Introduction
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Notes Introduction 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 2. Rossi-Doria draws different conclusions from those of Friedlander, and cites the distinctions he lists in his “Introduction” to the Italian edition of La Germania nazista e gli ebrei (“Memorie di Donne” 61 n6). 3. “The humiliation and worse of femininity is a phenomenon so renown of the concentrationary universe that one does not need to dwell on it, if not to remind that it was partly due to the direct action and ritual of the carcerieri (shaving of hair and pubic hair, nudity exposed . , up to sterilization), for another to the same material and psychological situation of the camp, which promoted first of all the interruption of the menstrual period, generalized because of the shock, undernourishment, etc. In testimonies, the desexual- ized image of the inmates is recurring” (Mengaldo, La vendetta 46). 4. Federica K. Clementi speaks rather explicitly of this unspoken forbiddance of women from critical and literary discourse (281–91). 5. For a discussion about critical exclusion of Italian women’s work, L’ebraismo nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, the otherwise worthy collection of essays edited by Carlà and De Angelis, is particularly emblematic. None of the nine essays is dedicated to a female writer. 6. “Why estheticism? I reply, why is there art in the tomb? Estheticism. In this case, it means compassion” (Moravia, “Preface” 20). 7. See Lucamante, “The ‘Indispensable’ Legacy of Primo Levi: From Eraldo Affinati to Rosetta Loy between History and Fiction,” for a treatment of liter- ary representability of the Shoah by working on the example of Primo Levi, Rosetta Loy, and Eraldo Affinati. 8. See Hanna Serkowska’s reflections on Alberto Cavaglion’s article (“Edith Bruck” 165–81). 9. It comes perhaps not equipped with the strong economic components that mark what August Bebel defines the “socialism of the idiots,” that stock of anti-Jewish anticapitalism on which Michele Battini reflects in his stimulat- ing study Il socialismo degli imbecilli. Propaganda, falsificazione, persecuzione degli ebrei. 250 NOTES 10. See Robert Gordon’s The Holocaust in Italian Culture. Although admitting that “[g]ender in Holocaust writing is already at this early stage a defining terrain of distinction [ . ]” (53) the discussion on women writers of the Holocaust ends here. 11. For this topic, see Sabine Sellam’s L’écriture concentrationnaire, ou, La poé- tique de la résistance. 12. For a further discussion of the main points of Adorno’s theory, see Peter Haidu’s “The Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the Narratives of Desubjectification,” 279–84. 1 The Italian Shoah: Reception and Representation 1. While the terms Shoah and the Holocaust will be used with no distinction, I am aware of the restrictive significance of Shoah limited in its understanding “only to the Jewish world as if this crime only concerned Jews” (Cavaglion, “Nota,” xxii). 2. See also Picchietti 573–78 and Marcus 142–44. 3. “The larger problem is, however, to explore the interaction between various dimensions of language use and its relation to practice, including the rela- tionship between the ‘constative’ historical reconstruction and the ‘perfor- mative’ dialogic exchange with the past as well as between ‘sublime’ excess and normative limits that are necessary as controls in social and political life” (LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust 4). 4. For a discussion of Derrida’s position on Marxism in Spectres of Marx, see Macdonald, 143–72. 5. According to Primo Levi, Italian Jews were and are by far the most assimi- lated (“Intervento,” 99). 6. See also Maier 29–43. 7. Cavaglion also talks of a “general underestimation of the significance and relevance of the extermination accomplished by the Germans in the Italian peninsula often with the direct complicity of the Italians” (“Nota” xx). 8. “I, the nonbeliever, and even less of a believer after the season of Auschwitz, was a person touched by Grace, a save man. And why me?” (Levi, Drowned 82). 9. About Liliana Segre, see also Zuccala. 10. Elisabetta Nelsen investigates Sonnino’s text, stressing how it exudes the concept of elegance in her family, despite all odds. Sonnino retrieves photos of her beautiful family that disappeared in the Holocaust. To their innate elegance, she opposes the blinding alienation of the camp and the constant attempt to forge individuals into Untermenschen (Nelsen 9–18). 11. Despite the fact that Alessandro Manzoni had later rejected his own impor- tant findings with respect to the hybrid literary composition of truth and fiction, the representation of the Milanese colonized and oppressed people in his work reveals still today a structure of power and usurpation of the NOTES 251 rights of the disadvantaged that little draws from chronicle-like precision. About the difficulty of a coexistence of truth and fiction in literature see, for instance, Cavaglion who, like me, favors the insertion of fiction into true (“Parola” 25–37). 12. To have a full idea of production based on this topos, of how the imagination of writers has been in this extremely fertile, it is interesting to look at the online list of works based on the Holocaust in the US Memorial Holocaust Museum. Elie Wiesel’s rather intransigent position (Un juif 190) cannot do much to prevent the desire of knowledge of the fact that, unknown to some authors, moves them nevertheless to try to imagine what s/he does not know. 13. For Millicent Marcus, Auschwitz is more a synonym than a synecdoche in the case of Italians, for they almost all ended up in that camp (5). 14. About the rhetorical significance of Auschwitz, I refer not only to Agamben’s study but also to Elaine Marks’s “Cendres Juives. Jews Writing in French after Auschwitz” and the way Paola Di Cori presents the issue in her work (in Maida, Un’etica 11). 15. “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ [Ranke]. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receiv- ers. [ . ] Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (Benjamin 255). 2 Not Only Memory: Narrating the Camp between Reality and Fiction 1. There are many essays on the turmoil that Ernst Nolte’s article on the Frankfurter Allgemeine provoked in 1986. LaCapra’s article “Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians’ Debate” is perhaps still today one of the most lucid and apposite for our own study. In 1987, Gian Enrico Rusconi edited Germania, un passato che non passa in Italy, which also con- tains an article by Ernst Nolte. 2. In 1971 the volume Un mondo fuori dal mondo was published, and in 1986 the volume edited by Federico Cereja and Brunello Mantelli La deportazione nei campi di sterminio. Storia vissuta: Dal dovere di raccontare alle testimoni- anze orali nell’insegnamento della storia della 2nda Guerra mondiale, in turn follows Bravo and Jalla’s volume. 3. In her preface to Essere donne nei Lager, Bravo specifies the number of texts— five—published by women in Italy between 1945 and 1947 (“Prefazione” 8). Judith Tydor Baumel notes how the many volumes on Resistance in the 1970s 252 NOTES would focus on the word “resistance” and not “women” or “family” thus deleting the issue of gender (39–41). It is interesting to note that, until then, Italian historiography did little to create connections between Resistance and Shoah. Saul Meghnagi notes how, “in the relationship between Resistance and Shoah one needs to underscore how until the end of the fifties, there was no awareness about the extermination of the Jews in concentration camps and instead would prevail the image of dead partisans, publicly exposed as a form of retaliation. Violence then has a different visibility that can partly explain the reason of a failed encounter between Resistance and Shoah” (“Introduzione” xxiii). 4. “In a unique way, Nazis doctrine created a society organized around ‘natu- ral’ biological poles. In addition to serving specific needs of the state, this radical division vindicated a more general and thoroughgoing biological Weltanschauung based on race and sex as the immutable categories of human nature” (Koontz 5–6). 5. See Hedgepeth and Saidel, and Baer and Goldenberg, for new studies on vio- lence against women in the Holocaust. 6. See Adam Jones’s introductory essay to Gender and Genocide for studies on the ethnic cleansing policies accompanying genocides and gendercides in several countries. Jones elaborates a theory on preventive genocide that emphasizes latency and retribution, and touches upon the more than ques- tionable role of medical doctors in the camp experiments (25–28). 7. In the first volume of the encyclopedia that she edited, Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, Kremer draws up a general and limited map of Italians in which Liana Millu and Giuliana Tedeschi are men- tioned (xxv) and a small entry on Millu by Judith Kelly appears (843–45). However, she gives prominence instead to Natalia Ginzburg (Vol. 1, 424–26), who contributed a valuable writing “The Jews” (Opere 2, 641–46). 8. An exception: chapters devoted to Tedeschi, Millu, and Morante in Risa Sodi’s Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing (1944–1994).