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L’articolo è dedicato all’opera di Edith Bruck, in particolare a La rondine sul termosifone, e si richiama alla riflessione sulla figura del testimone, sul paradigma etico della testimonianza nonché sulle scritture di sé. La tesi di fondo è che le opere esaminate dimostrano che esista una corrispondenza – palese sia sul piano etico che dal punto di vista delle strutture e modalità narrative – tra due tipi di testimonianza: perché chi è «sommerso» (vittima della Shoah e/o incapace di dare conto di sé per via della malattia) ha bisogno di un altro che ne racconti la vita. Ne La rondine sul termosifone, E. Bruck, già autrice di numerose opere in cui si costituisce come portatrice della memoria di milioni di vittime dello Sterminio, diventa testimone per conto del marito Nelo Risi, impedito dalla malattia neurodegenerativa. Nel far sì allarga il concetto della testimonianza e affranca la figura del testimone, come postulato da Michal Givoni. L’article est consacré au travail d’Edith Bruck, en particulier à La rondine sul termosifone, et fait référence aux théories récentes du témoin, du paradigme éthique du témoignage, ainsi que des « récits de vie » en tant que tels. La thèse de base est que les œuvres examinées montrent qu’il existe une correspondance – évidente tant du point de vue éthique que du point de vue des structures et des modes narratifs – entre deux types de témoignages : car celui qui est le « submergé » (victime de l’Holocauste et/ou incapable de raconter de soi à cause de sa maladie) a besoin que quelqu’un d’autre raconte sa vie. Dans La rondine sul termosifone, E. Bruck, déjà auteur de nombreux ouvrages dans lesquels elle est la porteuse de la mémoire de millions de victimes de l’Holocauste, devient le témoin de son époux Nelo Risi, empêché par la maladie neurodégénérative. Ainsi, elle élargit la notion de témoignage et rachète la figure du témoin, comme l’a postulé Michal Givoni. The article is dedicated to the work of Edith Bruck, in particular to La rondine sul termosifone, and refers to recent theories of the witness, of the ethical paradigm of the testimony, as well as of the forms of “life narratives”. The basic proposal is that the works under scrutiny show that there is a correspondence – apparent both from an ethical point of view and from the point of view of narrative structures and modes – between two types of testimony: because the person who is “submerged” (a victim of the Holocaust and/or unable to give a personal account because of their illness) needs someone else to narrate their life. In La rondine sul termosifone, E. Bruck, the author of numerous works in which she is the bearer of the memory for millions of Holocaust victims, becomes a witness on behalf of her husband Nelo Risi, suffering from a neurodegenerative disease. Thus, she expands the concept of testimony and redeems the figure of the witness, as claimed by Michal Givoni.

The claim here is that cultural representations of dementia may benefit from the structure of crime fiction which appears therefore to be among the theme most suited genres. We do not know enough about the disease or its etiology (the “culprit” remains unknown), hence the situation of the sufferer befits that of enigma or suspense, fear or confusion, doubt and presumption, standardly deployed by detective stories. Crime fiction narratives underscore that which is at stake in dementia: the riddle of disappearing of the person affected, the puzzle of memory loss, the identity doubt which extends to the relative when he or she is not recognized by the sufferer. By turning to a detective genre, Alzheimer’s novel profits from the genre’s growing popularity, owing to the reading public’s demand for challenges enhancing “mind reading” competences and training predictive abilities. The latter are more in demand as neurocognitive standards of readers grow.

The article examines some decisive transformations that took place in the representation of the mother-daughter relationship, reflected in texts written by Italian women writers between the early 1900s andthe early 2000s. Although updated, both motherhood and mother-daughter relationship appear closely linked and anchored to problems that imprison women in various predicaments. The corpus here under analysis focuses on unusual literary genealogies.

In Italy of the ‘90s, after major political parties were dissolved and institutional antifascism faded out, a reassessment of the Resistance movement took on. Giampaolo Pansa entered a clearly revisionist path in telling, he claims, untold and long overdue stories of “Guerra di casa”, the civil war. The house, household and domesticity are portrayed literally in his “cycle of the defeated”, as he emphasizes the impact of war on family and its members, whence love or friendship cannot “save” anyone anymore. I try to demonstrate that Pansa’s epic, based on fascist sources and private testimonies, is biased and partial, put in goal-oriented plots. “If war entered households, we read, we should hold communist partisans responsible for it, who first privatized war and later appropriated its historiography.

This interpretation of the cinematographic version of the novel La Storia by Luigi Comencini is far from a re-signification of the literary text. We will prove that this director, who has a pedagogical intent but opposes the political use of the cinema (and pays attention to avoid the typical pitiability of the Neo Realism) faithfully respects the Morant’s aims. He makes a film on the innocence threatened by death and violence during the war (at the same manner, innocence is threatened by education during the peace). Useppe is our own conscience in front of the history. Comencini deliberately simplifies the contents of Morante’s novel, which are transformed in exemplary scenes: the first of them on the equivocations of vitality, the second on the destroyed innocence, the third on Jewishness, the fourth on incoherence, etc. Comencini explicates the relation between the micro-history and the macro-history, which intersect one to each other although they don’t go ahead in parallel, using old documentary which alternate with the history of the main characters. The genesis of every historical event is an human act (or an human failed act).