Everything will be fine

Publish date 05-10-2020

by Renato Bonomo

On 28 October 1921, Maria Bergamas, on behalf of all the mothers who had lost their children in the Great War, was asked to choose from 11 coffins the one that should have been buried as an unknown soldier in the Altar of the Fatherland. In the following days the coffin was loaded on a cannon shaft and taken to Rome by train for the burial in the presence of the king. At each station, two wings of the crowd welcomed the passage of the body.

It was a real rite of a political religion with symbols and liturgies typical of patriotic rhetoric. However, the collective celebration of the memory of the victims of the war was not just an Italian event. In the 1920s, an extraordinary number of monuments were built in various countries of the world to commemorate the fallen of the Great War. Over 176,000 memorials were built in France alone. This imposing work of collective memory can be explained by the fact that the First World War was one of the first great mass events that entered in depth in the life of individual people. Almost all the communities had at least one dead or one wounded to commemorate.

But such an explanation is not enough: the celebration of pain suffered had the task of generating cohesion in societies. The postwar period had exacerbated social divisions and inequalities: governments tried to recompose them through a unitary narrative of the past, sometimes operating evident historical forces in order to achieve the goal.

The experiences of the unknown soldier and the collective commemoration of memory are opportunities to reflect on what is happening in our days of coronavirus. If certain celebrations of the past seem excessively cloying, the lack of memory of current generations is equally disconcerting.0

A few months after the most difficult days of the pandemic, there seems to be very little of the sort of civil tension that isolation had aroused. There were very few demonstrations to commemorate the many victims of the coronavirus who died and buried in solitude.

Among the few praiseworthy exceptions, the one that the president Mat ¬tarella strongly wanted in Bergamo. The desire to remove isolation seems to have prevailed, without having to deal too much with individual and collective conscience.

Once the emergency has been overcome in some way, indifference and the excess credit granted to oneself at the expense of us have returned. Too bad, however, that when the ego prevails over us, the tension towards the future and therefore hope is lost. Everything is flattened into a fake present.

None of us can live without memory, not even societies can. Those who cultivate the past are because - for better or for worse - they have a certain vision of the future. Those who have no past cannot even have a future. And then I don't know if everything will be really okay.

 

Renato Bonomo

NP Agosto/Settembre 2020

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