Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe

The Case of Italy

A. Hajek

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137263780
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe explores the transmission of memories of 1970s protest movements in Italy, Germany, France and Great Britain. Focusing on Italy, it analyzes commemorative rituals, memory sites and other forms of 'memory work' performed by social groups in a city where a protester was killed by police in 1977.

1

“Years of Lead”? Political Violence in Perspective

Introduction

On 7 May 2012 the chief executive of a leading Italian firm specializing in the manufacture of thermoelectric power plants was kneecapped by two men as he left his home in Genoa to go to work. This attack immediately prompted the mainstream media to resurrect memories of left-wing – or ‘red’ – terrorism in Italy (Hajek, 2012c).¹ Such a dramatic re-evocation of traumatic memories of political violence is symptomatic of Italy’s failure – or reluctance – to come to terms with its past, and hence of a wound that refuses to heal. At the same time, however, those who were involved in the various social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s tend to promote an overly celebrative narrative which equally hinders a more objective and inclusive elaboration of this past. In the first two chapters of this book I will outline the contrasting yet co-existing public memories of the 1970s in Italy as, on the one hand, the violent anni di piombo (‘years of lead’), and, on the other, anni formidabili (‘wonderful years’).² The first chapter challenges dominant narratives – characteristic of the Italian and German context in particular – of the 1970s as a decade marked by political violence and terrorism. In Germany these master narratives mostly revolve around the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF), the left-wing terrorist group which regained notoriety in 2008, when Stefan Aust’s best-selling history of the RAF – The Baader–Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon (1986) – was adapted for the cinema (The Baader Meinhof Complex).³ Similarly, the public memory of the 1970s in Italy primarily focuses on the violence perpetrated by the extreme left-wing terrorist organization the Red Brigades, and in particular the abduction and assassination of Aldo Moro in 1978. This played a major role in the ‘condemnation’ – in the public sphere – of these years as anni di piombo, which continues to be evident today, as the abovementioned incident illustrates.

The chapter analyses the origins of the notion of ‘years of lead’ in Italy, its application in the official and public sphere, and the emphasis it places on narratives of victimhood and trauma, to the detriment of a reassessment of historical facts. The chapter thus identifies strategies of selection and omission in the creation of a national history of the 1970s in Italy, and assesses the consequences of the specific use that Italian historians, journalists and politicians have made of this politically loaded term for the way the decade is remembered and narrated in the public sphere.

The chapter begins with an assessment of the protests of 1968 in Western Europe, generally seen as the starting point of a decade marked – albeit to varying degrees in each of the four countries discussed here (Italy, Germany, France and Great Britain) – by political violence, civil rights and women’s movements, and a new cultural climate. All three of these components contributed to the overall transformation of Western societies from the late 1960s on, although the chapter focuses on the origins of, and reactions to, political violence, its role in the construction of a negative memory of the 1970s and the impact of the protests of 1968 on the development of a new political subject in Western Europe, in the following decade. The case of Italy will be compared to that of Germany: the connection lies not just in the presence of left-wing terrorist groups in both countries throughout the 1970s but also in the alliance between the two countries during the Second World War, and its traumatic legacy.⁴ The controversial memory of Fascism and Nazism played a significant role in the motivations and identity of left-wing terrorist organizations in Italy and Germany, as it did in France.⁵ As such, it reflects a generational issue, especially in West Germany, where the Nazi legacy – Anna von der Goltz explains – ‘lent greater urgency to generational discourses’ (2011b, p. 13), which continues to inform the political activism of young left-wing activists today. Finally, the fact that the very notion of ‘years of lead’ was derived from the title of a German movie on terrorism suggests a relation between the two case studies.

The examples of Italy and Germany will be contrasted with those of France and Great Britain, where the reverberations of the events of 1968 had a far more limited duration and did not, for example, debouch into terrorism in the subsequent decade – at least, not on the same level. Nor have these two countries witnessed any significant re-emergence of social movements in more recent times, as is the case for Italy and – to a lesser degree – Germany. What does connect the four countries, however, is the persistence of a myth of 1968 in which the idea of generational conflict and youth rebellion dominates. As Von der Goltz notes, the latter was associated with the 1960s and 1970s ‘like perhaps no cultural product from this period’ (ibid., p. 7). The idea of generation ‘as a subjective and imagined category’ (Nienass, 2013, p. 113) will be further explored in Chapter 2.

The ‘1968 years’ in Italy⁶

If the protest movement that evolved around 1968 in Italy was first and foremost composed of students who mobilized against educational reforms, the protests themselves soon took on a broader significance, directed against capitalism and drawing inspiration from universal icons and martyrs of resistance, from Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution to the urban guerriglia of the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Palestinian liberation movement (Tolomelli, 2006, p. 94; p. 84; Kurz and Tolomelli, 2008). As Rainer Horn has observed, ‘Italy’s student movement evolved in the course of two years from a reform-minded constituency clamouring for improvements in course content and delivery into a frontal challenge to all forms of hierarchies and the powers of the state’ (2007, p. 112). Thus the Italian movement shifted its focus to class struggle, which resulted in an alliance with the workers’ movement that culminated in the period of the so-called hot autumn, when a number of strikes in factories and industrial centres of northern Italy – motivated by demands for better pay and working conditions – paralysed the country (Lumley, 1994; Ginsborg, 2006).

If it is true that solidarity was an inherent feature of the Italian movement of 1968, expressed, for example, in its ideological alliance with the working class and – on a transnational level – its criticism of the Vietnam War, nevertheless the substantial differences between two socially heterogeneous groups soon led to the decline of the student movement. In Marica Tolomelli’s words, there were irreconcilable differences between those ‘groups increasingly orientated towards the creation of an “organic connection” with the workers’ movement, and student groups that identified themselves less and less with these “worker’s instances”, which progressively moved back towards the universities’ (2002, p. 34).⁷

Nevertheless, contentious politics in Italy persisted throughout the 1970s, unlike in France, where the events of 1968 had created a momentum that was stronger than in Italy but did not last very long: ‘In Italy, it never came to such a climax, but the social conflagrations [ . . . ] ultimately undermined the status quo far more deeply’ (Horn, 2007, pp. 111–112).⁸ This was due, above all, to changing attitudes to the use of violence in reaction to the growing repression of the Italian student and workers’ protests in 1968 and 1969. This repression pushed left-wing militants more and more towards armed resistance and the idea of violence as a legitimate instrument in the battle against a corrupt and repressive state. The final straw in this process was a dramatic bomb attack on a bank in Milan in December 1969, which killed 17 people and wounded 88. The Piazza Fontana massacre is generally considered as the first in a series of attacks carried out as part of a ‘strategy of tension’: that is, the deliberate creation of a political climate of fear and alarm by a variety of right-wing organizations, aimed at provoking – through the illusion of a threat of political subversion coming from the left – ‘an atmosphere of terror in the country so as to promote a turn to an authoritarian type of government’ (Cento Bull, 2007, p. 7; p. 19).⁹ These attacks included two more bombings in 1974, in the northern city of Brescia (8 dead, 103 wounded) and on the Italicus train travelling from Florence to Bologna (12 dead, 44 wounded), and another on 2 August 1980, in the waiting room at Bologna railway station (85 dead, 200 wounded).

There were strong suspicions that neo-Fascist terrorist organizations were behind the Piazza Fontana massacre, and that these organizations were somehow connected to the Italian secret service, although this has never been proved. Moreover, an anarchist suspected of having been involved in the massacre – Giuseppe Pinelli – himself died under mysterious circumstances after three days of interrogation (Foot, 2007, pp. 59–61; Lanza, 2009). If violent resistance to the state had until this time remained merely theoretical, then, this incident led many people to consider other, more radical solutions, such as terrorism and armed struggle.¹⁰ To quote Tolomelli again, there was a sense that ‘the existing social order could not be transformed but only overturned through practices which did not exclude recourse to violence’ (2006, p. 65). In short, the Piazza Fontana massacre gave a new impetus to various autonomous, militant groups that organized themselves in northern factories in 1969. This was in fact the context in which the Red Brigades, the most notorious terrorist group of the left, came into being.¹¹

A second factor that contributed to the continuation of contentious politics in Italy in the 1970s was the economic crisis of 1973. The rise of oil prices and increasing unemployment affected young people in particular. The new generation faced a much more bleak situation than the generation of 1968, which had to some extent continued to enjoy the benefits of the economic boom of the 1950s: ‘The movement of ’77 lacked the profound optimism, “the psychological tensions of omnipotence” of the previous generation: a generation which still felt part of a “society of affluence”, even if marked by injustice and falsifications’ (Crainz, 2005, p. 572). On top of these material problems, the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) imposed a policy of austerity and selfsacrifice, which affected the lower classes in particular and was out of step with the growing consumerist attitudes of younger people and the new lifestyles imported from Anglophone countries. Consequently, they increasingly moved away from a traditional work ethic, the cornerstone of the historical left, and came to reject completely the concept of work itself.

Hence, the economic crisis and its consequences pushed young people away from the classical left-wing ideals of work and sacrifice and towards a focus on more private problems and desires. As a result, new forms of collective action evolved, aiming at the appropriation of a certain lifestyle and the satisfaction of personal needs. Think of the so-called autoriduzioni or auto-reductions, which originated in late 1976: these involved crowds of people visiting, for example, a cinema or a restaurant and refusing to pay the full price. This was not a new form of action, though: in the late 1960s auto-reductions – or what were called, at the time, ‘proletarian expropriations’ – had also taken place, but they had been restricted to basic household expenses such as gas and electricity. By the mid-1970s attention had shifted more towards consumer goods and luxuries (Moroni and Balestrini, 2005, p. 523), as young people laid claim to a more prosperous, more cultured lifestyle, consisting of more than just work, which was also illustrated by the very change of definition, from the more ideologically connotated ‘proletarian expropriations’ to the more individualistic ‘auto-reductions’.¹²

Finally, the enduring legacy of the ‘1968 years’ in Italy was also an outcome of the political void left by the PCI. As well as being a consequence of the Communists’ dwindling authority over a generation anxious to participate in new cultural developments, this void was due to the PCI’s move towards the political centre, through the so-called historical compromise. Launched by the PCI’s secretary, Enrico Berlinguer, in 1972, this project envisaged an alliance between the PCI, the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI) and the PCI’s main opponent, Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana, DC), led by Giulio Andreotti.¹³ This development was prompted, above all, by the need for a strong, stable government, in view of the rising threat of terrorism and of an authoritarian coup d’état, as had happened in Chile.¹⁴ It also became increasingly difficult for the PCI to present itself as both a Communist party and a democratic one, especially after the Soviet military invasion of Prague in 1968.

The alternative left-wing milieu did not respond favourably to the idea of such an alliance, though, and were particularly hostile to any form of submission to the hated Christian Democrats.¹⁵ So the disappointment was enormous when the PCI, after coming second in the elections of 1976 (with 34.4 per cent of the vote, against the DC’s 38.7 per cent), decided to support, indirectly, the centre-right government of the Christian Democrats, which led to the so-called government of ‘non distrust’ (Ginsborg, 2006, p. 501). This was perceived by many younger voters on the alternative left as a betrayal, and thus the feeling that the PCI no longer represented them was strong.

At this period the most notorious terrorist group of the time, the Red Brigades, decided to raise the stakes: after a series of mostly symbolic actions, such as the burning of company directors’ cars, from 1975 on the Red Brigades began killing representatives of the state and other public figures, such as journalists and judges. This reached its climax in 1978, when the statesman and leader of the Christian Democrat party, Aldo Moro, was abducted, held in captivity for 55 days and finally assassinated. The situation degenerated further, until a fierce anti-terrorist offensive and new laws on terrorism, in the early 1980s, dismantled the Red Brigades.¹⁶ Other left-wing terrorist groups were also active during this time, but the Red Brigades dominate the collective memory of the 1970s because of the often ‘spectacular’ nature of their actions, the publication of various (auto)biographies and novels written by former terrorists and the proliferation of movies about left-wing terrorism.¹⁷

In short, throughout the 1970s a growing mistrust of the political establishment, a sense of disappointment at, and criticism of, its handling of various economic, social and political problems resulted in greater recourse to political violence within a part of the alternative left-wing milieu in Italy, and subsequently in its total dissociation from the historical left. In addition, the Communist Party’s failure to offer youth a consistent political identity enhanced the fragmentation of the alternative left and allowed left-wing terrorism to escalate in the second half of the 1970s.

Germany’s ‘Red Decade’

The lack of belief in a central government and mistrust of state institutions were visible elsewhere in Europe too. In West Germany the shadow of the Nazi past added an extra dimension to the anti-authoritarian protests of 1968 and, in particular, those of the terrorist groups that sprang up in the early 1970s: their aim was to unmask the alleged ‘democratic semblances’ of Western society and to demolish ‘all legal and institutional devices behind which their substantial authoritarianism was believed to be hiding’ (Tolomelli, 2006, p. 95). Much like in Italy, where terrorist groups drew on collective memories of Fascism and the anti-Fascist resistance battle fought out by partisans between 1943 and 1945, in Germany the perceived connection between Nazism and ‘capitalist imperialism’ served to legitimize the recourse to violence. A minor terrorist group which attacked a US army base in Heidelberg in 1971, for example, claimed to be protesting against the Vietnam War, which was seen as analogous to the Holocaust (ibid., p. 89). The ‘traumatic experience of national socialism’ (ibid., p. 91) therefore makes the German case different from other European countries, with the exception, of course, of Italy. Thus, if

the 1968 movement in the Federal Republic of Germany shared numerous sociological and ideological traits with similar movements in other countries, it remains a unique phenomenon, and ultimately, the roots of this uniqueness must be sought in Germany’s Nazi past, in World War II, and in the Holocaust.

(Kraushaar, 2010, p. 80)

This reveals a generational component to the protests in Germany: ‘the legacy of Nazism lent greater credence to the notion of generational conflict’ (Von der Goltz, 2011a, p. 476).¹⁸

At the same time, the nature of the protest movement of 1968 in West Germany was shaped by the American counterculture and civil rights movements: the struggle of the American protest movement against the Vietnam War thus became ‘one of the central mobilizing and radicalizing issues of the German SDS [the German Socialist Student League] in the years 1967–1968’ (Klimke, 2008, p. 101).¹⁹ This was due to the presence of many foreign students in West Germany, the impact of the Cold War and the strong international connections (ibid., p. 106). Unlike the movement of 1968 as it manifested itself in Italy, though, the West German movement did not manage to move away from the university context and engage the workers as well. This failure to evoke ‘a decisive response from the working class’ contributed to the demise of the SDS towards the end of the 1960s: ‘[T]he student movement was driven back not by the repressive forces of the bourgeois state but by the refusal of the trade unions to break their post-war consensus with that state’ (Fraser et al., 1988, pp. 233–234).

Martin Klimke sees another reason for the disintegration of the SDS in this period: after the killing of a student named Benno Ohnesorg by a policeman on 2 June 1967, the student movement grew rapidly and suddenly, but not without altering its organizational and social structure (2008, p. 99). Subsequently, it became ever more difficult to create a unified national strategy: ‘Ideological infighting, local idiosyncrasies, and the emerging women’s movement contributed to the end of the SDS as a national organization’ (ibid.). Indeed, in 1968 the SDS was shaken by an internal revolt by its women members, which was ‘both a factor and a sign of the German student organization’s disintegration’ (Fraser et al., 1988, p. 242).²⁰ In the years that followed, the legacy of the 1960s was thus taken up mostly by the women’s movement and by the local citizens’ groups that had emerged throughout the 1960s, paving the way for the emergence of the German Green Party (Klimke, 2008, p. 107; Rootes, 2008, p. 298).

Other key events in the 1968 movement in West Germany, apart from the killing of Benno Ohnesorg, include the attempted assassination of the student leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968. This resulted in the so-called Easter riots, when 45,000 demonstrators across the country tried to block the delivery of newspapers published by the Springer media group, seen as morally responsible for the attack on Dutschke, who eventually died in 1979, as an outcome of the assault (Hauser, 2008, p. 104). It was not, however, until the ‘Battle of the Tegeler Weg’, on 30 May 1968, that the West German student movement reached a new level of confrontation with the establishment, and the country witnessed the development of armed struggle and terrorist groups, most notably the Red Army Faction (RAF).²¹ Thus, the 1970s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: Negotiating Memories of Protest
• 1. “Years of Lead”? Political Violence in Perspective
• 2. “Wonderful Years”? Myth, Nostalgia and Authority
• 3. The Trauma of 1977
• 4. Affective Labour: Between Mourning and Moral Duty
• 5. Seeking Consensus: Political Uses of the Past
• 6. Rebuilding Group Identities on the Far Left
• 7. Memory Sites: Negotiating Protest in Urban Space
• Conclusion: Trapped in Private Spaces
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index