Long-Term Memory of Extreme Events: From Autobiography to History

Author(s): Francesca Cappelletto

Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 241
-260
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3134648
Accessed: 03/03/2010 03:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rai.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

http://www.jstor.org
 LONG-TERM MEMORY OF EXTREME EVENTS:
FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHY TO HISTORY

FRANCESCA
CAPPELLETTO

Universityof 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 pattern-
ing and their emotional quality. Working from Bloch's assertion that there is no differ-
ence between the representations of autobiographical memory and those of historical
accounts, I argue that visual imagery associated with past traumatic experience is a fun-
damental 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 communi-

ties that were scenes of extreme violence inflicted by the Nazis in the Second
World War. It explores the link between the cognitive and affective dimen-
sions 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 filter of past events that tends to preserve only those images that support
the group's present sense of identity. Collective memory is a form of con-
sciousness 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 consciencecol-
lectiveof a given social unit. The merit of this formulation is that it success-
fully expresses what one might define 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.Iist. (N.S.) 9, 241-260
242 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

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 inter-
action - as, for example, in the telling of stories, the exchange of recollec-
tions between individuals.
After Halbwachs, social memory was understood as the sphere of relations
between cognitive practices and social practices (Tonkin 1992). The contri-
bution of oral historians, beginning with Thompson (1978), was to recognize
the 'highly mediated nature of memory' (Radstone 2000: 11), to be consid-
ered in relation either to lived, historical experiences or to the 'active pro-
duction of meaning and interpretation ... capable of influencing 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 Bloch's 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 specificity
of the concept of the individual in history'; he therefore argues for the use
by anthropologists of 'rather technical works of psychology, since the com-
plexity of the presence of the relmembered 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 representa-
tions', and on anthropologists to learn 'how the mental presence of the past
affects what people do' (Bloch 1995: 60). There is no difference between rep-
resentations 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': narrativeswith 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 systenms
(Fentress & Wickham 1992). One set of distinctions identified 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 nmemory
is descriptive of the event, connected to the concept of the self, procedural,
and chronologically organized; it deals with episodes recollected from an
individual's 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 memiory 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
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 243

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'flashbulb
memory', he sees these rites as 'part of a nexus of psychological and socio-
logical 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 his-
torical 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 experi-
enced by them in person. In order to understand this mechanism of memory,
I analyse the crucial dimension of the narratives: the elaboration and re-
elaboration of imagery of people, places, and visually based 'crystallizations' of
traumatic episodes.
Social scientists have not yet addressed the question of how visual percep-
tions 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 visu-
alization and verbalization is clearly complex. In the domain of cognitive psy-
chology, it is still not clear how the process of encoding works: how what has
been is built in the figurative 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 trans-
mission of emotionally charged events - particularly with the ways in which
a group memorizes and stores extraordinary images. Working on the rela-
tionships 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 final years of the Second World War, many mass murders were com-
mitted 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 civil-
ians; these were generally acts of reprisal against Italian partisans,most notably
in areas where there were detachments of German SS storm troops.'
My focus in this article is two mass killings which took place in the Tuscan
villages of Civitella (Arezzo province) and Sant'Anna di Stazzema (Lucca
244 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

province) in the summer of 1944.2 In Civitella, where 150 villagers were mur-
dered, 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 con-
gregation 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 Sant'Anna di Stazzema on 12 August 1944 SS forma-
tions 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 mas-
sacre, a grenadier3 interviewed fifty-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 didn't say a word, didn't scream
or beg for their lives; they didn't say a word ... Knowing they were about to die, some
of them took out photographs in the hope that they could be identified later. The SS
scattered hay, straw, and petrol on the bodies and set fire 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 con-
tinued to talk about it for fifty 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 massacreswere 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 respon-
sible for the massacres - even when they have been identified - have ever
been prosecuted, because the trials have been shelved for half a century or
so." Nevertheless, the survivors have been asked over the years to remember
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 245

and transmitthe memory of those events, not only for themselvesbut also
for others - for example, by journalists and historians.6I was one of the
persons who wanted to know their story.
I conducted fieldwork over a number of years, beginning in 1994, the
fiftieth anniversaryof the massacres,when there were many official com-
memorations.The anniversaryattracteda great deal of attention in Italy.
Over a period of several months, I interviewed 68 people, some of them
repeatedly:I worked with survivorsstill residingin the villages,and also with
villagerswho had emigratedto other partsof Italy.I also interviewedthe chil-
dren and other relativesof victims who had heard the story told in the years
that followed.
I often found it very difficultto 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 survivorsreassuredme before the interview,trying to relieve me of
the worries they intuited by explainingthat'for all these years[they] had been
trainingto remember':it was not the first time that they had faced the 'point
at which memory transformsitself into language'(Young 1988: 161). Cer-
tainly they, too, like Primo Levi, had built themselvesa 'memory-prosthesis'
(Woolf 1999: 45) which allowed them to narrateand to be heard with an
attenuatedpain, startingfrom a script that was not written but was presentin
their minds. But the deepest consciousnessthat united us in what has been
referredto as the 'testimonialpact' (Wieviorka1998) was that we - listeners
and survivors- were working together in the attemptnot so much to know
the facts as to grasp the significancethat had been, and still is, attributedto
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 Germanswere there, where they came from, how
they shot them ...- [is not significant].'

A mnemonic community
The survivors and their children form a mnemonic community which is
no longer defined by spatialboundaries (in that many of its members have
emigrated),but ratherby the duration of the story through time. Since the
war, the survivorshave continued to tell what they think of as 'their story',
a narrativein which individual and group memories intertwine and meld
together.
The 'story' of the massacrestestifies to the persistencein 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).
246 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

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 com-
monplace 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 tra-
ditional 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 fixed
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 official 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 doesn't 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 comnmunal 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 significant dis-
crepancies. 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 Civitella's 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 affiliations, and intra-group
conflicts 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
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 247

here, which is about the relationship between verbalization and visualization

in memory. Suffice 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 insider-
outsider dynamic. Within the community, 'the story' of the massacres is con-
ceptualized 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 unfulfilled desire for
justice and public recognition. They are always appreciative when national
politicians and officials attend their commemorative events. They want their
narrated memory of the massacre to be a public memory, capable of 'enter-
ing 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 people's
memories are remembered as if they were personal experiences. At the same
time, one's own memories are, in effect, rendered external to the self: they are
narrated as if they had been someone else's 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 thou-
sand 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 mother's lap, and he didn't want to go. He didn't 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 one's own memory.When I asked
directly about this aspect of memorization, I was told: 'We tell what we
248 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

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 testi-
monies 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-five 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 fire this machine gun.

They had crowded them together there. Now I can't 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 (one's own personal memory being nar-
rated 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' contribu-

tions 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 indi-
vidual versions of the event were necessarily partial and monofocal. It tran-
spired in all the interviews that each narrator gives more weight to what he
or she lived through and witnessed at first hand but that he or she also includes
summaries of the experiences of others which are usually based on first-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.
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 249

Typically, the narrator introduces the narrative 'brick' of another's experi-

ence 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 Sant'Anna] 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
one's 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 can't distinguish the personal memory from the memory
gained over time, because often the stories are stories of experiences, even
other people's experiences, that have become a personal inheritance, a col-
lective inheritance.' In this testimony two categories appear to be merging:
autobiographical, inner memory and the communal memory voiced in nar-
ratives 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 objec-
tive 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 reflected 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 (I'antefattoor prelude: for
example, the partisans'operations), the massacre itself ('They have killed every-
one!'), 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 narra-
tives 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.
250 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

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 flashbulb
effect in group memory.

Ineradicable remembrances of a tense past

To understand the crystallization, in other words, the recurrent, fixed pat-
terning of the stories, one needs to focus on the fact that they refer to trau-
matic 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 Sant'Anna, 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 charac-
terized 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 survivor's 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 can't handle it even now. It stupefies nmymemory.'
He leaves the telling of the story to one of his fellow villagers. A crystalliza-
tion 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 indica-
tive 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
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 251

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 remem-
brances, producing immediacy and a sense of participation. In them, the indi-
vidual 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 hypoth-
esis 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 specific 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 cornfield. 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 flattened 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 devel-
opments in cognitive science, Brandimonte (1997: 21) calls for the under-
standing 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 narra-
tions. 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
252 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

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 con-
ceptual 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 fifty years.
These subjective reflections 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 comnmunitywho were not eyewitnesses. For
both groups the visual appears to be the most powerful dimension of narra-
tives, 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. Pre-
served images of the past are difficult 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 film', or like a succession of'flashes', as the story-tellers themselves have said.
The flashes are relied upon as an organizing element in the story, that is to
say, the bearer of memory consciously and very confidently structures his or
her memlory around these illuminating images:

'I have two flashes ... the first 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 fiftieth [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 Geriman I saw
... he was armed to the teeth! In short, I have the photograph [in lly mind]! He had
belts with bullets in them, he had a machine gun ... he was really rigged out! But he
did not see ime, so I went into the mill. "Maimma, the Germans are here!" ... The other
flash, I saw this officer or soldier, carried on a stretcher. In the flash it is a stretcher, or
something else they are using as a stretcher. One thing I am certain of, because it's not
there in the flash: that manawas not bandaged. Therefore I have always thought that he
was not wounded by firearns, but iiaybe he had fallen and broken his leg ... Towards
evening I saw a boy colme down ... crying ... "They have killed everyone! They have
killed everyone!" and he cried.'

Whitehouse (1996: 710-11) defines memories that are 'printed on the mind'
as 'flashbulb 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 findings help us to understand how memory works following
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 253

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 fieldwork. People also experi-
ence 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 pre-
cision in recounting the facts. Images are not fragmentary and flickering.'True'
knowledge is a knowledge of the particular,which must be relived to be com-
municated. 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 wit-
nesses 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 field 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 climb-
ing on the roof, because the house was going up in flames; the death of the
mother and two of the little girls, suffocated by smoke; and finally 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 didn't have the courage and I ... I tell
you the truth ... perhaps he didn't have the courage because he was the only German
in sight ... anyway, he didn't 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 recog-
nized 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 firing 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 wouldn't want me to", and he
said to me, "Mum won't say anything to you anymore", and I didn't ask him any more
questions.'
254 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

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 flashbulb 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 direc-
tion - used the term 'image as memory'. The interlacements between the
visual and verbal dimensions of memory are difficult to explore, but I would
maintain that at the level of communal re-evocation in the mnemonic com-
munities, 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 briefly
describes his own escape and those of others:

'We were up here [he indicates the top floor 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 refer-
ence 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 mas-
sacre] 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 func-
tions 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 fire to
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 255

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 difficult to know with certainty whether a process of
mythification 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 fire 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 affirmation 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 didn't see anything', but the authority of wit-
nessing 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 individ-
ual autobiographical experience and the way in which this has been elabo-
rated 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 experi-
ence, 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
256 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

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 flow 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 findings on emotions seem highly relevant to the per-
spective suggested here. A recent study confirms that the memory of personal
experience flows into the historical memory, the memory of the third person,
without interruption (LeDoux 1992). Emotion is not just a sentiment that
influences 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 significance 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 there-
fore to be united by an emotional memory that has one common denomi-
nator: 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 recollec-
tion 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 bio-
graphically 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 transforma-
tion 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.
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 257

It is a fact observed by many anthropologists that descriptive representa-

tions 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 difficult, because it is itself
a 'singular situation': 'there is a systematic discrepancy between what anthro-
pologists are seeking, namely some semantic memory data, and what conver-
sation 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, autobio-
graphical knowledge). However, it is important not to equate episodic know-
ledge 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 autobio-
graphical 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 commu-
nity 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 fun-
damental part of processes of memory-making, in which perceptual images
258 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

run through the narratives and link the group memory. These 'mental paint-
ings' and modes of'thinking with images' (Carruthers 1998: 118) are differ-
ent 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 nmeno-
rization 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 commlents.
'During the German occupation of Italy, SS troops were particularly renowned for their
violence towards civilians (see Franzinelli 2()02: 5; Klinkhammer 1993: 319).
-Both Civitella and Sant'Anna 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.
'The term used was granatiere,which is distinct from fante (infantrylan).
4The numiber of civilians murdered is in fact far greater, because the figures given here do
not include the thousands who did not survive deportation to concentration camps.
It has been suggested that the prosecutions were blocked in the 1940s because it was feared
that they nlight have implications tor the planned reorganization of the German Federal
Republic army and its eventual integration into NATO. More recently, however, Italian par-
liamentary 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).
''Italian writing on the massacre, both in academic historical studies and popular journalis-
tic accounits, is now substantial, and it has nothing whatever in common with the historical
revisionist stance. Anmong recent publications, see Contini (1997) and Giannelli (1997).

REFERENCES

Bloch, M. 1995. Memoire autobiographique et memoire historique du passe eloigne. Eiiqmete

2, 59-76.
Boyer, P. 199(). Tradition as vtintad cllom nlication:a cogqqitive descriptionof traditionaldiscourse.
Cambridge: University Press.
Brandimonte, M.A. 1997. lMemoria,inmmgini, rappresentazioni.Rone: NIS.
Candau,J. 1996. Anthropolo(gicde la mllCemoire.Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Cappelletto, F 1998. Memories of Nazi-Fascist massacres in two central Italian villages.
SociologiaRuralis 38, 69-85.
Carruthers, M. 1990. The book of imemlory: a stud)y tf iiieiory in medielval culttre.Cambridge:
University Press.
1998. The craqftof tfholglt: lmediation, rhetoric,and the making
i oof itagCes, 400-1200.
Cambridge: University Press.
Caruth, C. 1995. Introduction. In Tralu-ia: explorations in melclory) (ed.) C. Caruth, 3-12.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Casey, E. 1989. Relmembering:a plhnomenologicalstudy. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University
Press.
Christianson, S.A. (ed.) 1992. Tle handbook ofcemotioni(anldimellcor): researchand tlheo). Hove:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Cohen, G. 1989. Mlemloryin the real world. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Contini, G. 1997. La nicnlloria divisa. Milan: Rizzoli.
 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO 259

Dakhlia, J. 1990. L'oubli de la cite: la memoirecollectivea I'epreuvedu lignage dans le Jrid tunisien.
Paris: Editions la Decouverte.
Durkheim, E. 1925. Sociologieet philosophie.Paris: Alcan.
Fentress, J. & C. Wickam 1992. Social memory.Oxford: Blackwell.
Franzinelli, M. 2002. Le stragi naziste: I'armadiodella vergogna:impunita 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 memoirecollective.Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Jedlowski, P. & M.R. Rampazi (eds.) 1991. II senso del passato. Milan: Franco Angeli.
Kanapathipillai,V. 1992. July 1983: the survivor's experience. In Mirrorsof violence:communities,
riots and survivorsin 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. L'occupazionetedescain 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:researchand theory (ed.) S.A. Christianson, 269-88.
Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Namer, G. 1987. Memoire et societe.Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck.
Passerini, L. 1988. Storia e soggettivita:le fonti orali, la memoria.Florence: La Nuova Italia.
Pavone, C. 1991. Una guerra civile.Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri.
Portelli, A. 1999. L'ordinee gia stato eseguito:Roma, le FosseArdeatine,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 Sant'Anna, di Piero Borella. Serata TG1, 12 Aug. [televi-
sion broadcast]
Schreiber, G. 2000. La vendetta tedesca, 1943-1945: le rappresaglienaziste in Italia. Milan:
Mondadori.
Tambiah, S.J. 1996. Leveling crowds:ethnonationalisticconflictsand collectiveviolence in South Asia.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Thompson, P. 1978. The voice of the past: oral history.Oxford: University Press.
Tobias, B., J.E Kihlstrom & D. Schacter 1992. Emotion and implicit memory. In The handbook
of emotion and memory: researchand theory (ed.) S.A. Christianson, 67-92: Hove: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Tonkin, E. 1992. Narrating our pasts: the social constructionof oral history. Canmbridge:University
Press.
Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic semantic memory. In The organisationof memory (eds) E. Tulving &
W. Donadson, 382-403. New York: Academic Press.
Whitehouse, H. 1996. Rites of terror: emotion, metaphor and memory in Melanesian initia-
tion cults.Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute. (N.S.) 2, 703-15.
Wieviorka, A. 1998. L'ere du temoin. Paris: Plon.
Woolf, S. 1999. Il senso della storia per Primo Levi. In Primo Levi testimonee scrittoredi storia
(eds) P Momigliano & R. Garris, 25-49. Florence: Giuntina.
Young, J. 1988. Writing and rewritingthe Holocaust:narrativeand the consequencesof interpretation.
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

Memoire a long terme d'evenements extremes:

de l'autobiographie a l'histoire
Resume
Cet article analyse les recits de massacres orchestres par les troupes allemandes dans deux vil-
lages de Toscane au cours de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Les mecanismes de construction
de memoire groupale sont etudies en considerant les souvenirs tant a partir de leur schema
social que de leur qualite emotionnelle. En m'appuyant sur l'assertion de Bloch qui consiste
a dire qu'il n'existe pas de difference entre les representations de la memoire autobio-
graphique et celle des compte rendus historiques, je soutiens que l'imagerie visuelle asso-
ciee a une experience passee traumatique joue un role fondamental dans les recits oraux et
260 FRANCESCA CAPPELLETTO

qu'elle facilite le passage des memoires personnelles aux memoires collectives. En analysant
la memoire comme une forme de savoir intersubjectif dote de contenu symbolique, plut6t
qu'une entreprise unanime et collective, je soutiens une approche qui integre diff6rentes
theories disciplinaires.

Dipartiiiiieto di Psicologiae Atroipologia Culturale, Uliversita di Verona,I ia S. Francesco,22, 37129

Verona,Italy. francesca.cappelletto@univr.it