Introduction

The introduction explains how, in the volume, authors have placed a particular emphasis on some case studies which were considered particularly useful to bring to light uneasy questions, such as the one of contested memories; in particular, the case of Italy and of Germany have offered an emblematic ground to further investigate the controversial and often painful idea of ‘reconciliation’. Moving often from the study of cultural memories of the two World Wars in these national realities, the authors have become more and more convinced that to acknowledge the existence of these contested memories is the first step to take to encourage the negotiation of a truly shared ethic of memory. Therefore, the introduction addresses uneasy and troubled questions: do winners and losers, victims and executioners, share the same right to remember? Are all executioners the same? Or can you distinguish among them? And is it ethical or moral to distinguish among them? And can you apply the same arguments to the winners? Are they all good? Needles to say, to ask these questions does not mean to revise history, it does not mean to be ‘revisionists’ or, even worst, to deny and to refuse to acknowledge what happened: condemnation of nazism cannot but be unquestionable, the exterminations camps stay as a historical fact and a shame, and you cannot absolve the dictators of the 1920s, 1930s and later years in Italy, in Germany, Spain, Portugal or the former USSR. Similarly, the partisan wars must be remembered as founding experiences deeply pervaded by national and transnational values of freedom and independence. All these memories must stay as lasting and untouchable values. And yet, this does not exempt us from the responsibility to remember also the shadows, to retrieve what, in time, has been removed, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes strategically; we have to face the uneasy debate on the dangers pervading the preservation of an idea of memory suffocated by all rituals and detached from historical sense, that is the dangers embedded in a strictly codified, even sanctified memory.