Blackwell Reference Online

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How can we remember terror, and how can we forget it? How can we commemorate it? What is the most suitable cultural shape of remembering terror? By addressing the issue of the social representation of very controversial pasts, this chapter addresses the relation between the collective knowledge and memories of terrorist attacks in Italy and the process of their being fixed and shaped into commemorative social practices and cultural objects. This process may reflect tensions and contradictions between state and civil society in the public inscription of a dramatic past. A proper commemoration of terror, in fact, requires constructing adequate sites and objects of memory, but accomplishing those tasks requires a functioning civic sphere. A comparative analysis of the events of the Bologna massacre of 1980 and the bombing in Milan of 1969 will explore technologies of remembering and forgetting and analyze why in some cases civil society is successful in articulating and institutionalizing the commemoration of terror, why in other cases not, and especially what consequences for the public sphere this lack implies.Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1968) in his pioneering studies argued that the past is a social construction shaped by the concerns of the present: not something given once forever, but instead a work in progress constantly shaped by institutional and individual conditions. This ... log in or subscribe to read full text