Lecture by Susanne Knittel: ‘Black Holes and Revelations: Trieste’s Divided Memory’ 

Abstract
This presentation will look at conflicts over public forms of commemorating the victims of World War II in North-Eastern Italy. Tracing the mechanisms by which certain memories predominate while others become invisible, Knittel examines the ‘invisible’ history of the Fascist persecution of Slovenes, Croats, and Jews in the region of Trieste, which can be seen to embody on a regional level also the tensions and contradictions that characterise national Italian memory culture. Fascist racial politics, enforced Italianisation, and collaboration with the Nazi occupiers are the subject of fierce debates among historians, which ultimately revolve around the question of Italian guilt and victimhood.

There are two competing narratives at work in the region emphasising either the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers, or those committed by the Yugoslav partisans, while exculpating the Italians. Knittel will illustrate these exculpatory narratives and the competition between them via two memorials, the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, a Nazi-Fascist extermination camp, whose victims were thousands of Yugoslav partisans, Jews, and Italian anti-fascists, and the Foiba di Basovizza, which commemorates the victims of the acts of violence carried out by Yugoslav partisans at the end of the war.

Through an analysis of these memorials and their broader cultural resonance she discusses how competing memories become instrumentalised in political and public discourse and how border anxiety and anti-Slavism continue to inform discussions about Italian identity and national character to this day.

Susanne Knittel is assistant professor of Comparative Literature in Utrecht. She completed her PhD in May 2011 at Columbia University and has published on memorials and post-war memory culture in Germany and Italy, particularly the cultural memory of Nazi-Euthanasia in Germany and questions of ethnicity and the politics of victimhood in North-Eastern Italy. Her talk draws on her book, currently in preparation, entitled Uncanny Homelands: Disability, Race, and the Politics of Memory.

• www.uu.nl/focusareas/cultures-identities