I encountered the war many years ago, in the course of my research, collecting the life stories of the generations born between the twenties and thirties, who had lived through the long and dramatic years of the war conflict. Almost all the witnesses placed the war at the center of their stories, which emerged in its extreme dimension, a sort of turning point which divided life into a before and an after.
This is a dynamic that unites the traumas related to war and those caused by natural disasters. The loss of physical space, of the house, of objects breaks the continuity of individual stories, interrupts the daily passing of time and causes a dramatic disorientation. Either way, war and catastrophe, public narratives simplify the complexity of the story and obscure people’s experience.
The representation of the Second World War is particularly significant from this point of view. Italy and Europe had been crossed by armies of occupation, divided between resistance and collaboration; the populations had experienced the violence of the occupiers (deportations, massacres of civilians), but also the violence of the liberators (bombings, mass rapes of soldiers of the French expeditionary force and the Red Army). More than a million Italian soldiers had been taken prisoner on different war fronts and with different enemies (British, American, French, Russian, German…).
After the war each country had reconstructed its own history trying to hide errors, defeats, faults: in Italy the participation in the Nazi war (from 1940 to 1943), the war crimes committed in the areas of occupation in the Balkans and in Greece, without counting those perpetrated in previous years in the colonies, still among the most forgotten sins today.
An edifying story had emerged in which all Italians had, albeit silently, opposed fascism and the great majority had participated in or supported the resistance. Not only in Italy, the liberation narrative also denied the war violence perpetrated by the victors, such as the terrible air raids that had destroyed so many cities and killed the civilian population.
The real experience of people, largely dissonant from the public narrative, is transmitted through the informal circuits of memory: private stories entrusted to family networks, circulating in more or less restricted “communities of remembrance” that have crossed memories in different ways public and, depending on their political strength, have been heard or rejected.
They are memories that help us to understand the true experience of the war, they make us enter that chain of thoughts and images that underlie official memories but that contribute to creating opinion and common sense. What did a French, a German, a Japanese, an Italian feel in the face of the rubble of his country when he had to welcome as liberators those who had destroyed his city? What have been, and still are, the feelings of populations who have experienced the crimes of various occupations to an extreme extent, such as the inhabitants of Eastern European countries? These are just some of the questions that historians have asked themselves over the years. The answers help us to understand the dynamics of memory that still today trigger resentments, conflicts and disputes, as happened in the Balkans and as happens today between Russia and Ukraine.
I retraced the experience of total war on one of the territories that experienced, at times at the same time, the violence of opposite fronts: Naples – the most bombed city in Italy -, the rest of Campania and lower Lazio crossed by the fortification lines. German and also for this reason the targets of the so-called surgical bombings.
In another volume I reconstructed the stories of the soldiers (Fighters, stragglers, prisoners, Donzelli editore 2016). Comparing myself with similar studies of oral history, I widened the field to the European reality of war and natural disasters (The memory, the traumas, the historyViella 2020).
Is there an analogy between the memories of war and those of natural disasters? The size, the territorial extension, the involvement of millions and millions of people, the violence voluntarily perpetrated against the enemy population make war an incommensurable and incomparable event with natural disasters. But at the same time we can detect some similar dynamics: like war, catastrophe is an event that breaks the ordinary course of things, opens a chasm between past and present, constitutes a radical threat to the cultural and social order in its spatial dimension and in its temporal dimension.
The echo of war always appears in tales of catastrophes. Those who have experienced an earthquake often think of a sudden and devastating bombing, and compare the rubble to that caused by air raids.
Even in natural disasters simplified discourses emerge often dominated by stereotypes rooted in time that must be criticized and deconstructed. Studying the context of the disaster with a close lens allows us to understand the vulnerability and the relationship with the risk of territories and populations, supporting the tools, including cultural ones, to prevent and mitigate the effects of the catastrophe which is never entirely natural. Think of the earthquakes and floods whose effects in Italy are always amplified by the careless hand of the human being.
Finally, there is the role of memory. In cases where the calamity has destroyed entire communities and claimed many victims, the need to overcome the trauma can lead to its removal. Attachment to places, the desire to stay in one’s home can lead to oblivion and underestimation of risk. Finally, the very institutions that have failed to prevent and fight a disaster can intentionally obscure the event.
Working in the communities to elaborate the memory therefore represents a fundamental work of prevention. Living with risk is possible, but on condition that you know it and are prepared to face it.
Gabriella Gribaudi she is a professor at the University of Naples Federico II. With the research group of the social sciences department, you are responsible for the multimedia archive of memories, which collects testimonies on war and earthquakes.