© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 IMAGES 6 Also available online—brill.com/ima DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340008 1 On the general field, see Robert S. C. Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). I have drawn on some of the material in this book for what follows. 2 The reference is to Michael Rothberg’s important work, Multi‑ directional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 3 On the history of the Auschwitz site see, for example, James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 4 Young, The Texture of Memory, 119–54; Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 180–85. ROBERT S. C. GORDON University of Cambridge ITALIAN MEMORY AND ITALIAN MEMORY WARS AT AUSCHWITZ Abstract The Italian national memorial on the site of Auschwitz I was opened to the public in April 1980 and closed down in July 2011. The article examines the conception and genesis of the memo‑ rial in the 1970s, looking at the tensions and also the artistic richness of the project. It then examines in this light the public controversy that erupted around its proposed renovation, starting in 2008. It suggests a number of ways in which this unresolved debate throws light on key questions about Italy’s historical and contemporary memorialization of the Shoah. The case of the Italian national memorial block at Auschwitz—opened in 1980 and closed to the public in 2011, with its future still unclear today—offers an extraordinarily resonant illustration of the power and complexity of memory politics in postwar Italy and the oddly oblique positioning of the Holocaust within the larger Italian cultural field.1 It tells us something about the nationalization of Holocaust memory, in Italy and elsewhere; about the tensions in the multiple or “multidirectional”2 patterns of memory through which Holocaust memorialization intersects with other, often more prominent threads of local memory culture in any one country; and about how these in turn are negotiated with Jewish strands of memory, between the home community and the site of Auschwitz. It also tells us something powerful about the layered history of postwar memory over the decades of the second half of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century, as one era’s conception of collective cultural memory and what constitutes due attention to the past clashes with that of the next. In the case of the Italian memorial block, there has been a recent flash of open public conflict, refracted through lines of political or ideological allegiance (and memories of these), as well as through intergenerational differences, between the events of the 1940s, their memorialization in the 1970s, and new practices of memory and history, as research, as art, and as pedagogy, in the early 2000s. Along the way, this case study also allows us to examine the conception and execution of a remarkable collabora- tive multimedia work of art, drawing on contributions from extraordinary figures such as Auschwitz survivor and writer Primo Levi, composer Luigi Nono, archi- tect and Mauthausen survivor Lodovico Belgiojoso, and others. 1980 The Italian national memorial at Auschwitz was opened with a solemn official ceremony on April 13, 1980 at Block 21 on the site of Auschwitz I. It was given the official title of “Memorial in Honor of the Italians Who Fell [italiani caduti] in the Nazi Extermination Camps.” In 1979–80, national pavilions were also opened by Austria, France, Hungary, and Holland. The year 1978 had further seen the opening of a section dedicated to “the suffering and martyrdom of the Jews” (suggest- ing an awkward tension between Jewish memory and national memory in the organization and re-organiza- tion of Auschwitz as a site of memory during the era of the Warsaw Pact). The year 1979 had also seen the extraordinary event of the newly elected Polish Pope, John Paul II, returning to Poland and saying mass at Birkenau in front of a crowd of over one million. And in 1979 again, UNESCO recognized Auschwitz officially as a World Heritage site.3 This was, in other words, a period of fervent activity and reconceptualization of the site, planned during the 1970s in a period follow- ing the official opening of the International Auschwitz Monument in 1967, itself a process begun years earlier, in the mid-1950s. The complex transnational history of this process, incidentally and perhaps surprisingly, had a significant Italian element.4