The phenomenon of Giampaolo Panza in the Discourse of collective trauma of Post-war Italy

Neretin Anton Il'ich Postgraduate student, Department of Ethnology, Anthropology, Ethnography, Faculty of History, Moscow State University 107045, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Kostyansky Lane, 11 p. 1 neretin11@internet.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction to the problem of violence and traumogenicity of cultureThe "black twentieth anniversary" is how historians characterized the time of the rule of Italy by Benito Mussolini, who owns the term "totalitarian state" ^[1].

This period (1922-1943) was a tragedy for Italians, because, in addition to "the complete suppression of all dissent, the formation of mass fascist organizations that include or in the orbit of their influence the vast majority of the population, its total ideological processing, the imposition of new – fascist – stereotypes of behavior and norms in everyday life, culture and even traditions of Italians" ^{[6, p. 152]}, Benito Mussolini plunged the people into the bloodiest war in history – the Second World War of 1939-1945. In addition to this military conflict, where the Duce acted as an ally of Adolf Hitler, from 1943 to 1945 a civil war was waged in Italy, which claimed 76 thousand lives (see: ^{[6, p. 9]}). These events, especially the last one, were not remembered for a long time in Italy: the majority of the population was quite satisfied with the new organization of life, besides, it was forbidden to write books or conduct discussions on the topic of fratricidal war: "In an effort to extinguish contradictions and reformat cultural and socio-political patterns, a number of topics were tabooed (the civil war of 1943-1945 in Italy, repression of the left and right, "patriotism", "nationalism")" ^{[7, p. 101]}. The defeated fascists, their families or those who were in the zone of influence of fascism, although he was not a fascist, were not given the word, because they were afraid that they could tell more than what was considered the only right and true or what was considered superfluous at that time.

            Only 57 years after the end of the war in Italy, the works of the Italian journalist Giampaolo Pansa arrived on the bookshelves of Italian stores, forcing readers not just to leave their established positions, but to experience fear, shame, bewilderment from the content of what they read, which appeared "suddenly" and demanded an explanation, since the word was given to the defeated, who presented a different truth.

            Both the truths of the winners and losers who swapped places revealed a kind of social collapse, the meaning of which was that the right and the guilty, executioners and victims, friends and foes by their actions revealed their belonging to the same time, which demanded exactly such actions and gave rise to the need for an analysis of force, violence and trauma, both personal and collective, historical and cultural.            

           The twentieth century went down in history as the "century" or "era of the masses" ^[12],[14]. It was then that totalitarian regimes with various ideologies appeared: fascist, Nazi and communist, prescribing to their society "an official, unified and correct culture." Fascism is associated with the most sinister pages of the history of the first half of the twentieth century . According to the definition of the famous German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism is characterized by absolute irrationality, violation of the legal system when a decree, i.e. a decree of the authorities caused by an emergency situation, replaces the law, the emergence of an ideology of selectivity, reliance not on the individual, but on the mass (Arendt – the crowd), which does not accept either multiparty, or any- or other social differentiation and recognizing the leader ^{[5, p. 8, 45, 166, etc.],[18, p. 12, 15, etc.]}. However, with the collapse of totalitarianism in a particular country, its citizens began to completely reconsider the foundations of life in which they had previously lived and which were imposed on them from above as "uniform and correct norms of life", which gave rise to such a phenomenon as collective trauma, representing "some inescapable experience of "existential negativity" as a fundamental anthropological principle" ^{[17, p. 6]}. Conveying this idea of J. Lacan, the Russian scientist A.M. Ponamareva notes that Lacan "also asserted the traumogenicity of culture, which includes, in addition to the everyday life that a person knows, the experience of extreme states that a person is not given to comprehend", but which he has to face ^{[17, p. 6, 7]}. This traumogenicity gives rise to special trauma studies, prompting to understand "whether the study of the "traumatized" consciousness, experience refers to the intentional features of the Lacanian master of knowledge, or the scientific and artistic analysis of multiple traumas, say, of the XX century, is primarily an ethically necessary attempt to objectively register and at the same time personal evidence of the "terrible", "unimaginable"" ^{[13, p. 59]}. This is all the more important because in totalitarian countries "uniform and correct norms of life" were instilled with the help of both direct terror and violence, not so much physical as structural, i.e. we are talking about hidden forms of imposing ideological norms that have not been outlived until now.

Force – violence – collective trauma The topic of structural violence in a totalitarian state is little studied, as, indeed, is the concept of force and its differences from violence.

We often use the first, meaning the second. The expression "to use force" implies precisely violence associated with the will and the possibility of its use. Power is a concept that accompanies a person from the moment he realizes himself to be a person, and a living person who created cults in which gods, often anthropomorphic, acted. Among the Romans, the founders of the family were the gods-penates, patrons of the hearth. The gods represented the king, pharaoh, emperor, i.e. those who had the power and the power to apply this power. At the same time, force meant a variety of things: authority, armed force, the power of orders, instructions, souls, knowledge, rights (they say "legal impotence"), physical strength...   One of the attributes of the Christian God was Omnipotence (Omnipotentia), which contains both the creative energy itself and the ability to create, and later to exercise power over the created world. Omnipotence is what makes everything there. Christian thinkers called God himself Life, Vita ^{[4, p. 136]}, closely connected with vir (husband), via (way), vinum (wine), but mainly with vis (power), which is the natural content component of these and other existing things. As a rule, such a force is adjacent to the effort to do something and the tension that the job itself requires. Some philosophers, for example, V. V. Bibikhin, even believe that "worries about reasonable external and internal arrangement are boring to us precisely because they do not require intoxicating tension of superpowers. We feel like the chosen of history and are waiting for its call" ^[8]. We can say that power is what reveals the presence of life. Since life is nature, power is the presence of nature.

            Violence is another matter (in Latin, this term is conveyed by the same word vis, but also violentia - force used under duress and using means of coercion. Basically, researchers consider physical violence and its impact on a person. But we are now interested in implicit coercion to any action, which by its "invisibility" affects a person the most, creating certain stereotypes of behavior, depriving him of the ability to think and forcing him to blindly obey those who create such "rules for the guidance of the mind." It is this seemingly passive, latent influence that influences the culture and self-identification of the people who have been subjected to such influence. Structural violence, as defined by the creator of the term Norwegian sociologist J. Galtung is the creation of conditions by social institutions that prevent people from satisfying their needs (for more information, see: ^{[15, pp. 11-18]}).

            Of course, the difficulties of this kind of research are obvious, especially in our time of universal education, when, it would seem, everyone is able and even obliged to use their own mind to understand and consciously relate to those ideas that are "served" with the help of the media, Internet propaganda, orally thrown information, etc. Moreover, no one has canceled the "public use of one's own mind", which "should always be free", as I. Kant said ^{[10, p. 29]}, But it was the twentieth century, the very century of crowds, and, perhaps, precisely because of this, more than once found itself under the influence of the visible, and invisible coercion. Kant said: "I don't need to think if I am able to pay" ^{[10, p. 27]}. It was said in 1784, in the twentieth century. the state of solvency, it is possible that it has become more.                             

            Modern anthropological, sociological and historical-philosophical thought has been puzzled not only by the phenomenon of passivity to ideological injections and methods of such infusion, but also by the formation of problems caused by such conditions, especially, I repeat, that the twentieth century gave grounds for the creation of such problems.

          In recent years, the ideas of structural violence and cultural trauma have been engaged in a lot and fruitfully both in our country and abroad. I will pay attention to some of them. In the article by A.M. Ponamareva "The theory of cultural trauma as an actual research perspective", the history of this problem is detailed and an extensive bibliography is given ^[17], as, indeed, in the work of A.V. Kucheva "The concept of cultural trauma and the possibility of its application to the interpretation of historical events" ^[11].  Like the mentioned sociologists, I would like to contribute to the analysis of the ideas expressed primarily by J. Alexander, about whom much has been said in the mentioned articles, especially since he, being not only a sociologist and a cultural critic, touched upon essential anthropological aspects.

J. Alexander's Cultural sociology. Definition of cultural trauma Alexander did not accidentally call his theory cultural sociology, unlike the sociology of culture, because culture is not an insignificant variable whose status in the formation of social life is unclear, but – on the contrary - what plays an important role in such formation is part of the thought that "tightly describes", as K. Girtz suggested, "codes, narratives and symbols that create ordered weaves of social meaning ^{[2, p. 62]}.

Alexander called such a methodological approach a "strong program" of cultural sociology, suggesting 1) analytical "separation of culture", which in the twentieth century became the center of research, "from the social structure" ^{[2, p. 61]}, 2) following the "principle of hermeneutical reconstruction of social texts" ^{[2, p. 62]}, related to semiotics and 3) "the rooting of causality in actors", methods of action and clarification of the influence of culture on the actual state of affairs ^{[2, p. 64]}. Alexander draws attention to the fact that sociology for a long time ignored the concept of the meaning of action and took into account only the instrumentality of action, objectivity and conformity to law.   The world was thereby deprived of a meaningful teleology. At the same time, the forces of the sacred and profane influence on him were simply not noticed. Meanwhile, for understanding the world, it turns out to be important not only spiritually symbolic, but also "immaterial forces" that "unite individual people together in common projects and destinies" ^{[2, p. 67]}.

            Alexander also did not accidentally raise the question of meaning in sociology: one of his tasks was "the study of the social creation of a cultural fact and the impact of this cultural fact on social and moral life" ^{[2, p. 97]}. Such a created cultural fact for him was the Holocaust. Step by step, he reviewed the stages of its appearance. At first, people faced with the phenomenon of the total extermination of Jews called it fascist "atrocities", which "both metonymically and semantically" ^{[2, p. 98]} stood on a par with other atrocities. Moreover, the total extermination of Jews was questioned, since it contradicted the "experience of life" ^{[2, p. 101]}, and was explained by the "moral panic of the Jews" ^{[2, p. 101]}. Then the "atrocities" began to be called "cruelties in their purest form, which became an attribute of war," and doubts about them disappeared ^{[2, p. 99]}. Since April 3, 1945, not only the atrocities have been considered an established fact (realistic meaning Ch. Piers, and not "arbitrary" symbols of F. Saussure), but in parallel, the fact of injury was also established. However, it did not become "a traumatic experience for the audience, i.e. for those who only watched the events, whether near or from afar" ^{[2, p. 102]}. In order for the audience to become traumatized, it was necessary to "symbolically expand and psychologically relate oneself to the victim" ^{[2, p. 103]}. The impersonal mass seemed to be representatives of another race. Moreover, Jews were disliked. Answering the question how such a "radical", in Kant's words, "evil" could happen, Alexander referred to "imperfect interpretations of traumatic events from the point of view of common sense" ^{[2, p. 106]}, which is fair. But even such an initial explanation shows the absolute uniqueness of the event.

Alexander considers two types of thinking. The first is connected with the popular theory of trauma and psychoanalytic theory, which explained why people were able to discuss this problem only after three decades of silence. Criticizing the definition of the Holocaust as "ontological evil" (Elie Wiesel), since the very idea of evil belongs to the theory of knowledge, and not to being, he considers this ontological construction of evil not natural, but artificially constructed, a product of the work of culture and sociology. Moreover, the design became possible on the grounds that the Allies won the war.  If this had not happened, the Holocaust would never have been discovered ^{[2, p. 112]}. Moreover, 1) there was an attempt to shift the focus of villainy to Nazism as an extra-national reactionary force, 2) an attempt, after the end of the extermination of Jews in 1945, to direct "organizational and cultural reactions" to all survivors of this mass extermination. This can also explain the incorrect methods used by the Resistance members in relation to the defeated, as described in Pansa's books. Only after overcoming that terrible incident, when it seemed that everyone was guilty, the Holocaust could be called a Holocaust, studies important for understanding cultural codes that distort the picture of events became possible.  

            Cultural trauma, for Alexander, is "an empirical, scientific concept that presupposes the presence of new semantic and causal connections between previously unrelated events, structures, representations and actions" ^{[3, p. 7]}. At the same time, special attention is paid to the responsibility borne by the society that caused the injury ^{[3, p. 26]}. In addition, Alexander studies in detail not just the change in everyday life and language, considering this aspect to be the most important in the face of change and one of the main traumatic elements. This is what contributes to the autonomy of culture, for the establishment of which the codes involved in cultural objects are necessary, knowing which, it is possible to detect some common internal influences and restrictions on the lives of people of various political, social or scientific and professional orientations.  

        Alexander shows the ways in which the process of trauma can capture the scientific world, the media, state-bureaucratic organizations. In the media discussing the process of trauma, new discussion opportunities arise, in which some of the competing interpretations gain greater persuasive power compared to others. But at the same time, representational processes acquire the character of news, where brevity, an ethically neutral position, the transmission of different points of view are required, which significantly reduces the "pain threshold" of the trauma experienced. Finally, according to Alexander, the struggle for the reader often leads to exaggerate the importance of the news or distort it, provoking intellectual and sometimes physical fights between "traumatized" groups and groups of "criminals", politicians, etc. In any case, Alexander's work is a full–blooded anthropological and sociological study of one of the most serious phenomena of the twentieth century - traumatized consciousness.

Somewhat looking ahead, I note that Alexander's research is confirmed by a recent article by A. F. Pavlovsky "Cultural trauma and modern historiography: the "second wave" of research on besieged Leningrad (2016-2021" ^[16], Pavlovsky makes an attempt to understand the event of the blockade through the impact of changing mental attitudes on him, forcing "researchers to pay more attention to "cultural traumae"" not only "as to the process of forming dominant ... narratives about the suffering of society in the past", but also "alternative ideas" ^{[16, p. 27]}, If in the "first wave" (1990s - 2000s), for example, the emphasis was placed on the clash of Soviet "myths" and oral history, the "second wave" engaged in the discussion of cultural trauma, shifting attention to the formation of "canons" and "archive" of texts about a traumatic event in the context of the emerging "historical and anthropological turn to the Soviet man" ^{[16, p. 28]}, expressed in the study of moods, behaviors and ways of survival, the view ofin the field of justice, informal communication, rumors, subjective relationships, religiosity, etc.     

   Studies of "post-memory", i.e. situations when there are no living witnesses and descendants show interest in their lives, lead, according to Pavlovsky, not to the "cooling" of memory (true, it would be worth explaining here, because there is no memory of their own), but "to the emotionalization and polarization of attitudes towards the blockade in different groups, those who prefer to imagine it as the space of a heroic epic or as a humanitarian catastrophe, which leads to various conflicts of memory" ^{[16, p. 29]}. The author explains the narratological approach to memory studies by the group's imagination about the past, depending on "specific narrative structures" and on deliberate ideological distortions, often leading to "amnesia" and "anesthesia" of the traumatic experience of millions of people" ^{[16, p. 30]}.

The Effective Power of grief The problems of force, violence, traumatic memory and cultural trauma were the focus of the book by psychologist and cultural critic A.M. Etkind "Crooked Mountain" ^[21].

This book uses an anthropological method that allows an introduction to the scientific study of personal impressions, associations and reflections. Through such experiencing thinking, conducting, as they said in ancient times, the mind through the heart is produced or reproduced, since we are talking about a traumatized memory, the tragedy is not so much of being as, as one interview says, "the tragedy of being." The emphasis is placed on the ability of memory to reproduce long–gone traumatic events that are not subject to oblivion and, accordingly, invade culture as breaks, dissonances that give any of their interpretation in the works a cathartic character and create a paradoxical situation, on the one hand, metanoia - a change of mind that alienates itself from itself, and on the other hand, a psychopathological situation of the impossibility of oblivion the violence suffered and the trauma received.

       The book begins with a description of the "balls of the victims", to which the relatives of the executed gathered after the French Revolution. "Women cut their hair the way the executioner did, exposing their neck, and wore a red ribbon around their neck where the knife fell. Inviting the ladies, the men did not nod their heads, but jerked it, imitating the movement of the body at the moment of the guillotine strike. Dancing and flirting, the participants of these terrible balls shared grief for the dead" ^{[21, p. 10]}.

       Etkind admits that these "balls of victims" are a legend, but this legend is "a recurring reaction to loss, which symbolically reproduces the loss itself" ^{[21, p. 11]}. Linking his concept of the study of grief with some elements of the theory of trauma, considering that his concept is both similar and dissimilar to the "traumatic realism" of Michael Rothberg, who assumed that the texts of traumatic realism admit a degree of reliability that exceeds the correspondence to the facts ^[27], Etkind talks about the possibility and ways of transmitting the experience of social, historical and the cultural catastrophe and the survivors of this catastrophe, and their descendants through works – literary, architectural, cinematic, which creates a special stereoscopic nature of the sorrowful existence. The creation of a fact ("balls of victims") doubles and enhances a really accomplished fact, creating a tragedy not so much of being as the tragedy of being, as M. Y. Nemtsev and R. Tempest defined this state.

       Etkind, introducing the existential of grief and obviously detailing the traumatics of violence, increased the "pain threshold" of the trauma experienced, ways of mitigating which Alexander suggested. The emphasized role of emotional tension with a huge sensual and intellectual fuse reinforces Alexander's idea of the need for understanding the era of cultural and symbolic codes and what can be called "immaterial elements". The empirical fact emerges in Etkind not just through literary and other reminiscences - he becomes a living, effective force. Etkind does not accidentally write about grief (considering it an expression of violence and traumatic states), because grief (not a term, not a concept, but an existential experience) shows the greatest degree of trauma, not only personal and not only collective, but also cultural, not rationally explicable.

       All of the above applies either to post–war Europe and the United States as a whole (individual, albeit very significant events are analyzed - the Holocaust, Watergate), or to the USSR-Russia before 2012. Etkind, comparing the tragic events that took place in Germany during the Nazi era (the Holocaust) and the USSR during Stalinism (the GULAG), wrote not about their identity, but about their difference: "If the Nazi Holocaust destroyed the Other, then Soviet terror was like suicide" ^{[21, p. 19]}, meaning that The executioners who sent people to the Gulag became victims themselves when they turned into GULAG prisoners. But conducting a comparative history of Europe, Etkind raises the most important methodological question about what happens when "there is a lot of memory" ^{[21, p. 21]}. And this "a lot of memory" in the presence of a different attitude to the past is stirred up when new crises arise.

        The speech of the vanquished vs the cause of the victors        

Pansa's books, to which and to which it is now necessary to return (this is prompted by the logic of thinking about violence leading to cultural trauma), imply another question: what happens when, as some historians believe ^{[23, p. 99]}, there is little memory. Pansa just resists such a perception, reminding both of the difference between its storage and expression, and of the tragic change of positions that occurs when the regime of violence falls and is replaced by a "normal" social structure. 

          Pansa was born in 1935, which means that he belongs to the generation that M. Hirsch called the generation of post-memory ^[23], i.e., not remembering the "catastrophic" culture, but interested in its multilateral study. Of the considerable number of books, two - "Children of the Eagle" ^[25] and "Blood of the Vanquished" ^[26] - attract attention: both, of course, belong to memoir literature, i.e. they are acutely subjective, and this subjectivity makes them personally attractive.

          While studying the history of the civil war, Pansa interviewed a 77-year-old woman (her pseudonym "Alba M."), who was 19 years old at the beginning of the conflict and who became the heroine of The Children of the Eagle. She told him about her young man ("Bruno"), who fought on the side of the fascists. "Alba and Bruno are the only fictitious names of my story," Pansa said, while "everything else (names and facts. –A.N.) is an accurate reconstruction, I hope without a lot of mistakes, of various decisive events of the Italian Civil War from the autumn of 1943 to the spring of 1945" ^{[25, p. IX]}.

            Alba was already quite an adult at that time, so she remembers a lot. This means that you can rely on her story, especially since we are talking about a memorable event in the history of any state, be it the civil War in the USA of 1861-1865, Russia of 1917-1922 or Spain of 1936-1939. She does not cite any references to other sources confirming her words in her story. Only memory is Alba's witness. However, after the publication of the book, no Italian historian refuted the information contained in it, although it is known exactly how memory can fail any person. Last but not least, a pseudonym can be a witness to the rightness of memory – the fear of violence that remains in it is alive. But the pseudonym also indicates that the past is different from the present, however, allowing the present to approach it in order to be able to open up and thereby enter the space of culture, the space of discussion and reflection – in the actual human work. This book is a narrative about cruelty, righteous or unrighteous, but manifested on both sides, thereby proving that these are people of the same generation of the same country.

         Narrator (respondent) his second book, "The Blood of the Vanquished" (2003), "Livia Bianchi" ("the only fictional name"), the Florentine librarian also told about the fate of former fascists after the end of the civil war and about the reckoning with them "in many provinces of Northern Italy, from May 1945 to the end of 1946, and in some in cases even longer" ^{[26, p. XVII]}.

The reasons for the massacre of supporters of the Mussolini regime were completely different. The regime has caused a lot of misery and suffering to the world and people. But when the time came to put an end to it, the accumulated hatred, indignation, desire for retribution, the feeling that arose, not always rationally realized, impasse in the development of mankind forced to resort to extrajudicial punishments, to unconsecrated punishments. Therefore, we are talking about reprisals, not retribution.

One of the common methods of murder was suspicion of espionage, which "guaranteed you almost always a bad death. This happened to a 23-year-old girl, Maria Raposa... on May 1, Maria was detained by the partisans of Asti (a city in Piedmont. - A.N.)... The girl was accused of espionage… She was robbed, stripped, then forced to march naked down the street..." and executed in Castello Square ^{[26, p. 112]}. At the same time, there was no evidence of her involvement in espionage. It was enough just to say the word "spy" to kill a person. The presumption of guilt took the place of legal consciousness. "Women, only suspected of involvement in fascism or espionage, faced the same fate" ^{[26, p. 11]}. Of course, it is possible in this case to refer to the wartime regime, but now we are not talking about the legitimacy of retaliation, but about the awareness of trauma – akin to the "balls of victims" - in post-memory.

            In this publication, which also has a memoir character, the narrator, unlike the Children of the Eagle, sometimes refers to various researchers and sources: "Before continuing, I must tell you that my main source is a thorough investigation of one right-wing researcher, Antonio Serena, the current deputy of the National Alliance ..." ^{[27, p. 187]}; "she handed me a photocopy of a report from the Bologna prefecture, which was dated July 4, 1948..." ^{[26, p. 270]}.

Both books are journalistic in nature. The author writes as simply as possible so that anyone can read it. Pansa, we repeat, for the first time raised the problem not so much of the mutual cruelty of the opposing sides to each other, even to the defeated enemy – this is typical of any war, as the problem of silence about what happened, about a long-term ban on talking about it, which created the illusion of just retribution, i.e. retribution based on judicial decisions, and not arbitrary reprisals, even if it is psychologically justified. This was the purpose of publishing his books: not only the war should be presented in its entirety, but also the attitude of one's own and another's, recognized and unrecognized, should represent a person as a whole, because "the identity itself acquired" should "encompass a person ... in the fullness of his constitution, his being" ^{[20, p. 18]}.

Such an awareness of the traumatization of the whole society, which arose many years after the war, presupposes, however, personal, if not experience, then comprehension and discussion. And the practice of following/not following the fascist ideology was definitely a personal practice, transformed by the totalitarian state into a collective one.  The man of the military and post-war eras was deeply rooted in this not so much a seemingly universal order as in the ways of responding to it, and in many cases they coincided with both "those" and "these". The "traumatized" consciousness arises, as a rule, a long time later, mainly when the chaos of events finds order in memories and is reflected in their interpretations. Forming a single whole with other representations, such memories contribute to the creation of cultural grounds for the formation of the phenomenon of socio-psychological trauma, which, according to Pansa, differs from the trauma of an individual in that "unites different types of representations and is associated with a change in collective identity… Unlike psychological or physical trauma, when there is a wound and the experience of intense emotional suffering of an individual, cultural trauma means a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the fabric of society, which affects a group of people who have reached a certain degree of cohesion" ^{[25, p. 42]}.

That is why the memories of fascism are important - the main traumatic event of the twentieth century, which affected the consciousness of people and the XXI century - of each individual: this event gave rise to an identity crisis, during which clumsy attempts are made to restore the old ideology.

Pansa, being an "objectivist", decided to tell the Italians about their hidden and silenced history, which the defeated in the civil war had no right to talk about ^{[26, p. 162]}. In the book "The Blood of the Vanquished", one of the eyewitnesses of the events of the Civil War asked when he was asked to give an interview on this topic: "Are you from any political party? Or from the police?" ^{[26, p. 233]}. Even in the 21st century, many Italians are afraid of talking about their recent history because of the taboo nature of a number of topics, including the civil war ^{[26, p. 162]}, especially since Pansa did not try to justify fascism in any way, wanting to hear both sides of the conflict. Not only the vanquished were silent, but also the winners. "Even today, almost no one wants to talk about these bloody stories" ^{[26, p. 153]}. Therefore, to the question of what are the books of Pansa and Pansa himself as a citizen – "a special phenomenon of fearlessness or catastrophic consciousness?", one can answer: "Both a phenomenon and a catastrophe." A phenomenon – because he decided – one of the first – to break the ban and remind about what was forgotten. A catastrophe – because it exposed and thereby aggravated the traumatized consciousness of Italians, demonstrating the binary “legal consciousness/arbitrariness” as the guiding principle of all those who establish a certain cultural fact, as Alexander said.

            To appreciate the significance of Pansa's books for Italy, you need to feel and think about the mentality of Italians. The people were afraid, embarrassed, ashamed of the not-so-distant totalitarian fascist past. Many tried to pretend that in general nothing terrible had happened. And now, more than 50 years after the final liberation of the territory of Italy from fascism, Giampaolo Panza comes on the scene, reminding his people what he really is. For the younger generation, Pansa himself is an irritant, prompting them to realize the myths they have created about themselves, and for the old – a hateful monument to the past. The Italian Communists perceived Pansa's work as a betrayal ^[22], as they saw in it the revisionism of fascism.  However, along with the problems of searching for the meaning of "post-memory", there remains the "problem formulated by Alexander that the meaning of trauma cannot be determined" if one does not answer the question of "what kind of evil and traumatic events are we talking about? Who is responsible? Who was the victim? What were the immediate and long-term consequences of traumatic actions? What can be done to correct or prevent these events?" ^{[2, p. 114]}. This is the question of turning into a narrative – one of the most important issues for modern anthropology.