A WAR OF MEMORIES

This article discusses Renzo De Felice’s Intervista sul Fascismo, published in 1975, as representative of a particular memory in the Italy of that time and considers its influence and impact on the subsequent historiographical and political discourse in Italy about fascism, the War of Liberation, and the Shoah. The starting point is the existence of many competing memories that battle with one another for supremacy. The very diversity of these memories – silent, always contemporary but different – sends one back to the agent par excellence of memory formation: politics. Because the memories of fascism, the war, the Resistance, and the Shoah represent essentially political structures, they are fated to vary in response to the definitions of the diverse identity groups that are dominant in a society in the struggle for the emergence of one memory at the expense of the others.