From Forgetting to Remembering – Delving Into the Memory of Italy’s Foibe Massacres

By guest writer Ava Abtahi

How does the memory of historical events, historical trauma even, change as a consequence of contemporary political debates? And how do they influence the construction and re-construction of a national identity? The history of the Foibe Massacres in Italy, and how these atrocities were subsequently instrumentalized for various political reasons, may grant us some insight into these processes, and perhaps even serve as an example of what heritage institutions may expect from such re-interpretations of history in a time of ‘alternative facts’.

The Foibe Massacres were a series of mass killings in the long-disputed borderlands between Italy and Yugoslavia, starting from the 1943 Italian Armistice with the Allies until the end of World War II in 1945. Yugoslav Communist partisans, sometimes aided by Italian Communists and anti-Fascists, disposed of victims’ bodies in ‘foibe’, an Italian term for naturally occurring deep karst cavities. Victims included  “Fascist and Nazi military personnel, Fascist officials, and anyone considered to be a threat to the developing communist regime, including Slovene and Croat landowners and industrialists” (Zamparutti 2019: 25, 26).

For several decades after the Second World War, there was a “submersion” of the Foibe Massacres, both for geopolitical and national reasons (McConnell 2019: 131).  On one hand, the Allies, who during the Yugoslav occupation of Italy collected a report about the massacres, dropped further investigations so as not to exacerbate tensions in sensitive borderlands of the newly emerging Cold War world. On the other, the Italian government felt that pursuing justice for the victims could potentially backfire, bringing to the forefront the ethnic cleansing and the harsh Italianization campaign inflicted on Yugoslavia (McConnell 2019: 131). Even more importantly, as Vanni d’Alessio explains, “an antifascist historical narrative prevailed in Italian historiography” focusing on “the heroic narrative of the Italian anti-Fascist resistance” and on the building of the myth of Italians as brava gente (good people) (d’Alessio 2012: 304; McConnell 2019: 131, 132). Thus, to complement this narrative, an oversimplified categorization of the victims occurred. They were identified as isolated Fascists, not representative of the Italian brava gente, who met their fate for their wrongdoings. 

As a result, historian Gianni Oliva elucidates that the Foibe Massacres became included in the regional memory, but were overlooked in the Italian national collective memory (Oliva 2002: 6). The story of the Foiba of Basovizza near Trieste, one of the major scenes of these tragic events, is indicative of this split memory. The site was monumentalized in 1959 but held only a local significance as the focus of celebrations by nationalist civic organizations.

However, the international and national situation that determined the silencing of the memory of the foibe changed in the 1980s and 1990s, ultimately leading to the elaboration of a significantly different narrative.  On a geopolitical level, Tito’s death and the Yugoslav Wars (1990-2001) resulted in the terms ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ becoming frequently deployed by the Western European public, bringing back the stereotype of Communist Slavs as “wild animals” (Zamparutti 2019: 32; Wolff 2006: 112). This legitimized the nationalistic interpretation, once local and marginal, of the foibe as the manifestation of Slavic Communist fury against the Italian brava gente. 

It was only with the rise of the Italian right and far-right parties that the foibe memories and traumas eventually became “central to the construction of public history and memorial culture in Italy” (McConnell 2019: 132, 133).

When Silvio Berlusconi’s ‘Forza Italia’ party and his far-right allies of ‘Alleanza Nazionale’ began gaining prominence in the 1990s, during the Second Italian Republic, they started addressing the Foibe Massacres, developing a new narrative opposite to the one elaborated in the years after the Second World War (Cabrero and Sierp 2024: 1). A new oversimplification in the characterization of the victims took place: they were now identified as innocent Italians, victims/martyrs often described “in Christ-like terms” and “as having been sacrificed for the sins of others” by Tito’s Communist partisans only because they wanted to live as Italians on their ancestors’ land (Ballinger 2003: 141).

Emphasizing that the perpetrators are Tito’s Communists and the victims/martyrs are Italian brava gente is beneficial to the far-right’s agenda for two reasons. Firstly, it encourages the construction of a strong Italian patriotic identity which is central to right-wing ideology. In addition, this narrative implies that Communism is as bad as, if not worse than, Fascism, a maneuver used to divert Italians’ attention away from Fascist atrocities to those of Communism and so, deflecting the blame of far-right actions to far-left ones, as argued by some scholars. The final act of this instrumentalization of the foibe memory by the Italian far-right occurred in 2004 when, mainly thanks to ‘Alleanza Nazionale’ and ‘Forza Italia’ deputies, a law was passed to annually commemorate foibe victims on February 10th, entitled ‘Giorno del Ricordo’ (Remembrance Day), drawing a parallel with the ‘Giorno della Memoria’ (Memory Day) dedicated to the Holocaust. Accordingly, the Foiba of Basovizza, which in 1992 had acquired the status of a national monument, became the national stage for the ‘Giorno del Ricordo’. On this occasion, speeches are recited by local, regional and national actors such as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. In her speech on February 10th, 2024, Meloni emphasized once again on the national stage that the Foibe Massacres are “an all-Italian story” and the victims are patriots who decided “to be Italian twice, Italians by birth and Italians by choice”.^[1]See Meloni’s commemoration speech here. The specific section I referred to is 32 minutes and 12 seconds and 28 minutes and 13 seconds into the video, respectively: … Continue reading

Ultimately, the memory of the Foibe Massacres has evolved from a regional to a national focus. In fact, Meloni announced during the Foibe Massacres commemoration on February 10th, 2024, plans for a ‘Museo Nazionale del Ricordo’ (National Museum of Remembrance) in the capital Rome, rather than in Trieste.^[2]See Meloni’s commemoration speech here. The specific section I referred to is 32 minutes and 18 seconds into the video: … Continue reading The foibe memory’s construction aligns with some of Aleida Assmann’s ‘strategies of repression’: externalization, suppression, concealing and forging (Assmann 2016).

Until the 1980s, anti-Fascist narratives suppressed and concealed memories of the massacres and redirected attention through externalization, leading to a national denial. Since the 1990s, externalization and forging, once again, though in an opposite direction, have reshaped the foibe memory, selectively recognizing victims and perpetrators to construct a nationalist and patriotic identity favoring the far-right. An instrumentalization of memory was thus produced.

An anthropological, bottom-up approach can help bring back the real victims’ voices and foster balanced perspectives regionally and nationally. Recognizing that victims included more than Italians and perpetrators more than (Communist) Yugoslavs enables a more nuanced understanding. Michael Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memory’ supports this, arguing that memories should coexist and enrich collective understanding rather than be in competition (Rothberg 2009).

Bibliography

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• Ballinger, Pamela 2003. History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Cabrero, Lorena Ortiz and Aline Sierp 2024. “Memory, post-fascism and the far-right”. Italian Political Science Review/Rivista  Italian di Scienza Politica, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2024.12.
• D’Alessio, Vanni 2012.” Dynamics of Identity and Remembrance in Trieste Esodo, Foibe and the  Complex Memory of Italy’s Oriental Border”. In: Erna Matanovic, Andelko  Milardovic, Davor Paukovic, Davorka Vidovic, Nikolina Jozanc and Viseslav Raos (eds.), Confronting the Past: European Experiences. Zagreb: Political Science Research Centre Zagreb. Pp. 285-315.
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• Governo Italiano Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri 2024. “Giorno del Ricordo, l’intervento del Presidente Meloni alla cerimonia presso la  Foiba di Basovizza”. https://www.governo.it/it/articolo/giorno-del-ricordo-lintervento-del-presidente-meloni-alla-cerimonia-presso-la-foiba-di, accessed on 28 October 2024.
• McConnell, Elysa 2019. “International Disputes in the Italian-Yugoslavian Borderlands”. Les Cahiers Sirice  22(1): 117-134. https://doi.org/10.3917/lcsi.022.0117.
• Oliva, Gianni 2002. Foibe: Le stragi negate degli italiani della Venezia Giulia e dell’Istria. Mondadori.
• Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional memory: remembering the Holocaust in the age of  decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Wolff, Larry 2006. “Revising Eastern Europe: Memory and the Nation in Recent Historiography”. The Journal of Modern History 78(1): 93-118.  https://doi.org/10.1086/499796.
• Zamparutti, Louise 2019. “The Basovizza Monument: Constructing Memory and Identity”. Research in Social  Change, 11(3): 25-38. https://doi.org/10.2478/rsc-2019-0013.