakubowska’s article, in particular, remembering is presented as an organized recounting by a group which reiterates its history. In cases such as this, it is not a question of a single person’s voice, an ‘authoritative narrator who spins out the story’, but of various voices which ‘command the course of the tale in story-telling, reflecting the fact that the narrator knows the entire story in advance’ (Casey 1989: 44). Narration may be a performance in a literal sense, like the theatre representation analysed by Ott, or a story-telling, like the narrative sessions in which past violence is rehearsed (Cappelletto, Petersen, Van Boeschoten in this volume).

Introduction • 25 In some contributions the narrative representation of events works in such a way as to produce a memory of memories (Funkenstein 1989), so that it is no longer the event which is being remembered but the text which the event has fixed in a process of textualization which is similar to what happens with the individual’s memory (Candau 1996). In fact, at both the individual and the group level the experience of remembering is reiterated in re-remembering (which means, ‘we can remember ourselves remembering’). This aspect hints at the ‘incapsulation’, the ‘self-enclosing’ character of memory (Casey 1989: 39), as is shown in Cappelletto’s article. As a consequence, what is actually remembered is the narration of the event. In the communities a process takes place which brings about an objectification of memory, so that even the individuals who were not witnesses and are component members of the mnemonic community evoke the narration of the event of others. It is in the process of repetition that the cultural connotations of narrative are enlarged in another fundamental way. Although the broad issue of the impact of structural models of narration on the forms of memory is not the concern of the essays in this volume, it is important to note that, in fact, narration that is continually repeated and spun out anew conforms to the canons of local oral traditions.

The Ethnographic Approach In communities that were the theatre of extreme events, it is not possible to carry out fieldwork with detachment. The experience of emotional closeness to our interlocutors is central to understanding the significance that has been and is still attributed to the nature of the group’s memory. During our conversations with the survivors we become involved with the people and their memories in both the affective and cognitive dimensions. This means a feeling of empathy and a shared complicity with them. It has been suggested that ‘the suffering of individuals, whose lives and struggles recall our own, tends to move us; the suffering of those who are distanced […] is something less affecting’ (Nordstrom 1995: 286). The suffering of our interlocutors is not of an exotic nature: it is the sort of Western suffering we are familiar with through indirect knowledge. In a sense, it is ‘our own war’ which is remembered, and this is an experience that affects us. ‘Full immersion’, as the key experience of the ethnographer, is even more pervasive here because of the close-knit ties of the communities and the atmosphere which is created in memories that echo from one individual to another. The way in which stories are narrated, as well as their form and content, lead to an individual, subjective involvement with people and their memories. In their striving to develop a ‘vision from inside’, the authors attempt to understand the traces that the experience of war has left in the lives of people who belong to a small-scale

26 • Francesca Cappelletto society. What interests us in our research into war memories is its subjective aspects and how these become socialized: the emotions, suffering and reflections of those who were witnesses and victims of an event. To use the words of Samuel and Thompson (1990: 2), ‘we reintroduce the emotionality, the fears and fantasies carried by the metaphors of memory’. When doing fieldwork we listen to personal recollections, which are impregnated with a deep sense of grief and where the component of re-living plays an important role (see above, ‘Violence and Traumatic Memory’). The narration of extreme events rotates around the representation of images that have been seen ‘with the mind’s eye’. Survivors tell us that visual pictures often come into their minds because they ‘saw everything’ and everything ‘was covered in blood’; they actually see it all, even with their eyes closed. These images of past crimes become so deeply ingrained that survivors live with memories that throw a shadow over their present-day lives. The images are very potent and make survivors feel as if they were living a kind of second existence, parallel to their everyday lives. Narration actually increases this perception, which affects the empathizing attitude of the ethnographer, his or her ‘feeling thought’ (Wikan 1992: 463). The act of re-living is compelling also because it appears to emanate from the experience of violence, which is itself ‘a dimension of living, characterized by the immediacy of its manifestation’ (Nordstrom and Robben 1995: 5).

The Mirror-effect The ethnographic approach differs from others in that it allows us to measure the way in which the experience of others reflects back on us, thereby leading us to a greater understanding. In the following example, which relates to what I will call the mirror-effect, the ambivalence of people’s attitude to memory is incarnated in the figure of the ethnographer and the way in which the survivors see him or her. The ambivalent attitude manifested by a number of mnemonic communities – the tension between the desire to close the chapter of memories and the knowledge that they cannot and, indeed, do not really want to do so – is reflected in their relationship with the ethnographer. I often had the sensation that I was functioning as a mirror, suspended between the two dimensions of desire and rejection. Speaking of his mother, a man told me: ‘She says she doesn’t want to see anyone, not even you … and then she wants nothing more than for someone to come and talk to her.’ Through my presence I could understand the interpenetrating contradictions between the struggle to remember and the struggle to forget. In this case, the ethnographer’s interviews themselves become the object of knowledge, rather than its instrument; his experience becomes a factor that permits him to attribute significance to the experience of others.

Introduction • 27

Internalizing the Experience of Others Anthropologists maintain that seeing through the eyes of others is a way of assimilating and understanding their experiences. In its ‘classic’ import, ethnography consists in looking at what social actors regard as significant and in entering into a dynamic of ‘closeness’ and ‘distance’. I made the effort to interpret the community’s recollections through the eyes of the participants as a primary ‘cultural property’, which in time became an object to safeguard. In this case, closeness means that the ethnographer herself enters the special dimension suspended between the private and the more public world of the mnemonic community. Recollections, in fact, are situated on the borderline between the inner and the outer world. From a more detached point of view, we have to respond to the demand made over the years by the survivors to transmit the memory of these events for themselves and for others, such as journalists and historians. In this case, ‘detachment’ requires us to distance ourselves and to develop a capacity for self-reflection about our own place within the community. This leads to the awareness that you are ‘one of the people’ who want to know their story. In the communities that suffered violence, the ethnographer may be viewed as the representative of the outside world that abandoned them after the end of the war and thus cannot comprehend their grief today. When I set out on my fieldwork, I had to accept the role of the outsider who was invited to comprehend the suffering, as it were, with a magnifying glass, and who came ‘from the other side of the barricade’. Towards this world local people still nurture tension and resentment. This volume presents various aims and nuances of the ethnographic interview: they differ according to the theoretical horizons of the scholars. In his work based on the narrations of emigrants and native Lithuanians, for example, the political scientist Roger Petersen uses the interviewee to gather data from both the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ points of view. The interview is considered as the means by which to understand the ‘objective facts’ concerning pre-war and wartime community life, such as, for instance, the socio-structural features of the group, their economic situation or membership of political and social associations. But the author also considers the more subjective aspects of the relationship between the people and the ethnographer. He argues that the influence of emotions such as grief and anger on narrative, when these emotions are unleashed, is visible while the interview is being conducted. The direction the interview takes may change. When the interlocutor becomes very involved emotionally, this reduces his interest in the interpretative aspects of the narrated events. Observation based on personal involvement is best illustrated in Sandra Ott’s chapter. As a spectator she took part in the performance of a piece of Basque popular theatre featuring the rivalry between two resistance movements. This shows us how, in the study of war memories, the ethnographic approach permits

28 • Francesca Cappelletto us to grasp the views of social actors which would otherwise remain concealed. For example, conflicting memories tend not to be voiced in public, but rather to be ‘protected’ within the confines of the group. During the interview some aspects do not emerge, because the interviewer is, after all, an outsider before whom the interlocutor does not want to wash his fellow villagers’ ‘dirty linen’ in public. Especially in cases such as this, the gathering of informal data appears to be crucial. Mutterings, signs of animosity and moments of general effervescence in the audience tell the ethnographer what the performance signifies to the people. The play is considered by the author as a living construction, as the group’s remembrance is a living construction. It functions as a filter in the work of interpretation, both of the social actor and the ethnographer. Van Boeschoten, too, raises the issue of the importance of informal, subliminal communication to understanding interactions among those who are carriers of memory. The ethnographer is situated between two rival groups that maintain competing versions of past events. Here the issue of complicity is rather complex, since affiliation with one group excludes that with the other. During the interview she could perceive that an atmosphere of tension arose when discussing painful matters, such as ‘why people took violent actions in 1945’, because they knew she ‘had done fieldwork’ in the opposing group and ‘had heard different versions’. Participant observation makes it possible to give a nuanced, deeply intuitive account of the process of remembering. Unlike other documentary approaches, that of the ethnographer permits a diversity of voices to be heard and probes the informal stratum in the behaviour of those who remember. For example, it was observation of informal social networks in daily communication that revealed the interference of political affiliations and social hierarchies in the patterning of memory (Cappelletto 2004). The ethnographer has the opportunity to gain insight into the mnemonic community’s behaviour, which includes negotiations and dissonant forms of conduct. The act of constructing memory is highlighted in its diverse facets.

Facing the Senseless The dialogue between the ethnographer and the people is quite a ‘delicate’ matter, because the narrative session is itself a time of shared construction and representation. This is exemplified by the way in which violence is conceived and dealt with in the setting of the interview, both by the ethnographer and his interlocutor. People nurture a fundamental perception of the violence of war: to them it is incomprehensible and senseless (see above, ‘Violence and Traumatic Memory’). They still struggle to face an experience that does not make sense. Narration is a way of facing extreme situations and giving coherence to what is indeed devoid of meaning. By means of narration, survivors try to restore sense to a world, which has been undermined.

Introduction • 29 Facing meaninglessness is something in which the ethnographer too is engaged. In some situations the acceptance of ‘the existence of an absence of meaning’ may even represent a sine qua non by which interaction with the victims of violence is impeded. The existence of meaninglessness is something that people transmit to the ethnographer, with a ‘feeling thought’ which the ethnographer has absorbed; without that ‘there can be no understanding, no appreciation’ (Wikan 1992: 463). Carolyn Nordstrom conducted fieldwork in Mozambique during the civil war there. She maintains that understanding a war ‘does not rest on the fact that the war begins to make any more sense as time goes on, as Mozambicans showed me […]’. Understanding war is not equal to understanding the war in general, an abstract war, ‘in the town X and among the people who populate it’. For her, ‘it was the war in Mozambique and the Mozambican experience of it’. She was concerned with sharing ‘an experience through others’ experience of war’ (Nordstrom 1995: 142). Of course, there is a big gap between witnessing the actual, atrocious act of war at close quarters and witnessing the shadow of violence through the filter of memory. Nevertheless, the emotional aspect of re-living the violence of war is a poignant factor in narrative sessions. It prolongs the ‘vision’ of violence. The visual and aural aspects of memory are linked to a visceral experience that still upsets the witness and involves the listener, including the ethnographer (Cappelletto 2003). This leads to another issue – that of the ethnographer’s personal involvement. It is expressed at different levels, although it seems that the most significant dimensions are the cognitive-emotional ones and ethical commitment.

Cognitive and Emotional Involvement In some ethnographic cases, the accounts of violence are comparable to those of survivors of the Holocaust. In this situation the anguish of a replay remains. For the ethnographer, participating in war memory sessions assumes a deep emotional and cognitive significance because he comes into direct contact with the painful reality of victims. Our involvement as ethnographers encourages people to re-enter into the past, and this may have ethical implications. It should be emphasized that the act of reliving is the core of the common experience between the ethnographer and his interlocutor. It creates a ‘shared domain’ in which empathy and sympathy originate. We ask the victims of violence to recount their stories to us, and in doing so we ask them to re-live their trauma. We are the ones who solicit the replay, whereas they still have to cope with the effects of violence on their minds and bodies. Reliving the past, which is in itself an experience of immediacy, strengthens this aspect of violence. From a practical point of view, the more the ethnographer empathizes with people, the more he avoids the risk of being intrusive and failing to understand

30 • Francesca Cappelletto extremes of violence that, according to the victims, cannot be shared with outsiders. In this case, participants feel more able to refuse the interview, making us understand their reluctance to re-live the past. Above all, if the ethnographer is a native of the area and, in a sense, belongs to the group, people speak of him as ‘one of us’, even if he is no longer directly involved in it (see Petersen in this volume on the Lithuanian refugees). With such an ethnographer, people feel an attenuated responsibility in expressing their feelings or, vice versa, in containing them. Finally, with his continual presence, the ethnographer is able to manifest his ethical and ideological convictions and to become a sympathizer. He is often considered to be one (Olivier de Sardan 1995). It remains true, nevertheless, that the replay of events produces suffering. Especially when entering into contact with people who bear the memory of extreme experiences, the ethnographer is ‘torn out of his experience of daily life’ (Piasere 2002: 44). By creating a feeling of empathy with the local people, such anguish may be partly overcome. This may be described as ‘a participating empathy in shared experiences’ (Bonino, Coco and Tani 1998: 16), which endows the ethnographer with a greater capacity to convey the experiences of others. These ‘others’ belong to a social group which the ethnographer wishes to encounter with both cognitive intentions and a participating sympathy. Autobiographical involvement and a tendency to empathize are common in those studying the memories of war. From the chapters collected here, what emerges is that, even in the case of historically sedimented conflicts, autobiographical involvement and the need for authenticity may be a key to the relationship between the ethnographer and victims of violence. Some authors have asked themselves where empathy ends and identification begins. When dealing with current conflicts, the issue of identification may be a burning and complicated issue, as was the case in the research on the post-intifada period in the West Bank carried out by Swedenburg (1995). The experience of ‘tasting some of the bittersweet fruits of resistance and retaliation’ did not prevent him from having an experience of closeness with his interlocutors: ‘empathize with the friends who were tortured and killed, abhor the squalid refugee camps, and share the humour and spirit of the people condemned to live in them’ (Nordstrom and Robben 1995: 15).

Ethical Involvement At the heart of the ethical involvement of the ethnographer treating the subject of war is the fact that we ourselves are witnesses of events that have been silenced, and ‘the act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral character’ (SheperHughes 1992: 262). The victimized communities share a key feature of cultural self-representation, that of having been violated. The ethnographers too are witnesses; indeed, they are

Introduction • 31 imbued with local history and they, in turn, have to bear the legacy of memory. In remembering, our ‘voice’ is different from that of the victims, in that we do not have our ‘own’ story to tell; yet we are bound by the desire to give testimony. To interact with victims of war violence is to share in flesh and blood the experience of ‘personal accountability and responsibility’ (Nordstrom 1995: 138). Our presence needs to be ‘justified’ not merely in terms of a theoretical enterprise, but also of giving voice to the victim’s experiences. We have to assume an ethical responsibility in judging issues such as social justice and injustice. Speaking about war during our encounters automatically evoked reflection about the wars that are raging in our world today. Both for the ethnographer and his interlocutor, exercising the act of memory in relation to a past war faces us with an urgent moral issue in judging misdeeds in the present. The past is projected on to the present and serves as a yardstick with which to measure historical events. We ask the victims of violence to tell us their stories. I wondered whether it was right to encourage them to remember, thus making them re-live their anguish, and I never ceased to ask myself how I could deal with my request. I often found it very difficult to ask those I worked with to talk and suffer – literally – in front of me, and to suffer in my turn in their presence. In some cases, the survivors reassured me before the interview, trying to relieve me of the worries they intuited by explaining that ‘for all these years [they] had been trained to remember’: it was not the first time they had faced the ‘point at which memory transforms itself into language’ (Young 1988: 161). Certainly they, like Primo Levi, had built themselves a ‘memory-prosthesis’ (Woolf 1999: 45), which allowed them to narrate and to be heard with an attenuated pain, starting from a script that was not written but was present in their minds. But the deepest consciousness that united us in what has been referred to as ‘the testimonial pact’ (Wieviorka 1998) was that we – listeners and survivors – were working together in an attempt not so much to know the facts as to grasp the significance that has been, and still is, attributed to them by memory.

Acknowledgements This study was made possible by funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc., New York (Grant GR6504). The Workshop on Memory of War held at the Center for International Studies at MIT (Boston, USA) helped contribute to the book. I thank Riki Van Boeschoten for having offered her assistance in the revision of part of the manuscript. I am very grateful to Stuart Woolf for his generous help in the final revision of the book. A special thank you to Olga Tagliaferro and Carla Bianco.

32 • Francesca Cappelletto

Note 1. In Italy a democracy was established after the war, which promulgated a constitution written with the contribution of all the political and social bodies involved in the civil war against fascism and Nazism. The values of the resistance movement are the basis of this democracy. Recently, historians have gained access to archives and material not previously available, which have resulted in landmark publications. The responsibility of fascism has been rediscussed and the dimensions and characteristics of the resistance and partisan movement re-evaluated (Pavone 1991).

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–2– ‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War Memories of Violence, Local Identities and Cultural Practices in a Greek Mountain Community Riki Van Boeschoten

Public Memory of the War in Greece and Europe When Europe turned the page of its Cold War past, which had divided it from an ‘external enemy’, it rediscovered its own past internal divisions, which had been ‘forgotten’ in the wake of post-war reconstruction. Since the 1990s historians have increasingly questioned the grand narrative of nations united in the struggle against Nazism and are replacing this foundation myth of post-war democracies with a much more complex story (see, for example, Guillon and Laborie 1995; Portelli 1997a; Guillon and Mencherini 1999). Part of this now recognized complexity lies in the fact that the Resistance was not only a ‘patriotic war’ but also a social conflict and a power struggle, and that some of the battles fought in its name were in fact a ‘civil war’ (Pavone 1992). Much of the violence was perpetrated among members of the same nation, community or even family. The fact that former neighbours had turned into enemies left deep scars or sometimes completely ripped apart the social texture of local communities. These disturbing memories had to be put to rest to facilitate the return to ‘normality’, but they have often continued to gnaw away at survivors, together with the memories of wartime atrocities perpetrated by enemy soldiers. Transmitted through family gatherings, hunting parties or among drinking companions at the local pub, these ‘dangerous’ and divisive memories stand quite apart from official commemorations which celebrate a heroic past. In local settings, such memories of a divided past have sometimes moved centre stage and marginalized narratives focusing on unity and common struggles. In this chapter, however, I will present ethnographic data related to a ‘real’ civil war. Greece was, in fact, the only European country which actually fought a fullblown civil war after the Germans had gone, a civil war with two opposing armies – the left-wing Democratic Army of Greece and the Greek National Army. This was a war that lasted officially for three years (1946–9), but in most areas had 39

40 • Riki Van Boeschoten already begun during the resistance period. Even in areas where no fratricidal armed conflicts took place, the struggle for power in the final years of the occupation created tensions which undermined the prospects for a peaceful transition and would eventually lead to an escalation of violence. For this and other reasons, at the grass-roots level the memory of the Resistance is often overshadowed by the memory of the Civil War. For many of the social actors involved, the Civil War brought about a definitive break with the past and is therefore still experienced as a ‘threshold to the present’ (Rosenthal 1995: 143): people talk about it as if it had happened yesterday. One of the main reasons why the Civil War still seems so close is related to political developments in the second half of the twentieth century. In the global context of the Cold War era, the defeat of the Left in 1949 inaugurated a long period of polarization which poisoned social relations in all aspects of daily life. Contrary to what happened in other countries of Western Europe, the defeat of Nazism by the forces of the Resistance did not function as a legitimation for postwar democracy. For many decades former members of the Resistance were persecuted as ‘leftists’ and very few collaborators were put to trial (Mazower 2000: 12). Conditions for a ‘normalization’ of the past were created only after the end of the military dictatorship in 1974. One of the first measures taken by the socialist party PASOK, which came to power in 1981, was officially to recognize the Resistance and to pass legislation to revoke measures intended to penalize former supporters of the Left in the Civil War. For example, it legalized the Communist Party and took measures for the repatriation of political refugees and the return of confiscated properties. As important as this legal framework was to advancing the process of democratic transition, it was unable to tackle the more profound cleavages left by the Civil War, as it imposed ‘reconciliation’ from above. In official discourse the Resistance was now celebrated as a united struggle of all Greeks and past divisions were simply ‘forgotten’ (Mazower 1995). It would take another decade before a more essential process of reconciliation in the wider society gradually began to emerge. From the early 1990s an increasing number of memoirs were published, which, contrary to those published in the 1980s, touched on the Civil War period. And younger historians who had not lived through this period began to produce new and innovating work (Mazower 2000; Marantzidis and Andoniou 2004; Carabott and Sfikas 2004). Within this new context, shaped by the end of the Cold War era, social memory began to play a crucial role in helping a divided society come to terms with its past. Therefore it is important to study how local communities remember civil war conflicts with their neighbours today and the social structuring of meanings attached to such memories. Having in mind this long period of polarization, one might expect that many of these grass-roots memories are, in fact, ‘divided’ memories. In many areas, especially in those with a large number of victims, this is in fact the case. And yet, this

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 41 is not the whole story. The ethnography on which this chapter is based suggests that present-day local narratives may seem to have a different social function: stories are told neither to perpetuate divisions of the past, nor to celebrate national union, but rather to mend past cleavages from a bottom-up perspective and to reconstruct a sense of community in the social imaginary. The case study I will discuss here concerns the village of Ziakas, a mountain community in northern Greece, which had been known as ‘little Moscow’ since the 1930s and had sided with the Left both in the Resistance and in the Civil War.

Ziakas or ‘Little Moscow’: A ‘Memory-Village’ The village of Ziakas today sits peacefully on the rocky slopes of Mount Orliakas, the habitat of wolves, bears and eagles. It is located in the foothills of the Northern Pindus range, about twenty kilometres west of the market town of Grevena (Western Macedonia) and a day’s walking distance from the Albanian border. Although the natural environment has remained the same, everything else has changed. In 1940 Ziakas was a lively community with 1,100 inhabitants (including the little hamlet of Perivolaki); today only 200 mostly elderly men and women live there all-year round. Their houses, food and language bear the traces of the thirty years they spent as political refugees in Eastern Europe, mostly in Czechoslovakia or remote Tashkent. In the summer they are joined by their younger relatives, who were also repatriated from Eastern Europe and now live and work in urban centres but still consider the ‘village’ as their original home. Young and old come across as sturdy, open-minded and sociable mountain villagers. As I soon discovered during my period of fieldwork in the late 1980s,1 flexibility of social norms, pragmatism and reciprocity were some of the key aspects of this community’s habitus and explain much of its political history. But today Ziakas is most of all a ‘memory-village’. Very few of its permanent inhabitants are engaged in any ‘normal’ productive activities; since their return from behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ in the 1980s their main concern has been to reconstruct their village, both in a physical and in a symbolic sense, and to make sense of their past. Ever since 1948, when most of the villagers followed the partisans into Albanian territory and then moved on to various countries of Eastern Europe, the legacy of the Civil War has been omnipresent in their lives. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I carried out fieldwork in the area, recently repatriated political refugees were actively exchanging memories and experiences with those who had stayed behind. Long-forgotten dreams, fears, dramatic accounts, as well as new interpretations, came to the surface and merged into a process which was in fact the construction of a ‘mnemonic community’ (Van Boeschoten 1997: 208–9). Whereas at the time official historiography had covered the period of the Civil War with amnesia, in Ziakas those years were the central focus of all accounts. In the

42 • Riki Van Boeschoten villagers’ view, this period had marked a watershed in the history of the community and now they were trying to pick up the threads broken thirty or forty years earlier. The centrality of this period in the present is also evident from the inscription of monumental time in space. In the central square there is a monument to the ‘National Resistance’. It presents an armed partisan looking up towards the mountains. Although the Resistance officially ended in 1944, the monument carries erroneously the dates 1941–1949. For the people of Ziakas, who had linked their fate with the left-wing resistance movement EAM (National Liberation Front), everything started in 1941, when EAM was established, and ended in 1949, when the Democratic Army was defeated. The continuity implied in this periodization is historically wrong but in accordance with their own experience and therefore subjectively true. Further down, near the church, there is a monument to the eighty victims of this decade. Most of them fell in the Civil War, fighting with the partisans near the Albanian border. The monument is well cared for and always decorated with fresh flowers. Finally, the legacy of the Civil War is evident during national elections. During the elections of March 2004, when the national electorate voted the socialist PASOK party out of power and gave the right-wing New Democracy Party 45 per cent of the votes, in Ziakas the latter obtained only about 15 per cent and the rest of the votes were shared between the communist Left and PASOK. On election day people queuing up to cast their ballot did not speak about unemployment or the economy, but about the Civil War. In this chapter then I will describe the ways in which the people of Ziakas remember in the ethnographic present those crucial years, focusing in particular on the dynamics of violence and on the community’s relations with its neighbours. In the first phase of the Civil War (1945–6) the people of Ziakas were mainly opposed to irregular armed bands from neighbouring villages, which set out to terrorize former members of the Resistance and, in many instances, to take revenge for the humiliation they suffered during the war years. Contrary to what could be expected, these memories focus on social and cultural practices which reflect a resistance to the logic of violence, cooperation across the lines and shared values. But to understand the social processes at work which split the local society in two and the way in which people try to make sense of it today, we have to turn to the past and go, way back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Social structure, cultural practices and political processes are key aspects of complex developments which would gradually undermine a profound sense of local belonging, without completely destroying it.

The Weight of the Past Western Macedonia was integrated into the Greek nation-state in 1913. During the latter part of Ottoman rule and the first decades of the twentieth century the

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 43 community of Ziakas had formed part of one and the same cultural area, the inhabitants of which combined subsistence agriculture with transhumant pastoralism and were known by the name of Kupatshars.2 But in the 1930s the community of Ziakas started to follow a different course at both the social and the political level. We need to take a closer look at these developments, in order to understand the multiple ways in which this particular past played a role in the polarization of the local society during the 1940s. The Kupatshar area contains a cluster of foothill villages along the Venetiko valley, west of the market town of Grevena. Under Ottoman rule they enjoyed a large degree of communal autonomy. Animal theft and brigandage were endemic to the area. The Kupatshars were linked to each other by multiple ties of kinship, cooperation and exchange, based on the principle of reciprocity, as analysed in the classical work by Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (1923–4). According to this principle, social relations and prestige depended on the observance of three obligations: to give, to receive and to reciprocate. Anyone receiving a gift or favour was deemed to be indebted to the donor and was bound to reciprocate to pay off this debt. The rules implied in this system of obligations were quite flexible, but all members of the local society were closely scrutinized by mutual observation. People who did not observe the rule were not ostracized or punished, but simply lost esteem. In the case of very serious violations – and this happened during the Civil War – the Kupatshars believed that the offenders would be punished by ‘divine justice’ and did not resort to violence themselves (see below). In other words, although in this ‘brigand society’ the use of armed violence was far from exceptional, violence was not used as a rule to settle social conflicts. On the contrary, the Kupatshars had to rely heavily on mutual support to face the constraints of a harsh life exposed to multiple dangers. For this reason they developed a system of cooperation networks through which they supported each other. The way in which these networks operated before the war was brought home to me by ‘unintentional messages’ (Vansina 1985: 93), casual remarks made in the course of interviews dealing with a different subject matter, but also by participant observation during my stay in the area. According to this evidence, these networks concerned needs of strategic importance and involved almost exclusively partners of Kupatshar origin. The support provided through these networks was related to the exchange of labour, marriage strategies (finding a suitable partner within the Kupatshar marriage zone), the practice of animal theft, the journey to and from the winter pastures, hospitality and providing rare goods (money or consumer goods). The term mostly used to denote the quality of the partnership was ‘friendship’, a notion well known in the Mediterranean area to characterize asymmetrical patron–client relationships (Campbell 1964; Boissevain 1966). But among the Kupatshars this kind of ‘friendship’ was very often developed among partners of equal status.

44 • Riki Van Boeschoten In fact, the social structure of the Kupatshar area is much more egalitarian than that of southern Greece. In the village of Ziakas this egalitarian structure was even more pronounced than in some of its neighbouring villages, each household owning between 1.5 and 3 hectares of land and/or 100–300 sheep. Instead of developing dependent labour relations, the villagers used to pool their resources according to the principle of reciprocity. Another aspect of egalitarianism was the prevalence of horizontal bonds in social relations. Marriage partners or sponsors were preferably chosen among families of equal status within the village or in neighbouring Kupatshar villages. In some villages social stratification was more important than in others. For reasons we will examine below, some families or individuals acquired a dominant position at the local level, partly due to economic factors and partly because of their links with brigandage or local politicians. But in Ziakas people avoided developing vertical bonds, either at the political (patron–client relations) or at the economic level (dependent labour). In fact, in this village egalitarianism not only reflected existent patterns of social relationships, but gradually developed into a future model for society. This happened during the 1930s, when the villagers became involved in the mass peasant mobilizations which shook the foundations of traditional peasant communities in the newly incorporated areas of northern Greece. Ziakas became a stronghold of the Agrarian Party (which obtained 60 per cent of the vote in the elections of 1933). Through the parallel influence of the Communist Party, it joined the contingent of ‘little Moscow’ villages (Marantzidis 1997) which would form the backbone of the left-wing resistance movement in the next decade. Another important aspect of the Kupatshar area was the ‘brigand tradition’, the outlaw culture which derived from it and the role this phenomenon played in political developments. A secular tradition of insubordination and armed violence during Ottoman rule had shaped a specific habitus among the mountain villagers of this area. The bandits of the twentieth century, heirs to this tradition, were increasingly entangled in nationwide political developments, as they were recruited or intervened on their own behalf in national or political movements. In this way some outlaws or members of their local support network established links with local politicians, most of whom belonged to the Royalist camp. Through these links they increased their power at the local level, serving as ‘political middlemen’ between the centres of national power and the local society. The deep socioeconomic transformations which accompanied the integration of this area into the nation-state widened the gap between these local power-holders and the majority of small shepherds and peasants. The latter were increasingly attracted by new mass parties on the left of the political spectrum, a process in which the village of Ziakas played a leading role. During the 1930s this process produced considerable social tension, and as a result the formerly homogeneous outlaw culture inherited from Ottoman times

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 45 started to crack. This created a new space for political action, but also new social cleavages. Again, the village of Ziakas formed an extreme example of developments in the wider Kupatshar area. Until the early 1920s both animal theft and brigandage had formed an important aspect of the social texture. For example, young males who had not proven their worth by stealing a lamb or goat were unlikely to find a bride. The habitus that informed social relations largely conformed to the values of the ‘brigand society’: personal bravery, virility, besa,3 revenge, family solidarity, and defiance towards central authorities (Damianakos 1995). Yet oral traditions revealed that members of the local society also shared other values, not necessarily compatible with the heroic model of the kleftic tradition: cooperation, reconciliation, flexibility, pragmatism.4 The disappearance of brigandage in the 1930s led to the disintegration of the cultural traditions on which the brigand society was based. Some elements of this tradition survived, especially in those sectors of local society where the ‘brigand connection’ had led to a greater degree of social differentiation and the development of vertical ties. Other aspects of the traditional brigand habitus moved to the background or were superseded by new values. In fact, during the interwar period a number of factors5 contributed to the strengthening of non-conflictual community values and favoured the incorporation of new values, in particular those of agrarian populism. This was, at least, the course of events in the village of Ziakas. In this respect, the developments in the 1940s formed, to a large extent, continuity with the previous decade. The villagers sided en bloc with the left-wing resistance movement of EAM but reinterpreted its message along the lines of their prewar experiences, focusing in particular on the concepts of communal autonomy, equality and direct democracy (Van Boeschoten 1993). On the other hand, the ‘brigand connection’ had also contributed to the formation of a distinct layer of powerful individuals, in local discourse referred to as tsorbatzides, or simply as zorbades.6 The sources of their power can be traced back to Ottoman times: some had played a leading role in the local power structure, intervening with the Turkish authorities on behalf of the community council. Others had engaged in brigand activities or offered protection to persecuted brigands. Most were herdsmen and many were able to increase their livestock numbers through cattle-rustling or through their connections with local brigands. During the so-called Macedonian Struggle (1904–8),7 notorious brigands of the Kupatshar area and their local protectors established connections with the central authorities in Athens. Through this network, most members of the local elite sided with the Royalist faction and the political Right. The influence of these families was limited, compared to the position of wealthy stockowners in the neighbouring Vlach area or that of local tsorbatzides in other parts of Macedonia (Vermeulen 1981, Karakasidou 1997). However, they played a crucial role in the division of

46 • Riki Van Boeschoten local society brought about in the 1940s. In fact, in those villages where former brigands, tsorbatzides or herdsmen had, through their political connections, secured a ‘dominant capacity’, social relations were less egalitarian. Members of the lower and middle strata were tied to this local elite through dependent labour relations, economic paternalism and asymmetrical patron–client bonds. When in 1943 the partisan forces of ELAS brought this area under its control and set up an alternative power structure, this network of hierarchical relations broke down and the local tsorbatzides lost their dominant position. In 1945, however, when ELAS surrendered its arms, they took their chance to re-establish their control, to take revenge for the humiliations suffered during the EAM period and to renew their links with the state apparatus.

The Logic of Violence from the Side of the Opponents of the EAM In the first stage of the Civil War (1945–6) violence in the Greek countryside was localized and one-sided. This period is known in the literature as the period of ‘white terror’. It was exercised against former members of the Resistance by local irregulars who had reasons to resent the rule of EAM during the occupation, were motivated by the desire to loot or simply understood it was time to change sides. These acts of violence were facilitated by the state of relative chaos and the lack of control of the central authorities as well as by a general climate of mutual ‘social fear’ which had been building up since the final months of the occupation. (Close 1993). As violence spiralled to ever-increasing levels, the country gradually slipped into wholesale civil war. To understand the ways in which the logic of violence grabs societies to the point of no return, it seems particularly important to follow the social processes at work at the micro-level and the ways in which such moments are remembered today in a different context. I will first turn my attention to those members of the Kupatshar community who took up arms in 1945 and began to persecute their neighbours who had supported the resistance movement led by EAM. Using both their own accounts and those of their victims, I will try to explain for what reasons they got entangled in the ‘logic of violence’. Consequently, I will examine in detail a particular interview with the descendants of one of the major band leaders, which shows some important features of the memory-structuring process on the side of the opponents of EAM. Then I will move the reader to the other side of the fence and give the floor to the people of Ziakas. The onslaught of violence in the first months of 1945 was the combined result of state policies and social tensions which had been building up since the spring of 1943, when EAM set up local resistance organizations and committees of selfgovernment (known as laokratia or ‘people’s rule’) so that in many villages old local hierarchies were turned upside down. Local tsorbatzides who had established

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 47 their power through the ‘brigand connection’ and/or their links to the central authorities in Athens were moved out of power. In the village of Filippei local power had been in the hands of the powerful Geourgoulas family, wealthy herdsmen who employed many of their co-villagers as dependants. When they returned with their flocks from the winter pastures in May 1943, they were initially surprised that nobody came to meet them, as usual, to enjoy free milk. They soon discovered that their dependants had taken over power. For the next year members of the once powerful Geourgoulas family were continuously harassed by people they considered their inferiors and were often brought to the ‘people’s court’. During the winter of 1944, when they had moved to the winter pastures near Elassona, they were persecuted by local forces of ELAS and went into hiding until ELAS surrendered its arms. In this period, in communist discourse known as the period of ‘revolutionary violence’, in many areas opponents of EAM were arrested, jailed or executed. In the village of Spileo members of the local elite had initially set up a rightwing resistance organization, but their leaders were removed from power by the intervention of a member of the regional communist leadership. Here, too, the local organization of EAM was run in part by people who had no prestige in the village but were members of the Communist Party. In addition, two men were killed in a clash with ELAS. A third man was killed in an ambush, because his brother had allegedly collaborated with the Germans. In the same village Christos Rammos, who had been known as a ‘friend’ of the brigands but later joined the gendarmerie, had been humiliated when he had stolen a mule from Ziakas and had been forced by the local resistance organization to bring it back. His brother had been killed in the clash with ELAS, and he had been unable to take revenge, as the old brigand code demanded. These were some of the factors which had split the local society in two and caused resentment against the rule of EAM. It was from this group that in 1945 the Greek government recruited members of the local elite and appointed them as mayors in their village. The same group, mostly powerful herdsmen and heirs to the ‘brigand society’ and its habitus, formed the first armed bands engaged in violence in the Kupatshar area. In more than one sense the tables were turned once again.

The Interview It proved very difficult to find any survivors of this group, as most of the band leaders had died or moved away from the area. Towards the end of my research I managed to find the children of Stergios Geourgoulas, who together with his brothers Giorgos and Alexis had been one of the most important leaders of the ‘white terror’ period. We arranged an interview in Athens, where they now live as members of the educated urban middle class. The stories I had heard in Ziakas

48 • Riki Van Boeschoten about their father’s conduct had caused me a considerable amount of stress, but I summoned the courage to knock on their front door. Although I had spoken on the phone only to Takis, Geourgoulas’s son, the whole family was expecting me: Takis, the lawyer, and his two sisters. Obviously, they took this opportunity to speak about their father’s memory very seriously. Takis was only five years old at the beginning of the Civil War, but his elder sister Eleni was eighteen and had vivid memories of the period. All of them still belonged to the political Right. What made this interview particularly interesting was the fact that it offered a unique opportunity to find out what kind of memories were transmitted within the family, and this largely compensated for the absence of the father. The interview itself was an unstructured conversation, rather than an organized life story, where dramatic personal accounts were interspersed with political comments, interpretations and old family stories. But from underneath the rather chaotic turn-taking among the siblings, a very clear message emerged. The cohesiveness of this message seemed to confirm one of the essential ideas put forward by Maurice Halbwachs in his Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925: 282): that it is through membership of a social group that individuals are able to localize and construct their memories. As Connerton (1989: 38) has pointed out, Halbwachs never analysed in detail the process through which memory is transmitted from one generation to the next, although he argued that what he called the ‘social framework of memory’ is bound to change from one period to the other (Halbwachs 1925: 278), as memories are updated in terms of the present. This interview showed that, in the case of intense past conflicts with an immediate bearing on the present, such memory frames may be ‘frozen’ and transmitted almost unchanged to the next generation. In fact, the Geourgoulas siblings seemed to reproduce the memory of the social group to which their father belonged, even if they mitigated the verbal violence of that period with irony. For them, too, the memories of the Civil War were a ‘threshold to the present’. In an article on German war memories, oral historian Gabriele Rosenthal (1991) has argued that the narratability of such memories depends on the structure of war experiences, on the biographical necessity of war narration and on the social function of remembering. In the case of this interview, the structure of war experiences only played a role for Eleni, the oldest daughter, as the other children were too young to remember. She focused on a dramatic episode, when the family went into hiding and her father was nearly lynched by a ‘communist crowd’. In this way she presented her family as victims, instead of perpetrators of violence. For all three the biographical necessity to narrate was linked to the fact that the Civil War functioned as a ‘threshold to the present’. For the Geourgoulas family, as for the people of Ziakas, the Civil War was a turning point after which nothing would be as it used to be. Their house was burnt down and their sheep were taken away by the partisans, and the family lost forever its prominent position in the Kupatshar area.

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 49 Whereas the people of Ziakas interpreted the demise of the Geourgoulas family as the result of ‘divine justice’, the narrators attributed it to class hatred nourished by the poorer families of their village. The main purpose of the narration was to rehabilitate the memory of the father and the social status of the family. The narrative strategy employed to this end was to focus on three key notions: kinship, patriotism and class. The opening sentence by Eleni was a clear statement in this sense: Our family was a patriarchal family. We lived all together with respect and … dignity. From our early years we learned what patriotism was and therefore in all struggles we carried Greece in our hearts. Therefore our ancestors came first in all the wars.

Out of patriotism, their father had fought the Italians on the Albanian front, and the family had even supported local communists to set up the first resistance organization. But class, and the power associated with a dominant position, were equally important. According to Takis: In that time the herdsmen had the same position as factory owners and ship-owners today. We were the most important stockowners in Macedonia […] hmm, I mean in the district of Grevena. And among the Kupatshars we were the first.

It was because of this dominant position, that the poorer villagers turned against them and with the help of EAM took over power. They were the ones that hated us from the first moment, the poor ones, who used to work for us. They hated us because we were the Geourgoulas family, the first in the village. And the children used to chant: ‘The hammer and the sickle will do away with Geourgoulas’.

In this small-scale class war the members of the Geourgoulas family had no other means to reassert what they believed to be their social superiority than verbal aggressivity. But when they did so, they were brought to the ‘people’s court’. Alexis Geourgoulas, for example, was brought to justice because, in a moment of drunkenness, he had said, ‘I don’t take orders from below, only from above’. Yet, throughout this period of ‘people’s rule’ no physical violence was exercised against the Geourgoulas family. Punishments inflicted by the people’s court were either fines or ‘public contempt’. In the light of these developments, one could suggest that the main reason why Stergios Geourgoulas undertook violent action in 1945 was to re-establish his power and social prestige and to take revenge for past humiliations. In fact, according to a report on the activities of right-wing bands submitted by the Democratic Army to the United Nations in 1947 (Memorandum 1987), his band

50 • Riki Van Boeschoten first undertook action in his own village and its immediate vicinity. This interpretation was, however, denied by the Geourgoulas siblings – though, admittedly, they grew quite nervous when I confronted them with this information. In their view, Stergios Geourgoulas undertook action only in August 1946, when he received an order from the Greek army to act as shock troopers, ‘partisans against the partisans’. The period of ‘white terror’, before the formation of the Democratic Army, which is documented both by the Memorandum of 1947 and by oral evidence, was passed over in silence. When pressed, they acknowledged that armed bands beat up villagers who had hidden arms, but they denied their father had played an active role in this. At this point in the interview, the narrator, talking about the violence, reproduced the ironic tone of those in power: They may have been beaten up, but not by our father. He had his band which was taking good ‘care’ of them. They knew how to handle them and so they told the truth.

When we discussed these matters, tension rose in the interview. After all, they knew I had done fieldwork in ‘Little Moscow’ and had heard different versions. When I told them about the beating of the responsible (Greek ‘ypefthinos’) of EAM in Perivolaki (Kitsos Laspas, see his account below) and that, upon his return from Poland, he had wished to see their father, they asked aggressively: ‘Why did he want to see him? Did he miss him so much?’, and concluded that if he had been responsible of EAM, certainly he would have been beaten up. Later in the interview, they acknowledged their father’s band had burnt down the village of Ziakas, but on the orders of the Greek army. They also admitted that later in the Civil War these bands were more violent than the regular army. They were ordered to forcefully remove left-wing villagers to urban centres, to prevent them from supporting the partisans. The army could not exercise violence, because there were journalists around and this ungrateful job was taken over by national bands like that of my father. And I must admit that some of these people had quite a rough time.

As these fragments show, the main social function of these narratives seems to be to ‘normalize’ the past of right-wing violence, by linking it, on the one hand, to alleged or real violence and intimidation by the Left in the previous period and, on the other, to ‘orders’ emanating from above. The rather grim tone of these narrations may be a reproduction of stories told within the family, but should also be seen in the context of a political climate in which left-wing historiography had gained the upper hand. On all these points the interview with the Geourgoulas family reproduced the Civil War discourse of the tsorbatzides. At other points, however, and especially in the final section, when I asked about reconciliation, a different discourse appeared.

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 51 Here, as in the narratives with left-wing members of the Kupatshar community, other values emerged: cooperation across the lines, the importance of kinship and local belonging. On many occasions they stressed that they had been saved by communists with whom they had entertained ‘friendship’, and, when asked about the prospects of reconciliation in their own village, they expressed the belief that blood ties are more important than political divisions: Our opponents were our relatives. Our kin group had victims both on the Right and on the Left. Our first cousins belong to the Left. We are every night together. We call them ‘kommounia’8 and they call us ‘fascists’, but we get together. We have forgotten the past. I think blood ties got the upper hand, and after so many years reason, too, has got the upper hand.

And in her final comments, Eleni tried explicitly to overcome past divisions and to unite in one sentence what, in her view, were the central values of life: local belonging, family and patriotism. I want to believe that the Kupatshars are good people, good family men, good patriots; no matter if they split up between Left and Right, they hold Greece in their hearts. In those years, the war had affected us a lot, it had split up our organism so much that I can’t understand how so much hatred had got a hold over people’s minds.

In ‘Little Moscow’: Resisting the Logic of Violence In the previous section we have seen how the logic of violence got hold over some of Ziakas’s neighbours and in what way their descendants have shaped memories of that period in the ethnographic present. It is time now to listen to the voices of those who were at the receiving end of that violence. In the first months after the Liberation people’s minds were set on reconstruction and physical survival. Ziakas had been burnt down by German reprisal actions, marriages had been delayed because of the war, livestock had been lost and production had dropped to a record low. In the district of Grevena, 85 per cent of the local population did not have enough bread to survive even for one day. During this period some of the poorest families left the village in search of work, never to return. And yet during this initial phase people still had some hope for a normal transition towards a better future. This optimism has been overlayed in memory by the painful events that were to follow, but it emerges from certain forward-looking activities (weddings, births, reconstruction of the village). The situation radically changed, however, after the first manifestation of armed violence by regular and irregular troops. In May 1945 the village of Ziakas was for the first time surrounded by armed troops, headed by Christos Rammos, the man

52 • Riki Van Boeschoten who had stolen the mule and now was in charge of the local Gendarmerie. To most people this upsurge of violence came as an utter shock. Memories of this period convey feelings of disenchantment and bitterness over the way former members of EAM were treated by post-war governments. Instead of recognition for their contribution to the liberation effort, they found contempt and persecution. This sense of injustice would mark them for the rest of their lives and partially explains the dominant role of the Civil War in their memory. We reckoned to find some recognition, but all the credit passed to the Security Battalions and the parastate and then they began to hunt us down. Apostolis Boubaris, Ziakas The first time they came here, they came and shot at us with machine-guns. Koliopoulos was there, the Chief Commander of the Gendarmerie. And they did not come by the road to discuss things with us. They did not say, ‘Well, now we have a state, so we will seek to solve our problems peacefully’. Instead they surrounded us with machine-guns and started to shoot. People felt upset; ‘what is going on?,’ they said, ‘we have a state, but what’s the difference between the state and the Germans?’ Beatings, arrests, they behaved just as they liked. Christos Ikonomou, Ziakas

The appearance of violence upset the daily life in the community, without, however, affecting its cohesion. During the night the men went into hiding in the woods and, whenever a detachment appeared, all inhabitants fled to the mountains. Beatings marked the daily experiences of the villagers. But the narrative reconstruction of these events, instead of focusing on the violence itself and on a polarized opposition between victims and perpetrators, concentrates on memories of resistance to the logic of violence. These kinds of memories appear to be highly gendered. They are most often recalled by women and retell events in which women played a leading part. They remember, for example, the day on which a whole group of women burst into the school building, where the soldiers had gathered their men with the intent to beat them up, and by their action were able to stop them. Or they tell the story of an elderly woman who was sitting on a bench in front of her house and was summoned to remove with her tongue the inscription ‘EAM-ELAS-EPON’ painted in red on her wall. Whereupon she stood up and said defiantly: ‘How on earth can I do that? Those letters are written with blood!’ In this account, the encounter between the woman and the army officer ended with a moral victory for the former. To the logic of physical violence and humiliation she opposed another logic, that of human dignity. In other narratives the notion of humanity is extended to include the perpetrators. One woman, for example, claimed that when they were hitting her husband, they stopped after they had wounded him on the head and blood started to flow. She explained this by referring to the concept of humanity: ‘when blood flows, you

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 53 are not allowed to continue beating, it is a human law!’ Obviously, this statement should not be taken at face value. Most victims were covered in blood when the beating stopped and, according to village customs, the best remedy was to wrap the tortured body for two days in the skin of a freshly slaughtered animal, in order to ‘absorb the blood’. This story, with its mythical overtones, conveys a deeper, symbolic meaning. It resembles, in many respects, the story of ‘the good German’ found all over Europe. Alessandro Portelli has sought the meaning of this myth in an attempt ‘to confirm our faith in the remnant of humanity that survives even in the most cruel torturers, or highlight through the humanity of one the inhumanity of all’ (Portelli 1997b: 154). In the case we are discussing here, the fact that the woman referred to a general ‘human law’ and not to the act of one isolated individual, makes the first interpretation seem more plausible. In both cases, however, the question of whether the act of humanity really happened is irrelevant; what counts is the need to believe in it. As Portelli wrote about Civitella, a Tuscan martyr village, in which 150 villagers where executed by the Germans (see Cappelletto’s chapter in this volume): that these images have a factual foundation does not detract from their mythical status: in fact, the main myth-making process at work in the memory of Civitella seems to be less downright invention than the amplification of the meaning of individual events. What really counts is not so much whether the good Germans existed and gave candy, but the deep-rooted need, even in their victims or enemies, to believe in their existence. ‘What shall we do without these images?’ (Portelli 1997b: 155)

Reconstructing Memories of Local Violence and Cooperation In spite of the fact that human losses were limited compared to the later period of total war, this first period of the Civil War was perhaps the most painful. Whereas the battles which were to follow took place ‘on neutral ground’, opposing impersonal soldiers to impersonal partisans, ‘bandits’ to ‘monarchofascists’ (in the terminology of the time), here the conflict was fought out on familiar territory, between individuals who knew each other well and were linked by bonds of proximity. The violence perpetrated by fellow Kupatshars violated all traditional rules of reciprocity and undermined the sense of local belonging. It is exactly this factor which reveals the full extent of the tragedy implied in any situation of civil war, as in Rwanda and Bosnia. To illustrate this aspect I will analyse a fragment which refers to the incursion of a local right-wing band into the hamlet of Perivolaki. We have already met some of the protagonists of this story: one of the armed men involved was Stergios Geourgoulas and the main victim of the violence was Kitsos Laspas, former ‘responsible’ of EAM, the man who, upon his return from Poland,

54 • Riki Van Boeschoten had tried to meet his former enemy. This then was how he remembered, in his nineties, the way in which he was handled with ‘care’ by the men led by Geourgoulas. They came down to the village at night, they came to me, they called and I came out to meet them. ‘Who was responsible here during EAM’s rule?’ ‘I was.’And they started to beat me, they beat me a lot and I nearly died. There was a Cretan officer, they beat me and then they took me to the house, they lifted me up and took me inside. There came this officer, the Cretan bloke. He says, ‘Why, I hear you are a good guy, you shouldn’t have been beaten up.’ I say, ‘That’s it, I am a good guy, that’s why they have beaten me. But they didn’t hurt me, those people from Old Greece and Agrafa, they didn’t hurt me as much as my co-villager Geourgoulas,’ I said. Geourgoulas was there, too. Because they were the ones that directed the whole operation, no matter if the other one, the Cretan, was an officer. They did whatever they liked. And for good luck two doctors came, to look after me, one of them was from Spileo … And I was young and tough and I survived. And the doctors that came, they were right-wingers, but no tough fascists. We were on good terms of old. Kitsos Laspas, Perivolaki

Kitsos Laspas was a relatively well-off peasant. Before the war he used to bring rare goods to the village and to grant loans without interest to people who were short of money. In this way he had built up a wide network of personal connections in the whole area. He was a mild man, who with his humour and popular wisdom had particular skills in easing tensions. For all these reasons he was widely respected in the village. In the 1930s he had been elected president of the village and a member of the school committee. Through the Resistance he held the office of ‘responsible’ of EAM. His narrative is centred on the concept of local belonging. It presents five central actors: the strangers (the Cretan and the people from Old Greece)9 and the locals (Laspas himself, the rightist gang-leader Geourgoulas and the doctors). The main message is conveyed by the sentence ‘those people from Old Greece … didn’t hurt me as much as my co-villager Geourgoulas’ (emphasis added). This expression should not be taken too literally: its main function is a symbolic one. The narrator does not intend to say that Geourgoulas hit him harder than the others. He is in fact hinting at the moral pain he felt because Geourgoulas violated the unwritten code of behaviour which demanded solidarity between people of the same locality. Therefore he calls Geourgoulas his ‘co-villager’, even if he came from the neighbouring village of Filippei. We could expand this reasoning also to the dialogue between Laspas and the Cretan officer. The focus here is on the term ‘good guy’, which in turn acquires a symbolic dimension. In the particular context, this term has a certain ambiguity: for the Cretan officer it may imply that Laspas had not harmed his opponents in practice, for Laspas it refers to his role in the village during the inter-war period

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 55 and the resistance period,10 which conformed to the pre-war habitus of the Kupatshar area. Therefore when he says, ‘I am a good guy, that’s why they have beaten me’, he blames indirectly the logic of civil war which breaks down traditional practices and values. He thus concludes his story with the right-wing doctors, ‘co-villagers’ like Geourgoulas, but who ignored that logic and came to help in spite of their opposite political views, confirming in this way the moral standards of traditional society. The example of the doctors was not an isolated phenomenon. The oral evidence shows many similar examples of solidarity across the lines. The normative principle on which these practices were based was the principle of reciprocity. As noted earlier, granting favours, aid or cooperation implied a recognition of debt at the receiver’s end, a debt which could only be repaid by a counter-presentation. The split in the local society undermined these traditional practices, but it did not destroy them altogether. Personal relations were put under great strain and the time had come to pay off old debts, both those inherited from the pre-war period and those contracted during the Resistance. Obviously, repayment could also take a negative form (revenge), but here we want to focus on its positive form. In fact, the particular place reserved in local narratives to cooperation instead of division enables us to reconsider the memory of the Civil War in a different light, compared to the global image handed down by the historiography of the Cold War period. Taking into account that this aspect emerged even in right-wing memories (the Geourgoulas siblings repeatedly stressed that their father had often been saved by local communist friends), it seems to belong to a shared local memory. Solidarity between political opponents took multiple forms: timely warnings about imminent arrest or deportation, intervention with the authorities to obtain a prisoner’s release, giving witness on behalf of the defendant in court or to the police, exempting somebody from collective beatings, hiding somebody else’s belongings, protecting somebody from persecution. At a later stage, when the mountainous zone under partisan control was blocked off from the town of Grevena, favours included delivering foodstuffs or intervention on behalf of those who ventured into town, to help them pass the blockades. All cooperation networks of the pre-war period were mobilized: the network of real or spiritual kinship, the animal theft network, the network of hospitality and that of exchange of rare goods. During the Resistance these traditional patterns of mutual aid had been incorporated into a new context and changed character under the impact of the new power structure developed by EAM/ELAS. They were expanded to include individuals who were not previously linked by bonds of kinship, cooperation or friendship. In fact, the actions of solidarity by ‘right-wingers’ to ‘leftists’ during the Civil War were to a large extent a ‘repayment of debt’ contracted when EAM was in power. Individuals belonging to EAM had saved people in their area from hunger, beatings or execution by intervening in their favour in the partisan court or in the

56 • Riki Van Boeschoten court-martial of ELAS. They had granted hospitality to merchants from Grevena and hidden their merchandise in the woods, in order to save them from German reprisal drives. Finally, they had used their position in the new power structure to help friends solve their economic problems. Now that the ‘tables were turned’, the time of repayment had come. The oral narratives from Ziakas clearly show with what care people kept track of these open accounts: when a narrator tells how he was saved by somebody of the opposite camp, he will never fail to explain the logic behind the favour done to him. Because the respect of this rule was considered so important, its violation raised public outcry. And yet, in spite of the indignation it roused, such ‘ingratitude’ did not lead to personal revenge: retribution was left to ‘divine justice’. According to this traditional belief, people who did not pay back their moral debts or transgressed in general the limits of socially accepted standards of behaviour would later be struck by God’s curse and lose what were considered the most precious goods: lineage, property or prestige.

Beyond Structure: Civil War Violence and ‘Communitas’ The actions of mutual support between opponents retold in the ethnographic present do have not only a material but also a symbolic dimension. On a more immediate level they are presented as a way of resisting the logic of civil war, counter-balancing the cleavages it brought about with the operation of cooperation networks beyond ideological connotations. On a more theoretical level they refer to the interaction between structure and social actors. At this point it is useful to bear in mind the seminal work of social anthropologist Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (1969). This book deals with rites of passage in traditional societies, but also widens its focus to include broader social phenomena, such as millenarian movements, monastic orders and the hippy movement of the 1960s. The most important moment of rites of passage is the intermediate phase between separation and aggregation, when the community enters a situation of liminality, in which the social structure is temporarily suspended, together with the position assigned to each individual inside this structure. During this liminal period, a ‘moment in and out of time’, society becomes unstructured and the only authority to which all passengers have to submit is the total community (Turner 1969: 95–103). According to Turner, there are certain moments in history which are similar to the liminal periods of important rituals, when major social groups are ‘passing from one cultural state to another’ (Turner 1969: 111). At such moments a phenomenon which Turner called ‘communitas’ emerges, breaking in through the interstices of structure. He defined communitas as a ‘relationship between concrete, historical and idiosyncratic individuals’ and as a model of society intended as a ‘homogeneous, unstructured communitas, whose boundaries are ideally coterminous with those of the human species’ (Turner 1969: 131).

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 57 Although the events which marked the first period of the Civil War cannot be reduced to this model, there are certain similarities which can help improve our understanding of people’s reactions. To some extent, we can see the emergence of ‘liminality’ as defined by Turner. This happened when the social order which had taken shape under the rule of EAM broke down, and with it came about the reversal of social hierarchies. At the same time, the social structure prevailing before the war was suspended: in villages, like Ziakas, which were united in their support for EAM, and where the nikokirei (better-off peasants) played a leading role in the Resistance, the position of each individual in the pre-war social structure had lost its significance, because the ‘white terror’ struck all indiscriminately. In other villages local leaders who had lost their dominant position during the war aimed at restoring the pre-war social order. Yet, given the fluidity of the situation, the result of this operation was far from certain. Admittedly, those who intervened on behalf of their friends or relatives, supporters of EAM, often drew their mediating capacity from the position they held in the new power structure which was being set up after 1945: the cooperation networks described earlier did not operate only between common villagers, but also involved leaders of right-wing bands and local authorities (mayors, local police officers). Their mediating actions relate to an underlying principle above and beyond the structure. Through the interstices of structure emerged something which does not correspond exactly to the concept of ‘communitas’, but which can nonetheless be described as a ‘relationship between concrete, historical and idiosyncratic individuals’, who, under the pressure of external events, were redrawing the mental map of social bonds. In this sense the social structure does not appear in the memory as a static phenomenon, but as a dynamic process: it defines not only the position of each individual in the community, but also its cultural practices. If we take into account this dimension, we can no longer speak of a total breakdown or suspension of the social structure: the mediating networks which operated during the Civil War go back to deeply rooted practices which were part of that social structure. The oral testimonies convey the impression that many individuals operated as if there was something more essential and more permanent than the logic of division: the logic of local belonging, cohesion, bonds of kinship, reciprocity, human solidarity. Whether this memory reflected actual practice or a mythical representation of the past is irrelevant. What seems more important is the social meaning conveyed by this memory. Reconstructing a divided past through the prism of local belonging and solidarity confirmed the belief that this logic prevented situations of total disintegration of the social texture and opened a pathway for reconciliation. With its emphasis on local belonging, this version of ‘communitas’ clearly also presented a model of society, although not in the universal sense intended by Turner.

58 • Riki Van Boeschoten

Keeping the Balance: Civil War Violence and Internal Cohesion The memories of the people of Ziakas, however, draw a clear line between their own village and its neighbours. In their accounts, practices of solidarity within the wider Kupatshar area are remembered as marginal phenomena, little breaches into the dominant logic of division. In Ziakas, on the contrary, internal cohesion was so strong that it was able to supersede any divisive tendencies. In their view, it was this factor which set Ziakas apart from all other villages in its direct neighbourhood. To justify this claim, they mobilized memories of the past in which they had always ‘flocked together, just as our sheep’. Although some of this may represent a rather mythical version of the past, the ethnographic evidence suggests some factual foundation for this image of a ‘united village’. In fact, most of the factors which led to division elsewhere were hardly present in Ziakas or altogether lacking. Its social structure was more egalitarian, there were no relations of dependency, people with prestige were not passed over but on the contrary played an active role in the structures of EAM, and no ‘revolutionary violence’ was exercised by ELAS. Equally important was the community’s habitus: the flexibility in social relations, with a focus on cooperation and reconciliation, contributed to the fertile incorporation of the message brought by EAM and helped to broaden and transform the ideas of agrarian populism inherited from the pre-war period. As could be expected in a period of strong external pressures, some cracks developed in this cohesion. First of all, some individuals passed over to the opposite camp. Most of them left the village and settled in the town of Grevena, without, however, taking up armed action against their fellow villagers. Secondly, some people wavered. In a different context they might have chosen to change sides, but they did not, in order to avoid conflicts with their fellow villagers. These two groups together formed only a tiny minority of the community (not more than fifty individuals). The others remained faithful to the EAM camp, even if their initial enthusiasm had received a serious blow. Although cohesion, unity and the avoidance of violence, hatred and personal revenge were deeply rooted in cultural traditions, they were not self-evident. In the narrative reconstruction of events within the village, threats to the internal cohesion are not suppressed from memory, but on the contrary are openly discussed. These memories convey the feeling that the boundaries between unity and division were very subtle indeed, and a little spark was enough to set ablaze the smouldering fire of violence. There were many pressures, both from inside and outside the community, which undermined cohesion and threatened the very survival of the community. For the first time suspicion made its appearance in interpersonal relationships and the danger of ‘treason’ was a tangible factor to contend with. Moreover, possible ‘suspects’ were in real danger of being punished by the first

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 59 partisan groups, which also pushed for a more dynamic confrontation with the enemy. This subtle balance had to be renegotiated day by day in order to be preserved. Thus in the village of Ziakas cohesion was not only a static attitude inherited from the past, but also a dynamic process in which the role of specific actors was often of crucial importance. The invention of cohesion, as a daily process, aimed at the construction of communitas: what mattered was ‘the village’, the fate of its inhabitants as a whole, not the personal interest of each individual. I will give a few examples to illustrate this process. One of its aspects was the way the ‘double-minded’ were dealt with. Instead of isolating them or betraying them to the partisans, their fellow villagers just ‘recommended’ the best course of action. These recommendations were usually voiced in symbolic language. They were told, for example, not to ‘have two feet in one shoe’, or that ‘one cannot carry two watermelons under one arm’. In the rare cases of betrayal between villagers, the person in charge would take timely measures to prevent the village from suffering the consequences. In one instance, for example, Kitsos Laspas, the man who was beaten up by the Geourgoulas band, was able to defuse the threat caused by such a betrayal by offering his best ouzo to the police officer who came to enquire. Once a sergeant of the Gendarmerie came, from the information office. We kept him with us that night, he was stationed in Polineri. ‘Bring us some ouzo,’ I said to the women, I had my own home-made ouzo. He drank and got drunk. He said, ‘In Ziakas,’ he says, ‘such-and-such has got a weapon.’ ‘Oh, that one?’ I said. ‘He doesn’t even know how to open it!’ (Others had betrayed him, because they were quarrelling about property.) The next morning, when he was sober again, he left. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but don’t tell anybody of our discussion.’ That is to say, he didn’t want me to tell people in Ziakas that they know about the arms and many things more. He left for Polineri, and I headed towards Ziakas …’. Kitsos Laspas, Perivolaki

With the same aim, ‘to save the village’, people in charge, or simply individuals with prestige, prevented the partisans from taking up premature armed action. In this way the Geourgoulas brothers made a narrow escape from an ambush laid for them by the partisans. One day the Geourgoulas brothers were coming from Ziakas in the direction of our village. And about halfway, where the fir-trees are, the partisans laid an ambush for them. They had them at gunpoint, with the intention of letting none of them escape alive. And then my father went up to them and told them: ‘If you kill the Geourgoulas brothers, the next day our village is doomed, they will kill us all,’ he said. And finally, they did not kill them. Tilemachos Katsanikos, Perivolaki

These examples show that for the people of Ziakas the concept of ‘communitas’ had both a mental dimension (cohesion) and a material one (the integrity of the

60 • Riki Van Boeschoten totality of its inhabitants). In the end, however, all attempts to contain the violence failed, and most villagers ended up fighting on Mount Grammos or, eventually, in Eastern Europe. But after their return from the long years of exile, these memories acquired a new meaning, as they set out once again to reconstruct their community.

Conclusions In this chapter I have examined patterns of local memory regarding the civil war violence within the Kupatshar area. For the people who had lived there for generations, the Civil War marked the end of an epoch. Today, as they are looking into the mirror of their past, they are delving into their memories in search of patches of meaning that might help them reconstruct their lives and build a future for the next generation. These patterns of memory have revealed some important aspects of the memory-structuring process which might improve our understanding of the social role of memory in the present, at the micro-level of local communities. A first important point that has emerged is the multivocality of local memories,11 in contrast to the homogeneous view of the past transmitted by ‘national memory’. We have also seen that, in order to understand and explain this intra-cultural variation, expressed by various group memories, we cannot limit ourselves to events of the Civil War itself, but we have to go back further. Social structure, cultural practices and political processes all played their part in bringing about a fragmentation of local society and, consequently, of their memories, thus preparing the ground for the events in the 1940s. On the other hand, in spite of the fact that divided memories exist until the present day (as in the conflicting accounts of the beating of Kitsos Laspas), former opponents are also seeking common ground, by focusing on local belonging and practices of cooperation across the lines, thus opening a social space for a reconciliation from below. A second point concerns the question of narratability. In contrast to public history, which – at least until the mid-1990s-imposed ‘reconciliation from above’ by celebrating a ‘National Resistance’ and crossing out the Civil War, local memories focus on the more conflictive aspects of the Civil War. We have argued that the main reason why this happened is because the Civil War continues to operate, for all social actors, as a ‘threshold to the present’, as an interpretative turning point, i.e. a ‘biographical turning point which led to a reinterpretation of the past, the present and the future’ (Rosenthal 1995: 143). Apparently, in the view of the Kupatshars, until they pass this threshold and put their traumatic memories at rest, no future is possible.

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 61

Abbreviations EAM ELAS EPON PASOK

Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo (National Liberation Front) Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos (National People’s Liberation (Army) Eniaia Panelladiki Organosi Neon (United Panhellenic Organization of (Youth) Panellinio Sosialistiko Kinima (Greek Socialist Movement)

Notes 1. Fieldwork was carried out intermittently between 1987 and 1996. During this period I collected eighty interviews with all age groups, male and female, both in Ziakas and in neighbouring villages. The results are published in Greek (Van Boeschoten 1997). 2. The Kupatshars were Hellenized Vlachs. The term is probably derived from the Vlach word ‘koupatsou’ (meaning ‘shrub’). By labelling their neighbours Kupatshar, Vlach pastoralists living higher up in the mountains expressed their contempt for people living on lower altitudes and engaged in agriculture. 3. Albanian term (lit. ‘oath’) meaning trustworthiness, straightforwardness. 4. The ‘kleftic tradition’ refers to the practices, values and lifestyle of the ‘kleftes’, the Greek version of Balkan outlawry during the period of Ottoman domination. 5. These factors include the restriction of winter pastures as a result of the land reform, the growing influence of the market, the breakdown of traditional safety valves (brigandage, emigration, seasonal labour), state intervention in village affairs and, finally, the economic crisis of 1929. 6. Derived from the Turkish word zor (violence). Both tsorbatzides and zorbades are described as people who imposed their will arbitrarily, including the use of violence or the threat of violence 7. Armed struggle between Greek and Bulgarian irregular bands over the control of Macedonian territory. 8. Derogatory term for communists, widely used during the Civil War and its aftermath. 9. The term ‘Old Greece’ refers to the territory of the Greek state before 1913, when the so-called ‘New Lands’, including Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace, were incorporated. 10. This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the narrative about the beating, which happened in 1946, springs from another narrative about the role of Laspas in the school committee in 1936. In oral witnesses this ‘telescoping’ of two separate events into one often reveals an underlying message (cf. Thompson 2000: 159).

62 • Riki Van Boeschoten 11. In this chapter I have mainly focused on the variation between the memories of the people of Ziakas and those of their opponents. In Ziakas itself the diversity of post-war experiences produced three different branches of local memory, which by the late 1980s had started to blend. I have described this process in Van Boeschoten 2000: 137–40.

References Boissevain, J. (1966), ‘Patronage in Sicily’, Man, 1: 18–33. Campbell, J.K. (1964), Honour, Family and Patronage. A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carabott, Ph. and Th. Sfikas (eds) (2004), The Greek Civil War. Essays on a Conflict of Exceptionalism and Silences, Ashgate: Aldershot. Close, D. (ed.) (1993), The Greek Civil War, 1943–1950. Studies of Polarization, London: Routledge. Connerton, P. (1989), How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Damianakos, St. (1995), ‘Du clephte des montagnes au rébète des villes, dissidence sociale et continuité des illégalismes populaires en Grèce, XVIIIe-première moitié du XXe siècle’, in Banditisme et violence sociale dans les sociétés de l’Europe méditeranéenne, Université de Provence–Etudes Corses, 121–38. Guillon, J.-M. and P. Laborie (1995), Mémoire et histoire: la Résistance, Toulouse: Privat. Guillon, J.-M. and R. Mencherini (1999), La Résistance et les Européens du Sud, Paris: L’Harmattan. Halbwachs, M. (1925), Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris: Alcan. Karakasidou, A. (1997), Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood. Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Marantzidis, N. (1997), Oi mikres Mosches. Politiki kai eklogiki analysi tis parousias tou kommounismou ston elladiko agrotiko choro. [Little Moscows. Political and Electoral Analysis of Communist Presence in Rural Greece], Athens: Papazisis. —— and G. Andoniou (2004), ‘The axis occupation and civil war: changing trends in Greek historiography, 1941–2002’, Journal of Peace Research, 41(2): 223–31. Mauss, M. (1923–24), ‘Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés arcaiques’, in M. Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: PUF (The Gift). Mazower, M. (1995), ‘The Cold War and the appropriation of memory: Greece after liberation’, East European Politics and Societies, 9(2): 272–94.

‘Little Moscow’ and the Greek Civil War • 63 —— (ed.) (2000), After the War Was Over. Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Memorandum (1987), Etsi archise o emfylios polemos. I tromokratia meta ti Varkiza 1945–1947. To ypomnima tou DSE ston OHE ton Martio tou 1947. [That Is How the Civil War Started. Terror after the Varkiza Agreement 1945–1947. The Memorandum of the Democratic Army of Greece to the United Nations in March 1947], Athens: Glaros. Pavone, C. (1992), Una guerra civile. Saggio sulla moralità nella Resistenza, Milan: Bollati Boringhieri. Portelli, A. (1997a), ‘The battle of Poggio Bustone: violence, memory and imagination in the partisan war’, in A. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press: 126–39. —— (1997b), ‘The massacre at Civitella Val di Chiana (Tuscany June 29, 1944): myth and politics, mourning and common sense’, in A. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press: 140–60. Rosenthal, G. (1991), ‘German war memories: narrability and the biographical and social functioning of remembering’, Oral History, 19(2): 34–40. —— (1995), Erlebte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte. Gestalt und Struktur biographischer Selbstbeschreibungen, Frankfurt/Main and New York: Campus. Thompson, P. (2000), The Voice of the Past. Oral History (third revised edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, V. (1969), The Ritual Process. Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Van Boeschoten, R. (1993), ‘The peasant and the party: peasant options and folk communism in a Greek village’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 20(4): 612–39. —— (1997), Anapoda chronia, sillogiki mnimi kai istoria sto Ziaka Grevenon (1900–1950) [Troubled Years. Collective Memory and History in the Village of Ziakas, Grevena (1900–1950)], Athens: Plethron. —— (2000), ‘The impossible return: coping with separation and the reconstruction of memory in the wake of the Civil War’, in M. Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over. Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vansina, J. (1985), Oral Tradition as History, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. Vermeulen, H. (1981), ‘Conflict and peasant protest in the history of a Macedonian village, 1900–1936’, Epitheorisi Koinonikon Erevnon, special issue (Aspects du changement social dans la campagne grecque), 93–103.

–3– Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre A Basque Controversy Sandra Ott

With its roots in a genre that combines theatre, history and oral tradition, a popular play about resistance to the German occupation of one French Basque province, Xiberoa, provides an unusual opportunity to explore ‘the interplay between autobiographical memory and group remembrance’ (Cappelletto 2003 and in this volume).1 An overview of the structure, format and cultural significance of Xiberoan popular theatre is given in the first part. In the second, an outline of the historical background to the play, The Maquis of Xiberoa (Davant 2001), is given, covering key events at national, regional and local levels relevant to understanding the many ‘stories’ upon which the play is based. Public reaction to the ‘delicate subject’ of the Resistance in Xiberoa is then linked to four main interpretative approaches to Basque popular theatre: as artistic performance, as commemoration, as an historical representation of the past, and as a culturally unifying form of social interaction. Individual and group memories, like the ‘official’ versions of events written and rewritten by the resisters themselves, are integral to the multiple and often conflicting ‘histories’ of resistance in a French Basque province that has long been culturally proud and distinctive. These ‘histories’ were reopened by the play and re-examined by many local Basques. As a consequence, the performance of the play, in the summer of 2001, caused some friction and controversy in Xiberoa.

Basque Popular Theatre Like the process of remembering itself, Xiberoan Basque popular theatre creatively constructs a representation of the past. The genre is often said to be ‘seventy-five per cent legend and twenty-five per cent history’ (Davant 2001: 18). It probably has its origins in the medieval mystery plays and uses verse, music and dance to tell a story about the struggle between Good and Evil (Veyrin 1975: 65

66 • Sandra Ott 287).2 All plays are written in Basque, in verses of four lines each, with assonant rhyme used in even-numbered lines (Aulestia 2000: 45). Never recited, the dialogue is sung in a highly stylized, monotonous chant. Until the nineteenth century, the genre drew its themes from the Old and New Testaments, hagiography, chansons de geste, French and Basque history and legend (Hérelle 1926: 7–9). More recently, Xiberoan popular theatre has focused on Basque history and Basque heroes. When a community decides to perform a pastorala, an organizing committee is formed, and they appoint a ‘teacher’ who helps them choose a topic. Making a pastorala is a process that normally begins one year before the actual performance. The ‘teacher’ studies the text closely, recruits the actors, assigns their parts, and directs them in fifteen to twenty lengthy rehearsals. All actors and musicians are amateurs and almost always local. The number of roles ranges from twenty to seventy-five or more. Deciding to take part in a pastorala is a serious commitment, a source of collective pride for the group and their community. It requires dedication, a good voice, a good memory and at least some fluency in Basque. The classic structure of the pastorala pits the ‘Good Ones’ (the protagonists, the Christians) against the ‘Bad Ones’ (the antagonists, the Turks), with goodness prevailing over evil. The bipolarization of the stage reflects the opposition of Good and Evil, with the Good always using the door to their right, whereas their enemies go to the left. The Bad Ones are aided by Satan and his devil-servants, who tempt the Good Ones and promote discord and evil. Satan’s dancers are beautifully costumed, and their movements are elegant. By contrast, the devil-servants are buffoons who amuse the crowd with grotesque commentaries. Basque popular theatre is by and for the people who perform and watch it. The day begins with a parade through the host community of all the actors and organizers, as well as the flock of sheep that inevitably appears on stage, at some point, with its shepherds. Basque flutes and drums play, bells tinkle. At midday actors, organizers and members of the public mingle to eat and to drink. The performance starts either in mid-afternoon or early evening; it is always an impressive, colourful spectacle, lasting three to five hours without intermission. Traditionally unique to Xiberoa, these popular plays are usually watched by some three thousand (mainly Xiberoan) people, who follow the performance both attentively and critically. The audience often applauds the Good Ones, insults and boos the Bad Ones, laughs and jeers at the devils. In a successful pastorala, the audience and actors ‘feel that they are one big Xiberoan family’ (Idiart 1987: 119). The actors perform in a highly stylized manner, with largely expressionless faces. Both actors and dancers hold their bodies rigidly. The genre does not permit much individual interpretation of roles, and, key to understanding the controversy over The Maquis of Xiberoa, the characters are usually fictional or represent famous figures in the Basque Country’s medieval or modern history. Characters

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 67 are not normally ‘still alive’. If they were ever ‘real people’, their actions and experiences are not usually remembered by the local people. There is always at least one battle in which movements are highly regulated. The Good and Bad Ones line up on their respective sides of the stage, then advance, one against another, striking their staffs in unison. When Good triumphs over Evil, the Good hero recounts the main events of the ‘story’ or ‘history’ that formed the subject of the play. He thanks the audience for having been so numerous, for their attentiveness during the performance, and wishes them a ‘good meal, a good night, and a safe journey home’. In July 2001, in the Xiberoan community of Sohüta, some seventy locals twice performed The Maquis of Xiberoa.3 The organizing committee and town’s mayor chose the topic, because a maquis (resistance group) had been based in their community and its first leader was the mayor’s father, Pierre Béguerie. A local scholar, Jean-Louis Davant, had already written a draft of the play. He, too, had personal reasons for wanting to write about the Resistance in his natal province. Davant was nine years old when he saw his first maquisard, a nineteen-year-old agricultural worker who emerged from the woods near Davant’s home. The playwright still has vivid memories of the young Basque resister, dressed in khaki, a machine gun at his side. ‘For me, as a child, he was like Robin Hood!’4 The now elderly Basque resister who so surprised the young Davant in 1943 jokes that his sudden appearance that day inspired the playwright to tell the tale of Xiberoan resistance.

Stories and Histories in the Background In June 1940, when France signed the armistice with Germany, the southern, socalled Free Zone was separated from the Occupied Zone, which included all of France’s Atlantic and Channel coasts and most of the French Basque Country. The line of demarcation extended from the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva to the French Basque border with Spanish Basque Navarre to the south. The Free (Unoccupied) Zone lay to the east, including the Basque province of Xiberoa and Béarn.5 In the early days of Vichy, Basque support for Pétain was often guided by national veneration of the hero of Verdun (Jacob 1994: 106–7). During the 1930s and 1940s, Basque society was largely rural, conservative, staunchly Catholic and deeply attached to Basque ‘traditions’, many of which focused on the local religion, the importance of the family and work. In 1940 Pétain espoused values they understood. Basque Pétainism was embodied in the twenty-six-year political career of the Marshal’s first Minister of Youth, the Family and Sport, Jean Ybarnégaray. He himself was a prominent sportsman, militant in right-wing politics and a member of the Basque bourgeoisie (Paxton 2001: 162). Ybarnégaray was an ardent

68 • Sandra Ott supporter of Franco during the Spanish Civil War. As Minister of Youth in 1940, he sought to rid the educational system of teachers who were freemasons, Jews or communists (Paxton 2001: 156). Ybarnégaray’s anti-communist sentiment grew with the rising number of Spanish Republicans exiled in the French Basque Country, especially from January 1939 after Franco’s Nationalist victory in Catalonia. In an attempt to cope with some 500,000 Spanish refugees, the French government established ‘welcome centres’ for such ‘undesirables who required close surveillance’ (Laharie 1993: 22). As the deputy of the constituency that included Mauléon, Ybarnégaray was not keen to accommodate Spanish ‘reds’, whom he deemed to be a threat to French Basque social order (Laharie 1993: 24). None of the communities on the Xiberoan/Béarnais border wanted the Spanish exiles on their territory; but it was finally decreed that the camp would be located in Gurs, a few kilometres from the Xiberoan village of l’Hôpital-Saint-Blaise. In 1943 a Basque-Béarnais maquis based itself in l’Hôpital-Saint-Blaise. Gurs was a valuable source of weapons and enemy intelligence for the Resistance. By October 1940 most of the Spanish Republicans had been released from Gurs.6 Some joined the already established Spanish/Spanish Basque communities in Mauléon, the capital and industrial centre of the province, or sought work in the lumber and mining operations in the mountains. The Germans occupied Xiberoa in November 1942 and established garrisons in Mauléon and the nearby town of Tardets, which served as a base for SS-controlled security guards and their outposts along the southern border of the province bordering Spanish Basque Navarre. Assisted by French police and local informers, the Germans sought information about the intelligence and evasion networks that operated across neighbouring French and Spanish Basque territories. With the help of many ordinary citizens, as well as intelligence networks, organized resistance groups and the Basque clergy, several thousand Jewish refugees and other ‘undesirables’ made their way across the Basque Pyrenees in the early 1940s. Similar journeys were made by Allied pilots, spies and the numerous young French and Basque men who evaded Vichy’s compulsory work service in Germany (STO, Service de Travail Obligatoire) or arrest for other reasons.7 Two rival resistance movements operated in Xiberoa: Sector IV of the Secret Army (Armée Secrète) and a company of the CFP (Corps Franc Pommiès), which represented the ORA (Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée) in southwestern France. The Secret Army supported de Gaulle, whereas the CFP initially backed his political rival, General Giraud.8 In the spring of 1944 the local maquis of these two resistance movements were led by Xiberoan Basques well known to each other and to the community. When the local CFP leadership was assigned to a French officer, relations between the two movements became increasingly strained. The

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 69 acrimony between them still gives rise to tensions and disagreements among some veterans and their families about events leading up to the liberation of Xiberoa in August 1944. This in turn affected the way in which many local Basques read, watched and discussed the popular play performed in 2001, The Maquis of Xiberoa. The Secret Army was set up nationally as a united military resistance movement (Sweets 1976: 37). Its military role was to prepare for the Allies’ landing and de Gaulle’s day of ‘national insurrection’ intended to liberate France for the French. In Xiberoa the Secret Army was local in origin (Davant 2001: 169). It consisted of mainly civilian volunteers and some reserve officers strongly opposed to Vichy and firmly behind de Gaulle. Its maquis operated from Mauléon, from the rural hamlets of Larceveau and Larrebieu, and from the mountainous zones of Arbailles and Haute-Soule. By the end of 1942 dispersed groups of Secret Army resisters had formed in the mountains. Organization and communication improved locally with the merging of resistance movements across France in January 1943. This led to the formation of both a civil, administrative sector in the department of the Basses-Pyrénées (including Xiberoa) and a military one, which was the Secret Army (Poullenot 1995: 176). The head of the civil sector contacted a Mauléon Basque, Jean-Pierre Hégoburu, to set up an escape network across the Pyrenees. A socialist and factory worker, he soon became the widely respected head of the Secret Army maquis in Mauléon, to which he recruited some 300 local people. In May 1944 the departmental chief of the Secret Army asked another Xiberoan Basque, Clément de Jauréguiberry, to take charge of Sector IV, which covered all of Xiberoa and included disparate Béarnais maquis groups formed by exiled Spanish Republicans (Poullenot 1995: 188). Educated, passionate about the Basque language and of sober disposition, de Jauréguiberry was highly disciplined. A decorated veteran of the First World War, he served in the artillery in 1939–40. When the ‘phoney war’ ended, he became the director of a sandal factory in Mauléon. As head of Sector IV, de Jauréguiberry worked closely with Hégoburu. As a committed Gaullist and proud Xiberoan, Clément de Jauréguiberry was zealous in his efforts to uphold the ‘purely military role of the Secret Army in maintaining order without political action’ (de Jauréguiberry 1950). Its goal was to defeat the German occupiers, while at the same time ensuring the safety of civilians, refraining from armed conflict in or near any Basque community or isolated farmhouses, and thus avoiding circumstances that might lead to reprisals against them. For him and his resistance group, the term ‘civilians’ meant ‘the families and friends’ of Xiberoan members of the Secret Army (de Jauréguiberry 1950). From the summer of 1944 de Jauréguiberry headed de Gaulle’s French Forces of the Interior (FFI) in Xiberoa. The FFI had jurisdiction over the Secret Army and

70 • Sandra Ott the other, smaller resistance movements, some of which favoured immediate direct action against the Germans, wherever they happened to be. Among these were Spanish and Spanish Basque partisans from the communist FTP (Francs Tireurs Partisans), the International Brigades, and from the Spanish Guerilleros. In 1939 many of them had been interned in ‘welcome camps’ such as Gurs. Although few in number, the partisans were often at odds with the Gaullist directives that de Jauréguiberry sought to enforce and were opposed to the right-wing political associations of the rival resistance movement’s leadership in the CFP. A more substantial number of communists, radical and moderate socialists in the Xiberoan-based Secret Army were local people, many of them from Mauléon, where the sandal factories had long employed migrant labourers from Navarre and Aragon in Spain. In 1942 some Mauléon communists came under the close scrutiny of the Vichy and German authorities when clandestine publications such as Alianza, Reconquista de Espana and Mundo Obrero were found, and arrests were made (Dreyfus-Armand 1999: 150). Owing to the presence of both local and ‘foreign’ communists and radical socialists in its ranks, Sector IV of the Secret Army is now described as ‘very political’. It was ‘the Red Maquis of Xiberoa’ and, by July 1944, had 477 resisters operating in Xiberoa (Poullenot 1995: 189). When his name appeared on the Gestapo’s list in the summer of 1944, de Jauréguiberry led Sector IV from its mountain retreat nearby. The movement was poorly armed but well organized. For Secret Army Basques whose identity was firmly rooted in Xiberoa, their ultimate goal as resisters was the liberation of their province. French, rather than Basque, and a former French army officer, André Pommiès, created the second largest resistance movement operating in Xiberoa and Béarn at the time, the CFP (Corps Franc Pommiès). Pommiès was keen to redeem the honour of the French army, to rid France of the German occupiers and to prevent a communist takeover. In February 1943 an officer in the Vichy army appointed Pommiès military commander of Region 4 (Toulouse) under the auspices of the Giraudist movement that became the ORA (Ceroni 1977: 24). The combat troops of Region 4 soon thereafter became known by Pommiès’ name. Liaison with the British Secret Operations Executive (SOE) enabled the CFP to receive regular parachute drops and thus to be better armed and supplied than de Gaulle’s Secret Army (Ceroni 1980: 37). The CFP carried out numerous acts of sabotage and direct military aggression against the Germans in the southwest. In June 1943 an envoy of Pommiès asked two reserve officers in the French army to recruit a CFP company in Xiberoa.9 One was a Basque industrialist from Mauléon, Captain Pierre Béguerie, whose father had made a substantial fortune in the sandal-making business, among other enterprises. The other was also a local man, Lieutenant Jean Jancène, whose father ran a grocer’s shop in the town.

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 71 Privileged as a child, wealthy and successful as a businessman, Pierre Béguerie is now described as a man who enjoyed ‘fine things’ as much as he loved to hunt with his friends in the Xiberoan countryside. Like Clément de Jauréguiberry, he was in his forties and married with children when he was recruited to the Resistance. The two men knew each other well socially and belonged to an extensive network of Xiberoan families linked by marriage. Although much respected in the community, Béguerie did not always have an easy relationship with leftwing socialists and communists in Mauléon. One socialist with whom he disagreed about local labour issues was head of the Mauléon Secret Army, Hégoburu. Although the CFP recruited several thousand men in southwestern France as a whole, Béguerie’s Xiberoan company often operated with no more than thirty. Some recruits had been together in the French army. Contrary to the assumption mistakenly made by some local people, most of the men recruited by Béguerie were in fact Xiberoans. Like their Secret Army counterparts, they had a vested interest in ridding their community of the Germans, as well as in avoiding the destruction of local property and enemy action against civilians. Many of the men were in their late teens and became involved in the CFP simply by chance, rather than owing to any strong political commitment. Owing to its Giraudist, military links with the ORA and Pommiès, the Xiberoan CFP company formed by Pierre Béguerie is now often remembered as ‘the White Maquis of Xiberoa’. Its maquis were based in the Xiberoan communities of l’Hôpital-Saint-Blaise, near the internment camp of Gurs, and Sohüta, adjacent to Mauléon. Shortly before D-Day, de Jauréguiberry and Béguerie made a key agreement as far as Xiberoan Basques were concerned. They recognized that the military mission of the local CFP company would be to disrupt German communication and transport links (Ceroni 1980: 122) and that Sector IV of the Secret Army would begin its own military action on de Gaulle’s day of ‘national insurrection’. The Secret Army would maintain civil order in the province and would in due course achieve political control for the Gaullist Liberation Committees across Xiberoa. From the start, de Jauréguiberry insisted that resisters should refrain from combat near civilians. The violation of that understanding by non-Basque CFP leaders during August of 1944 lay at the core of the rivalry and extreme tension between the two resistance groups in Xiberoa. Tensions were exacerbated by defections from an adjacent Béarnais CFP company to the Secret Army there, by denunciations, and most of all by the actions of one non-Basque resister called Bercut. He moved to Mauléon soon after the Franco-German armistice and worked briefly as a dentist there before joining a Secret Army combat unit in Béarn. Bercut quickly gained local notoriety as an audacious resister, quick tempered, fond of disguises and of danger. He was controversially involved in the theft of all

72 • Sandra Ott weapons stored in the internment camp at Gurs in September 1943 (Davant 2001: 173). When his reckless behaviour drew sharp criticism from Secret Army leaders in the summer of 1944, Bercut defected to Béguerie’s CFP company. Some people now say he was ‘crazy’ and ‘arrogant’, but others found him charismatic. As one now elderly Basque CFP veteran explained to me in 2003: ‘Bercut arrived at my house disguised as a priest! He had a revolver. I remember how exciting it all seemed. I was only seventeen.’10 Bercut once robbed a bank in Mauléon to obtain funds for the CFP. It is said that Béguerie paid the bank back after the Liberation with his own money. In July 1944 a German battalion of 600 troops entered Mauléon to assist the fifty soldiers already based there and to eradicate resistance activity. An SS section stationed in Pau supported them.11 The enhanced German presence was in part owing to the activities of the CFP, especially of Bercut, who had variously taunted, robbed and ambushed German and SS troops in Xiberoa (Ceroni 1977: 101). Following one ambush, German intelligence papers were seized by the CFP. Shortly thereafter, the CFP commander for the Pyrenees demobilized the Basque company leader, Béguerie, and appointed a former French army cadet and a CFP resister, René Lavalou, as his successor. Local opinion and ‘official’ accounts of Xiberoan resistance are divided on the reasons for Béguerie’s departure. Some attribute it to the disappearance of those enemy papers. Others speculate that Pierre Béguerie left of his own accord due to extreme frustration with the ill-disciplined Bercut. One former CFP resister reports that Béguerie and his co-founder of the Xiberoan CFP company, Jancène, were both denounced to the enemy. With sufficient warning, it is said, they escaped arrest and hid on an isolated farm until the Liberation.12 The ‘official’ history of the CFP merely mentions a ‘problem’ with the Mauléon CFP company and reports that Béguerie waited ‘in readiness’ to be recalled by the CFP ‘as soon as circumstances were more favourable’ (Ceroni 1977: 101). In the ‘official’ account of Xiberoa’s liberation, written by de Jauréguiberry, the Basque-led Sector IV of the Secret Army recognized ‘the tremendous efforts (of Béguerie) to contend with the insane orders of his (CFP) superiors and the dissoluteness of his subordinates’ (Libération de la Soule 1984: 11). When Lavalou took charge of the Xiberoan CFP, relations between the Giraudist, ‘White’ maquis and the Gaullist, ‘Red’ maquis in Xiberoa deteriorated rapidly. During one intensely hostile meeting between de Jauréguiberry and Lavalou, the two leaders faced each other across a table with their revolvers drawn. From the end of July until the liberation of Xiberoa in August 1944, they and their senior command argued heatedly about military tactics, about honour, duty and what constituted ‘criminal behaviour’ in times of war. In the Secret Army’s ‘official’ version of events, the CFP leaders are depicted as ‘insane’ and as ‘strangers’ to Xiberoa who would have subjected its people to destruction and bloodshed, had

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 73 it not been for the stubborn efforts of the Basque Secret Army based in Mauléon. When Lavalou and Bercut shot two German prisoners in their care, de Jauréguiberry asked: ‘And from which side do the terrorists come? From that of the regular (French) army?’ (Libération de la Soule 1945: 10). After several days of fighting between the Germans garrisoned in Mauléon and the two rival resistance groups, the resisters took 44 German prisoners. This in turn brought Major Spielberg back to the town with 800 troops. Following lengthy, difficult negotiations between de Jauréguiberry and Spielberg, and unwelcome interventions by Lavalou and Bercut, de Gaulle’s day of ‘national insurrection’ arrived on 16 August 1944, when the Allies landed in Provence. Sector IV described the sudden departure of the Germans on that day as ‘the miracle of Mauléon’ and ascribed it to the evident ‘dangers’ posed by the Secret Army resisters (de Jauréguiberry 1950). One Basque CFP veteran wryly noted that the ‘miracle’ of Mauléon might more accurately have been described as ‘the miracle of SaintTropez’ (Davant 2001: 178). In November 1948 Mauléon became the only town in southwestern France to receive the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic. The citation notes that it was a ‘particularly resistant town throughout the Occupation […]. Owing to the intelligence and initiative of its local leaders, the people of Mauléon intimidated the enemy while at the same time preventing reprisals against the civilian population. The resisters of Mauléon then went on to take part in the siege and liberation of a neighbouring community’, Tardets (citation, quoted in Libération de la Soule, 1945 and 1984 editions). Tardets is regarded by some as the only canton in Xiberoa from which the Germans did not depart ‘spontaneously’ (Poullenot 1995: 262). The German garrison there was manned by 116 well-armed soldiers and heavily protected by several kilometres of barricades and barbed wire. The Basque leaders of Sector IV quarrelled violently with Lavalou and Bercut over weapons and ammunition. De Jauréguiberry then decided that his resistance sector would, on its own, liberate Tardets, without intervention by or help from the CFP. He did so with his 300 men and the assistance of the priest, among others, after prolonged, difficult negotiations with the German commander there. A local intelligence agent for the Secret Army, Mme Sagardoy, anticipated that the enemy ‘would resist to the very end’. De Jauréguiberry had trouble convincing the Germans that they were dealing with ‘soldiers, not a band of terrorists, as German propaganda had insisted the resisters were’ (Davant 2001: 180). The 184 German prisoners of war were taken to Gurs. Under the leadership of de Jauréguiberry, the Xiberoan FFI maintained civil order in a liberated Basque province. The tensions and rivalry between the two resistance movements in Xiberoa did not, however, end there. When the mayor of Mauléon, a Secret Army veteran, issued invitations to commemorative celebrations in August 1964, marking the

74 • Sandra Ott twentieth anniversary of Xiberoa’s liberation and remembering the town’s receipt of the Croix de Guerre in November 1948, he included only one CFP man, Pierre Béguerie. The local Basque industrialist and initial CFP company leader politely objected to the mayor’s exclusion of all other CFP men from the public celebrations, including its local members. When informed about the affair, Pommiès wrote to the ex-Secret Army mayor. The mayor defended his decision on the grounds that the festivities were ‘a local, Mauléon affair’. Pommiès pointed out that the mayor had in fact included veterans from the Béarnais Secret Army and had even allowed them to display their provincial flag. If such outsiders to Xiberoa had been included, why then had both Lavalou and Bercut been ignored? The mayor replied that Lavalou was not a resident of Mauléon in 1944, and that Bercut ‘had acted in ways that made his presence undesirable’.13 Pommiès was thus determined to write his own history of the Resistance in Xiberoa. His letters show that he was motivated not only by the ingratitude shown by the Secret Army twenty years after the Liberation, but also by the omission of all CFP men from official documents written by the national French Committee of the Liberation that accompanied the citation for bravery awarded to Mauléon in 1948. As a counter to the ‘official’ FFI/Secret Army history of the liberation of Xiberoa, written by de Jauréguiberry in 1945, General Pommiès was keen to publish an ‘official’ CFP version of events. In the summer of 1964 he asked a Xiberoan Basque man and CFP veteran to assist him. The two exchanged lengthy correspondence about inaccuracies and misrepresentations in the FFI/Secret Army document. To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Liberation, the Xiberoan veterans’ association of the Secret Army, Sector IV, reprinted in 1984 the FFI/Secret Army pamphlet first published in 1945. As one avid reader of the original version noted, they mistakenly omitted certain passages from the first edition. This bothered the reader, who attributed the omissions to carelessness and lamented the ‘incomplete’ nature of the reprinted text. The veterans had added their own introduction, which included the names of resisters in the various Secret Army maquis, as a further attempt to tell the true story of Xiberoan resistance. They made no mention of the CFP.

The Resistance in Popular Theatre: History-Telling In the introduction to The Maquis of Xiberoa, Davant (2001: 18) recognizes the delicate nature of his topic, stating that he ‘has treated the two maquis (Secret Army and CFP) with the greatest possible respect’; yet he anticipates a measure of dissatisfaction with his representation of the past. Each side, he predicts, will see itself as having been the better of the two; but he ‘leaves that debate to the

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 75 historians’. The writer of the pastorala, he continues, must not decide on such issues, ‘even though he has his own opinion and preference’. Davant (2001: 11) identifies his play as a ‘memory-work’ in which the Sohüta people and other Basques could participate not merely as an audience but through their own individual remembering. He seeks to commemorate the role both maquis played in the Liberation and, by writing the play, to show how the small Basque province of Xiberoa helped to end German tyranny in France, in its own small way. The pastorala, he continues, is not ‘realist theatre, but symbolic. The details are imagined, as so often the dialogues as well’ (Davant 2001: 18–19). In this spirit, the play ‘deliberately ignores the tactical disagreements which divided the Resistance in Xiberoa’. Davant argues that the key point of this pastorala lies in the ‘common struggle for freedom’ in which both sides engaged. It is not his intention ‘to reawaken old quarrels, but on the contrary to rise above them and to unite the local population in an amicable fervor in celebrating a difficult and finally glorious page’ in the history of the Resistance in Xiberoa (Davant 2001: 19). To this end, the author limits himself ‘to the visible, military aspects’ of the Resistance by focusing on five battles in which local Basques lost their lives or were wounded (Davant 2001: 19). He asks the reader to ‘leave the rest to the historians’, and to treat his play as a ‘hymn to universal freedom, as well as a love song to our mother Xiberoa, above all nationalisms’ (Davant 2001: 19). Structurally, his pastorala follows the classic format. The Good Ones are represented by the men and women of the Resistance and their supporters (including the Basque clergy); the Bad Ones are represented by the Nazis, the Lady Turks and Devils who stir up trouble. The supporting cast includes a range of townspeople, angels and shepherds. The principal male hero, Battita, is a fictional resister who joins the Secret Army and falls in love with a Gaullist supporter, Maddi. With these exceptions, many of the characters are named after ‘real’ people who supported the Secret Army and the CFP in the 1940s. The Good Ones include characters representing Jauréguiberry, Béguerie, Hégoburu, among other ‘real’ men in the Secret Army maquis. They are aided by (among many others) the Basque head of the Red Cross, and the Basque clergy who hid and ‘passed’ Jewish refugees and took part in resistance activities. There is also a character who plays ‘Mme Sagardoy’, whose house was occupied by the German command in Tardets, whose garage brought her into daily contact with the enemy, and whose own intelligence work and negotiating skills greatly aided Basque resistance. Davant portrays Secret Army characters as loyal Gaullists, poorly armed, whose mission is to prepare for the day of national insurrection. One Secret Army actor, whose part corresponds to that of a ‘real’ resister, cautions Battita, his newly recruited agent: ‘Don’t provoke combat close to any community or house. Follow the laws of the war by respecting the local population’ (Davant 2001: 75).

76 • Sandra Ott In representing the CFP, Davant (2001: 74–9) portrays Béguerie as a leader prepared to complement the resistance work of the Secret Army. In Scene 11, he shares Battita’s excitement about the Allied landing and confidently proclaims that the Secret Army and CFP will stand united, each maquis in its proper place, committed to ridding Xiberoa of the Germans. The timing of Béguerie’s disappearance from the play is correctly placed in the chronology of the battles fought. The controversial CFP leader, Lavalou, appears only once in the play. With their respective maquis, he and de Jauréguiberry fight the Germans and liberate Mauléon. In his four lines the character Lavalou merely reminds the Secret Army leader that they should share the German arms just seized and that the CFP still has two Nazi prisoners under guard (Davant 2001: 106–7). The playwright does not mention their fatal shooting by the CFP. What of Bercut himself, the audacious CFP officer whose fondness for risky, ‘spectacular military action’ so annoyed and upset Captain de Jauréguiberry? Although no character in the play is called Bercut, the Lady Turks appear in Scene 13 to joke about finding themselves in such a backward place as Xiberoa. ‘Is it really part of France?’ they ask, and propose some mischief. As one says to another, ‘You must know what happened between the two maquis. Let’s cause a lot of confusion between them!’ To which her fellow mischief-maker replies, ‘I’m sure you know who Bercut is, the lunatic! If only we could stir him up, that would be such a splendid trick!’ (Davant 2001: 96–7). Bercut never appears. In the play, negotiations with Spielberg and the liberation of Mauléon follow the unseen denunciation of the fictional Secret Army agent, Battita. The ‘battle’ between the Basque Secret Army maquis and the Germans at Montory ends with the accidental death of a Spanish resister by his own grenade, a ‘true story’ in Xiberoan resistance history. Triumph of Good over Evil is repeated as the Secret Army and its supporters in Tardets convince the German commander there to surrender, marking the liberation of Xiberoa. Throughout the play, the fictional ‘unknown resister’, Battita, and his fictional fiancée, Maddi, appear periodically, depicted as Gaullist supporters and proud Xiberoan Basques. In the last ‘acted’ scene, their heretofore unseen brothers return from prison in Germany to attend their wedding in 1945, the ‘first since the war and the liberation’ (Davant 2001: 145). The cast join together to celebrate the victory of love, love of liberty, and Xiberoa, symbolized by the marriage of the young resisters. They then thank the audience for their kindness in forgiving any offence taken by the portrayal of events in the play. An actor notes that they are all forever indebted to the unknown heroes such as Battita for their part in defeating fascism, in promoting and defending freedom, and in forgiving the enemy ‘of yesterday who is today our best friend in Europe’ (Davant 2001: 151). The performance ends with the entire cast on stage singing a song about Sohüta, the community whose people ‘made the pastorala’, during one year in their lives

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 77 and who brought thousands of Xiberoan and other Basques to their town in 2001. Romantic and poetic, the song extols the beauty of the countryside, their love of the Basque Country, its liberation, its culture and language, and their hope for the future, invested in the young people of that Basque province. In the annexe to his play, Jean-Louis Davant (2001: 174–80) quotes directly from ‘official’ versions of Secret Army/FFI and CFP history (Libération de la Soule 1945, 1984; Ceroni 1977, 1980). He cites the names of villages where the maquis operated and where local civilians experienced German brutality. Yet when both play and its annexe are compared to ‘official’ accounts of events in 1944, striking omissions become apparent: the author carefully makes no mention of quarrels between the rival resistance leaders, or of CFP actions which contravened accepted military conventions. In the annexe, Davant cites many local events that are still part of communitycentred group memories of the German occupation. He notes, for example, the burning of Basque farms by the Spielberg battalion in l’Hôpital-Saint-Blaise after its attempts to find any CFP maquisards sheltering there. He recalls the murder of a Gurs man by Germans as he attempted to escape and the arrest of twenty-one Saint-Blaise Basques, nine of whom were deported to Germany. Davant ‘remembers’ the denunciation of Basque CFP resisters who were caught by Germans in the Xiberoan hamlet of Barcus. He invokes the memory of elderly Basques in the village of Esquiule who saw or heard about the punitive German raid in which one farm was destroyed and two youths arrested. He recalls denunciations of the Secret Army maquis in the village of Aussurucq, and how the warning provided by Mme Sagardoy enabled the resisters to flee before the Germans arrived. Although Davant notes that Spielberg’s battalion did take revenge on the people of Aussurucq, his annexe gives no details. These and other ‘omissions’ in the text were the focus of criticism by some Basques during the summer of 2001, when the play was performed.

Interpreting the Play Public reaction to the play varied widely. While it is impossible to say how many people who saw the play were pleased with it, Davant did receive many positive responses from a range of people. Conversations with Basques, and with Davant himself, have revealed four, often intermingling, interpretative approaches to the play: it has variously been treated as an artistic performance, as a commemoration, as an historical representation of past events, and as a culturally unifying form of social interaction. Many Basques appreciated the play as an artistic performance and did not treat literally either the text or the ‘acting out’ of roles on stage. Many expressed pleasure in Davant’s use of the classic, complex structure of a ‘proper pastorala’,

78 • Sandra Ott with the battle between Good and Evil clearly depicted and the triumph of the former over the latter duly observed. For these spectators, the performance successfully rose above lingering animosities and tensions between veterans of the rival resistance groups. As one man put it, ‘the play isn’t about politics. I’m sick of people dragging up the politics of 1944, and arguing about who the real terrorists were – the Germans or certain CFP leaders. Arguing about the communists, arguing about de Gaulle and Giraud. It’s a play, for heaven’s sake!’ For many people, the performance provided an enjoyable spectacle, to which the audience themselves contributed through their sheer numbers, as well as through their participation. When Spielberg and his German troops first goose-stepped through the seated crowd to take the stage, people booed and hissed. Some laughed aloud and whistled. The actors themselves grinned at times, sharing with the audience a sense of comedy. Seeing and being local men, who were shopkeepers, shepherds, farmers, workers and professionals, dressed up as and imitating Nazis struck many of them as funny. When the Gaullist heroine defiantly stood her ground in opposition to a German patrol, people applauded her pluckiness, recognizing in it the characteristic readiness of a Xiberoan woman to stand her ground among men and to defend her beliefs. When the German troops and resisters engaged in ‘battle’, the genre required them to strike a pose that seemed comical to some at first sight. The uniformed soldiers took mincing, skipping steps towards their Basque adversaries, with one hand on a hip, the other wielding the wooden staff that is a hallmark prop of Xiberoan popular theatre. The resisters did the same. Among some elderly people, it was the ‘Germans’ who provoked laughter edged with bitterness. They enjoyed seeing ‘the former enemy’ portrayed by people whom they knew and behaving in such a ridiculous fashion, even if the conventions of Basque popular theatre dictated that it should be thus. When a resister ‘died’ on stage following combat, a murmur rippled through the crowd. Young and old alike were thoroughly engaged by the spectacle. Some of the children on stage suppressed a giggle, because the ‘dead’ resister was himself somewhat embarrassed by his play-acting. His discomfort did not draw a laugh from the older people close enough to the stage to see it. Even as it entertained on one level, the spectacle also brought back memories in which humour played no part. As a public commemoration of Basque victory over German occupation, the play called upon the mnemonic community to engage in an act of remembrance. Although the playwright insists that the genre is not ‘realist theatre’ (Davant 2001: 18), the process of remembering was aided by his use of ‘real’ names, ‘real’ places and ‘official’ versions of events written by Secret Army/FFI and CFP leaders. His decision to name key people involved in the Resistance was intended to commemorate symbolically their brave actions.

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 79 One of many people who wrote to Davant after having seen the play, the daughter of Mme Sagardoy expressed her sincere gratitude to him. Watching the theatrical representation of her mother’s role in the liberation of Xiberoa brought back childhood memories which, ‘until then, had been completely buried’.14 She felt that the play had honoured her mother and her own memory. Before the final version of his play was published and performed, Davant closely consulted many Secret Army and CFP veterans and their relatives. Most agreed with him that the play absolutely must not be treated literally, as ‘history’. Some did ask him not to use the real names of local people, a few of whom were still alive. Nearly all of them still had close kin in the area. As many remarked to me, ‘the subject matter of the play is too recent, too sensitive’. Using ‘real’ names did not, in their view, square with the playwright’s insistence that the genre cannot be treated as a ‘strict lesson in history’ and ought to be seen more as ‘an historical novel in verse with mimicry’ (Davant 2001: 18). In August 2001 a group of elderly veterans and the relatives of some late comrades met to discuss the play. Some members argued that the pastorala was never intended to be an accurate, complete representation of the past; they largely appreciated the performance as a spectacle. Having both read and seen the play, a few insisted that Davant had left out ‘whole chunks of history’ in his theatrical representation of Xiberoa’s recent past. Some had read the text but not seen the play. A few had ignored it altogether. For much of the afternoon, the group debated whether the play could be both a subjective, imagined depiction of the Resistance in Xiberoa and at the same time selectively seek to be historically accurate, in some respects. Was it possible, in Basque popular theatre, to capture reality without falsifying it? One Secret Army veteran was publicly critical of Davant and his play in a regional newspaper article.15 He asked why so many figures active in the Resistance, as well as those who died in deportation, had been ‘forgotten’ in the play. He accused Davant of having written ‘an incomplete text’ which failed to recognize the important part played by many local heroes not mentioned in the pastorala; of having given too much credit to certain individuals; of having got certain details of history wrong. He was particularly annoyed that the playwright had failed to tell the whole story of his own community, whose mayor bravely offered himself to the Germans when they took the villagers there hostage. Such selfless courage had ‘prevented a second Oradour!’, he claimed.16 His complaint was echoed by a small group of people from two other Xiberoan villages directly affected by German brutality who felt that the play had ignored their own tragic stories as well. Mention was made of these communities in the annexe to the play, but the absence of their local ‘stories’ from the play itself provoked anger among them. The playwright’s omission of local experiences, which were highly personal ‘histories’, violated the group memory of these villagers.

80 • Sandra Ott Complaints about the play were thus largely made by people who insisted upon a literal interpretation of the pastorala, which rendered it an ‘incomplete’ historical representation of the liberation of Xiberoa. They acknowledged that thousands of Basques had enjoyed the two performances as a theatrical spectacle, but they feared that the text would be treated as a definitive history of the Resistance in that part of the Basque Country and in France more generally. Appreciation of the play as spectacle did sit uneasily alongside concerns about historical accuracy for other Basques who saw the play performed. Even when they resisted a literal interpretation of the text, some people felt compelled to point out certain ‘factual errors’ to Davant. In one case, a ‘real’ character in the play was confused with his ‘real’ nephew in a particular scene; it was the nephew who ‘had had the experience’, not the uncle, who was a character in the play. The play was at odds with autobiographical and family memories. Of particular interest is the manner in which the play, both as text and as performance, has been seen as not only contesting autobiographical and group memory, but also corrupting them in its theatrical representation of the recent past. Another elderly Secret Army veteran, whose ‘real’ name was used in the play, has great difficulty treating the pastorala as a performance. On one occasion when we discussed the play, he read the text aloud where ‘his character’ appears. In his four lines the character tells the fictitious hero Battita that he is mad to imagine that their maquis could successfully attack the Germans; they were too poorly armed to do so (Davant 2001: 99). Turning to the annexe, where Davant briefly outlines what happened there, the veteran read aloud the words: ‘A group of maquis, commanded by [the veteran], attacked the soldiers stationed at Ahusquy … One German was killed. The enemy abandoned the area. The massif of Arbailles was thus under the control of the resisters. But some shepherds and some men from Alçay (a nearby village) were taken hostage (by the Germans). They were freed thanks to the diplomacy of Mme Sagardoy’ (Davant 2001: 175). ‘That is what happened!’ the veteran exclaimed. ‘This is right’, he asserted, tapping his finger on the passage from the annexe, before flipping back to the verses of the play and frowning. As a symbolic representation of events in 1944, the play was unacceptable to him. It violated his own life narrative, the stories central to his experience of self and to the social identity of the dwindling group of veterans who gather annually to commemorate their dead comrades and to remember together the experiences they shared in the ‘dark years’. Even as the play contested his own autobiographical memory – all the things he personally remembers about the occupation and the Resistance, as well as all the things he has been told over time about them – it also contested the group memory of fellow veterans. Far fewer complaints focused on Davant’s treatment of the two rival resistance groups. One man objected that an early draft favoured the Secret Army over the

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 81 CFP. The mayor of Sohüta, son of CFP Captain Béguerie, was pleased with the play. He and Davant had discussed various drafts, and the scenes with which the mayor was unhappy had been altered. Davant’s playful treatment of Bercut’s character has apparently not given rise to any adverse comments from Basques, perhaps in part because he was an outsider, in part because of his controversial actions. For many Basques who participated in the performance, as actors and as spectators, the play was an instructive and culturally unifying form of social interaction. Many had no direct experience of the German occupation. Some with whom I spoke, in their forties and fifties, had second-hand memories of their parents’ experiences during the war but admitted that, until they had seen the play, they had never thought much about that difficult period of Xiberoan history. For them, the performance of the play was a catalyst to aspects of individual as well as family memory. As one man from a mountain community told me: ‘Papa was a POW in Germany. Maman never talks much about what happened in our valley. The neighbours don’t either. So when my wife and I saw the play, we wanted to talk to Maman about it all. I heard things I never knew before, about the Resistance, some of the bad things that happened here, in the same household.’17 For many people, The Maquis of Xiberoa helped local Basques ‘learn the story’ (Cappelletto 2003) of occupation and resistance at grass-roots level. Watching the play and acting in it often led to conversations about the experiences of individuals and groups during the period 1940–44. As ‘memory-work’ that brought back remembrances of those times, the play often induced people to share their knowledge of what happened. Such sharing was particularly marked among the actors and their families during the year-long process of ‘making the play’. For them, as for the thousands who watch and take part in Xiberoan popular theatre every summer, ‘making the play’ is a culturally unifying form of social interaction. It entails the intense social involvement of many in the host community, who differ widely in age, in political views and, to a lesser extent, in socioeconomic background. ‘Making the play’ promotes Xiberoan Basque language and culture; it often draws young people to participate whose fluency and interest in Basque were previously minimal, and whose social identity as Xiberoan Basque was not yet clearly formed. According to some Basques from other provinces, with whom I watched The Maquis of Xiberoa, one has to be Xiberoan in order to appreciate the genre fully. Although the text is normally now published in Basque, French and Spanish, the words recited and sung are in the Xiberoan dialect. Not all other Basques can easily understand it; nor do all non-Xiberoan Basques find it easy to sit through these lengthy, highly stylized, highly localized performances that are so much a part of Xiberoan cultural identity. In March 2003 students at a private school in Mauléon put together an exhibition about the Resistance, which broadly covered the period 1940–44 at national,

82 • Sandra Ott regional and local levels, with newspaper articles, old photos, maps and some handwritten personal histories of local evaders, deportees and resisters. The head of their school and a history teacher were keen to use the exhibition not only as ‘history-telling’ (Young 2003), but also as a socializing process in which ‘memory practice’ by local war veterans would enable the students to participate in Xiberoan public memory (cf. Cappelletto 2003). During one of two evening presentations, the students, their teachers and some fifty members of the public gathered to hear the testimonies of local men from the Secret Army and the CFP. The elderly men spoke of their experiences as resisters. One talked about his deportation, imprisonment and escape. Among some adults in the audience and in the body language of certain speakers, there was a measure of tension. The last man to testify was a former CFP resister from Mauléon, who talked briefly about the accomplishments of his resistance group in Xiberoa, and then at length about their victories outside the Basque Country. This drew some grumbled complaints from people in the audience, who agreed that they had come to hear about Xiberoa and Xiberoans. As one woman obeserved, ‘I don’t care about what the CFP did in Medoc’. When the organizers commented on the importance of preserving Xiberoan ‘collective memory’, they referred to the valuable lessons in history which Davant’s play had provided. Some people stirred uneasily in their seats. When the school’s head went on to say that Davant had given his apologies for not attending the event, lest his presence provoke tension or discord one of the Secret Army veterans looked greatly relieved. In his play Jean-Louis Davant reached out to the mnemonic community of Xiberoan Basques, seeking to unite them and to rise above longstanding rivalries and tensions between the ‘White’ and the ‘Red’ maquis. The performance of the play did rekindle animosities in some veterans by ‘history-telling’. The play was an agent of remembrance; it provoked in some a fear that its incomplete story would become a definitive representation of a Xiberoan past that continues to be contested by a handful of elderly people. Concerns about the historical accuracy of the play echo ongoing disagreements over the actions and motives of rival resistance groups sixty years ago. Together they offer a forum in which to consider the interplay between autobiographical memory and group remembrance and how these are translated into, and contested as, public memory through the medium of Basque popular theatre. In his essay on ‘History as Social Memory’, Peter Burke (1997: 47–8) considers five of the many different media employed in the transmission of social memory: oral traditions, written records, images, actions (especially ritual ones, such as acts of commemoration or remembrance), and space. As oral tradition, with a written text performed in a quasi-ritual style, the play by Davant constitutes a hybrid media in the shaping and transmission of Xiberoan public as well

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 83 as individual memory. Its ability to do this seems to lie at the core of the controversy surrounding its publication and, more importantly, its performance. The play was intended to be both a public celebration of liberation and ‘memorywork’; it is the latter which aroused the most intense emotion among some veterans, for whom the pastorala, as a ‘social history of remembering’ (Burke 1997: 46), was incomplete and therefore unacceptable. For others, the play was both performance and commemoration, kept apart from the ongoing polemic over what really happened in the summer of 1944 in a small French Basque province.

Notes 1. Xiberoa (Soule, in French) is the easternmost of the three French Basque provinces and has a population of around 15,000. It borders Béarn to the east and Navarre to the south. I have been doing fieldwork there intermittently since 1976 and have published a monograph about one Xiberoan mountain community (Ott 1981). I thank Joseba Zulaika for having helped me to return to my academic work and am very grateful to him, to William A. Christian and to Robert Gildea for their helpful advice and comments on a draft of this paper. Any errors or shortcomings are, of course, my own. I owe special gratitude to the editor of this volume, Francesca Cappelletto, whose encouragement and patience have been immense. 2. The oldest known text was written and performed in 1750. 3. It is customary practice to perform a play twice. It may never be performed again. 4. Personal communication with Jean-Louis Davant, July 2004. I am most grateful to M. Davant for his help and interest in my research. 5. Little has been written about the French Basques under Vichy or German rule, or their resistance to occupation. In English, see Jacob (1994: 110–16, 119–20), Ottis (2001: 119–45) and Ostrum (2004). In French, Poullenot (1995), Laharie (1993) and Jiménez de Aberasturi (1996) are excellent sources. Halty (1985) writes about the occupation in Cambo. Larronde (1995) deals with the Basque battalion ‘Gernika’ that fought against the Germans in April 1945. 6. The introduction of Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws radically changed the population when some 11,000 German Jews were interned in Gurs (Laharie 1993: 168). Vichy’s massive deportation of Jews in 1942 aroused increasing discontent among Basque Catholics, as elsewhere in France (Paxton 2001: 153). 7. No accurate figures are available. Poullenot (1995) provides useful information about clandestine guides, the number of people deported and arrested for evasion, resistance and other activities.

84 • Sandra Ott 8. The Americans appointed General Giraud head of Vichy’s North African forces in December 1942. He changed political direction from support for Pétain to a pro-Republican stance in March 1943. Although American intelligence reports indicate ‘no support at all among the resistance movements’ for Giraud (Sweets 1976: 79n), he retained the loyalty of former members of the French Armistice Army, created after the 1940 Armistice agreement between Germany and France. 9. It was one of three in the Carrère battalion operating in the Basses-Pyrénées (Ceroni 1977: 121–2). The CFP operated in the Ariège, the Pyrenees, parts of Gers and the Landes, the Lot and Lot-et-Garonne, and Tarn-et-Garonne. Poullenot (1995: 196) estimates that some 6,000 men were recruited, whereas Kedward (1993: 294) gives a much lower figure of 3,000. 10. Personal communication, G. Recalt (March 2003). 11. Speilberg’s battalion belonged to the regiment of Colonel Wolf. The SD (Sicherheitsdienst) in Pau was established in December 1942, as a division of the SS-controlled security service. Its outposts throughout the French Basque Country were responsible for gathering information about Jews, resistance activity, intelligence and evasion networks, and for surveillance (Poullenot 1995: 152). 12. Testimony of Victor Carrique (Le Miroir de la Soule, 5 November 1994: 1, 4). 13. Private correspondence of General Pommiès, obtained from J. Larroque in Mauléon, July 2003. 14. I am grateful to M. Davant for having shown me her letter. 15. The article appeared in the regional newspaper La République des Pyrénées, No. 17280, 30 August 2001: 2. 16. The village of Oradour-sur-Glane was the site of a massacre by SS troops on 10 June 1944, when 642 men, women and children were killed (Farmer 2000). 17. He was referring to the denunciation of a son by his own father. His community does not figure at all in the play.

References Aulestia, G. (2000), The Basque Poetic Tradition, Reno: University of Nevada Press. Burke, P. (1997), Varieties of Cultural History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cappelletto, F. (2003), ‘Long-term memory of extreme events: from autobiography to history’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9: 241–57. Ceroni, M. (1977), ‘Les débuts du Corps Franc Pommiès 1942–1943’, Résistance R4, 2: 20–6. —— (1980), Le Corps Franc Pommiès, Toulouse: Editions du Grand-Rond. Davant, J.-L. (2001), Xiberoko Makia, Ozaze: Ideki.

Remembering the Resistance in Popular Theatre • 85 Dreyfus-Armand, G. (1999), L’Exil des républicains espagnols en France: de la Guerre Civile à la mort de Franco, Paris: Editions Albin Michel. Farmer, S. (2000), Martyred Village. Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, Berkeley: University of California Press. Halty, D. (1985), Cambo sous l’occupation allemande 1940–1944, Cambo: Imprimerie San Juan. Hérelle, G. (1926), Les Pastorales à sujets tragiques, Paris: Champion. Idiart, R. (1987), ‘Réflexions sur la pastorale souletine’, in La pastorale: théâtre populaire basque en Soule, Bayonne: Lauburu. Jacob, J. (1994), Hills of Conflict: Basque Nationalism in France, Reno: University of Nevada Press. de Jauréguiberry, C. (1950), quoted in Libération de la Soule (1984), Tardets: Amicale des Anciens de la Résistance du Secteur IV. Jiménez de Aberasturi, J.C. (1996), En Passant la Bidasoa: le réseau ‘Comète’ au pays basque (1941–1944), Biarritz: Editions J and D. Kedward, H.R. (1993), In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942–1944, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Laharie, C. (1993), Le camp de Gurs, Biarritz: Editions J and D. Larronde, J.-C. (1995), Le bataillon Gernika: les combats de la Pointe-de-Grave (avril 1945), Bayonne: Editions Bidasoa. Libération de la Soule (1945, 1984), Tardets: Comité de Libération de Tardets & Amicale des Anciens de la Résistance du Secteur IV. Ostrum, M. (2004), The Surgeon and the Shepherd: Two Resistance Heroes in Vichy France, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ott, S. (1981), The Circle of Mountains: A Basque Shepherding Community, Oxford: OUP, (1994), Reno: University of Nevada Press. Ottis, Sherri Greene (2001), Silent Heroes: Downed Airmen and the French Underground, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Paxton, R.O. (2001), Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940–1944, New York: Columbia University Press. Poullenot, L. (1995), Basses-Pyrénées, Occupation Liberation 1940–1945, Biarritz: Editions J and D. Sweets, J.F. (1976), The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940–1944, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Veyrin, P. (1975), Les basques, Bayonne: Arthaud. Young, James E. (2003), ‘Between history and memory: the voice of the eyewitness’, in A. Douglass and T. Vogler (eds), Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, New York: Routledge, 275–83.

–4– World War II comes to an Istrian Village Atrocities and Memories Rudolph M. Bell

The narratives I am about to relate describe real events, actions relatively well documented, even if there are unresolved differences about their meanings which depend upon the oral testimony of my informants. They occurred about sixty years ago in a small Istrian hamlet – I shall name it Kvarnerica – in the months following Italy’s defeat in 1943. Civil war then raged between Yugoslav nationalists, mostly communist, and Italophiles, largely devoid of any ideology beyond a determination to survive and to keep their possessions. As in nearly all of northern Italy, German troops took control of territories formerly part of the fascist state, and Anglo-American forces rendered only minimal aid to partisan fighters struggling for self-liberation against the ex-ally now turned occupier. The situation throughout the Istrian peninsula involved a complex, bitter, volatile mixture of class warfare and ethnic strife. Over several decades immediately following the civil war and resulting exodus of half the population, the renowned novelist Fulvio Tomizza’s works beckoned readers to pay heed to the plight of his compatriots, both those in exile and those who stayed behind. More recent studies, ranging from the semi-popular Foibe (Oliva 2002) to the more specialized Un paese perfetto (Nemec 1998), demonstrate that conflict over meaning continues long after the bullets have stopped killing. The Venetian Empire had dominated the region for hundreds of years prior to its brief inclusion in Napoleon’s Kingdom of Illyria (Wolff 2001). In 1815, however, the peninsula came under Habsburg control and immigration to the developing countryside thereafter was largely by ethnic Croatians, not Italians. The new people came to speak a dialect that, while fully comprehensible to no outsider, owed more linguistically to Slavic origins than to Venetian antecedents (Goldstein 1999; Nemec 1998: 30; Suppan 2003: 116–39). The collapse of the AustroHungarian Empire, and the sudden takeover by Italy immediately after the Great War, did not go down easily. Istria became a prize awarded by outsiders to the very same state against which the resentful locals had fought in the hills and valleys northwest of nearby Trieste. Subsequent fascist local policy in the 1920s and 87

88 • Rudolph M. Bell 1930s brought about forced Italianization of language, culture, historical records, bureaucratic ways, economic activities, and even the most intimate details of married life. Many people adapted and even thrived, blackshirts loyal to the core, especially in the large towns along the western coast. In the interior villages and hamlets and towards the eastern shore, by contrast, hostility towards the occupier festered, country folk played little tricks on petty fascist officials and waited for the day of reckoning when they would break the bonds of servitude (Schiavi = Slavs). The time came, lasting for many days, months and years, from the collapse of Italy in late 1943 until the formal end of the war in 1945 – and well beyond. Kvarnerica is situated on the rocky eastern coast of Istria, about as far from Trieste as any place on the peninsula, mid-way between Rijeka (Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Fiume) and Pula (with the famous Roman amphitheatre). The hamlet, consisting of fourteen households perched at 200 metres above sea-level and less than two kilometres from the sea by a steeply winding path, usually housed over 100 souls, although in 1944 the men of fighting age were all absent, along with some of the women. In peacetime, village men were also absent, spending years at sea or as migrants in America digging tunnels. Poor soil conditions and lack of predictable spring and summer rains rendered farming problematic. The women stayed at home and did what they could, and indeed were the keys to survival for their families. Nonetheless, any hope of escaping debt cycles incurred as a result of initial land purchases, or when one’s mule died, required cash infusions from work opportunities available only in Trieste or New York City. It was into this world, where survival was an uncertain struggle, where intense local identification coexisted with first-hand knowledge of the wonders of the big city, and where electricity would not come until 1968 (and even today there is no piped water), that the horrors of World War II came home. It is here that my three stories took place. In telling them, I insert an occasional bibliographical reference to acknowledge professional work that illuminates my understanding or on which I have relied for factual material, but mostly, following the path of Abu-Lughod (1993) despite its known pitfalls, I let the events and memories speak for themselves. I listened to these narratives during my encounters with the hamlet of Kvarnerica

Fish One early morning in the spring of 1944 Giovanni and Giuseppe pushed out from Kvarnerica cove in their five-metre wooden boat, powered in the customary fashion by two oars, and laid down a parangal. Fitted only with 100 hooks spread across a 1,000-metre line, this was obviously the work of hungry locals rather than professional fishermen. Back in the fall of 1943 the German occupiers, already harassed by partisan insurgents, had issued a decree warning that anyone found fishing along the coast might be shot, instantly. Still, in the houses of Giovanni and

World War II comes to an Istrian Village • 89 Giuseppe, along with many other villagers, a kettle of fish stew or at least some fresh squid occasionally graced the table. German boat patrols had intercepted locals on numerous occasions, but if you just gave them your bucket of fish there was no danger; in fact, the Nazis knew enough to stop you only after the catch, so the whole game involved taking in lines as close to shore as possible and then making a quick pull for shore. In times of scarcity, fish were abundant. Giovanni and Giuseppe did not return that morning, and at noon Giuseppe’s wife walked for twenty minutes down the narrow path from the hamlet of Kvarnerica to the cove below. She saw their boat clearly fixed about 200 metres offshore, seemingly with no one aboard and certainly with no one answering her calls. Her anger at the thought that they had stopped off somewhere to drink with friends soon turned to fear, because the anchoring of an empty boat in deep water meant trouble for sure. She returned to Kvarnerica for help and spent an afternoon of agonizing suspense before learning the worst from her brother-in-law, who had gone to the rescue. Giovanni and Giuseppe had been machine-gunned to death and left slumped in the bottom of their boat, their fishing lines still in the water. It was obvious to all that the Nazis had killed them. Only the Germans had guns of that sort; their patrol boats had been seen in the vicinity that very morning; they had issued directives months ago saying they would do exactly what they did; the local commander did not deny responsibility, saying only that his orders had been clear enough. As partisan activity reached everyone’s doorstep over the next two years and villagers became each other’s mortal enemies, the circumstances attending the executions of Giovanni and Giuseppe appeared less clear. The German decree had been issued several months earlier and yet not a single local boat had even been stopped until after the catch was in. No one else had been killed before or since for fishing; always they took the fish but left you with your lines, anchors, floats and hooks to try again another day. When the Germans retaliated, they did so openly, assembling villagers and making sure everyone knew exactly who was doing the shooting. The ambiguous response of the local commander was entirely out of character. Upon reflection it became more and more plausible to believe that Giovanni and Giuseppe had been killed by the partisans, or else that they themselves were partisans and had got only what was coming to them (Herzfeld 1991). The second, less conspiratorial theory – that Giovanni and Giuseppe were partisans – made some sense. They had returned together on foot from Calabria when the fascist government collapsed the preceding summer, after serving hard time and being chased by the British across the desert to Tobruk in North Africa. Men with their experience had already volunteered to join the partisan cause, or were being forced to do so, and it was odd to see the two of them still in good health and around the hamlet. Maybe their rowing expeditions had more to do with spotting German troop movements and

90 • Rudolph M. Bell reporting them to the partisans than with catching fish. After all, from where they were anchored, the positioning of their boat or other signals could be seen with field glasses from the hilltop partisan stronghold of Lukac˘ka, a good forty minutes away by a steep uphill climb and ideally situated to move quickly to pick off isolated Germans patrolling in twos or threes. If this line of reasoning was correct, then the Nazi massacre became an ordinary moment, even a legitimate act of war. Until the collapse of Yugoslavia, only embittered anti-communist émigrés voiced the theory that Giovanni and Giuseppe had been killed by the partisans, but with the emergence of an independent Croatia it has become fashionable to recast this village event into yet another Serb/Muslim atrocity (Vidakovic Petrov 1989: 77–96). Perhaps the two local men were actually German collaborators, which would account for their steady success in bringing home fish and avoiding the patrol boats. More benignly, maybe they were just tired of fighting and had refused to leave home for a harsh life of guerrilla warfare and scavenging in the woods. Either way, the partisans, probably some Bosnian outsiders among them, decided to execute the recalcitrant villagers and set an example for any other able men who played both sides or who dallied about joining the cause. Certainly, the partisans later had plenty of machine-guns, so they might have had a few this early in the campaign, especially if they were not true locals but Muslims or Serbs who had infiltrated up the coast from one of Tito’s strongholds in Bosnia (Lobont 2004: 440–68). The outsiders, according to this created memory, waited until Giovanni and Giuseppe were unarmed, shot them in the back, towed them out to the middle of the cove, and left them there for all to see.

Food In December 1944 Maria’s husband worked in nearby Pula as a stevedore. He says he loaded and unloaded only foodstuffs and other such provisions essential for feeding the people; all military weapons and support supplies were handled directly by German army personnel. Before taking the job, he had been recovering at home from injuries suffered when, outside the port of Alexandria, the British had torpedoed the Italian merchant ship on which he was serving in a civilian capacity. Now that his injuries were healed, the partisans wanted him to join their side, but he did everything possible, including maiming himself again, to reject their command to join them in fighting for liberation from the Nazi-fascist occupiers. As far as he was concerned, during his months of recuperation it had been the partisans, not the Germans, who had stolen his food and terrified his family. About two months earlier he had been told by his immediate neighbour, herself a member of the local partisan council, that the time had come to get out. His name was about to be added to the death list, and she was warning him of this only because she knew he was essentially a good man whose stubbornness on this

World War II comes to an Istrian Village • 91 matter should not be punished by vengeance that would leave behind a helpless widow and two children. That very night he packed a small bag and left by the mountain paths for Pula, some forty kilometres away. Word that he was safely behind German lines and working regularly reached Maria back in the hamlet, as did his call to come to see him so he could give her some badly needed food (and, more probably, hard currency for trade on the black market). The dangers of travelling in wartime were many, but Maria, like many wives, was determined to make the trip. In order to pass safely through the partisan checkpoints she was sure to meet during the first ten kilometres of her trip, she obtained a permission slip from the very same neighbour who had warned her husband that his name was about to go on the death list. Next would come the German checkpoints, where you could be shot for possessing a partisan permission slip, but since she could show that her husband worked in Pula and therefore was under their protection, she believed the Germans would not search her thoroughly. She could not simply throw away the partisan slip, of course, because then she would have no way of returning home safely. In the evening her neighbour gave Maria a very official-looking document, printed in Cyrillic rather than the ‘Christian’ alphabet she had learned in school and could have read. The next morning she set off at 4: 00 a.m. on a journey that with luck would end in bed with her husband in Pula by nightfall. Her two young children she left with her sister in the hamlet. Less than one hour along the way, still before dawn, she encountered a makeshift partisan checkpoint, manned by local people she recognized. They laughed at her pass, which they also could not read, confiscated the chicken she had killed and cleaned the night before, along with the raisin bread she had baked, and marched her in the opposite direction to a jail cell somewhere beyond the nearby town of Labin. After being kept in darkness and without food or water until the next day, she was interrogated harshly concerning her husband’s whereabouts: how much money had he sent her and by whom? Where had she kept it hidden? Where were her two children staying while she was on the road? And where had she got the raisins? Then in the late afternoon they released her and for fourteen hours she walked towards home, through the night and without a permission slip from anyone. To this day, Maria lives in fear that if you talk too loudly about these things someone may hear you and cause trouble. She sleeps fitfully (Bozon and Thiesse 1990: 32–6). In 1951 Maria and her husband left the hamlet for a new life in Trieste and then in America. For many years they were refused permission to enter Yugoslavia, and Maria still deeply resents being denied permission to tend to her dying mother in 1965. She knows that it was local people, not some bureaucrat in Belgrade or Zagreb, who did her in. In 1971, however, the permission to visit finally came, and since then she has done so regularly. For Maria these are times of anguish, for the good neighbour who warned her husband that his name was on the death list is still

92 • Rudolph M. Bell there, alive and well, and surely it is she who told the local partisans about the intended trip to Pula and about the chicken and the raisin bread. It must be she who forbade Maria a farewell visit to her mother. Now the neighbour brings gifts of eggs and cheese; Maria swallows very hard and reciprocates with American jeans and Tylenol.

War German occupation of the Istrian peninsula in 1944 and early 1945 must be distinguished clearly from the more widely studied and commemorated experience of nearby regions of Yugoslavia. Further down the Dalmatian coast and in the interior of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italian occupiers were summarily replaced by German forces once the Badoglio government changed sides in mid-1943. The fight then became brutal but clean, between Tito’s unified partisan forces on one side and the German army on the other. Civilian casualties during these months were far lower than they had been during the immediately preceding years of the fascist puppet state of Croatia and in the suppression of Serbian resistance to Axis conquest. Atrocities there were, but most of the killing was among men in uniform (Siegman 1993: 351–6). In the Istrian peninsula, by contrast, the early war years brought no local horrors, relatively light casualties and some prosperity. Incorporation of the region into Italy proper had occurred over a generation ago and the Mussolini government had made great improvements in the area, not on the splendid scale of the Austrians in the nineteenth century in places such as Opatija, but still quite visible and useful. Local mines were operating at full capacity, as was the cement factory, and prices for agricultural goods were at all time highs. Men in their twenties were away at war, but many had the good fortune to make use of their traditional skills as sailors. Whether they served in the Italian navy or in the merchant marine, the dangers and hardships were far less severe than for ground troops. Even Maria’s husband, victim of a torpedo, at least survived. Along the coast the traditional agrarian economy always functioned without men of working age, who for centuries had migrated or sailed the seas, and so the war years were not highly disruptive. All this changed rapidly in late 1943 as a combination of factors fuelled a rapidly expanding civil war. The ideological appeal of Tito’s pan-Slavic nationalism was powerful (Sluga 2001: 63–82). Istrian volunteers trained in communism who had fought with Tito since 1941 now returned home to organize guerrilla brigades. Their recruitment efforts were especially successful with two groups: young men who had served in the Italian army and carried home their guns when the order came to change sides, and teenage boys with romantic zeal who had been too young to fight and now saw a second chance for glory.

World War II comes to an Istrian Village • 93 Resistance against the German occupiers quickly merged with the growing struggle against a more immediate enemy. Local fascist officials, some native and others from distant Sicily, had been living well for nearly two decades. They knew there was trouble ahead but had nowhere to go. Trapped in their town bureaucratic posts, they systematically looted the local economy for everything that could be converted into hard currency. Inevitably, they worked closely with the German occupiers. At its core each side was unambiguous. Fascist town elites, especially along the coast, collaborated more or less openly with Nazi forces, always citing civil decorum, safety and helplessness. They went to church and prayed for peace and deliverance, traded on the black market for hard currencies and gave just enough to the partisans to keep from being killed. Big landowners allied with them through intermarriage behaved similarly. On the other side, mountain people from the interior, joined by industrial workers in the coastal towns, formed small guerrilla units dedicated to making German occupation more difficult and costly, something for which they could get Allied support. As it became clear that the Nazis would leave soon, regardless of what the partisans achieved, the insurgents calculatingly redirected their best efforts away from killing Germans and towards gaining control of post-war Istria. To do this they had to turn a war of liberation into a civil war and thoroughly discredit or destroy their local enemies. These enemies lived openly in a well-to-do style, or at least a little better off than most partisans, and portrayed themselves as keepers of a western, Italian, Catholic, civilized tradition. In a pattern found elsewhere among middling peasants (Bokovoy 1998: 1–28; Stauter-Halsted 2001: 164–69), they disdained the partisans as eastern, Slavic, atheist, barbaric and destitute. Partisans, most of whom at this time suffered great hardships while hiding in the woods, had no means to effectively counter this harsh image, one widely held among stillpowerful town shopkeepers and tradesmen. The only way for hard-core partisans to win was to make neutrality an impossibility, and that is exactly what they did. Ultimately nearly half the population, about 300,000 people, migrated or were forced out of Istria, abandoning their possessions and property, usually without compensation. With this very brief historical overview as a backdrop, I now want to return to the hamlet of Kvarnerica and a youth named Pietro. Aged eighteen in 1943, he had never served in the Italian army, and when older boys started straggling home he was instantly taken with the heroics of combat. He was the first in the hamlet to join the partisan cause and the first to stay out overnight on patrol in the woods. His enthusiasm for the cause was infectious and everyone agrees that he was the ringleader who got more timid youths to join. Just one of many ironies is that Pietro never suffered so much as a scratch during two years of fighting, whereas some two dozen local names appear on the official memorial to the dead at the cemetery in

94 • Rudolph M. Bell Lukac˘ka. Partisan forces lived by taking food from villagers in an extremely dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the Germans. The real victims, of course, were the women, children and old men terrorized by both sides. According to my informants, the partisans came to your home at night or surprised you in a distant field at dawn, threatening to kill you if you had nothing for them to eat or if you refused to give it up. They say that the Germans came by day, took your food not out of hunger but to deny it to the enemy, and sometimes waited until nightfall to see if a partisan would show up, in which event his jaunty demeanour might well mean your death. In these circumstances some families survived and others did not; we need not quantify the matter to be sure that the women gave up as little as possible of their food to either side. Some had lovers or husbands among the partisans and surely they favoured the cause, but even these women could not possibly feed a squad of men. Information they gave more freely; much of the partisan success depended on networks of female informers who let them know exactly where and how many Germans were around the next bend. Other women had lovers or husbands at work in Italy, and their support for the partisan cause was always in doubt, always deeply suspected. These women had more hard currency hidden somewhere or other than did women who lacked outside connections. They had good reasons for being quite immune to the call for pan-Slavic unity and the overthrow of the Italian oppressors. They were easily accused of collaboration with the Nazis. Every attempted ambush, every enemy escape, every fortune or misfortune was attributed not to fate but to treachery. If the partisans had set a trap to ambush the Germans and somehow no Germans came that way, it was pretty clear that some wife with a husband in Trieste must have informed the enemy soldiers of the danger, no doubt in exchange for some sweet favour. Neither side gave quarter to the other, but their civilian brutalities were of differing qualities. German reprisal was less frequent and personal, more massive and indiscriminate. Partisan terror came daily and into your home. So it was when Pietro and two companions went to visit a woman living on the outskirts of Labin who was suspected of having informed the Germans about the location of some partisan ammunition. Her husband worked in Trieste and so she was alone except for her two children, aged two and four. After a brief shouting match, and in front of the children, Pietro plunged a knife into the woman’s chest and killed her. Then he and his companions set fire to her house and adjacent barn, burning them both to the ground. We know it was Pietro who killed the woman because he came home to Kvarnerica and boasted that he had got her right between the breasts. His outraged father slapped him and warned him that there are things you do in war but do not talk about. End of discussion. A couple of years later Pietro’s sweetheart’s family tried to get her to marry someone else, but she was in love and her relatives eventually gave in. His nieces and nephews on her side said that they were ashamed to have him as an uncle, but still they did not shun him openly. At his funeral many decades later I observed no obvious absences.

World War II comes to an Istrian Village • 95 The slain woman’s husband returned home after the war and swore vengeance, and upon reaching manhood her surviving son vowed the same. For decades, when Pietro, who migrated to Venice in 1947 and then to America in the early 1960s, went back to the hamlet for visits every five years or so, he always arrived unannounced. Still, he stayed around locally for several days each time and no one killed him. His death came from natural causes.

Forgetting The anthropologist Paul Connerton, in How Societies Remember, posits a fundamental distinction between the function of collective memory in a village versus a larger community (Connerton 1989; Bouvier 1993). In larger settings we must constantly introduce ourselves and convey enough about ourselves and our past to make us credible participants in whatever we are undertaking: bill collecting, teaching, voting, riding a bus. Thresholds of trust between two or more individuals may deepen rapidly but only through the sharing of memory, the revelation of self that requires a recalling of the past. Collective memory matters little because we belong to diverse groupings that do not share a common past. In a village things are very different. Collective memory is everything and immediately sets the scene and assigns the actors their expected roles. Everyone knows everything about everyone, and even a Martin Guerre cannot masquerade for long. New information is spread daily through networks of gossip, which function best when everyone learns everything more or less simultaneously, along with injunctions not to tell anyone else. The unfailing ability of villagers to spot a ‘Serb’ or a ‘Bosnian’ on the road to town is not based on ethnic differences in physique but simply on being ‘not recognized’. Istrian villagers have no business travelling from one place to another and so any stranger must be an outsider, a foreigner to the local culture. Horrors such as those I have recounted in these three brief narratives are in one respect not at all like the Nazi atrocities visited upon other European locales of memory. The well-known massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in France highlights the differences (Farmer 1999: 99–133). There the forces of brutality seem far away from the locus where the evil deeds were perpetrated. Even those most fanatically intent on remembering the past do so with a rational purpose in mind: never let it happen again. The ‘place of memory’ is preserved as a museum to record exactly how things looked at the time of the massacre and a new town is built nearby, drawing yet more sharply the distinction between the here and now versus the there and past, however haunting that past. The perpetrators of Istrian village atrocities, by contrast, are a living presence within, often the cousins or cousins-once-removed of those they killed. The place of memory is simultaneously the place of life. Bullet-pocked houses are repaired,

96 • Rudolph M. Bell the stains of spilled blood have been scrubbed away, and heavy underbrush hides the by-ways along which partisans marched. Even the ethnic or religious differences separating ‘us’ from ‘them’ that scholars have found in other communities with memories of how neighbours killed each other (Gross 2001) are absent in Kvarnerica. At the local level, the health of a collective psyche capable of nurturing daily activities depends on forgetting. Conscious efforts to avoid memory cues, concentration on retellings of happier pre-war stories, flat denials and refusals to discuss, all contribute to dissociated memories of war trauma (Absalom 1999: 40; Kirmayer 1996: 173–98). Istria’s villages, virtually all of which lost dozens or even hundreds of soldiers and civilians to one side or the other of the partisan struggle, held no fiftieth anniversary commemorations of atrocities committed on their soil, carried out against their people (Koonz 1994: 258–80). Even when Tito was alive, Partisan Memorial Day was celebrated not in the village square but rather at a regional restaurant in town, where the old-timers assembled to eat and get drunk, away from the people they had liberated. The very process of remembering fosters forgetting, while the attempt to memorialize facts results in the invention of traditions, phenomena also noted by scholars Oren Stier (2003: 191–217) for the Holocaust and Yael Zerubavel (1995: 197–213) for Masada. At the intimate crossroads of the village as well, collective forgetting, not collective remembering, is the way people get on with their daily lives. Pamela Ballinger’s recent study, History in Exile (2003), grapples in depth with situations parallel to those encountered in my stories from Kvarnerica. Her fieldwork focused primarily on the western Istrian coast and its exiles in Trieste, whereas the harshest local fighting and back-stabbing during the hard years of 1943–7 occurred in the interior and towards the eastern shores. Nonetheless, enough happened in every Istrian town and village to provide ample substance for remembering and for forgetting. She concludes that the bi-polar collectivities found in Istria to this day some sixty years later – exiles versus those who remained, Italian vs. Slav, Left vs. Right – continually reconstitute themselves ‘through practices of remembrance and contests over history which actors phrase in terms of singular and exclusive historical truths’ (Ballinger 2003: 268). The sense of entitlement to how a historical account is recalled also runs strongly among my informants, who, as for Ballinger’s, readily self-define themselves into sharply divided collectivities. But I found that these collectivities, while rigid in themselves, serve as the foundation for action only on a highly selective basis. The collective identities are more often set aside than invoked. For a villager to go to town, sit at the café and speak Italian with a cousin from Trieste is a decision to forget. When the now-married grandson of an exile comes from America for a whirlwind visit, speaking not a word of the local dialect but looking for the remains of the house where his ancestors lived, the villager who shows the way is

World War II comes to an Istrian Village • 97 choosing to forget old hostilities. In the seasonal tasks of bringing olives to the press, or hauling wood from a remote forest, or repairing a boat after a storm, there are economies of scale in setting aside feuds in order to form a temporary collective aimed at getting the task done efficiently. And if the effort to forget fails, there may well be total feud: the participants do not speak to each other; they look away if they pass on the road; they kill each other’s animals and destroy each other’s fences; they do not attend each other’s funerals.

A Coda on Interpretative Anthropology During her fieldwork in a Slovenian village, in some respects not so unlike the ones I have studied in nearby Istria, Irene Portis-Winner (2002: 44–5) found deep avoidances: Until the demise of communism in Slovenia, no villager would say anything derogatory about another, although there were strong internal fissures between families, particularly between those of former partisans and those of the former domobranci, the Slovene group that fought the partisans and collaborated with the occupiers. Nor did villagers mention tensions between the larger and smaller land holders and the once well-off millers, between the usually landless communists in the village and the anticommunists who were in the majority, or between neighbors whose houses huddled together very closely. Yet internal conflicts could be deduced from indirect and nonverbal signals such as intonation, facial expression, and general body language. Indeed, in our long hours of conversation, neighbors rarely mentioned each other despite the fact that a mere narrow path separated their homes.

The narratives related in the present chapter, known to me in varying forms for over thirty years, certainly before the demise of communism in the former Yugoslavia, obviously resulted from exchanges that got past the sort of stonewalling reported by Portis-Winner. I would attribute the breakthroughs in some significant measure to the fact that my wife did a lot of the listening, often in my absence and among women-only groups. I then used this ‘knowledge’ while engaging in my own conversations with the same people, and with the men as well. Rather than attempt to present a semiotic analysis of what happened, I shall tell it as I think (indeed, I’ve heard their accounts third-hand) the villagers themselves understood the stranger/scholar who visited them. My encounters with the hamlet of Kvarnerica began in the summer of 1971, preceding a year as a Fulbright lecturer in Genoa. My wife introduced me to the hamlet, her birthplace, a home she had not seen since leaving for Trieste in 1951 (Halbwachs 1992: 54–83). Driving the seventeen kilometres of unpaved road from the town of Labin to the hamlet of Kvarnerica was a nightmare of spoiling meat, leaking juice bottles and a cranky child, and for the last stretch I should have had a donkey or a

98 • Rudolph M. Bell jeep. Electricity had been introduced only two years earlier, and the home we stayed in, that of a kindly great aunt, like the majority of homes in the hamlet, had no refrigeration and no running water. We made the requisite adjustments, and with the exceptions of 1973 and 1979 we have lived in Kvarnerica for two or more months each summer and on several occasions for a month around the New Year as well. The obstacles to understanding the hamlet’s collective memory have been many, and I would not claim to have overcome them completely. Among the foremost is my failure to grasp the things that ‘go without saying’. More than three decades ago, I obtained permission from the local priest to copy all the parish’s registers of births, marriages and deaths. Most villagers have heard that I subsequently wrote a scholarly article drawn in part from the evidence contained in those books (Bell 1974: 243–70) and that I talk about their experiences at professional conferences and in my classroom. They admire and respect my knowledge of their ancestries but do not realize that to know that nearly a century ago their widowed grandmother remarried very quickly tells me nothing about why she did so. Evening chats, indoors around the fire in winter or outside in summer, yield mixed results. The local folk are much more interested in the latest plane crash over California or a flood of the Mississippi than they are in recounting who among them first joined the partisans or how they hid a prosciutto from the Germans. The events of 1943–7 are painful, and it is difficult when three or more are gathered together not to be confronting opposing memories. I’ve tried asking questions and listening while playing chess, draughts and briscola, but all these games require too much concentration and interest my opponents much more than rehashing the past. Hiking is better, especially with an old partisan willing to show you the path to his former retreat, but the fighters are getting frail and the paths are dangerously overgrown. Fishing provides the best occasion for reflection. Once you drop the parangal, you need to row quietly a few hundred metres away, drop a large stone to serve as an anchor and wait for an hour or so while the fish bite. It’s dark, one-on-one, and if the conversation gets too close to a raw nerve, you can always squirm a bit and decide it must be time to pull up the anchor and go to get the fish. The resulting evidence is seldom chronological and occasionally it is chaotic; certainly the methodology transgresses the boundaries some believe should ‘exist between the authorial subject’s voice and that of the interlocutors’ (Portis-Winner (2002: 44, citing Vincent Crapanzano). But I do believe that these stories matter and that their preservation for the human record is worthwhile.

References Absalom, Roger (1999), ‘Peasant memory and the Italian Resistance, 1943–45’, in R.J.B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (eds), Italian Fascism. History, Memory and Representation, London: Macmillan.

World War II comes to an Istrian Village • 99 Abu-Lughod, Lila (1993), Writing Women’s Worlds. Bedouin Stories, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ballinger, Pamela (2003), History in Exile. Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, Rudolph M. (1974), ‘The transformation of a rural village: Istria, 1850– 1972’, Journal of Social History, vol. 7, no. 4. Bokovoy, Melissa (1998), Peasants and Communists. Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–1953, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bouvier, Jean-Claude (1993), ‘La mémoire au village et la conscience des mutations’, in Frank Alvarez-Péreyre (ed.), Milieus et mémoire, Jerusalem: CRFJ. Bozon, Michel and Thiesse, Anne-Marie (1990), ‘The collapse of memory: the case of farm workers (French Vexin, Pays de France)’, in Marie-Noelle Bourguet, Lucette Valensi and Nathan Wachtel (eds), Between Memory and History, Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers. Connerton, Paul (1989), How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farmer, Sarah (1999), Martyred Village. Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldstein, Ivo (1999), Croatia. A History, trans. Nikolina Jovanovi?, McGill: Queen’s University Press. Gross, Jan T. (2001), Neighbors. The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice (1992), ‘The collective memory of the family’, in Lewis A. Coser (ed. and trans.), Maurice Halbwachs on Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herzfeld, Michael (1991), A Place in History. Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kirmayer, Laurence J. (1996), ‘Landscapes of memory: trauma, narrative, and dissociation’, in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (eds), Tense Past. Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, London: Routledge. Koonz, Claudia (1994), ‘Between memory and oblivion: concentration camps in German memory’, in John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lobont, Florin (2004), ‘Antisemitism and Holocaust denial in post-communist Eastern Europe,’ in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust, London: Palgrave. Nemec, Gloria (1998), Un paese perfetto. Storia e memoria di una comunità in esilio: Grisignana d’Istria, 1930–1960, Gorizia: Libreria Editrice Goriziana (Istituto Regionale per la Cultura Istriana).

100 • Rudolph M. Bell Oliva, Gianni (2002), Foibe. Le stragi negate degli Italiani della Venezia Giulia e dell’Istria, Milan: Mondadori. Portis-Winner, Irene (2002), Semiotics of Peasants in Transition. Slovene Villagers and Their Ethnic Relatives in America, Durham: Duke University Press. Siegman, Henry (1993), ‘La Bosnie et les leçons de la mémoire’, in Emile Malet, Résistance et mémoire: d’Auschwitz à Sarajevo, Paris: Hachette. Sluga, Glenda (2001), The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border. Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe, Albany: State University of New York Press. Stauter-Halsted, Keely (2001), ‘Rural myth and the modern nation: peasant commemorations of Polish national holidays, 1879–1910’, in Maria Bucer and Nancy Wingfield, Staging the Past. The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Stier, Oren Baruch (2003), Committed to Memory. Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Suppan, Arnold (2003), ‘Yugoslavism versus Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene Nationalism’, in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case, Yugoslavia and Its Historians. Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vidakovic Petrov, Krinka (1989) ‘Memory and oral tradition’, in Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory. History, Culture and the Mind, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wolff, Larry (2001), Venice and the Slavs. The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zerubavel, Yael (1995), Recovered Roots. Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

–5– Public Memories and Personal Stories Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres Francesca Cappelletto

This chapter is the product of research conducted among survivors of massacres committed by the Nazis in three Tuscan villages in 1944: Civitella, Vallucciole and Sant’Anna di Stazzema, which together lost an estimated 758 of their people.1 In each of these communities, the massacres entailed the murder of unarmed civilians. Extermination followed a macabre ritual which was similar in all three villages. In Civitella, German troops arrived in the villages in the early morning, rushed into the church, where a service was being held, and forced the people to gather in the main square. Meanwhile, other soldiers broke into the houses, threw the occupants out into the street and set the houses on fire. They separated the men from the women and children, then marched the men to the nearby school and shot them. In Vallucciole, the SS shot all the men of the village, set fire to the houses and killed all the inhabitants, including women, children and elderly people. The massacre in Sant’Anna di Stazzema was one of those perpetrated in the ‘preparatory phase of the incursion in an area “infested with guerrilla fighters” ’ (Franzinelli 2002: 4). The population was swollen with refugees from the Allied bombardment of Pisa and Livorno. In fact, the Germans had given an evacuation order sending people to the commune of Serravezza, of which Sant’Anna was a part, because they wanted to form a line of resistance in that area. On 12 August 1944, two days after the liberation of Florence by the Allies, an SS formation surrounded the village. When the alarm was raised by some of the villagers, many men hid in the woods, afraid that they would be taken off to forced labour. Only these men and a few others survived the slaughter, during which, among other atrocities, 110 children were taken from Sant’Anna and put to death. The SS combed the houses methodically, forcing people out into the street or into a particular house, then setting fire to it. In one house the body of a pregnant woman was found. Her belly had been cut open and the foetus was lying on the ground, still attached to the umbilical cord. Few survived these horrific events, because the order was to shoot and kill everyone. The survivors ‘bear overwhelming witness to an experience so extreme, 101

102 • Francesca Cappelletto so dark, that without their testimony it would be unimaginable’ (Bravo, Davite and Jalla 1990: 97). Elsewhere I have analysed how public memories of the past are conveyed in those villages, their social patterning and emotional quality (Cappelletto 2003). The focus of that study was on the transformation of remembrance into shared memories, the social actors’ modes of perceiving events in an historical past and the process through which their stories acquired a form beyond the identity of the individual teller. I showed how the experiences of others were incorporated into a given narrative and presented as if they were the narrator’s own. Why did some informants recount events as if they had seen them, when in fact they had not been witnesses to them? Tonkin (1992) identified one crucial aspect of relevance here; namely, that narrative reformulation of past experience is a form of symbolic representation and has to do with the process through which we internalize the outer world. Starting with the assumption that the narratives shared within a group are a way of thinking about the experience, I argued that the visual images formed in the inner world become socialized in the outer world and represent a vehicle to communicate the memory of that group (Cappelletto 2003). In this chapter, I focus on the structure of community memory relating to those Nazi massacres and on its mechanisms of transmission. I describe ways of representing, in the present, a past that will not pass and that therefore gives form to the present. Story-telling sessions, when members of the community gather together, are current events characterized by sharing and repeating recollections; they are events in which past and present blend together. There is a lacuna in historical research on the period of the German occupation in Italy, and the experiences of the communities involved have not yet been fully investigated and understood (Kershaw and Lewin 1997), ‘either as an object of repression or as a subject of opposition and political resistance, of adaptation and collaboration’ (Klinkhammer 1993: 21). This chapter also takes steps to fill that gap. The narratives are treated as ideological representations of the massacres, as they have unfolded in time; they contain an element of political rhetoric as well. Bypassing the vexed question of the ‘truly historical’ as opposed to the subjective oral, I argue that oral documentation contributes to our understanding of the cultural moulding of testimony from an anthropological perspective. The narratives are examined not just because they help to reconstruct what happened; they also show the significance that events are given and the ways in which they are represented by different social actors. I first examine how the ‘story’ has been represented through narrative over time and describe the social networks which form the agent of remembrance. I then consider some processes of group memory in the context of current interest in the

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 103 rethinking of those events. Although there are discrepancies in the interpretation of the past events which focus on the theme of responsibilities, a shared memory has been cultivated by groups and has evolved into their ‘own story’. I seek to show how this group memory of the massacres has, over time, become a ‘cultural artefact’, how it has become ‘the story’ in which all the others, such as ‘the genealogical story’, converge. In order to understand the way local people interpret, I will analyse the social dimension of the imagination. From a methodological point of view, the research is poised between observable experience, the words and actions of the people who engage in remembering, and the interior states they claim to experience. These interior states are ‘sensations, motives and intentions’ that pose greater problems of interpretation than public expressions do, because ‘they are not directly observable. Often they have no conventional definition and can be deliberately concealed by those who experience them’ (Scheff 1990: 53). Until very recently, these mental states belonging to the domain of introspection were considered to be outside the ambit in which the social sciences operate, because they lack a behavioural correlative and thus a ‘measurable’ objective manifestation (Maquet 1986). Experiences that are subjective and objective at the same time are a central focus of interest. I shall refer to the current debate on mental images and their visual content, using the concept of ‘image-memory’, or memories founded on iconic images. I have asked myself how visual images, created by an individual and then narrated within the group, come to be commonly shared. The analytical strategy takes account of elements in the narrative deriving from the social actor’s own lived experience and particular way of voicing emotional difficulties. The significance of that experience for the speaker and his particular way of remembering are important elements of each interview. A traditional, qualitative, ethnographic approach enables me to locate catalysing experiences in informants’ representations of the past. The passage from spoken to written language is problematic, in that the interpretative voice of the author risks superimposing itself on that of the subject (Kohler Riessman 1993). Therefore, I have considered the narrating experience in itself. For example, I consider the way in which some aspects of experience are expressed through metaphor, ordered in time and put in relation one to another. The past cannot be preserved as a coherent whole. Narration is in fact both a way to understand past events and an event in itself, a kind of social act (Mattingly 1998).

Premise During the last two years of World War II many mass murders were committed by German troops in Italy, mainly along the so-called ‘Gothic Line’, where the Germans

104 • Francesca Cappelletto set up a barrier to resist the Allied advance. Many of these killings were not done one by one but in groups, and in several cases entire communities were exterminated. These massacres were part of the last phase of the Nazis’ war in Italy, in which ‘all the civilian population became potential hostages in the hands of the occupying arms’ (Pavone 2001: 488). Nazi occupation of Italy followed the fall of Mussolini (25 July 1943) and the royal government’s declaration of withdrawal from the war (8 September 1943). The term ‘Nazi-fascism’ is used ‘because contemporaries accuse the two regimes of joint responsibility, and because of the objective involvement of fascism in atrocities’ (Woolf in this volume). The violence that was raging in Italy after 8 September 1943 arrived after a long period of war violence (Pavone 1991). Between 1943 and 1944 more than 9,000 unarmed civilians were slaughtered by German troops (Schreiber 2000). Opposition to Nazi atrocities was a driving force behind the main core of the Resistance, the armed revolt against Nazi occupying troops and the fascist republicans, who were allies of the Nazis. It also became a cultural turning-point for post-war Italian democracy, in so far as it represented one of the basic principles of the new constitution promulgated in 1947. The key strategic objective of the German occupying army was to hold the civilian population responsible for partisan actions and to exterminate them (Pavone 1991; Klinkhammer 1997). Klinkhammer maintains that ‘the population itself had to be called to account for the partisan presence […]; terrorizing the civilian population was thus a means, ruthlessly employed by the German military, of fighting the partisans. Its scope was twofold: on the one hand, the Germans hoped that it would stir up hatred for the partisans in the civilian population; on the other hand, it was supposed to exert pressure on the rebels to abandon their resistance activity, which usually operated in their home regions’ (Klinkhammer 1997: 92). Very few of those responsible for wartime crimes in general have ever been prosecuted and condemned.2 Like many other massacres, the Tuscan mass murders were also forgotten in the self-conscious story of the nation. The trial relating to the Sant’Anna massacre is one of several that was ‘temporarily shelved’ for reasons of state by the Council of the Italian Military Court (Schreiber 2000). According to recent historical studies (e.g. Pezzino 2001), the Allies had intended to stage an Italian Nuremberg, but in December 1947 it was decided to discontinue court martial trials.3 Now, 60 years later, the ‘closet of shame’ has been reopened and Nazi criminals charged with massacres.

The Dead and the Living Dead In the Tuscan villages of Civitella, Vallucciole and Sant’Anna di Stazzema, the extent and intensity of the violence inflicted upon the victims were enormous. Over the years the survivors have been asked to remember and to transmit the memory of those events, not only for themselves but also for others. The ‘story’

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 105 was formulated twice: internally and externally, with the information repeated either within the local group or selectively to others deemed able to transmit the memory. However, for political reasons, the ‘particular histories’ of these survivors were ‘left out’ of the story for half a century. The sense of a lack of justice and their own powerlessness made the communities retreat into silence for long periods. Survivors did not want to tell the story to outsiders. It belonged to them, among whom the practice of narration continued: ‘those of us who are still here talk about it all the time … it has always been on our minds’. Today all three villages are imbued with a cult of death. The living speak of the dead as though they were still alive. Sant’Anna has transformed itself into a museum of memory. A sacred atmosphere pervades the small village, in which the main street has been renamed ‘The Street of Remembrances’. The church, in front of which 130 bodies were burnt, stands at one end of it. Nearby there is a museum for martyred resisters, built of cement. The only public meeting place is a little shop run by a talkative villager, who has what is now recognized as ‘the social identity of the survivor’ (Wieviorka 1999). He was around twenty years old at the time of the massacre and belongs to a veritable community of memory there. In the testimonies of several villagers who were children at the time of the massacres, the narrator identifies by name the loved ones he lost. In doing so, he reminds others of their own tragic losses. A salient characteristic of such collective interweaving of memories is the formation of a liminal dimension, on the border between past and present. The dead do not seem to be really dead; rather, they are ‘called’. Likewise, the living are in part already dead, for, as narrators often observe, ‘it has always been a spent life’. The relationship between living and dead is patterned in narratives where fragments of aural memory are the most important pieces of personal memory: The only thing I remember and it still makes me shudder … evening, the voices … calling the names out loud … because the corpses were unrecognizable. The hope raised that the men would return [from the villages, where they had been hiding], the hope that one of your own family, perhaps, had escaped! The thing I remember is those names … being yelled out, you know, it echoes … from one place to another … this calling for the loved ones … to see if they were still alive, if they would respond.

It is as if they were still trying to establish a firm nexus between the living and the dead. Sant’Anna seems to have experienced a prolonged death, a sort of living death, because ‘we lived with death for a long time’. In fact, in the years after the massacre, the dead physically lived beside the living: ‘In the very first years 1945, 1946’, said one person who was a child at the time, ‘I became … I wasn’t afraid of anything … I found cadavers in the woods, but it had no effect on me at all. Those who were killed in the woods were then buried there, but

106 • Francesca Cappelletto afterwards, naturally … the animals dug, and you could see bits sticking out … legs, feet, skulls … They are the living dead, who produce terror, terror … then I didn’t go out anymore, especially when it got dark.’

As in other communities where massacres were perpetrated, burial was in most cases only symbolic because it happened years after the massacre in which the bodies had been destroyed and obliterated altogether. In Sant’Anna those who were about to be burnt took out photographs of themselves in a last heart-rending hope of being recognized afterwards. This gesture was, of course, rendered futile by the flames. Very few of the men, women and children were recognized after the killings and thus not buried in the cemetery. A few others were buried where their bodies were found, now marked by tombstones as a memorial to them. Most of the remains, however, were thrown into a mass grave in the piazza, in front of the church. The absence of a corpse, in so many cases, impeded the grieving process. ‘To bury the body,’ observes Portelli (1999: 253), recalling the Italian intellectual Ernesto De Martino, ‘means making it “pass” for us, which transforms the loss into value, to overcome the crisis of mourning.’ Using the words of the same author, we might argue that at Sant’Anna the burial ‘began with its opposite’, that is, with the exhumation of the bones and their transfer to the charnel house in 1948. Since then, every year the commemoration is marked by an intensity of emotion that makes it seem like a true funeral rite. These are also the times when the members of the community gather together and recount ‘their story’.

A Mnemonic Community In all three villages those who survived the massacres continue to tell what they consider to be ‘their story’. It is the story of events that destroyed the world as they knew it in 1944, which now seems to be a veritable golden age. A new reality has slowly risen up from its ashes. The survivors still form a society that remembers, a mnemonic community not defined by spatial boundaries but rather by the duration of the story through time. None of them has been able to put the past behind them. They are unable to distance themselves from the memory of the Nazi atrocities. History has been embroidered and elaborated into a vast narration that has affected the entire social group. As one woman puts it, ‘no matter how you go about it, you end up there. In one way or another we end up talking about the massacre or something related to it.’ The ‘internal voices’ which every survivor has endured for fifty long years have joined those derived from ‘interwined voices put into words’ (Simone 2002: 24). These ‘voices’ have never ceased to circulate among the survivors, or among the people of the village: ‘I grew up with this … always the same stories … I came to recognize the burden when I saw the same things happening between Kosovo and

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 107 Yugoslavia.’ Neither the survivors nor their children can get away from it. Continuity in time is, in fact, the central element of memory that takes the form of actions and narrations: the story is passed on within the group, as it adds members, and is also recounted to outsiders. ‘The story,’ one woman said, ‘has been told and retold forever.’ The total disruption of the local social order by Nazi violence is overcome by telling the tale over and over again. Repetitive recitation of ‘the story’ establishes continuity and in itself is an attempt to survive past atrocities. It is as if the story, repeated within the group, reassures and reminds the group’s members that they had in fact escaped the tragedy (Cappelletto 2003). In the narratives, individual and public memories intertwine and blend together. The network of people who remember serves as a support to the story. In the storytelling, ‘those who are left’ refer to one another continuously in a network of relationships including both living and dead: ‘Everyone has told me this,’ a person from Sant’Anna said, ‘“Get out and hide”’ Other villagers variously observed: ‘My mother always told me everyone was hanged from the poles.’ ‘From what they told me, this Pietro and his son Amos and this Salvatore have told me the story a thousand times!’ ‘This Ettore … and then you will see if Federico remembers, but he must remember even better than I do because they were his relatives … they lifted him by the belt, and he played dead.’ ‘Enrico can answer that; he was left in the pile of dead people … and, at Vaccareccia, Milena can answer because she was there.’

In these communities, narration is a public, shared act, in terms of fact; for the narration can take place as a narrative session that revolves around the facts of 1944. It is also shared through recalling the narrations of others, which are incorporated into ‘the story’. Such narration is processual, formed over the years. It is also multivocal, with individual and group content intermingling. A process of selection has certainly taken place over time, but only in the semantic memory, not the factual. In the narratives, the description of events, put together like stone chips in a mosaic, seems to have been minutely sifted and subjected to careful examination by the members of the group. In many cases, the narration is composed of visual pictures, of scenes that are fragments of actions. The rest of the story is the fruit of acquired knowledge, and this too is transformed into images of its visual content. Occasions for narrating include the above-mentioned story-telling sessions, when members of the community gather together, and the narrations repeated to outsiders. The narrative sessions entail a socializing process and memory practice, which, in turn, reveal connections between the individual and collective components of war memory. In fact, eyewitnesses only saw what happened in the place where they happened to be at the time. They learned what happened in other parts of the village through group story-telling. Even those who were not witnesses have

108 • Francesca Cappelletto listened to the story of the massacre countless times and have made it their own through the remembered words of survivors. In the Tuscan villages studied, narratives are a prominent form of social interaction in commemorative celebrations, where commemoration consists in ‘an intensified remembering’ (Casey 1989: 217). They usually take place on the anniversary of the massacre. At these sessions the atmosphere is intense, and the massacre is viewed as a sacred and almost mythical event. Involving a network of relatives, neighbours and friends, the narrative sessions employ a group mnemonic technique that includes elements of traditional repetition (Cappelletto 1998). Survivors conceptualize memory as commemoration, which is double-edged. It involves an intensified narration of tragic past events and pilgrimages to the places of the massacre, as well as forms of devotion performed in the homes of survivors. Memory of the massacres appears as an ‘absolute memory’ of words and actions, dominating all other contents of memory. In one house a woman pointed out that the walls of one room were covered with photographs of the many relatives she had lost in the massacre. She said that the photographs had made her daughter grow up ‘an old woman’; it was as if they had trapped her in the time of the massacre, a time that never passes, an ‘intransitive memory’ (Todorov 1995). But the mother too was trapped in that past that had never gone away since the day of the massacre. She continued: ‘I have seen them cry … always telling the story … the 12th of August; even the first years were one long cry and … a terrible thing!’ In fact, the tireless narration gives form to the present. The commemorations are experiences in themselves. They are memory lived in the present, as it is understood in the three villages, and not just a monotonous and endless rehashing of the traces of the past. As Elizabeth Tonkin observed with regard to the literature on memory and time, narrative is not to be conceived as a sort of instrument of memory: ‘telling and remembering are themselves events, not only a description of events’ (Tonkin 1992).

How ‘the Story’ is Represented through Narrative: Aspects of Genealogical Memory In the process of constructing public memory at community level, the transmission of memory through words occurs horizontally, among peer groups. As some people observed, ‘even the kids told the story, each one told his experience and his story’, or ‘we swapped stories’. It also occurs vertically, from parents to children, as indicated by a common refrain: ‘I first found out about it from my parents.’ The story begins with changes that the family suffered because of the massacre, by recognizing the individuals who died. A genealogical structure is used as the framework for the story, so that those who have disappeared can be placed in the family network: they are ‘our’ dead who are ‘called’. Transmission within the

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 109 family provides those who were children in 1944 with a wider context of knowledge for their own personal memories. For the children of survivors and for their own children’s children, the memory of the massacre was, in fact, a non-material inheritance received in infancy. Children were told about it very early in life, so that such knowledge and its emotional content formed a permanent part of their unconscious minds, which then fed upon the reiteration of their memory, the multiple re-evocations: I don’t remember seeing the soldiers, but I went to mass with my mama when I was little, I won’t say two or three years old, because I don’t remember, but certainly after that … We went to mass, then we came out … all of those who had survived had lost at least one family member, most had six, seven, eight, ten dead … cousins, nephews, all related … And the crying!! But then I didn’t understand.

In another testimony, a survivor observed: So my first years of life … during the war, these soldiers came, but when you are little you don’t take it seriously, I don’t know if I thought it was just a story, a fairy tale … and afterwards I began to understand.

When the ‘fairy tale’ is ‘understood’, the person to whom the memory has been transmitted becomes himself a narrator, a bearer of memory, and from that moment on he, too, contributes to the re-evocations: ‘I’m telling you the truth, just as they told it to me.’ There are two criteria of truth: to have witnessed the events or to have heard them recollected. The children take on the role of those who give voice to the memory of the massacre. Compare, for example, a story told by a mother and daughter. The text below is the story as told by the mother during an interview by a local historian, which was reported by Borella (Raiuno 2000). The italicized parts were told by the daughter when she recounted the story to me during the ethnographic research. On the morning of August 12th, we got up early because we already feared that something was going to happen. I went to the end of the piazza and I saw M.B. [another woman from the village] running and looking frightened: ‘Run away! The Germans are in Compito’ [a neighbourhood of Sant’Anna]. She had heard about it from someone else … but it was too late, because the Germans were already upon us. They took us there to the piazza, in the open area. They put us all against the wall. There were about twenty-five of us. Some of us had two children, some had three. I had a baby girl nine months old. They put us there and brought out the machine-gun, closer than this [she indicates the microphone], and a commander who had come from the hill cried ‘Raus! Raus!’ We all screamed because we were afraid … we had heard that they always said that word before they started killing. But instead they took us and made us stand in single file. One of them in front, one behind, and us in the middle. They were armed to

110 • Francesca Cappelletto the teeth! They made us walk through the flames, the fire, because they had already set fire to E.’s house, and then we went down to M.’s house, away from the flames … They took us down. There was a group of them … I turned round to see if the others from the piazza were with us, and one of them struck me on the hip with his rifle. And I was left there by the big chestnut tree … now it is all overgrown, but then it was clear … I saw that the roof had caved in on my parents’ house, and my legs gave way. I couldn’t stand up any longer. The baby was heavy. They all looked at me as they passed. And I could already see the company [of SS]. And the last one who passed me said to me three times, ‘Signora, go home, go home!’, but I didn’t go because I couldn’t stand up. I started to cry … and then I heard shots, then the mooing of the cows … I stayed there. Finally I heard a little voice, but after a long time … I cried a lot … But where can I go? Where can I go? … L. [the baby] was nine months old. I heard a little voice. I stood up and saw a hand going like this [beckoning]. It was like seeing God! But I didn’t even know who it was. ‘Come with me,’ she said. It was D., a woman from Farnocchia. She’s dead now, but if I am alive I owe it to her. She came and took the baby from me. ‘I can’t!’ ‘Come. We are down in a cave.’ We spent the morning in this cave. There was D. and her husband, who was ill. He said to me: ‘Signora, don’t let that baby cry, because if they kill me that’s one thing, but if they kill [the baby]?’ N. was there and P. [two other women from the village], and I don’t remember exactly who else. We went all day without eating, drinking or going to the toilet. We hardly breathed for fear!

Comparing the daughter’s account with the mother’s, we can see that in the daughter’s story the more ego-centred elements are transmitted, those elements that refer to the daughter herself (the ‘baby’ of the mother’s story). The daughter’s account centres around her infant self: she who was to become the next bearer and transmitter of the memory. This means that, even in the memory of one who was not a witness, the accent falls on autobiographical aspects of the story. Following Marc Bloch’s reflections on the superimposing of the generations that characterizes the two world wars (Bloch 1969), I might argue that here we have two contiguous generations for which ‘personal time’ and ‘social time’ have been united by the fact that they were witnesses to the event. This fact has had the effect of extending the lives of the older generation and shortening those of the younger generation, as we saw in the example of the mother who had made her daughter grow up ‘an old woman’.

Episodic and Semantic Recollections: Emigrants’ and Immigrants’ Memories Two types of memory have been identified by social psychologists: episodic and semantic memory. This important distinction emerges from the analysis of the war narratives here under scrutiny. In the narratives of emigrants, the semantic component is more accentuated; it is associated with ‘general world knowledge’

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 111 (Tulving 1972). Their experiential memory is given less emphasis compared to the more abstract, general and declarative form of memory. Frequently these emigrants maintain that the guilt lies with the war and that it must be found out who gave the Nazis the order to kill everyone. Emigrants’ narratives confirm Bloch’s assertion about the memory of episodes from the revolt in Madagascar of 1947: namely, that the re-evocation of past events is not the same thing as remembering (Bloch 1998). An experience is condensed into memory that is subjected over time to reformulation, and is retold. Such reformulation is not of the experience itself, which is no longer available to consciousness, but rather of the traces of the experience, which are mnemonic rather than verbal. It could be a re-evocation of things that others, not the narrator himself, have experienced. The memory is a preliminary formation or a crystallization of the experience. It can then become the object of multiple reformulations, which revive emotions in others and become part of their autobiographical experience. This helps explain how individual and group memory are formed and maintained. The memory of the Tuscan emigrants is more like that of the survivors’ children. Both are removed from the events, in time (children) or in space (emigrants). The emigrants have removed themselves from their original village society, come in contact with different societies, and mulled over their trauma in places far from where the massacres happened. Emigration is an ‘obstacle to the maintenance of memories’: ‘in general, those who remain in the places where they were born can better recall themselves and their lives’ (Bettizza 1999: 53). The children of survivors have also mulled over the remembrance, often compounding their temporal distance from the event with spatial distance, because they moved away from the village. On the other hand, immigrants (‘those from outside’) ‘know the story like everyone else’. ‘Outsiders’ who moved to the three Tuscan villages (and among them are new spouses of those who were widowed) ‘learn the story’. A process of acculturation takes place, and the massacre is at the centre of this. Those who don’t belong to the village but are relatives of villagers express the desire to speak out and tell the story like everyone else. Learning the story is part of the process of absorbing the local culture; becoming a fellow-villager entails this narrative training, which consists in the learning and actual retelling of the story. Autobiography and history here coincide.

A Fractured War Remembrance These repeated and persistent acts of remembrance gave rise over time to a choral narrative, thought of as their ‘own story’, the agent of which is the mnemonic community of survivors and their children. The descriptive elements of the narration are cohesive and consistent, despite the fact that it is composed of fragments of information from different sources that have been pieced together. By contrast, in

112 • Francesca Cappelletto the interpretative dimension there are several discrepancies. In fact, the motifs that run most pervasively through the recollections are fraught with tension. They revolve around the theme of responsibility and of understanding at least how and by whom (if not why) an act was committed that still today seems a senseless slaughter. The principal reason why the remembrance became so tortured was the fact that it was a ‘divided memory’. In the narrative heart of stories about the massacres of Civitella and Sant’Anna, the structure that sustained them was the theme of the partisans’ guilt. Some people bitterly blame the partisans and claim a causal relation between resistance activity and SS reprisal. Other narrators, however, make no such claim. In Civitella the main accusation thrown at the partisans is that of exposing the local population to retaliation by killing German SS soldiers, without providing any form of protection for the local people, and of actually abandoning them after the event. There is less emphasis on this aspect in Sant’Anna, although it is certainly present. In Vallucciole the narratives revolve around the Nazi-fascists’ guilt. Many stories implicitly or explicitly affirm that those ‘really’ responsible were the partisans. The Nazi-fascists inflicted death, but this was taken for granted, so to speak; they had to follow orders. The Nazis were the actual executors; but those who acted ‘freely’ were the partisans and the local fascists, who often came from elsewhere. They were the ones who provoked the murderous madness; they were the main cause of the massacres. The fractured ‘story’ is embodied in actions concerning spatial and commemorative memory. In 1971 the ‘Association of the Martyrs of Sant’Anna’ was established. A similar organization, the ‘Committee for Honours’, was formed in 1991. The history of these two associations, founded by the villagers to commemorate their dead, shows how they are permanently in disagreement over the organization of commemorative events.

The History of Memory in Relation to Politics The struggle against forgetting in these Tuscan communities has not been uniform over time, because remembering, as historians love to say, is an activity anchored in the present. It is not simply a reconstruction of the past but a weapon of the present (Watchel 1986; Todorov 1995). Nevertheless, there is no perception of processual change, because this process obliterates itself in passing (Fentress and Wickham 1992). In the early stages of my fieldwork, some villagers were suspicious about my research. In Sant’Anna they often asked me if it was really ‘that’ I wanted to know, that is to say, ‘whose fault it was’. In a sense, I was ‘suspected’ of wanting to enquire into their own divided memory about conflicting political attitudes. Identifying in a narrative ‘whose fault it was’ also keenly interested ‘those who

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 113 came from outside’. It was a relief to them and to me when I explained that I was interested in knowing how that past history was dealt with over the years, and at present. I also wanted to know what networks of social relations had sustained their divided memory. The latter, too, has a history, and this was something I wanted to reconstruct. The memory of the killings has in any case passed through diverse political positions. In the immediate post-war period, mourning was the dominant concern. In the three villages, ‘talking about it [the massacre] went on for years, until the early 1950s, the period of family reconstruction’. At that time, the need for ‘active’ memory was attenuated: ‘The families were out of it,’ explained one inhabitant of Sant’Anna, ‘and perhaps they did not want to hear it spoken of too much.’ In the 1960s, however, active memory was revived again, but attention was focused then on discussions and explanations from outside, that is to say on the interaction (and entangling) of local memory and national memory. The theme of the partisans’ guilt has undergone a similar temporal transformation, and its changes through time form a significant commentary on successive periods of contemporary Italian history. The tendency to blame the partisans gained ground during the Cold War: ‘we villagers criticized what we had seen with our own eyes’. In the 1970s the theme of the partisans’ guilt was still relevant. That was the period in which people from outside, such as the right-wing author Pisanò, began openly to manipulate the information provided by the villagers. The villagers felt used and refused to give further interviews. ‘In the 1970s you could not say that there were Italians involved as well [among those responsible for the massacre]. More than the Germans, it was the Italians [who were responsible]; where there were only Germans, they [the villagers] were allowed to run away, but where there were Italians and Germans, they killed everyone.’ Some people maintain that, in the 1970s, the possibility of Sant’Anna di Stazzema receiving an honorary gold medal encouraged villagers to keep silent about the partisans’ guilt: ‘[My fellow-villagers] pressed me not to say that there were Italians allied with the Germans at Sant’Anna, because if there were, nothing would be done [i.e., if I spoke out, Sant’Anna would not receive the gold medal], even if you said the partisans were to blame, nothing would be done.’ People say that after the massacre everyone wanted to forget about the village; the right-wing wanted to forget it for obvious reasons and the left-wing wanted to forget because many at Sant’Anna blamed the partisans. Today a revival of interest in the matter has been triggered by a political climate of revisionism in historical matters. In groups of survivors, many people seem reserved or reluctant to state their position clearly and are convinced that the truth will never be told, but rather that it will always be obfuscated by the political agendas superimposed on the testimony. Other people feel strongly committed to defending the values of the Resistance.

114 • Francesca Cappelletto

An Impossible History: Group Memory versus Historical Representation With the passing of the years, despite internal divisions, survivors’ groups remain in perpetual mourning, induced and maintained by diverse individual recollections. Time has emphasized the component of lived autobiographical experience, centred on the mourning of one’s own family (‘everyone remembers their own relatives’), in which the ethical-political dimensions of the experience are attenuated. At an interpretative level, the memory has continued to reproduce internal divisions in the very attempt to overcome them: people would like to be able to remember differently, and yet they want to preserve this memory. This seems to be a crucial point: to survivors and their children, the ambivalence signifies an almost impossible, blocked remembrance. Recollection is trapped in the form of an impossible story, which generates a sense of impotence that seems to spring from two convictions. First, ‘no one will ever write the truth’, even though people also consider the memory of the massacres as a potential instrument in a search for the truth, so that the story can be transmitted to future generations. A second conviction is that one’s own story must be protected from outside intrusions, from people who are not members of the community but who nevertheless presume to write down and interpret the community’s memory. These two convictions are interwoven. In Sant’Anna the majority of survivors do not seem to acknowledge any ‘historical’ account. It seems to be a story that is impossible to tell, and the impossibility of it springs from the fact that the massacres are sins that even now have not been expiated. For example, the Germans who are presumed to be responsible for the massacres have not paid so far for the crimes they committed. While struggling within itself against forgetting, each village has thus constructed a community of memory, even though based on a veritable divided memory. In their relations with the outside world, villagers characterize the memory of the massacre as discontinuous. Moments of expression were interspersed with moments when it was impossible to articulate to the outside world. For example, at one stage the massacre became associated, in the minds of villagers, with a national tendency to forget them and their community, because, according to them, no one wanted to talk about a place where many people blamed the partisans: ‘Then there was moral recognition … which was the sending of the gold medal … it never arrived!’ In fact, Sant’Anna did not receive the Military Medal of Bravery until 1971, twenty-two years after it was conferred on the more widely known and commemorated Italian community of Marzabotto. For the inhabitants of Sant’Anna, being abandoned means an absence of memory, that is, mostly of dialogue, as Namer (1987) reminds us in his rereading of Halbwachs. By extension, one can say that memory equals honour.

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 115 If we try to understand how the ‘impossible’ memory has been experienced over time, some aspects clearly emerge. In Sant’Anna people resent having been abandoned and not having been honoured by the outside, national world. Over the years the villagers realized that they were double victims: victims of the massacre and then victims of abandonment by the public authorities. They were not only excluded from the national memory; they also remained physically cut off from the plain, when the authorities failed to construct the road they had so badly wanted. Resentment gave rise to a fundamental ambivalence in their attitude towards the memory of the massacre. The villagers have a desire, which has remained unfulfilled, to be recognized by national institutions. They have a negative opinion of the fact that the memory of the communities has never been incorporated into the national memory. For example, they would appreciate the presence of national authorities at commemorative events. At the same time, they dislike the intrusion of anonymous forces from the political world and wider society into what they call ‘our story’. The villagers are wary of discussions and explanations of the event that come from the external world. The exterior, crystallized, historicized memory, embodying that of the national past as enacted by non-local institutions, does not correspond to their lived, experienced memory. As one villager puts it: ‘These [history] books are already there, they are in the library. But they don’t tell the reality … about what we say.’ The internal memory of the group is represented as a memory of resistance to abandonment and to the diverse truths of the experience: ‘What we lived through, that is the most vital memory, both those in the piazza and those in the houses … as to the rest – how many Germans there were, where they came from [a gesture signifying that it matters little].’ The dissonance between personal memory and public representation is painfully apparent in the story of group remembrance. The very presence of an anthropologist among them, nearly sixty years after the massacre, was seen in itself as confirmation of a long-standing abandonment. For the villagers, my research was judged to have come too late to ‘harvest’ their memory, and that, in turn, seemed further proof that their dead have not been honoured, unlike those of another Italian community: ‘in Marzabotto, there they managed things better, there people reconstructed the memories straightaway, they knew straightaway … the honor that should have been given them!’4 According to those who escaped the massacre and according to their children, the past should not be removed, it should be told. Moreover, it must be shown; it must be incorporated in commemorative gestures and objects: ‘This year [2000] at the charnel house, the priest wore a red chasuble, finally a red one! He said he had put on this chasuble which represents the martyrs, but it took sixty years … for him to put it on!’ The gold medal is a commemorative object that testifies to the link between memory and moral order. And that too arrived too late.

116 • Francesca Cappelletto In 1994 many local people from communities where massacres took place joined historians and anthropologists in an international conference dedicated to the study of Nazi massacres during World War II (Contini 1997; Paggi 1997).5 My ‘reading’ of memory is thus located in a context of current discourse about the rethinking of a historical period. The conference was itself a challenge. After fifty years, it provided the first occasion to compare different representations of a past in which the massacres had occurred. The theme of the partisans’ guilt played an important role in survivors’ narratives, to the surprise of many participants. At times, representations of the inside world stimulated various reflections in the outside world. The implied, unspoken objective of many participants was to reconcile opposing sides, divided by the ‘guilt theme’, and to create some form of ‘general memory’ capable of containing the local and the national ones. Elements of continuity and tension emerged which even now are shaping the form of remembrance. Some survivors were reluctant to participate in the conference itself, because they did not trust a supra-local discourse on their own intimate past. Today divided memory also means setting yourself apart, avoiding the narration of memory in public. During the conference, moments of silence were often interspersed with moments of overt tension. To the group, remembered history is in dynamic contrast to master narratives. The majority of villagers apparently defend their own ‘counter-history’ as something opposed to the master narrative, the epicentre of which is the Resistance. The resistance movement itself was harshly criticized by some people, which originated a dissonance between them and the ethnographers, including me. The difference between the community itself, considered as a homogeneous unit, and the outside world, between the group memory and that formulated by the wider, civil society, is also manifest in the variability of the stories told in the more than fifty years. Gradually, the Resistance movement against fascism assumed a central role in the founding discourse of the Italian Republic and became integrated into Italian national history. However, the hostility that some Tuscan villagers felt towards the partisans did not appear to weaken; neither were they appeased in the intermittent periods of tension between the local community and national institutions. The partisan memory (of those partisans who were locally despised because the villagers held them indirectly or even ‘truly’ responsible for the massacre) tended to become the general memory, ‘encircling, so to speak, the communities from the outside’ (Contini 1997: 230). Thus the dissonance between group memories and public representations tended to become ever more apparent. At the 1994 conference in Arezzo, one of the ways people dealt with these tensions was by expressing them explicitly. The result was a network of narrative relations which itself formed a sort of new story re-lived there as a performance. What could properly be defined as a local drama of memory consisted of a confrontation between a leading woman from one of the villages involved and a delegate from

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 117 the National Association of Italian Partisans. Some speakers claimed that the history written by professional historians was superior to the ‘spontaneous memory of the community, which ends up bending the reconstruction of the past to fit the political needs of the present’, as Contini (1997: 10) reports. Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out a salient issue, i.e. the importance of distinguishing between historical facts and representations. In an article on the public responsibilities of the historian, which appeared later, he maintained that memory and history are different ways of preserving the past, but that it is necessary to evaluate the villagers’ narratives on the basis of documents and a critical approach to sources in order to gauge the influences of the sense of belonging and of identity on memory (Hobsbawm 1994). As Stuart Woolf (in this volume) points out, it is necessary to balance empathy, respect and solidarity with critical interrogation. ‘This is the reason why memory needs to be contextualized by historical research (just as history needs to be informed by memory’ (Lambek in this volume). The local drama of memory has shown, as did the re-lived context of the conference, that the partisans have been perceived as representatives of that outside world that could not understand; because in half a century it had never understood the internal drama of the community. In fact, the conference in Arezzo was the climax of the tension between local and national agencies of remembrance that had been felt intermittently during the preceding fifty years. The survivors perceived the conference as a public commemoration, and thus potentially as a distasteful experience. In Sant’Anna di Stazzema, on the other hand, the dissonance between local and national was crystallized in the resentment over being abandoned and in the local community’s self-conscious commitment to the struggle against forgetting.

War Trauma and Images War remembrances have an emotional density that could help elucidate the meaning of Tuscan villagers’ ‘own story’. As referred to in the above section entitled ‘A Mnemonic Community’, the core of the narratives is formed by images endowed with a dense visual content. Stories are entirely made up of visual pictures that transmit all the vividness and drama of violent scenes. Over time, memory has become clustered, so to speak, around the visual, and the continuity of telling has been associated to the continuity of reliving. In fact, ‘seeing’ is an act of communication and interaction: seeing each other when they get together, in the moments at annual assemblies to commemorate the massacres, on 2 November, the feast of All Souls’ Day, at the funerals of the oldest members of the community, when those who moved away from the village come back to visit. It is likely that the formation of visual images plays a crucial role in the memory of traumatic events with a high emotional content. Perceptions, affective aspects

118 • Francesca Cappelletto and internalized images are shared during those acts of group remembrance that are the story-telling sessions, where inter-subjectivity is established through participation (Cappelletto 2003). The repeated evocation of visual pictures emotionally prepares the listener, including those who were not eyewitnesses, to relive a narrated event as if he had actually experienced it. It is as if the story ‘stays with’ the listener and makes him suffer, as one woman from Sant’Anna said, because the visual imagery has such a strong visceral content. ‘I saw everything, it is all in my blood,’ said another who was a child at the time of the massacre. Visual imagery can be conceived of as central to the construction of a shared, communal view of the past. In descriptions of episodes, the past perceptual experience of some individual, a sort of sensory memory, is communicated and reified in a ‘text’. In fact, the re-evocation of descriptive pictures with a high visual density, which the single individual derives from his own experience, becomes the imaginative basis for other stories. The categories of the symbolic and the aesthetic are closely associated in the experience of living and remembering war. The Great War represents an archetypal example of the ‘very strong prevalence of the aesthetic element […] the prolonged contact with the dimension of blood, violence, and death, signifies an overflowing extension of the kinetic-visual-emotive element at the expense of the ethical-interiorizing element’ (Galli della Loggia 1984: xv). This prevalence can help explain why the memory of the massacres turns in on itself: the kinetic-visual-emotive sphere has an overwhelming strength that prevents the memory from becoming ‘transitive’ and from transforming itself from prevalently episodic to semantic. The narrowest meaning of imagination is that of common sense, though even that meaning refers to the architecture of the mind in relation to society. Here, imagination is the shared inheritance of mental contents with a visual dimension. As the Italian fiction writer Italo Calvino puts it, ‘imagination is the power to put visions in focus with your eyes closed’ (Calvino 1988: 92). It is a mental faculty that consists of the representation of visual images. In the accounts of what happened during the massacres, the re-evocation of descriptive, intense pictures with strong visual density is rich in descriptive minutiae. It derives from the personal experience of the narrators and then is passed on to other listener-narrators. In a wider sense, but one that complements the first, the image should be understood experientially, that is, as part of a narrative act and social memory that has an inter-subjective dimension. Imagination is an emotional and cognitive experience in a visual form, a way of thinking associated with the sphere of sensitivity. We form mental images that can be so vivid ‘that we can see them with our eyes open, while our sensory sight is looking at other things. We have two kinds of sight that can operate simultaneously: that of the eyes, which naturally operates only

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 119 when our eyes are open, and that of the imagination, which operates via some internal viewing mechanism that may be called “the mind’s eye” […]. While the external eyes see one thing, the internal vision (or imagination) can see another’ (Simone 2002: 83). The memory of extreme events seems to consist in the representation of images that have been seen with ‘the mind’s eye’. A person who was a child at the time of the atrocities told me: ‘It often comes to my mind because I saw everything, everything in blood … I see everything even with my eyes closed!’ According to Cathy Caruth (1995: 4–5), ‘to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image’. Several testimonies showed that the images of the massacre have been so deeply embedded into the mental life of survivors that they throw a dark shadow over their present-day lives. The images have so much power that they make survivors feel as if they were living a sort of second existence, parallel to their everyday life. The following account shows this clearly: When I pass by the places where the massacre happened, or even if I don’t pass by them, at night when I can’t sleep I see all these houses again where they killed all these poor people I knew … those of the village who lived that wretched life, together, of misery, these miserable places!!! Who could forget them?! I don’t think that I ever go to bed without thinking about it, my thoughts carry me there.

While flashbulb memory has a realistic tone and is consciously lived by the narrator as subjective ‘proof’ of the events, the mind’s eye is a different kind of projection. This is a more abstract level of imagination, which harks back to cultural representations. Here ‘image’ is used in Hume’s sense of imagination, in which images that confirm real-life experiences are linked to a ‘synthesis’ of the experience. The anthropologist Veena Das recalls the sense in which Hume used ‘imagination’, ‘when he insisted that the capacity to contract two instants into a single sequence is not a reflection, but rather that it forms a synthesis of time. He implied that it is in the context of a living present that certain moments of a past are retained while others are actively forgotten’ (Das 1992: 16). This meaning of imagination can be helpful in analysing the survivors’ narratives. I have tried to show how the images, as memory, form a connection between narratives and are shared when people speak about the past. Little is known in general about the role of images and emotion in aspects of sociality such as group integration. This is a question that concerns the deep working of memory transmission in a social group. In the Tuscan villages studied, the massacre serves as a catalyst for all the other personal and communal experiences. For example, the villages were depopulated in the mid-twentieth century due to the collapse of the sharecropping system, but survivors attribute this to the Nazi massacre that shattered their lives. The images that can be described as prototypes are those of the war

120 • Francesca Cappelletto scenario and the terror; they relate internally to the image of the lost world and the experience of the dividing waters between that world that can never be regained and a world whose backdrop is the nightmare of the massacre. In the ethnography relating to the memory of the massacres, there are two groups of images that posit the massacre as the most significant experience in the biography of the narrator and of the group. Among the ‘image-syntheses’, one is recurrent, describing an original uncorrupted past to which the tragedy put an end. The summer of 1944 became the last summer, ‘as we knew, the time that represents what we lost in the flood, what cannot be regained, that time when everything ended and everything started over again’ (Galli della Loggia 1984: xvi). Nature, still ‘uncontaminated’, is remembered as a paragon of purity: ‘In June ’44 we were all there … It was a really beautiful summer, a splendid summer … the countryside in full bloom.’ And the people were happy, as a survivor argues: Before the tragedy life in Sant’Anna was happy. They had a completely happy life. They lived peacefully; they had their work, because it was a village of miners, it sprang up just because of the four mines. So everyone was just fine. The people of Sant’Anna have always had enough to eat because they had … they grew everything … they had their animals, their cows, and mules to ride down on, there were pigs, there was … everything!

In villages brutalized by an unutterable violence, the luscious landscape changes, the tragedy comes, and the solitary voices remain, calling the names out loud, in the hope that one of your loved ones escaped. People take the place of their animals, which have all been killed, and the scale of being is altered; at night people came out ‘to graze’ in the fields while ‘the dormice in the trees tried the chestnuts that were not yet ripe’: That evening … I was lucky, my family was intact … and twenty-three of us went into a cave, I don’t know how many square metres it was … there we even lost the sense of time. We only went out at night because by day we were afraid that the smoke would be seen. And we went out at night … to graze in the fields: potatoes, beans … and we were in those caves for more than one month, naturally we smelled more like animals than people.

The ‘before’ and the ‘after’ are still marked by the contrast in the words of one survivor who ran through the streets of the village after the atrocities were committed. Here the remembrance of the massacre is coagulated in the image of houses as violated, desperate human beings. When I was in the street, it was so quiet … compared to the shouting when I left the village … these houses I found … with their windows wide open, black like open mouths … this disaster!

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 121 The past has something heart-breakingly irrevocable. The sense of disaster, the sense of life as grievous stagnation, the perception that reality makes no sense at all (Fussell 1975) dominates, with its irrevocable fracturing. As one woman from Civitella said: ‘To live in this atmosphere that was so familiar, when it happened … after ’44 … everything was shattered! It was all shattered! The families were … beyond death, at the … let’s say hardships, because they missed the support [of the breadwinners who had been killed] and besides, everything in the family circle had been shattered … all this intimacy.’ Several recurrent images in the narratives describe a village that can no longer maintain its order and that looks for justice that never comes, facing abandonment that is lived through and suffered: ‘They were denied all their rights and then they were forgotten … By forgetting them, they shut them out … I would have given the gold medal to the living as well as the dead.’ ‘The abandonment was serious. It was awful not to be able to speak out because no one would listen to you! You weren’t even considered … you were abandoned and that was the end of it.’

Victimhood, Empathy and Community I have shown that a crucial element of the relation between memory and group integration emerges in the ambivalent ‘guilt theme’. The conflict and controversy surrounding responsibility for the massacres can threaten the very unity of the survivors’ community. Nevertheless the community is sustained by recounting the atrocities through narratives shared by the group as a whole as ‘our own story’. I have sought to understand how these Tuscan communities are joined in a communal, unified effort to struggle against forgetting, how they form a ‘community of sentiment’. The choral narration of the story seems to be based on the participatory empathetic way the story has been experienced through time. Its choral quality derives from the fact that the narrative sessions are community rites, pervaded by currents of empathy, where the survivors are the performers of narratives. The perception of victimhood is the most important element binding the narratives together. The survivors claim their fellow villagers died as innocent people. The community as a whole is regarded as a victim of the atrocities and, subsequently, of abandonment, whether the blame is placed on the partisans or the Nazis. Victimhood might be a cognitive frame that gives commonality to the vision of past experience. The narrative act is characterized by immediacy and participation in the emotional states of others. During these social interactions, internal subjective experi-

122 • Francesca Cappelletto ences mingle with those of the external real world. The ‘rumination’, the internal theatre, the sounds and words that dialogue in our minds allow the survivors to imagine the interior experiences of others. In these narrative acts empathy plays an important role. The narrator wants the others to ‘enter into’ his experience, into his internal feelings. One can see the effort of doing so in the narrator’s muscular twitches, tense body, posture and facial expressions. Often his tears break his voice and constellate the narration. The transcriptions of the interviews take note of pauses, periods of silence and ‘groping for terms and language’ (Young 1988); but they cannot record the nonverbal memory – the body movements, above all facial expressions – or the difficulty of conveying the message. This ‘performance of memory’ (Young 1988) constitutes a stimulus which produces an emotional contagion in the listeners. For the survivors of Civitella and Sant’Anna, the purpose of this practice is to seek closure for the trauma they endured. Empathy is based on a corporal concept. The idea that others can project themselves on to ourselves is implicit in the notion of empathy. In fact, an emotional state can be ‘assumed within us by the imaginative reproduction of the corporal expressions of others (for instance, somatic representations of fear, hate, etc.); this is the way people communicate with each other’ (Abbagnano 1971: 297). Psychologists have renewed their interest in the study of empathy, as ‘the ability to share the emotional experiences of another person’ (Bonino, Coco and Tani 1998: 17). This definition integrates ‘emotional components with an ability for understanding social behavior’ (ibid.). In all forms of empathy, the cognitive aspect–consciously to assume another’s point of view – is inseparable from the affective aspect, to experience another person’s emotions. According to Johnson’s analysis (1993: 36), empathy is one of man’s most significant moral capacities. Empathy enables a person to absorb the experiences of others through the imagination. To side with others, to put oneself in other people’s shoes, is ‘an act of imaginative experience; this means to come and meet others in order to inhabit their world, not only for any specific purpose or with calculated rationality, but rather with imagination and feeling’. It is an imaginative rationality by which we participate in the experiences of others through empathy. We can rightly claim that story-telling represents one of the most significant incarnations of the social significance of public, shared imagination in the villages’ life. Empathy is an act of ‘embedded knowledge’. In the narrative sessions of the Tuscans, it enables the listener to mimic the body language of the survivor narrator. Being aware of other people’s emotions comes through an act of imitation and projection, where one goes beyond the ‘us’ (Bonino, Coco and Tani 1998: 134). The anthropologist Judith Okely (1982: 17) called this particular type of physical and cognitive closeness between the ethnographer and the listener ‘incorporated knowledge’, which here is extended to that particular group of listeners

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 123 who form the ‘mnemonic community’. Psychologists define this attitude as global empathy, affective mimicry or physiognomic mimesis. Okely claims that it is a process that ‘responds to certain rhythms and patterns’ of the relationship between people who interact side by side with syntony that springs from fieldwork. As an example, she used a photograph of herself taken without her knowledge, where she is standing next to a gypsy woman. She is not looking at the camera and has the same defensive posture as the other woman, with her arms folded (1982: 17). Mimicry is the stimulus that produces in a listener the same emotions as the survivor. This new emotional experience of the listener is ‘registered’ both as a new event and as a strong emotion. The new event and its emotional significance could be important elements when the memory is conveyed. One particularly interesting way of participating in other people’s experiences is that where the cognitive mediator of empathetic association is represented by language. In this case, a verbal description of a given situation allows an individual to visualize it in their mind and thereby have an emotional reaction. In empathy where there is mutual sharing, which was a topic particularly studied by Strayer (1987), an experience passed to another person is the stimulus for empathetic sharing. ‘Our attention is focused on the event that the person before us is experiencing […] and on the association between that event and our own personal experience […]. We can also call this type of empathy one based on events because it is cognitively mediated by the recounting of the event itself’ (Bonino, Coco and Tani 1998: 36). A narrative about Nazi massacres has strong evocative power because it renews under the form of images experiences and emotions previously experienced. The shared participation is said to be empathic. One can imagine another person’s life experiences, and this act of internal resonance is accompanied by empathic participation. In this process, which is of an experiential, interpretative nature, lies the social dimension of memory, and thereby the sharing of single fragments of autobiography that are central to the history of that particular group. The narrators choose images that become dialogic representations, which become a part of the interior world of the listeners. The person recounting the episodes and the person receiving the message made up of images are both situated within the described scenario; at the same time they have the opportunity to ‘see’ themselves from a certain distance. For survivors as well as other people present, including myself as ethnographer, listening to the stories told by other survivors got us involved in a process which often took on the characteristics of the dramatization itself. The narrators would try hard to recount their past experience quite vividly. For instance, they would describe in minute detail certain places (even those where seemingly insignificant events took place), as if they wanted to centre their story there. In other accounts, actions that were actually of brief duration are drawn out into dilated tales (‘I’ve been talking for five minutes, but it all really happened in a matter of a few

124 • Francesca Cappelletto seconds’). In yet other narratives, flash moments dominate the story, just as the narrator lived them. In other accounts, a third party (for example, a wife or daughter) spoke ‘on behalf of someone’ because the family member had suffered too greatly and had to be protected; in that case, many nuances of that individual’s personal account were prominent in the story. An analysis of the survivors’ narratives shows how individual and affective processes intersect with cognitive and social processes in the social act of conversation (Tedlock 1983). Over the years, interpersonal and communicative relationships have formed, centred on memories of the massacres. During narrative sessions, each person contributed his/her own personal story, while at the same time interjecting accounts of other people’s experiences. A sort of new experience has taken shape over the years, which the survivors, their children and grandchildren call their ‘history’, where ‘emotional selves’ and ‘responsible selves, which we may call consciousness’ (Hill 1995: 139), intertwine. The ability to recognize and absorb the emotions and descriptive representations of others is considered to be the fundamental significance of empathy. There is participation in corresponding experiences, and this sharing of narratives through images is a social phenomenon. Perhaps memories are transmitted because ‘new’ events and ‘emotions as memory’ (LeDoux 1992) are created on the basis of cognitive and emotional experiences. These are not simply psychological phenomena of private expression as it may appear; they are ‘conventional expressions of sentiment and emotions’ (Houseman 2000: 70) of those who attended the narrative sessions. The fact that ‘the stories stay with you’ is considered a precondition for learning the ‘story’. Other people’s stories are internalized and re-lived; this is both a conscious and subconscious process. To be able to know ‘history’ well (or their stories in this case) and transmit it orally, one must internalize it. One must feel it. This is a ‘creative’, but not fictive, aspect of one’s memory.

War Memory as a Cultural Object In communities that were scenes of massacre, an anthropological analysis of narratives shows how ‘the story’ is perceived as a group’s ‘own story’ with a cultural value that should be protected from intrusions and exploitations on behalf of outsiders. The core of this memory is represented by a relentless struggle not to forget and not to be forgotten. Public acts of remembrance are not seen to be endowed with ‘truthfulness’; instead, they are perceived as a desecration of mourning. It is in the domain of the individuals and of the small community that remembrance is considered to be ‘fully’ viable. People call the memory of war ‘our own story’, as in it all other ‘inside stories’ converge, including genealogies. Acts of remembrance restore this fundamental dimension of the intimate and almost sacred.

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 125 In this chapter, I have tried to understand how the massacre is a memory-event to which one clings in the mourning of individual memory and around which the circle of group memory is drawn. At the heart of group remembrance lies the selfconscious knowledge of having undergone a huge violence, an extreme experience that dramatically threatened the existence of the social group. The members of the community share the basic feeling of unity in so far as they know about unique events, which they transmit in narrative form within the group. Theirs is an experiential and communicative ‘truth’; it is also an endless rite, witnessed by the fact that in Sant’Anna today they are thinking of restoring the church where many of their fellow villagers died. The villagers are afraid of being dispossessed of their own story. This fear grows out of the feeling that the memory of the massacre is their own property, intimate and communicable only within the group of survivors. The act of remembering this event appears to be part of what anthropologists call ‘the sense of belonging to a group’. The group uses this cultural representation as part of the usual way of identifying itself, protecting and not exhibiting what it possesses. The interplay between memory and identity is a critical argument that cannot be discussed here (see Cappelletto 2004). Within a coherent narrative, opposing interpretations co-exist. Despite the inner fractures, the memory of Nazi crimes is a communal ‘object’, a primary cultural object of the Tuscan villagers. It has an evocative force, as ‘our own story’, and reflects the feeling that they too have a history. It is this story that must be protected as an important cultural value from the anonymous forces of politics and society. In all the victim communities, the idea that the story of the massacres should belong to them alone entails the recognition that other stories should belong to those other communities where massacres happened as well. It is not simply the past that is remembered, but also ‘the we’, the communal consciousness that is constructed around that crucial event. The mnemonic community constitutes and maintains itself around the guardianship of this cultural artefact. Weiner has elucidated how ‘inalienable possessions’ function as catalysts which cause the awakening of an ethnic identity in a group (Weiner 1992: 42). Like those ‘inalienable possessions’, the memory of the massacre is a legacy passed down from one generation to another, which must be ‘authenticated by an authority perceived as external to the present’ (ibid.) and which is connected to sacred sites. At the same time, the acts of remembrance are history. The teller feels that he himself is the protagonist of an event because he experienced it (and no one else can testify as he can) and because, from his standpoint, he cannot only ‘confess’ but must also ‘accuse’. There really are strong ties between ‘narrative, memory and moral order’ (Antze and Lambek 1996: xxv).6 The village can become a court that judges the world, as witness the founding in 2001 of the Committee for the Judgment of Nazi Crimes. This memory makes one ‘part of history’. But

126 • Francesca Cappelletto paradoxically it is precisely this story that these communities must defend from the world, because the world would like to appropriate it.

Dedication I’d like to dedicate this work to the memory of my father, Antonio, who was an Italian soldier imprisoned from September 1943 to March 1945 in the Nazi work camps of Tilsit and Hannover. He wanted to join neither the Nazi occupying troops nor the fascist Italian Repubblica di Salò. Just like many other men who underwent and survived the same dark, frightening experience, his inner refusal to accept what had happened made it impossible for him to tell his story or to bear testimony. It was only in the latter part of his life that he conveyed some fragments of his story to me: this was a collection of visual images that had been haunting him persistently for many years. It is not merely a concession to self-reflection, which is so popular nowadays in the domain of anthropology, if I say that this meeting of worlds has inspired my wanting to know more.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Paola Calamandrei for her indispensable aid in carrying out fieldwork, and to Dorothea Barrett for the editorial assistance. This study was made possible by funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc., New York (Grant GR6504).

Notes 1. In the three Tuscan villages I carried out sixty-nine in-depth ethnographic interviews with survivors still living there, as well as with those who moved to other parts of Italy after the massacres. The children of some survivors and other close kin also participated. Interviews were held with both individuals and groups, with both men and women, of various ages and different social classes. The interviewees included fifty-eight survivors, both eyewitnesses and non-eyewitnesses, who are members of those communities directly touched by the tragedy, and eleven people from later generations, resident in the three villages, who had heard the story told over the past fifty years. Group interviews were carried out with participants during narrative sessions concerning the massacre, most of which took place at these villages around the time of massacres. I also utilize written testimonies by survivors and video-recordings produced by the local Museum of Sant’Anna di Stazzema. The villagers’ account quoted in the chapter are taken from these sources. 2. In recent times Italian parliamentary representatives have called for urgent

Recalling the Nazi-fascist Massacres • 127

3.

4.

5. 6.

action following the discovery of a so-called ‘closet of shame’, a real closet containing hundreds of pending trial dossiers relating to the massacres (Franzinelli 2002). In 2004, after sixty years, six ex-officers belonging to the II Battalion Panzergrenadier, Division Reichsführer SS, now living in Germany, were charged for their alleged participation in the massacres and are now on trial. In the late 1940s the military magistracy did not do justice to war crimes: they set aside 695 trial dossiers against the Germans, bringing only a dozen proceedings to a close (Franzinelli 2002). By contrast, Marzabotto (a village in the Apennines between Tuscany and Emilia Romagna) and Fosse Ardeatine, in Rome, where similar Nazi crimes were committed, are today sacred national sites. The conference was entitled ‘In Memory. Revisiting Nazi Atrocities in PostCold War Europe’ (Arezzo, June 1994). For example, the Park of Peace is a project for a permanent exhibition of testimonies from nations that had victims of the Nazi regime to ‘let all the world know about the village that suffered martyrdom’.

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–6– Memory and Cultural Schema Linking Memory to Political Action Roger Petersen

As a political scientist, I am interested in how memory of violence and war affects observable political behaviour. While it seems reasonable to believe that the memory of past violence can motivate individual actions decades later, it is difficult to understand how this process works. Memory of war is a collective phenomenon constantly constructed through a myriad of social interactions among survivors, the State, academia and the media. To connect this complex process to individual decisions at a particular point may be a quixotic enterprise, but in this chapter I will make observations about memory, history and cultural schema and link these phenomena to one specific event: the risk-laden anti-Soviet protests in Vilnius, Lithuania, in January 1991. I am targeting this one event for three reasons. First, I was present during these protests and witnessed behaviour that was impressive and politically important. As Anatol Lieven described: ‘The solidarity and courage of the peaceful, unarmed crowds outside the parliaments in Riga and Vilnius, convinced that they were about to be attacked, but standing their ground, is indeed one of the most moving political images of modern times, not only for Balts, but for Europe’ (1993: 254). Many commentators believed these events were a precursor for the failed Moscow coup the following summer. Second, the events of January 1991 were intimately connected with World War II and memory of that war. In comments shortly after the protests, Lithuanian leader Vytautas Landsbergis stated that World War II had never ended in Lithuania. In 1939–40 Lithuania had been illegally incorporated into the Soviet Union through the Molotov–Ribbentrop accord. As Landsbergis pointed out, the results of this pact between Stalin and Hitler had never been undone. While Hitler and the Nazi regime had been defeated and assigned to political oblivion, Stalin’s legacy remained to dominate Lithuania in the form of the Soviet Union. For most Lithuanians, World War II began in 1939 and continued past 1945, blending into an anti-Soviet resistance struggle that lasted into the early 1950s. In 1991 the political battle to leave the USSR, as seen in Landsbergis’ statement, was often seen as 131

132 • Roger Petersen an extension of the war. In a point that I will address in more detail below, for Lithuanians World War II was primarily a conflict with the Soviets, not the Germans. Positioned between Hitler and Stalin, the latter was overwhelmingly seen as the most important enemy. The very sense of World War II – when it started, when it ended, who the principal actors were – differed from that in Western Europe. It is important for those living in the West to realize this point because without such an understanding we cannot comprehend the nature of memory in this region, nor fathom elements of the region’s contemporary politics. Furthermore, given Lithuania’s legacy as part of the Russian empire, the enemy from the east formed a major part of a Lithuanian historical and cultural schema, leading into the third reason that I am using this case. In a previous work I wrote a speculative chapter about the motivations behind the protest events in Vilnius in 1991 (Petersen 2001: chapter nine), and I wish to use the present forum to expand on that work by focusing on the role and significance of community-based memory. In this chapter, I will first review the events in Vilnius in January 1991 and my previous interpretations. In the earlier work I wrote that some of the ‘first actors’ – those rushing to protest with little concern for safety – were driven to act in part by a specific cultural schema. This schema provided a script for the unfolding events. Most importantly, it produced specific roles that guided and motivated participation in risk-laden protest. A cultural schema is an abstract mental model containing specific scripts with recognizable individual roles.1 In effect, a historically and culturally formed schema embodies a liturgy, and the actions are specific rituals within that liturgy. When a historically oriented schema is activated, the actions of one’s ancestors may serve as rituals to be repeated. The concept of a cultural schema is aptly described by Sherry Ortner: In effect, the cultural schema has been moved by an actor from an external to an internal position, from an abstract model of deeds done by ancient heroes and ritual participants to a personal program for understanding what is happening to one right now, and for acting upon it […] there is a distance between actors’ selves and their cultural models, in the sense that not all of a culture’s repertoire of symbolic frames make sense to all actors at all times. (Ortner 1990: 89)

The schema is an external, abstract model that sometimes informs a personal programme for understanding and action. A culture possesses, as Ortner suggests, a repertoire of symbolic frames. At any given point a particular schema, although constantly existing as part of a repertoire, will not be guiding a large number of the ethno-cultural group. However, the external model is always available for activation. As I will discuss in more detail below, there are five key aspects of a cultural schema: narrative, actors, roles, the mechanism that activates the schema, and the

Memory and Cultural Schema • 133 reason why the schema motivates specific actions. In the previous work I concluded that social scientists will always be limited in their ability to understand how cultural schemas motivate actions like the ones seen in Vilnius in January 1991. However, I will argue here that we can strive towards a better understanding of these opaque phenomena, if we examine the memory processes that help maintain and shape schemas over time. In the latter sections of the chapter I will try to sharpen the interpretations and intuitions in my previous explanation through reexamination of my interviews with survivors of the brutal 1940s period of Lithuanian history. I will argue that it is these memories, differently transmitted in different types of communities, along with the politicization of history, which helped form and sustain the cultural schemas framing action in January 1991. In effect, I am peeling back my previous argument another layer by trying to establish the foundations of cultural schemas in the actual experiences and memories of individuals and communities.

The Events in Vilnius, January 1991 In January 1991 I was a participant-observer in the events precipitated by the Soviet assault on communication facilities in Vilnius.2 There I watched individuals engaging in resistance activity that involved at least a small chance of death. Early on the morning of 13 January 1991 the Soviets attacked the radio-television building in Vilnius.3 An anonymous ‘Lithuanian Salvation Committee’, along with Soviet paratroopers, claimed to be taking control of the government. Supporters of Lithuanian independence had anticipated the attack on communication centres and stood around the buildings. While the tanks and armoured personnel carriers performed their work, the crowd chanted ‘Lithuania’. At the radio-television building, the shock waves from explosions blew out the windows of neighbouring apartment buildings, raining glass upon the crowd below. When the main action was over, my Lithuanian friend turned to me and, referring to the parliament building, said: ‘They will attack the parliament building next, we must go to the parliament building.’ At the time it seemed quite probable that the Soviets would use force to crush Lithuanian resistance, killing a few more people along the way. Again, Anatol Lieven (1993) provides an extensive account of the January events that concurs with my own notes. He quotes a student waiting at the parliament at length: We all thought that they would come next to the parliament. I was afraid, and so were others, but in general the mood was more angry. That was so even when people came from the TV tower and told us what had happened; some of my friends came, and their faces had quite changed, stony. It took months for some of them to get over it. Landsbergis broadcast over the loudspeakers, asking us to move to the side, so as not

134 • Roger Petersen to be caught in the crossfire when the parliament was attacked. He said something like, “we need live witnesses, not more victims”; but we didn’t move … All sorts of rumours ran through the crowd, and it would surge in one direction or another – that was dangerous, because the square was completely packed. There was a fear of spies. I saw people catch one man – they were screaming that he was a provocateur, and they were going to throw him in the river, but they let him go. (1993: 251)

These impressions matched my own. When we arrived at the square in front of the parliament, uncertainty, fear and some silent anger seemed to permeate the crowd. Everyone knew that there had been casualties and believed that more people would be killed or wounded at the parliament. Similar to the experience of the student quoted above, I was told that Soviet agents might infiltrate the crowd to gain access to the parliament prior to the impending attack. I also recall hearing that the Soviets might land helicopters on the roof.4 Yet, despite these fears and rumours, the square remained packed. After the events at the television station, my Lithuanian friend predicted that many others would also be at the parliament building because, in his words, ‘this is 1940’. The reference was clear because many Lithuanians knew a specific narrative explaining the end of Lithuanian independence in 1940: 1) Lithuanians were living peacefully and prosperously until the outbreak of World War II; 2) in the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop accord, Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide Eastern Europe, with Lithuania eventually assigned to the Soviets; 3) the Lithuanians allowed the Soviets to occupy their territory; and 4) sham elections were then held that allowed the Soviets to claim that Lithuanians voluntarily and joyfully joined the Soviet Union. A key point in this narrative is that the Soviets incorporated Lithuania without a fight from Lithuanians. In January 1991 many Lithuanians working from this narrative vowed that this time things would be different. If necessary, there would be a record of casualties so that history would record the essential fact of Lithuanian resistance. I heard reference to ‘not repeating the mistake of 1940’ several times. Deputy Prime Minister Romualdas Ozolas stated that things would be different from 1940, that he would fight so that ‘my children will not be able to accuse me that nobody shot back, as in 1940’ (Vardys and Sedaitis: 1997: 174). Lieven provides a summary quote from an interview with a Lithuanian parliamentary guard: ‘The intention is not to win, because we all know that is impossible; the intention is to die, but by doing so to make sure that Moscow can’t tell any lies as they did in 1940. To make sure the whole world knows that Lithuania was prepared to fight for her freedom’ (1993: 253).

Memory and Cultural Schema • 135

A Lithuanian Cultural Schema As mentioned in the introduction, five aspects of cultural schemas are most relevant here: narrative, actors, roles, activation and motivation. First, a schema is usually formed around a narrative, a recognizable causal sequence of events. When one ‘remembers’ a war, one is likely to have in mind a narrative rather than isolated events. As Mark Schudson summarizes: ‘To pass on a version of the past, the past must be encapsulated into some cultural form, and generally this is a narrative, a story, with a beginning, middle, and end; with an original state of equilibrium, a disruption, and a resolution; with protagonist and obstacles in his or her way and efforts to overcome them (1995: 355).’5 A second key element of a cultural schema is the nature of the actors and their qualities within the narrative. What qualities define the ‘self’, and what qualities define the ‘others’ in the story? A third feature concerns the specific roles the players should take on as the script plays out. The individual is driven to perform action X rather than action Y. Fourth, responding to Ortner’s definition, when and how does the ‘abstract model of deeds done by ancient heroes and ritual participants’ become a ‘personal program for understanding what is happening to one right now’? This is the question of activation of a schema. Here some type of ‘matching mechanism’ must be at play. Matching is a specific form of ‘remembering’. Individuals recognize similarities between their present circumstances and a cultural schema. In terms of the Lithuanian case, the actor mentioned above stated in January 1991 that ‘this is 1940’. The individual matches present events to a cultural schema. In turn, the individual becomes conscious, to varying degrees, of a prescribed role to play in an unfolding script. A fifth issue is motivation. Individuals may simply recognize historically analogous events without being compelled to act by a cultural schema. For instance, an individual can match ongoing events to those of a past war or conflict and use the course of past events to serve as a guide to help predict the course of present events. In this case, relatively straightforward rationality drives the individual – probabilities are calculated, decisions are made. A cultural schema, however, implies something more than analogous reasoning and calculation of probabilities. Under the influence of a cultural schema, the individual feels compelled to accept the role and scripted actions created by the schema. The basic source of this motivation may involve rational calculations, but the adoption of risk-laden behaviour, the decision to be the first one to show up at a rally that may endure the violent response of a brutal regime as occurred in Vilnius, probably involves something more than a straightforward calculation of benefits. Under the influence of cultural schemas, action is more likely motivated by emotions and norms. In my previous treatment of the Lithuanian case I addressed these elements of a cultural schema.

136 • Roger Petersen

Actors Lithuania is a small, Catholic country that has been dominated by outside powers throughout much of its history. Correspondingly, Lithuania’s cultural schemas have followed from these basic features. The dominant schema, in my interpretation, consists of three actors – the Russians/Soviets, the West, and the Lithuanians themselves. Straightforwardly, the Russians/Soviets are oppressors. The relationship to the West is more complicated and is characterized by ambivalence.6 To understand it, one can go back to the partisan war of the late 1940s. This guerrilla war, which maintained its intensity far longer than in Latvia and Estonia, resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Lithuanians. During the same period, the Soviets deported hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians to Siberia as part of the collectivization campaign, some of whom were deported as a pacification measure in quelling the resistance in the countryside. During the carnage, the Lithuanian partisan movements felt compelled to develop a justification for their losses and reasons to continue to struggle in what appeared to be a futile and losing cause. The following excerpts are from the Instructional Bulletin of the United Democratic Resistance Movement of Lithuania, dated 16 March 1947: We are fighting because we want to show the world that there are ideals that inspire and enable a dwarf to become a giant, that give so much power and strength that the powerful tyrant no longer knows how to suppress it, if he is still ashamed of publicly hanging everyone […]. We are fighting because we think and believe that one day the hour will come, and the world’s patience will run out, and it will tear off the mask of the rapacious tyrant, it will rally all its forces and it will help free the enslaved millions, the martyrs, the exiles […] our struggle is a continuation of that struggle with the minions of evil that was begun by the handful of fishermen of Genesareth inspired by His ideas, the banner of which has been borne by the martyrs of the Coliseum and all times into these days of ours.

Here are the recurring identities of a cultural schema: the Soviets/Russians are oppressors, the West is a coward, and Lithuanians are the small people caught in between, forced to become a moral symbol.

Narrative The three actors described above interact within a recurring story. Lithuanians cannot win by themselves, but their sacrifice will help show to the world the true nature of the Soviet opponent. One day the West will shed its hypocrisy and come to the aid of the enslaved. Lithuanian martyrdom and bravery will be instrumental in these events, enabling the ‘dwarf to become a giant’.

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Roles Lithuanians are martyrs. This role and the accompanying imagery, also present in Lithuania’s fellow Catholic Polish neighbour, stretch back to the nineteenth century. They were also perpetuated in the post-war period in fictional accounts. Émigré plays, such as Five Posts in a Marketplace written in 1958 by Algirdas Landsbergis, positively portrayed suicidal partisan missions in the last stages of rebellion. Even inside Soviet Lithuania itself, themes of martyrdom remained common in the post-war period. In ‘The Red Forest’, Romualdas Granauskas (1992), in an apparent attempt to summarize Lithuanian history, develops an imagery of thousands of crucified women stretching back endless generations in a blood-red forest. In the end, a little girl asks, ‘Mama, when I grow up, will they nail me to a cross, too?’ Other stories of the period, written in code to avoid censorship, show that martyrdom still held cultural meaning. The martyr role continued to be physically played out decades after the end of the partisan war. On 14 May 1972 nineteen-year-old Romas Kalanta burned himself alive in Kaunas in front of the theatre in which a jury-rigged assembly had proclaimed the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union in 1940.7 It was rumoured that a group of youths, some students and some workers, had drawn lots for the planned suicide (Remeikis 1980: 118–19). When the Soviet authorities secretly buried Kalanta’s body to prevent publicity, riots broke out in Kaunas, requiring the efforts of internal security troops. The prevention of Kalanta’s funeral became the cause of one of the great riots of the Brezhnev era. The events of January 1991 created opportunities for individuals to play culturally paradigmatic roles. The identities of all the actors had fallen into place. Lithuania called for the West to help, if not diplomatically recognize, the new freely elected and self-declared independent state. The West’s response was clearly seen as inadequate. Again, the West was perceived as sacrificing the Lithuanian nation out of self-interest. As events played out during the early hours of 13 January 1991, the scene was set for Lithuania to play out its martyr role at the parliament building. The West would be shamed, the Soviets would oppress, and some Lithuanians would die. Clearly, the dead in Vilnius were martyrs who suffered at the hands of the traditional Soviet enemy. A script was played out. At the peak moment of uncertainty and risk, Landsbergis had told the crowd, ‘we need live witnesses, not more victims’. No one was swayed by this statement; in fact, the words allowed the milling crowd to make a decision to stay as potential martyrs. Martyrs should volunteer for their role; they come to it through choice, not coercion. Landsbergis knew that his fellow Lithuanians would not leave. His statement simply allowed the unfolding script to be clearer and more dramatic.

138 • Roger Petersen

Activation In my interpretation, a concatenation of three (matching) cognitions was occurring for at least a small minority of Lithuanians. In January 1991 Lithuania’s recently declared independence was apparently going to be extinguished by Soviet force. This situation was very similar to that in 1940. Individuals clearly framed the event in those specific historical terms. Unlike 1940, however, Lithuanians should do something. But what? The cultural schema produced a specific role both for the nation and perhaps the individual – martyrdom. Obviously, the possibility of martyrdom is unlikely to motivate mass protest in the modern world. However, the specific conditions in Vilnius at the time – thousands of protesters – kept actual risks of death at an acceptable level. The action here was not martyrdom, but rather taking on the risk of martyrdom.

Motivation Motivation remains the most puzzling aspect of any action involving personal risk. I will address this issue at the conclusion of the chapter.

The Role of Community-based Memory Certain questions remain about elements of the schema. Lithuanians, the West and the Soviets/Russians must maintain a certain minimally coherent identity across time. What maintained the definition of actors within the narrative across decades of communist rule and vast social change? Second, the issue of motivation remains problematic. Even given the operation of a cognitive ‘matching mechanism’, we still need to understand why an individual was compelled to participate in dangerous actions. On both these issues our understanding is enhanced through analysing the various ways the Lithuanian community passed down memories of the violent events of the 1940s. In this section I am going to compare two sets of memories used to explain antiSoviet resistance in Lithuania during the 1940s. Interviews with Lithuanian émigrés in the United States during 1990–91, primarily in Chicago, the centre of Lithuanian-American cultural and social organization, form one set. Interviews conducted in Lithuania in the summer of 1992 form the second. While both sets of interviews shared some common features, they diverged in terms of emotion and narrative emphasis. To preview my conclusion, I will make the case that these divergent memory processes worked in conjunction to maintain aspects of the Lithuanian schema outlined above. In creating both sets, I would begin the interviews by encouraging respondents to draw their village and map out pre-1940 social networks. Then they were asked

Memory and Cultural Schema • 139 to describe the nature of the transformation of these networks during Soviet and German occupation. The interviews lasted from a couple of hours to two days; the number of interviews totalled forty, about equally split between émigrés and nonémigrés. In both sets of interviews, I primarily sought the ‘objective facts’ of the respondent’s pre-war and wartime community life: who participated in community-level economic arrangements, who belonged to social-patriotic organizations, who were members of political parties, who joined the local resistance organization (if one had developed at all).8 Both émigrés and natives could remember their neighbours and the associational life of their community in remarkable detail. For rural communities, elderly Lithuanians were asked to draw maps of their villages, list local pre-war membership in political and social associations, and describe the nature of anti-Soviet resistance. Many interviewees, both émigrés and natives, could draw an intricate map of their village as it stood on the eve of World War II. For example, respondents could indicate the location of each farmstead and designate the number of hectares as things stood before the first Soviet occupation (1940–June 1941). They could also list memberships in political parties and social organizations. Finally, they could usually give a rendition of how resistance was organized in this community. In both sets of interviews, the narrative describing the local formation of a resistance unit was detailed and vivid. For social scientists and historians attempting to reconstruct social life in the 1940s Baltic area, interviews with elderly survivors have often been the only available source of information, especially in terms of rural communities. Yet it is not only their necessity but their very richness that makes these oral histories so valuable. In one chapter of Resistance and Rebellion, I described the experience of five individuals from the area around Merkine, a small town in southern Lithuania, during the post-war years. One interviewee became a member of a locally based Soviet collaboration force whose mission was to pacify the countryside. Another tried to stay out of the conflict altogether. A third joined a band of mobile partisan fighters (and was quickly captured and deported to Siberia). Two others were involved in community-based resistance, although the development of resistance in their respective communities differed. As in other interviews, these two respondents produced community maps, lists and histories. The interviewees could recall remarkable detail. One respondent related how the twelve farmsteads of the community were aligned along the Merkys River; he listed the number of hectares and the total number of family members. He recalled lists of members of various social/political groups. The interviewee listed other details on his map, including the listing specific names of partisans and collaborators. Rural villages were not the only communities examined in this research. Seven respondents were associated with one fraternity at the University of Kaunas, a community heavily involved in conspiratorial anti-Soviet resistance during the first

140 • Roger Petersen Soviet occupation (1940–41).9 Both émigré and non-émigré members of Grandis, the Catholic engineering fraternity, can tell a remarkably similar story of how rebellion evolved within their ranks. Most had been active in the Catholic youth organization (Ateitis) in their home villages. After the Soviets installed their regime in Lithuania, organization developed along ‘groups of five’, five-person, self-contained cells designed to prevent easy Soviet penetration throughout the organization. Recruitment was conducted almost exclusively within Catholic circles. When the actual revolt occurred, timed to coincide with the German invasion, each group of five was assigned a specified task. One respondent’s group guarded a tunnel; another was assigned to reconnaissance at the airport, and so on. Former members of the fraternity who had emigrated to the United States have written about these experiences and shared them at meetings of former political prisoners. Those remaining in Lithuania had also not forgotten their participation in anti-Soviet resistance. For example, in 1992, within a year of the re-establishment of independence, one of the Lithuanian non-émigré respondents produced a sheet of paper during the interview listing the former members of the fraternity and their fates. Respondent G2 could name almost every member and whether they had been deported, killed, were still living, and so on. In short, a coherent collective narrative of the Grandis fraternity existed that could be accessed by the seven former members (from Chicago, Cleveland, Vilnius and Kaunas). In my limited set of interviews, I saw little difference among émigrés and natives in terms of the ability to produce community-level information and narratives. Émigrés and natives remembered their neighbours and the number of hectares they had owned in the pre-Soviet days about equally well. Both groups could draw maps or fail to draw maps in roughly equal numbers. Both groups produced roughly similar narratives about the establishment of Soviet power in 1940 and the German invasion of June 1941. In short, the ability to provide names, numbers and a list of events appeared much the same to me. Perhaps this should not be surprising. In the case of both émigrés and natives, no one had ever sat down and asked them these particular details before. There could be no rehearsal of this previously unasked story. Coming back to a point from the introductory paragraphs, in both émigré and native narratives the German occupation played a minor part in the story. There are several reasons why this could be expected. First, my primary purpose was to uncover the mechanisms behind violent resistance and by and large Lithuanians did not violently resist the Germans. In 1941 Lithuanians generally greeted the Germans as liberators from Soviet oppression. While attitudes towards the Germans rapidly cooled, the population largely stood on the sidelines and waited to see how the war would turn out, especially after the German defeat at Stalingrad. Based on memories of World War I, many Lithuanians hoped that a stalemate between Germans and Soviets would again lead to Lithuanian

Memory and Cultural Schema • 141 independence. Given these hopes, most Lithuanians conserved their energies and passively waited for the right moment to act. My focus on the organization of violent resistance meant that the bulk of my time was devoted to the 1940–41 and post-1944 periods. In these periods some villages organized violent resistance while others did not. It was this variation that allowed testing of my hypotheses on rebellion. Had I been pursuing a different question, about social or economic policies for example, memories of the Germans might have played a larger role. Second, the nature of the German occupation led to silences in the narratives regarding those years. Almost all of the interviewees, both émigré and native, were sensitive to the moral ambiguities of how World War II played out in Lithuania. Most critically, the vast majority of Lithuania’s Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis, helped by Lithuanian collaborators. Unsurprisingly, this fact does not generally appear in Lithuanian narratives. Lithuanians see themselves as victims, and those who see themselves as victims are loathe to see themselves as perpetrators.10 Even given the absence of violent resistance and the moral ambiguities, the relative lack of emphasis in the narratives on the German occupation is remarkable. Two of the interviewees were arrested by the Germans and sent to concentration camps. Yet even their narratives were centred on the Soviets. Two factors are crucial here. The Soviets had not only occupied Lithuania, they remained as occupiers. Second, the Soviets were part of a cultural schema. The Germans had simply become part of ‘the West’, and memories reflected this to a great extent. Compared to the Soviets, the Germans and their occupation paled in comparison and paled in memory. Most importantly for the question at hand, the memories of World War II that drove individuals to anti-Soviet protest action in 1991 were not likely to be connected to the German occupation.

Differences There are some obvious reasons to predict that the two sets of interviews might unfold in very different ways and produce divergent types of information and interpretation. Many in the Lithuanian émigré community in the United States fled their homeland during the multiple occupations of the 1940s. They formed new émigré associations or joined existing ones; they often lobbied the US government on foreign policy issues. Two issues are most crucial here. First, the émigrés’ stories were often well rehearsed in the sense that they had been openly discussed. In contrast, their native counterparts, who had lived under communist rule for over four decades, could not openly discuss the 1940s, especially the nature of anti-Soviet resistance. In fact, many of the native interviewees in my sample (gathered in 1992) had never discussed their experiences even with their own families. Second, émigrés had, in general, been exposed for several decades to a meta-narrative stressing Soviet inhumanity and Western betrayal and hypocrisy. The West had

142 • Roger Petersen sacrificed Lithuania to the brutal Soviet regime. However, political efforts, such as the continuance of the US policy of non-recognition of the Soviet incorporation of Lithuania, could and should be made to correct historical injustices. While my research primarily sought community-level information, the interviews were fairly open-ended and often diverged to either personal or national levels. To summarize my impressions, the interviews of native respondents were more likely than those of émigrés to transform into personal and grief-laden narratives. Émigrés were more likely to digress into political meta-narratives with an angry emotional undertone. I mention anger and grief because I believe these emotions, once unleashed, changed the flow of the interviews in significant ways. In order to understand the effect of these emotions on narrative, a few comments on emotion, and grief and anger in particular, are required. Following the work of Nico Frijda (1986) and others, emotion can be treated as an action tendency – an impulse or a state of readiness to act, or in the case of these interviews to remember, in a specific way.11 For example, the emotion of shame activates an urge to disappear from social life; fear initiates action tendencies towards fight or flight. In reconstructing life from violent eras, the most powerful emotions are often those related to loss and absence. Respondents must recall (or vividly imagine) the death of relatives or the act of fleeing one’s country. In my project, interviews commonly and unsurprisingly activated grief and anger, both powerful emotional responses that are triggered from memories of loss. Frijda makes the following observation regarding these emotions: For absence to truly constitute grief, it must possess the property of finality: the notion that absence will be forever. Without finality there is misery or distress or anger. Anger upon loss indeed appears to function as a means to ward off realization of finality: ‘I wish there was something I could blame’. (1986: 200)

Frijda expands on this point: Grief is the emotion of finality, of definitive, irreparable loss. Finality has its specific painfulness in the helplessness that it implies. It also has its advantages: no efforts make sense, nothing has to be endeavored, no effort has to be spent. Similar considerations apply to anger. Its situational meaning structure involves an obstacle that in principle might not have been there. The antagonist could have acted otherwise; something or someone else is to blame. This implies that behind the obstacle the blocked goal still exists, still is available; and the nature of the obstacle is such that, in principle it can be controlled and modified. Anger implies hope. Further, anger implies that fighting is meaningful; one is not reduced to mere passivity. (1986: 429)

While both grief and anger relate to loss, their respective action tendencies create different impulses. Anger precipitates efforts to correct the brutal past. Thus, the

Memory and Cultural Schema • 143 angry interviewee might be expected to take a more proactive role in shaping his or her responses to questions as well as to produce different types of narratives. Anger might tend to lead to questions of blame, possibly to revenge. Anger implies that a battle over the history of the past is still being waged in the respondent’s mind, that the events are not final, that the very interpretation of events that might proceed from the interview will somehow modify that event. Anger may drive the interview into the political realm. Grief admits finality. The action tendency of grief may be towards confession or catharsis. The interview itself cannot be seen as changing finalized events.12 With the grief-stricken respondent, the interviewer is less likely to become involved with some form of interpretative game concerning the events of the past. Unless counteracted, grief is likely to drive the interview into the more personal realm.13

Examples and Generalizations For obvious reasons, in the early 1990s émigrés were more likely to have discussed the events in Lithuania during the 1940s far more often than their native counterparts. As discussed above, grief is one response to the experience of loss; anger is another. A key difference between the two emotions is summed up in the Frijda quote above: ‘Anger implies hope. Further, anger implies that fighting is meaningful; one is not reduced to mere passivity.’ Anger’s action tendency is to address the source of loss, to avoid finality, to try to attack those responsible for loss in order to put things straight somehow. Well-rehearsed émigré narratives tend to bring in the political rather than the personal. Ethnic or political groups are often targeted for blame. Reference to documents or treaties sometimes replaces vivid personal memory. The émigré respondent seems to take on a responsibility to provide a broad history for the interviewer. A set of Western terms (genocide, for example) creeps into the narrative. The interchange below typifies this phenomenon. At this point in the interview, I was encouraging the respondent to discuss, in terms of sticks and carrots, Soviet methods of deterring resistance. Visibly annoyed with the questions, respondent M kept slipping back into the angry collective narrative: RP: The Soviets obviously want to stop people from going in this direction (towards active resistance). Now there are two ways the Soviets could do this: they could make the penalty so high that nobody would want to go and that would deter them. The other is that they might give benefits to people who go in the other direction (towards collaboration). M: In communism there was no human face. Suslov at that time was governing and he simply announced that there will be Lithuania without Lithuanians. And the government took that particular direction.

144 • Roger Petersen RP: So everything was a stick and there was no carrot? M: There was no regard for human life at all. Destruction. No human faith. People were robbed and destroyed. RP: Couldn’t they say that I will give you a government position or land if you do this [collaborate]? M: The people did not believe what they gave and that was actually deceit. Volunteers (collaborators) were the people to whom power was assigned one hundred per cent. They could shoot anybody, kill anybody, rob anybody, and they had complete freedom to behave in that country anyway they wanted. RP: Were there any istrebiteli [Soviet-armed collaboration force] from your village? M: One was. He was just born in that village, but he did not live there. He was living in the township. RP: Was he a communist student or anything? M: The people who volunteered … the incentive to volunteer was first, it was promised that they would not be inducted into the Red Army to fight against the Germans, they would remain in that particular location and serve the purpose, and more so for those who volunteered actually they were hooligans. The one who was from this village raped a girl and was taken out during the Smetona period [pre-war period] to the penitentiary. He volunteered to avenge those who disturbed his peace.

As with many émigré interviews, general terms of blame dominate the discussion. Slogans (‘In communism there was no human face’, ‘Lithuania without Lithuanians’) replace detail. As with almost all of the respondents in my project, members of the émigré community suffered tremendous losses, including the loss of connection to their homeland and even the loss of the ability to communicate with relatives. However, the organized Lithuanian émigré community, particularly in Chicago and other large cities, saw a possibility to act – an opportunity to publicize their history, to affect US government policy, to identify those responsible for their suffering. These possibilities cannot undo the losses that have occurred, but they do prevent grief. As the emotion of finality, grief is eliminated, or suppressed, by anger and the possibilities for justice and/or vengeance. Anger leads to a search for new targets of blame. In the above example, communism, the Soviet official Suslov and a local collaborator are targeted in turn. Often, specific questions, answered through a prism of anger, are refracted into generalized responses: ‘There was no regard for human life at all. Destruction. No human faith. People were robbed and destroyed.’

Memory and Cultural Schema • 145 Natives, having lived under Soviet domination for decades, were less likely to fall into the pattern of a well-rehearsed and politicized narrative, at least not in 1992. Consider the following example. One evening I decided to interview the woman from whom I was renting a room (Respondent S). I went through the usual interview process, starting with her earliest recollections of the village where she grew up and proceeding through the changes of the 1940s. S had left her rural community in the mid-1940s to attend the university in Vilnius. Respondent S had never been involved in politics. She was a fairly typical sixty-five-year-old Lithuanian. Like many of the respondents in my project, S painted a positive, almost idyllic, picture of pre-war life in her community: ‘There were very good times. Very beautiful relations between neighbours.’ S recalled beekeeping operations and relations among god-families with visible joy. Whether community relations were actually this friendly and tranquil is not clear; the point is that S, like many other respondents, began her narrative with a series of observations about pleasant events and relationships. The main focus of the interview began when I interceded to ask factual questions about the structure of the village or community. How many hectares did this neighbour have? Who owned a threshing machine? And so on. Eventually, the narrative led to tragic and violent events. Like many other Balts who had lived through this period, Respondent S had witnessed considerable tragedy and atrocity during the Soviet occupations: a brother had been shot in the cross-fire between Soviets and partisans, her father was tied to horses and dragged to his death, and her cousin had been imprisoned and tortured during the first Soviet occupation. S had personally witnessed the Soviets display dead partisans in the town square, a common deterrent tactic; she had twice seen scores of individuals and families destined for Siberia herded on to trucks. While horrific, on the whole her experiences were similar to those of most of the other interviewees. Also, like many other interviewees, S broke down and wept during the session. The morning after the interview S was pale and somewhat withdrawn. She mentioned that she had not slept because of nightmares about the events of the 1940s, events she had not recalled for years and had never openly discussed. During the latter stage of the interview, S’s narrative became more vivid. She recalled not only a looting of her family’s house, but how the trespassers took the guitar from the wall and how they found her father’s prized gold watch in one of his coat pockets. S tended to concentrate on her family’s history. She had little comment on political matters; she had little desire to assign blame or seek revenge; she did not tend to speak in terms of ethnic or political groups or in general terms at all. At the end of the interview, when asked if she had anything to add, she replied: ‘You can’t make any decisions on that time because you must understand both sides, and you can understand them only if you have a knowledge of the smallest detail.’ Politicians today, she added, must not seek revenge

146 • Roger Petersen but rather concentrate on the good of the Lithuanian nation and ‘humans in general’. Some émigré interviews resemble that of S. Respondent L emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s and worked as a meat packer in a small mid-western city for most of his life.14 After dispassionately describing his community, Respondent L broke into grief-dominated discourse. First, when asked to list individuals deported from his village, L described his brother’s arrest in June of 1941. Weeping, L related the last words his mother spoke to his brother. After the introduction of grief, the interview became intensely personal. Regardless of the nature of my questions, L began to tell long and vivid personal stories – he told of being stopped by a Soviet soldier while riding his bicycle during the German invasion of 1941 and lying to the soldier about going to get his shoes fixed; he recounts the smell of the Soviet soldiers’ food (‘it stinks like hell that food’); at length he tells the story of his last meeting with his girlfriend before leaving for Germany in 1944. At this point, there was no reason to continue the interview. L was simply too upset to return to a systematic account of events. Like S, respondent L’s narrative became personal. Since coming to the United States, he had lived in an isolated town in the middle of the United States and had less chance to participate in organizations with a politicized meta-narrative of 1940s Lithuania. In the two examples above, the respondents did not belong to organizations or local communities with a rehearsed meta-narrative. Both interviews tended towards the personal and came to be dominated by grief. Finally, let me come back to the seven fraternity members. They all told a similar narrative concerning the community of their engineering fraternity. While being told, this narrative created an emotional effect – pride. Emotion theorists define pride as a positive emotion triggered by a belief about one’s own action. The seven members of the Grandis network all positively assessed their personal participation in the 1940–1 conspiracy. They took pleasure in going over the group’s history. Most emotion theorists consider pride as an emotion without an action tendency; it is experienced on its own without consistently directing the individual towards any specific type of action. The crucial point here, though, is that the existence of this type of collective narrative diverts the individual from strictly personal narratives dominated by grief. The seven former members of Grandis certainly experienced tragedy and hardship. Two of them, continuing resistance activity into the German occupation, were arrested by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. Two others were arrested and sent to Soviet labour camps in Siberia for anti-Soviet activity in the 1944–6 period. Yet, on the whole, this particular set of respondents was among the least embittered in the entire pool. Their narratives generally proceeded in a straightforward manner, avoided political generalizations and did not exercise excessive judgement and blaming.

Memory and Cultural Schema • 147

Connecting Memory, Schema and Action Above, five aspects of a cultural schema were outlined and then considered in the light of the protests in Vilnius in January 1991. When using the concept of cultural schemas, the most challenging aspects concern how they are maintained across time and how they motivate action at a specific time and place. In this particular case, the role of émigré memories was very important, I would argue, for at least two different reasons. First, the nature of émigré discourse clearly defined and maintained the ‘other’. Given their opportunities to organize and remonstrate, émigrés developed a well-rehearsed narrative that repeated the crimes of the Soviets and the inadequacies of the Western response to Lithuania’s plight. Émigrés possessed the luxury of anger, an emotion that can ward off the finality of loss. They could write letters and hold meetings and develop lobbying strategies. They could give interviews to political scientists. Driven by anger and the resulting action tendency to blame, émigrés maintained the elements of the Lithuanian cultural schema that defined the Soviets as aggressors and the West as an appeaser. For decades their political hopes seemed quixotic at best and delusional at worst. However, across decades of Soviet rule their memories and resultant emotions and actions helped sustain basic elements of the Lithuanian cultural schema. Second, parts of the émigré narrative became a core element in the political strategy of Baltic elites. In one example of the types of efforts being made, documentary film-makers, using new opportunities to travel, came to the United States to find and interview Lithuanian émigrés who had been important political figures at the time of the Soviet takeover of Lithuania. Their statements eventually became part of a documentary film, Naktis Lietuvoje (‘Night over Lithuania’), which reiterated the outlines of the Lithuanian narrative. The film was partly funded by a famous Lithuanian basketball player, Sarunas Marciulionas, at the time a member of a team in the American-based National Basketball Association. Figures like Marciulionas exemplified the links between émigré and native Lithuanians that were emerging in the late 1980s. Thus, émigrés helped maintain the narrative aspect of the schema. Baltic political elites were focused on one element above all others: the illegality of the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union in 1939–40. The most realistic way for the Baltic peoples to free themselves from the Soviet orbit was through reference to these illegalities rather than through provocations. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, a statement by all three Baltic movements began with the words: ‘23 August 1939 inflicted wounds to tens of nations and states. Some of these wounds are still bleeding.’ In the paragraphs below, it was stated:

148 • Roger Petersen Today on the fiftieth anniversary of the deal, we remind all nations of the world that, under international law, treaties of this kind are criminal and unlawful from the very moment of signing. This knowledge, which the apologists of imperialism and red fascists have preferred to overlook, has supported and kept us alive despite the decadeslong public terror and systematic genocide […]. The Hitler–Stalin pact is still shaping the Europe of today, our once-common Europe. Yet we are convinced that the European community and democratic forces in the East will unite their voices in support of the demands of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that the pact together with its secret protocols be denounced and declared null and void from the moment of signing. Only then will Europe divest itself of the last colonies of the Hitler–Stalin era, and the Baltic nations will get the opportunity to determine their own destiny on the basis of free self determination.

The Soviet authorities themselves were overwhelmed by the emergence of this narrative and blamed the émigré community. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee Statement on the Situation in the Soviet Baltic Republics, released four days after the Baltic demonstrations of 23 August, read: ‘Abusing freedom of international relations, nationalist leaders contacted foreign organizations and centres, seeking to involve them in what was in fact an internal affair of their republics and treating them as consultants and advisers, as if people in the West were better aware of the actual needs of the Baltic nations, as if they were guided not by their own open or concealed projects with respect to our country.’ While the effect of the émigré community on developing this strategy should not be exaggerated, it should not be ignored either. For over forty years, émigré narratives about what had happened in Lithuania had contained a mantra about the illegal incorporation of Lithuania and the obligations of the West to undo this illegal action. When Lithuanian communities in Chicago and Cleveland gathered to remember their past, the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact was often merged with their memories of personal suffering. When my Lithuanian friend said ‘This is 1940’, his connection between 1940 and 1991, this activation of a schema, was undoubtedly partly supported by the memory dynamics of émigrés. What importance, if any, did the memories of those remaining in Lithuania have on the events of January 1991? Their role was more subtle, but perhaps more powerful. Many natives were more likely to use the opportunity provided by the decline of Soviet repression to address their personal grief. In the process, they emphasized the quality of the Lithuanian ‘self’ embedded in the cultural schema. They wanted an admission that their suffering had occurred, that they had lived through the tragedies and violence of the 1940s. Within their interviews, the narrative often came to terms with a definition of self as witness and victim. Their existence reaffirmed the ‘martyr’ role of common people in Lithuania. The memory processes of émigré and native communities thus may be seen as being somewhat complementary. The émigrés helped maintain the schematic

Memory and Cultural Schema • 149 meaning of the ‘others’ as well as a narrative story of betrayal. The natives, by their very presence and longevity, represented the martyr essence of the Lithuanian people in modern history. There is one last issue to address here – motivation. Even if events activate schemas with specific roles, it is still not completely clear why an individual would adopt such a role in the face of risks as significant as those accepted by the first actors, those rushing to stand in front of the parliament in Vilnius. In my previous work, I tried to explain this motivation in rational terms by employing an argument by Stanley Benn (1979). Benn proposes that individuals act in different roles and that each role has its own preference ranking: an actor can rationally and consistently prefer a to b under role A, while preferring b over a under role B. The individual switches ‘from one socially-defined role to another as different social situations confront him’ (Benn 1979: 302). The obvious problem with this formulation, as Benn recognizes, is that ‘different social situations’ need better definition, if we are to know when an individual might switch from one role to another. Benn (1979) summarizes his argument and addresses this particular issue in the following passages: I am suggesting, in short, that political activity may be a form of moral self-expression, not for achieving any objective beyond itself (for the cause might be lost), nor yet for the satisfaction of knowing that one had let everyone else know that one was on the side of the right, but because one could not seriously claim, even to oneself, to be on that side without expressing the attitude by the action most appropriate to it in the paradigm situation. (1979: 310)

Benn expands upon the meaning and importance of action conforming to a paradigm situation: The smaller the possibility that the relevant states will be significantly altered by the individual’s decision, the more strictly the expressive act must conform to some socially understood pattern for expressing that attitude. It is rather that only by using such standard modes can the protester claim, even to himself, to have made his protest, to have expressed his attitude, and so to have been true to himself. (Benn 1979: 310–11)

Socially understood patterns are connected to the rituals and symbols of a society. For example, in many democratic societies elections possess strong symbolic significance. The apparent irrationality of voting is overcome as the individual switches to a role where the expressive motivation to show support for democracy in a paradigm situation overcomes the costs involved in going to the polls. Of course, not all individuals in democratic societies have similar role-rankings and not all will turn out to vote. For some, voting may have little symbolic significance and the opportunity to play the role of voter will have very little meaning or value.

150 • Roger Petersen Benn’s expressive motivation theory provides an explanation for the risk-laden events in Vilnius in January 1991. Benn’s explanation is based on the nature of the event and provides a culturally oriented lens to address the question of variation in risk insensitive nationalist participation. Normally, an actor occupies roles that are risk averse, but if an event produces opportunities to play a paradigmatic role, then the individual may, to use Benn’s language, ‘switch over’ to this socially understood role in order to express some core attitude. A certain percentage of the given society, a small percentage no doubt, will value this role highly enough to become first actors. The more the event produces opportunities to play a paradigmatic role, the more individuals will feel compelled to be ‘true to themselves’ despite the risks. In applying these concepts to Vilnius in 1991, the explanation would hold that a specific cultural role became available. By standing in front of the parliament, Lithuanian patriots could play the role of martyr (but at an acceptable cost, because although the chance of death was significant, it was still low). In this interpretation, those first actors rushing to the parliament building received a benefit by being true to themselves.15 Perhaps this rationality-based pseudo-martyrdom mechanism did drive some of the first actors that night. However, others, including émigrés, were probably driven by simple anger. As discussed above in the quoted passage from Frijda: ‘Anger implies hope. Further, anger implies that fighting is meaningful; one is not reduced to mere passivity.’ Anger may well be one of the most politically important emotions. Without some level of anger, it is doubtful that thousands would have rushed to the parliament building that night in January. In this case, grief, despite its tendency to breed passivity, may also have played a role. As I noted in my descriptions of events that night, a mixture of older and younger people participated in the protest (Petersen 2001: 277). What was driving the older people, those who personally suffered through the violence of the 1940s? The action in this case involved standing in front of the Lithuanian parliament, a national and historic symbol. For some, this action may have been simply an act of witness. Their voices silenced for decades by communist rule, these survivors may have showed up to give recognition to seminal events, to give personal witness. Political scientists often apply a cost/benefit analysis to make sense of puzzling actions. Rational choice theory is a major part of the discipline. In my previous explanation of events in Vilnius in January 1991, I wrote that the Lithuanian cultural schema that was activated at the time may have had the ability to turn costs and risks into benefits. However, in the light of re-examination of my interviews and consideration of the memories of Lithuanians, perhaps a better explanation is the simpler one. That is, relatively straightforward emotions such as grief and anger were embedded into the roles of the schema and these emotions alone,

Memory and Cultural Schema • 151 without any consideration of any benefit, were sufficient to drive participation. Anger with its action tendency to correct the past drove many participants, while grief and the desire to give witness to the past, and to come to some final terms with the past, drove others. The combination of these diverse emotions helps to explain the diversity in age and social groups seen among the protestors in Vilnius.

Conclusion The events in Vilnius in January 1991 were important but also puzzling. I have offered an explanation based on a specific Lithuanian cultural schema. However, this explanation only begs the question as to where such schemas originate and how they can be maintained across generations. The answers to these questions must be found in the study of memories and how they are transmitted. As seen in the other chapters of this volume, this understanding can best be gained by studying how memories are transmitted in communities. In this chapter I have shown that different communities, particularly émigrés versus natives, have produced different effects in reinforcing the roles of cultural schemas and the motivations to act upon those roles. In Lithuania these multiple effects came together to influence action at a national level at a critical juncture in that nation’s history.

Notes 1. This paragraph is from Petersen (2002: 64). 2. This section is from Petersen (2002: 274–5). 3. The Soviet action took place at two locations, the television tower, where all of the deaths occurred, and the radio-television building located a few miles away, where the action was certainly violent but not lethal. Altogether the casualties totalled fifteen or so dead, a few hundred injured. I was at the radiotelevision building at the time of the initial assaults. A detailed written account of these events can be found in Senn (1991). Many of the numbers and estimates are gleaned from this source. 4. In fact, the Lithuanian Guards inside the building unscrewed the support beams to the roof in order to thwart such an attack (Lieven 1993: 250). 5. For an extended theoretical discussion of narrative on a related case, see Wertsch (2002). 6. The following lines are from Petersen (2001: 287–8). 7. Descriptions of the event appeared on 22 May 1972, in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times and many other major newspapers. 8. This fieldwork was an important part of a broader project that sought to identify individual-level causal mechanisms that promote and sustain political

152 • Roger Petersen

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

violence. More specifically, this research pursued the relationship between observable types of community (classified by size, centralization, density of ties, etc.) and the development of rebellion and resistance (as related in the narratives of interviewees). In attempting to isolate the mechanisms of rebellion and resistance, I sought to find the source of variation in the development of resistance organization among villages in the same region. The basic question asked why one village would develop an extensive guerrilla organization or cell while the neighbouring village (under the same geography and regime policies) remained passive. I cover the organization and history of this fraternity extensively in Chapter Four of Resistance and Rebellion (2001). Lithuanian–Jewish relations are an extremely thorny issue. While there is much written on the subject, for a particularly clear discussion of some of the issues involved, see Tomas Venclova (1989). I have addressed the issue of collaboration in Petersen (2001) and the nature of the June 1941 pogroms in Petersen (2002). As Frijda writes: ‘Action tendency can actualize in mental actions having similar intent to overt ones: turning toward an object in thought, or away from it; disengaging emotionally from it; turning toward or away from the thoughts themselves’ (1986: 76). This view of the action tendencies of grief and anger has a long history. For example, for Aristotle anger was partly defined by the impulse to revenge and could not be separated from it – ‘no one grows angry with a person on whom there is no prospect of taking vengeance’ (Rhetoric). Anger is a mixture of pain and pleasure, the pain of being insulted combined with the pleasure of revenge, or at least imagining revenge. Aristotle points out the re-equilibrating effects of mourning, which involves a view of grief: ‘There is an element of pleasure even in mourning and lamentation. There is grief, indeed, at his loss, but pleasure in remembering him.’ For further insights on action tendency and the operation of specific emotions, including anger and grief, see Elster (1999: especially 281–3). Referred to as # 21 in Petersen (2001). The approach addresses risk in at least two non-exclusionary ways. First, the value of playing this role produces enjoyment as a benefit. Second, and more important, the paradigmatic role may redefine the meaning of risk and, in certain cases, turn risk from a cost into a benefit. In this event, one plays the role not only despite the risk, but because the role itself informs one that enduring risk within the context of the particular event is a good in its own right. In terms of the collective action approach, participation becomes a selective incentive.

Memory and Cultural Schema • 153

References Benn, S. (1979), ‘The problematic rationality of political participation’, in P. Laslett and J. Fishkin (eds), Philosophy, Politics, and Society, New Haven: Yale University Press. Elster, J. (1999), Alchemies of the Mind. Rationality and the Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frijda, N.H. (1986), The Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Granauskas, Romualdas (1992), ‘The red forest’, in V. Kelertas (ed.), Come into My Time. Lithuania in Prose Fiction, 1970–1990, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Landsbergis, A. (1977), ‘Five posts in a marketplace’, in A. Straumanis (ed.), Confrontations with Tyranny, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Lieven, A. (1993), The Baltic Revolution. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence, New Haven: Yale University Press. Ortner, S.B. (1990), ‘Patterns of history: cultural schemas in the foundings of Sherpa religious institutions’, in E. Ohnuki-Tierney (ed.), Culture through Time. Anthropological Approaches, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Petersen, R. (2001), Resistance and Rebellion. Lessons from Eastern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2002), Understanding Ethnic Violence. Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Remeikis, T. (1980), Opposition to Soviet Rule in Lithuania, Chicago: Chicago Institute of Lithuanian Studies Press. Schudson, M. (1995), ‘Dynamics of distortion in collective memory’, in D.L. Schacter (ed.), Memory Distortion. How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Senn, A.E. (1991), ‘The crisis in Lithuania, January 1991: a visitor’s account’, Association of Baltic States Newsletter, 15: 1–12. Vardys, Stanley and Sedaitis, Judith (1997), Lithuania. The Rebel Nation, Boulder: Westview Press. Venclova, T. (1989), ‘Jews and Lithuanians’, Cross Currents, 8: 55–73. Wertsch, J.V. (2002), Voices of Collective Remembering, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

–7– Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland Longina Jakubowska

Forced into silence by the communist regime for half a century, the gentry in Poland had a powerful need to tell their story. Their rapid emergence on the public scene in 1989 was followed by a surge of reminiscences, admissions of social origins, disclosures of family histories. As life stories unfolded, one event came to dominate both personal and collective narratives. The experience of expropriation and eviction from their landed estates in 1944–5 is stamped in the gentry’s memory as a traumatic event, and the decree mandated by the Soviet-backed Polish government as an act of violence intent on annihilation of the gentry as a group. The focus on this particular episode and the accompanying intensity of the mnemonic recounting are surprising; the war and occupation that lasted six years and took 7 million lives in Poland alone, leaving no family untouched by death and violence, finally ended. Taking place soon afterwards, expropriation is conceived as part of the war, and the event does not stand alone in the gentry’s memory, but constitutes just one stage in the long chain of violence, expulsion, displacement and deprivation ever so potent because it irrevocably altered their lives. It was Wednesday morning, 31 January 1945, about 9 o’clock, when we saw the emissaries of the Peoples’ Poland walking down the park lane towards the manor. All employees were called to a meeting. Tactfully, they did not parade in front of our windows but approached the house from the side in small quiet groups. Somebody was sent to fetch me. I quickly took a few drops of Valeriana to calm my nerves. The local deputies, estate workers and some poor peasants gathered in the salon. Two land surveyors, members of the expropriation committee, and the assistant to the county secretary were already seated at the table. They rose to greet me. I forestalled the workers’ greetings by saying firmly that there was no need for commotion. I sat on the chair they offered. Marcinkowski, the chair of the committee, began the official speech. He spoke of the Land Reform decree issued in Lublin, ‘historic justice’, ‘Peoples’ Poland’, and such things. The estate workers stood silent, herded in a tight group. Their support for the new regime was being bought by the magical word ‘land’. Marcinkowski asked whether there were any grievances against the owner. I looked at the workers. They immediately denied having any. Only the old and decrepit Julian, who was already in

155

156 • Longina Jakubowska my father’s employ, spoke up. He demanded three quintals of grain, which he should have received during the German occupation. ‘Be quiet, the German overseers should have done it, not her ladyship’ – whispered his fellow workers to him. Marcinkowski also tried to explain to Julian that this was the Germans’ responsibility, not mine, but the old man was only getting more confused. He believed that ‘her ladyship’ should be held responsible for everything. Marcinkowski decided to bring the meeting to an end. ‘Since there are no grievances against Lady Walewska’ – he resumed – ‘we will move the date by which she is required to leave by two weeks counting from tomorrow. Do you agree?’ ‘We agree’ – responded the workers in unison. Marcinkowski instructed me that we are not allowed to live on the estate grounds, nor in the neighbouring village, not even in the same county; that we may take all the furniture and personal belongings; that we were entitled to use estate carriages to transport them. Finally, he politely asked me to hand over the keys to all estate buildings. I put on the table the bunch of keys tied together with a leather strap – the symbol of rule over the estate. ‘I believe we do not need you anymore’ – said Marcinkowski. I rose and left. They stayed in my house. (Walewska nd)

This one gentry woman’s account of expropriation strikes with precision and vividness of recollection. In listening to memories of land reform which took place fifty years ago, I was impressed by how fresh they appeared, how rich in minuscule details. This made me eager to believe that they were obviously authentic and accurate. Memories inspire faith because we believe they were recorded at the time; they have an eyewitness status. Yet it has been shown through research into autobiographical memory that despite the vividness of our memory of momentous events, our recall of the actual facts of the event and the circumstances we were in at the time is often incorrect. Neither the vividness of a memory nor the strength of our certainty in a memory can ensure its veracity (Pillemer 1998). Generally, memory is taken to mean the process by which events are coded and recalled. The simplicity of this definition obscures the complexity of the problem. The rapidly accumulating psychological, sociological and anthropological studies on memory emphasize its elusive, fragmentary nature and ever changing character. It becomes increasingly apparent that memory is not a record of the past but its reconstruction, and an act of retelling a complex work of interpretation. What is remembered is not only retrieval of stored information, but also a representation of the self then and the self now, which occurs in a culturally contextualized social interaction (Bartlett 1932; Middleton and Edwards 1990). Furthermore, ever since Halbwachs’ seminal work on collective memory (1950), it has been stressed that individual memory is not simply personal. Typically, our memories are mixed, possessing both a personal and a social aspect. This presents us with a perplexing paradox that the memory of a person, precisely that which is taken to epitomize individuality, draws upon collective idioms and mechanisms. Our memories are nested in interpersonal settings, and these are in turn embedded in social, cultural

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 157 and historical contexts. Indeed, even the very process of remembering personally significant events and situations depends upon cultural and historical practices for remembering and creating meaning (Conway 1992). The fundamental question in the study of memory is how autobiographical memory becomes transformed into collective memory and collective representation of the past. How is the collective memory tableau created? Focusing on life histories of the Polish gentry in the post-war era, this chapter examines social mechanisms that shape the processes of memory-making. Using life story as a narrative, it examines the means through which a group establishes memory of the collective past.

Memory and Class Identity While sharing many characteristics with their Western counterparts, the Polish gentry, szlachta,1 were in many respects exceptional. Like other European nobilities, they originated in the practice of granting land in exchange for military service to the kings, but unlike them they converted these grants into inalienable possessions. Unique to European nobility was the complete absence of a feudal hierarchy in Poland, which implied that there were no titles, no system of vassalage, and a near absence of a central court. The vast size of the szlachta set them even further apart. While in Western Europe there were on average one to two nobles per 100 inhabitants, in Poland that proportion was about ten in 100, or 10 per cent of the population. The gentry’s economic power was boosted by the great grain boom of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The nobles’ exclusive right to the grain trade eventually undercut the previously prospering cities as independent political entities. The ‘republic of gentry’ that formed in Poland fortified the gentry’s economic hegemony by enforcing serfdom and maintaining a monopoly of land ownership, and, through instituting electoral monarchy, political hegemony as well. In effect, Poland was a state run by the nobles for the nobles. The noble control over the executive, legislative and judicial functions of the State, together with the gentry’s relative economic prosperity and the tremendous gap that had developed between them and the rest of the population, encouraged the belief in a separate destiny and a corresponding myth of different origins. The myth held that the Polish gentry originated from an ancient tribe of Sarmatians, a warrior people from the Black Sea Steppe, who had resisted the Roman Empire and conquered the indigenous masses. The origins myth took on Messianic dimensions. Nobility having been bestowed upon them by God, the gentry believed they were bound by a sacred covenant, destined to defend the frontiers of Christianity. Against the history of the wars with Orthodox Muscovy, Protestant Sweden and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the Sarmatian ideology converged with Catholicism. Progressive cultural integration diminished local variations and created a union of

158 • Longina Jakubowska brotherhood, the boundaries of which were marked by the Polish language, the Catholic faith and an egalitarian code of conduct. Conveniently, the origins myth provided a convincing justification for the political unity of nobles in the face of regional cultural differences and for their equality in law in spite of glaring economic disparities among them. First and foremost, all szlachta, whether rich or poor, shared the explicit understanding that the gentry constituted a nation, that the State must be subservient to the gentry because it existed in order to serve them. With an indigenous bourgeoisie hardly present and the peasantry excluded, the gentry indeed constituted a nation of equals with full citizenship rights. The paradigm which had developed in the ‘gentry’s golden ages’ endured through the next centuries amidst changed political and social realities. In the long run, the presence of a weak, contested kingship and the ensuing decentralization made the Polish state vulnerable to the expansionist policies of adjacent empires: Russia, Prussia and Austria. At the end of the eighteenth century Poland disappeared except as a memory, a nationalist programme and a set of administrative subdivisions of enlarged neighbouring states. The nationalist discourse born during the period of Partitions (1795–1918) gave a new boost to the gentry’s raison d’être. The nobility came to be viewed as the repository of state tradition and the source of resistance to the occupying powers. Nobles played the leading role in the great rebellions of 1830 and 1863. Both failed, largely due to the reluctance of the propertied gentry leaders to appeal to the peasants. With serfdom still intact, the latter had little motivation to join what they perceived was the gentry’s cause.2 The gentry paid heavy penalties for both uprisings in terms of lives lost, imprisonments, de-enoblements, forced emigrations, confiscations and the punitive sale of property. Armed insurgency was no longer an option, so resistance efforts concentrated on the construction, preservation and celebration of ‘national’ tradition. In cultural terms, the period coincided with the era of Romanticism. The national imperative became disseminated through the medium of art and literature, which enshrined the noble cause of the struggle in the pursuit of political freedom. In fact, the gentry were both the producers and the consumers of culture, its sole creators and audience. They exerted an everlasting mark on the Polish collective heritage by providing models of behaviour, ideals, heroes and martyrs. Glorified as the carriers of the Polish national-religious tradition, immortalized in historical novels, poetry and paintings, the gentry tradition became part and parcel of what constituted the essence of the nation. The process of Andersonean ‘imagining’ proceeded very slowly in Poland and, although in the course of the nineteenth century the definition of ‘nation’ was hesitantly extended to include the non-gentry, the modern national ideology retained the stamp of the noble estate. The nobility were gradually compelled to admit the budding bourgeoisie into the inner circle of the nation’s elite. As Poland became

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 159 independent in 1918, the State was restructured in line with the democratic reforms sweeping Europe. The group’s hegemonic power declined, but their position was not fundamentally affected. In spite of gradual changes in the society’s structure, the gentry continued to dominate the country’s intellectual, cultural and bureaucratic life. Put differently, the governing model of the Polish elite remained situated in a country-manor lifestyle, which had been created and eulogized in the previous epochs. Its cultural genealogy, i.e. the system of values, practices and objectives, was moulded by the historically accumulated noble heritage. The politics of World War II left Poland in the Soviet sphere of influence. Still, according to the famous words of Stalin, introducing communism in Poland was like saddling a cow. The Soviet-backed government had little legitimacy. In an effort to secure peasant support in this largely agricultural country, it proclaimed a radical land reform on 6 September 1944. All landed estates larger than fifty hectares became nationalized and subsequently either were allocated to landless and poor peasants or formed state agricultural farms. Since it was suspected that the presence of owners would inhibit peasants from participation in the land redistribution, a special ordinance banned them from the county of their expropriated estates.3 The land reform successfully removed the gentry from the countryside – its traditional stronghold, locus of power, sentiment and identity. Manors became converted into schools, orphanages and workers’ housing, or were simply taken apart brick by brick. With few exceptions, most of them quickly deteriorated; decades later only ruins in a cluster of old trees give an indication of their existence. Their former inhabitants migrated to urban centres, where they forged new lives, established new careers and developed new ways of holding on to the vestiges of their old status. Literate and educated in the largely illiterate country of that time, most swiftly converted their skills into professions. Education set them apart as an intellectual elite, just as before their incomes from landed property had set them apart from those obliged to earn their living in wages. The gentry became politically invisible and socially marginal, but although they were for some time barred from prominent positions, their cultural resources allowed them to maintain a higher standard of living than the majority of the population. Subsequently, the State and the gentry each produced their own representations of the past, representation connoting a specific form of reference in which a sign at once reveals and conceals a reality beneath it. Although each could claim to give a true account of the historical facts, their contested versions illuminate not so much the past as an ideological construction of it, each illustrated by a set of historical myths (Jakubowska 1999).

160 • Longina Jakubowska

Master Narratives and Scripted Lives Memory-making is a powerful agent in mediating identity. Recalled past experience and shared images of the historical past have particular importance for the (re)construction of social groups in the present. Collective memory often constructs certain events as symbolic markers of historical transitions. These turning points can, and often do, assume mythical dimensions, emerging as hegemonic representations of the group’s past (Zerubavel 1994). Kakar refers to them as ‘chosen traumas’, not in the sense that people chose to become victims but in the sense that they have chosen to mythologize, psychologically internalize and reactivate that particular event from their history (1996: 50). Expropriation appears to be such a milestone in the experience of the Polish gentry and its memory embedded in the group’s collective identity. Therefore the collective narrative of the event dictates a paradigmatic form. After the land reform and the traumatic circumstances attending it, the gentry were socially displaced and fragmented. Most moved to large cities, took unassuming jobs and thus never formed a ‘community’. Their identity as nobles was sustained through the repetitive telling of the stories of expropriation. They were told in intimate and private circles, but the circles often criss-crossed and overlapped. While each story was different, they eventually merged into a master narrative. Hence they are all extraordinary and yet strangely typical, gripping and yet predictable. Conventionalized by privileging a particular narrative form, the life course of their protagonists assumed similarity. They resemble each other and appear scripted. In essence, the narration of others provides us with a script with which to formulate our own stories. The kind of association that makes possible retention in the memory is not so much one of resemblance or contiguity but rather a community of interests and thoughts. It is not because thoughts are similar that we can evoke them; it is rather because the same group is interested in those memories, and is able to evoke them, that they are assembled together in our minds (Connerton 1989: 36). Under those circumstances, the desire to meet the expectation of the group is so strong that we incorporate the stories of others into our own memory, a process called transformative memory (Haaken 1998; Silverman 1996). And yet at other times the ‘shared memory’ provides merely a reference against which we remember personal experiences. In the process, personal memories become contaminated with information from similar events and so change over the years as we encounter new experiences. They remain vivid at least partially because they are told and re-told, and affirmed by the similarity of stories told by other people whose experiences – while they could not have been identical – were comparable. Shared memories, and the sharing process itself, or the production of spoken or written narratives about the past, take shape

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 161 within the framework of meaning assigned by the group within which they are told (Fentress and Wickham 1992). Social groups construct their own images of the world by establishing an agreed version of the past, a version that is established not by private remembrance but by communication (Halbwachs 1980[1950]). The gentry, largely isolated from social others by both the bureaucratic practices of the socialist state and their own politics of exclusion, oriented themselves inwards. Socializing mainly in their own milieu, they told and re-told accounts of their experiences, identifying with parts of the stories of others and eventually appropriating those fragments which were likely to have happened to them. Frequent repetition of the story of expropriation helped produce a largely uniform version of ‘the event’. The memory of expropriation became a time-frozen frame prompting instantaneous recall against the background of the collective script. Persecution ‘experienced’ and ‘remembered’ provided the overarching framework of collective identity. The gentry’s war experiences were nested in other – earlier and deeper – historical layers of collective memories of other wars, struggles and losses suffered by previous generations and inflicted by the ‘same’ enemies. The imperial powers of Germany and Russia conspired against independent Poland over two centuries; the aggression of 1939–45 was but a link in a chain. Personal experiences of the gentry were thus also structured by an historical pattern. Similar images are repeated in each generation, alike stories told by forefathers about the distant and recent past; grandparents were displaced by the January 1863 uprising, parents by World War I, and children by World War II. Enactment of this logic compels interpretation of the land reform in 1944–5 as yet another historical loss. Hence individual recollections (reproduced here from interviews) of expulsions on German and Soviet orders appear scripted as well and show a remarkable similarity with the stories told of the land reform. ‘We had to leave immediately after the Germans confiscated our mansion in September 1939. We were allowed to take limited possessions and items of everyday use, such as clothing, bedding, books and objects of sentimental value and small monetary worth.’ Or: ‘One day in September 1939 the Bolsheviks took my father away and told us to move out. He never came back. And this is how our exile started. We came back after the Soviets withdrew. The Germans threw us out. We settled on a neighbouring estate. They threw us out again. We were forced to leave for central Poland.’ Within a present clouded by war, displacement and insecurity, the memory of their recent past was the connective tissue, the ubiquitous bond that bridged distinctions among them. It also added a distinctly political dimension to the community they developed in becoming guardians of Polishness and depositories of oppositional history. The internal hierarchy was momentarily suspended, and the group became flattened, while shared discourse and experiences made it more cohesive and unified, and hence able to reproduce itself physically and culturally.

162 • Longina Jakubowska Paradoxically, practices of the regime intended to undermine the gentry produced the contrary effect of reinforcing the group’s ethos and boundaries. The similarity of biographical accounts and the cumulative conventionalization of collective memory, are shaped by thematic borrowing and idiomatic memory recall. The ‘one suitcase’ story is such a recurring motif. The gentry commonly claim that at the time of expropriation they were allowed to leave their estates with only one suitcase or nothing. This story, however, is historically substantiated only in a few cases, as is also evident in the opening narrative of this article. As interviews unfolded, it became clear that most landlords managed, or were allowed to, take with them many of their personal possessions. Their economic base, i.e. landed estates, indeed vanished, but they were able to keep, legally or illegally, substantial assets. The following recollection is personal yet exemplary of the collective narrative. We were left with nothing (my italics). We only took what was absolutely necessary – furniture, china, clothes (especially fur coats, because the winter of 1944/45 was severely cold). We took paintings and portraits. We had to leave the books – the commissars sealed the library. We took silverware. Two trunks of silver and jewellery were hidden at another estate. (Interview)

Having lived through the German and/or Soviet wartime occupation, the gentry acquired considerable experience in concealing property from the various administrations intent on seizing it. In crisis situations yet another family jewel was sold, a crate of crested china dug out of hiding, or an ancestor’s portrait put on the art market. These material resources allowed members of the gentry to maintain a standard of living significantly higher than that of the majority of the population at any given time after the war. Nonetheless the ‘one suitcase’ story is widely circulated and believed to be accurate. The apparent contradiction between selfreported facts and the narrative does not break the logic of the story, primarily because it serves as a metaphor that captures the drama of dispossession and expulsion and allows the establishment and assertion of the commonality of experience. Yet that experience was not common at all but ruled by the local power relations and loyalties embedded in the patriarchal structures of dependency and hence located at the conjunction of particular social situations, individual personalities, chance and historical developments. Not everyone suffered the same loss. While some gentry were aided by their trusty employees, others had to face their hostility; some manors were left unscathed and some were robbed by the villagers themselves; some landlords departed amidst friendly goodbyes, while others had to flee in the dead of night; and some estates were not expropriated until years later. The ‘truth’ of the ‘one suitcase’ story lies not in the factual veracity of particular details but rather in the archetypal material it contains. Recollections of personal and others’ experiences combine to make the unique personal event part

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 163 of a category, with the dulling of individual detail and the highlighting of similarities. In a similar fashion, people ‘remember’ discrimination in the following period. Although they might not have experienced it personally, the theme is appropriated from the experience of others and incorporated into their personal story as part of a collective discourse. This allows every member of the gentry to claim discrimination without actually experiencing it. Reminiscences about the bias in university admissions offer one example of the logic of collective memory formation. In the early 1950s the State instituted an affirmative action programme privileging children of working class and peasant background in access to institutions of postsecondary education. In spite of diligent bureaucratic selection procedures, the policy did not radically alter the social ratio of the student body.4 Life histories of the post-war gentry generations reveal that almost all of them received professional and university education. Their life stories, on the other hand, affirm the discriminatory practices of the regime in admissions to institutions of higher education. Most narratives invoke the same case of Ferdinand Radziwill of an eminent aristocratic family, who was denied admission to medical school five years in succession in spite of excellent test scores. It is said that his intellectual ability, his determination and ultimately his personal acquaintance with the prime minister at the time eventually – this was to be a story of transcendence – secured him the desired place, marking the start of a distinguished career. Although few gentry could directly claim such a personal experience, and most suffered minor difficulties in university admission, if at all, the Radziwill case encapsulated the ‘common’ experience. Invoking this and similar stories, i.e. the experiences of others, made discrimination part of the collective experience of the entire group, or the personal histories have been reinterpreted in the light of collective trauma. How valid then, is, the notion of ‘experience’? Challenging the common-sense concept of experience as a direct, unmediated, subjectively lived account of reality, some scholars argue that it is fundamentally discursive (de Lauretis 1984; Scott 1992; van Alphen 1999). Events do not stand on their own, and we experience them not as isolated happenings but from a perspective of narrative frameworks in terms of which these events can be understood as meaningful. This implies that discourse and experience cannot be separated and that discourse plays an essential role in the process that allows experience to come about and in shaping its form and content. People’s memories are clearly shaped by dominant historical narratives, popular tropes and contemporary concerns. For example, the panic that swept through the gentry and their subsequent flight upon the news of the advancing Soviet armies, who were to liberate them from the German occupation, were doubtless bound up with the obsession with the danger of ‘the red plague’. Starowieyski writes in his memoir that:

164 • Longina Jakubowska it was while waiting for the Bolsheviks to come in September 1939 that I experienced the greatest fear of my life. I went for a walk. I could see neither Polish nor German soldiers, nobody. I am walking in complete stillness and suddenly I hear a distant monotonous melody which was neither sung nor hummed. The melody grew louder as did another sound, the sound of hundreds of heavy boots. The wind blew in my direction and I smelled the stench. They reeked. The worst beggar among us did not stink as much. An odour of soap and disinfectants, birch tar, vodka, cheap tobacco, dirt. The men sang. (Uniechowska 1994: 12)

Accompanied by rumours of atrocities committed by soldiers, revolutionaries and peasants, the stories generated a real fear because they were grafted upon a loom of historical familiarity.5 The Red Army had invaded Poland three times before (in 1918, 1920 and 1939), and the gentry were frightened that they would suffer the brunt of the communists’ condemnation of the hierarchical social order in the Polish countryside. Although the Soviet military advance proceeded rather peacefully at the local level and few among the gentry ‘experienced’ bloodshed, their expectations and subsequent behaviours were ordered by a particular culturally shared trope of blood-thirsty barbarians invading the easternmost bulwark of Western civilization. In the process, their own memories become substituted by the recollections of those exceptional few who did indeed witness the brutality of the invasion of the Soviet troops.

Memory Fragments Remembering and forgetting constitute processes that mutually pattern memory. However, what is remembered and what is forgotten are not arbitrary. In one way, it appears that the gentry privilege remembering over forgetting in the belief that they are reclaiming history. For centuries history-makers as well as history-writers, they were brusquely left out or removed by the communist regime from the official national collective theatre, appearing only sporadically in the role of villains and traitors. In periods of repression, the gentry took it upon themselves to be the keepers of the unofficial history. In the post-1989 political climate, their memories serve to fill blanks, to counteract what was written about them but without them, and to vindicate ‘the truth’ and ultimately their own image. The commitment to writing counter-histories of the nation has, of course, privileged some memories over others, and the oppositional version does not make the history more complete but merely presents us with a picture of a fractured social reality derived from fragmented knowledge and competing hierarchies of credibility (Stoler 1992). The gentry’s memory recall (that is, what is remembered, what is silenced and what is forgotten) is forcefully shaped by social difference. Hence they remember only a fraction of the reality of manorial life and assimilate selectively from their immediate surroundings.

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 165 Its grim aspects, those dealing with peasant hardship, poverty, illiteracy and in many cases the appalling living conditions of estate workers, which had all been part of the gentry’s experience, vanish into oblivion. If absorbed by memory, they rarely appear in the act of retelling, and when they do, they do so in a relativized and historicized form. Village impoverishment and the destitution of farm workers emerge as an inherent feature of the manorial economy. As an exception to the embarrassed silence/forgetting, or ‘strategic refusal’ to remember (Sommer 1999), which surrounds the subject, Helena Stankiewicz presented a rare glimpse of reflection in remembering a scene from life on an estate in eastern Poland. Once her two little daughters wandered off to the workers’ quarters. A peasant woman offered each a slice of bread. Assuming that the white substance on top was sugar, the girls asked for a bit more. But it was salt, not sugar, for estate workers could not afford sugar at all. Recalling this episode from over half a century ago, Helena Stankiewicz wonders why she was not conscious of the circumstances of her employees’ life, why she didn’t attempt to help them, why she didn’t send sugar to the woman, why she didn’t ever offer workers apples from the estate orchard, although the owners could neither eat nor sell them all (Wis´niewski 1991: 150). While many gentry nowadays admit the inadequacy of the manorial system, they also skirt around the endemic problems of dire poverty and the shortage of land. Instead, they inevitably mention their own and their forefathers’ decent conduct towards estate employees. Each narrative speaks of charitable deeds performed by ancestors, such as funding orphanages, endowing churches, literacy campaigns. They are all presented as an integral part of the gentry code of behaviour yet disclose the paradox of memory play: making necessity a virtue developed into a double morality whereby nobles could be praised for assisting to the destitute whom they had created in the first place. Peasant collective memory drastically deviates in its evaluation of the practices of manorial life. A village mayor reported: Every farmer had first to do his dues to the manor house, whether with team, or on foot. Only then could he work his own land, sowing and reaping at night. No excuse as to pressing needs at home. If one did not appear as ordered, at once the overseer would come. If he found his wife busy cooking, he would throw a pail of water on the fire, or in winter he would carry off the windows or the doors. In case that didn’t work, and men were needed for service, the overseer would come with his foreman and eject the farmer from home and homestead. Another would be put in his place. Nor was there any appeal anywhere, since that was the usage and, at bottom, the lord of the manor was owner of everything. His was both land and water, yes, even the wind since only he was allowed to build a windmill to grind corn. (Slomka 1941: 14–15)

These contrasting accounts make it evident that collective memory is structured by class and class interest. In each instance the nature of the bond between the past

166 • Longina Jakubowska and the present assumes considerable political significance. The gentry manoeuvre between the various aspects of the past, compelled to defend their historical legacy, seeking moral redemption for the injustices they had committed, and insisting on recognition of the wrongs inflicted upon them. Engaging in a sort of mnemonic engineering, they currently attempt to rewrite the history of the estate economy and manor–peasant relations in particular. To counteract the memories from below, i.e. the memories of the disadvantaged privileged by the socialist state, they present the role of the manor in a different light – as a progressive, not oppressive, element in the village life, as a precursor of a civil society and a possible model for the future of agriculture in Poland, a model enlightened by lessons learned from past errors. Yet there is inconsistency, even dissonance, in their memory of the estate economy. In the process of remembering, they fashion three portraits of the peasantry; the first features the faithful and dedicated domestic servant, the second the docile but cunning estate worker, the third the disgruntled labourer infected by political radicalism. It is the first and the third which occupy most memory space in the act of story-telling. The gentry’s stories of former domestic servants are filled with demonstrations of affection, loyalty and mutual recognition. While the devoted domestic servant provides the proof of the moral and decent rule of the landowner, the radical rural proletariat is ascribed a personal motive for standing against their employer. They are portrayed as lazy, thieving and disobedient individuals who are refused employment because of their misconduct and thus hold a personal grudge. Political motivation is denied them but personalized as an act of revenge. This portrait is perhaps most telling because these were the very people who saw to it that the land reform was implemented on the ground, who evicted the gentry from their estates, thus irrevocably changing their lives. The conduct of the second category – the numerous estate workers – who appear in the memory as unindividuated peasant masses, is more problematic. Why did the docile peasant turn revolutionary? Why did he take part in the plunder, as in the following narrative? I arrived in Jarantowice [estate] three days after the Germans withdrew. The mansion was already looted and so was the farmyard. One bull in the stable, a pile of dying lambs in the shed. The entrance to the mansion stood wide open in spite of freezing temperatures. Most furniture was already gone. Only a huge painting of an elk crossing a swamp with a village in flames in the background stayed on the wall. The grim theme and the large size saved it from plunder. Only the heaviest pieces of furniture remained – the dining table, the grand piano, the large linen cupboards, the hefty desk of my grandfather. Everywhere traces of looting and destruction: the bathroom fixtures ripped out, the toilet crushed. I saw a peasant woman dragging a precious inlaid tea table, the space between its carved legs packed with pillows, quilts and other bedding. She pulled it through the snow with a rope, like a sled. Such disgust

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 167 overcame me that I left immediately. The PKWN Manifesto [the text of the Land Reform decree] was posted at the gate. Dusk approaching, a crowd of farmhands gathered to read it in the light of a match. They already knew that landowners were the enemy of the people, that their pillage was legal, and that they would get even more – in land and in pastures.

More often than not, the cause for peasant plunder and acts of destruction is sought and found in the outside forces, the contagion of the red plague, the Soviet domination, even the Jewish infiltration, all of which allows the gentry to displace responsibility for peasant discontent, deny local agency and dispense with the thought of insurgency.

Mnemonics of Places and Objects It needs to be noted that personal as well as collective memories of the gentry are coloured by an intense sense of tragic and irretrievable loss. Through the act of remembering, they mourn the passing of an era of history and their own childhood and youth. Yearnings for a lost home, cultural milieu and past existence are mixed with the bitterness of rejection and expulsion. Memory is a substitute, a surrogate for something that is missing, explicitly preoccupied with rupture and loss (Davis and Starn 1989). This makes recollection problematic. Memory, and memory of childhood in particular, is a trickster which twists reality and dupes us into believing in vague, distant and yet comforting images of home, which then seemed large, the family happy and life uncomplicated. Home, which in the eyes of a child appear as the source of ultimate good, warmth and security, becomes idealized in the memory of an adult and mythologized in the memory of the next generation. Nostalgia plays enlargement tricks, which convert a cottage into a manor, and a manor into a palace, creating a myth of splendour. Memories twice removed are capable of playing even more dangerous tricks. The next generation is brought up with secondary memories, memories conveyed through and by their parents. And yet these can be so potent that even confrontation with reality may not necessarily change the vision of the past. The following episode may help to illustrate my point. As soon as the borders of the post-Soviet states opened, like many of the younger gentry generation an acquaintance of mine went in search of his family home in the current territory of Ukraine. Western Ukraine came under the dominance of the Soviet Union as a result of the border shift in 1945 but previous to that had long been part of the Polish state. The Polish nobility used to own vast tracts of land in the Ukrainian borderlands, and over the centuries any large landowner became conterminous with a Polish gentry man, while the term Ukrainian was reserved for peasants. All my acquaintance had to go by was an old

168 • Longina Jakubowska black-and-white photograph displayed on his grandparents’ mantelpiece ever since he could remember and the name of the place the house once stood. It featured a typically Polish gentry mansion built in classicist style with two sets of columns supporting the frontal porch; shrouded in the foliage of old oak trees, it looked prosperous and endearing. What seemed like a reasonably easy task became a chase after an illusion. For one thing, the Soviet era altered toponymy. It eradicated the old (Polish) names of districts, towns, even hamlets; old villages were razed and new ones erected in their places. Second, indications passed on through the memory chain were far from specific; correlating memory fragments with modern geography proved difficult and few local inhabitants volunteered to help. He spent days pursuing false clues, convincing local officials to open population registries, searching cemeteries for the family name etched on gravestones. Eventually he did find the ‘mansion’: it was a rather small house at the edge of town, neither grand nor pretty, which, stripped of columns and porch and with dilapidated walls and a leaking roof, utterly lacked charm. There was no correspondence between this house and its image preserved in the black-and-white photograph. His reaction to this not in itself unusual discovery was symptomatic of the manner in which the past is interpreted. Finding it too painful to reconcile the image of the past with the reality of the present, my acquaintance concluded that the building must have been one of the minor structures erected on the estate grounds, although no record of such existed. This example is rather typical of the impressionistic memory of the younger gentry generation, many of whom were raised in the shadow of the stories of manorial life. According to Halbwachs, and others who followed, the physical environment, historically saturated landscapes and objects, serve as a mnemonic for memory. Topography infused with history triggers recollection and facilitates re-experiencing (Bloch 1998). For the older and the younger gentry generation alike, memory is rooted in a land alive with geographical mnemonics. Journeys to places from the past provide connecting links between who they have been and who they are, then and now. Mansions and graveyards are something tangible and thus serve as mnemonic benchmarks. Periodic visits to the places of ancestry, manors and estates, or what is left of them, give a fresh breath to the fading images of the past and assert their relevance in the present. They provide existential continuity for an individual as well as a foundation, a mental and social schema, for subsequent generations which, having neither memory nor experience of the manorial way of life, become socialized into the particular personal and collective identity. Thus the pilgrimage to the ancestral manor, although seemingly unsuccessful, was of tremendous importance to my acquaintance. Like him, hundreds of gentry who had been expatriated from the Polish borderlands in 1944–5, the territories that were subsequently annexed to Lithuania, Ukraine and Belorussia, made pilgrimages to their family estates after the liberalization of travel regulations following

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 169 the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the older generation the visits reaffirmed the memory by giving it physical corporeality, and they made the ‘memories’ of the younger generation more substantiated and real. Geographical mnemonics is closely linked with genealogical memory. The celebration of a Mass on the anniversary of a family member’s death and visits to relatives’ graves on All Souls’ Day are common commemorative rites in Catholic Poland. Apparently private family matters, such practices perpetuate the historical and genealogical memory of their practitioners because the memory of ancestors cannot be disconnected from the milieu that produced them. Celebrating the dead, the rites regenerate memories of the cultural and social contexts in which they had existed. So the Mass in honour of the grandfather, or a visit to his grave or the family crypt – often located near the manor in which he had lived – is an occasion for memory-work, story-telling, anecdotes and history lessons. Such rites provide an opportunity for a gathering of numerous relatives, cementing the ties among them and affirming the distinct identity of the family and the larger social group to which it belongs. They also persistently locate the gentry in the community of their former estates – distant yet present, equal in the new social order and yet superior. Disregarding the ordinance forbidding visits to the locality in which they had previously owned property, like many gentry Teresa Konarska and her family routinely came to see ‘their’ village, ‘their’ church, ‘their’ graveyard: The first time we visited my father’s grave we also stopped at our village church. The priest was so stupefied that he forgot about the consecration. Everybody rushed to offer us chairs. Maybe they were afraid that we had come to take our china back! You see, the peasants took everything we had. Were you to take a walk around the village, you would find our china in every cupboard. Even my grand piano, if they don’t use it as a chicken feeder. And why did my father have beds made for the farmhands? Then everybody said that he had been a peasant-lover. He cared about people, much more than my uncle, who would routinely beat them. And there [on uncle’s estate] they behaved as they should. There they didn’t steal. Well, we made sure to give a generous offering; actually, we gave all the cash we had on us so the peasants wouldn’t think that we are driven to poverty. (Interview)

In such a fashion, the younger gentry generation was taught to ‘remember’ the past, or rather particular fragments of it. Typically, parents mark and contextualize what is important for children to remember, identify significant elements and elaborate on the information that is missing but implied. In looking at the family album, a portrait gallery or visiting a graveyard, children become aware of how their own private past converges with that of the family, the country and bygone times in general (Lesy 1980; Middleton and Edwards 1990). This is no more than an approximation, nor can it be, because, for those generations, that inherited memories encoded by their parents, conjured images become idealized and

170 • Longina Jakubowska abstracted from the contextual emotional field at the time that the encoding transpired. Just as the black-and-white photograph is merely an abstracted image of reality, their memories are no more than renditions of an already imperfect reconstruction. The gentry’s longing for the past is evident in the interiors of their houses, which emphasize distinction and set them apart. The gentry surround themselves with objects from the past, a bricolage of anything and everything that is reminiscent of life in a manor. It appears that as the past seems to recede, they seek to re-evoke it by accumulating historical paraphernalia and by preserving its relics. Antique furniture of all styles, ancestors’ portraits no matter what their artistic merit, grandmother’s trousseau china, sepia-coloured photographs and chandeliers rescued from the family mansion crowd the modest urban living spaces. They all bear the unmistakable marks of the gentry habitus. More than memory objects of youth foregone, or a vanished era, it is a style that features in dwellings of the older and younger generations alike. The meaning of any such article is inscribed in its form, uses, trajectories and life histories. Fragments of the past, reminders of bygone ways, memorabilia, if you will, they are also signifiers of the gentry identity, statements of status, material manifestations of intrinsic value which link the personal, the familial-genealogical and the class with the making of Polish history. The value of these objects is not located in their monetary worth but in their origin from the family seat. The manor, as the locus of the gentry’s identity, endows them with exceptional attributes. They are locked into the life histories (and therefore memories) of their owners and simultaneously provide continuity, bridging the past and the present. Of these, portraits of ancestors are of particular significance because they express that link most vividly. They are the transmitters of family memory, nesting every consecutive generation in its historical chain. As expressed by di Lampedusa (1991: 189), the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its tradition, that is in its vital memories. Family records, some centuries old (land grants, letters, diaries, photographs), have been meticulously collected, salvaged from the ravages of war and the plunder of peasants, and saved for future generations in a desk drawer as tangible proof of the historicity of being. So are genealogical charts, which record every birth, marriage and death, thereby recognizing the existence of each and every person and giving him or her a place beyond their immediate life. Each one of them has a life story, a distinct personality with flaws, virtues and idiosyncrasies, and a face immortalized in a portrait, which makes them so much more real. Commissioned in private pursuit of the perpetuation of family memory, such portraits are often of artistic excellence and so form part of the national heritage as well. And thus not only an individual coalesces with a group but also a group with a nation as an historical unit. The performative power of portraits lies in their inherent ability to express these linkages.

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 171 In contrast to the poor, elites have a recorded life. The annals of the underclasses are short and simple because they leave little documentation. No family trees, obituaries, heirlooms, or even wills worth mentioning. Their ancestors have become lost in historical anonymity, their names have vanished from records and memory, and hence they appear as if they had not existed at all. The gentry, on the other hand, are prolific memoirists and meticulous record-keepers. Hence their collective memory is transmitted and shaped by historically documented existence.

Mnemonics of the Body As Connerton (1989) convincingly argues, collective memory is also perpetuated by culturally specific bodily practices. Just as a habit of servitude is incorporated in the behaviour of a servile group by way of their own habits of body deportment, so is the habit of superiority among the elite. A noble incarnates embodied authority and, more importantly, does it not by mechanically executing codes but by the prestigious ease of practised performance. This sets him apart from a social climber, who, as hard as he may try, is unable to embody the acknowledged model effortlessly and gracefully. Culturally specific postural performance provides people with a mnemonic of the body, habitually observed rules of decorum. The past becomes sedimented in the body, which exudes the cultural substance of one’s personal and collective history. The natural ease Connerton spoke of is so thoroughly incorporated that it is difficult to alter or suppress. Distinguished by their grooming habits, manners, speech patterns, the total way of presentation of self, the gentry stood apart from the ‘common folk’. Consider, for example, differences in the etiquette of a handshake. A nobleman was introduced to his non-gentry female office co-workers. The women rose from their seats. He made a deep bow and waited for each of them to extend a hand to him. None did, so he bowed again, but they sat down and so he left the room. The women were surprised that he did not shake their hands, while he wondered why they did not stretch out theirs (Szypowski 1997). Gentry women seemed particularly easy to identify, perhaps because they found it harder to shed, or hide, the numerous traces of cultivated distinction inscribed on to their bodies by centuries of tradition and lifelong practice. Their past, as it were, was locked in habitual memory. A mnemonic of the body manifested itself in the practices of everyday life: in the hats women wore, in the manner they sipped their tea, in the gentility of their vocabulary, in the fact that they kept nannies. Just as the gentry can instantaneously recognize each other, so are the non-gentry alert to distinctions manifest in body deportment. My question as to whether such-and-such was of gentry origin often elicited the answer that he must be because he looked the part. The explanation that followed was as vague as the image itself but included a firm glance, an upright posture, a resounding voice, a polite but arrogant air, a confident grace and a sense of his authority.

172 • Longina Jakubowska This ‘something’ so difficult to define is what distinguishes many gentry from others – a total look, a demeanour, a bearing worn as if a second skin – what Bourdieu (1984) calls ‘habitus’, and the gentry call ‘race’ (Pol. rasa). There is a vague relation between the common definition of this term and the gentry’s usage of it. One can speculate that ‘race’ refers to the myth of Sarmatian origins, the belief of the Polish gentry to be descendants of eastern warriors conquering indigenous peasant populations, genetically separate and inferior. Remnants of this eastern tradition could be found in the male clothing worn on ritual occasions, in the popularity of oriental carpets adorning mansion walls and the curved swords hanging above them. ‘Race’ connotes a demeanour and an attitude but most significantly physical appearance, separate and yet inseparable from the sanguine poise generated from within. Although all gentry are supposed to ‘have race’, not all of them ‘have it’ to the same degree. In no way does the concept refer to physical anthropometrical features, whichever way one conceives of them, such as a darker skin colour or slanted eyes. None of these can be spotted. On the contrary, ‘having race’ implies a very ‘European’, Caucasian appearance. Just what precisely this idealized purity embodies is difficult to pinpoint, but ‘race’ certainly included regular facial features, a well-formed body, a clear skin, a firm glance, an upright posture, a resounding voice, a vigorous stride, in brief an entire habitus, which marks the contrast between the appearances of the mighty and the lowly, which do not originate in different genetic stock but in socially inherited differences in wealth, prestige and power. Although the past is continually and involuntarily re-enacted in the present conduct, that conduct is also purposefully kept up, even cultivated. In the absence of property to transmit, a code of conduct, firmly regulated behaviours and strict manners become the social badge that distinguishes the gentry from the ‘common people’. In the midst of a changed and at times hostile environment, maintaining that conduct became ever more important. Impeccably dressed in pressed shirts and polished shoes, the gentry would sit down to a table decked with crested china even if they were to be served a simple dish of potatoes. The self-imposed discipline and the insistence on preserving standards of behaviour and proper habits reminded them about whom they once were and informed the younger generation about how to be, ultimately helping to assert and safeguard their social superiority. These inherited and inculcated bodily practices of distinction perpetuated class differences and challenged the overtly democratic and egalitarian social order.

Agendas in Memory-making Like reconstructing personal past in the present, collective remembering is also done for certain purposes. Memory is a signifying practice, part of a moral discourse taken by individuals and groups, often not consciously, as a means to

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 173 articulate, legitimate and even constitute their selfhood and relationships to others (Antze and Lambek 1996). Social memory is often selective, distorted and inaccurate. As phrased by Lowenthal (1985: 210), ‘the prime function of memory is not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present’. Collective memory of the gentry in contemporary Poland presents an instance in which the nature of the bond between the present and the past has assumed considerable political significance. The personal histories of members of the gentry have been reinterpreted in the light of the collective trauma and the meaning of their individual experiences transformed by making it the basis for social action. Their collective memory is at least partially structured by the striving for justice, public exoneration and recognition. As one member of the gentry observed, ‘I was raised in a class, which for generations believed it was solely responsible for all social and national actions. I was deeply hurt not only by the fact that my estate was taken away from me, but also because I was treated as an enemy, because I was discarded, made irrelevant.’ However, regaining voice is not the only concern of the gentry. With reprivatization high on the national agenda, the gentry lobby for the return of the property unlawfully, or so it is argued, seized from them in the course of the land reform. As expected, their request met vehement opposition from peasants and the parties that represent them. Neither did it receive support from the government or the populace. In an effort to manage the overwhelmingly negative public response, the gentry lobby quickly restated the issue, requesting not the return of the entire nationalized property but of what in the land reform parlance became known as ‘residuaries’, i.e. the manors and the parks which surround them. Public discussions about reprivatization aroused strong emotions, heightened the nostalgic aura shrouding the ‘family home’, boosted memories of expropriation and, in consequence, focused the act of re-telling on the very ‘event’ of eviction. To underscore the point that injustice was inflicted on the entire group, the group’s collective memory had to assume uniformity. The gentry’s life-history narratives are constructed as political dramas. Accentuating politically poignant moments in the nation’s history, they start with the experience of expropriation and eviction, followed by accounts of victimization endured during the Stalinist years of 1948–56. The year which marked the beginning of de-Stalinization, commonly referred to in the history of communism as ‘normalization’, draws the life story to an end stopping in the middle age of the protagonists. Thus the story line follows the political periodization of Polish history. The sequencing and the space allotted to the narration of particular periods suggest that the gentry conceive of their lives as quintessentially political in nature. When great political events ceased punctuating their lives and life assumed an ordinary social course, the political drama subsided and so did the life story of its dramatis personae. So what Bartlett (1932) discovered for individual memory, which is that the form in which memory is sequenced is not only a reflection of

174 • Longina Jakubowska content but is also determined by the intentions and predispositions of the remembering individuals, holds for collective memory as well. Just as individuals use different aspects of reality as their governing ideas and strategies to memorize them, so the group’s experiences are ordered in such a fashion as to become important sites in the struggle for its place in history as well as its position in the future. The memory the group constructs is structured by and transferred through a variety of means that range from the practices of everyday life, staged rituals, purposeful and unintentional invocations of the past, and collective acts of remembrance performed in private and semi-public spaces. All memory is essentially an ever-changing reconstruction of the past, and memory itself is continually reprocessed as contexts and perceptions change. And so collective memory continuously negotiates between available historical records, remembered experience and current social and political agendas, selectively emphasizing, suppressing and elaborating different aspects in the process. For the researcher, memory ‘management’ poses a problem of interpretation. In the extreme, the narrative may be overly determined by a conscious or unconscious agenda or so biased that it obliterates the complexities of the social and political context in which the events occurred.

Notes 1. The Polish language does not discriminate between ‘gentry’ and ‘nobility’, using the term szlachta for both. I follow the Polish practice and use the terms interchangeably. 2. Serfdom was abolished in Prussia in 1907, in Austria in 1848, and in Russia in 1864. 3. In all, 9,707 landed estates with a total area of 3.5 million hectares were nationalized. One-third was divided among landless and poor peasants, while the rest became part of the State collective agricultural system (Rocznik Statystyczny 1949). 4. According to official statistics, the greatest number of traditionally underprivileged students was enrolled in universities in the academic year 1950/51, when they constituted 62 per cent of all students. The figures fluctuated slightly during the Stalinist period but dropped sharply afterwards, almost reversing the pattern. In 1958/9, only 44 per cent of the student body came from working class and peasant families. 5. Kakar (1996) noted that the rhetoric of violence derives its potency not so much from the fact that it illuminates actual action but that it substitutes for it.

Memory-making among the Gentry in Poland • 175

References Alphen, E. van (1999), ‘Symptoms of discursivity: experience, memory, and trauma’, in M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Antze, P. and Lambek, M. (eds) (1996), Tense Past. Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, New York and London: Routledge. Bal, M., Crewe, J. and Spitzer, L. (eds) (1999), Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Bartlett, F. (1932), Remembering, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloch, M. (1998), How We Think They Think. Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy, Boulder: Westview Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London and New York: Routledge & Kegan. Connerton, P. (1989), How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conway, M. (1992), Theoretical Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press. Davis, N. and Starn, R. (1989), ‘Introduction’, Representations 26: 1–6. Fentress, J. and Wickham, C. (eds) (1992), Social Memory. New Perspectives on the Past, Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Haaken, J. (1998), Pillar of Salt. Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Halbwachs, M. (1980[1950]), On Collective Memory, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Jakubowska, L. (1999), ‘Images and counter images: the remaking of the gentry in post-war Poland 1944–1995’, Focaal, 33: 75–86. Kakar, S. (1996), The Colors of Violence. Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lampedusa, G. di (1996[1960]), The Leopard, London: The Harvill Press. Lauretis de, T. (1984), Alice Doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lesy, M. (1980), Time Frames. The Meaning of Family Pictures, New York: Pantheon. Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Middleton, D. and Edwards, D. (1990), Collective Remembering, London: Sage. Pillemer, D. (1998), Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rocznik Statystyczny (1949), PWN: Warsaw.

176 • Longina Jakubowska Scott, J. (1992), ‘Experience’, in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, London and New York: Routledge. Silverman, K. (1996), The Threshold of the Visible World, London and New York: Routledge. Slomka, J. (1941), From Serfdom to Self-Government. Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, London: Minerva Publishing. Sommer, D. (1999), Proceed with Caution when Engaged with Minority Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stoler, A. (1992), ‘In cold blood: hierarchies of credibility and the politics of colonial narratives’, Representations, 37: 151–89. Szypowski, A. (1997), Szlachcic w Peerelu, Warsaw: Oficyna IN Plus. Uniechowska, K. (1994), Franciszka Starowieyskiego Opowiesc o Koncu Swiata, Warsaw: Czytelnik. Walewska, M. (nd), W Cieniu Reformy Rolnej, unpublished manuscript. Wis´niewski, W. (1991), Pani na Berz·enikach, London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna. Zerubavel, Y. (1994), ‘The death of memory and the memory of death: Masada and the Holocaust as historical metaphors’, Representations, 45: 72–100.

–8– Historians: Private, Collective and Public Memories of Violence and War Atrocities1 Stuart Woolf

In June 1994 an international colloquium was held at Arezzo in central Italy, entitled ‘In Memory. Revisiting Nazi Atrocities in Post-Cold War Europe’ (Paggi 1996; 1997a). Besides anthropologists, the colloquium brought together a substantial number of leading European and American contemporary historians, experts on Nazism, World War II, oral and gender history. I stress the mix of professional skills of the participants not in obeisance to the academic idol of interdisciplinarity, but because of the radically different approaches to a theme that is inherently difficult for academics to discuss and analyse because of its charged emotive content. The very nature of the subject – the massacres and genocide that marked Nazi occupations throughout Europe – remains difficult for historians and other social scientists to analyse with aseptic detachment. Indeed, as the conference and subsequent publications directly or indirectly related to it have made clear, the emotions aroused by the memory of events (pain, grief, outrage, resignation, hate, resentment …) may change but are not necessarily diluted by the passage of time (Contini 1997; Pezzino 1997; Cappelletto 1998; 2003). The conference had been preceded by numerous oral historical interviews, conducted by anthropologist Francesca Cappelletto with Paola Calamandrei, on the narrative memory of the massacres perpetrated by Nazi and German soldiers in 1944 (Cappelletto 2003 and contribution in the present volume). For all of us who were present, the colloquium was, from the outset, unlike ‘normal’ academic conferences. The occasion of the meeting – the fiftieth anniversary of the massacres of civil populations in the province of Arezzo – charged the colloquium with an immediate and intense emotional involvement because of the rehearsal before a public of academic experts of what were clearly long-standing accusations by the community and their rebuttal by the partisans of responsibility for the massacre at Civitella.2 What rendered the exchange so harrowing was the collective conviction of the inhabitants of Civitella, survivors and families of the dead, apparently unchanged over half a century, that the partisans’ action in killing two German soldiers and fleeing had been irresponsible and had provoked Nazi retaliation: so 177

178 • Stuart Woolf adamantine was the collective memory in Civitella and so distant from the official commemoration of the tragedy that in 1969 a Military Medal of Bravery awarded by the Italian Republic was contested by the community, to underline the fact that their menfolk had not been soldiers or heroes but victims (Paggi 1997b: 76–8). The exchange brought out with disturbing clarity the gap between the public memory and representation of the resistance movement in Italy and the private and collective memory of the survivors and relatives of civilian populations caught in the cross-fire of the shifting front line of the war. In central and northern Italy massacres and violence against civilian populations had marked the prolonged retreat of the German occupying armies and their Fascist republican ally, as had happened throughout continental Europe occupied by Nazi and Fascist armed forces and their puppet regimes (Browning 1992; Bartov 1995; Collotti 1997; Mazower 1993). The resistance movement in the Nazioccupied regions of Italy sabotaged and harassed the German troops and Fascist militia and, as the Allied armies advanced in 1944–5, endeavoured to strengthen their future negotiating powers by liberating urban centres before the arrival of the Allies. There is a vast literature on the period between the fall of Mussolini (25 July 1943), the royal government’s declaration of withdrawal from the war (8 September 1943), the Nazi occupation of Italy, the creation of the Fascist Italian Social Republic (RSI), the Resistance, and the military history of the war between the German and Allied armies, until the final liberation of Italy (25 April 1945) (Pavone 1991). On the German side, ‘cleansing’ of the areas around their main lines of communication and the shifting ‘Gothic line’ was officially authorized by Kesselring and practised as a matter of course by the Nazis and fascist repubblichini (Klinkhammer 1993; Geyer 1997). The Tuscan villages where massacres occurred were close to the Gothic line and the withdrawal routes of the German armed forces. At Civitella all the men were shot by German troops and women and children killed (about 150 in all) after the partisans killed two German soldiers (Paggi 1997b); at Vallucciole over 100 unarmed men, women and children were massacred; at Sant’Anna di Stazzema about 500; at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome, the most notorious instance in the official memory of the Italian Republic, 335 men were shot as a 10:1 reprisal for a successful partisan assault on German soldiers (Portelli 1999a). Whether or not the massacre of civilians was a deliberate reprisal for attacks on German soldiers or subsequently perceived as such by local populations, it was a regular accompaniment and included innumerable ‘small’, undocumented killings throughout central Italy along the routes of the German withdrawal and the Gothic line. What was common knowledge during and immediately after the war has been confirmed by research before and since the Arezzo conference, based on the documentation of the Nazi military archives, the official inquiries into Nazi atrocities of a British military commission in the weeks and months

Historians: Memories of War Atrocities • 179 immediately following the successive liberation of villages and towns, whose evidence was effectively set aside by the Italian government in 1947, and the very recent discovery of hundreds of pending Italian military trial dossiers hidden in the Cold War so as not to create difficulties with a rehabilitated West Germany (Klinkhammer 1993; Battini and Pezzino 1997; Pezzino 1997; Tognarini 2002; Battini 2003; Franzinelli 2002). The study of community and memory in World War II inevitably poses questions about the more general issue of the relationship between violence and war. There is nothing specifically modern or characteristically European about such a relationship. It is enough to recall the long tradition of violence committed in the name of religion by Christian Europe, or the scale of slaughter in the wars of nonEuropean societies (from classical Persia to Vietnam, Cambodia and East Timor since World War II), to conclude that violence in war has been a constant of both European and non-European societies from ancient times to the present. War brings with it a process of brutalization, a willing or unwilling abandonment of control; the wearing of uniforms, as Pavone observed at the Arezzo conference, would seem to justify behaviour that would be unthinkable in civilian circumstances. Nevertheless, within the broader context of the process of brutalization that accompanies conditions of war, what was characteristic of Fascism and Nazism, what the two movements inherited from World War I, and always vaunted, was the cult of violence. Throughout World War II, and in Italy from 1943, the particular forms of violence perpetrated by the Nazis and their fascist collaborators can be described as the infliction of an impersonal, systematic brutality. It has been suggested that, from an anthropological perspective, Nazi brutality was ‘modern’, in that it did not engage in the symbolic desecration of the body; but to kill by lining up groups of five and shooting them in the neck contains as much symbolism as cutting off ears after death. It may be that the rising level of atrocities can be interpreted as a vendetta, a sacrificial revenge to honour the death of the German soldiers on the front, following the failure of the lightning invasion of Russia (Paggi 1997b; Burrin 1989). But what is certain is that such impersonal, systematic violence was part of a deliberate policy. The policy of terror and killing formed part of conscious political projects – from the Ostpolitik to the extermination of Jews and gypsies. This is why, in Italy and elsewhere, it is proper to associate the infinite number of ‘small’ massacres with the inconceivably large ones like Civitella, as both the former and the latter formed part of a deliberate policy of terrorizing people regarded as inferior. Anthropologists and oral historians are concerned with the detailed study of what is local, the social practices and collective memories, structures of organization and beliefs of small communities. The historians’ landscape is broader and concentrates on what has left the most visible imprint on the records of the passage

180 • Stuart Woolf of time, such as war, international relations, the role of great figures, the administration of states or, over the longer period, economic and social change. Methodologically, anthropologists are particularly sensitive to the conditions of the production and transmission of collective memories, whereas historians apply sophisticated analytical techniques to the study of power but pay far less attention to their reception by ‘ordinary’ people. In this volume Francesca Cappelletto, as an anthropologist, compares the process of the formation, transmission and consolidation of community memory in three Tuscan villages, including Civitella. My remarks as a historian relate to the implications of a memory so divided as that of Civitella for the history of the Resistance and more generally for the impact of traumatic political events (such as World War II or the collapse of the Soviet Union) on the interpretative perspectives of historical narrations. There is nothing new, for either historians or anthropologists, in noting the separateness of public and private memory. At the public level, victory and death in battle have always been commemorated: the rites of public mourning for the (military) dead have assumed notable visibility since the nineteenth century; and historians have devoted much attention to the monuments and commemorations of the world wars (Gillis 1993; Winter 1995). The role of the military has traditionally been pre-eminent, in the medals and march pasts of national commemorations as much as in the memorials to the dead. By contrast, oral memory, because it circulates privately within families and communities, has for the most part always remained hidden from the public gaze; at most, very occasionally, it might be filtered through the written recollections of literary-minded local inhabitants. Private memory, particularly that of ‘ordinary folk’, was for a long time dismissed by historians as unlikely to provide anything of substantial interest or use to them. Over the past half century social and oral historians have certainly changed what Edward Thompson called the ‘condescension of posterity’ and, slowly, historians are beginning to write a history from below of family and community ways of life and values based on the written and oral language of the actors themselves. This is not to say that public and private memory were insulated from each other. There must always have been a continuous but asymmetrical relationship between them: family and community memories, not just in modern times, seem to me inconceivable without the constant presence of public memories and have certainly always been nourished by the latter; whereas the converse is certainly not true. One needs to add that the ubiquity of the modern state has increasingly impinged on local and private memory. We still understand relatively little about the mechanisms of the overlaps and intersection of these two layers of memory. There are many possible approaches to what seems to me an aspect fundamental to explanations of social and political cohesion and its breakdown, both historically and today. The linkages and connections between public and private memory extend far beyond the political

Historians: Memories of War Atrocities • 181 sphere, although they may feed back into it. Chartier and Darnton, for instance, have opened up a world of interchanges between ‘high’ and popular literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Chartier 1995; Darnton 1984). ‘The myths we live by’ and ‘theatres of memory’ (to cite the titles of two classic books) are excellent metaphors of the variety of ways in which elements of public memory are absorbed, appropriated, reformulated and transmuted into integral parts of individual, family and community memory in twentieth-century societies (Samuel and Thompson 1990; Samuel 1994). Public and private memory, national and local memory, function at different levels, each with its own conventions, languages, forms of expression and chosen locations. But in particular historical moments, moments of exceptionality, usually characterized by the suspension of accepted political authority and established social order, such as war, revolution or dramatic and rapid political change, politics and violence erupt into the private and daily life of ‘ordinary’ people and communities. This is not a phenomenon of modernity: chronicles and historical narrations across the centuries are replete with numbers relating to battles, military deaths and the sacking of cities, although it is left to artists and novelists (Goya, Tolstoy …) to give more telling descriptions of their impact on the civilian populations. But what is a facet of modernity – from the French to the Russian revolution, from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia to the two world wars – is the increase in scale of the savaging of civilian populations and territory. Such exceptional moments inevitably lead to a rupture in the explanation of the past in historical narrations and public memory, but also, as is now becoming clearer, in popular memory. How, otherwise, can one explain the rapid omission of Nazi atrocities and their replacement by the Stalinist/Soviet oppression of minority nations in the public and popular narrations that have followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia? The rewriting of the past in Central European and the new Baltic states substitutes Stalinism for Nazism in the narration of a victimized holistic nation. The ambiguities of the war years, the involvement and popular collaboration with the Nazis in the military invasion of the Soviet Union and the deportation and destruction of the native Jewish communities, are removed by omission (Gyáni 1993; Lieven 1994; Petrusewicz 2002; Woolf 1996; Petrungaro 2002). The abruptness of change in the official historical narrative, and apparently popular memory, in the Baltic states, Croatia or Slovakia – all countries with welldocumented evidence of widespread collaboration with Nazism and Nazi atrocities – brings out with startling clarity the issue of the relationship of official memory to radical political change. If a comparison is then made with some Western European countries after 1945, this further raises the issue of how long it takes, in a democracy, before a public memory begins to be challenged as it loses conviction and the methods by which the challenge is mounted. It is these issues that I now propose to discuss.

182 • Stuart Woolf There is, to employ the felicitous phrase of Charles Maier in his paper at the Arezzo conference, a ‘hegemonic historical and political narrative’, whatever the level within which it is expressed and circulates – local, national or, nowadays, European. A hegemonic historical narrative is necessarily replete with political implications, but the reasons for its existence, as well as its process of formation and its manner of presentation, will differ according to the level at which it is produced. At the local level, the hegemonic account presented in the name of the Civitella community proposes an almost idyllic image of a village living at peace with itself, remote from the realities of fascist Italy or the events of the war through its isolation and, implicitly, through the choice of its inhabitants not to be involved in politics. The cause of the terrible massacre is assigned firmly to the irresponsibility of the partisans in killing two German soldiers; indeed, their immediate withdrawal into the mountains, it is later implied (when the Medal of Military Bravery is contested), is evidence of their non-heroism. This had not been the case immediately, in the first months, when the anguished accounts of the female survivors were filled with the horror of the event but without accusations of responsibility. But already by 1950 the ‘outrage’ of the massacre had been shifted from its German perpetrators to the partisans (Paggi 1997b: 65–7). Despite (or perhaps because of) the ritual methods of the massacres, the innate brutality of the Nazis had rendered them impersonal, as it were outside history, whose actions were not an issue in dispute, but passively registered, ‘divine retribution of Dantesque poetic justice’ (Clemente 1994). Paggi explains the consolidation of this narrative on the one hand through Freudian analysis of the elaboration of grief (which seems to me inadequate in the passage from individual to collective memory), on the other in the political terms of the presence of the new parish priest acting out his role as a Don Camillo in the context of the Cold War and the Christian Democrat crusade against the communists (who had been dominant in the Tuscan Resistance). One can add, following anthropologist Pietro Clemente, that the narrative can also be read as an expression of the sense of offence felt by the local community at the high-handed way in which the institutions of the Republic had swept this local memory under the carpet in their commemorations and celebrations (Clemente 1994). I would suggest that there are multiple reasons for such a hegemonic narrative which have little to do with the search for the complexity and totality of historical reconstructions. They relate to what Primo Levi has explained to all of us – to the private need to find a way of living with the unspeakable, to atone for the irrational but real sense of guilt at being one of the survivors, to recount so that others will remember. But the reasons are also intimately and profoundly related to the tacit search for a common ground which would avoid lacerating accusations of responsibility and recriminations; which, through the construction of a community of

Historians: Memories of War Atrocities • 183 experience and shared memory – with all the inclusions and omissions that this implies – would provide the basis for rebuilding social relations in the village, the essential prerequisite for living together on a daily basis. Indeed, the interior bond expressed by the uniformly accepted narrative of the tragedy – if one can judge by the reconstruction of the social fabric of Civitella – must surely make the historian reflect about the potential costs and benefits, in human and social terms, of too relentless an identification of responsibilities in the course of historical reconstructions. At the national level, the reason for a hegemonic narrative – in this case, the narrative of antifascism and the Resistance – is clear, because it lies at the very core of the values of democracy, liberalism and pluralism on which the Italian Republic was founded. The narrative incorporated, from the outset and for a generation, a black and white representation of a uniformly bad fascism as the counterpart to the heroism of the Resistance. Such a narrative was politically necessary, I would argue, particularly in the early years of the Republic, as it played a central role in the cultural underpinning of the process of reconstruction and education of Italian society after two decades of the fascist regime. But precisely because the Republic was founded on antifascism, the Resistance narrative suffered through its identification with and subordination to the official rhetoric and ceremonies of the State. The usage by political parties of such ceremonies, closely related to the Cold War, progressively eroded the evocation of the values of a resistance united in its antifascist armed struggle (Cenci 1999). The history of the Resistance increasingly lost its meaning for successive generations born after the war, ultimately because of the optimistic assumption by those who had actively participated that their values were unanimously shared by Italian citizens (Pavone 1994–5), an assumption reinforced by its reiteration as a litany by the political class. It is worth adding that only motivated students were likely to learn about fascism and antifascism, given the virtual absence, until the 1980s, of the teaching of contemporary history in the State school curriculum, an aspect of the ambivalence and lukewarm attitude of Christian Democrat-dominated governments towards Italy’s fascist past. In an Italy increasingly transformed materially and in expectations by economic growth, the younger generations expressed boredom with, as much as ignorance of, both fascism and antifascism.3 The remoteness of this hegemonic narrative from the younger generations is first clearly visible in the contestation by the student generation of 1968 of a resistance which had failed and merely offered a rhetorical fig-leaf to capitalism. By the changed political climate of the early 1990s, what had been a submerged discourse of the marginal fascist party had become a pervasive vindication not only of fascist Italy but of the ‘ragazzi di Salò’, the fascist republicans, allies of the Nazis, who had died for their cause (Portelli 1999b: 93–5). The European level of the hegemonic historical narrative merits a brief comment, because it has been constructed on the affirmation of the values of

184 • Stuart Woolf antifascism and democracy. It consists of an attempt from above, increasingly with its own inbuilt liturgy, to create a new ideology of a unity of Europe, based on a selective choice of the multiple European pasts and in particular on the self-image of the specificity and superiority of European civilization, whose origins can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Such a narrative, sponsored actively by the political leaders of the European Community and most of its member states, forms part of the cultural baggage of what it is hoped and expected can become the future of Europe. In this sense, the function of the official narrative of European unity is analogous to the narrative of the continuity of nations, which has always been so necessary for the formation and expansion of national movements and nationalisms in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. The major difference from national ideologies is that the political economy of Europeanism was constructed prior to the cultural legitimation of Europe as a rival political reality to nationstates (Woolf 2003); and even if the hopes and sense of the need for a future supranational Europe have spread to ever wider circles (as undoubtedly they have done, compared to twenty or thirty years ago), it is hard to believe that, since the collapse of the communist regimes, we are now living in a ‘post-national’ age. Indeed, the decline in enthusiasm for the European Union that has accompanied the wars in former Yugoslavia over the past decade and the self-interested doubts about its institutional expansion eastwards have revealed only too clearly the fragility of the hegemony of this European ideology in the making. Fifty years after the Nazi atrocities, challenges and contradictions have emerged in the relationships between these different-level narratives. At Civitella – unlike Vallucciole, where class differences led to a greater politicization at the time of the massacre that took place there – the accusation that the partisans were responsible for the massacre was symbolically reinforced by the story of the ‘good’ German who refused to obey. At the national level, there has been a denial of the black and white interpretation of the Resistance, through attempts to rehabilitate the achievements of the fascist regime and Mussolini (a ‘good’ fascism until 1938, followed by the disasters – or simply the misfortunes – of the following years) and the revival of the description of the partisans as bandits, responsible directly or indirectly for the bloodshed of a civil war. Both elements form part of an overarching narrative of the humanity of Italians as a people compared to Germans, and of a Catholic-inspired affirmation of the need to forgive and forget: partisans and repubblichini were equal, as they all died for a cause; and in any case Italy is now living in a brave new world where what happened between 1943 and 1945 is irrelevant. What is notable about this contestation of the hegemonic narrative of the Resistance is the total omission of the democratic pluralist institutions and values of the Republic, set up by the antifascists as the framework within which Italy has transformed itself economically and socially over the past fifty years. At the European level, the hegemonic narrative has become less convincing through

Historians: Memories of War Atrocities • 185 doubts about the success of what is at the very core of the European ideology – economic prosperity – as well as through the strident contradiction between the values that are claimed to define the specificity of Europe – its civilization – and the barbarity of the war in former Yugoslavia. To the historian, it is natural to enquire not just into the reasons for such changes in perspective, but also into the processes of change. They are easiest to understand at the European level, where the consequences of 1989 have fed through the entire political, economic and intellectual system, puncturing facile optimisms. At the national level, with the exception of Claudio Pavone, whose critical reading of the experience of the armed revolt against Nazi-fascism in Italy long predates his masterly book Una guerra civile (1991), it needed the shock of the 1994 elections and the new atmosphere of deliberate provocation and contemptuous dismissal of the established values of the Resistance to bring about serious intellectual questioning of the hegemonic narrative of antifascism. There is beginning to be a recognition that possibly many Italians preferred not to take sides in the terrible years of the Nazi occupation and the Resistance (Revelli 1977; Absalom 1991); that partisans were also responsible for violence and killings (Valdevit 1997; Storchi 1998; Pansa 2003). At the local level, it is legitimate to ask why the memory of the massacre was not presented in the same way in its immediate aftermath; Francesca Cappelletto provides us with a detailed and convincing reading of the process of consolidation of the narrative of the community which raises many questions about the selectivity of oral testimony, the relationship between individual memory and collective memory and the apparent unanimity of the latter (Cappelletto in this volume). If we knew more about social relations at Civitella during the years of the fascist regime as well as in the period of partisan activity – crucially important in understanding the dayto-day life of any small village or community in times of crisis – it is arguable that it would be possible to detect a broader and more complicated spectrum of opinions, as Pezzino has done for another ‘antipartisan’ Tuscan village (Pezzino 1997). We would need to know about the relations between local ‘notables’ and the fascist exercise of power at Civitella, for example through membership of the regime’s organizations and participation in its ceremonies, and about relations with the partisans, besides those of the antifascist parish priest (Paggi 1997b: 57–60). Given that the partisans were perceived as responsible in the memory of the massacre at Civitella, it is important to know about matters which have been ignored and expunged from the official memory, such as in what sense the partisans were regarded as ‘outsiders’. And since we are in the heart of Tuscany, we would need to interpret the significance of living intra and extra muros at the time, given the implicit distinction that local memory makes between the citizens of Civitella who were massacred and the poor, unfortunate peasants who lived extra muros and had come for protection within the walls (and were also shot).

186 • Stuart Woolf These are all extremely difficult and delicate questions to ask, not least because the voice of the community, through its consolidated memory – and through its participation in the Arezzo conference – was searching for ratification. Atrocities, such as the Nazi massacre at Civitella, dramatically disrupt the supposedly dispassionate detachment and objective categories of the scholar, even half a century later; ethical involvement acquires a primacy of place in the face of what is unimaginably horrific. But to recognize the ‘unspeakable’ – as Primo Levi repeated time and again and demonstrated in his final work, I Sommersi e i Salvati (The Drowned and the Saved) – cannot remove the need to analyse in order to understand; nor is it incompatible with respect for the survivors and an ethical involvement of solidarity. There has been considerable discussion in recent years about the respective roles of the judge and the historian (Ginzburg 1991; Maier 1997a; Pezzino 1997: 15–24; Portelli 1999a: 117–20). Both evaluate evidence, but with different intent. The responsibility of the judge is to reach a definite conclusion about individual guilt, that of the historian to reconstruct and analyse a specific event or situation, both in the context of its broader historical background and on the basis of the role and perceptions of the actors, in order to arrive at a narration that includes alternative, even multiple, memories and hence interpretations of the event – but without assigning sentences of guilt. This does not signify that all interpretations are equally valid, but that there is an obligation to endeavour to understand the reasons – emotional, political and other – in which the different perceptions are embedded. What characterizes the research and writing of the professional historian is the absolute commitment to accept that there are multiple ways of interpreting the past, but never at the cost of ignoring, manipulating or utilizing evidence out of its precise historical context. The historian has a sacrosanct duty to refute the deliberate neofascist and racist falsities, such as the negation of the extermination camps (Vidal-Naquet 1987; Bédarida 1994; Maier 1997b). If contradictions have become apparent between the different levels of hegemonic historical and political narrative, it is necessary to ask on what basis the three levels were united in the past? Without a shadow of a doubt, the answer lies in a sentiment of revulsion at the barbarity of Nazi-fascism, shared by its victims at the local level, by the Resistance in all its manifestations, and by the conviction of public opinion within the Allied nations that in Europe they were fighting for the values of civilization and progress against a regression to the arbitrary abuses of barbaric violence. I use the term ‘Nazi-fascism’ rather than Nazism, because contemporaries accused the joint responsibility of the two regimes, and because of the objective involvement of fascism in atrocities. There is a tendency in Italy, particularly in popularizing articles in magazines and television programmes, to insist on the lesser brutality of the Italian fascists compared to the German armed forces. Usually couched in terms of the natural

Historians: Memories of War Atrocities • 187 humanity of Italians, such a consolatory conclusion is supported by an evidently popular diffidence towards Germans, widespread among Italians and dating back at least to World War I. Such commonplace affirmations, presumed to derive from innate ‘national characteristics’ and lacking any analytical content, would merit enquiry into the circumstances and forms of their expression and their function as conduits and seedbeds of nationalist prejudices. But in the specific context we are discussing, it would be more fruitful to analyse specific incidents, whether small or large, and enquire on each occasion who was responsible and who was regarded as an enemy. It is difficult to believe in the greater humanity of Italians, if one recalls the torturing of partisans by repubblichini, or the denunciation of Jews in the knowledge that they would be deported, or the practices of the fascist regime in the African colonies or the Balkans (Pavone 1991; Sarfatti 1994; Del Boca 1984; Collotti 1997). On the other hand, if one points to the multiple instances of assistance and generosity, to the point of danger, towards individuals (Allied soldiers, Italian and foreign Jews) escaping from Italy and the camps, it is easy to think of Italians as being more humane (Absalom 1991). The humanity was lacking towards those regarded as the enemy. We should never forget the brutalizing effects of dehumanizing categories of human beings who, through such a process, become anonymous and hence removed from ‘normal’ sentiments of humanity. If one wants to maintain the generalization that Italian soldiers (a far broader category than fascists) were less brutal than Germans during the war, perhaps one should look to the Catholic roots of pietas for the individual and human dignity, but also to the particular forms of sociability in a society with little respect for the decrees of the State. What conclusions can be reached? It seems to me unquestionably clear that there is a need to go beyond the three levels of hegemonic narratives of memory with which I started, because they have become so formalized and rhetorical that they have lost at least part of their credibility. At the local level this may be impracticable, as the recounting of their memory by Civitella’s citizens is an intimate part of their identity. Clemente suggests ‘a gesture of good will [by the regional institutions], of care and respect [for] that sense of the value of the autonomy and dignity of local life and traditions, of the difference that they tenaciously pursued’ (Clemente 1994: 14). In any case, for the historian it raises major ethical issues about the opportunity of silence. But even so, there is a danger in accepting a frozen memory. All memory is permeable and changes subtly in content and expression, because of its inevitable receptivity to broader changes in language and values which are purveyed ever more visibly and powerfully by (political and other) opinion makers, which can transform the message that the memory wishes to convey. National memory is a symbiotic part of national identity, which explains the selectivity of its narration, the omissions as well as the inclusions; a nation needs

188 • Stuart Woolf to forget as much as to remember (Renan 1882). Across the continent of Europe, the traumatic experiences of World War II, the consensus obtained by the regimes in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, collaboration with the Nazi occupation elsewhere and the destruction of European Jewry required the elaboration of a historical narrative that marked a break with the past. The immediate political importance attributed to reconciliation worked against the purge of collaborators in all countries and was a disenchantment for resistance movements. At such a moment of abrupt and radical rupture, political demands conditioned the new hegemonic narrative. ‘The unmasterable past’ of Nazism led to a more rapid contestation of the official narrative in Germany than in Italy (Maier 1988). Elsewhere, in France, Belgium and Holland, the concern to construct a national patriotic public memory of concord in the newly restored democracies and to avoid opening the hidden wound of collaboration had the political consequence of a refusal to recognize the specificity of the fate of the Jews compared to other deportees. Not until the 1960s did recognition of the genocide of the Jews in these countries acquire the status of public knowledge and become part of the national narrative, subsequently (and then only slowly) extended to include the issue of collaboration during the Nazi occupation (Marrus and Paxton 1981; Rousso 1987; Lagrou 1997). In Italy the return of the vast numbers of deportees, including the handful of Jews, was equally an embarrassment, denounced by Primo Levi in their name already in 1955 (Levi 1997). But the very fact of the deportation of both Italian military and civilians could be incorporated into the national narrative. The public memory of the Resistance in Italy retained its hegemonic role until considerably later. The contrasting experiences of the construction and duration of these two public memories, both direct products of World War II, point to the difficulties, for the contemporary historian, of coming to terms with the limits of a narration that for a long time had seemed historically established. Its erosion in Italy, after so prolonged a lapse of time from the experiences of the war, has not led to a critical rereading of the silent reception (or worse) of fascism’s racist laws. Instead, it has opened the door on the one hand to reopening judicial trials of war crimes exclusively of Nazi officers (for judges can only consider individual responsibility), and on the other to politically motivated accusations against the partisans for the foibe, the killing of Italian refugees from Tito’s Yugoslavia, and for the vendetta murder of fascists after the Liberation (Valdevit 1997; Pansa 2003). There is a need to go beyond the narrative of national patriotic antifascist unity, not just because it omits too much, but above all because its moral overtones seem to have lost their resonance for the great majority of the younger generations. In reality, research has long since passed the simplistic black and white assumptions typical of the early post-war years and has shifted attention from the purely political and detailed reconstruction of specific events to the social and cultural history

Historians: Memories of War Atrocities • 189 of the two decades of fascist domination in Italy. But today historians of antifascism – like their colleagues of other periods in Italy and elsewhere – have lost their monopoly of the production of historical narratives in the face of audienceorientated, uncritical popular productions (Gallerano 1995 and 1999; Woolf 2003: 333–5). Far more worryingly, the uninhibited political use of history over the past decade, with the ‘rehabilitation’ of Italy’s fascist past that has accompanied the acceptance of the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale into the democratic arena of the Italian Republic, has placed the history of the Resistance on the defensive. Hence there is an urgent need to probe more deeply into the relations between partisans and the civil populations, to recognize the desire for non-participation, or the ingenuous belief that, despite the divisions and tensions accentuated within every community by the twenty years of suspicion generated by fascism, there could be protection by deliberate abstention, especially in time of war. I share Charles Maier’s scepticism about the possibility of incorporating in a balanced historical narrative all the discordant voices of a national community (Maier 1997a). But committed historians today carry a direct responsibility to counter ignorance or a retreat into rhetoric by providing, in a language suited to our times, a less simplistic, but historically and socially more plausible, explanation of why there was a resistance and what it achieved. To conclude, it would seem appropriate to return to the broader perspectives of Europe. If the affirmation of a belief in Europe is to be anything more than rhetoric, it can only be based on the values of antifascism. We should not forget that for decades, between the 1950s and 1970s, neo-fascists throughout Europe also proclaimed a European ideology, which was an ideology of the supremacy of a superior, white civilization over inferior races (Del Boca and Giovana 1970; Cheles, Ferguson and Vaughan 1991; Ignazi 1994). In a period of economic crisis and nationalistic aggression, it would be rash to deny the temptations for some, perhaps for many, of the proposals for a closed, fortress Europe, within which nationalist egoisms are united only in their common hostility to their poorer neighbours and the developing world. Even if one is not convinced of the possibility, in our lifetime, of creating a Europe that goes beyond nation-states, it is essential that there should be an alternative project in order to resist the European siren of the neo-fascists and broader right. This includes the elaboration of a memory of Europe less removed from the conflictualities of its past than the current official narration, capable of including the multiple perceptions of what Europe has signified (Woolf 2003).

Notes 1. This is a much revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Memoria, narrazione egemonica e pluralismo europeo’, published in Passato e Presente, 34 (1995): 32–7.

190 • Stuart Woolf 2. In earlier years both the partisan leader and the local doctor had published their personal memories (Succhielli 1979; Gambassini 1981). The Civitella spokesperson published her interviews with the survivors on the occasion of the colloquium (Balò Valli 1994). 3. I can recall a newspaper sketch (I think in 1994, the year of Berlusconi’s first electoral victory) of a grandmother gagged by her daughter in order to prevent her from recounting – yet again – the terrible experiences of the war.

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192 • Stuart Woolf —— (ed.) (1997a), La memoria del nazismo nell’Europa di oggi, Scandicci: La Nuova Italia. —— (1997b), ‘Storia di una memoria anti-partigiana’, in L. Paggi (ed.), La memoria del nazismo: 49–80. —— (ed.) (1999), Le memorie della Repubblica, Scandicci: La Nuova Italia. Pansa, G. (2003), Il sangue dei vinti: quello che accadde in Italia dopo il 25 aprile, Milan: Sperling & Kupfer. Pavone, C. (1991), Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. —— (1994–5), ‘La Resistenza in Italia: memoria e rimozione’, Rivista di storia contemporanea, 23–4. Petrungaro, S. (2002), ‘La riscrittura della storia in Croazia’, Passato e Presente, 55: 35–42. Petrusewicz, M. (2002), ‘Fine della Polonia innocente. Analisi di un dibattito’, Passato e Presente, 56: 153–66. Pezzino, P. (1997), Anatomia di un massacro. Controversia sopra una strage tedesca, Bologna: Il Mulino. Portelli, A. (1999a), ‘Le Fosse Ardeatine e la memoria. Rapporto di un lavoro in corso’, in L. Paggi (ed.), Le memorie della Repubblica: 89–154. —— (1999b), L’Ordine è già stata eseguita. Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria, Rome: Donzelli. Renan-Lévy, E. (1882), Que’est-ce qu’une nation?, in Œuvres complètes de Ernest Renan, 1947, I, Paris: Calmann-Levy. Revelli, N. (1977), Il mondo dei vinti. Testimonianze della vita contadina. I. La pianura, la collina, Turin: Einaudi. Rousso, H. (1987), Le Sindrome de Vichy (1944–198 …), Paris: Seuil. Samuel, R. (1994), Theatres of Memory, London and New York: Verso. —— and Thompson, P. (eds) (1990), The Myths We Live By, London and New York: Routledge. Sarfatti, M. (1994), Mussolini contro gli ebrei. Cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938, Turin: S. Zamorani. Storchi, M. (1998), Combattere si può, vincere bisogna, Venice: Marsilio. Succhielli, E. (1979), La Resistenza nei versanti tra l’Arno e la Chiana, Arezzo: Tipografia sociale. Tognarini, I. (2002), Kesselring e le stragi nazifasciste. 1944: estate d sangue in Toscana, Rome: Carocci. Valdevit, G.P. (ed.) (1997), Foibe. Il peso del passato. Venezia Giulia 1943–1945, Venice: Marsilio. Vidal-Naquet, P. (1987), Les assassins de la mémoire, Paris: La Découverte. Winter, J. (1995), Sites of Memory. Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Historians: Memories of War Atrocities • 193 Woolf, S. (ed.) (1996), ‘Costruzioni di identità nazionale. L’Europa centro-orientale e balcanica’, Passato e Presente, 39: 7–103. Woolf, S. (2003), ‘Europe and its historians’, Contemporary European History, 12(3): 323–37.

Index

Abbagnano, N. 122 acculturation iii adolescents 92–4 affection/affective 4, 17, 25, 117, 124 affiliations 27 class 8 kinship 8 politics 15, 27–8 religion 8 Afghans xiii Africans xiii aggression 2 Agrarian Party 44 Albania 41 Alleanza Nazionale 189 Allies 68–9, 73. 87, 89, 90, 93, 178, 186–7 Americans, Northern xiii, xiv amnesia 41 anecdote, see narration/narrative Anglo-Americans 87 animal theft 43, 45, 55 anthropologists 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 27, 56, 119, 125, 177, 179, 180 anthropology xi, 9, 11, 12, 13, 102, 126, 156 and history 1, 3 interpretive, 97–8 antifascism 183–5, 189 Antze, P. xvi, 125, 173 armies, armed forces 1, 52, 178, 186, 188 Arezzo 177 conference (1994) 177–8, 182, 186, 116–17, 127 Assman, A. 20, 21

195

atrocities 7, 19, 29, 39, 51, 53, 88–90, 94–5, 104–7, 119–21, 177–9, 181, 186 see also brutalities, crimes, massacres aural memory 29 Austria xiii, xiv Austro-Hungarian Empire 87, 92 autobiographic memory 65, 75, 80, 81–3, 123, 156–7, 160, 162, 165, 171, 173, 174 see also history, memory, life history autobiographies 13, 114 Badoglio, P. 92 Balkans xvi, 187 Ballinger, P. 96 Baltic States 181 barbarities 16, 175, 186 Bartlett, F. C. 9, 24, 156, 173 Basques culture 81 French 65–8 society in 1930s 67 Spanish 68, 70 battles, social, see conflicts and tensions Bausinger, H. 6 Belgium 188 Belgrade 91 Bell, R. xiv, 4, 6 Belorussia 168 Benn, Stanley 149–50 Berlin Wall xii Bettizza, E. 111 bipolar collectivities 96 black market 90, 92

196 • Index Bloch, Marc 110 Bloch, Maurice 11, 12 body 106 language 122 symbolic desecration of 179 tortured 53 see also memory, violence Bonino, S. 30 Bosnia 19, 53, 90, 92 Bourdieu, P. 172 Boyarin, J. 10 Bravo, A. 102 Brezhnev, L. 137 brigandage 43–7, 61n5 brigands 16 British armies 89, 90 military commission 178–9 Bruner, J. 23, 24 brutalities 2, 79, 95, 179, 182, 187 see also atrocities burial 106 Calabria 89 Calamandrei, P. 126, 177 Calvino, I. 118 Candau, J. 8, 9 Cappelletto, F. xii, xiii, xiv, 4, 5, 11, 12, 16, 20, 22, 29, 108, 117, 177, 180, 185 Carrithers, M. 2 Caruth, C. 23, 119 Casey, E. 19, 23, 25, 108 Catholicism 67, 157, 158, 169, 184, 187 Chartier, R. 181 children 11, 20, 91, 94, 106–9, 111, 126, 167, 169 Christian Democrats 182n3 Civil War xiii, 6, 7, 39, 87, 93 Greece 39–60 resistance to the logic of 56 role in people’s memory 52 Spain 68 civilians 1, 2, 15–6, 104, 178, 181, 188–9 Civitella (Italy) 2, 16, 53, 101, 104, 112, 122, 177–8, 182–4, 186, 187, 190n2

class, social, see affiliations, memory class warfare 87–8, 94, 96 Clemente, P. 16, 182, 187 cognition 3, 14 cognitive dimensione of memory 16, 17, 25, 29, 121, 124 frame 5, 6 schemas xii Cohen, G. 9 cohesion 52, 57–9 and division 7, 58–9 Cold War xi, 7, 14, 39, 40, 55, 113, 127, 179, 182 collaborators 40, 47, 94, 102, 188 collective history 171 collective memory 8, 9, 23, 60, 65, 95, 161, 171, 177–8, 180, 182, 185 transmission 180 collective narrative 160, 162, 163 commemoration xv, 1, 18, 42, 60, 73, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82–3, 96, 178, 180 official 39 public 18 commemorative rite 108, 168 Committee for the Judgment of Nazi Crimes 125 communist regimes 17, 87, 92–4, 97, 155, 184 communist/s 7, 51, 61n8, 68, 70, 71, 78, 78, 155, 156 ‘communitas’ 56, 57, 49 community xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 27, 30, 39–49, 45, 51, 56–60, 121–4, 177, 182, 185–6, 189 boundaries (insiders/outsiders) 5, 6, 19 concept 5, 7 Jewish 181 see also memory, mnemonic community, village ‘community of sentiment’ 121 comparative method 3 concentration camps xiv, xv, 15, 22 conflicts and tensions xiii, 1, 6, 7, 15, 28, 30, 48, 50, 58, 69, 71, 112, 116

Index • 197 among people linked by bonds of proximity 53–6 intra-village 7, 65, 96 see also memory, rivalry/rival groups conversation as a social act 124 Congolese xvi Connerton, P. 95, 160, 171 Contini, G. 116 cooperation 42, 43, 45, 53–8, 60 crimes 26 Nazi 17, 19, 22, 26, 104, 114, 125 Croatia 4, 90, 92, 181 Croatians 87 cruelty 19, 22, 53 see also atrocities cultural schema 132–8, 141–3, 149–51 Czechoslovakia 4 D’Annunzio, G. 88 Darnton, R. 181 Das, V. 13, 20, 119 Davis, N. 167 dead and living dead 105 death 20, 105, 112, 155, 179 death camps xiv De Martino, E. 106 democracies, see post-war Democratic Army 39, 42, 49, 50 deportation 15, 188 dialect and language 87, 91, 96, 98 disruption, see traumatic memory ‘domestication of the past’ 4 Douglas, M. 24 dramatization 123 Durkheim, É. 8 Düsseldorf 12 EAM 42, 45–7, 49, 50, 52–5, 57–8 economic activities and organization 15, 27, 45–6, 61n5, 97, 162 fishing 88–90, 98 mezzadria (sharecropping system) 119 Edwards, D. 23, 156, 169 Eichmann, A. 2 elections 42, 44

elites 12, 158, 159, 170, 171 see also gentry emic/etic 3, 5, 16 emigrants 110–11, 141 vs. non-emigrants 15, 96 emigration 61n5 internal 4 to urban centres 4, 160 emotions 2, 14, 16, 21, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 111, 117, 121–4, 142–4, 146–7, 150, 170 and memory 19, 102, 103 anger 142–4, 143n12, 144, 147, 150 anguish 29, 31 as memory 124 disenchantment and bitterness 52 fear 19, 20, 22, 26, 109, 142 grief 26, 27, 142–4, 146, 150, 177, 182 hate 177 outrage 177 pride 114, 146 resentment 115, 117, 177 see also memory empathy xi, xiii, 25, 26, 29, 30, 121–4 entextualization xi episodic memory 107, 110, 118 Erikson, K. 5 Estonia 136, 148 ethics xiv, xv, 184, 188 see also ethnographer ethnic identity 125 ethnic strife 87–8, 90, 92–4, 96 ethnographers 3, 5, 7, 25–31, 123 as an outsider 27–8, 97 ethical involvement of 30–31 ethnography xi, 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 25–31, 102, 109, 120, 126 ‘living ethnography.’ 7 in women-only groups 92 ethnography and history 23 Europe xi, xiii, 14, 39–41, 53, 76, 178, 179, 183–5, 189 Central and Eastern 17 Eastern xi 41, 60 Western 181 European Community xv, 184

198 • Index Europeanism 184 eviction 155, 173 evocation 125, 183 exile 4, 60, 96 see also memory expropriation 155–6, 161–2, 169 extermination 104 camps 186 extreme events and conditions 2, 3, 17, 20, 22, 26, 125 feelings 5 face-to-face-interactions 4 see also networks family/families 113 histories 155 see also memory fascism, fascist regime xiii, 1, 26, 32, 87–8, 90, 92–4, 96, 183–4, 186–8 fascist collaborators 19 Fascist militia (MSVN) 178 fascist party 183 Fascist Republic, see Italian Social Republic fascists viii, 5 local 93, 112 neo-fascists. 189 Fentress, J. xii, 112, 160 fieldwork 2, 25–6, 28, 41, 50, 61n1, 97, 112, 123 flashbulb memory, see visual memory foibe 87, 188 forgetting, see memory, and forgetting Fosse Ardeatine (Rome) 127, 178 France xiii, xvi, 73, 188 armies 72 commemoration of Liberation 73–4, 78 government 67–8 Liberation 72, 74 Franco, F. 68 Franzinelli, M. 14, 127 Freud, S. xii, 182 Frijda, N. 142–3, 150 ‘full immersion’ 25

funeral, see rite Funkenstein, A. 9, 23, 25 Gagliano (Italy) 16 Galli della Loggia, E. 118, 120 Gaulle, de 68, 71, 73 Gaullism 69, 71, 75 Geertz, C. 10, 13, 14 genealogies 12, 124 generations 183 genocides 177 gentry, Polish xii, 14 German armies 39, 72, 87–95, 178 Federal Republic 14 invasion xv occupation 14, 62, 65, 67–8, 70, 72–3, 75, 77–8, 83, 87–95, 102–4, 140, 161, 162, 163 prisoners 73 reprisal 51 resistance to 69–73, 102, 112 see also resistance movement, soldiers Germans 16, 68, 71, 73, 76, 109, 113, 114, 182, 184, 186–7 depicted in Basque popular theatre 77, 78 Germany 161 West xvi, 179 Gestapo 70 gestures, see body, language Givors (France) 13 ‘good German’ 53, 184 ‘good guy’ 54 Gothic Line 103, 178 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de 181 Grandis 140, 146 Greece xiii, xiv, xvi, 4, 39–60 grief, see emotions group memory 2, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 25, 60, 65, 79, 80, 82, 115, 173, 174 formation and maintenance of 117 group narrative 17, 24 group remembrance 125 Guantamano prisoners xvi Guerre, Martin 95

Index • 199 guerrilla brigades 92 guilt 182–3 Gurs (France) 68, 70, 72–3, 77, 83 gypsies, see extermination habitual memory 171 habitus 41, 44–5, 47, 55, 172 Habsburg Empire 87 Halbwachs, M. 4, 9, 12, 48, 114, 161, 168 Hannerz, U. 17 Hannover 126 Hastrup, K. 16 hate, see emotions healing, see trauma Herzegovina 90, 92 Hill, J. H. 124 Hitler–Stalin Pact 148 historian/s 1, 3, 16, 26, 38, 177–8, 179, 180, 186, 187–9 and the judge 186 local 109 oral 9, 12, 13, 48, 179 historical documents 11, 171 interpretation 3, 77 reconstruction 2, 183 see also narrative history xi, 4, 11, 12, 113, 177, 183 autobiography and 111 counter-history 12, 164 ‘from below’ 12–13, 180 gender 177 local 65, 123 of elites 12 official 72 of memory xi of nations 173 oral 12–13, 177 personal 79 public 60 rewriting 65, 74, 166 social 3, 13 see also anthropology, ethnography and history, memory, memory and history history-telling 74, 82

Hobsbawm, E. 117 Holland 188 Holocaust 1, 20, 29, 96 horror 18, 186 Houseman, M. 124 human dignity xiv, 52 identity 6 and memory 157–60, 187 local 39 ideologies 184 Illyria 87 ‘image, memory’ 103 ‘image synthesis’ 120 images, see memory, visual memory imagination 14 social dimension of 103, 122 imaginative rationality 122 immigration xiii, 4, 110, 111 individual memory, see private, individual memory informal communication 28 Ingold, T. 8, 14, 24 injustice 52 see also justice insiders/outsiders, see community interdisciplinarity 3, 11, 177 interned xv intersubjectivity 8, 10, 117 interviews 11, 12, 13, 26–8, 47–51, 61n1, 109, 113, 122, 126, 161, 177 as object of knowledge 26 group interviews 126 refused 30, 96 ‘intransitive memory’ 108 Iraquis xvi Istria xiv, 4, 6, 87–8, 92–3, 96 Italian armies 89, 90, 92 Italian Republic 116, 178, 182, 184, 189 Italian Social Republic (RSI) 178 Italians 96, 113, 185–7 Italy 2, 4, 16, 19, 22, 32, 53, 87–8, 92–4, 102–3, 126, 178, 183–4, 186–9 central 178 defeat 87 Liberation, annual celebration of 7

200 • Index military court 104 military magistracy 127 parliamentary representatives 126 see also war trials Jakubowska, L. xii, 4, 14, 15, 24, 159 Jallà, D. 102 Jews 167, 187–8 see also community, extermination, Jewish Johnson, M. 122 judges 186, 188 justice 3, 14, 17, 182 divine 43, 49, 56 lack of 105 people’s 47 vs. injustice 19, 31 Kalanta, R. 147 Kanaoathipillai, V. 19 Kaunas 137, 140 Kesselring, A. 178 kinship 6, 43, 49, 51, 57 spiritual 55 see also affiliations Kirmayer, L.J. 18 Klinkhammer, L. 102 Kohler Riessman, K. 103 Kossovo 106 Kupatshar 43–60 Laub, D. 18, 20 Lambek, M. xvi, 125, 173 Lampedusa, G. di 170 Land Reform 14, 155, 156, 161,166 Landbergis, A. 147 landed estates 155, 156, 159, 162, 165, 168, 169, 174n3 Landsbergis, V. 131, 133 Latvia 136, 148 Le Doux, J. 124 legend 65 Lequin, Y. 13 Levi, C. 16 Levi, P. 22, 23, 31, 182, 186, 188l Liberation, see France, Italy

Lietuvoje, N. 147 Lieven, A. 131, 133–4 life history 157, 163, 170, 173 life story 155, 163, 173 liminality 56–7 Lithuania xiii, 15, 131–5, 168 local belonging xvi, 6, 7, 16, 42, 51, 53–4, 57, 60, 117, 125 Lo Coco, A. 30, 122 Lowenthal, D. 173 Madagascar 111 Maier, C. 14, 19, 182, 189 manorial 159, 162, 166, 168, 170, 173 economy 166 life 166 system 165 Marciulionas, S. 147 martyr/martyrdom 112, 127, 136–8 Marzabotto (Italy) 114–15 Masada 96 mass murders 103–4 mass violence 1, 2, 20 see also violence massacre/s, Nazi 5, 14, 15, 16, 20, 53, 95, 101, 102, 106–7, 112, 114, 119, 120, 123, 163, 177, 178, 181,184 ritual method of 182 Mattingly, C. 23 Mauss, M. 43 Medal of Bravery, Military 114–15 memory/memories xii, xiii, 3, 11, 13, 15, 16, 26, 40, 177, 186–88 and class interests xxiii, 157–60, 162, 165–6, 170 and community 8, 40–58, 102, 105, 180–1, 182–3 and forgetting 2, 4, 5, 9, 19, 26, 39, 40, 60, 95, 96, 112, 117, 119, 121, 124, 164–5 and group integration 121 and images 20, 22, 24, 26, 53, 102, 117, 118, 120, 123 as a process of re-living 19, 25, 29, 31, 116, 117 as counter-discourse 6, 116

Index • 201 as honor 114 as property of the group 6, 114, 124–5 biased 163, 174 bodily 22, 168, 171–2 communal 8 conceived as historical truth 96 confirming the society’s moral standards 55 contested and divided xiii, 15, 39–41, 57, 60, 95–7, 111–12, 116–17, 164 distorted 14, 162, 166 ethical dimension of 21, 115, 125 exchange of 41 family, genealogical 103, 108–9, 114, 167, 168, 169–70 following exile 60 from below 7, 166 ideological (re)construction and interpretation 5, 7, 9, 14, 18, 22, 28, 60, 65, 108, 159, 169, 174 local 10, 60, 62n11, 103, 108–9, 113, 114, 116, 181, 187 long-term 2, 3, 8, 15 national xiv, 60, 113, 114, 181 objects of 167–71 of workers 13 official 9 plurality of xiii political dimension of 13–17, 50, 60, 113–14, 166–7, 174, 182, 186, 187 politics of 10 relation between cognitive and social practices 9, 156 rewriting 181 ‘secondary-memory’ 14, 167 selectivity of 18, 181, 185, 187 shared 24, 102, 116, 160, 183 social formation of 10, 180 ‘theatre of’ 181 traces 108, 111 transmission 8, 12, 23, 48, 60, 102, 108–10, 119, 124, 167–8 see also autobiographic memory, collective memory, emotions, and memory, episodic memory, group memory, mnemonic community,

narration/narrative, national memory, private/individual memory, public memory, recollection, remembrance/remembering, semantic memory, social memory, spatial memory, traumatic memory, visual memory memory and history xii, xiv, 16, 114–17, 125, 159, 162, 185 ‘memory of memory’ 23 ‘memory-event’ 124 ‘memory-making’ 160 ‘memory-village’ 40–6 ‘memory-work’ 75, 81, 83, 169 Merkine 139 Middleton, D. 23, 169 migration 87–8, 91–6 military, see armies, Medal of Bravery Mitchell, S. xii, xvi mnemonic community 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 15, 18, 22, 25–8, 41, 78, 116–17, 117, 122, 125 ‘mnemonic engineering’ 166 mnemonics 155–6, 167–8, 171 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 131, 134, 147, 148 mourn, inability of 106, 124 mourning 18, 106, 114, 124, 167 desecration of 124 public 180 Mozambicans 29 Mozambique xvi, 29 museum, see spatial memory Muslims 90 Mussolini, B. 92, 104, 179, 184 myth/mythical 53, 57, 58, 181 Namer, G. 8 Napoleon, B. 181 narration/narrative, 3, 7, 14, 15, 18, 20, 23–5, 50, 61n10, 87, 88–92, 94, 95, 102, 108–9, 117, 119, 122, 155, 157, 160, 163, 165, 174, 177–8, 180–4, 186–7 anecdotes 20, 121, 169 as community rite 121

202 • Index challenges and contradictions 184, 186 ‘grand’ 1, 6 hegemonic, dominant 12, 182, 183, 184, 187, 188 individual 4 local, national and supranational 17, 188 macro-historical 4 master 116, 160 performance 24 structural models of 25 story-telling 107, 117, 166, 169, 173 see also memory, recollection, remembrance/remembering, story, telling and retelling national memory, see memory nationalism 75, 184, 189 NATO 14 Nazi invasion xv occupations 126, 177, 178, 188 puppet regimes 178 regime 12 see also crimes, massacres, violence Nazi-fascism 101, 104, 185–6 Nazi-fascists 7, 90, 112 Nazis xiii, xv, 2, 5, 15, 16, 19, 40, 106, 111, 121, 177–9, 181–6 Nazism xv, 32, 181, 186, 188 neo-fascism 189 networks, social xiv, 17, 28, 42, 102, 107, 113 exchanges 6 family 1 New York City 88 Nordstrom, C. 25, 26, 29, 30, 31 normalization 20, 40, 50 nostalgia 167, 173 Nuremberg, see war trials Okeley, J. 122 Oliverio, A. 17 Olivier de Sardan, J-P. 30 omissions 181 see also memory Opatija 92

Oradur-sur-Glane (France) 79, 84, 95 oral memory 180, 185 sources 11, 12 traditions 65, 82 ‘ordinary people’ 2, 12, 180, 181 Ott, S. xii, 4, 11, 15, 20, 24, 27 outrage, see emotions Paggi, L. 116, 182 participant observation 28 particular histories 105 Partisans xiii, 7, 15, 16, 19, 87, 88, 89–94, 96, 41, 42, 48, 53, 59, 70, 113, 114, 121, 136, 177, 178, 182, 184–5, 187, 188, 189, 190n2 National Association of Italian Partisans 116 see also Resistance PASOK 40, 42 Pastorala, Basque, see popular theatre patriotism 49, 51, 188 Pavone, C. 31, 39, 104, 185 peasants 155, 158–9, 163–70, 173–4, 185 movement 44 perceptions 14, 19, 21, 28, 117, 186 performance 116, 171, 177 ritual 5 studies xii theatre xii see also narration/narrative, popular theatre ‘performance of memory’ 122 perpetrators 52 see also victims persecution 52 Pétain 67 Pétainism 67 Petersen, R. xv, 11, 12, 14, 15, 25, 27, 30 Pezzino, P. 104, 185 Piasere, L. 10, 30 Pillemer, D. 156 Poland xiii, 14, 155, 176 polarization 40, 43 political refugees 30, 40, 41 Jewish, French, Italian xv

Index • 203 Spanish, Jewish 68 political science 3, 15, 27 politics, see affiliation, memory popular theatre (Basque) 4, 27, 28, 65–7, 75–7, 79, 83 as agent of remembrance 78–82 as ‘history telling’ 66, 75, 77–8, 79, 81 functions of 66, 81–3 Resistance to German occupation, depicted in, 65–8 see also performance Portelli, A. 9, 12, 106 Portis-Winner, I. 97 post-war 93, 113 democracies 1, 32, 39 governments 52 reconstruction 39 power 22, 40, 45, 49, 57, 105, 180, 185 pre-war politics xiv, 44, 45 society 55, 57, 58 stories 96 priest 182, 185 private, individual memory xiii, 8, 23, 25, 107–8, 114–15, 173, 177, 178, 180–2, 185 incorporated in a collective dimension 163 psychic experiences 21 psychologists 122 psychology 9, 11, 156 cultural 23 public memory 39, 40, 60, 107, 115, 17–18, 180–81, 188 public remembrance 124 Pula 88, 90–2 racism 188, 189 Radstone, S. 9, 12 Rappaport, J. 10 Rapport, N. 7 rebellion 15 reciprocity 41, 43–4, 53, 55, 57 recollection 2, 6, 9, 15, 18, 26, 109, 112, 124, 162, 167 group 15

written 180 see also memory, narration/narrative, remembrance/remembering reconciliation 6, 40, 45, 50, 51, 57, 58, 60, 188 recount 102 Red Army 164 re-evocation 109, 118 see also remembrance/remembering refugee camps 30 refugees, see political, refugees religion, see affiliations remembrance/remembering xiv, 10, 12, 15, 17, 23, 24, 28, 31, 48, 78, 95, 96, 102, 107, 111, 114, 117–18, 120, 157, 163–5, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 182 as an act xii collective 9 communal 10 compared to re-evocation 111 formation and maintenance of 8 from the grass-roots 3 social dimension of 19 see also memory, narration/narrative, recollection, group remembrance, public remembrance reminiscences 163 removal 18 see also memory replacement 181 see also memory representation 156, 157, 159, 160 reprisal, see German, SS re-privatization 173 repubblichini 178, 184, 187 see also Salò Republicans, Spanish 67–8, 69, 70, 76 re-remembering 25 resentment, see emotions Resistance movement 1, 6, 27, 30, 39–42, 44, 45–9, 55, 57, 60, 68–74, 116, 136, 139, 140, 178, 180, 182–6, 188, 189 left-wing groups 7 portrayed in popular theatre 65–85

204 • Index resonance 123 retaliation 30, 112 re-telling, see narration/narrative, telling and retelling revolution 181 revolutionaires 164, 166 Riches, D. 21 Ricoeur, P. xii, xvi Riga 131 rivalry/rival groups 68–9, 70–4 political 6, 68 see also conflicts and tensions Rijeka 88, 90–2 rite funeral 97, 106, 117 of passage 56 see also commemorative rite Robben, A.C. 26, 30 Rome 7 Russel tribunal 16 see also war trials Russia 161, 181 Rwanda 53 Rwandans xvi sacrifice xv, xvi sadism 22 Sahlins, M. 8, 16 Salò, Republic of 126, 183 see also Italian Social Republic Samuel, R. 12, 26 Sanjek, R. 11–13 Sant’Anna di Stazzema (Italy) 101, 104, 109, 112, 114–15, 117, 122, 125, 178 Santomassimo, G. 7 Sarmatian ideology 157 origin 169 Schreiber, G. 104 Scott, J. 175 self-reflection 27 Shama, S. 24 Seiffert, R. xvi semantic memory 107, 110, 118 Semprun, G. xi Serbs 90, 92, 95

Sheper-Huges, N. 30 Sierra Leone xvi silence 30, 105, 113, 116, 122, 155, 187 see also violence Simone, R. 119 Sivan, E. 3, 9, 13 slaughterers 20, 189 see also atrocities Slavs 96 Slovakia 181 Slovenia 97 social bonds 57 groups, segments 1, 3, 4, 5 interactions 7, 10, 18, 25, 185 hierarchies 28, 57 life 12 norms 15, 41, 55 prestige 49, 58 see also affiliations, conflict and tensions, memory, network social memory xiii, 5, 40, 53, 55, 57, 60, 82, 123, 157, 173 social scientists 24, 177 social structure 13, 15, 27, 42–4, 56–8, 60, 162, 185 socialism post-socialism 14 Switzerland national xvi Socialist Party, see PASOK socialists xv, 70, 71 socialization xiii, 9 sociology 3, 14, 20, 156 sociology of knowledge 13 Sofsky, W. 20 soldiers 17, 36, 39, 164, 182, 187 German 17, 177–8, 182, 187 solidarity xii, 6, 7, 21, 186 Sorabji, C. 19 Soviet armies 163, 164 occupation 15, 139, 140, 161, 162 regime xi sphere of influence 159 Soviet Union 131, 134, 136–7, 147–8, 167, 169, 180–1

Index • 205 see also Russia spatial memory 42, 112, 167–71 museum 126 ‘museum of memory’ 105 ‘place of memory’ as a museum 95 sacred national site 127 Spencer, J. 22 SS 72, 127, 168 reprisal 7, 16, 112 Stalin, J. 173, 181 Starn, R. 167 state policies 15 Stoler, A. 160 story 55 local 79 personal 124, 173 told within families 50 ‘story, our own’ 102–3, 105–6, 108, 111, 114–15, 117, 124, 160 story-telling, see narration/narrative Stranper, J. 123 sufferance xv suicide xv survivors 2, 4, 7, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 28, 31, 47 104–7, 111, 113, 119, 123 feeling of guiltiness xvi Switzerland xv, xvi symbol/symbolic 6, 8, 41, 53, 54, 59, 78, 118, 160, 179 taboo, see violence Tambiah, S. 13 Tani, F. 30 Tedlock, D. 124 telling and retelling 19, 20, 22–3, 107 see also narration/narrative, memory terror 119 policy of 2, 179 ‘testimonial pact’ 31 testimonies 2, 6, 119 testimony 21, 31 theatre, see popular theatre Third Reich 22 Thompson, E.P. 180 Thompson, P. 12, 26 Tilsit 126

Tito, J.B. 90, 92, 188 Tobruk 89 Todorov, T. 21 Tolstoi, L. 181 Tomizza, F. 87 Tonkin, E. 9, 12, 13, 102, 108 torture 53, 187 see also body tradition/s 58 invention of 96 oral 25, 65, 82 traditional society 53, 55 trauma xiv, xvi, 4, 6, 14, 20, 107, 117–21, 163, 173 as a re-living 5, 19, 29 characteristics 18 ‘chosen trauma’ 160 communal 5 healing 2 long-term effects 1 social dimension 5 wake 19 words and trauma traumatic memory 17–23, 60 trial, see war trials Trieste 87, 88, 91, 94, 96 Tsorbatzides 45–6, 50 Tulving, E. 110 Turner, V. 56–7 Tuscany 15, 19, 53, 104, 108, 178, 180, 182, 185 Ukraine 167, 168 United Nations 49 United States 4, 138, 140–1, 146–7 Valeri, V. 10, 13 Vallucciole (Italy) 101, 104, 112, 178, 184 Van Boeschoten, R. xiv, 4, 6, 11, 12, 20, 25, 28, 31 vendetta 79, 188 Venetian empire 87 vengeance 95 Vergne, L. xi, xvi, 21 Vichy 67, 68, 69, 70 victimization 30, 48

206 • Index feeling of 5 victimhood xiv, 121–4 victims 2, 3, 6, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 29, 31, 40, 42, 46, 48, 52, 53, 115, 178 and perpetrators xiii, xiv, 2, 4, 5, 20 Vietnam xvi village life 4, 7, 12, 15, 52, 88–98, 185, 187 Vilnius 15, 131–5 violence 42, 46–7 ‘absolute’ 20 and linguistic formulation 20 and the body 20, 22, 30, 31 as socially transformed 17 committed by Nazis xiii, 11, 13, 15, 18, 23, 28, 52, 53, 56–8, 60, 61, 104, 107, 120, 177, 178 communication of 19 conceived as external 19 cult of 179 intra-community 19, 39 producing silence 19, 20, 22 seen through the filter of memory 28 tabooed 19, 22 unpunished 19 visual memory 19, 22, 23, 26, 29, 103, 107, 117–21, 124, 126, 156 flashbulb 119 war xi, xv, 177–8, 181 crimes 127, 188 frontline 178 ‘patriotic’ 1 wake and consequences xi, xvi

war trials 2, 104 against the Germans 126–7, 188 Italian military trials 104, 178–79 Italian Nuremberg 104 Nuremberg 2, 16 Watchel, N. 10, 13 Weiner, A. 125 white terror 46, 47, 50, 57 Whitehouse, H. 22 Wieviorka, A. 21, 31, 105 Wikan, U. 26, 29 Wikham, C. xiii, 24, 112, 160 Winter, J. 3, 9, 11 witness/witnessing xi, 2, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 30, 61n10, 109, 126 women 89, 90, 92, 94, 171 Wolf, C. xiv, xvi Woolf, S. xi, 2, 11, 13, 16, 17, 31 World War I 16, 87, 104, 110, 118, 160, 180, 187 World War II xi, xiii, xvi, 1, 14, 15, 87–94, 103, 110, 116, 131–2, 134, 139, 141, 159, 177, 178, 180, 188 Xiberoa (French Basque province) 65–85 Ybarnégaray 67–8 Young, J. 20, 31, 122 Yugoslavia 4, 87, 90, 91, 92, 107, 181, 184, 185, 188 Zagreb (Croatia) 91 Ziakis (Grece) 41–60