BRIDGES OVER THE BURDENS OF HISTORY
KATJA HROBAT VIRLOGET
I’ll start with the desire of the author of the dialogues from this book Jernej Šček from the book Café Italy (2023, ZTT), “Let’s be bridges, not walls.” Through these kinds of “cultural acts,” as the author calls this series of books, words can become the building blocks of bridges across a national border over which the burdens of an unresolved past have been pressing for decades, even centuries. A border that divides and at the same time unites us in our common conflictual memory legacy of past border wounds. Because of all the unresolved traumas of the borderline past and our own entrapment in the victim’s narratives, this border still creates blurred lenses on both sides that distort and limit our view of the “one” beyond the border. That is why this selection of dialogues with established personalities on the Italian side is a bright light that opens up the world “beyond” to the Slovenian reader in all its humanistic and social science greatness. In this world, researchers and thinkers (how would sociolinguist Vera Gheno comment from the book that the Slovenian language does not know the feminine form of the word thinker, sage?) from the fields of theology, philosophy, literature, translation, journalism, physics, gastronomy, sports, etc., think about the contemporary and past world and about a variety of perspectives that broaden the reader’s mental horizons… The book straddles the reflections of Italian intellectuals that go far beyond our borderline obsessions with unsolved history. We read, for example, about modern migration, which is so necessary in our ageing European society. And it is precisely Europeans, who are so afraid of homo migans, which is in fact a constant of human history, who are the result of the great migrations of homo sapiens, which, in the words of the philosopher of the revolution Thelmo Pievani, triumphed over other human species precisely through language. This is just one story among many that break the established stereotypes in all the wealth of wisdom that Jernej Šček evokes in selected dialogues.
As a researcher of the legacy of borderline memories and silences, I was most attracted by the reflections in the book on the collective and individual weight of the past history, on facing the responsibility that Slovenians expect so much “from others”, but rarely demand from ourselves. With writer Antonio Scurati and historian Eric Gobetti, we read about the Italian trauma of fascism as a great repression of the Italian national conscience. As the latter observes, in its sacrificial narrative paradigm and in its ideological reading of the past, fascism is denied in public discourse and erroneously equated all victims, thus relativizing and decontextualizing various types of crimes. As Shoah historian Laura Fontana reflects, the myth of shifting responsibility solely to authority has fallen away today. People paved the way for violence with their (in)choices. Totalitarian regimes such as fascism, as historian Emilio Gentile argues, created factories of obedience rather than factories of consensus. The fact that Italy has not reckoned with its fascist crimes is also reflected by the translator Patrizia Raveggi and the philosopher Michela Marzano. However, in oblivion there comes a time when shame calls for confrontation, reworking, which the philosopher herself has processed in prose at the level of an individual, family past. As psychoanalysts say, silences can also be intergenerational, when we inherit experiences from the past that we ourselves have never experienced, and as phantoms they direct our lives. And it is the third generations who, like writer Elif Shafak writes in The Island of the Missing Trees (2023, 287), carry the “oldest memory” and try to wrest it from silence, while the first generation suffers and the second represses the past. Similar thoughts are read in this book by the writer Igiaba Scego, wars and colonial traumas, migration experiences, foreignness is carried long after the conflicts in the form of inner discomfort, emptiness, silence. However, history is never black and white, but we live with its shadows, grays, and share its pains. And it is in these vulnerabilities of ours that we can find our strength, Michela Marzano thinks psychoanalytically.
It teaches us all a lesson, both individually and as a society, don’t expect an apology that never comes, but forgive yourself and come to terms with your own past. The Istrian writer Milan Rakovac thinks similarly about reconciliation, catharsis is brought only by repentance for one’s own crimes, not by fighting against those who committed them, these crimes are a matter for the one who committed them. 1 Reconciliation, as another frontier intellectual, journalist Nicolò Giraldi, writes, will not come from the handshake of presidents, but from the everyday actions of people, from mixed marriages, learning each other’s language, to curiosity about each other.
But despite the big words at the political and institutional level, despite the large investments, such as in the 2025 Capital of Culture project, according to Patrizia Raveggi, the cooperation between Italy and Slovenia, burdened by decontextualization and the unresolved burdens of history, remains lackluster. Anthropologist Katja Jerman shows a similar thing in her book Two Hills – One City? (2025, ZTT), despite establishing ti. Of the common places on the border, despite all the political rhetoric about “boundlessness”, people remain held back by the unpaid bills of the past.
And yet, let’s not be pessimistic, let’s rather conclude with the words of the lay theologian Vito Mancus from Šček’s book The Café Open. “Optimism changes the world for the better. Whoever believes in his fellow human being arouses the desire for change, gives hope, produces change for the better.” True, there is much that needs to be done, especially to give weight to border history by confronting it honestly and responsibly on both sides, and this book is a nice step in that direction. In the book, small and great wisdoms shine through us, which have the power to move mountains, not only in the direction of building bridges between neighbors, but also in the greatness of humanistic thought.
In the words of the neorealist Maurizio Ferraris, we need philosophers (and other humanists) who will be able to lead us “through chaos without meaning”.
That is why the book Cafe Open is all the more necessary today. Thank you, Jernej.