Manuela Consonni. Journal of Israeli History. Volume 23, Issue 1. Spring 2004.
The fall of fascism, the military defeat and, above all, the Resistance with all its myths shattered the ideological model that had defined life in Italy for over 20 years—the paradigm of identity that the fascist regime had created—and replaced it with an anti-fascist ideological model that was equally strong. What these events failed to accomplish, however, as Ernesto Galli Della Loggia stresses, was to inflict basic harm on the fortunes of the middle class that had been the mainstay of the fascist dictatorship.
The “Eichmann event,” as I shall call the abduction, trial, conviction and execution of Adolf Eichmann by the Israeli authorities, was received in a particular way in the context of a country such as Italy, which, at the end of the 1950s, still oscillated between heroic, Resistance-style anti-fascism—which was steady, with all its overly celebrative aspects—and a seemingly strong fascist element. The latter continued to obfuscate the memory of the war and the deportation and extermination of Italian Jews by disseminating anti-liberal propaganda that preyed on people’s forgetfulness and widespread ignorance of the facts to dim the historical truth. It is from this perspective that the impact of the Eichmann event in Italy should be evaluated.
This confrontation between two ostensible poles, a “totally anti-fascist” Italy and another Italy, a “totally fascist” one that was somewhat similar to it, began in 1945, immediately after the end of the war. In 1955, Piero Caleffi, a survivor of Mauthausen, explained its political terms very clearly: “In our country, immediately after the liberation, there quickly came together not only an indulgence, which could be to a certain extent noble, but an oblivion of what was and remains criminal.”
During the decade between the end of the war and the year in which Caleffi explained the nature of the confrontation, the Jewish memory of the deportation started to emerge, even though the memory of the deportation and the extermination was represented mainly by political survivors. The Jews did not enunciate a precise request for a specific kind of memory; that would come later. Instead, they made a shy attempt to station the Jewish memory alongside the other memory, that of the political deportation, as a worthy and separate Jewish memory of resistance to Nazism and fascism. To justify this solution, the active participation of Italian Jews in the war of liberation, among other things, was cited:
Today it would be salutary to document the participation of Italian Jews in the war of liberation, lest our silence make us responsible for another mistake, one that we define as opposite to and nearly as dangerous as the other—the mistake of considering the Jews passive participants only, persecuted opponents of the persecutors, the Fascists and the Nazis, but excluded by the others who knew how to resist the Nazi fascism.
As stated, this was not yet an explicit demand for difference. However, it was definitely the affirmation of a presence, a will that wished to become a voice. It is a fact that Primo Levi’s book, Se questo è un uomo (If this is a man), was published by Einaudi at this time amidst a massive advertising campaign. The idea of Jewish resistance had already been suggested during the war by the Italian Jew and literary critic Giacomo Debenedetti, who was more than convinced that the Jewish claim for recognition, i.e. the demand that Jews who had died of violence and starvation should be recognized as war victims, fighting victims, like others who had died in the cause of liberty, was fundamental.
Their ordinary clothes served them as uniforms but were tattered by the torments and hung empty on their bare bodies …. Under these conditions, they marched toward their fronts, the places of their pain and sorrow … falling face-down …. These soldiers ask only that their [casualties] be remembered as [having fought on the] battlefields of this war. They ask that their names be read out among the names of other soldiers who fell in this war … without any extra pity—pity for the poor Jews—that would demean their sacrifice.
So much for the level of principled declarations. At the practical level, the Italian national memory of the deportation and destruction during those years expressed the opposite message: the failure and, ultimately, the collapse of national solidarity. The truth is that the Resistance and its history became, during the 1950s, a silent chapter that the anti-fascist drive had rendered meaningless.
These regressive events in Italian politics, unexpected in a country based on the republic that had been established after the downfall of fascism, had a very strong influence on what was said and how it was received.
In a country where the Fascists, the ones you fought until yesterday and who caused you to suffer the camps and the torture, have returned to the opposition; in a country where the democracy for which you fought is always on the verge of forming an alliance with the enemies of yesterday and considers it a virtue to resist this temptation; in such a country, belief in sincerity is destroyed and the true need for communication is broken. Nobody pleads guilty in front of the enemy.
The memory and its expression in “silent writing”—survivors’ writings that were created but not published in 1947-54—are among the contrasts and contradictions of a political tradition that was not allowed to free itself of the fetters of the past, a political tradition interrupted by hopes for an auspicious postwar renewal that did not take place. Armanda Guiduicci has attributed the history of this writing, or non-writing, to the climate that followed the 1948 elections, brought about by the absence of a political ethos based on democratic conviction and confidence in the future. The utter absence of commemorative writing during those years, she claimed, was the outcome of the method and forms that had been adopted in 1945-47, when the end of the war was followed by a torrent of writing. She construed this spurt as a natural but limited fact—a flood of random writings created in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic experience.
The early producers of memoir literature were neither journalists nor publicists but simple people who had survived the inferno. Publishers thwarted the appearance of this literature on artistic and commercial grounds, precipitating a crisis and squandering an opportunity for change. In the 1950s, however, the memoir literature evolved into a more professional and polished genre that had literary aims as well. It positioned itself in the domain of important literary, aesthetic, and artistic research that responds, more than anything else, to the contemporary and social trend. The second phase of memory had begun. Now memory was no longer an act and a will of political morality but an inert, strained outburst. Once, it could have furthered the construction and formation of a cultural consciousness and could have made a personal contribution. By the mid-1950s, however, this potential no longer existed. Amidst the cacophony of voices with which it seemed to express continued collective participation in the war against Nazi fascism on the basis of the Resistance, it no longer expressed the hopes of the Jewish and non-Jewish survivors. The lengthy silence that separated 1947 from 1954—the year in which L’oblio è colpa, a special issue of the survivors’ journal, Triangolo Rosso, appeared—shows how difficult it was for all sides—Jews, partisans and military internees—to talk. By that time, not only had an opportunity to hear them been squandered, but the words themselves had lost their power and symbolic existence.
These were Italy’s years of reconstruction, the years that truly represent the country’s postwar period. They were marked indelibly by a general tendency to treat the events of the war as a closed chapter and to dismiss the suffering. With this, a chapter was closed as well. A larger cultural phenomenon occurred instead: the emergence of people from the war of liberation, from the world war, and from the concentration camps with the intention of reestablishing democracy.
As stated, the impact that the initial writing could have made was squandered. There are various ways of interpreting this silence in memory, which persisted into the late 1950s amidst domestic social tension. Perhaps survivors always tend to distance themselves from the agony that they experienced, to take a necessary pause for silence, before grasping the strands of memory and reflection again. “One must forget in order to remember,” said Jorge Semprun. Many survivors “cleared their desks” in order to have room for the future, for careers, or for politics. This is an especially valid statement for those who, having written or told their stories, were certain that they had done their duty. Others went to work for survivors’ associations. Still others, who had returned from the camps in worse condition and in deeper loneliness, were driven by the indifference of society to marginality and even greater loneliness.
This loneliness is represented in the greatest postwar drama, Napoli milionaria, written by the Italian playwright and actor Eduardo De Filippo. At the end of the play, the hero, Gennaro Jovine, an unemployed tram driver who has just returned from a concentration camp to his hometown, Naples, utters a sentence that has become legendary: “The night must pass.” This expression, the voice of a difficult hope, of a naïve expectation of someone who suffered, captures the general tendency of the period succinctly. Once the night passes, however, why stir up old matters, reopen the scars and wounds, and shatter the small certainties, individual and collective, that ordinary people have just reestablished? Then, as happens in the eyes of these ordinary people, testimony becomes sheer lamentation, an obstinate will to remember and recall the past in order to obtain by repetition a form of reparation that would otherwise be unobtainable. Many survivors were deterred from continuing to bear witness by the justified rage of some survivors who wished to keep placing society’s attitudes and behaviors on trial, a kind of Pirandellian torture chamber, a pitiless mise en scène of their possibilities of starting to live again, and intolerance and judgmentalism.
Another aspect of the 1950s was the appearance in 1959 of a different publication for a different age and attitude. It came in the aftermath of the first exhibition about the deportation, sponsored by the Aned-Piemont (the National Association of Survivors) in Turin. The exhibition was prepared entirely by survivors, including Primo Levi. It was
an important date … The bitter and painful silence that the survivors were very often obliged to maintain … and the careless silence of historiography were finally broken by the will of the same survivors in a public and collective initiative, and the response, mostly among the young, was ready, massive, and passionate.
Primo Levi remembered an interesting episode in regard to this fact and discussed it in an article that he published in 1984 in Rassegna Mensile di Israel. To explain why the reprinting of Se questo è un uomo was so immensely successful, Levi says that the occasion for republishing the book was provided in 1956 by the exhibition in Turin about the deportation. Levi remembers that “The young … asked me questions. They seemed to know my book by heart. They asked me if I hadn’t anything else to tell. Then I proposed the book to Einaudi, which reprinted it in 1958.” The exhibition actually took place after the book was published; Levi inverted the causes and the effects. As the historian Anna Bravo explains, the besieging of Primo Levi by the young was not the reason for the reprinting of the book but rather its consequence. It was evidence of the success that If This Is a Man encountered among groups of young people who were culturally and politically receptive and aware. The members of this new public did not have a past to defend or conceal. Even the little they might have known about the deportation and the extermination may have been very vague. However, they looked to recent history for ideas and models as they would to a fount from which they might derive the strength to face a present for which they had little affection. This sort of quest was one of the definitive traits of the ideological and civil formation of that generation. Another manifestation was the great interest shown in the lessons of history in the spring of 1960, when the Gallery of Modern Art in Turin hosted classes on “Thirty Years of Italian History (1915-1945).” The classes were so successful that the organizer decided to offer them again the following year and sought a larger place in which to hold them. Furthermore, while none of the classes in the first round was directly dedicated to the deportation and the extermination, in 1961 Piero Caleffi, the aforementioned survivor of Mauthausen, retold the camp experience of the Italian deportees for the first time since the end of the war. The new classes were held at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, which had a seating capacity of more than 3,000. Their success gave decisive evidence of the younger generation’s new interest in the baggage of the past—the war, Nazism and fascism.
This was the complex cultural and political soil into which Eichmann’s arrest in Argentina and trial in Jerusalem were planted. This signal event should therefore be understood and interpreted in the context explained above.
The capture and prosecution of Adolf Eichmann immediately reverberated powerfully in Italian public opinion. It turned into one of the most important events in postwar Italy and a unique impetus for mobilization against the Right. Due to the Eichmann event, Italians were now able to consult newspapers, several books, and debates in prestigious journals in order to apprise themselves of the vicissitudes of the Italian and European Jewish communities during the war. Although people of any age could have done this, it was mainly the young who did so. Their elders, generally speaking, had been too involved in the fascist past to behave similarly.
After his arrest and even before the trial began, Eichmann appeared on the front pages of all Italian newspapers, especially those affiliated with the Left. The communist daily paper, L’Unità, launched its anti-Adenauer and anti-Eichmann campaign in March 1961, and the journalist Ruben Tedeschi became its correspondent in all phases of the trial in Jerusalem. L’Unità reported extensively on the man who had been in charge of Jewish affairs in the Third Reich, running a picture of the man in his prison cell in Haifa, articles against Bonn mingled with one against Nazi Germany, and so forth. The distinction among the prewar, war and postwar periods became blurred. The daily newspaper Il Messaggero of Rome wrote about the complex method used to arrest Eichmann and explained how “Israeli agents” had delivered him to Israel clandestinely. The correspondent Matteo De Monte was sent afterwards to Jerusalem to cover the trial. Three journalists with the Corriere della sera—Vero Roberti in Jerusalem and Dino Frescobaldi and Massimo Caputo in Bonn—wrote several editorials and articles about “Adenauer’s Germany,” the German psychosis of collective guilt, and Eichmann. They interviewed members of Eichmann’s family, including Robert Eichmann, the brother of “the exterminator of the Jews,” as the headline in the paper termed him. Sergio Segre, a columnist for L’Unità, segued from the antagonistic coverage of Eichmann to an assault on the most prominent officials in Adenauer’s government: Hans Globke, the Chancellor’s undersecretary; Adolf Heusinger, chairman of forces at NATO; and Friedrich Foertsch, inspector general of the Bundeswehr, stating: “The real problem is not the problems of names… but rather the problem of why, fifteen years after, between the Rhine and the Elbe, the old, traditionalist, arrogant, conformist, deaf, irritating, and ambitious Germany still exists.” In fact, the press at large—not only its communist and socialist organs—mobilized to demonstrate a purported Hitler-Bonn nexus. Interestingly, nearly all of the most engagé journalists were Jews.
As noted, several books about the event were published. Two of them came out in March 1961, even before the trial started. The words on the cover of Dossier Eichmann proclaimed: “Six million victims—on the eve of the trial against the person directly responsible for the Jews’ extermination, chilling documentation of his criminal activity.” The cover of Moshe Pearlman’s book, It’s Him, Eichmann, showed a Muselmann—a camp prisoner who is as good as dead due to physical and psychological collapse—walking and pointing towards Eichmann, silently mouthing the words “It’s him!” in a kind of J’accuse.
The trial undoubtedly had the valuable and important effect of lifting the veil of silence and oblivion that had been drawn over the concentration-camp phenomenon for 16 years. However, if the public followed the phases of the trial painstakingly, day after day, on the front pages of the most widely circulated and important Italian newspapers; if books about the concentration-camp universe appeared concurrently, albeit at different levels of quality and engagement; if a public that steadily grew in size and involvement became informed of the Germans’ extermination policy—none of this means that the public suddenly realized that its historical knowledge was lacking, that it wished to correct the deficiencies, or that it simply decided to demand its “share” in the truth that others had already acquired.
To believe such a thing is to commit the sin of naïveté … but also to admit that the Eichmann trial was an excellent impetus for the publication of works that, in another time not long ago, had been bought by no one or had been even considered unsellable. Let us also admit that the current efflorescence of writing about the concentration camps is truly advantageous, irrespective of the factors that brought it about.
In conclusion, the Eichmann event raised discomfiting questions and reopened old wounds that had never really healed. It could have served as a positive challenge to the prettified rhetorical image of fascism as having had absolutely nothing to do with the deportation and the extermination of the Jews, an affair that was individuated and defined as German-only. Italian Jews such as Hulda Cassuto Campagnano testified against Eichmann. The trial could also have demolished the mythical extraneity of fascism that had been proposed immediately after the war and that most of the Italian population still considered valid during the years at issue. The old Resistance-style formula of anti-fascism, which had become “synonymous with prejudice, ignorance, and obscurantism,” was replaced by a kind of sterile and celebrative anti-fascism. According to this dilutional way of thinking, the Resistance—and, with it, the extermination and the deportation—lost its role and risked becoming a mere “genre,” susceptible to the tyranny of standardization.
Both the Jewish world and the non-Jewish world in Italy agreed that the trial was a historical necessity. As Primo Levi said very pointedly on the occasion of a survivors’ reunion:
It seems to me that even in a world that miraculously has been restabilized on the basis of justice, even in a world that, hypothetically, faces no more threats to its peace, [in which] any violence would disappear, any offense would be rectified, any evildoer would be punished and made to pay his price, even in this world, a world so unlike our own, it would be a mistake and an act of foolishness to maintain silence about the past…. Everybody knows that “History” is not always full of justice and that “Providence” does not always act. However, everyone loves Justice. So why should we hide this great example of historical justice from our children?
The non-Jewish world, however, considered Eichmann as part of Nuremberg, another cog in the process of bringing the Third Reich to justice. The Italian Left, using the Cold War rhetoric that still characterizes Italian political discourse, picked a fight with Eichmann as Adenauer, setting the event in the old-fashioned context of the liberation war of 1945-47—in the context of anti-fascism as against the fascism of the present and the past.
The Eichmann event in Italy reverberated mainly on and in the world of Italian Jewry. In the early postwar years, the Jews wished to accept the proposals of the Resistance model in part, acquiescing in this representation of the Jews in the context of European history and their participation in the war of liberation. Sixteen years later came confirmation that the Jews, too, could claim their Resistance and that the racial deportation could be considered a kind of political deportation, as Primo Levi put it. At long last, the Jews’ survival of the concentration camps could be deemed the equivalent of active resistance to Nazism. What happened now, it seems, was what Slavoj Zizek wrote about image and gaze, about the relationship between imaginary and symbolic identification or—to use a distinction made by Jacques-Alain Miller—between “constituted and constitutive” identification. The Italian Jews constituted themselves by identifying with the image of the heroes whom they would like to have been, that is, members of the Resistance, instead of passive victims of persecution. Thus, they shaped their own version of the Resistance ethos. Symbolically, however, they concurrently created an identification with the place from which—albeit vicariously—they could be perceived, and perceive themselves, as heroes and Resistance fighters. That place was the arrest, the trial and the execution of Adolf Eichmann—in Jerusalem, not in Nuremberg.
From then on, Eichmann opened Israel’s doors to the diaspora. Eichmann’s captors joined the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto as paragons of Jewish courage. By virtue of his arrest, the Jews could claim a full place in the ethos of the Italian and the European Resistance, without ambiguity and without shame.