«Lager illness». The representation of psychiatric hospitals in the Sixties

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 01:57

Visite: 3944

The traditional approach to mental illness has historically been revealed by the institution of asylums. And asylums have often been represented through the classical iconographic metaphor of concentration camps, as clearly shown in the first documentary ever shot in a psychiatric hospital, I giardini di Abele (1967) by Sergio Zavoli or in the famous photos published in Morire di Classe (1969) by Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin. In the decade of Sixties of the last century, a group of psychiatrist, universitary students and workers of health sector began to contest the way the patients were treated and “cured”. In doing so, they first gave birth to the semantic identification between concentration camps and asylums and consequently accused psychiatric hospital for showing the same structure of a prison camp (separation from the world outside, no stop sorveillance, phisical constraint etc.). The representation of brutality was necessary for denouncing the inhuman treatments of patients in the asylums and went along with the progressive consciousness of the so called “institutionalization”, an illness suffered by patients of a “total institution” such as a psy-chiatric hospital or a prison. The photos of the patients taken in asylums are the vivid proof of their “civil death”, in other words their forced renounce to the world. Similarly, even simple photos of a psychiatric hospital express something beyond the intention of the photographer because the miss of personal objects or traces of a subjective presence show the predominance of a collective and impersonal dimension.

«Make love, not war»

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 01:29

Visite: 3620

Between 1966 and 1967 the issue about conscientious objection strikingly surfaced worldwide to becoming urgent in the following two years, together with student dissent, several demonstrations were organized to protest against the Vietnam war.

That conflict represented for the young people a new way for new a recognition and elaborating a large collective rethinking, interweaving the ferments coming from distant cultural “places”: from post-Vatican Council Catholicism, aspiring to Pacem in terris (1963), to American counterculture.

I will try to explain the reasons that urged in the United States, in Great Britain, in France, in Italy, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, workers, the capelloni and intellectual young people of the 1960s not to wear the uniform of the army and to refuse war as a conflict resolution device. In particular, I will concentrate on the Italian context examining the practices and the language used by the members of the conscientious objection movement.

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A legal discourse on Radical Diversity

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 01:48

Visite: 5094

Law plays a pivotal role in the “construction” of diversity as it allows the legalization of exclusion and discrimination. Part of the historiography concerns itself with the events which devastated the Jewish population in the 1940s and maintains that the requirements of the death camps have to be found in the law, suggesting a reflection on the specific responsability of those who drew up such legislation. At the beginning of the 1940s, when anti-Semitic legislation reached its highest territorial extension, European jurisprudence was engaged in a common reflection on the formation of a new geo-political order and on a new legal order essentially focused upon “anthropical elements”. The present essay proposes to reflect on the contribution of jurisprudence in the construction of racial differences, paying heed to the ideas by which the architects of such laws came to articulate a juridical discourse founded upon ethnic data. Attention is also paid to the experience of fascist Italy and to that of Vichy France,

which have been long considered by historians as mere reproductions of the National Socialist model, with much attention paid to legislative texts as well as to the theoretical constructions originated by racist doctrine. We show how lawyers, who were engaged in racial fascist politics and in that of Vichy anti-Semitism, succeeded in giving voice to the binomial race and rights. These same lawyers constantly integrated biological, anthropological and political data when dealing with law, thereby contributing to the improvement of racial legislation. We focus then on the original character of the solutions which were proposed by Italian and French legislators, illustrating how the integration of the racial data within the law took place along the backdrop of a constant adaptation of the single national juridical experience: some traditional liberal and republican ideas and categories – first and foremost “the principle of equality” – were then rethought and made compatible with the new criteria of “inequality of racial origins”.

At the mercy of discretionary power

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 02:06

Visite: 3589

The general unconditional consent on the Arendtian “Auschwitz-Event” (in the real and metaphoric sense) as the starting point for the study of Nazism and the understanding of Twenty century history has relegated the Italian fascist regime to a secondary place after Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR. Actually, some forms of political repression and political detention in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany can be compared. The paper examines two preventive-repressive measures: the political banishment (confino politico) and the protective custody (Schutzhaft). In addition to the institutional and judicial aspects of both instruments and their continuities and discontinuities with the previous state systems, I consider the material aspects of the everyday life of political detainees and the consequent effects on their personality in a comparative and transnational perspective. The application of confino and Schutzhaft was a critical moment for the destruction of what in the continental tradition is called Rechtsstaat and for the establishment and fortification of the two dictatorial regimes. This praxis – based on detention without accusation, defence, sentence and certainty about duration – dates back to the previous political system, was improved and adapted by both dictatorial regimes and persists into the present. It is being used in dealing with immigration and in the so called “War on Terrorism” to prevent political and social dissent without incurring judicial obstacles and limits.

Guf anti-semitism in Italian universities

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 02:08

Visite: 7201

When Mussolini’s government introduced racial laws in Italy in 1938 fascist university students were in the forefront in the exclusion process of Jewish students and teachers from Italian Universities. This essay focuses on changes in Italian fascist policy and on how its results affected Italian university system and the everyday life of young Jewish students and teachers, victims of the Italian racial laws.

In the Twenties and early Thirties of the 20th Century Italian Fascism welcomed foreign students at Italian Universities in order to spread its influence and ideology abroad and this welcome practice concerned also those Jewish students run away from Eastern Europe after many governments had adopted anti-Semitic laws. Italian policy began to change in 1933 and restrictions on welcome practice

of the foreign students were placed, affecting particularly Jewish students who studied in Italy thanks to grants and facilities. After 1938 Italian and foreign Jewish students were no longer allowed to finish

their studies. Also teachers were excluded. Italian fascist students were protagonists of many anti-Jewish activities and became an avant-garde of the regime in institutions of higher education, strongly supporting the construction of a “Jewish problem” and influencing the spread of this idea among Italian public. The anti-Semitic policy of the regime was preceded and supported by an intensive propaganda based on a theoretical elaboration of racism. Students associations and reviews took part actively in this propaganda: students helped the creation of an ideological context for the anti-Semitic legislation and its application. In Italian universities the Guf (Gruppi universitari fascisti), the fascist

students’ associations, turned this propaganda into actions against colleagues and teachers in order to drive away Jews from the Italian academic world and to cancel any signs of their university lives both in a material and in a spiritual way.

Holocaust memory in reunified Germany: what heredity of DDR?

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 01:50

Visite: 4578

In East Germany the traces of the antifascist memory of the GDR-era are still visible: whether it is difficult to know their relevance for the everyday life of East Germans, their political manipulation is evident. That concerns not only people who feel nostalgic for the German Democratic Republic but also those who support

the idea it was a totalitarian state and consider so it is necessary crossing out its vestiges. The removal of a memory is often functional to legitimate other versions of the past that can also lead to relativize the National Socialism. In this regard the idea that the antifascist memory was only an ideology on one hands delegitimizes its contents (mainly the communist resistance), on the other hands it can favor that other forms of irreflexive memory emerge in the public discourses. Reflecting upon the ‘heritage’ of the GDR-Antifascism can then highlight the various strategies of memory in the reunified Germany. In particular the paper shall focuses on two aspects. First, by remembering the Holocaust in public discourses we find frequently references to the GDR dictatorship. Second, the construction of a collective memory means reworking not only different pasts but also different forms of remembering. To sum up the aim is to contextualize the GDR-memory of the national socialism historically and culturally. This perspective allows thus to reflect upon the possibility of a new frame for the public memory of the Holocaust and of the National Socialism, based on the idea of taking care of own past. Whether the result is not a shared memory, the exchange of different historical experiences can avoid relativizing attitudes towards both German dictatorships.

Post-colonial studies and strategies of escape

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 02:07

Visite: 4055

The essay, from Rhoda of Igiaba Scego and using the term sdiib which indicates the entry strategy of Somalis in Europe, aims to prove the correspondence between literature and routes of migration. By using theoretical, with interviews and cognitive maps will investigate the construction of subjective and collective imaginary of the Somali diaspora.

Prisoners of the Lager, interpreter of the Lager

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 02:19

Visite: 4002

The Lager seen from the inside. Its capacity to mould the personality of the detainees, and to leave open wounds in the behaviour of the survivors. These are the topics of the essay that moves from a concise comparison of the real lives of Viktor A. Frankl and Amedeo Dalla Volta in two different temporal and detention contexts: the Nazi death camps for the former, and the “human deposits” of Austria-Hungary for Italian prisoners after Battle of Caporetto for the latter. Both men were Jews and psychologists with solid medical training. Frankl recalls his experiences in A psychologist in the Lager (1946); Dalla Volta relates his psychological and psychiatric studies on prisoners of war (1919). They do not limit themselves to describing the horrors of the camp, and they enrich the narrative with an urgency that is original without being simplistic.

Psychiatry, Nazism and fascism

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 02:04

Visite: 5219

The author studies the connections between Nazi and fascist policies on racism, eugenics and bio-politics (acknowledging the characteristics of each regime). He also examines the specific role played by psychiatry in this context (it is a clinical approach and psychiatric institutions). In brief, he underlines how the question of alterity, the “social management of difference” still remains today basic, beyond the established facts on the personal responsibility of German psychiatrists, and psychiatry on the whole, in the Nazi selection policies of mentally ill patients and other “deviant” groups (such as alcoholics etc.). Building an understanding on how psychiatry generated and strengthened the racist ideologies of European fascisms (and primarily of the anti-Semitic stance) merits no doubt special attention nowadays. Historically, one can observe, in the late nineteenth century, the influence of eugenic theories on psychiatry. In fact, one can detect, before the times of Auschwitz, the common ideological and scientific roots of psychiatry and fascisms, and the non linear drift of psychiatry towards Nazi-fascist policies. Italy, on this topic, represents an interesting case study. Recently in fact, several researchers have highlighted how Italian psychiatrists (with only a few exceptions) actively supported the fascist regime (it is an ideology, medical policies and socio-anthropological vision). Italy, unlike Germany, did not pass eugenic policies laws (on compulsory sterilization or mass euthanasia of interned patients), nonetheless, psychiatry played a fundamental role in the persecution and deportation of Italian Jews.

The challenge of international feminism

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 02:21

Visite: 4834

This contribution is focused on non-violence during a totalitarian age. More specifically, I analyze the possible relationship between non-violent practice and antifascist activism, also from a cultural perspective. In my doctoral research I observed the activity carried out by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s governing bodies between 1919 and 1939. During these twenty years, the International WILPF Executive Committee and the International Secretariat strengthened the organization, becoming involved with the League of Nations in public debates on the traffic and production of armaments, on economic reform and the exploitation of resources, and on the promotion of a non-violent culture among the youth. The use of WILPF’s education materials, unexplored before, allowed me to see how internationally active the secretariat was, and how the international officers distinguished between disarmament and education those sectors of activities which better expressed their ideals, at least during the 1920s. However, it is important underline how in this decade the “wilpfers” – even if they had occasion to deal with Mussolini’s politics – did not take any official action to censure his Fascist regime. Something changed at the beginning of the 1930s. The WILPF International Executive Committee accorded League membership to the “Group of Italian Women Abroad” (all political exiles).At this point, Italian as well as German members’ evidences about persecutions and abuses carried out by Fascists and Nazis in their own country helped WILPF executive officers make a definite choice in favor of an anti-fascist public position. In other words, the public consciousness of these pacifists was pushed to realize that the affirmation of non-violent principles required a wide range of confrontation, which had to involve not only the personal aspirations of all people who worked for peaceful relationships (within and outside of national borders), but also those of whole institutional systems.

The memory of WWII in Italian Cold-War peace movements (1949-1953)

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 02:03

Visite: 4129

The experience of World War II represented a turning point for the social perception and representation of war in European culture. The direct involvement of any sector of society in a total war, with the transformation of entire countries in battlefield, the fall of any border between soldiers and civilians, the strategic employment of weapons of mass destruction, made any attempt to elaborate a positive interpretation of war experience impossible or at least very hard. On the contrary, the memory of World War II and its use in public discourse became essential elements for the creation of a broad pacifist attitude and for a general and widespread refusal of any other possible return to the war experience. The essay will be focused on a specific, significant case of use of WWII memory in the making of a pacifist language: the case of Italian Movement of Partisans of Peace. In the years when the Korean war seemed to prelude a Third World War, Italian Partisans of Peace succeeded in mobilizing a large anti-war front in Italian public opinion by promoting a general and absolute refusal of conflicts and violence based on the recent memories of WW II experience. However, in the cultural

identity of a movement influenced by the elaboration of international Communist movement, the traumatic WW II experience had to be mixed and confused with a more celebrative view interpreting the 1939-45 conflict as the triumph of democratic “civilization” over fascist “barbarity”, and as the origin of a resistance movement whose ideal heirs had to be the cold-war peace activists.

The relationship between the Italian Party and the State of Israel

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 01:10

Visite: 3720

The birth of the State of Israel is one of the post-Second World War political events that Italy has to cope with: it has struggled its position between the memory of the Shoah and the attempt to re-establish an influential role within the Arabian world. This paper aims at analysing the complex relationship between the ICP and the State of Israel.

To prevent the next generation

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 01:59

Visite: 3509

Jewish women entering Auschwitz-Birkenau, who weren’t sent to gas chambers upon arrival, were striped from their clothing also their heads and intimate parts of their bodies were shaved. From that moment they were treated not as women but as subhumans whose destiny was inescapable death. Some of Jewish female inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau were forced to participate in medical experiments. Moreover, a number of Jewish women in order to save their life had to sacrifice

their unborn babies. This paper presents the issue of violating the sexual nature of Jewish female prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau through painful and humiliating sterilization experiments, castrations, and forced and voluntary abortions. I will illustrate the nature of Dr Carl Clauberg’s sterilization experiments in which chosen Jewish women had their uteruses injected with a specially invented caustic liquid that blocked the fallopian tubes. Furthermore, I will present the procedure of surgical castration of Jewish women that was a consequence of Dr Horst Schumann’s sterilization experiments through X-Ray. I will also investigate the extreme circumstances that forced women to abort their unborn babies. Finally, I will analyze the post war testimonies related to the topics mentioned above revealing their consequences on psychological health of their victims.

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Woman and Resistance

Dettagli

Categoria principale: Before and Beyond Auschwitz Digital Brochure

Categoria: Paradigma Lager - Abstracts

Pubblicato: Venerdì, 21 Gennaio 2011 01:20

Visite: 3240

The paper discusses Slovenian and Jews women from Trieste and its surroundings who survived the Second World War. The author raises the question as how and why being a member of the Slovenian minority and the Jews minority became a decisive factor and a distinguishing element in the decision of many of the Slovenian and Jews women to join the anti-fascist and Liberation movements and to play an active political role in the post-war period.