Abstract
Despite the wide use of testimonies in collective memory of violent historical and political events, proper psychosocial studies addressing the process of becoming a testimony remain scarce. In the context of the massacre of Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, this study examines the biographical transition from victims to testimonies of people directly or indirectly involved in the event. Through the use of semi-structured interviews, 13 biographical stories were collected and analysed through qualitative methodology. Out of the four biographical transitions evinced by the results of this study and besides the scenario of a victim not becoming a testimony, the results highlight three different biographical transitions: the immediate transition from victim to testimony, transition as awareness, and transition as a process of knowledge. These three biographical transitions are summarized in three types of identity: ‘heroic testimony’, ‘civic testimony’ and ‘epistemic testimony’. The results are hence discussed in the light of the community practices of collective memory and psychosocial research on the testimonies.
According to scientific literature, a witness can be present in various scenarios: as eyewitness, attending episodes of urban emergencies (Darley and Batson, 1973); as testimony (or juridical witness), called on to testify in a trial (Lipton, 1977; Loftus, 1979; Zamperini and Menegatto, 2015); and as people involved in an event of major social impact, such as natural disasters (Drake, 2013; O’Byrne, 2011; Parker et al., 2006) and their resulting commemorations (Su, 2012).
In addition, the figure of a witness is studied in relation to historical developments: in this context, the testimony is defined as a person who concretely attended, was present at, or experienced a historical fact and therefore is able to give testimony. However, when it comes to contemporary history, the importance of testimony comes from its moral message, meaning that it enables us to understand historical facts (Tozzi, 2012). From what concerns the transmission of a traumatic experience instead, what the testimony says becomes a symbolic mediator between the past and the present (Zamperini and Menegatto, 2013). There are actually plenty of cases in which the testimony is trusted to artistic re-elaborations such as painting, music or narrative, as in the famous case of the writer Primo Levi who survived the concentration camps (Rowland, 2008).
Since the decade following the Second World War, the role of testimonies became the main topic of systematic research, thus comprehensively renewing the field of studies on collective and autobiographical memory of political outbursts (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2009).
If after the war, the significance of the testimony was primarily linked to the individual experience, then Adolf Eichmann’s trial (Wieviorka, 1998; Zamperini, 2013) constituted a turning point. In the courtroom, the survivors of the Holocaust were considered testimonies not only in order to understand the historical truth but also for the purpose of building a collective memory (Brants and Klep, 2013; Chaitin, 2014). Actually, this was the occasion when concepts such as Pedagogy and Transmission of trauma appeared for the first time.
During the Eichmann trial, the Attorney General Gideon Hausner (1967) explicitly pointed out that the main purpose of the hearing (in court) was to tell a story and make a moral judgment. The recipients of that morality were those young Jews who had to develop awareness of what happened and, at the same time, take that responsibility in the construction of the new State of Israel. Leaving aside the legal disputes on his capture and the conviction to death penalty, the Eichmann trial constituted the first grand narrative of the Shoah (Burgio and Zamperini, 2013; Weitz, 2009). This precisely was because, compared to the previous process of Nuremberg, Hauser, with a surprising decision, gave a voice and face to the Jewish Martyrology and its Heroization, by choosing not to refer to historical documents but to the testimony of the witnesses. The men and women who survived the Nazi massacre filed past the glass cage imprisoning Eichmann, sat down and narrated first-hand what had happened. The importance and centrality of the witnesses’ speeches emerges even from the title of the introductory report of the Attorney General: ‘6,000,000 Accusers’ (Hausner, 1961). Substantially, Adolf Eichmann’s trial inaugurated the era of testimonies (Wieviorka, 1998): hence the social demand for testimony to create a memory archive (documentaries, video interviews, diaries, film) for the new generations (High and Zembrzycki, 2012; Kraft, 2006).
However, testimonies grew into a proper field of research, defined as evidence of social massacres (Feierstein, 2014), which was much wider than the Holocaust and that went beyond the Holocaust itself. For example, this term is used with reference to the genocide in Rwanda (Barnett, 2002; Ibreck, 2010; Zamperini and Bettini, 2015), the war in Bosnia (Halilovich, 2011) and political violence in South America (Andermann, 2015; Robben, 2012).
The scientific literature on social massacres can be divided into three subgroups. The first one analyses the testimonies of survivors in front of international tribunals for war crimes and aims to reconstruct reality as experienced by the various human groups during traumatic events (Funkeson et al., 2011; McDermott, 2013). The second subgroup refers instead to evidences gathered in psychosocial centres through the use of psychotherapy of testimony, dedicated to political refugees and survivors of political violence (Igreja et al., 2004; Luebben, 2003; Skjelsbæk, 2006; Weine et al., 1998). Finally, the third subgroup specializes on written or audio-video recorded testimonies of survivors, gathered in order to build concrete memory archives in order to pass on the historical truth of violence to future generations (Gigliotti, 2007; Gomez Barris, 2010; Weine and Laub, 1995).
Another area of research which involves testimony is terrorism. Notably, the event that most attracted the researchers’ attention was undoubtedly the attack of the Twin Towers on September 11th of 2001 (Howie, 2012). The literature at our disposal ranges from the collection of written accounts of the users of social Web sites (Cohn et al., 2004) to the analysis of possible modifications of the memory through collection of evidences in subjects with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Dekel and Bonanno, 2013), patients with Alzheimer’s disease, patients with mild cognitive impairment and healthy older adults (Budson et al., 2004).
In this brief introduction, it can be noted how the scientific literature uses both terms ‘eyewitness’ and ‘testimony’: sometimes interchangeably. We have until now summarized the various theoretical positions with reference to the terminology used by the various quoted authors without a lexical clarification which, however, now becomes essential: consequently, from now on, we will use only the word ‘testimony’. Although we risk to make a confused and indiscriminate use of the word ‘testimony’, this term means much more than just ‘eyewitness’. We need to offer a neutral point of view, like a third party who narrates the facts with the aim of resolving a fight or contributing to a legal dispute.
To establish a judicial truth in a tribunal, the forum has a central role. Hence, it is most obvious that eye-witnessing serves to prove the correspondence between what happened and what has been told.
The testimony, however, should not be confused with those traditional forms of storytelling that take a full correspondence between history and memory. The witness acts in society not with the aim of providing an accurate reconstruction of historical events, but rather with the aim of promoting the repercussions of these historic events on the existential, psychological and ethical plan (Margalit, 2002). Therefore, the witness deals with the human struggle to understand extreme forms of violence by making them meaningful, and trying to share the experience. Relieved from its former dimension of strictly private business and reconfigured as a social affair, the witness becomes the subject of a new pedagogy: it transmits its knowledge of the events and develops a transference to the audience (Felman and Laub, 1992). Therefore in our article, we will use the term ‘testimony’ with this meaning.
Specifically, the figure of the testimony will be analysed in the context of a particular form of terrorism carried out in Italy in the 1970s: the stragismo (a word derived from strage, meaning a massacre). Stragismo was a terrorist practice conceived by neo-fascist groups: it mainly consisted of placing bombs in public places (such as banks, squares, stations, or on trains) in order to cause as many deaths and injuries as possible. The purpose of this form of political violence was the creation of a climate of fear and tension that would have led (in theory) to a coup d’etat, or an authoritarian restoration of the public order so as to obstruct the rise of consent of the Italian Communist Party. Among the numerous terrorist incidents that occurred in those years, the massacre of ‘Piazza della Loggia’ in Brescia is still at the core of the legal disputes and, unfortunately, the official memory of the incident is still affected by omissions and distortions which make it difficult to transmit the events to future generations.
In the next section, we will illustrate the political and social scenery in which the massacre occurred, while then proceeding with the presentation of the research.
The massacre of ‘Piazza della Loggia’ in Brescia
On 28 May 1974, at 10:12 am in Loggia Square, Brescia, a bomb exploded during an antifascist demonstration killing 8 people and injuring more than a hundred. The victims were Giulietta Banzi Bazoli, aged 34 years, a teacher; Livia Bottardi Milani, 32, a teacher; Clementina Calzari, 31, a teacher; Euplo Natali, 69, retired; Luigi Pinto, 25, a teacher; Bartolomeo Talenti, 56, a labourer; Alberto Trebeschi, 37, a teacher; and Vittorio Zambarda, 60, retired.
The massacre of ‘Piazza della Loggia’ situates itself in a period of great political and social changes and strong trade union struggles, and also of numerous clashes between right-winged and left-winged groups (Ginsborg, 1989).
As a matter of fact, the Italian historical period which goes from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s was characterized by a radicalization of political antagonism which resulted in street violence, armed struggle and terrorism. This period is generically known as ‘Years of lead’, coined by the Italian translation of the title of the famous movie Die bleierne Zeit by Margarethe von Trotta. The most famous and active left-wing armed group of this period were the Red Brigades whose most recalled and striking terrorist action was the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. The former Italian Prime Minister was seized (after the murder of all his body guards) on 16 March 1978 and executed on 9 May. As many researchers have pointed out (Della Porta, 1990; Moss, 1989), left-wing terrorism became often associated with the actions of the Red Brigades and thus synonymous with ‘Years of lead’. The Red Brigades gained a central role not only for research but also thanks to the multiple forms of representation of the political violence in the Italian context: cinema, literature, media and popular culture (Antonello and O’Leary, 2009).
It has to be pointed out, however, that within this historical-political period, and connected with the phenomenon of the left-wing terrorism, there existed another phenomenon related to the neo-fascist terroristic activities, called stragismo (Ferraresi, 1988; Weinberg and Eubank, 1988). Internationally, the political climate of ‘Cold War’ prevailed (this was the period when Italy joined North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)): at the same time, however, within the nation, both the neo-fascist subversive forces and the conservative ones allied in the shared goal of destroying the Italian democratic institutions (born from the Resistance), by turning them into an authoritarian system. The discovery of plans of several coups attempts aimed at the subversion of the democratic order confirms this assumption (Borracetti, 1986).
Among them the Piano Solo of 1964 was a military plan drawn up with the aim of giving full power to the Police in Italy; the Golpe Borghese in 1970 refers to the plan for a coup organized for occupying the Ministry of the Interior and of Defence, take control of mass media (radio and television) and deport political opponents who sat in Parliament at that time; the Golpe Bianco, instead, had the purpose to hinder the rise to power of the Italian Communist Party and establish a presidential republic (Pacini, 2014). Finally, in 1973, the Italian judiciary, through a judicial inquiry, identified a neo-fascist organization called Rosa dei Venti. The investigation allowed them to reconstruct the history of this secret organization that, with the support of some military units and an international agreement signed within the NATO, would have planned a new coup attempt. Moreover, the presence of some corrupted branches among the intelligence that supported Italian neo-fascist groups and similar subversive activities was discovered (Franzinelli, 2008).
In this socio-political and institutional atmosphere, on 12 December 1969, a bomb exploded in the hall of the National Agricultural Bank in Piazza Fontana in Milan. A total of 17 people died and about a hundred were injured. This was the first massacre Italy went through at the turn of the 1970s. Four days later, the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli fell from a fourth floor window of a Police station in Milan and died. He had been previously wrongly accused of the massacre of Piazza Fontana.
In the months before the massacre of ‘Piazza della Loggia’, the city and the province of Brescia were forced to face many bombings and assassination attempts. In one of them, a young neo-fascist lost his life. He was driving a scooter, carrying a bomb: the bomb exploded on the way and tore him apart. As a reaction, the Unions and the Permanent Committee decided to convene an antifascist demonstration. On 28 May, the protesters gathered in Loggia Square and there the bomb exploded.
Immediately, by order of the police and with gross negligence, the scene of the massacre was completely cleaned. Fire hydrants cleared the streets from any trace of blood, human rests and fragments of the bomb, scattering them all around the place and causing great damage to the investigation in tracing the identity of the terrorists. However, it was not possible to ascertain any specific responsibility for the police’s behaviour. As a result, given the communalities between the police’s intervention in Brescia and the modalities that occurred few years earlier in the massacre of Piazza Fontana in Milan, citizens and left Parties became even more suspicious of the actions of the police and institutions of the Italian State. They appeared to them particularly lenient with such armed groups of extreme right, and not very committed to ending the series of massacres and assassinations. The strike that had been interrupted by the outbreak of the bomb was extended for 24 hours and the event moved to the adjacent Piazza della Vittoria. Factories and city schools were occupied and numerous meetings were held there. That day, Brescia became a militarized city. This led to a 3-day mass mobilization organized by political parties, associations and citizens awaiting the funeral of the victims. The police service was replaced by the labour movement, which was in charge of surveillance in Piazza della Loggia and the nearby streets. On 31 May, over 300,000 people attended the funeral of the victims. During the ceremony, the former Italian Prime Minister, Mariano Rumor, and the former President of the Republic, Giovanni Leone were bitterly contested by the crowd and the relatives of the victims. This episode of protest and indignation represents a deep rift that occurred between civil society and the Italian Government (Dondi, 2015).
The trial for the massacre of Piazza della Loggia lasted for more than 40 years. During this period, there have been many processes, many defendants and several judgments. The initial investigations focused on those who materially placed the bomb, and then spread to those who had planned and commanded the massacre. The knowledge of the event was based on the investigations conducted by the judicial police and on the several technical and scientific ones; then the information provided by members of the imprisoned neo-fascist groups was taken into consideration. Finally, the investigation was broadened to include also sources of information related to other surveys on episodes of right-wing terrorism in Italy. However, the use of side-tracking constituted a main obstruction to all these attempts to identify the perpetrators of the massacre and to understand their motivations (Ferraresi, 1995). Through a systematic and deliberate distortion of information, including the one coming from intelligence’s corrupted branches, the ascertainment of legal truth was continuously delayed further in time despite the hundreds of thousands of documents: this is what makes of the Brescia massacre one of the biggest trials for terrorism ever celebrated in the Italian history. Over the years, several defendants were acquitted, some died, making it increasingly difficult to reconstruct the events. We had to wait until 2012 to have a ruling which identified the organization of far-right Ordine Nuovo as the politically and materially responsible terrorist group for the massacre, and until 2015 for a judgment that established the criminal liability of two of its members: Carlo Maria Maggi and Maurizio Tramonte. Despite this outcome, the constant side-tracking and slowness of the process (41 years) prevented shedding light on the massacre, thus creating a sense of mistrust and discontent among survivors and the relatives of the victims.
The trial of Piazza della Loggia is one among many held in Italy to verify the truth about political killings, which, however, failed to bring justice to the victims and to the citizens’ desire of knowledge. When a long process continuously fails to bring full clarity about events, it inevitably leads to confusion among the public and nurtures opposing views. This scenario clearly reflects the controversial history of that era.
Concretely speaking, Italian historians failed to create a collective memory of the 1970s’ paths of terror (Foot, 2009), and in many cases, their interpretation of events was even contested. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge that there are many different ways of telling the same incident (Hajek, 2013). Periodic public commemorations are occasions when these opposing memories emerge through complaints and protests (Tota, 2004). The lack of certain legal findings makes the reconstruction and transmission of memory of terrorism even more complex. Furthermore, the choice by the Italian Government to name the day of Aldo Moro’s assassination as the National Day for the victims of terrorism shows the political intent to condemn certain forms of terrorism more strongly than others. Actually, as demonstrated by the analysis of Hajek (2010), in Italian history books, the history of neo-fascist terrorism (stragista) is partially obscured by one of the left-wing terrorist groups, so that the ‘Years of Lead’ are more easily remembered than the ‘Strategy of Tension’ (the name which defines right-wing terrorism). In this situation, the associations of the families of the victims, and especially the victims (meaning the people who were at the attack and remained physically unharmed or only injured), and the relatives of murdered and/or injured people who later became testimonies carried out an important role for the transmission of memory of the massacres.
Research
The overall aim of this research is to analyse the biographical transition from victim to testimony following a political massacre. By ‘biographical passage’ we mean a passage configured as a turning point (Clausen, 1990; McAdams et al., 2001), which requires the person to be significantly different from what he or she used to be until then. Since the bombing was a terrorist attack which had a sudden and violent impact on the people, in our case it constitutes a turning point which may introduce unexpected profound discontinuity in the life cycle. In addition to that, our particular aim is to include in the process of transition from victim to testimony the analysis of the role, if any, played by the duty of memory and the sense of responsibility towards the new generations.
Method
Participants
The research for participants was conducted with the cooperation of the House of Memory of Brescia, an association that currently maintains the largest archive of documents concerning the massacre of Piazza della Loggia. Initially, a list was drawn up of 25 names of people involved in the massacre, directly or indirectly, who were still living. Later, the following selection criteria were applied: the participants needed to be (a) a relative of the victims who died in the massacre, (b) a relative of the victims injured in the massacre or (c) a victim of the bomb blast, leaving wounds and/or psychological trauma. The application of these criteria resulted in a final list of 18 people. The purpose of this research and the methodology adopted was presented to each participant. At the end of this procedure, 13 people joined the research, while 5 people, for reasons of health and personal commitments, decided not to participate. 1
The 13 participants included 6 females and 7 males with an age range from 48 to 80 years (mean age 64.1). In all, 6 of them were relatives of victims who died during the explosion of the bomb (while a relative of a victim who died was also present in the square during the outbreak), 2 were relatives of victims injured by the bomb, 2 were people injured by the bomb and 3 were attending the demonstration on the day of the bomb. In addition to a gender distinction (M vs F), the participants can be divided into ‘dichotomous categories’: ‘mourning versus non-mourning’ (6 participants suffered a loss in the family and 7 suffered no loss); ‘present in the square versus not present in the square’ (6 respondents were physically present at the site of the blast while 7 were not present); ‘political commitment versus no political commitment’ (7 participants were characterized by a political commitment in associations and/or parties, and 6 participants were not politically active).
Procedure
The data were collected through a semi-structured interview which was built to cover comprehensively the full range of issues identified in the scientific literature on the figures of the testimony and turning points. In particular, the topics covered in the interview were the following: the autobiography of the person and the socio-political role at the time of massacre, the social and political context before the massacre, the social and political context after the massacre, the relationship between collective memory and autobiographical memory, the memory and the effort of remembering, the emotions of survivors and/or family members, the transition from victim to testimony, the significance of the testimony, the duty of remembrance and commemoration practices, the civil and social responsibility of the testimony, the testimony in front of the new generations, the legal processes and social justice, the foundation of the organization House of Memory, and the role of archives as support and extension of the individual memory. The questions were formulated in order to solicit personal accounts, narratives of episodes, self-descriptions, memories, opinions and evaluations. In addition to that, interviews were preceded and accompanied by the analysis of archival documents, observations and informal talks during the brief stay at the House of Memory of Brescia. The analysis of archival data was used to consider new matters and/or to take into consideration aspects possibly overlooked by the existent scientific literature on the figure of the witness. In order to respect the rights of the people involved in the research, all respondents signed a written consent and were informed about the code of ethics adopted to protect their privacy. At the beginning of each interview, we made it clear to the participants that they could withdraw at any time. Each interview lasted for about 2 hours. All interviews were videotaped. First, we transcribed interviews verbatim and, subsequently, we coded textual data through the instrument for qualitative analysis, Atlas.ti. The encoders – the two researchers and an external encoder – worked independently at the categorization of the interviews. Categorical memberships of participants were considered to analyse whether and how membership in one category rather than another could have influenced the transition from victim to testimony.
Results
In this section, we report the results obtained from the analysis of the turning points. Results show that four types of biographical transitions developed starting from the event of massacre. To remain true to participants’ accounts as expressed in their own words, each turning point will be illustrated through direct quotes from interviews. Table 1 summarizes all types of biographical transitions according to the gender and peculiarity of the participants.
Biographical transition.
M: Male; F: Female.
Immediate transition from victim to testimony
The transition from victim to testimony as immediate experience was antecedent to the socio-political individual commitment (in this specific case, socio-political individual commitment concerns the membership of a political party of the Italian left-wing) and associated with the mourning of family members. Without experiencing any period of latency between the events and starting from the moment immediately after the bomb, the suffering is clearly understandable and immediately transformed into social action. The conversion of suffering in public memory is expressed by two testimonies in this way:
I believe to have been facilitated by an experience of political commitment (…) there was a sign written immediately after the massacre whose the title said: ‘Do not call them victims, but aware fallen’; and this is a crucial factor because it takes you to say that those people, certainly affected by the bomb, were people who had decided in full conscience to take the streets that day to protest (…) I have started from the principle that yes, I am a survivor of that massacre and it was right to tell the experience, but I should not lock up this story in my personal experience, but try to understand it and transform it. Otherwise, if you do not do it this way, in my opinion, it remains locked inside the victim and I think that’s the worst thing (…) only a processed suffering can be output and transformed into public memory. Let’s say it was almost a natural thing (…), probably everything started after that fact. Maybe, I would have needed more time. However, in this case, it was the natural course of the events (…) always considering that since I worked, I had not that much spare time to take part in certain things.
Transition from victim to testimony as awareness
The transition from victim to testimony as awareness requires a latency characterized by a path of personal processing of and suffering from the incident. This transition is associated first with defensiveness and then with acceptance. Only after having been through the discomfort of the relationship with the ‘self-victim’ and the ‘relative of the victim’, it becomes possible to open up to the world by warning it of the duty of testimony, especially younger generations. Two respondents, the first a survivor of the massacre and the second a relative of a victim, illustrate this realization as follows:
Before, I could not do it, now I understand that I can do it (…) Now, in the last few months, I thought it is a civic duty to testify (…) I think it’s important to have a meeting between the population and the testimonies. When I managed to do that short speech at the school and saw the attention of the guys, huh, I thought: it’s something I have to do, now I have to do it, I know that many years have passed but maybe it was meant to be, meant to be that way, I had to wait for such a long time.
This kind of biographical transition turns out to be the most prevalent (6 people of the 13 respondents), where the female gender is the most represented (4) and where it results in a direct and personal socio-political commitment in the community the participants belong too.
Transition from victim to testimony as a process of knowledge
The transition from victim to testimony as a process of knowledge instead does require a latency period. If the transition as an awareness latency was related exclusively to a troubled individual processing of the event, in the case of transition as a process of knowledge, latency is mainly collective and linked to the social construction of memory, in particular to the development of an association dedicated to collect and preserve the memory of the massacre. This transition is linked to the activities of the ‘House of Memory’. Thanks to the association, the victim becomes a testimony to contribute to the knowledge of the events, but still without a consensual truth. In the words of an interviewee,
With the ‘House of Memory’ we enter, it seems to me, in a stage that is completely different and we go from a dimension of mere reminder into a logic where memory is a process of knowledge. After having obscured my memories for a certain period of time, even if I didn’t want to forget, however, […] when they set up the ‘House of Memory’, a few years later, although not right away […] I realized that it was required to meet students in schools or go to meetings to bear testimony […] and I regained the pleasure, let’s say, for the commitment to bring testimony. I think it’s an opportunity given by the ‘House of Memory’.
A transition which engages the individual in the new narrative of events gives the testimony a new and important ‘historiographical’ role within social communication. It is a new status, but it is also problematic because of the risk for the narration of events to result in a sort of ‘epistemic tyranny’ of the testimony. There is a mention of this in an interview:
If before there was a risk that the story was exclusively rebuilt by the mass media from the point of view of the guilty, now instead it begins to occur a shift towards the point of view of the victim/testimony. This is undoubtedly important, because it brings out the victim from his solitude, but there is a negative element representing the narrative of the victim/testimony as the absolute truth, as the truth that encompasses everything.
It is remarkable how this biographical transition characterizes those who have suffered bereavement and who were not physically present at the place of the massacre. Finally, in this case, the socio-political commitment is not direct but mediated by the association.
No transition from victim to testimony
Only one of the respondents did not demonstrate any passage from victim to testimony. His position with respect to the massacre remains that of a secondary victim (a relative died during the massacre), focused on the private dimension of the incident and the problems generated on their biography. The absence of transition can be associated with the trouble of remembering and with oblivion. The period after the bomb has been hence characterized by survival memories, thus letting oblivion take its course:
Of course the memory remained, especially in the first few days, and this, eh, made it a very difficult life; and later, the memory slowly waned and was minimalised.
Discussion
Like all historical events, the massacre of Piazza della Loggia hit not only the people who were directly or indirectly involved but also the Italian society. At the same time, we are confronted with a ‘cultural trauma’ founded on social narrations (Alexander, 2003) and with an ‘individual trauma’, which affects individuals (Silke, 2003) and their lives. In this article, we analysed the biographical transformations and identified the processes that trigger qualitative change. Bronfenbrenner (1979) introduced the concept of ‘developmental trajectory’ to indicate the subjective way in which each individual engages in the various contexts of life activities, roles and relations, so as to acquire motivational patterns and patterns of action that will tend to constitute a lasting reference for individual identity. The participants of this study are people whose evolutionary trajectory suffered a rupture in their biography due to a political massacre. An event that deeply involves an individual psychological arrangement consequently forces an elaboration of what happened through a process of interpretation and sense making (Louis, 1980). Given the collective nature of the event, it becomes important to understand how the reconstruction of the self works, particularly by researching the process of those considered a ‘victim’ or a ‘testimony’.
The results show that the interaction between the historical event and the individual biography has generated four types of turning points: the immediate transition from victim to testimony, the transition from victim to testimony as awareness, the transition from victim to testimony as a process of knowledge, and becoming a victim without any transition to the role of testimony.
The first three forms of transition are united by a narrative of identity and processing of the suffering which turns itself into a victim testimony, with its sense of civic responsibility and participation in the social work of memory. In the case of failed transition from victim to testimony, the narrative identity is burdened by an unwanted and undesirable condition, making the right to forget more prevalent than the duty to remember (Connerton, 2008; Stone and Hirst, 2014; Wixted, 2004). In addition, it should be noted that in this case the non-transition from victim to witness does not imply any judgment of value because the memory is not considered more important than oblivion. This participant shows on a subjective level a psychic tension between the duty of memory and the need to forget, with a prevalence of the latter. As for the specificities of the three turning points creating identity as a testimony, there are significant differences. In the case of an immediate transition from victim to testimony, there exists a precise and peculiar identity from before the outbreak of the bomb. It is the identity of activists socially engaged in various political battles in the historical period of the strategy of tension. In their eyes, from the start, the dead of the massacre are not victims but ‘fallen’; this term alludes to the fact that those people were engaged politically and were consciously involved in a demonstration. This narrative identity, focused on the defence and promotion of the antifascists’ ideals, approaches by analogy the figure of ‘heroes’ (Zimbardo, 2007). It should be emphasized that in this transition, the phenomenon of latency of the testimony is not present (Horowitz, 1986; Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Pennebaker, 1990; Wieviorka, 1998) and does not need a certain period of time to occur. Here, it should be pointed out in what sense we use the term ‘hero’, to avoid misunderstandings and not to promote the use of glorified figures.
According to political philosophy, the hero is an antagonist who becomes a political subject, publicly opposing something or someone (Bazzicalupo, 2011). Consequently, to have a hero, a tragedy or a drama is needed. It is therefore commonly understood that the figure of the hero implies a violent and unjust society: in the opinion of the authors, it constitutes a figure that should not be used and a scenario that should be changed.
The latency time is instead present in the other two transitions: the testimony as awareness and testimony as a process of knowledge. Unlike the case where one was already sided with a political party, as in the immediate transition, in these two cases, the Italian cultural atmosphere, characterized by social amnesia, played a major role. As a matter of fact, and especially in the case of the strategy of tension, Italy chose amnesty. This decision caused the isolation of the victims of the neo-fascist massacres. Anna Bull analyses some first-person narratives of the victims of the Italian political violence of those years and affirms that for those who received psychological help, the act of speaking with a psychoanalyst was the equivalent of talking to society (Bull, 2014: 76). We can hence find strong similarities with this study, where the gathered testimonies pointed out a long period of personal impasse and isolation, characterized by the absence of interlocutors, mostly referring to authorities and institutions.
In the case of testimony as awareness, it is the personal stories of loss and suffering that, after a period of physiological imbalance, are transformed into evolutionary potential. The state identity is reached, freed the person from the liabilities of the condition of victim, making it aware of a certain self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997). From such awareness derives a sense of educational agency and community commitment, especially in school and among new generations; furthermore, it derives a civic responsibility which goes beyond the simple tale of a subjective experience, to translate into the teaching of democratic coexistence, the repudiation of violence and the social dangers of inaction (Zamperini, 2013).
Finally, the transition to testimony as a process of knowledge constitutes a biographical passage which, over time, led to an epistemic agency which is collective in nature. While in other scenarios as in the Shoah (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2009), the commitment of the testimony was primarily focused on the need to preserve the memory (to protect it from the inevitable biological death of eyewitnesses of the events), in the case of the massacre of Piazza della Loggia, the commitment was directed primarily for the building of a memory.
Indeed, the failure to achieve a legal truth and a mutilated historical truth entails that the House of Memory of Brescia, either at a Community citizen level or at the national level, plays the role of producer of knowledge, committed to the reconstruction and understanding of the events of the past. A community effort led by the need for justice – indeed, the reconstruction of the past – is closely connected with the experience of an injustice that has lasted four decades, and which could be resolved at least through the building of a socially shared history.
The figure that represents this biographical transition has a central role in the communicative memory theory of Jan Assmann (2008). As a matter of fact, the communicative memory represents a form of memory which starts from below and is shared by a certain group of people (in this particular instance the victims’ association). This form of memory aims to replace the institutional cultural memory, especially in cases where the institutions, as in the strategy of tension, adopt a social amnesia strategy and are therefore not able to create a national shared memory. The effort to create knowledge on a communicative memory level can be considered an attempt to produce a cultural memory. Ultimately, because the reconstruction of the biographical history is forever intertwined with the construction of the figure of the narrator, the three transitions from the role of victim, which emerged in this study on the massacre of Piazza della Loggia, allow policy to identify at least three figures of testimony: the ‘heroic testimony’, the ‘civic testimony’ and ‘epistemic testimony’.
Conclusion
In the age of the testimony (Wieviorka, 1998), it is often expected that those involved in dramatic historical events can or shall engage at societal level in a pedagogy of horror. In fact, the ‘duty of memory’ assigns to the testimony a social value which goes beyond the story of the experience. Many community projects focused on the transmission of collective memory resort to testimonies, using them as new pedagogical figures to promote coexistence and tolerance among younger generations. In courtrooms, in classrooms, in conferences open to the citizens, on the radio, on television and in any other area where before had reigned supreme social historians, now direct witnesses have become prominent. Historians experience this coexistence with some discomfort because, they say, the testimonies’ memory is unreliable and unstable, while only historiography is scientific and rigorous.
Facing a memory full of tangled identities and strong emotions, like De Luna (2011) warns, the temptation to separate this combination of memory–history emerges. The critical analysis of events pertains to history, while remembering and identity belong to memory. De Luna also advises not to make this mistake, leading to the open conclusion that the changes that have occurred in the relationship between history and memory need to be faced. Along with De Luna (2011), other authors (Giglioli, 2014; Fassin and Rechtman, 2007) have thus started to question the victim paradigm, analysing the social and rhetorical logic that accompanies it. In our view, another possible way to face it is to develop an empirical analysis of the protagonists of social atrocities and political violence biographical paths.
In this specific case, the study of the transition from victim to testimony may increase our knowledge about the different biographical paths and then lead to different ways of understanding the testimony, of which the ‘pedagogy of horror’ constitutes only one dimension. Furthermore, it is necessary to focus the attention on the agent within a context; indeed, the testimony of the Holocaust is not the same social practice as the testimony of a political massacre in a democratic country. If the same memory has its own history, then the testimony is an actualization of the past, worthy of great attention from scholars of collective memory.