Mediated Holocaust memories in Italy from 1945 to present

Abstract

The present work aims to address the relationship between war memory and media culture, along with present political and social issues. Through an analysis of the Italian development and construction of Holocaust memory by means of movies and television, I endevour to show how the subject of war memory has been the result of the interplay of both media logic and political ideology, whose aim vary according to the socio-political needs of the ruling class and of the cultural industry. The disappointing absence in the Italian memory of the Holocaust, of any conscientious attempt to face the historical responsibility of the war, of the racial laws (1938), and of the Shoa itself, reveal how the inclusion of narratives of victimhood, of innocence, and of redemptive Resistance, are not only the result of aesthetic representational choices, but are part of a wider cultural practice which, by all means, is ideological.