The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010 by Gordon Robert;

Author:Gordon, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

§9 Transnational Lines

This book is a study in the shape and substance of a particular field of Holocaust culture within one European nation, with its local history of complicity with and suffering from the Nazi genocide, and with its local set of responses to both its own role and the wider historical phenomenon of the Holocaust. It belongs in a well-established field, as noted in Chapter 1, of studies of single national histories of responses to the Holocaust. Taken together, this field of work gives us a patchwork panorama of the supranational phenomenon of the Holocaust’s aftermath, how it had an impact upon and played out in an array of national settings and how, with variations and parallels, over the long postwar era it worked its way into a global, cultural consciousness. Within this wide perspective, certain figures, events, images and moments from one or other single country might be said to have ‘turned global’, to have become pivotal in that globally circulating supranational cultural field, transmitted through mass media and absorbed by millions across many countries. Instances of such pivotal cultural phenomena were used to build up the stock chronology of Holocaust response offered at the start of Chapter 1 (the camp liberation photos and newsreels, Anne Frank’s diary, Eichmann’s trial, Holocaust, Schindler’s List, etc.). The list might be supplemented by other lists of less vastly penetrating but more ‘prestigious’, intellectually influential, elite cultural phenomena, again each produced within a single national context, and taken up and spread into the supranational. To this ‘high’ list might belong Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and the canon of survivor-writers, including Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowksi, Etty Hillesum, Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz, and others. Such figures are imported into local, national fields, just as, conversely, local presences filter out into the supranational field. In the Italian case, Primo Levi, Benigni’s film Life Is Beautiful, Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis and De Sica’s film of it, Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties and others add up to a perhaps surprising contribution from a country where, numerically at least, the impact of the Holocaust on the ground was relatively small.

To proceed in this taxonomic way is reductive, but it undoubtedly reflects a real dynamic that is perhaps peculiar to vast-scale historical events, to events which are enacted across national borders as they happen—here, millions of victims deported across national borders, targeted by ethnicity, in some sense irrespective of national origin and identity—and which become ‘world historical’ as they are related, narrated and historicised thereafter. From this global purview comes also the capacity for events such as the Holocaust to operate not only supranationally, in historical and cultural terms, but also as universal phenomena, with lessons to impart about, say, the nature of mankind, the human mind and the human body, about the workings of violence, guilt, morality and responsibility (and so on), an array of questions which, as we have seen, has occupied a great deal of important reflection on this Event, and which

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