Perché?

Why? Thinking about some facts of her own life, the Author asks herself if it can help us better understand the causes of the oblivion that for many years affected oppressed victims and oppressors. Can this personal affair be meaningful with regard to the omission - someone talks about removal - Italians did of the violence inflicted on Jews? Early 1900s Italian society, so fragile in its recent identity, could have seen in Mussolini an idealized Self-Object, able to make people forget about divide, foreign oppressions, poverty. But the war, its tragic end, but above all the civil war, inflicted the traumatising injury. Suddenly the catastrophic event rained down upon a country without any adequate means of decoding what happened. A traumatic event culminating in the killing of the idealized father. The ugliness of war and, above all, of its end as civil war produced anguish of loosing the national identity. Every fact which might point out Italians’ co-responsibility in committing violence, as participation to the genocide of the Jews, avoided the blame of the others, the evil Germans. The silence, the surrender of the search for a "why" (Amati remembers that in Auschwitz "Hier ist kein Warum", Here there is no why) was the way the Italian society tried to maintain a minimum of narcissistic balance. However the research of that Warum non-existent in death camps is precisely what can return dignity, in the painful knowledge of the human fragility, to individuals and society.

Keywords: Identity, dis-identity, trauma, social catastrophe, thought arrest, denial pact.

Annamaria Burlini, Perché? in "EDUCAZIONE SENTIMENTALE" 27/2017, pp 112-117, DOI: 10.3280/EDS2017-027008