La transición amnesica italiana

At the end of World War II, Germany and Japan were put on trial in Nuremberg and Tokyo respectively. Italy, by contrast, had multiple identities and underwent a complex and heterogeneous transitional process. The criminal prosecution of war crimes was based on a double path, depending on the nationality of the perpetrators: Italian or German. For Italian perpetrators, the outcome was a complex amnesty, which resulted from de iure and de facto elements. In this perspective, the comparison with Spain is useful. The Italian amnesty does not involve an explicit choice for oblivion. Unlike Spain, it is an unelected government (and not the first democratic parliament) the subject that takes responsibility for clemency. The outcome of the transition is a mnemonic paradigm determined by needs of pacification, needs of the political actors to legitimize themselves, needs related to the Cold War. The ‘nation-victim moral alibi’ covered collaboration with the Nazis, but also a twenty-year-old dictatorship and two years of civil war. After the end of the Cold War, before old myths were replaced by new ones, the mnemonic interregnum did not lead to a reconsideration of national responsibilities, but to a wider self-absolution (also through the new centrality of Holocaust).