LONG-TERM MEMORY OF EXTREME EVENTS: FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHY TO HISTORY

Francesca Cappelletto University of Verona

The article analyses narratives of massacres by German troops in two villages in Tuscany during the Second World War. It explores the mechanisms of construction of group memory, considering the recollections from the perspective of both their social patterning and their emotional quality. Working from Blochs assertion that there is no difference between the representations of autobiographical memory and those of historical accounts, I argue that visual imagery associated with past traumatic experience is a fundamental part of oral narratives, and facilitates the passage from personal to public memories. Treating the memory as a form of intersubjective knowledge endowed with symbolic content, rather than as a unanimous, collective endeavour, I argue for an approach that integrates different disciplinary theories.

This article focuses on the social formation of memory in Tuscan communities that were scenes of extreme violence inicted by the Nazis in the Second World War. It explores the link between the cognitive and affective dimensions of testimony through an analysis of oral narratives as complex means of elaborating the memories of past experiences. I am concerned with the mechanisms of memory-construction, considering recollections from the perspective of both their social patterning and their emotional quality. Numerous scholars have explored the ways in which social factors may combine to affect the patterning of memory; there has also been much debate about the extent to which individual memory may assist in codifying the materials of remembrance. For Halbwachs (1968) and others, memory is socially constructed (see also Candau 1996; Dakhlia 1990; Jedlowski & Rampazi 1991; Namer 1987; Tonkin 1992). Halbwachs characterizes memory as a lter of past events that tends to preserve only those images that support the groups present sense of identity. Collective memory is a form of consciousness of the past that reinterprets it in the light of present interests. The attempt to construct a theory of collective memory, to concretize it, and to endow it with an existence of its own, is closely linked to the Durkheimian idea of society as an organism, and of social ideas as the shared conscience collective of a given social unit. The merit of this formulation is that it successfully expresses what one might dene as the remembering behaviour of a society. This is something that at times appears uniform and at other times diverse and inconsistent, giving the impression that different generations, social classes, and sexes all have different attitudes to memory. The theory of
Royal Anthropological Institute 2003. J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 9, 241-260

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collective memory expresses the notion that a society really can have a memory.What Halbwachs did not notice, absorbed as he was in the rhetoric of community (Candau 1996), was how individual memories can come together to form a group memory through the medium of actual social interaction as, for example, in the telling of stories, the exchange of recollections between individuals. After Halbwachs, social memory was understood as the sphere of relations between cognitive practices and social practices (Tonkin 1992). The contribution of oral historians, beginning with Thompson (1978), was to recognize the highly mediated nature of memory (Radstone 2000: 11), to be considered in relation either to lived, historical experiences or to the active production of meaning and interpretation capable of inuencing the present (Passerini 1988: 195). In this view, narration and memory are themselves events, rather than merely descriptions of events (Portelli 1999). The collaboration between anthropology and psychology sets the context for Maurice Blochs account of the relation between autobiographical memory and historical memory (Bloch 1995). Bloch argues that such a collaboration should not rest solely on psychologists attempts to use anthropological material, since psychologists so often fail to recognize the cultural specicity of the concept of the individual in history; he therefore argues for the use by anthropologists of rather technical works of psychology, since the complexity of the presence of the remembered past in the present is clearly one of their central themes. Bloch thus calls on psychologists to learn from anthropologists how to discuss memory over long periods of time which involves them in the move from private representations to public representations, and on anthropologists to learn how the mental presence of the past affects what people do (Bloch 1995: 60). There is no difference between representations of autobiographical memory, which are largely the province of cognitive psychology, and those of historical accounts. Using as a case study a series of rebellions against the French in Madagascar in 1947, he argues that an account received from others is then re-represented, imagined, and retold as if its events had been witnessed by the speaker. He distinguishes between evocation and remembrance: narratives with highly emotional content show a point of juncture between oral traditional memory and autobiographical memory, so that the schematism, which is characteristic of the oral tradition, is overcome by the vividness and potentially limitless content of memories of personal experience. Psychological studies dating back over the last forty years have concluded that humans possess separate though interconnecting mnemonic systems (Fentress & Wickham 1992). One set of distinctions identied in these works is that between episodic memory and semantic memory; these differ both in quality and in the mental or cognitive tasks they undertake. Episodic memory is descriptive of the event, connected to the concept of the self, procedural, and chronologically organized; it deals with episodes recollected from an individuals past life and non-rationally organized experience. Semantic memory, in contrast, is the description of what we know of these events. It is abstract knowledge of the world; it derives from episodic memory and uses it in a process of generalization; it is the rationally organized memory. Running in parallel to this dichotomy is the distinction between implicit and

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explicit emotional memory. The former consists of feelings, rather than words, the latter of conscious, intentional recollections of some previous episodes (Tobias, Kihlstrom & Schacter 1992). Among anthropologists, Whitehouse has used these categories to explore the role of terror in rites of initiation and its endurance in memory: employing the concept of ashbulb memory, he sees these rites as part of a nexus of psychological and sociological processes (1996: 713). My interest here is in social actors modes of perception of events of an historical past. In the communities in which the massacres took place, people have continued to remember. These are veritable mnemonic communities made up of survivors who are still engaged in a struggle against forgetting. An aspect of these representations is the fusion of autobiographical and historical memory, so that the story with all its descriptive minutiae can be recounted by those who were not witnesses as if its events had been experienced by them in person. In order to understand this mechanism of memory, I analyse the crucial dimension of the narratives: the elaboration and reelaboration of imagery of people, places, and visually based crystallizations of traumatic episodes. Social scientists have not yet addressed the question of how visual perceptions are communicated within a social group and transmitted over the long term, since very little is known about the mechanisms by which a group memorizes and stores extraordinary images. The relationship between visualization and verbalization is clearly complex. In the domain of cognitive psychology, it is still not clear how the process of encoding works: how what has been is built in the gurative dimension is rebuilt as a verbal description of it (Brandimonte 1997). The exploration of imagery has thus far been neglected in anthropological studies of narrative memory. What I seek to understand is how these images as memory are shared when actors speak of past time. My concern is thus with the deep mechanisms and long-term dynamics of memory transmission in a social group. My central focus is therefore the mechanisms of transmission of emotionally charged events particularly with the ways in which a group memorizes and stores extraordinary images. Working on the relationships between verbalization and visualization in narratives, this article attempts to show that visual imagery, which is a fundamental part of the oral narratives, facilitates the passage from individual representations to historical ones.

Background
In the nal years of the Second World War, many mass murders were committed by German troops in Italy, mainly along the so-called Gothic Line which the Germans had established as a defensive barrier against advancing Allied forces. Such massacres frequently involved the killing of unarmed civilians; these were generally acts of reprisal against Italian partisans, most notably in areas where there were detachments of German SS storm troops.1 My focus in this article is two mass killings which took place in the Tuscan villages of Civitella (Arezzo province) and SantAnna di Stazzema (Lucca

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province) in the summer of 1944.2 In Civitella, where 150 villagers were murdered, SS troops stormed the village on 29 June, smashed their way into the church where an early morning service was taking place, and herded the congregation into the main square.Those still at home were forced into the streets and their houses set alight. Following a common wartime practice which calls to mind recent ethnographic accounts of ritualized or routinized violence (Kleinman, Das & Lock 1997; Tambiah 1996), the storm troopers divided the men from the women and children, then marched the men off to the wall of the nearby school and shot them all. The survivors of Civitella were almost exclusively women. At SantAnna di Stazzema on 12 August 1944 SS formations surrounded the village. When the alarm was given by some of the villagers, many of the men hid in the woods, afraid that they would be taken off to forced labour camps. Only these men and a few others survived the slaughter, in which 110 children were put to death.The SS combed the village methodically, going from house to house, throwing people out into the street or shutting them in their houses, which they then set alight. A person later recounted that in one house, the body of a pregnant woman was found: her belly had been cut open and the foetus was lying on the ground, still attached to the umbilical cord. One witness was among the perpetrators of the massacre, a grenadier3 interviewed fty-six years after the event by a German reporter (Raiuno 2000). He recalled that
It was like hunting: they were dragged out of hiding, pushed along, and gathered in the piazza in front of the church the people in the piazza didnt say a word, didnt scream or beg for their lives; they didnt say a word Knowing they were about to die, some of them took out photographs in the hope that they could be identied later. The SS scattered hay, straw, and petrol on the bodies and set re to them.

Survivors of these tragic events are few, because the order was to shoot and kill everyone. Those who survived these two episodes of extreme violence have continued to talk about it for fty years, as if in a hopeless attempt to come to terms with to digest the memory of those atrocities: Those of us who are still here talk about it all the time it is always on our minds In these communities, the massacres are still recalled with a deep sense of grief and they are perceived as an apocalypse, as the end of an entire world. For them, recounting the memory of the massacre is like touching a wound that never heals, because their inner life has continually revolved around this suffering. These massacres were part of the last phase of the Nazis war in Italy in which all the civilian populations became potential hostages in the hands of the occupying army (Pavone 1991: 488) and more than nine thousand unarmed civilians were slaughtered by German troops (Schreiber 2000).4 Rejection of outrages of this kind became a cultural turning-point for post-war Italian democracy, in so far as it represented one of the basic principles of the new Constitution promulgated in 1947. As in the case of other atrocities in wartime Italy, very few of those responsible for the massacres even when they have been identied have ever been prosecuted, because the trials have been shelved for half a century or so.5 Nevertheless, the survivors have been asked over the years to remember

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and transmit the memory of those events, not only for themselves but also for others for example, by journalists and historians.6 I was one of the persons who wanted to know their story. I conducted eldwork over a number of years, beginning in 1994, the ftieth anniversary of the massacres, when there were many ofcial commemorations. The anniversary attracted a great deal of attention in Italy. Over a period of several months, I interviewed 68 people, some of them repeatedly: I worked with survivors still residing in the villages, and also with villagers who had emigrated to other parts of Italy. I also interviewed the children and other relatives of victims who had heard the story told in the years that followed. I often found it very difcult to ask those I worked with to talk and suffer literally in front of me, and to suffer in my turn before them. In some cases, the survivors reassured me before the interview, trying to relieve me of the worries they intuited by explaining that for all these years [they] had been training to remember: it was not the rst time that they had faced the point at which memory transforms itself into language (Young 1988: 161). Certainly they, too, like Primo Levi, had built themselves a memory-prosthesis (Woolf 1999: 45) which allowed them to narrate and to be heard with an attenuated pain, starting from a script that was not written but was present in their minds. But the deepest consciousness that united us in what has been referred to as the testimonial pact (Wieviorka 1998) was that we listeners and survivors were working together in the attempt not so much to know the facts as to grasp the signicance that had been, and still is, attributed to the facts by their memory: as a woman of the village said to me, What was experienced is the living memory whether in the piazza or in the houses the rest how many Germans were there, where they came from, how they shot them [is not signicant].

A mnemonic community
The survivors and their children form a mnemonic community which is no longer dened by spatial boundaries (in that many of its members have emigrated), but rather by the duration of the story through time. Since the war, the survivors have continued to tell what they think of as their story, a narrative in which individual and group memories intertwine and meld together. The story of the massacres testies to the persistence in the present of a distant past that has not yet been digested or distanced from everyday consciousness. The recollections appear as absolute memories of words and actions that dominate all others. A woman who was an eyewitness showed us around her house; the walls were covered with photographs of the many relatives who had been killed. She said that the photographs had made her daughter (who was born after the killings) grow up an old woman: it was as if they had trapped her in the time of the massacre, a time that never passes, an intransitive memory. As for other survivors, the violence did not just erupt and then disappear, it is not contained in time, but experienced as continuous violence (Kanapathipillai 1992: 343).

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Occasions for narrating the massacre include spontaneous repetitions of the story to outsiders and organized story-telling sessions, when members of the community gather together. This kind of communal narrative session is commonplace in rural Italy. In these victim-villages, the sessions take place mainly on the anniversary of the massacre, on All Souls Day, and during funerals of survivors. The narrative sessions are both a socializing process and a memory practice, a sort of group mnemonic technique that involves elements of traditional repetition. For example, the story is used as the framework for the recollection of genealogies, since our dead (the victims of the massacre) occupy a central place in the family history. The massacre represents a xed point of orientation in the narratives of the group as they consider past time: The world we have lost (such a friendly atmosphere!) are recurring phrases which refer to the life of ordinary people before the massacre, after which everything fell apart. My accounts of the various recollections are drawn both from narrative sessions that I organized and from retellings at ofcial commemorations and other locally initiated events. All of these occasions shared certain key features. In particular they all reveal a tension between two opposing desires: the desire to close that chapter of remembrances (to relieve themselves of that weight) and the knowledge that they cannot and, indeed, do not really want to do this. As an ethnographer, I often had the sensation that I was functioning as a mirror, suspended between these two dimensions of desire and rejection. Speaking of his mother, a man told me: She says she doesnt want to see anyone, not even you and then she wants nothing more than for someone to come and talk to her. Today people in the victim-villages are united in a relentless struggle against forgetting which consists in the commemorative retelling of their story in a manner which has strongly ritualistic and even sacred overtones. The story contains a number of fundamental ambivalences, however. One of these areas of ambiguity lies in the complex relation between the description and the interpretation of events. In the communal shaping of memory, the purely descriptive aspects of the story have become standardized and consistent; but as far as the interpretative dimension is concerned, there are signicant discrepancies. Many of these divergences arise in the attempt to assign blame for the events. In Civitella, where the massacre was preceded by an act of armed resistance in which German SS soldiers were killed, a degree of blame is ascribed to the partisans, who are widely said to have exposed the local population to German retaliation without attempting to protect them. In Stazzema this accusation is more muted, though it does appear in the local narratives. In contrast to Civitellas narratives, however, the Stazzema story ascribes blame to local Fascists who are said to have guided the Germans on their deadly rounds. This of course gives rise to considerable tension in the lives of villagers today. Differences in social, occupational, and residential identities of the groups concerned in the event proved to be relevant in the patterning of memory. The evidence of how different traditions, political afliations, and intra-group conicts interfere with the process of the constitution of memory raised the issue of variations in thinking about history (Cappelletto 1998). This more explicitly socio-structural approach is not directly relevant to the argument

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here, which is about the relationship between verbalization and visualization in memory. Sufce it to say that, although the episodic memory has arrived at a common version, the semantic memory remains fragmented; it is an open story, in which variant versions of the same event are given. Another area of ambivalence arises from the ambiguities of the insideroutsider dynamic. Within the community, the story of the massacres is conceptualized as our story, and thus as something of value to be protected from intrusions and potential exploitation by outsiders. People are afraid of being dispossessed of their own story. This fear grows out of the feeling that the memory of the massacre is their own property, intimate and communicable only within the group of survivors, since they share the knowledge of unique events. At the same time, however, the villagers have an unfullled desire for justice and public recognition. They are always appreciative when national politicians and ofcials attend their commemorative events. They want their narrated memory of the massacre to be a public memory, capable of entering into history.Yet they also dislike the intrusion of anonymous forces from the political world and the larger society into what they call our story.

Segments of remembered experience

The local narratives can be considered as a common, historical text, this being the result of various episodic memories that are self-focused. There is a mixture of individual and group memory. This means that other peoples memories are remembered as if they were personal experiences. At the same time, ones own memories are, in effect, rendered external to the self: they are narrated as if they had been someone elses experiences. A frequent example of the former is the presence, here and there in the narratives, of direct speech, quoted by the narrator even when he or she was not a witness to the event, as in the case of one man who was a prisoner in Corsica at the time and recollects a story that he says he heard told a thousand times by his cousins. In his retelling of the story, he uses direct speech, so that we have three agents of narration:
As Pietro told me, his dad the husband of my aunt ran away [and he said]: I took an empty bread-basket, the bread they had made the day before was all gone, and then I took the turnip and Bruno, the littlest, he was nine years old, Oh, baby, come! He was on his mothers lap, and he didnt want to go. He didnt want to go, otherwise he would have been saved.

There are episodes that people are always telling you, as informants say, so that they seem to have lost their individual quality, and have been adopted by others, as if they had been experienced and are now being experienced again by each narrator. Descriptive minutiae are retold, as in the following scene of the good German recounted to me by an eyewitness, but also by many other narrators who were not present at the event. Hearing two sisters calling for their mother, and perhaps thinking that the mother had been killed, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and he dried their tears. The story heard told by others is re-elaborated as ones own memory.When I asked directly about this aspect of memorization, I was told: We tell what we

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remember of what others have told us; This is my own personal experience, but when I am talking to the others it is a communal experience; Now I confuse my own experiences with those I have heard told. In many cases, remembrance coincides with what the teller has heard. The following testimonies are narrated by people who were 1 year, 9 months, and 20 years old, respectively, the last being a woman who was away from the village at the time of the massacre. Though not eyewitnesses, their narration is similar:
Then at a certain point about thirty of them [Germans] arrived.They put it [the machine gun] in position, and they stood them all against the wall; there were twenty-ve of us, women and children, then we waited for someone to give the order [note the shift from the impersonal form to the personal, in so far as the infant girl was in the group]. At a certain point they got all the people and brought them here to the little piazza that is still there, and they put them all up against the wall. People carrying children, some one year old, some three years old they put them all there and the machine gun was ready in front of them they waited for the order to re this machine gun. They had crowded them together there. Now I cant remember the number, about twenty or thirty. They put them in the little piazza, they put them all there, these people, and they had already put the machine gun in position

This particular shift in perspective (ones own personal memory being narrated as if it had happened to someone else) recurs especially in interviews where the witness has written his or her memories down, and in doing so has made an effort to be objective and arrange them in a tidy sequence of points.

Group recall as an interaction

Group memories do not derive exclusively either from individuals contributions or from those of the community at large; they are instead a product of interactions between the two. Current memories of the massacre reveal certain mechanisms for the switch from individual to social memory. Stazzema was divided into a number of hamlets, and each narrator witnessed events in only one of these, so the individual versions of the event were necessarily partial and monofocal. It transpired in all the interviews that each narrator gives more weight to what he or she lived through and witnessed at rst hand but that he or she also includes summaries of the experiences of others which are usually based on rst-hand accounts. The narrated event is thus formed of episodic fragments, one or more of which may be strictly autobiographical. For example, one man, who was 11 years old at that time, wove various elements into his basic narrative scheme of what he himself had seen both in the piazza, and then in the evening after the massacre. He incorporated more detailed stories of what had happened in his own neighbourhood, which he had only heard told by others. He also included what had happened in another neighbourhood where his sisters had been killed. No survivor had witnessed these killings, but the bodies were found afterwards. Most of the narratives are put together in this way. The sense of witnessing and re-witnessing is central in these micro-narratives, the content of which is highly visual.

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Typically, the narrator introduces the narrative brick of anothers experience with the phrase, [Another] can tell you about this experience, but then he (or she) tells you himself: This is how you know things then, bit by bit, they come together someone tells one episode and someone else tells another and when the bits are put together you know what happened. The references to names of people who are bearers of memory function as a support to the story, thus forming a network of relations. Those who are left refer to one another continuously: Everyone has told me this. A woman from Bambini [a neighbourhood of SantAnna] said Get out and hide! My mother always told me, everyone was hanged from the poles. From what they told me, this Pietro and his son Amos and this Salvatore Enrico can answer that; he was left in the pile of dead people and, at Vaccareccia, Milena can answer because she was there. A web of narrative connections is formed, so that the missing pieces of ones story can be reconstructed and thus a historical memory the actual act of remembrance is constructed through the piecing together of these fragments or monofocal experiences. One person I interviewed was a child of 6 at the time of the massacre. He now works at the museum, created by local initiative, which has become a shrine to that memory. He said: My memory often I cant distinguish the personal memory from the memory gained over time, because often the stories are stories of experiences, even other peoples experiences, that have become a personal inheritance, a collective inheritance. In this testimony two categories appear to be merging: autobiographical, inner memory and the communal memory voiced in narratives shared by a group. The general visualizations of the event, which include summaries from everyone, tend to merge into the more emotional and detailed versions, that is to say the individual or autobiographical visions of what happened. Today, the description of events (not the search for explanation) occupies the central part of the story. The narration sticks to the story, that is, to its more objective or micro-descriptive aspects. People from these communities emphasize the importance of keeping to the facts because, they say, there lies the reality, the truth that must be rendered in the story. It must be reected in the story so that the narrative never departs from the facts. And the narratives we have heard are all committed to the reconstruction of a truth. The narratives show a tendency towards a detailed repetition of the story in its entirety. There is a basic scheme or narrative type that recurs in nearly all the accounts. It includes a description of how life was before the massacre (the paradise lost), what had happened just before it (lantefatto or prelude: for example, the partisans operations), the massacre itself (They have killed everyone!), and its epilogue (The night afterwards was a night full of cries and desperation). Of course, testimony tends to be consistent: what could change in the account of facts that have remained unchanged? The procedural, factual, or episodic elements prevail over the interpretative. The literalness of the narratives collected in all two villages must be due to the fact that we are dealing with old, long-term memories.The story has been recounted among survivors and requested many times, and this has led to the formation of an historical reconstruction in which the autobiographical density is attenuated.

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Past events are conveyed in a strongly visualized way through imagistic contents running through the recollections of the components of the group over the years. The trauma has become viscerally internalized by the whole community, so that, as I will maintain, it seems possible to talk of a ashbulb effect in group memory.

Ineradicable remembrances of a tense past

To understand the crystallization, in other words, the recurrent, xed patterning of the stories, one needs to focus on the fact that they refer to traumatic experiences. These coagulate into visual pictures which put the person in the emotional state in which they can relive the narrated event. In the words of one woman from SantAnna, it is as if the story stays with the listener and makes them suffer. This occurs particularly because the visual imagery has a strong visceral content. I see everything, it is all in my blood, said another woman who was a child in 1944. The insistent return of events, for example in traumatic dreams, is characterized by literalness and a non-symbolic quality (Caruth 1995; Christianson 1992). Events are intrusive, which means that their memory appears insistently and invades everyday life. As Caruth (1995) has shown in the case of Holocaust memories, the survivors of these massacres live with memories that cast a shadow over their lives today. Repetition partly blocks consciousness, giving rise to an alienation of the self in the recollection. This helps to explain why the episodic representation of the event is so central and the semantic dimension so attenuated. It seems sometimes that the narrator cannot entirely possess the reality or meaning to which the traumatic event gives access. The inability to reach complete understanding explains how it is possible for there to be striking common features in the accounts of survivors and in those of people who learned the story from others in the years after the massacre. Sometimes the survivors literally leave the telling to those who, in their opinion, can remember more clearly precisely because they are not burdened with the survivors traumatic memory. One man arrived at the site of the massacre two days afterwards and found the burnt bodies of his wife and eight children. In his written testimony, produced for subsequent generations, he says that he does not know how to describe what happened, because My brain cant handle it even now. It stupees my memory. He leaves the telling of the story to one of his fellow villagers. A crystallization of the experience then becomes the object of multiple re-evocations; it can revive emotions in others and become part of their autobiographical experience. The intense solidarity among participants in the narrative sessions is indicative of the affective aspects of memory, and of the process through which, over time, the story acquires a form beyond the identity of the individual teller, becoming in effect a medium of communication within a group and between the group and outsiders. Participants in the sessions feel as if they were the bearers and transmitters of an unforgettable memory. The heart of this memory is experienced both as private family mourning and as mourning by a mnemonic community of survivors. The massacre

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seems to be a memory event to which one almost clings in the mourning of individual memory, and around which the circle of group memory is drawn. This double level of internalized remembrance helps to explain the striking persistence of the visual/aural images which hold together the remembrances, producing immediacy and a sense of participation. In them, the individual and group dimensions reinforce each other in a painful process of rumination.

Memory and visual imagery

Having characterized some aspects of the process of memorization in these communities, I now introduce the central element of my work: the hypothesis that the fusion of autobiographical and historical memory is facilitated by imagery associated with past experience. In the survivors accounts, seeing things as they saw them at the time is a crucial dimension of the narration. The emotional tone of memory appears to be crystallized in the visual dimension of the atrocities. This represents a sort of procrustean bed of villagers narratives. The story of the massacre is always composed of sequences of concrete images, which are invariably full of both sensory memory and the memory of specic scenes:
The only thing that I remember very clearly, that is always before my eyes, are the German soldiers coming down: they shouted, they sang. My dad with two other men hid in the corneld. My body melted with fear. I heard the women who were still in the olive grove screaming because they were taking all their men away .

The events seem to be attened out into visual and aural images to such a degree that it is appropriate to call them event-images. Here I am not using the category of image and imagery in the empiricist sense, as a copy of reality. Nor am I using it as a mental process synonymous with fantasy or vision, but rather as an emotional experience in visual form, a way of thinking that is associated with the sensory. Building on recent developments in cognitive science, Brandimonte (1997: 21) calls for the understanding of imagination as the production and use of visual mental images. When I asked the survivors to describe the day of the massacre, they described a sequence of images. What they envisaged was likely to be different from the images which I and other listeners would craft for ourselves from thse narrations. As Brandimonte maintains, we make and reconnoitre the image as if we were moving around it. Imagining and perceiving are analogous from an experiential point of view in that to see an image is to have a sensation similar to those we experience when we are perceiving something (1997: 43): I saw I heard a silence I heard the shots and the screams when I tell the story I feel bad I suffer, I cannot feel I tell the story willingly because it frees me of it, but always suffering! The visual is perhaps the strongest perceptual dimension. Visual memory serves to reinforce the other senses, such as the aural, and this means that the aural content is more readily remembered if associated with visual imagery (Carruthers 1990). Visual memory lends the narrative a realistic tone, since it is a perceptive-sensory memory. In their recent work, Fentress and Wickham

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have proposed an enlargement of the notion of social memory to include the sensory memory of space and sound, which they see as being no less conceptual than is our abstract memory of meanings (1992: 30).

Flashes of recall, emotional evocations and verbal memorization

As a key methodological instrument of my research, I explicitly asked the people I met how they have handled the memory of the massacre, and what the course of their recollections has been during the intervening fty years. These subjective reections are important in helping us to understand the process by which a common text may be formed, as well as the way in which people communicate through the eyes of a past time, reliving as a group events which are emotionally charged. I compared the narratives of the survivors who witnessed the tragic events with those of people in the same community who were not eyewitnesses. For both groups the visual appears to be the most powerful dimension of narratives, as well as a crucial element of the process of memorization of violence. The traces left by violence in the victims built up a sort of bodily memory in which the narratives are constantly projected against a visual screen. Preserved images of the past are difcult to objectify and communicate, and yet they are massed and transmitted through the repetition of narrative year after year. The predominance of visual images is intrinsic to narratives that unfold like a lm, or like a succession of ashes, as the story-tellers themselves have said. The ashes are relied upon as an organizing element in the story, that is to say, the bearer of memory consciously and very condently structures his or her memory around these illuminating images:
I have two ashes the rst is hearing German spoken the Germans pointing and saying Valdicastello and I turned around if you go [there], you will see that the wall you have to climb is a couple of metres tall and on top is the end of the path that goes to Coletti there are the ruins of the old mill. On the ftieth [anniversary of the massacre], I did it [investigated the area] for two hours, until the bell rang. I left a note for the owners saying that I got there by climbing over the fence the German I saw he was armed to the teeth! In short, I have the photograph [in my mind]! He had belts with bullets in them, he had a machine gun he was really rigged out! But he did not see me, so I went into the mill. Mamma, the Germans are here! The other ash, I saw this ofcer or soldier, carried on a stretcher. In the ash it is a stretcher, or something else they are using as a stretcher. One thing I am certain of, because its not there in the ash: that man was not bandaged. Therefore I have always thought that he was not wounded by rearms, but maybe he had fallen and broken his leg Towards evening I saw a boy come down crying : They have killed everyone! They have killed everyone! and he cried.

Whitehouse (1996: 710-11) denes memories that are printed on the mind as ashbulb memory, and he considers them to be linked to the traumatic nature of dramatic, frightening and surprising experiences such as initiation rites. Events become memorable in proportion to the intensity of emotion at encoding. His ndings help us to understand how memory works following

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the traumatic experience of massacre. Flashbulb memory-images produced by a high intensity of emotion may be consciously experienced by individuals as sudden eruptions of memory. Such eruptions did affect survivors when I asked them to narrate for me in the course of my eldwork. People also experience these effects when they think or speak of that traumatic past within their mnemonic community. Details perform an important function in a context of memory in which the scenes are drawn as mental pictures (Carruthers 1998). In the narratives there is a great concern for detail, something akin to a need to relive the details: this quest, however, is not for nuances of meaning, but rather for precision in recounting the facts. Images are not fragmentary and ickering.True knowledge is a knowledge of the particular, which must be relived to be communicated. They are the same details that are recollected verbally, in such a way as to evoke what we would call pictures that arouse emotion. The witnesses say that to see with the eyes or to look at an image means to feel the sensations that are attached to past experience. Images that are described verbally and based on visual stimuli that seem to be still active are shared. For example, the following recollection is part of the story, shaped by the eyes of that time, of a 5-year-old child. In it, the whole visual eld is tied up in an as-it-were timeless, still dimension in a series of consecutive pictures: the father, mother, and three little girls climbing up to the attic; the father climbing on the roof, because the house was going up in ames; the death of the mother and two of the little girls, suffocated by smoke; and nally the escape, running across the roofs:
My dad picked me up and carried me, with my head here, like a bundle, under his arm like this, he went all through my house like this, he passed two houses, on the roof he got to the schools, he knocked off some roof tiles He closed my eyes and jumped with me in his arms, because the roofs then were high, and he landed in the piazza. I remember everything about the piazza the piazza, my dad still holding me like this holding my legs and what did my dad do? He got down on his knees, holding me tight and he said to the German there was only one German quite far away from us: Have pity! Have pity! And it seemed humiliating to me that my dad got down like that and asked for pity for this little girl I remember the German taking aim quite far away from us but not very far but he didnt have the courage and I I tell you the truth perhaps he didnt have the courage because he was the only German in sight anyway, he didnt have the courage to shoot and I remember seeing the dead well, all piled up, the dresses burnt, the jackets burnt, and I said Whatever for? and then we went across the piazza, where they had done the executions and there I recognized my Uncle Dante, and I said, Dad, what is Uncle Dante doing there? My uncle looked horrible his eyes, his hair his eyes were out of their sockets. I recognized him. It was so terrible to see a body like that that I the image of these eyes once I was given a doll and it had eyes a little more closed [than those of a doll] I threw it away then I saw it again when I was twenty years old it had only [a little defect] because the eyes of this uncle were horrible So my dad closed my eyes with his hand, and we walked the rest of the way from the piazza here we passed by the ring squad and I I saw my uncle in front, by the little gate, where the skips are now and then there behind all the bodies and my dad stepped over and closed my eyes and then I asked as any child would Dad and we hid there were the grapevines, the plants and I said, Dad, I want to go to the toilet! and my dad said, Do it in your knickers and I said, Mum wouldnt want me to, and he said to me, Mum wont say anything to you anymore, and I didnt ask him any more questions.

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The cognitive energy of the texts derives from the fact that images can be seen and discussed. The very continuity of telling is made possible precisely because the ashbulb memories remain present in their concreteness to the mind over time, even when one wants to escape them: I see it all, even if I close my eyes. The description of images is central to memory operations. The repeated evocation of visual pictures puts the teller and listener in the emotional state to relive a narrated event. It is as if the story stays with the person and makes him suffer. The visual is explicitly linked to a visceral experience that still upsets the witness. People pointed out the relation between traumatic experience and visual image. A person without my having urged him or her in this direction used the term image as memory. The interlacements between the visual and verbal dimensions of memory are difcult to explore, but I would maintain that at the level of communal re-evocation in the mnemonic communities, visual representations are emotional evocations which reinforce verbal memorization. The survivors have to envisage stories that are repeated year after year. Such envisaging is emotionally disturbing, and of itself it helps verbalization. The desire to speak and see with the eyes of that time characterizes the accounts of eyewitnesses and non-eyewitnesses alike. Both types of narrator usually point to places as they tell the story. Sometimes they asked me directly if they could tell the story while showing the places in which it unfolded. The narrators aimed at reconstructing the appropriate location or pointing out the right direction, even for little bits of the story in which they explained their own actions or those of others, which the narrators did not actually witness. While the corpses were burning in the piazza of Civitella, a boy managed to stay hidden in a house. Today as an old man he briey describes his own escape and those of others:
We were up here [he indicates the top oor of the house], and then we escaped from your kitchen garden [he indicates another person present at the session], where there was a ladder we went all the way down there and the ladder was stained with blood because, they say, Gino, who was wounded, had gone down it they say that he escaped that way we ran down into the woods here

The aspect of locational memory, the visual-spatial component, appears to be crucial in the formation of a narrative. The continued familiarity with the places of those events (the square, the house, the ladder) is a common reference which permits the narrative reconstruction. Places are the trigger and, at the same time, the setting of the memory. The narrator places himself at the scene he remembers: When I passed there [in the years after the massacre] I always saw those bits of wood burning. For those who did not live through the events, knowledge of the locations in which they took place functions as a blank screen on which to project the action. The familiar spaces of the village seem imprinted with images of atrocities: I see everything. I know the spot. I see the spot. Each eyewitness saw only what happened in the place where he or she happened to be, but also then heard about what happened in other parts of the village. No survivor who participates in the narrative sessions today was present in Stazzema in the last terrible moments when the SS set re to

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the bodies of the dead in the piazza in front of the church. Nevertheless, the story-tellers have an image of the Germans dancing, drunk, to the music of a barrel-organ. It is difcult to know with certainty whether a process of mythication is under way here. However, there are various testimonies of people who from their hiding-places saw groups of Germans singing to the music of a barrel-organ as they left the village, after setting re to the houses. It is possible that, in this case, mechanisms of condensation and displacement are coming into play, which characterize visual memory as part of an emotional experience. The remembered scene in the piazza should not be understood as discrediting the veracity of the accounts, but rather as part of a cultural construction. The images are experienced and felt; the narrator becomes the witness, creating for himself a particular knowledge. At the same time, it is as if the community is controlling the recomposition of segments of experience, having made itself the guarantor of the veracity of individual accounts. The afrmation that Not all the episodes were seen, but they were seen only appears to be a contradiction. In fact, it makes sense: it means that all the episodes may not have been empirically observed, but they were all experienced emotionally. I heard the complaint that many speak, even if they should keep quiet because they didnt see anything, but the authority of witnessing is not necessarily respected, as is demonstrated by the fact that one of the principal interpreters of the memory, who is also the person who gives voice to the group memory (the living archive), is a woman who was 11 years old at the time of the events and, more importantly, who was not in the village at the time of the massacre. For those who were not eyewitnesses, the imagery is the product of a past perception which is not tied to direct experience (except for the background of the story, which depends on personal memory of the village and environs), but rather to the indirect experience of hearing others recount the facts. In these testimonies the visual is inferred: this kind of imagery is closer to that of oral traditions (outside the self ) than that of autobiographical accounts, which are internal to the teller.The visual functions as a bridge between lived reality (the memory) and the story (the re-evocation), between the individual autobiographical experience and the way in which this has been elaborated by the group, that is to say, the historical representation. The images that people formed as they listened to the story are substitutes for direct experience, and are themselves part of an emotional memory. The process of organizing the kind of consciousness which we call visual memory is, therefore, a two-way operation. For the individual who lived through the experience, the visual image is imbued with an emotional tone and becomes a memory-image. But the reverse is also true: hearing the story told over and over again produces an effect on listeners like that of having seen the events; non-eyewitnesses are thus enabled to live through the events in the form of the emotional experience that I call imaginary memory.

The emotional content of memory

The content of visual memory is in large part emotional. For those who were not present at the massacres, telling the story means imagining the past and

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transmitting it on the basis of acquired knowledge. It is a story in which a picture that has been described and memorized comes to be pervaded by an emotional tone. Commemorating the event (that is to say, telling the story), the subject tries to make sense of a reality that still seems senseless to him. If in the communal memory the world is a continuous ow from the episodic to the semantic dimension, in the emotional memory of personal experience and experience of the historical world, the perceptible and the thinkable, autobiography and history, seem even more closely allied. Some psychological ndings on emotions seem highly relevant to the perspective suggested here. A recent study conrms that the memory of personal experience ows into the historical memory, the memory of the third person, without interruption (LeDoux 1992). Emotion is not just a sentiment that inuences memory: it is memory itself (emotional memory or emotion as memory). An emotional experience leaves multiple traces in the brain. One is episodic: a simple account of the factual details, probably stored in the hippocampus. Another is of the emotional signicance of the experience, held in the amygdala. The emotion is therefore a mnemonic datum that can be detached from the information about the event. This has implications for our anthropological analysis of narrative: to feel an emotion associated with a past experience does not necessarily require the remembering of that experience. Non-witnesses relive the event crystallized in a feeling, that is neither an emotion produced by something they have lived though nor simply imaginary (All the things they told me about I feel and live through them again). Witnesses and non-witnesses seem therefore to be united by an emotional memory that has one common denominator: the emotional meaning of the event. For eyewitnesses, the memory of the massacre consists of information about the event and its emotional meaning; in those who were not witnesses, on the other hand, the recollection is only of the emotional meaning as it is attached to another experience that of hearing the facts recounted and then recreating the event in the imagination. At the centre of both these experiences is an emotional memory. Emotion as memory means that the emotion is itself a form of memory which can be transmitted. The direct experience of a few produces local and historical knowledge which is shared by an entire group: the biographically and historically generated pain may never be entirely separable (Young 1988: 127).

Conclusion: the socialization of perceptions

In analysing the process by which public memory is formed the transformation of a remembered event into a story it is not possible to distinguish clearly between the biographical and historical dimensions of testimony. Awareness of this intermingling of the two elements is an integral part of the testimony of my interlocutors. Singular, factual, descriptive, autobiographical memories become historical group recall through an intersubjective, communicative action that is repeated over time and in which the making of images plays a crucial role.

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It is a fact observed by many anthropologists that descriptive representations of a particular context are much more common than representations of a knowledge-based, abstract, evaluative kind, or what Tulving (1972) calls general world knowledge. In a study of traditional phenomena that are closely linked to processes of memorization, Boyer complains that this reality has been systematically ignored by anthropologists, and contends that this is one of the reasons why ethnographic work is so difcult, because it is itself a singular situation: there is a systematic discrepancy between what anthropologists are seeking, namely some semantic memory data, and what conversation with informants provides in abundance: memories of singular situations (1990: 43). Boyer maintains that it is of crucial importance to understand how signifying representations are constructed from descriptive facts (in our case, how historical knowledge is generated from individual, factual, autobiographical knowledge). However, it is important not to equate episodic knowledge absolutely with the factual, nor semantic memory with the historical. In fact, the two forms of representation are closely allied to such a degree that both the factual and the interpretative contain historical and autobiographical elements that are inextricably combined (Bloch 1995; Cohen 1989). Treating memory as a form of intersubjective knowledge endowed with symbolic content, rather than as a unanimous, collective endeavour, I argue for an approach that integrates different disciplinary theories and emphasizes the interaction of the episodic and the semantic, of memory and tradition. Story-telling falls within the genre of traditional phenomena in that it is a repeated event of social interaction characterized by psychological saliency (Boyer 1990: 1). I regard remembering as an experience that is not opposed to traditional phenomena: memory and tradition cannot be seen as a dichotomy. Story-telling sessions are acts of remembering which involve both singular utterances and also a form of memory work in which people build on general knowledge. In other words, they constitute what is perceived semantically as the story of the group. The memorized experience of a single person is shared by an entire group whose members repeat that singularity because there are characteristics which make possible the construction of a more abstract categorical knowledge, as does the communication of tradition. In the mnemonic communities, the interruption of continuity created by Nazi violence is overcome through the continuity of telling the tale over and over again. The principal dimension of living this continuity is apparently the attempt to survive past atrocities. It is as if the story, repeated within the group, reassures them that they did in fact escape the tragedy. Flashbulb memory images are a recurring feature of these narratives: they circulate as a sort of property of the group and are inextricably tied to living within a community that has viscerally experienced extreme violence. The cultivated narrative memory of a profoundly frightening experience creates bonds of solidarity that unite in a single verbalization those who lived that experience and those who participate in the narrative event. I have therefore proposed that we conceive of visual imagery as central to the view of the past. Research on the role of visualization and emotions in sociological processes is still at an early stage. Here, it is envisaged as a fundamental part of processes of memory-making, in which perceptual images

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run through the narratives and link the group memory. These mental paintings and modes of thinking with images (Carruthers 1998: 118) are different for each person (including myself as recipient of the narratives), but they generate emotions in everyone. This emotional evocation in the form of images shared by several subjects is central to the process of verbal memorization and in the persistence of memory traces over time.

NOTES Research for this article was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant GR6504). I thank my friend and research assistant Paola Calamandrei and Dorothea Barrett for editorial assistance. I am grateful to the anonymous referees for their insightful comments. 1 During the German occupation of Italy, SS troops were particularly renowned for their violence towards civilians (see Franzinelli 2002: 5; Klinkhammer 1993: 319). 2 Both Civitella and SantAnna di Stazzema were poor share-cropping villages with a high level of out-migration; each had a population of about one thousand. The majority were farm labourers, though Civitella contained a small number of artisans and professional families. 3 The term used was granatiere, which is distinct from fante (infantryman). 4 The number of civilians murdered is in fact far greater, because the gures given here do not include the thousands who did not survive deportation to concentration camps. 5 It has been suggested that the prosecutions were blocked in the 1940s because it was feared that they might have implications for the planned reorganization of the German Federal Republic army and its eventual integration into NATO. More recently, however, Italian parliamentary representatives have called for urgent action following the discovery of a so-called closet of shame containing hundreds of pending trial dossiers relating to the massacres (Franzinelli 2002: 10, 194). 6 Italian writing on the massacre, both in academic historical studies and popular journalistic accounts, is now substantial, and it has nothing whatever in common with the historical revisionist stance. Among recent publications, see Contini (1997) and Giannelli (1997).

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Dakhlia, J. 1990. Loubli de la cit: la mmoire collective lepreuve du lignage dans le Jrid tunisien. Paris: ditions la Dcouverte. Durkheim, E. 1925. Sociologie et philosophie. Paris: Alcan. Fentress, J. & C. Wickam 1992. Social memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Franzinelli, M. 2002. Le stragi naziste: larmadio della vergogna: impunit e rimozione dei crimini di guerra nazifascisti, 1943-2001. Milan: Mondadori. Giannelli, G. 1997. Versilia: la strage degli innocenti. Seravezza: Ed. Versilia oggi. Halbwachs, M. 1968. La mmoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Jedlowski, P. & M.R. Rampazi (eds.) 1991. Il senso del passato. Milan: Franco Angeli. Kanapathipillai, V. 1992. July 1983: the survivors experience. In Mirrors of violence: communities, riots and survivors in South Asia (ed.) V. Das, 321-44. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kleinman, A., V. Das & M. Lock (eds.) 1997. Social suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klinkhammer, L. 1993. Loccupazione tedesca in Italia, 1943-1945. Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri. LeDoux, J. 1992. Emotion as memory: anatomical systems underlying indelible neural traces. In The handbook of emotion and memory: research and theory (ed.) S.A. Christianson, 269-88. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Namer, G. 1987. Mmoire et socit. Paris: Mridiens Klincksieck. Passerini, L. 1988. Storia e soggettivit: le fonti orali, la memoria. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Pavone, C. 1991. Una guerra civile. Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri. Portelli, A. 1999. Lordine gi stato eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria. Rome: Donzelli. Radstone, S. (ed.) 2000. Working with memory. In Memory and methodology (ed.) S. Radstone, 1-22. Oxford: Berg. Raiuno 2000. Bentornati ragazzi di SantAnna, di Piero Borella. Serata TG1, 12 Aug. [television broadcast] Schreiber, G. 2000. La vendetta tedesca, 1943-1945: le rappresaglie naziste in Italia. Milan: Mondadori. Tambiah, S.J. 1996. Leveling crowds: ethnonationalistic conicts and collective violence in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, P. 1978. The voice of the past: oral history. Oxford: University Press. Tobias, B., J.F. Kihlstrom & D. Schacter 1992. Emotion and implicit memory. In The handbook of emotion and memory: research and theory (ed.) S.A. Christianson, 67-92: Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tonkin, E. 1992. Narrating our pasts: the social construction of oral history. Cambridge: University Press. Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic semantic memory. In The organisation of memory (eds) E. Tulving & W. Donadson, 382-403. New York: Academic Press. Whitehouse, H. 1996. Rites of terror: emotion, metaphor and memory in Melanesian initiation cults. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. (N.S.) 2, 703-15. Wieviorka, A. 1998. Lre du tmoin. Paris: Plon. Woolf, S. 1999. Il senso della storia per Primo Levi. In Primo Levi testimone e scrittore di storia (eds) P. Momigliano & R. Garris, 25-49. Florence: Giuntina. Young, J. 1988. Writing and rewriting the Holocaust: narrative and the consequences of interpretation. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

Mmoire long terme dvnements extrmes: de lautobiographie lhistoire

Rsum Cet article analyse les rcits de massacres orchestrs par les troupes allemandes dans deux villages de Toscane au cours de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Les mcanismes de construction de mmoire groupale sont tudis en considrant les souvenirs tant partir de leur schma social que de leur qualit motionnelle. En mappuyant sur lassertion de Bloch qui consiste dire quil nexiste pas de diffrence entre les reprsentations de la mmoire autobiographique et celle des compte rendus historiques, je soutiens que limagerie visuelle associe une exprience passe traumatique joue un rle fondamental dans les rcits oraux et

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quelle facilite le passage des mmoires personnelles aux mmoires collectives. En analysant la mmoire comme une forme de savoir intersubjectif dot de contenu symbolique, plutt quune entreprise unanime et collective, je soutiens une approche qui intgre diffrentes thories disciplinaires. Dipartimento di Psicologia e Antropologia Culturale, Universit di Verona, Via S. Francesco, 22, 37129 Verona, Italy. francesca.cappelletto@univr.it