Who were the enemies? : the spatial practices of belonging and exclusion in Second World War Italy

The Italian Resistance during the Second World War was the iconic episode shaping political and intellectual debate in post-war Italy like little else before or since. How the Resistance is remembered today varies due to myriad factors concerning social, political and cultural identity constructions (Forlenza 2012). Far from being a unifying force as purported by left-wing party propaganda (Battaglia 1953), the Resistance represented instead a deeply divisive event that still engenders profounds fractures in Italy’s popular consciousness (Pezzino 2005). As well as an opposition to German occupation, the Resistance also implied a civil war (Pavone 1991; Behan 2009) in which anti-Fascists, many of them Communists, fought the Fascists to eradicate Mussolini’s regime and to re-establish democracy in Italy. This resistance was significant in military and social terms: by some estimates 300,000 Italians were involved in direct action against the Nazi-Fascist regime, with many more supporting the fighters with aid, provisions and assistance. Some calculate that in those frantic 20 months (September 1943-May 1945) as many as 70,000 fighters were casualties, with a further 40,000 wounded (Lewis 1985: 23). The complex, often contradictory manner in which people remember the events unravelling during those 20 months can illuminate the impact actions, persons, interactions and perceptions can have in any given historical period, and what their implications are likely to be for postmemory (after Hirsch 2008).