Testimonies of the long battle for an often denied Italianness

Author: Carmen Palazzolo

BIRTH OF A MINORITY. Istria 1947-1965: history and memory of the Italians who remained in the Istrian-Kvarner area. The subtitle of the work already well summarizes the content of the volume, which describes through testimonies the living conditions of the Italians who remained in the territory ceded to Yugoslavia after its massive abandonment by the majority of its inhabitants. Prof. Nemec, the memory of those who remained can still be defined as fearful - as Prof. Pupo in the Preface - and their behavior characterized by silence and camouflage? “I do not believe that the Istrian-Italians have any more need to keep quiet and blend in, even if the lasting perception of social control and the amnesia promoted as a reason of state, with respect to events such as the exodus of the majority of compatriots, have left their mark: they have led to the learning of cautious and prudent ways of expressing themselves, in accordance with a regime that did not tolerate antagonisms to the official versions; silence has had a historical meaning, for a long time it has been a strategy of defense of the private sphere against the invasiveness of the public sphere. If we have these stories today it is because they have been preserved within family nuclei and communities that were able to function as contexts of defense and reception, while the official versions prevailed in the general devaluation of the minority. We need supportive interlocutors and social practices in which memories can be placed to ensure that they do not remain private and irrelevant. Historical-social research with the memories of the protagonists goes in this direction: the statutory objective of oral history is to give a voice to those who have not had one, have spoken in a subdued way within restricted circles or have not spoken at all. Through this type of sources, experiences, dynamics and interpretations that cannot be otherwise documented are reconstructed and which enter into the heart of the post-war transformations. In this way, the range of differences is opened up, the picture is enriched with many variables, doing justice to many paths, often hidden by univocal and simplifying definitions such as that of "remained". What difficulties did you encounter in collecting testimonies? “In the volume several pages are dedicated to the analysis of the different narrative styles, of the motivations for remaining silent or for speaking about the past, of the very conditions of production and elaboration of memories. We must keep in mind that we are talking about a twenty-year period of minority formation, in which the urgencies of daily life suggested not to see too much, not to judge, to learn to live in terms of normality the anomaly of the passage from a hegemonic condition to that of a minority. Everywhere in the post-war period the work of overcoming traumas and losses took up a great deal of society, here it was continuous with respect to the post-exodus and parallel to the processes of neo-integration in communist Yugoslavia: the whole thing required familiarity with oblivion, the ability to "turn the page". I can say that the reception given to me and my investigative project was generally good, the broadcast was able to take place in the Istrian context at the end of the new century, within culturally lively and comfortable environments such as those of the Italian communities, at a time when the dissolution of ideologies, the decline of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the disappearance of the border between Slovenia and Italy were behind us, all factors capable of reformulating the relationship between the Italian minority, Istrianness and the wider Balkan context. Other elements favored the narration: there was, at various levels, the awareness of a sort of "last appeal", or of the crisis of a "living memory", determined by the progressive disappearance of direct witnesses of the crucial events of the 900th century; a constructive use of memory was also possible, in the sense that members of a minority can compensate for the loss of rights and value in the past with the desire for a better future for subsequent generations. It is clear that the quality of the openings has been different, as in any historical field research that involves working with witnesses: it is a matter of entering into a relationship with very different dispositions and situations, even more so in this case, since I asked to recall the hardest post-war years, to tell a controversial and often traumatic past: there is almost no family among those who remain that has not been marked and redefined by the twenty years after the war and I asked for family stories, to then return them in a broader context”. It now seems certain and accepted that the reasons for leaving as well as for staying were multiple. What are the reasons for staying that emerge from your research? “The central part of the research was precisely that relating to the exploration of the multiplicity of constraints and microfactors that induced permanence. Much has emerged regarding the difficulty of navigating the labyrinth of options, for which the memoirs report strong deterrents; in the variety and complexity of the testimonies many other elements are highlighted, such as strong ties with the territory, parental obligations, the brake exercised by the elderly, the tiredness of war veterans who have been far from their place of origin for a long time, distrust in the possibilities offered by Italy, and waves of hope in a socialist future. The time factor was fundamental for the generations born in the 30s: as the times of uncertainty and waiting became longer, integration processes in the new political-social context occurred: educational, work-related, marital. In these directions, the Istrian-Italians inaugurated complex adaptive systems, faced formative processes - linguistic, political-cultural, inter-ethnic relations - experimenting with normative instances and implicit rules to create survival and stabilization strategies. The work on the memoirs does not reach univocal conclusions, each of the many issues addressed - the material conditions of life, the perception of the exodus, the education of young people, communism, the relationship with the territory, the economy and work, etc. - it lends itself more to considerations than to conclusions, hopefully of a new type”. Were the ideological reasons for remaining - in your opinion - more numerous than the others? “Some, especially the younger ones, felt an exuberant surge of hope and a revolutionary impetus aimed at building a socialist society and a new life under the banner of Italian-Slavic brotherhood. “We believed in it” is an expression that signals a commitment to concrete activism, in the projection towards a future that seemed just around the corner, intensely desired and pursued with collective strength. Hunger and fear, the damage and mourning of war, the violence, the family and community lacerations could be conceived as private miseries, accidents along the way, in the pursuit of a future full of promise. For the others, who found themselves, often against their will, acting as a rearguard for the exodus movement, the important thing was that the Italians had lost their ruling classes and the new blood of the People's Powers had arrived, only partly indigenous, the rest coming from other Yugoslav regions. They found themselves lost and disoriented, faced with a new illiteracy, in the literal sense and for many also in the political sense: this was particularly true after 1948, when the turning point brought about by the Cominform resolution was incomprehensible to many. The new hierarchies created by politics, however, did not favor the Italians; the faults of fascism - from denationalization to the lost war - and the past economic and cultural hegemony played against them, a fact that made them the immediate target of the class struggle. Furthermore, the acute crises in the relationship between Italy and Yugoslavia involved the entire minority, as documented by the events of its most representative body, the Union of Italians of Istria and Fiume, whose history appears structured as a war made up of defeats and setbacks, battles won and territories reconquered, in a context of perpetual re-legitimization”. Many exiles consider those who remain to be traitors and collaborators and therefore want nothing to do with them. Is this a justified offense? “It is one of the most painful and central issues in the relationship between exiles and those who remained; violence and betrayal constitute a complicated mourning to process, which involves several generations. One of the main accusations made against fellow countrymen by those who left was in fact that of having taken part in the expulsion movement, as they were members of the Popular Powers; but the generalization and the related rancor often overlook the fact that a good part of those who had compromised themselves in particularly zealous and hateful acts had then also left. The personalization of guilt may end up extending to the entire minority, which by having adapted seemed to deny its Italianness, in fact continuously negotiated and defended in the spaces allowed by integral Yugoslavism. The presence of a counterpart to whom one can attribute at least some blame for one's own vicissitudes is generally a decisive factor in the processes of building collective memory. The reciprocal representations have retraced the political-cultural demarcation lines of the Cold War, portraying the other side as politically entangled in the propaganda of the Italian or Slavic-Communist right. The paradoxical outcome of this process of personalizing guilt was the absolution of the regimes, leaving the lost war and a good part of the 900th century in the background. Istria, in the two decades covered by the research, was for many Italians not on the other side of the Adriatic, but a distant continent; but at the same time in other family realities, in a private dimension, relations were maintained with relatives beyond the border, not only in terms of correspondence but also of aid, coming from those who had settled in Italy and providential for those who had remained in the desolate poverty of post-war Istria”. What was the “objective” situation of the Italians who remained after the first massive wave of exodus, that is, around 1950? “If by objective we mean quantifiable, in the Istrian-Kvarner territories ceded in 1947, the Italian population was estimated at around 225.000 units. Almost concurrently with the movement of options, the first official Yugoslav census was launched in March 1948, which for the areas of Istria, Fiume, Zara and the Kvarner islands, defined the provisional figure of 79.575 Italians, excluding Zone B. In the new census of 1953 the Italian national group was more than halved, with 35.874 presences, which in the third statistical survey of 1961 became 25.614. This figure included the territories of the former Zone B for the first time and was destined to decrease further. The historical low was reached in 1981 with approximately 15.000 attendees”. The remaining Italians became - and quite abruptly - from a majority a minority and Yugoslav citizens, required to obey the laws of Yugoslavia but of Italian nationality. How can we explain to those who live far from our territory the complexity, difficulty and richness of this situation, which can be summed up in the question: “What does it mean to be a minority”? This is a topic that should be the subject of reflection and debate in border cities like Trieste to understand, in addition to our minority living in Croatia and Slovenia, the Slovenian minority living among us. “We must think that the theme of preservation - but also of regeneration - of cultural identities is fundamental for minorities, although in the post-war period many engaged on the fronts of survival, of overcoming mourning, of new integrations, have delegated this task to small elites. Only a small group of intellectuals were able to think in terms of safeguarding the linguistic heritage, knowledge and traditions, and were able to maintain alternative perspectives and solid ties with the legacy of a past that needed to be revisited but not erased. The subsequent recovery of community vitality was based on their legacy, on the possibility of transmitting it to the new generations that had formed in the meantime. In the current context, generational change has extended the possibility of drawing on the heritage of the past, but has also favored the formation of mixed identities that are aware of the leading role that minorities can have in a cultural and economic sense, as an interface between different languages ​​and traditions. The Italian minority in Istria has demonstrated how the theme of safeguarding national culture can peacefully coexist with other identities, prefiguring a multicultural society in which only what can be useful in projects of contamination and exchange is used from the old ideologies”. What was the greatest suffering of those who remained in the first period of the exodus, that is, around 1950? “Let's say that for those who remained, a twenty-year period of decreasing difficulty awaited them, from an economic and social control perspective, within a society that was struggling to demilitarize and democratize itself. The testimonies are totally eloquent on the range of problems: in many family stories, events were added together that, even taken individually for other families, had been sufficient to determine the choice to leave; in these cases, different conditionings and constraints evidently worked as a counterweight. Perhaps the most painful was the irreversible crisis of family and community structures, the collapse of a way of life; the suffering for the separation of relatives grew with the progression of separations and the desertification of places, until it became dramatic when the last links of a chain left, with a drip of departures that continued until the 60s. Many have pointed out the tremendous generational void that opened up: the loss of peers was experienced in terms of “theft”, the disorientating feeling of loneliness brought about disorientations capable of orienting one’s life path. The isolation from the mother country was also serious and prolonged; even if at an individual level and in the Italian cultural circles, many people made efforts to obtain books and contacts, a structured network of exchanges with Italy had to wait until 1964. During this period of time, it was not easy to maintain an identity profile for a minority that continued to lose weight, to suffer the closure of schools and clubs, to be accused of being separate and detached from the UAIS organizations. Relations with the Slovenian minority in Italy were encouraged, protected by the same legislation as the Memorandum, but Italy was still a capitalist country and its cultural production could cast a false light on what in Yugoslavia was defined in terms of social progress.   There must have been great confusion surrounding a concept of culture that was supposed to involve dispersed and proletarianized groups”. From reading your research I got the impression that the first generation survivors lived for a long time in a situation of hardship and suffering no less than that suffered by the exiles, even if different. What do you think? “The image of a Cold War separation, with exiles and those left behind divided by barbed wire, antagonistic to the primacy of reason and pain, is one of the most painful legacies of the post-war period and specific to our north-east. I believe that the elaboration of mourning for a disappeared world and the condition of disorientation were shared for a long time by both parties, engaged in different contexts but which required a significant work of adaptation and redefinition of identity. Today it is clear that a broad and common cultural and linguistic substratum unites the memories of the diaspora with those of those who remained, a symptom of which is the theme of the preservation of cultural identity, the emphasis on autochthony, the roots, a territoriality that materially and symbolically contains the trunk of the origins.