HISTORIC PASSION

A Passion for Memory

by Luisa Passerini

For the first twenty years of my life, I did not have much appreciation either
for personal memory or for history. The memories of my childhood were not
all painful, but they were associated with the memory of the death of my
mother when I was six. For a long time, nothing belonging to that period
could be remembered joyfully. Later on – during my first psychoanalysis – I
rescued some of those early memories and valued them. But until very late in
life, I could not remember the date of my mother’s death. I kept thinking it
was 1946 rather than 1947 and I had to check her documents repeatedly to
be sure. Before six years of age, I was comforted by a form of memory which
was not personal memory but the stories that my grandmother told me: fairy
tales, her life-story as well as family stories concerning my great-
grandparents, great-uncles and aunts, but also summaries of Italian
operas – with music composed by Verdi, Puccini, Bellini. The other
person who nourished my hunger for narration was Signorina Nene, the
aunt of my best friend Aurelia. She used to narrate to us with great preci-
sion, but very probably also with invention, novels and stories she had read,
such as Le Comte de Montecristo by Alexandre Dumas or The Nose by
Gogol or Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero by Emilio Salgari (Jolanda, the
Daughter of the Black Corsair, 1905, an adventure novel which was part of a
series on pirates in the Antilles). These story-tellings took place on Sunday
afternoon, when Aurelia came to visit her aunt, who lived in the same build-
ing as my grandmother and myself. A novel would last for several weeks, so
detailed was the narration, sometimes interrupted by our questions, eager
for more details, to which she knew all the replies. Aurelia’s smaller brothers
would also be present, but they were silent in awe at the wonderful stories
being created by our dialogue. Signorina Nene was not married, but she had
an affair with a musician who lived on the same floor as us, a very mysteri-
ous man who played at night and slept during the day. She was very fond of
cats, and one night, hearing a desperate mewing repeatedly coming from one
of the walls in her apartment, she did not hesitate to brandish some sort of
pickaxe and break through the wall which had been built to close an old
fireplace. Its chimney communicated with the big attic of the house, from
where the cat had fallen. It was a very small lively cat, who happily survived

Universitá di Torino and Columbia University luisa.passerini@unito.it

New York

History Workshop Journal Issue 72 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbr033

ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
242 History Workshop Journal

Fig. 1. The author recording an interview in Turin, 1979, with one of the protagonists of her book
Fascism in Popular Memory (1984, transl. 1987).

to our amazement and delight. These stories embodied a whole world of

adventure, wonder and care.
History was a different matter. I had always hated it, at least the type of
history we were taught in school. Dates, facts, great events, the greatness
of Italy: text books when I was in elementary school, between the autumn of
1946 and the summer of 1951, were still largely modelled on the Fascist
ones. The teaching of this grandiose and triumphalistic history was both
boring and incongruous, given the conditions of the majority of the popu-
lation at the time. My own family, although not poor (my father was a
railway employee), had to be careful with money and still in the 1950s,
when I was a teenager, could not afford expenses such as buying a pair of
skis; I had to rent very old ones, which were not up to the standard of the
smart skis of my peers. We lived in a provincial town in Northern Italy, Asti,
where everything was a mark of class at the time. The unpleasantness of
history learning continued through secondary schools, leaving deep traces:
still today, I cannot remember dates and I must often ask my husband, a
physicist who might be expected to know less than me about history, such
questions as the exact dates of crucial events in the Risorgimento. For a long
time the only dates I remembered were those I learned in contexts other than
history: for instance 1066, the battle of Hastings, and 1688, the Glorious
Revolution, dates that I learned in my English course; or 17 February 1600,
the execution of the free thinker Giordano Bruno by the Catholic church, in
the philosophy course. After completing Italian secondary school, I spent a
year (1959–60) in a high school in the United States, in Rochester, NY,
thanks to a student-exchange programme. In that context, the history
learning did not improve: I took a course in American History and had to
respond to written texts with closed-format questions, plus writing a few
short essays full of facts. I did all right, but I have completely forgotten
everything I was obliged to memorize in that course.
 A Passion for Memory 243

Fig. 2. The author at her wedding party, May 2008.

However, another memory came to salvage me from drowning in com-

plete oblivion: in 1960, back in Italy, I was the founder, together with a few
other young people, of a small group meant to unite students, workers and
peasants. I cannot remember any peasant, but some of the partisans who
had fought in the Resistance had gone back to the country and were doing
agricultural work there. We spent long evenings with them eating and drink-
ing and listening to their stories about their activities in the Resistance.
It was deeply inspiring and we often wondered how we could live up to
that memory.
When I went to the University of Turin in 1960, I decided to take a joint
degree in history and philosophy. Philosophy dominated the course and I
wrote a final thesis in History of Philosophy. Significantly, the topic was
‘The concept of historical crisis in the philosophies of Henri de Saint-Simon
and Auguste Comte’. I had a terrible argument with my tutor over this thesis
during my oral defence, when he accused me of presenting a pro-Marxist
interpretation of the two philosophers. He was more or less right and my
interpretation might well have been unfounded, but he had not read my
thesis before the defence and voiced his disagreement only at that point,
speaking with all the arrogance of pre-1968 academic barons. I took it very
badly and I broke all relationship with him. In this way, I was left ‘like
a boat in the wood’, as the Italian proverb says: what did one do without a
patron in an Italian university in 1965? (Even today, to tell the truth.) But a
history professor, Guido Quazza, came to my rescue, offering me a schol-
arship for two years in order to do some historical research on the
anti-Fascist press in both Italy and France. After all, I had a degree in
Philosophy and History and I was known for being a scrupulous researcher.
This was the occasion of a great discovery: the revelation of primary sources,
244 History Workshop Journal

especially newspapers, but also other documents, to be read in small libraries

all over Piedmont and in the heavenly Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris
dating from the eighteenth century, at the time still located in rue de
Richelieu in a magnificent setting. That experience of primary research rad-
ically changed my attitude to history, in spite of the political spirit of the
time, which was both ahistorical – in the sense of not caring about history –
and anti-historical – in the sense of being determined to reject anything to do
with the past.
In the second half of the 1960s I was pro-Situationist. Both politically and
personally, I lived or believed I was living entirely in the present, here and
now. This attitude actually proved to be a projection into the future, which
at the time was often confused with the present. The idea – happily utopian –
was to start ‘immediately’ living differently, through what we called the
revolution of daily life. This led to a number of dissident practices such as
sexual freedom and ‘happenings’, abrupt interruptions of cultural and pol-
itical events, on which occasions we attacked and ridiculed the current
stereotypes as well as the divisions between culture and politics, art and
life, politics and life. For instance (in 1966?), some of us went – all dressed
in black – to a conference on education, composed of progressive teachers
who of course claimed to be antifascist, and we interrupted them dramatic-
ally, claiming with derision that they were not up to the real legacy of the
anti-fascist Resistance and that their views on education were a dead end. (A
very nice old teacher told us benevolently, afterwards, that we behaved like
the early fascists.) All this however was not enough to satisfy my hunger for
change and liberation, and the insistence on the present diverted my pleasure
in historical research to a new field. In 1967 I left Turin and Italy for Africa,
where I worked with and on liberation movements such as the Frente de
Libertaçao de Moçambique (Frelimo), now in power in independent
Mozambique. It was on Frelimo that I published my first book,1 since I
had refused to publish anything from my thesis, which I considered not
adequately radical by Situationist standards. The present was projected
into the future in Africa too, but history and memory appeared to be of
some use in understanding colonialism and the directions that new forms of
liberation should take. African socialism had come under criticism, but it
still had some attraction, and the Mozambicans spoke and wrote about the
‘new man’, new cultural and existential relationships, while accepting the
contribution of Marxist politics and political economy. I would say that at
the time there was also awareness of the relationship between the
pre-colonial society and the impact on it of colonialism, thanks to the an-
thropological work of friends such as Jaap Van Velsen, author of a seminal
work, The Politics of Kinship, on the Lakeside Tonga of Nyasaland
(Malawi).2
This same attitude, making instrumental use of history in the service of
politics, continued when I was back in Italy, active first in the student/
worker movement and the radical new left groups, then in the women’s
 A Passion for Memory 245

movement and finally in the trade-union movement. In these new left

groups – which aimed to go beyond hectic political activity towards some
stable political organization – some of us created courses for our comrades
called ‘scuola quadri’ (training for cadres), in which we studied and analysed
the history of capitalism and the world situation. I was in charge of teaching
the history of the labour movement and Marxian thought. Among the
friends who were engaged in that effort were Giovanni Arrighi, who gave
wonderful talks to our small group on the history of imperialism and its
present stage,3 and Romano Màdera, whose capacity to find deep links
between the personal and political was already remarkable.4 We read and
commented on works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao Tse Tung.
A sense of history was also present in the name of the group to which we
belonged, Gruppo Gramsci, and we published a journal with a historical
title, Rassegna comunista. This title was taken from the theoretical periodical
of the Italian Communist Party in the first half of the 1920s, so it was
intended to recall a period of beginning, when revolutionary organizations
had to be refounded on the basis of innovative theory and historical class
analysis.
The women’s groups I participated in from 1970, on the other hand, were
resolutely anti-historical: we did not recognize any antecedent, any prede-
cessor whatsoever, we rejected the heritage of the so-called first wave of
feminism, believing that it was centred on equality while we focused on
difference. Of course this interpretation was wrong, as we discovered later
on, when Anna Rossi-Doria studied the ‘first feminism’.5 But at the time I
was deeply into the idea that we were doing something absolutely new and
unheard of; I remember that when Franca Pieroni Bortolotti – one of the
very first Italian historians of feminism – came to a conference in Turin, I
went to meet her and she told me in an almost disheartened voice: ‘We must
study the history of women and feminism’, but I could not listen to her
advice, as I found her work too exclusively focused on the political aspects
of women’s-liberation history and not dealing with issues of gender differ-
ence and daily life.6
In the second half of the 1970s, all the hopes of regeneration which had
driven the new left activities were defeated. Of the new social movements,
only feminism survived. Some of us, including myself, moved into a sort of
new-age phase, in which my lack of interest in history was justified by the
fact that I was an Aquarius, a sign of air, supposedly always in search of
novelty; fortunately the ascendant in Scorpio, a sign of water, gave some
opening for a slightly more concrete outlook. In 1974, after some years of
teaching in secondary schools, my qualification to teach as Assistant
Professor in History was recognized by the University of Turin, and I was
assigned to the chair on the history of the Internationals and Marxism held
by a colleague. So my training in Gruppo Gramsci became the basis of
my limited academic career (which developed mainly outside my country:
I became a full professor in an Italian university only late in life). I still have
246 History Workshop Journal

many of the books we taught; the proceedings of the congresses were espe-
cially deadly to read. Fortunately, we also taught English social history, Eric
Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson and John Saville. Thus the history which I
and others with a similar biography appreciated and taught came to be
social history, subsuming the political rather than being at the service of
politics. That type of social history, informed by Marxism, seemed to be a
part of politics and even a politically significant intellectual act.
Later, in the first half of the 1980s, I became Associate Professor of
history at the University of Turin literally by default, thanks to a law es-
tablishing that those who had qualified without obtaining a chair in certain
entrance examinations, where the winner (completely predetermined) was
the one to gain a chair, would become professors too. This measure was
taken in order to solve the problem of a mass university which was the
indirect outcome of the students’ struggles and the direct result of a law
by the state. In 1969, under the impact of 1968, a decree began a reform that
liberalized university entrance, no longer to be reserved for students from
the élite type of high school. In my new position I was finally free to choose
which topics to study and teach. This shift followed the political turning
point represented by the defeat of the new left and of the new social move-
ments (with the exclusion of feminism), a point marked also by the increas-
ing presence of ‘red’ terrorism. For me, the last years of 1970s – with the
assassination of Premier Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978 – repre-
sented also the transition from socio-political history to a type of cultural
history in which oral history and memory were central. This move led me to
value the memory of others – at the time still mainly the working class – and
to look for workers outside of the places where I had always met them,
either in front of their factories where I distributed leaflets and discussed
politics with them, or in the assemblies and meetings held in the smoky
headquarters of the groups. Now I went to bowls clubs for old people,
pubs, trade-union offices, parish meeting places and private homes, where
I could interview old workers about their lives. Finally, a passion for
memory was free to emerge, in the interchange with women and men
older than me, and in the effort to understand the various levels of their
narrations. Their testimony and conversations revealed traces of more an-
cient memories; for instance, oral traditions transmitted from the rural to
the industrial working class, or women’s traditions of freedom and inde-
pendence, ‘woman on top’ and the world upside down.7 The move in itself
did not take me far away in terms of geographical distance, since I inter-
viewed factory workers in Turin. But it put me in contact with the oral
history movement, developing rapidly at the end of the 1970s. This meant
becoming part of an international network of people and initiatives dealing
with memory.
As I have written in Autobiography of a Generation (published in Italian
in 1988 and in English in 1996),8 it was the experience of listening to the
memory of others that allowed me, after about a decade of such practice, to
 A Passion for Memory 247

listen to my own memory. Between the end of the 1970s and the end of the
1980s, I interviewed – and tried to interpret the memories of – not only
workers, but also the protagonists of 1968, feminists, primary-school chil-
dren, and – in the Turin jail – women who had been terrorists. After the
publication of my book on working-class memories of fascism, in the
fall-back that follows a long and intense period of work, I decided to
begin psychoanalysis. Of course there were also other reasons for doing
so: personal and emotional problems that had ripened with the end of
youth (I was more than forty by then), and one protracted illusion in
particular, which was encouraged by political movements, that frenetic
activism kept one from aging. Feminism was no different in this respect:
we saw our bodies as sexually potent, ready to be free, young and defiant.
Ideas of old age, illness and death did not touch my self-consciousness until
much later. Of course, all this postponing was part of the process of repres-
sion that finally exploded and led me first, in the mid 1980s, to psychoanaly-
sis and later on, in the late 1990s, to a better understanding of intersubjective
relationships. It was only twenty years later, in the early 2000s, that I came
to fully grasp the meaning of subjectivity as having its origins in intersub-
jectivity, if one can ever fully grasp such a complex rapport. A simple
implication of this complex process was that I had not adequately
thematized the age difference between my interviewees and myself.
As the passion for memory went back and forth between my interviewees
and myself, and as thanks to this bustle my own memory became individua-
lized, my idea of memory itself enlarged. This process happened as I de-
tached myself from the practice of oral history for several years, although
not from oral history as such, since I kept supervising oral-history theses,
reading oral-history books and acting as consultant for oral-history projects.
The first interviews I did after this period were in 1999-2000 with Roma
refugees from the Kosovo war, who having been sedentary for a length of
time were obliged to return to nomadism and landed in camps near
Florence, where I was then teaching at the European University. This ex-
perience was crucial in the process of enlarging and deepening my idea of
memory. But the whole process had started with my interest in European
identity and the link between the idea of Europe and the idea of love, themes
which I have been researching since the early 1990s. My aim in the last
twenty years has been to produce a historical analysis and critique of
Eurocentrism in the discourse of love. With a first book, Europe in Love,
Love in Europe, I had understood memory in an expanded sense, the cultural
memory of Europe, which included aspects such as literature, psychoanaly-
sis, the language of federalism, and love letters. In a second book, Love and
the Idea of Europe, individuals and their memories became much more
prominent, of course against the background of collective cultural pro-
cesses.9 At the same time, the limits of Europe and European-ness became
more evident to me, as I am going to explain.
248 History Workshop Journal

Paradoxically, abandoning the direct practice of oral history allowed me

to bring history and memory closer together, but not only in the sense of
developing the concept of cultural memory. Rather, in the sense that, in this
time of postcoloniality and of diasporas through and to Europe, the
memory of Europe, an abstract concept, could not be understood as
belonging exclusively to European subjects, that is, concerning what and
how they remember. In our time, ‘memory of Europe’ must also be given
a meaning within which Europe is the object: who remembers Europe
and how? In other words, the broadening of memory today is necessary
because this subverts the hierarchy between the self and the other, and
this makes a crucial contribution to history. As the memory of Europe
extends beyond Europeans themselves, who are anyway scattered and
migratory, as well as coming to include people from outside Europe’s
ever-changing boundaries, the distinction between self and other is broken
down – at least in terms of European identity, of who is European – an
operation which takes on historical force, at the same time as history
inspires memory towards an understanding of the colonial era its and
present implications.10
Of course, the dual intersubjectivity that is the basis of learning to speak
and live, that between the mother (or whoever has this role) and the infant,
remains foundational. So does the dual relationship between the interviewee
and the interviewer in creating/reproducing memory and generating/
constructing oral history. But these forms of intersubjectivity must be
placed in a larger and longer context, in which the memory of the dead
and in the end the unity of humanity through different times and spaces
are at stake. However, the perspective of death makes it impossible to deny
the frailty and the limits of memory. No one can remember one’s own death,
and most of us are quickly forgotten once dead. Memory survives only in
the fragments of intergenerational memory through which the lives of the
dead partially live on in memories of generations to come.11
In recent years, teaching courses on memory in various countries of the
world has put me in contact with new seminal work being done by young
scholars, who discover new meanings of memory understood as subjectivity
and intersubjectivity through exploring new fields and topics. I am thinking
of the work done by Lance Thurner on volunteers in New Orleans after
hurricane Katrina, by Phil Sandick on the history of an African school in
Namibia, by Liz Grefrath on Guantanamo, by Lisa Polay on cognitive
neuroscience, and by many others, all revealing new aspects of what inter-
subjective memory can mean. Something similar is also true for develop-
ments in memory studies; I am struck by the relevance of some of the
contributions from the neurosciences on how short-term memory is trans-
formed into long-term memory and generally on the importance of corpor-
eal memory, or contributions from visual sources, which help us to
understand the value of emotions in creating and innovating memory as
well as in transmitting it. The type of intersubjective memory that operates
 A Passion for Memory 249

in transgenerational and transcultural interchanges is the one which con-

cerns me today, along with the issue of its conservation in new types of
archive: oral and visual archives of course, but also ‘archives of feeling’,
in the sense give to this expression by Ann Cvetkovich. She started thinking
about alternative archives for feelings/sexuality, looking at how we might
acknowledge and embrace critiques of the archive as a way of constructing
new archives that foster new public and political cultures, including cultures
of public memory that include the aims of activism.12
Where has history ended up in this story? I believe that memory has
played a major role in reconciling me with history, to the extent that I
can even, at times, be passionate about it too. The change has to do not
only with the value of oral sources. These days, I am convinced that visual
sources are at the forefront in the struggle for innovation in history and its
methodology, and in modifying the frontiers of the relationships between
history and other socio-historical disciplines, like anthropology, sociology,
literary criticism and so on. So, it is not only orality, it is memory in all its
forms, written, oral, visual, material, corporeal, that has modified my way of
writing history and my relationship with history in general. Memory has led
me beyond dates, towards an understanding of why we do or don’t remem-
ber certain dates, why we postpone or anticipate in our memory the date of
something that matters to us. And it has led me beyond events, to the
processes that go on around, underneath and within them. It is the contact
with memory that has led historians – or some of us – to accept the idea that
a history of subjectivity can exist, and that we can explore the many ways of
constructing it.

Luisa Passerini, previously Professor of Cultural History at Turin

University, is External Professor of History at the European University
Institute, Florence, and Visiting Professor in the Oral History Masters
Program at Columbia University, New York. She was Director of the
Research Project ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’ at the
Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, as the recipient of the 2002-4
Research Prize of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Her recent publications include:
Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics Between the
Wars (London, 1999); Il mito d’Europa: Radici antiche per nuovi simboli
(Florence, 2002); Memory and Utopia: the Primacy of Intersubjectivity
(London, 2007); Love and the Idea of Europe (2009); Sogno di Europa
(Torino, 2009). She has also coedited: European Review of History 11: 2
(special issue ‘Europe and Love’), summer 2004, with Ruth Mas; Fuori
della norma. Storia lesbiche nell’Italia della prima metà del Novecento, with
Nerina Milletti (Torino, 2007); La laicità delle donne, with Luisa Accati
(Florence, 2008); New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love
in the Twentieth Century, with Liliana Ellena and Alexander Geppert (New
York and Oxford, 2010).
250 History Workshop Journal

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Luisa Passerini, Colonialismo portoghese e lotta di liberazione nel Mozambico, Torino,

1970.
2 Jaap van Velsen, The Politics of Kinship: a Study in Social Manipulation among the
Lakeside Tonga of Nyasaland, Manchester, 1964.
3 These talks were later elaborated in Arrighi’s ground-breaking book The Geometry of
Imperialism: the Limits of Hobson’s Paradigm (1977), transl. Patrick Camiller, London, 1978.
4 Just one example of his later reflection on the link political/personal: Romano Màdera,
L’animale visionario, Milano, 1999.
5 Anna Rossi-Doria, La libertà delle donne: Voci della tradizione politica suffragista,
Torino, 1990.
6 Franca Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini del movimento femminile in Italia 1848-1892,
Torino, 1963.
7 Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: the Cultural Experience of the Turin
Working Class, transl. Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield, Cambridge, 1987 (Torino operaia
e fascismo, Roma and Bari, 1984).
8 Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, transl. Lisa Erdberg, intro. Joan Wallach
Scott, Hanover and London, 1996 (Autobiografia di gruppo, Firenze 1988).
9 Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics in Britain
between the Wars, London, 1999, New York, 2000 (Italian version L’Europa e l’amore,
Milano, 1999); Love and the Idea of Europe, transl. Julia Haydock with Allan Cameron,
New York, 1999 (Storie d’amore e d’Europa, Napoli, 2008).
10 These are recent developments in my thinking, so I have to refer to work not yet
published: Luisa Passerini, ‘The Ethics of European Memory’, in Moving Worlds: a Journal
of Transcultural Writings 10: 4, forthcoming, 2011, and ‘Europe and Its Others: Is There a
European Identity?’, in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. Dan Stone,
Oxford, forthcoming 2011.
11 Inspiring writings on this point are John Berger, ‘Twelve Theses on the Economy of the
Dead’, in his Hold Everything Dear, 2007, and Sally Alexander, ‘ ‘‘Do Grandmas Have
Husbands?’’: Generational Memory and Twentieth-Century Women’s Lives’, Oral History
Review 36: 2, summer/fall 2009.
12 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public
Cultures, Durham NC, 2003.
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