Passerini-A Passion for Memory

HISTORIC PASSION

A Passion for Memory

by Luisa Passerini

For the first twenty years of my life, I did not have much appreciation eitherfor personal memory or for history. The memories of my childhood were notall painful, but they were associated with the memory of the death of mymother when I was six. For a long time, nothing belonging to that periodcould be remembered joyfully. Later on during my first psychoanalysis Irescued some of those early memories and valued them. But until very late inlife, I could not remember the date of my mothers death. I kept thinking itwas 1946 rather than 1947 and I had to check her documents repeatedly tobe sure. Before six years of age, I was comforted by a form of memory whichwas not personal memory but the stories that my grandmother told me: fairytales, her life-story as well as family stories concerning my great-grandparents, great-uncles and aunts, but also summaries of Italianoperas with music composed by Verdi, Puccini, Bellini. The otherperson who nourished my hunger for narration was Signorina Nene, theaunt of my best friend Aurelia. She used to narrate to us with great preci-sion, but very probably also with invention, novels and stories she had read,such as Le Comte de Montecristo by Alexandre Dumas or The Nose byGogol or Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero by Emilio Salgari (Jolanda, theDaughter of the Black Corsair, 1905, an adventure novel which was part of aseries on pirates in the Antilles). These story-tellings took place on Sundayafternoon, when Aurelia came to visit her aunt, who lived in the same build-ing as my grandmother and myself. A novel would last for several weeks, sodetailed was the narration, sometimes interrupted by our questions, eagerfor more details, to which she knew all the replies. Aurelias smaller brotherswould also be present, but they were silent in awe at the wonderful storiesbeing created by our dialogue. Signorina Nene was not married, but she hadan affair with a musician who lived on the same floor as us, a very mysteri-ous man who played at night and slept during the day. She was very fond ofcats, and one night, hearing a desperate mewing repeatedly coming from oneof the walls in her apartment, she did not hesitate to brandish some sort ofpickaxe and break through the wall which had been built to close an oldfireplace. Its chimney communicated with the big attic of the house, fromwhere the cat had fallen. It was a very small lively cat, who happily survived

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to our amazement and delight. These stories embodied a whole world ofadventure, wonder and care.

History was a different matter. I had always hated it, at least the type ofhistory we were taught in school. Dates, facts, great events, the greatnessof Italy: text books when I was in elementary school, between the autumn of1946 and the summer of 1951, were still largely modelled on the Fascistones. The teaching of this grandiose and triumphalistic history was bothboring and incongruous, given the conditions of the majority of the popu-lation at the time. My own family, although not poor (my father was arailway employee), had to be careful with money and still in the 1950s,when I was a teenager, could not afford expenses such as buying a pair ofskis; I had to rent very old ones, which were not up to the standard of thesmart skis of my peers. We lived in a provincial town in Northern Italy, Asti,where everything was a mark of class at the time. The unpleasantness ofhistory learning continued through secondary schools, leaving deep traces:still today, I cannot remember dates and I must often ask my husband, aphysicist who might be expected to know less than me about history, suchquestions as the exact dates of crucial events in the Risorgimento. For a longtime the only dates I remembered were those I learned in contexts other thanhistory: for instance 1066, the battle of Hastings, and 1688, the GloriousRevolution, dates that I learned in my English course; or 17 February 1600,the execution of the free thinker Giordano Bruno by the Catholic church, inthe philosophy course. After completing Italian secondary school, I spent ayear (195960) in a high school in the United States, in Rochester, NY,thanks to a student-exchange programme. In that context, the historylearning did not improve: I took a course in American History and had torespond to written texts with closed-format questions, plus writing a fewshort essays full of facts. I did all right, but I have completely forgotteneverything I was obliged to memorize in that course.

Fig. 1. The author recording an interview in Turin, 1979, with one of the protagonists of her bookFascism in Popular Memory (1984, transl. 1987).

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However, another memory came to salvage me from drowning in com-plete oblivion: in 1960, back in Italy, I was the founder, together with a fewother young people, of a small group meant to unite students, workers andpeasants. I cannot remember any peasant, but some of the partisans whohad fought in the Resistance had gone back to the country and were doingagricultural work there. We spent long evenings with them eating and drink-ing and listening to their stories about their activities in the Resistance.It was deeply inspiring and we often wondered how we could live up tothat memory.

When I went to the University of Turin in 1960, I decided to take a jointdegree in history and philosophy. Philosophy dominated the course and Iwrote a final thesis in History of Philosophy. Significantly, the topic wasThe concept of historical crisis in the philosophies of Henri de Saint-Simonand Auguste Comte. I had a terrible argument with my tutor over this thesisduring my oral defence, when he accused me of presenting a pro-Marxistinterpretation of the two philosophers. He was more or less right and myinterpretation might well have been unfounded, but he had not read mythesis before the defence and voiced his disagreement only at that point,speaking with all the arrogance of pre-1968 academic barons. I took it verybadly and I broke all relationship with him. In this way, I was left likea boat in the wood, as the Italian proverb says: what did one do without apatron in an Italian university in 1965? (Even today, to tell the truth.) But ahistory professor, Guido Quazza, came to my rescue, offering me a schol-arship for two years in order to do some historical research on theanti-Fascist press in both Italy and France. After all, I had a degree inPhilosophy and History and I was known for being a scrupulous researcher.This was the occasion of a great discovery: the revelation of primary sources,

Fig. 2. The author at her wedding party, May 2008.

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especially newspapers, but also other documents, to be read in small librariesall over Piedmont and in the heavenly Bibliothe`que Nationale in Parisdating from the eighteenth century, at the time still located in rue deRichelieu in a magnificent setting. That experience of primary research rad-ically changed my attitude to history, in spite of the political spirit of thetime, which was both ahistorical in the sense of not caring about history and anti-historical in the sense of being determined to reject anything to dowith the past.

In the second half of the 1960s I was pro-Situationist. Both politically andpersonally, I lived or believed I was living entirely in the present, here andnow. This attitude actually proved to be a projection into the future, whichat the time was often confused with the present. The idea happily utopian was to start immediately living differently, through what we called therevolution of daily life. This led to a number of dissident practices such assexual freedom and happenings, abrupt interruptions of cultural and pol-itical events, on which occasions we attacked and ridiculed the currentstereotypes as well as the divisions between culture and politics, art andlife, politics and life. For instance (in 1966?), some of us went all dressedin black to a conference on education, composed of progressive teacherswho of course claimed to be antifascist, and we interrupted them dramatic-ally, claiming with derision that they were not up to the real legacy of theanti-fascist Resistance and that their views on education were a dead end. (Avery nice old teacher told us benevolently, afterwards, that we behaved likethe early fascists.) All this however was not enough to satisfy my hunger forchange and liberation, and the insistence on the present diverted my pleasurein historical research to a new field. In 1967 I left Turin and Italy for Africa,where I worked with and on liberation movements such as the Frente deLibertacao de Mocambique (Frelimo), now in power in independentMozambique. It was on Frelimo that I published my first book,1 since Ihad refused to publish anything from my thesis, which I considered notadequately radical by Situationist standards. The present was projectedinto the future in Africa too, but history and memory appeared to be ofsome use in understanding colonialism and the directions that new forms ofliberation should take. African socialism had come under criticism, but itstill had some attraction, and the Mozambicans spoke and wrote about thenew man, new cultural and existential relationships, while accepting thecontribution of Marxist politics and political economy. I would say that atthe time there was also awareness of the relationship between thepre-colonial society and the impact on it of colonialism, thanks to the an-thropological work of friends such as Jaap Van Velsen, author of a seminalwork, The Politics of Kinship, on the Lakeside Tonga of Nyasaland(Malawi).2

This same attitude, making instrumental use of history in the service ofpolitics, continued when I was back in Italy, active first in the student/worker movement and the radical new left groups, then in the womens


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movement and finally in the trade-union movement. In these new leftgroups which aimed to go beyond hectic political activity towards somestable political organization some of us created courses for our comradescalled scuola quadri (training for cadres), in which we studied and analysedthe history of capitalism and the world situation. I was in charge of teachingthe history of the labour movement and Marxian thought. Among thefriends who were engaged in that effort were Giovanni Arrighi, who gavewonderful talks to our small group on the history of imperialism and itspresent stage,3 and Romano Ma`dera, whose capacity to find deep linksbetween the personal and political was already remarkable.4 We read andcommented on works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao Tse Tung.A sense of history was also present in the name of the group to which webelonged, Gruppo Gramsci, and we published a journal with a historicaltitle, Rassegna comunista. This title was taken from the theoretical periodicalof the Italian Communist Party in the first half of the 1920s, so it wasintended to recall a period of beginning, when revolutionary organizationshad to be refounded on the basis of innovative theory and historical classanalysis.

The womens groups I participated in from 1970, on the other hand, wereresolutely anti-historical: we did not recognize any antecedent, any prede-cessor whatsoever, we rejected the heritage of the so-called first wave offeminism, believing that it was centred on equality while we focused ondifference. Of course this interpretation was wrong, as we discovered lateron, when Anna Rossi-Doria studied the first feminism.5 But at the time Iwas deeply into the idea that we were doing something absolutely new andunheard of; I remember that when Franca Pieroni Bortolotti one of thevery first Italian historians of feminism came to a conference in Turin, Iwent to meet her and she told me in an almost disheartened voice: We muststudy the history of women and feminism, but I could not listen to heradvice, as I found her work too exclusively focused on the political aspectsof womens-liberation history and not dealing with issues of gender differ-ence and daily life.6

In the second half of the 1970s, all the hopes of regeneration which haddriven the new left activities were defeated. Of the new social movements,only feminism survived. Some of us, including myself, moved into a sort ofnew-age phase, in which my lack of interest in history was justified by thefact that I was an Aquarius, a sign of air, supposedly always in search ofnovelty; fortunately the ascendant in Scorpio, a sign of water, gave someopening for a slightly more concrete outlook. In 1974, after some years ofteaching in secondary schools, my qualification to teach as AssistantProfessor in History was recognized by the University of Turin, and I wasassigned to the chair on the history of the Internationals and Marxism heldby a colleague. So my training in Gruppo Gramsci became the basis ofmy limited academic career (which developed mainly outside my country:I became a full professor in an Italian university only late in life). I still have


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many of the books we taught; the proceedings of the congresses were espe-cially deadly to read. Fortunately, we also taught English social history, EricHobsbawm and E. P. Thompson and John Saville. Thus the history which Iand others with a similar biography appreciated and taught came to besocial history, subsuming the political rather than being at the service ofpolitics. That type of social history, informed by Marxism, seemed to be apart of politics and even a politically significant intellectual act.

Later, in the first half of the 1980s, I became Associate Professor ofhistory at the University of Turin literally by default, thanks to a law es-tablishing that those who had qualified without obtaining a chair in certainentrance examinations, where the winner (completely predetermined) wasthe one to gain a chair, would become professors too. This measure wastaken in order to solve the problem of a mass university which was theindirect outcome of the students struggles and the direct result of a lawby the state. In 1969, under the impact of 1968, a decree began a reform thatliberalized university entrance, no longer to be reserved for students fromthe elite type of high school. In my new position I was finally free to choosewhich topics to study and teach. This shift followed the political turningpoint represented by the defeat of the new left and of the new social move-ments (with the exclusion of feminism), a point marked also by the increas-ing presence of red terrorism. For me, the last years of 1970s with theassassination of Premier Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978 repre-sented also the transition from socio-political history to a type of culturalhistory in which oral history and memory were central. This move led me tovalue the memory of others at the time still mainly the working class andto look for workers outside of the places where I had always met them,either in front of their factories where I distributed leaflets and discussedpolitics with them, or in the assemblies and meetings held in the smokyheadquarters of the groups. Now I went to bowls clubs for old people,pubs, trade-union offices, parish meeting places and private homes, whereI could interview old workers about their lives. Finally, a passion formemory was free to emerge, in the interchange with women and menolder than me, and in the effort to understand the various levels of theirnarrations. Their testimony and conversations revealed traces of more an-cient memories; for instance, oral traditions transmitted from the rural tothe industrial working class, or womens traditions of freedom and inde-pendence, woman on top and the world upside down.7 The move in itselfdid not take me far away in terms of geographical distance, since I inter-viewed factory workers in Turin. But it put me in contact with the oralhistory movement, developing rapidly at the end of the 1970s. This meantbecoming part of an international network of people and initiatives dealingwith memory.

As I have written in Autobiography of a Generation (published in Italianin 1988 and in English in 1996),8 it was the experience of listening to thememory of others that allowed me, after about a decade of such practice, to


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listen to my own memory. Between the end of the 1970s and the end of the

1980s, I interviewed and tried to interpret the memories of not only

workers, but also the protagonists of 1968, feminists, primary-school chil-

dren, and in the Turin jail women who had been terrorists. After the

publication of my book on working-class memories of fascism, in the

fall-back that follows a long and intense period of work, I decided to

begin psychoanalysis. Of course there were also other reasons for doing

so: personal and emotional problems that had ripened with the end of

youth (I was more than forty by then), and one protracted illusion in

particular, which was encouraged by political movements, that frenetic

activism kept one from aging. Feminism was no different in this respect:

we saw our bodies as sexually potent, ready to be free, young and defiant.

Ideas of old age, illness and death did not touch my self-consciousness until

much later. Of course, all this postponing was part of the process of repres-

sion that finally exploded and led me first, in the mid 1980s, to psychoanaly-

sis and later on, in the late 1990s, to a better understanding of intersubjective

relationships. It was only twenty years later, in the early 2000s, that I came

to fully grasp the meaning of subjectivity as having its origins in intersub-

jectivity, if one can ever fully grasp such a complex rapport. A simple

implication of this complex process was that I had not adequately

thematized the age difference between my interviewees and myself.As the passion for memory went back and forth between my interviewees

and myself, and as thanks to this bustle my own memory became individua-

lized, my idea of memory itself enlarged. This process happened as I de-

tached myself from the practice of oral history for several years, although

not from oral history as such, since I kept supervising oral-history theses,

reading oral-history books and acting as consultant for oral-history projects.

The first interviews I did after this period were in 1999-2000 with Roma

refugees from the Kosovo war, who having been sedentary for a length of

time were obliged to return to nomadism and landed in camps near

Florence, where I was then teaching at the European University. This ex-

perience was crucial in the process of enlarging and deepening my idea of

memory. But the whole process had started with my interest in European

identity and the link between the idea of Europe and the idea of love, themes

which I have been researching since the early 1990s. My aim in the last

twenty years has been to produce a historical analysis and critique of

Eurocentrism in the discourse of love. With a first book, Europe in Love,

Love in Europe, I had understood memory in an expanded sense, the cultural

memory of Europe, which included aspects such as literature, psychoanaly-

sis, the language of federalism, and love letters. In a second book, Love and

the Idea of Europe, individuals and their memories became much more

prominent, of course against the background of collective cultural pro-

cesses.9 At the same time, the limits of Europe and European-ness became

more evident to me, as I am going to explain.


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Paradoxically, abandoning the direct practice of oral history allowed meto bring history and memory closer together, but not only in the sense ofdeveloping the concept of cultural memory. Rather, in the sense that, in thistime of postcoloniality and of diasporas through and to Europe, thememory of Europe, an abstract concept, could not be understood asbelonging exclusively to European subjects, that is, concerning what andhow they remember. In our time, memory of Europe must also be givena meaning within which Europe is the object: who remembers Europeand how? In other words, the broadening of memory today is necessarybecause this subverts the hierarchy between the self and the other, andthis makes a crucial contribution to history. As the memory of Europeextends beyond Europeans themselves, who are anyway scattered andmigratory, as well as coming to include people from outside Europesever-changing boundaries, the distinction between self and other is brokendown at least in terms of European identity, of who is European anoperation which takes on historical force, at the same time as historyinspires memory towards an understanding of the colonial era its andpresent implications.10

Of course, the dual intersubjectivity that is the basis of learning to speakand live, that between the mother (or whoever has this role) and the infant,remains foundational. So does the dual relationship between the intervieweeand the interviewer in creating/reproducing memory and generating/constructing oral history. But these forms of intersubjectivity must beplaced in a larger and longer context, in which the memory of the deadand in the end the unity of humanity through different times and spacesare at stake. However, the perspective of death makes it impossible to denythe frailty and the limits of memory. No one can remember ones own death,and most of us are quickly forgotten once dead. Memory survives only inthe fragments of intergenerational memory through which the lives of thedead partially live on in memories of generations to come.11

In recent years, teaching courses on memory in various countries of theworld has put me in contact with new seminal work being done by youngscholars, who discover new meanings of memory understood as subjectivityand intersubjectivity through exploring new fields and topics. I am thinkingof the work done by Lance Thurner on volunteers in New Orleans afterhurricane Katrina, by Phil Sandick on the history of an African school inNamibia, by Liz Grefrath on Guantanamo, by Lisa Polay on cognitiveneuroscience, and by many others, all revealing new aspects of what inter-subjective memory can mean. Something similar is also true for develop-ments in memory studies; I am struck by the relevance of some of thecontributions from the neurosciences on how short-term memory is trans-formed into long-term memory and generally on the importance of corpor-eal memory, or contributions from visual sources, which help us tounderstand the value of emotions in creating and innovating memory aswell as in transmitting it. The type of intersubjective memory that operates


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in transgenerational and transcultural interchanges is the one which con-

cerns me today, along with the issue of its conservation in new types of

archive: oral and visual archives of course, but also archives of feeling,

in the sense give to this expression by Ann Cvetkovich. She started thinking

about alternative archives for feelings/sexuality, looking at how we might

acknowledge and embrace critiques of the archive as a way of constructing

new archives that foster new public and political cultures, including cultures

of public memory that include the aims of activism.12

Where has history ended up in this story? I believe that memory has

played a major role in reconciling me with history, to the extent that I

can even, at times, be passionate about it too. The change has to do not

only with the value of oral sources. These days, I am convinced that visual

sources are at the forefront in the struggle for innovation in history and its

methodology, and in modifying the frontiers of the relationships between

history and other socio-historical disciplines, like anthropology, sociology,

literary criticism and so on. So, it is not only orality, it is memory in all its

forms, written, oral, visual, material, corporeal, that has modified my way of

writing history and my relationship with history in general. Memory has led

me beyond dates, towards an understanding of why we do or dont remem-

ber certain dates, why we postpone or anticipate in our memory the date of

something that matters to us. And it has led me beyond events, to the

processes that go on around, underneath and within them. It is the contact

with memory that has led historians or some of us to accept the idea that

a history of subjectivity can exist, and that we can explore the many ways of

constructing it.

Luisa Passerini, previously Professor of Cultural History at Turin

University, is External Professor of History at the European University

Institute, Florence, and Visiting Professor in the Oral History Masters

Program at Columbia University, New York. She was Director of the

Research Project Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics at the

Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, as the recipient of the 2002-4

Research Prize of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Her recent publications include:

Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics Between theWars (London, 1999); Il mito dEuropa: Radici antiche per nuovi simboli

(Florence, 2002); Memory and Utopia: the Primacy of Intersubjectivity

(London, 2007); Love and the Idea of Europe (2009); Sogno di Europa

(Torino, 2009). She has also coedited: European Review of History 11: 2

(special issue Europe and Love), summer 2004, with Ruth Mas; Fuori

della norma. Storia lesbiche nellItalia della prima meta` del Novecento, with

Nerina Milletti (Torino, 2007); La laicita` delle donne, with Luisa Accati

(Florence, 2008); New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love

in the Twentieth Century, with Liliana Ellena and Alexander Geppert (New

York and Oxford, 2010).


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NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Luisa Passerini, Colonialismo portoghese e lotta di liberazione nel Mozambico, Torino,1970.

2 Jaap van Velsen, The Politics of Kinship: a Study in Social Manipulation among theLakeside Tonga of Nyasaland, Manchester, 1964.

3 These talks were later elaborated in Arrighis ground-breaking book The Geometry ofImperialism: the Limits of Hobsons Paradigm (1977), transl. Patrick Camiller, London, 1978.

4 Just one example of his later reflection on the link political/personal: Romano Ma`dera,Lanimale visionario, Milano, 1999.

5 Anna Rossi-Doria, La liberta` delle donne: Voci della tradizione politica suffragista,Torino, 1990.

6 Franca Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini del movimento femminile in Italia 1848-1892,Torino, 1963.

7 Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: the Cultural Experience of the TurinWorking Class, transl. Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield, Cambridge, 1987 (Torino operaiae fascismo, Roma and Bari, 1984).

8 Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, transl. Lisa Erdberg, intro. Joan WallachScott, Hanover and London, 1996 (Autobiografia di gruppo, Firenze 1988).

9 Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics in Britainbetween the Wars, London, 1999, New York, 2000 (Italian version LEuropa e lamore,Milano, 1999); Love and the Idea of Europe, transl. Julia Haydock with Allan Cameron,New York, 1999 (Storie damore e dEuropa, Napoli, 2008).

10 These are recent developments in my thinking, so I have to refer to work not yetpublished: Luisa Passerini, The Ethics of European Memory, in Moving Worlds: a Journalof Transcultural Writings 10: 4, forthcoming, 2011, and Europe and Its Others: Is There aEuropean Identity?, in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. Dan Stone,Oxford, forthcoming 2011.

11 Inspiring writings on this point are John Berger, Twelve Theses on the Economy of theDead, in his Hold Everything Dear, 2007, and Sally Alexander, Do Grandmas HaveHusbands?: Generational Memory and Twentieth-Century Womens Lives, Oral HistoryReview 36: 2, summer/fall 2009.

12 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian PublicCultures, Durham NC, 2003.


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