Edizioni FrancoAngeli - Last issue of MEMORIA E RICERCA (38/2011)

Introduzione

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Teresa Bertilotti, Barbara Bracco

Disabled war veteran in Italy: polysemy of a cruel place

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Barbara Bracco
Among the many "places of memory" of the Great War, the injured body of the soldier was and still is, in its materiality, the most dramatic, complex and persistent one. Only in Italy half a million men came back from the front with permanent, often highly visible, damages. The phenomenon of disabled ex-servicemen had a huge impact on society, rousing new ways of looking at the body devastated by war. This essay studies how the injured body was re-written by the disabled ex-servicemen themselves and by doctors, agitprops and politicians. Obviously different sectors of Italian society gave different and new representation of the injured body. From Barbara Bracco’s essay, it emerges a complex picture that turns violated physicalness into a polysemous place. Manifesto of medical progress or of political regeneration, ancient sign of degeneration or tool of patriotic propaganda, the soldier’s body presents itself in these pages as the real text of war experience and modernity.

Between texts and the body: Italian soldiers’ writings and physical experience in the First World War

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Vanda Wilcox
In discussions of combat experience too narrow a focus on soldiers’ psychological experiences and the cultural and social issues surrounding them risks obscuring the vital role of the body and of physical experience. In letters and diaries, Italian soldiers frequently describe their bodily experiences and transformations, enabling them to express their emotions obliquely through the use of the body as a metaphorical representation of the spirit. Building on international comparisons, this paper emphasises the centrality of the physical in our understanding of combatants’ experience. Soldiers’ bodies, which were transformed by changes in diet, fitness and health, acted as the primary vector through which military life was experienced. The paper analyses both the emotional impact of bodily transformations and the ways in which Italian soldiers represented these experiences in their writings.

Urban Practices, Entertainment, and the Representation of Violence

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Teresa Bertilotti
At the intersection of home and the front, cinemas and theaters serve as places where wounded and mutilated bodies become spectacle, prior to the raising of the curtain on representations of war itself, which, drawing together diverse cultural vectors, are created and consumed there. Working with current historiography on urban practices in times of war, this article investigates the content and reception of such spectacles; the political, moral and artistic discourses that surround them; and the representations of war that they produce. Particular attention is paid to the technologies of theatrical and cinematographic representation with regard to the violated body, be it male or female.

From monsters to victims: the First World War Medical Filmography

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Sophie Delaporte
In a comparative perspective in the time, this article analysed the images filmed by operators of the film Service Cinema of the Army (SCA) affected in the Health service during the Great War and more specially those who relate to the trauma (physical and psychic), with the recent representations of François Dupeyron’s movies entitled The room of the officers and Gabriel Le Bomin Antonin’s fragments. In both cases the images displayed the phenomenon of "derealisation" of the battlefield in particular by the absence of "corporéité" becoming attached for the main part to consequences, far from the horror of the battlefield. Filmography participates as the paper in the phenomenon of "derealisation" of the brutality made for bodies and practices of care. The fictional representations envisage in both cases studied here the traumas under a "romantico-mélo-dramatique" angle being very widely inclined in the sense of a victimization.

Restoring the wounded body of the Nation. The assistance for disabled war veterans in Germany in the First World War

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Pierluigi Pironti
The disabled and mutilated veterans of the World War I in Germany have different meanings: they are symbols of patriotic propaganda, instruments of experimentation for orthopaedics, a social problem for labour and social policy experts. They are at the same time both "heroes" because of their of their sacrifice and a possible threat for the social and economic order of Germany. The State reintegrates them in the community and to do so requires a complex bureaucratic apparatus, which not only assists them, but also determines a new quality of public intervention in social policy. Therefore if disabled veterans become the object of a paternalistic and at times strongly authoritarian "Work Therapy" on the one hand, on the other hand their presence helps the development in the country of a new debate on the rights that their disability earned them. The debate brings about the idea of a debt of the Nation towards war disabled that the Weimar Republic will be asked to liquidate.

Soldiers’ bodies, women’s words

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Valeria Tanci
This essay focuses on the way Italian women interpreted the disabilities caused by the First World War. Considering short tales or novels written by women and addressed to a female reading public, this article shows the presence of a strong gender stereotype, which was essential for the acceptance of the disabled soldiers among women in the post-war society. The way this stereotype influenced women’s reaction to the presence of different kinds of mutilations has been researched through the letters many of these women wrote to the Italian Prime Minister and, after 1922, to Mussolini himself, in order to have their rights respected. These two very different kinds of sources show us the difference between the way the war and its consequences were conceived and the reality, but they also make clear one of the reasons why the transition from war to peace was usually more peaceful than expected.

Futurism’s Mutilated Subject: F.T. Marinetti and the Construction of the Post-WWI Italian Futurist

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Anthony Martire
This article analyzes representations of mutilated and prosthetically reconstructed bodies in two works by F.T. Marinetti: L’alcova d’acciaio: Un romanzo vissuto (1921), and Come si seducono le donne (1917). I argue that Marinetti’s interest in the physical body belies an anxiety over the integrity of the Italian body politic as a result of the culturally destabilizing effects of Italy’s participation in the First World War. Moreover, I argue that the prosthetic reconstruction of the body that Marinetti lauds throughout his writings demonstrates the extent to which the futurist political project is an extension of traditional formulations of Italianità since the Risorgimento, while it posits a form of political subjectivity rooted in the dissolution of liberal-democratic principles, and produces a model of political subjectivity amenable to, though not coincident with, Fascism.

The statistical surveys on unemployment in Italy since World War I (1914-2004)

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Manfredi Alberti
During the period examined the statistical representation of unemployment has undergone the influence of both economic and social transformations and of the political and cultural choices of the social actors. Analysing the Italian case as an expression of some more general transformations typical of all other western countries, my article focuses on the characteristics of the official statistical sources on unemployment produced in Italy from 1914 to the present, analysing in particular their economic, political and cultural background. The transformations of the statistical category of "unemployed" is understood also in a gender perspective.

An aspect of intercommunity Jewish relations in the Mediterranean area: French Jews and their italian coreligionists during the fascism (1922-1939)

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Jérémy Guedj
Between the two wars, while splits within French jewry were deapening, with the advent of a lot of foreign Jews, French Jews, who were onlooking the status of the jewish world in general, were quite interested by their Italian coreligionists, who indeed appeared to them as the best assimilated of the whole Europe. They made important contact with Italian Jews, whose they praised the model of integration. This article intends to show which influence the increasing opposition between republican France and fascist Italy had on those intercommunity relations.

The Austrian Nation: a XXth century’s construction

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT

Giovanni Schininà
The construction of the Austrian Nation has been a troubled process, which was only able to begin after 1945 and finally strengthened starting from the 1960s. The author firstly identifies the factors, which inhibit a specific Nation Building during the Habsburg Monarchy. Afterwards he analyses how in the First Republic, characterized by a weak political and economic legitimation and heavy external influences, the first theories and interpretations of an Austrian nation historically and culturally separated from that of Germany arose. Only the tragic experience of Anschluss and the end of II World War permitted in the course of the Second Republic the construction of a collective national identity, supported by economic success, pragmatism of the political élite and an inedited international role. The affirmation of a national identity intertwined with "Opfer-Mythos" and to the theme of co-responsibility regarding Nazism, is finally subjected to reworkings following the entry of Austria into The European Union.

Abstract

Fri, 15 Dec 2011 8:00:00 GMT