La memorializzazione delle Foibe e il paradigma della Shoah: storia, politica, televisione

The object of this essay is to illustrate how the memory of the Foibe has been diffused in the Italian media since the end of the Second World War. In particular, this text will explore how certain paradigms of representation, which are characteristic of the memory of the Holocaust, have also been adopted to portray the group of violent events which we collectively call Foibe. These public discourses have been particularly reaffirmed during the last thirty years. Initially, we will introduce the subject with a brief historiographical reconstruction of how the theme of the Holocaust has been compared to the Foibe by historians. A second part will follow in which we will dive into the institutional politics that have been bent to the creation of a public memory of the Foibe based on that comparison. In the final part, we will analyze the modalities through which the paradigm of the Foibe/Holocaust has found effective expression through the realization of TV transmissions and fictional televised programs on the subject. Via the analysis of several moments, we will see how certain rhetorical and metaphorical themes persist out of preceding representations of the Holocaust, which were facilitated by the same media channels.