La Grande Guerra. Storie e parole di giustizia

Through the obscure, tragic and irredeemable clouds of war, sometimes filters out some gleam of truth and dignity: 'thoughtful truces', acts of recognition of the 'face of the other', right actions, beyond the simple obedience to the order received. It is the literary narrative that knows how to distinguish, in the 'steel storms' of mass conflict and industrial carnage, no less than in everyday lives, what is 'spiritually typical', the 'spectral dimension' ', as the Austrian writer Robert Musil would have said, in which the human mettle can show itself. One may perhaps think that this magic of disarmament, which is renewed every time in the great narratives, is destined to enlighten - yesterday, today and always - those who, by profession and by simple belonging to the human race, desire and must confront themselves. with the 'question of justice'. To thicken even more this great issue, guiding it to possible answers, it is really the look of literature that has been able to penetrate the extreme destruction of the war, of a war that has been called ‘Great’. The book - a collection of essays written by lawyers, historians, political scientists, literary and film critics, philosophers and writers - is a painful and participatory search for 'right words', inspired by the stories of those who have crossed the abysses of the conflict. A war that can be named Great also because it really never ended as it epitomized and anticipated many of the horrors of our recent past and of a present that still is not able to free itself from the ghost of “Polemos”, from the hostility towards all those who are or may be deemed as ‘other’, namely as people somewhat looked and treated as adversaries