Tommaso Pepe

This dissertation intends to retrace and critically reconstruct the multiple, and sometimes intimately diverging, trajectories followed by the literary memory of the anti-Jewish persecution in the territories of postwar Italian literature. Specific attention has been accorded to areas and segments of this cultural field that have generally remained at the margins of scholarly inquiry, with a methodological choice has resulted both in a hermeneutic recuperation of texts that have been object of a precocious rejection and perduring disinterest in the cultural economy of the memory of the Shoah in Italy – as it is the case with Otto ebrei by Giacomo Debenedetti – and in an excavation intended to explore literary genres generally excluded from critical mappings of Italian literature about the Jewish genocide – such as poetry, theatrical works, or accounts and memoirs authored Fascist and post-Fascist writers. In bringing at the center of the scrutiny forms of expressions and corresponding intellectual sedimentations previously relegated at the margins of the critical debate, this interpretive reorientation has been thus intended to highlight a series of conceptual and critical articulations that inhabit and at the same time problematize the literary memory of the Shoah in postwar Italy. The identification these “memory perspectivisms” has represented the primary intellectual goal pursued in Counter-memory, Autofictions, (Anti)Poetry: Rethinking Holocaust Literature in Postwar Italy. The first of these literature/memory articulations, is represented by what I termed as a literary “counter-memory” of the Shoah in postwar Italy. The second critical segment of this dissertation has scrutinized what I proposed to call post-Fascist, autofictional narratives of the persecution. The theoretical and cultural implications of the problematic literary paradox raised by Theodor Adorno in 1947 – “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” – have been at the center of the fourth chapter of the dissertation, dedicated to a critical reconstruction of the intellectual genealogies that shaped the field of poetic memories of the Jewish genocide in postwar Italy. The fifth and concluding chapter of the dissertation, instead, has been dedicated to a literary genre thus far substantially neglected in critical studies about Italian literature on the Shoah, that of theatrical representations.

The 4on4 Salons are a series of informal and interdisciplinary academic conversations organized
 by the Society of Fellows. They takes place on Thursday evenings
 at 4 pm, hence the name. They are jointly co-organized by all members of the SUSTech Society of Fellows.

Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird anhand ausgewählter Erinnerungsfelder-Shoah, Kolonialismus, Faschismus sowie Resistenza als wesentliches Gründungsnarrativ der Repubblica italiana-in Bezug auf den italienischen Kontext beleuchtet, wie groß (gerade vor dem Hintergrund aktueller revisionistischer Tendenzen) der Bedarf an ›Erinnerungsarbeit‹ nach wie vor ist und welche erinnerungskulturellen Paradigmen dabei in den Vordergrund rücken. Der Beitrag setzt sich aus einem einleitenden Überblick sowie zwei Interviews zusammen, die mit Daniele Comberiati (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier) und Tommaso Pepe (Brown University, USA / Guangzhou Maritime University, China) geführt wurden, die sich in ihrer Forschung u. a. mit postkolonialen Theorien, transkultureller italophoner Literatur, Memory Studies und der Darstellung der Shoah in der italienischen Literatur befassen.

A crowd of suffering but not forgotten individuals, ‹victims› whose existences have been annihilated by history and smothered by a ruthless society, inhabits the narrative universe of the Novel of Ferrara. If violence is always declined in relational dimension, expressed through an encounter of active and passive bodies, subjects and objects, perpetrators and victims whose interactions are inextricable from what Walter Benjamin termed as the «moral conditions» that make an «effective cause violent in the precise sense of the word»., such dialectis permeates the entire body of Bassani's narratives. This article seeks to explore the expressive and intellectual ramifications that substantiate Bassani’s conceptualization of the victim/perpetrator dynamic: what is the meaning that the author of The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles attributes to the word «victim»? What genre of analytical language is employed to address such dialectics of violence? Bassani’s reflection on the question of victimhoo, however, brings into purview two fundamental problematics that traverse the entire architecture of his narrative oeuvre. The first relates to the notion of «subalternity», a topic that has already stirred the attention of critical scholarship on the author. At the same time, the thematic structure of The Novel of Ferrara conjoins this careful exploration of the victimary condition with a parallel emancipatory discourse. Following the thematic diachrony articulated in the later narratives of the author – I will focus primarily on Behind the Door, an anti-Bildungsroman published by Bassani in 1964 – it is possible to point out how the intellectual itinerary articulated in the Novel of Ferrara is not limited to a recognition of the all-pervasive presence of violence within the sphere of human action: Bassani’s goal is rather that of opening a space of conscience where it might be possible to disarticulate this oppressive binarism.

Le matin du 25 janvier 1942, Curzio Malaparte, engagé dans un long reportage journalistique sur le front oriental pour le Corriere della Sera, franchit le seuil de la « ville interdite » de Varsovie. Malaparte fut le premier écrivain italien à se livrer à une reconnaissance personnelle du plus grand ghetto juif établi en Europe orientale: le compte rendu littéraire de cette expérience sera recueilli dans une longue séquence narrative de Kaputt, livre publié en 1944. Toutefois, Malaparte
n’était pas seul lors de sa visite : il était en fait accompagné par un autre journaliste italien, Alceo Valcini, dont la figure est intégralement supprimée dans le récit de Kaputt. Correspondant de Varsovie pour le Corriere, Valcini aurait assisté en tant que témoin oculaire à l’invasion allemande de 1939, à l’occupation de la ville et à la révolte du ghetto juif au printemps 1943. Les souvenirs de ces événements ont été rassemblés dans un volume, Il calvario di Varsavia (« Le calvaire de Varsovie ») publié par Garzanti en 1945. Cet article se propose de présenter une lecture sélective de ces deux récits atypiques sur le ghetto varsovien, élaborés par des auteurs dont la trajectoire intellectuelle fut, en outre, profondément compromise avec l’univers idéologique du fascisme.

The memory of anti-Jewish persecution intersected the work of prominent authors in Italian twentieth century poetry, often following oblique and unexpected trajectories that touch authors such as Montale, Sereni, Fortini, Pasolini, Saba, Levi, Quasimodo. This essay intends to probe a genealogical juncture in this poetic history, bringing into purview a series of poliperspectival models of poetic writing about the Shoah elaborated by Salvatore Quasimodo, Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale in the early postwar years. If Quasimodo's poesia civile paved the way to a literary monumentalization of memory, such poetic configuration ultimately might be seen to hinge on what Friedrich Nietzsche critically termed a «spiritualization of cruelty». Thus it was progressively identified as a potential anti-model for Italian poetry dealing with the memory of the persecution-as a reading of Montale's treatment of this theme reveals. On the other hand, Saba condensed his afterthoughts about the «cannibalism» of racial persecution in Scorciatoie e raccontini ("Shortcuts and Very Short Stories"): a book of poèmes en prose that possesses «the accent of poetry and the rigor of aphorism». These uncanny and ironical shortcuts raise corrosive doubts about the value attached to a purported monumental memory of the Shoah and bring to attention the existence of genealogical complexity in Italian poetic writing about the Jewish genocide that calls for adequate critical recognition.

The shaping of Italy's cultural response to the legacy of the Jewish extermination followed multiple, oblique and sometimes significantly diverging channels. What kind of critical interaction did literary representations of anti-Jewish persecution have with the substantial erasure of the anti-Semitic past from Italian postwar collective memory? How, and with what effects, did these texts respond to the ideological construction of the «good Italian», as well as to the definition on the part of the Italian Jewish community of a largely «reconciliatory» memory of the genocide? Was the relationship between literary memory and collective memory marked by patterns of convergence, or rather by a radical disjuncture?

A versatile and polyhedral writer, Primo Levi has been also a builder of extensive and articulated hypertexts: macrotextual structures based on relations traced among chronologically and typologically differentiated works. An extraordinary but not certainly
isolated example of this writing in the second degree, organized in complex textual palimpsests, is the one that Marco Belpoliti defined as the «macrotext of the Lager»: an intra- and intertextual network that, starting form If This is a Man, developed
with a rhizomatic structure through different writing and genealogical stratifications that extend up to The Drowned and the Saved.

«L’idea», spiega Marco Belpoliti, è nata da una serie di conversazioni avute fra il 2000 e il 2003 con Davide Ferrario, regista e produttore cinematografico: «rifare insieme il viaggio narrato da Primo Levi nella Tregua», alla ricerca delle «tracce» dello scrittore e «del suo passaggio» all’indomani della fine della Seconda guerra mondiale e del genocidio ebraico . Progetto affascinante e complesso, dal quale sarebbe nato un film documentario, La strada di Levi, presentato alla Festa del Cinema di Roma nel 2006 . Per la sua realizzazione, fra il 2004 e il 2005 Ferrario, Belpoliti e pochi membri della troupe hanno così compiuto quattro viaggi – in aereo, poi auto e pulmino – in cerca di tutte «le località citate, facendo il giro indicato dalla cartina» acclusa al libro di Levi: da Auschwitz al Brennero, attraverso territori un tempo parte dell’Unione Sovietica e oggi divisi fra Ucraina, Bielorussia, Moldavia, e in seguito Romania, Ungheria, Slovacchia e Germania. Il percorso è stato poi concluso da un incontro d’eccezione con Mario Rigoni Stern, intervistato sulle montagne che circondano la sua casa di Asiago . A questa rinarrazione del cammino di Levi se ne affianca tuttavia un’altra. A margine dei sopralluoghi per le riprese, infatti, Belpoliti ha redatto una serie di note: resoconti delle cose e delle persone incontrate, delle «andate e ritorni», appunti apparsi sporadicamente sotto forma di elzeviri o brevi reportage sulle pagine de «La Stampa» e di «Domus». Una volta raccolte e irrobustite da riflessioni personali, queste annotazioni hanno dato vita a un libro il cui titolo, La prova, proviene da un calco tratto ugualmente dalle pagine di Levi.

"Se questo è un uomo" fu pubblicato nel 1947 da una piccola casa editrice torinese, la Francesco De Silva, diretta all’epoca da Franco Antonicelli, a cui Levi si rivolse dopo il rifiuto precedentemente ricevuto da alcuni «grossi editori». Quella approntata per De Silva non è però la versione di "Se questo è un uomo" che leggiamo correntemente. La ripubblicazione del libro di Levi presso Einaudi, allestita nel 1958, fu preceduta da un processo globale di revisione da cui nacque un testo con una fisionomia per diversi aspetti differente da quella originariamente concepita nel ’47. Se si tiene conto di questi estremi – l’«atto di nascita» in Lager, la rifinitura del testo messa a punto a metà anni Cinquanta – la storia compositiva di "Se questo è un uomo" copre così un periodo lungo pressappoco quattordici anni. Essa disegna un percorso straordinariamente vivo, nel quale l’elaborazione del libro si intersecò con quella di altri scritti di Levi animandosi al contempo di dialettiche interne che meritano di essere vagliate e soppesate. Cercherò pertanto di valorizzare di una serie di apporti documentari, alcuni già noti, altri invece inediti o ancora da illuminare sotto un profilo critico, che aiutino a ricostruire la nascita il destino assolutamente «imprevedibili» di questo libro: fra essi, una lettera spedita da Levi alla propria famiglia dal campo per rifugiati di Katowice in Polonia il 6 giugno 1945; tre versioni dattiloscritte della Storia di dieci giorni; il Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per Ebrei di Monowitz, steso a quattro mani da Levi e Leonardo Debenedetti nel 1946 e riscoperto da Alberto Cavaglion unicamente nel 1991; le cinque anticipazioni del libro che uscirono in forma di brevi prose narrative sul periodico vercellese «L’amico del Popolo» nella primavera del 1947; infine una copia dell’edizione De Silva del libro glossata dallo stesso Levi per approntare la revisione definitiva del testo e attualmente depositata presso l’Archivio di Stato di Torino.

In his books Primo Levi employed a remarkable selection of heteroglot linguistic fragments, derived from the languages that the author encountered in his wanderings across Europe: German and Polish, Yiddish and Russian, besides several other Slavic languages of Eastern Europe. The relationship Levi had with these languages is centrifugal and articulated, following an itinerary where linguistic curiosity and anthropological inquiry blend together. The purpose of this paper is to examine the diverse functions of Levi’s plurilingualism and its semantic stratifications, following to this purpose a diachronic approach. In his first works (If This is a Man, The Truce) the hereteroglossia is set in a framework dominated by the Babelic myth, while the experience of the ‘inhuman’ idioms of the universe concentrationnaire results in a harsh expressive mixture that pervades the linguistic representation. However, Levi’s plurilingualism will successively feature more meditated forms of cultural elaboration. In his later works, the focus will shift from languages symbolizing oppression and violence to the oppressed idioms of the Jewish diaspora – the Yiddish and a peculiar Judeo-Pidmontese dialect. The choice of these languages will emphasize thus a function of cultural and memorial recovery, expressed in both the linguistic orchestration of Argon and the recreation of a Yiddish intertextuality that characterizes Levi's last novel, If not now, when?.

The poetic production of Primo Levi has raised the interest of literary scholars only recently. A first
critical perspective has investigated the intertextual relationships existing between Levi’s poems
and other portions of his narrative production, highlighting significant parallels between Levi’s
first work, Se questo è un uomo, and his poems. The essay tries to shift the attention from the
analysis of intertextual resonances to a valorization of the « intrinsic » elements of the collection
Ad ora incerta, related to its thematic organization and its evolution. Thus, it has been possible to
emphasize a gradual process of « desegregation » of the poetic voice taking place in the collections,
resulting in the elaboration of a centrifugal and « uncertain » poetry.

The article outlines the development of Montale’s reception in the English-speaking world. The work draws from previous studies by Sonzogni, Barile, Baldini and Francini, whose conclusions have been reconsidered into a global perspective, covering Montale’s diffusion from the 1930s through the 1960s. Besides the role of M. Praz, T. S. Eliot, I. Brandeis and L. Meneghello in promoting the diffusion of Montale outside Italy, a specific emphasis has been added to other two new channels of the transmission of Montale abroad. One is represented by the role of Renato Poggioli in coordinating most of Montale’s translation appeared in the United States in the postwar period, the other by the influence of several book anthologies of Montale’s poems in translation that have been published in the early 1960s. The analysis of one of these anthologies has revealed the presence of a small group of previously unnoticed textual variants that refer to some poems of La bufera e altro.

To what extent films and documentaries about the Holocaust have been used as implicit reference models for the elaboration of cinematic representations of other genocides, and what have been the outcomes of such visual and cultural intertextuality? In the lack of a comprehensive theorization concerning the relations between Holocaust and genocide cinema, this essay intends to investigate the critical re-appropriation of visual and narrative elements of Holocaust films and documentaries by cinematic representations of genocidal violence in Cambodia and Rwanda. Specific attention is devoted to the appropriation, in Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, of narrative patterns derived from the well-known Holocaust film Schindler’s List and, on the other hand, to the influence that the documentary style of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has had on the work of the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Pahn

The studies so far dedicated to Levi’s linguistic experimentalism
have usually tried to chart a taxonomic map of the plurilingual structures employed by the author, in the attempt to clarify which are the languages used by Levi and where they have been used. However, the complexity that often marks the multilingual backgrounds of works such as If This is a Man, The Truce or The Periodic Table further raises interpretative issues. The problem is represented not only by which are the languages employed by Levi, but also how and why such diverse linguistic horizons are so acutely interwoven. The logics and dynamics that lay behind these heterogeneous language combinations reveal in fact to be extremely articulated and, at least so far, scarcely explored. The specter of Levi’s prose embraces extremely variegated idiomatic universes, ranging from German to the Slavic languages, from Russian to the parlances of the Jewish diaspora. So diverse linguistic sources are suspended between two biographical extremes: the nightmare of the death camp and the subtle thread of a frail but intensely yearned Hebraic tradition. This paper will attempt to chart this rich plurilingual journey, from Levi's initial testimonial works up to his later fiction works, where the author will progressively explore the universe of the languages of the Jewish diaspora.

Motivation represents a key element in the process of second language learning and teaching. Though not being directly related to the cognitive dynamics involved in the learning process, motivation has been often described as the key engine in all activities involved in the learning in a second language. In my personal experience as a teacher, I have usually tried to motivate and engage m  students relying on empathy, enthusiasm and a personal direct involvement in the classroom. Although all these ‘emotional’ elements may prove essential in promoting a positive and engaging environment during the course, I am glad that the study and reflection in these last weeks gave me the opportunity to deepen this particular theme in second language acquisition theory.

Marco Polo’s geography of Asia is a heavily gendered geography: bodies, sexualities and gender hierarchies loom large in the Divisament dou Monde, the “description of the world” Polo composed with the help of Rustichello of Pisa in 1298. Often considered as the literary archetype of a “fetishization of Asian sexuality” that will later permeate the fantasies of European Orientalism (Calabrese, 1997), the Divisament dou Monde nevertheless relates of numerous cultural phenomena ranging from Asian polyandry to the scourge of infanticides, from tales of sexual licentiousness and to admired accounts of the rigorous ascetic practices of Asian religions. Rather than being “typically Oriental”, Polo’s descriptions of feminine and masculine bodies reveal a grid of color lines, and implicitly racialized patterns, that call the attention on the crucial interplay of gender, race and ethnicity at work in one of the most renowned works of European travel writing to Asia.

Il Divisament dou Monde composto nel 1298 da Marco Polo e Rustichello da Pisa costituisce uno dei case studies più ardui e celebri nel campo della filologia romanza. Redatto in un peculiare ibrido linguistico franco-italiano, conservato in oltre centoquaranta manoscritti disseminati in una tradizione testuale eccezionalmente intricata, che spazia dal toscano al veneziano, al francese, al latino, al catalano, al lombardo, la descrizione poliana dell’Asia è stata vittima del suo stesso successo: “bruciata” in una catena di riscritture, traduzioni, adattamenti, manipolazioni e interpolazioni che hanno finito per sommergerla in un “naufragio editoriale” generato dall’onda della fortuna del Milione tra i chierici e i laici dell’Europa tre-quattrocentesca.

Medieval geography experienced a radical change of perspective at the turn of the 14th century. If we look at the two of most famous medieval mappaemundi known to us today, the Hereford world map (England, 1276-1283) and the Catalan Atlas (Iberia, more precisely Aragon, 1375), we can easily visualize the intensity with which European cartographers re-thought and reconceptualized the world they were living in.
Marco Polo’s "Divisament dou Monde" (“The Description of the World”, 1298) is located exactly in the middle of this transformation of medieval literary and conceptual geographies. Starting from a comparison of these two astonishing mappaemundi and the Divisament, whose influence on the Catalan Atlas has been widely documented, this lecture aims to re-assess the cultural significant of Polo’s book in the context of premodern European travel writing. Moving away from an oversimplified reduction of Polo’s narrative to a (stereo)typical account about the “wonders of the East”, I will try to reconsider some most significant and intriguing interpretive issues related to the cultural geographies of medieval Eurasia traced in the "Divisament dou Monde".

In this joint talk, we aim to explore the manifold implications concealed in the double re-appropriation of the literary model of the Odyssey performed by Dante and Primo Levi. We will argue that the figure of Ulysses represents an implicit archetype invoked by both authors to voice their own dramatic experiences of exile and displacement: Dante was expelled from Florence in 1302, writing his most renowned masterpiece in exile. Levi was forcibly deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and made return home only after a perilous journey across Central and Eastern Europe.
Such appropriation of the Homeric archetype, however, provides both authors with a topological structure to conceptualize the double dimension that characterizes their own exile: an experience where a centrifugal movement of displacement is accompanied by a vertical movement of descent towards the “bottom” of an in/human condition.

Knowledge and perception of Asia in both European and Islamic cultures experienced a dramatic shifting point at the beginning of the 13th century. The sudden encounter with the Mongol empire paved the way to an unprecedented wave of transcontinental mobilities along the routes of what, centuries later, Ferdinad von Richthofen would have called the Seidenstraße: a “Silk Road” that linked the Mediterranean basin with the immense territories of Central and East Asia.
In this talk, we will explore the work and biographies of two outstanding figures of travelers and writers who engaged– without ever crossing their paths – in this unprecedented network of transcontinental mobilities: the Venetian Marco Polo (1254-1324) and Ibn Battuta (1304-1377), a Muslim scholar and jurist who, over a period of almost thirty years, ventured across India, Central Asia and Indonesia from his native Tangiers.
Investigating the ambivalent role that literature, language and identity play in the representation of cultural diversity, in this talk we will explore how these two premodern writers mediated perception and knowledge of Asia within the multiform context of a global Middle Ages.

Accanto alla dolorosa fioritura della «letteratura concentrazionaria» la memoria della Shoah nella letteratura italiana del dopoguerra avrebbe altresì generato una serie di traiettorie molteplici che, intrecciate assieme, configurano una «memoria multidirezionale» dalla natura sfaccettata e complessa. Il presente intervento si propone di tratteggiare una mappatura delle risonanze generate dal trauma della persecuzione – e dalla sua colpevole rimozione – nel panorama della letteratura italiana del dopoguerra orientandosi lungo tre macroterminologie critiche.
La prima è incentrata sulla nozione (foucaldiana) di contromemoria. Se l’Italia dopoguerra avrebbe dissennatamente alimentato il mito autoillusorio del «bravo italiano», minimizzando l’entità del coinvolgimento italiano nelle politiche genocidarie del nazismo e di fatto sopprimendo la memoria scabrosa della campagna antisemita promossa dal fascismo, una lettura ragionata di due testi di Giacomo Debenedetti e Giorgio Bassani – Otto ebrei e Una lapide in via Mazzini – sembra invece suggerire l’esistenza d’una contromemoria critica della persecuzione mediata dalla letteratura e volta ad illuminare l’inquietante zone d’ombra dell’opera di complicità prestata dai «carnefici italiani» alla distruzione dell’ebraismo europeo.
Il secondo termine guida è autofinzione. In che modo autori pesantemente compromessi con il regime fascista hanno ripensato, nel dopoguerra, il loro coinvolgimento o la loro compiacenza nei confronti del «regime della menzogna» su cui venne edificata l’ideologia antisemita? Prendendo a modello paradigmatico la complessa parabola intellettuale di Curzio Malaparte, che nel suo Kaputt descrive con un linguaggio volutamente allucinatorio e surreale le persecuzioni dai nazisti perpetrate in Europea orientale, la seconda parte dell’intervento si soffermerà su una serie di manipolazioni di memoria – o di false memorie letterarie – che problematizzando ulteriormente il quadro della rappresentazione del genocidio nella letteratura del dopoguerra italiano.
Da ultimo verranno indagate le risonanze che un nota aporia concettuale evidenziata da Adorno, sintetizzata nel dictum «scrivere una poesia, dopo Auschwitz, è barbaro», avrebbe suscitato nella cultura poetica italiana. Verranno prese in modo particolare in considerazione la «ricostruzione poetica» proposta dalla poesia civile di Salvatore Quasimodo e, dall’altro lato, la vertiginosa poesia-non-poesia con cui, nelle sue Scorciatoie e raccontini, Umberto Saba avrebbe tentato di evidenziare l’«inespiabilità» di un trauma indelebile.

Over the last decades the field of the Holocaust studies has demonstrated not only the capability to define a well-structured sector of knowledge, but also of revitalizing itself by projecting a stock of methodological competences towards constantly renovated areas of investigation. In its reaction to the impact of the Shoah, the Italian cultural system seems thus to be marked by sort of an internal asymmetry, between the lively and manifold response of its intellectual figures - be they writers, philosophers, directors – and on the other hand a scholarly discourse still to be fully developed. the Holocaust and their relevance in the field of Italian studies, as well as for a wider cultural examination..

«I primi giorni di Lager», scrive Primo Levi nei Sommersi e i salvati, «sono rimasti impressi nella memoria come un film sfuocato e frenetico, su cui tuttavia la parola umana non affiorava». Del dramma che fu recitato in quel luogo, delle vittime e degli oppressori che presero parte, Levi avrebbe in seguito offerto uno dei resoconti più lucidi e dettagliati consegnati alla cultura del Novecento. Quella dell’autore di Se questo è un uomo non è però certo una voce isolata: pochi avvenimenti hanno lasciato una memoria così ramificata e problematica come la persecuzione di ebrei e, su un piano diverso, prigionieri politici a opera dell’apparato di dominio nazionalsocialista.
Addentrandosi tuttavia in una lettura sinottica delle opere di autori e testimoni della deportazione – scrittori come Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Jean Améry, Imre Kertsz, Robert Antelme – è possibile osservare come quella che viene generalmente definita come letteratura concentrazionaria, o letteratura della Shoah, sia qualcosa di quanto più lontano da una semplice antologia dell’orrore e della memoria. Infranto il muro del silenzio, l’unicità monolitica di Auschwitz ha generato racconti e risposte intellettuali estremamente diversificate, che è difficile ricondurre entro una prospettiva omogenea. La «vergogna», avrebbe osservato ad esempio Primo Levi, è il sentimento morale più forte e marcato dell’esperienza della vittima nell’universo concentrazionario (si confronti l’omonimo capitolo nei Sommersi e i salvati). Antelme avrebbe avvertito il medesimo sentimento nell’Espèce humaine, consonanza non irrilevante, ma per l’austriaco Jean Améry, internato nello stesso campo di Levi, Buna Monowitz, il sentimento che più propriamente descrive la condizione delle vittime nel sistema concentrazionario è quello del «risentimento», concetto quanto mai differente dalla vergona di Levi a attinto dalla lettura di Nietzsche. «Vergona» e dall’altro lato «risentimento»: come spiegare reazioni umane così difformi? O ancora, per Levi il campo di sterminio rappresentò il luogo ideale dove portare a compimento il crimine ultimo del nazionalsocialismo, la «demolizione di un uomo». Scriverà invece Antelme, deportato politico francese sopravvissuto a Buchenwald e Dachau:
"C’est au moment où le masque a emprunté la figure la plus hideuse, au moment où il va devenir notre figure, qu’il tombe. Et si nous pensons alors cette chose qui, d’ici, est certainement la chose la plus considérable que l’on puisse penser : «Les SS ne sont que des hommes comme nous» […] La puissance du bourreau ne peut être autre qu’une de celles de l’homme : la puissance de meurtre. Il peut tuer un homme, mais il ne peut pas le changer en autre chose". (R. Antelme, L’espèce humaine, Paris, Gallimard, 1957, pp. 240-241)
A partire da questi sondaggi e seguendo un approccio comparatistico, l’intervento cercherà pertanto di porre in evidenza tre questioni di rilievo che, all’interno dell’opera degli scrittori e testimoni della Shoah appena ricordati, hanno generato risposte significativamente differenziate.

The European culture has elaborated a representation of the facts of 1989 and of their historical meaning that is anything but unique and consistent. As all great and dramatic caesuras, 1989 ended up to instigating a bundle of narratives that place those events within various, and at times contradictory, cultural trajectories. Seen from Moscow or from the remote and unstable regions of the Caucasus, the fall of the Soviet empire had for instance a much different significance in comparison to the enthusiastic analyses that Garton Ash wrote about the knocking down of the Iron Curtain.
To explore the fascinating complexity of the narratives of memory that have constructed the ‘story’ of 1989, this paper will thus begin from an analysis of two of the most compelling literary testimonies of those months, authored by European writers who witnessed the demise of Communism from the opposite perspective: looking at west, from the East.
With national borders that had become suddenly fluid in 1989, Ryszard Kapuścińki embarked on an risky and precarious series of travels in what had been, and was on the point of ceasing to be, the Soviet empire. From the Russian-Polish border these wanderings led Kapuścińki progressively out of European Russia, touching remote places from Georgia up to the gulf of Kolyma: Kapuścińki later published the notes taken during these travels in Imperium. On the other hand, in 1991 Tiziano Terzani, one of the most significant figures of Italian journalism in the twentieth century, was on the rivers of the Amur river, at the extreme Eastern border of the Eurasian continent. At the announcement of the dissolution of the USSR, Terzani followed a specular itinerary, from East to West, described in his Buonanotte Signor Lenin (Good bye, Mr. Lenin).
Seen from these perspectives, which reflect in turn the mood of the former citizens of the USSR, bureaucrats or common people, the fall of the Soviet empire acquires a completely different tone.

In 1947, Primo Levi concluded the first manuscript of what would have later become Se questo è un uomo. At that time, the intended title of his book was still I sommersi e I salvati and the text was somewhat different from what we read now with the title of If This Is a Man. Initially refused by the Einaudi publishing house, Levi decided to print the book with the help of a little publisher, Da Silva. Only in 1958 Se questo è un uomo was reprinted to become one of the most important testimonies of the Holocaust. On this occasion however, Levi revised entirely his book, making significant changes in the style and contents of his story: new episodes and a whole new chapter, Iniziazione, were added. How worked Levi in the creation and revision his text and how this latter changed from the original version of I sommersi e I salvati to the 1958 edition?
The paper will attempt to answer this question analyzing published and unpublished materials of Primo Levi’s writing laboratory, including his personal copy of the 1947 edition of the book, containing manuscript and typescript corrections and currently kept at the Archivio di Stato of Turin. It will thus be possible to retrace the evolution of the project of Se questo è un uomo from the initial drafts of the Rapporto igienico-sanitario sul campo di concentramento di Buna-Monowitz, recovered only in 1990, up to the definitive edition of the book.

Primo Levi and Mario Rigoni Stern, Italian writers, were united by a profound friendship. Both suffered two of the darkest tragedies of twentieth century: the Shoah, in Levi's case, and the disastrous war on the Eastern Front in January 1943, after the Stalingrad battle, for Rigoni Stern. This paper aims at establishing, if possible, a comparison among the divergent responses that these two authore elaborated to their traumantic experiences.

Conference paper for the 21st South-East Conference on Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cinema on the plurilingual experimentalism of Primo Levi. A revised version of the presentation has been published in the proceedings of the conference.

In recent years the cultural predicaments of Italy’s Oriental fantasies have attracted sustained critical attention: in the wake of this growing interest, the brilliant collection of essays gathered by Beatrice Falcucci, Emanuele Giusti and Davide Trentacoste offers a much-welcomed contribution. Probing the multifaceted relations that linked modern Italy to Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Re-Reading Travellers to the East unearths a wide spectrum of intellectual experiences ranging from Giovanni Gentile’s involvement in the Istituto Italiano per il Medio e Estremo Oriente to Fascist attempts to (re)claim the “Italianness” of Marco Polo, from the exploits of colonial architecture in the Dodecanese islands to an overview of the (largely unmapped) history of Italian travel writing to Iran. A solid critical aim holds together the versatile mosaic of critical forays included in the volume: to deconstruct the multiple “re-readings” through which post-Unification Italy has sought to resuscitate the “mythical” halo of a tradition of medieval and early modern travelers.

The publication of this thought-provoking collection of essays, Pop Shoah? Immaginari del genocidio ebraico, edited by Francesca Recchia Luciani and Claudio Vercelli, brings an original and intentionally provocative perspective to the Italian critical debate over the memory of the Holocaust. The critical trajectory of the volume seeks to present the reader with a first survey of those dynamics of banalization of memory that, within the specific territory of Italian culture, increasingly put at risk an effective 'comprehension' of the historical and cultural significance of the genocide.