Unexploded Ordnance: Recurrent Amnesias

The coherent paradox of Italian historical memory is that such a crucial episode as Italy’s Fascist past is both ubiquitous and only partially retold. In few sites of memory can the symbiotic existence of memory and forgetfulness be more clearly evident. In the 2009 volume he co-edited with Efrat Ben-Ze’ev and Ruth Ginio, Jay Winter borrows Marc Augé’s metaphor of a coastline to explain silence as the shallow waters that mediate between the cliffs of remembrance and the inscrutable depths of forgetfulness.1 In this turquoise frontier, the seabed is tantalisingly close and yet both its depth and its exact topography remain unsure, while the surf inexorably erodes what we know, dredges up forgotten truths and ferries back into forgetfulness what was once remembered. Augé’s metaphor is not only an elegant and fortunate image, eminently suitable to the ever-shifting complexities of memory, but it is also applicable to a range of different memories, from the friable limestone cliffs of shaky collective identities to the man-made concrete breakwaters of totalitarian versions of the past. The concept of silence dissects the relationship between remembering and forgetting, with which scholars from many disciplines have long grappled, and serves well the need to distinguish between what is genuinely forgotten and what is deliberately left unsaid.2