It is a consolidated fact that “Auschwitz”, effective and now universal synechdoche to indicate the Holocaust, constitutes a historiographical theme of great density and thickness. Not by chance do we use here a term equipped with the same root as “thick”, wishing to allude to the concept of thick description of Clifford Geertz[1], which precisely indicates the narration of a single event, but furnished with great representative effectiveness, and, therefore, generalizable to a large extent.

Paolo Macry, in his recent essay Gli ultimi giorni[2] (which does not tackle the topic of Auschwitz), uses the expression zona densa (thick zone)[3], referring to the characteristics, that are as much determining as they are accidental – or, if we wish, as they are a direct result of circumstances, on the boundaries of fortuitousness –, of the stages of passage to the great historical traumas with special reference to the 20^th Century: revolutions, regime fall, civil wars and so on. More than being the subject of, by now, numerous descriptions, Auschwitz can be also pictured as a zona densa (thick zone) – among other things, it is actually a place, or a set of places: a site, for many aspects, on the border – of the history of the 20^th Century, where events, and especially the existence of “goodies and baddies” intermingle. It is, for example, an exemplary place of relationships between two classic categories of infamous people, those who, as Michel Foucault has written[4], come into the light of history only when they become judged thus. The most immediate example is constituted by the Jews in the view of the anti-Semites; but even «common men» who give themselves to the needs of mass extermination can fit into the category of ‘infamous people’[5]; or, still, the «victims [and the] torturers» of whom, together with the «spectators» of no lesser importance, Raul Hilberg wrote[6]. In a more precisely 20^th-Century sense, Auschwitz is also a place where “enemies” are exterminated, in keeping with a mechanism of political violence (in the specific case, extreme) which Saul Friedländer defined «redemptive»[7], aiming to totally redeem and purify the community from foreign and dangerous bodies.

In the case of Auschwitz, the thickness, as intended in the dual sense we outlined above – singularity and representativeness/generalizability – may be evaluated, in the first instance, in synchronous terms: we are dealing, indeed, with a place that is, at the same time it exists, a symbol of a regime, of a policy, of a conception of the world, of an aberrant system of human relations, and for these same reasons it is comparable, first of all, with coeval events. Yet there is, in an ever more evident way, also the possibility of a diachronic evaluation, which makes it generalizable and comparable beyond its existence too: “before and beyond”, to be exact, as the title of the conference from which the reflections contained in these pages originate.

In them we will try to signal, at times climbing symbolically up “onto the shoulders of giants” of historiography and literature on this topic, certain pathways linked to the concept of Auschwitz “oneness”. Its problematic statute, besides constructing a continually open historiographical question, has been at the basis of the layout itself of the conference which constituted the chance for these thoughts. Over time, certain scholars, but especially many among the principal characters and victims of the Holocaust, have intended “unique” not just as synonym of “unrepeatable” – which is, to some extent, taken as read: nothing and nobody is perfectly equal to something else or to somebody else – but also as an example of an “incomparable” situation. The viewpoint and the methodological equipment of historians tend to consider the comparableness of whatever event as primary hypothesis of work, together with the ascertainment that every historical event is unique: on the other hand, only different things may be compared. Distinction, comparison and safeguarding complexity are the tools of history, its particular utensils: as Pierre Nora wrote, «history, in as much as it is an intellectual and secularising operation, requires critical analysis and discourse»[8]. The lawfulness of comparing Auschwitz, an operation which, among other things, is useful for understanding it better, is not, therefore, in to be talked about here. Rather, it is necessary, not only useful, to compare Auschwitz. That does not alter the fact, nevertheless, that there are a number of questions about the gauging of the event in 20^th-Century history, and about what has occurred “first and beyond”, that cannot be sidestepped maintaining, for example, that Auschwitz is determinant in understanding history, only within a certain temporal terminus (first half of the 20^th Century) or else within a certain context (the Western world), after which other events would take over as paradigm or terminus a quo (Hiroshima, the regime of the Khmer Rouge, and so on, going “beyond”). A similar caution in recognising the universal interpretative value of Auschwitz seems useless to us, especially because that recognition does not eliminate, rather it favours, the understanding of other events. Auschwitz provided a repertoire, even a semantic one, from which it is now difficult to do without. Most acutely, Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo[9] made it be noted how the five concepts (of which four pairs of opposites) which Reinhardt Koselleck, at the end of the Eighties of the 20^th Century, had placed as fundamental basis for every story – and that is «being able to kill/having to die», «friend/foe», «internal/external», «generativity» (which may be interpreted as old/new, or fathers/children) and, finally, «master/slave» – perfectly suit Auschwitz and, we would say, have largely been introduced by Auschwitz into contemporary historical discourse.

Neglecting the concrete, and ponderous case records of comparison, starting from those classic ones tied to coeval events (lagers/gulags, Holocaust/Hiroshima, and so on), which besides are to be found, to some extent, in other essays contained in this volume, the pages that follow concentrate on questions of method of a general weight. More than the, also, important questions which Auschwitz poses by its very nature, and in the comparisons which it allows as thick zone of the 20^th Century, it indeed seems important to us to select some of the methodological stimuli that constant work of narration and analysis of the Holocaust has offered historians. Of the disciplinary specificities of the historical work, among it all, Auschwitz may be an effective “paradigm”, in the measure that it was also by way of Auschwitz that – either it directly dealt with it or not – history as knowledge has considerably broadened its horizon, opening itself strongly to that interdisciplinarity which defines its statute starting right from the second half of the last century. It seems, anyway, that this ascertainment – Auschwitz has constructed complex and valid interpretative paradigms beyond itself – may also help to overcome that view, which is of course legitimate, and nevertheless vaguely deterministic, according to which, as Martin Broszat wrote, «in the light of new catastrophes and atrocities»[10] its explicative weight would diminish.

In this reference framework, it is opportune to propose some thoughts. It seems proper to us to start where all stories should start – and that is from people, and from their single happenings in life – relating with witnesses, who are, as we all know and as we shall see later on, one of the points of greatest importance of the exemplariness and thickness of Auschwitz. It has to be said that the experience of the Holocaust had immediately put them facing the obstacle of possible comparison, and of the consequent risk of relativization, starting from the banal affirmation that their initial stories were often considered unlikely. The same media broadcasting of the Holocaust, right from the dense filmography dedicated to the theme in the initial decades after the war, troubled to come out of the stereotypical bad (Germans)/good (victims of Nazism), for a long time sidestepping the recognition of the Jews – we might say, of the individual Jewish people – as the real principal characters of the project of massacre[11]. This has, of course, generated some measure of closure, well-understandable in he who had to think upon the sense of his own existence and not on historiographical categories, which we nevertheless have to consider in terms of a stimulus to thought too, seeing the mass of testimonies given and their richness and variety. Regarding the inescapable specificity of an event like Auschwitz, we have the precise and lean assertion, repeated several times, of Primo Levi – the Nazi concentration camp system as a unique specimen – who, however, was a very sensitive witness to the rights of comparison, immediately careful of the relationship and of the comparison with those who represented the nation of the persecutors. What is striking however, and totally particular in nature, is the sentence of one of the most polished and implacable survivors and judges of the Holocaust, the Austrian-French philosopher, Jean Améry (Hans Mayer, a name refused and Frenchified following the War), who in the Sixties of the 20^th Century wrote these, certainly extreme, but prophetic to some extent, words:

[…] the killing of millions of human beings carried out with organisational reliability and near scientific precision by a highly-civilised people will be considered deplorable yet not at all unique, and cited therefore beside the ferocious deportation of Armenians by the Turks or the shameful acts of the French in their colonies. Everything will mix together in a brief  “century of barbarism”. We, the victims, will be considered the uncorrectable ones, the implacable authentic ones, reactionaries contrary to history in  the genuine meaning of the term; and, in the final analysis of it all, the fact that some of us survived will be considered an accident while on duty[12].

The account not of a survivor but of an illustrious historian of the last century corresponds singularly to this type of reasoning. A historian, ‘existentially’ not only scientifically tied, so to speak, to the pathways of anti-Semitism – and therefore witness, himself, to an intellectual and human pathway – George L. Mosse, who in one of his lessons between the Seventies and Eighties recently collected together, said:

Today that the word ‘genocide’ is often almost haphazardly applied, we may lose its real meaning: we are not dealing with a civil war, not brutality, no matter how ferocious, of wartime, but it is about the methodical and planned massacre of an entire people. To massacre is different from making war, it is different from making you a slave: it is the war against the Jews that we have to accept [...]. Nations have often been thirsty of blood, one against the other, and nevertheless we do not pose the question of placing the Holocaust [Mosse always uses this term instead of the Shoah, American-style. Author’s Note] within a comparative perspective, maintaining that not just the Jews have been massacred in recent times. This is a false liberalism which finds spurious consolation in abstractions and untrue analogies. The Holocaust has no analogies in history[13].

We are talking about two sentences which nobody would hesitate calling staggering, and maybe politically – which probably, here, is of no interest – but above all historiographically “improper”: especially that of Mosse, given his being an academic historian, and his absolutely original effort to identify a “before” Auschwitz in the history of European racism, beyond that of anti-Semitism[14]. When we say “original”, we mean it in both senses of the term. Mosse, indeed, was among the first scholars to have systematically taken on the question of modern racism as well as its relationship with anti-Semitism, placing its contemporary roots in the Enlightenment. Looking for and finding the roots of anti-Semitism in a historical path which is completely recognizable, he has avoided making sacrifices to that which Marc Bloch (another great historian of the 20^th Century: existentially, if not professionally, involved in the so-called “Jewish question”) had defined  as «the idol of the origins [and that is that which] confuses a filiation with an explanation»[15]. It is all-too-well known just how much simplifying and phylogenetic tendencies can influence history (we are not talking here about political simplification, forever incumbent in its public use): a recent essay by Theodore S. Hamerow[16], for example, seems to maintain that the answer to the question may be exhausted by the ascertainment, amply documented by the author, that anti-Semitism was, in the first half of the last century, rather widespread throughout the Western world. But a similar assumption eventually describes, it does not explain, the context of Auschwitz, in a monocausal dimension. In a much subtler and complex way, Mosse had told his students: «Throughout European history, nothing is stranger to the Holocaust, and I have attempted to dig deeper into the nature of European society through analysing its perceptions and attitudes towards diversity»[17]. The nature of Auschwitz as “sentinel event” of  a most widespread “civilisation malaise” is, therefore, emphasised; and, again, as a thick place, where not only was an interpretive paradigm built, but where also other enemies were pursued and massacred, beside those classic ones, enemies identified on the base of their inadequacy and diversity: that which a little before we defined as infamy.

The task of history is to calibrate both individual and collective responsibilities, background and details, context and event, without establishing mechanical relations of cause and effect between them. From this viewpoint too, Auschwitz has constituted an essential reference point in historiographical and civil reflection, making us reflect upon the fact that only the complexity and continual revision – not by chance do we use this word – of approaches may compensate for the substantial incapability in unambiguously responding to a “why”. In recent times, much has been thought about the “leap”, or even the “abyss”, that would exist between Auschwitz and its preconditions: anti-Semitism, but also the habit of  locking up and concentrating enemies which has become constant practice ever since WW I, but with significant anticipations since the second half of the 20^th Century. With reference to the after Auschwitz, we probably see more of a “leap” than an “abyss”, seeing the “sentinel event” character that it has represented in the history of contemporary man; if Hans Mommsen clearly states that «between the possibility to ‘think’ the extermination and its concrete putting into operation, there was no pure and simple relationship of cause and effect», in a more anguished way, Enzo Traverso in turn writes: «the extermination camps represented the “paroxysmal” height of the concentration camps: without the creation of the latter […] it’s very improbable that Treblinka and Sobibor might see the light»[18]. A tragically peculiar element comes into play here: the «obsessive [and] apocalyptic» aspect of the Nazi extermination, as Friedländer defined it on more than one occasion, which, as we will later see, may place itself in conflict with the strong historiographical option that sees Auschwitz as a product of modernity.

Also Améry’s words quoted before have a, perhaps involuntary, historiographical importance, at the moment when they strongly refer to a certain carelessness of the tendency, of some decades later, to define the 20^th Century, that is the century of full contemporaneousness, as the “century of…”: massacres, genocides, war, death and so on. These are perhaps excessive, and anyway effective, generalizations, under certain aspects similar to the recurring temptation to evaluate the numerous mass-exterminations of the 20^th Century along the basis of that “zero level” of the comparison that is made up by counting the deaths. For historians, fully agreeing with the reduction of the thick and complex meaning of such events of “bare life” is a risk. The very same historical authenticity of the phenomenon suffers from it, in that it is reduced and stripped of flesh till the loss of any type of horizon: the context, the persecutors’ intentions, their way of operating, the reaction of the victims. All themes on which, anyway, historiography is most quizzed, at times bitterly conflicting with itself. Naturally, biopolitics, which among other things is a category of Foucault referred to a “before”, and which may be applied to the Holocaust as a paradigmatic “after”, is a really important side of the multidisciplinary reflection on Auschwitz; but it is to the second part of the word (politics) that the specificity of the historical discourse is addressed, starting from Hannah Arendt, understanding it as an extreme and imposing personification of the total domination of politics over man. In a different meaning, the very same context becomes, instead, the stripping of every personal political identity and integral reduction to the body, to “bare life”, precisely.

Going back to the two witnesses mentioned above (Améry and Mosse), even regardless of the potential density of critical stimuli offered, theirs are, in any case, useful statements to evaluate the importance of a requirement-key of the specificity of the Holocaust. That is, the weight that, in its historiographical consolidation, the storytelling and the word have played. The autobiographical word of a witness as in the case of Améry and in that of many others; a “didactic” word, we would say, and therefore perhaps more full of passion and more loose than that calibrated and measured of the writings of Mosse, who finds himself facing a kind of methodological block, till he ends up explicitly negating that aptitude to compare that which has constituted the foundation stones of his work of historian. Mosse, moreover, declares himself contrary to the insisted-upon exhibition of photographs of the most harrowing repertoire of the Holocaust, especially those photos of mass murder, where he recognized the dual danger of the “museumization” and “banalization”[19] of the tragedy (as has been noted, Susan Sontag also said something really similar)[20]. To me, it seems that, in this contrariety, an important call to the peculiar aptitude of the historian, who – so to speak – registers the implicit effectiveness in representing death, but acutely senses the limits of communication. It is opportune here to underline how the particular aversion to the possible “monumentalization” of the Holocaust – which is the war cry of the professional historian – here draws nearer to a reflection that is naturally curved towards comparison, since the rejection of the monumentalization is, in itself, a refusal of the incomparableness, an affirmation of the dynamic nature of the historical pathway. There is, probably, throughout the whole of events exemplified by Auschwitz, an insurmountable contradiction between the possibility of rational analysis and the impending sense of grim tragedy, whose emotional charge is extended by the ample, insistent visibility of its dramatic effects, and even in its atrocious everydayness. It is the same contradiction, not completely rectifiable, that there is between unutterableness and comparability.

Now has come the moment to explain the senses of the two terms which recur in the title of this presentation paper (unutterable and comparable), which, actually, are in no way homogenous, not even by contrast: we should have said, respectively, incomparable or utterable. The imperfection is intentional, and it aims to denote the fact that, initially and for a long time, the very serious theme which is not easily got rid of by the total “untellable nature” of the Holocaust has ended up coinciding with the concept of the oneness of Auschwitz. Something so unattainable that it cannot be represented and said – all this lived together however, as we know, with a strenuous will to tell which Tzvetan Todorov defined heroic[21] – and that, rather, must not be told, because in some measure this would constitute a justification of it, right till the radicalism of the survivor from Dachau (a non-Jew, rather, a Dominican cleric) quoted by Georges Bensosussan: «The only true witnesses to the concentration camps are the dead»[22]. This represents a position held by many.

Actually, since forever Auschwitz has revealed itself to be a great “discourse”, an immense repertoire of narratives, which also may be valued in the compensatory light which appears in the nice title of the work of Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, La vendetta è il racconto, and which has been, for example, expressed by the French author Georges Perec in the sense of a real exchange between silence and writing, between death and life, recognizable when he states that «the unutterable does not nest in the writing, on the contrary, it is that which has triggered the process», and which, therefore, speaking about his parents, he is aware of writing « because they have left an indelible impression inside me and the writing is the trace of it […] writing is the memory of their death and the statement of my life»[23].

We do not want nevertheless here, in any way, to invade the field of literature (and linguistics), travelled by other authors more competently, no doubt; we will limit ourselves to repeating the unrectifiable contradiction, but historiographically dense and fertile, existing between storytelling and reticence, between the unspeakable and the flux of words, which characterizes Auschwitz and makes it, in a certain way, an example when compared with other generations of victims of persecution. For example, the families of the desaparecidos in Latin America: the American novelist, Nathan Englander, designed his The Ministry of special cases[24] upon a case of real memory ablation which involves, at the same time, the Jewish community of Buenos Aires and some families of political dissidents who disappeared, intertwining events. But, think too of the unbounded crowd of victims of persecution during the Soviet regime, and of the emerging of their testimonies, as for example, unfolded in the work by Orlando Figes[25]. If the comparison between lager and gulag was constructed in a first and rather isolated test bed in the fundamental work of Hannah Arendt, which saw a plan of comparative similitude in the combination between concentration and terror, it seems to us that another field of comparison may be built up – once again – putting oneself on the side of the victims, of the principal characters, of the witnesses, and digging around among the personal memories. There where, in the first instance, the political terror in the Soviet Union had no problems of unrepresentableness – till a very few decades ago, it was simply not represented and was conveyed almost entirely by literary accounts[26] - but reveals too, a significant difference of attitude between the two categories of infamous victims: differently from that which occurs for witnesses of the lager, in the survivors of the gulag as well as in their descendants – especially if not belonging to the disadvantaged social categories (former nobles,  the middle-class,  Kulaks), but, in some cases, even in these ones – the anguish of the storytelling is not rarely determined by the sense of guilt for not having been able to adapt to a political system of which the victims of persecution and their families felt, paradoxically, proud, shouldering the responsibility of not having deserved it. We have here, for the most part, the common people, naturally not the great figures of the political and intellectual dissidents. Actually, something similar had come about in Germany following the founding of the Third Reich (with offshoots right till inside the Weimar Republic), when belonging to the German Volk becomes an ever more accentuated requirement of nationalisation also for the go-between of intellectual circles, who had a high cultural profile and were deeply anti-Semitic, like that circle which gathered around the positivist historian, Heinrich von Treiscke; and it would be interesting to be able to go through a dense network of accounts, even epistolary accounts, from eminent German Jews, from whom bewilderment and shame emerge for discrimination (besides, almost completely without any legal repercussion at all), and even claims of belonging to pure Germanic blood[27]. The sharing of language and cultural background with the persecutors will become, in Auschwitz, one of the greatest reasons for alienation and catastrophe for German Jews[28].

What a historian has to, really, particularly emphasise is the centrality of the witness as source of history, that showed itself exactly at the time when the possible unrepresentableness translated into storytelling, forcing history to thoughts and methodological refinements, and favouring the development of historiographical genres like: oral history, which certainly did not start with Auschwitz, but which has been extraordinarily livened up and problematized. In general, the peculiarly interdisciplinary character of history and the constant broadening of its sources have been praised. A leap in quality happened in the field of cinema fiction as well. As has been observed by various parties, in the representation of the Holocaust, progressively the victims, intended collectively, were transformed into the main characters; the film, The Pianist by Roman Polanski (2002) is practically the first film on the Holocaust where the main character is a Jew – among other things, an artist with a heightened sense of individuality – and where the story is told from his viewpoint, not from that of the Nazis or the liberators, as had nearly always been the case. The centrality, and we would say, the dignity of individual accounting pose, moreover, the grave question of a profound transformation into communication «dopo l’ultimo testimone» (after the last witness) as David Bidussa wrote[29], exactly while the awareness that the sun is forever to set upon «the era of the witness»[30]. Nevertheless, the written and recorded words (on video as well) remain. It is possible that, just as the visualization of Auschwitz is assuming an ever lesser sensationalist-type character and more a documentary one, so the witness accounts of the Holocaust, without taking anything away from its communicative worth, can bed themselves in the mediated dimension of the collected and conserved word, just as happens in every historical process. What really matters, and makes the difference, is the combination between the voluntariness and vastness of testimony given for future memory, as well as the ample register of its manifestations and of conservation methods. On the other hand, the most profound nucleus of Auschwitz, that is to say the final aims for which it has been conceived – the physical destruction of the enemy – remain unattainable and incommunicable especially from the point of view of the victims, due to its own statute of extreme experience. Also upon this, and that is on the recognition that the historical work, as Robert Darnton has, for example, admirably underlined[31], is essentially an attempt to “speak with the dead”, and that on those communication grounds considerable gaps open, and will always open up, Auschwitz invites us to reflect, offering itself once again as a paradigm of the challenges and defeats of that work.

Central and contextual, too, is the space conceded by historiography to the reflection on the memory: we made reference to this a bit beforehand, as fertile grounds of comparison between experience, beginning from the ascertaining that memory is not a vague and “bare” place, rather a space to know and live in. Here, truly, Auschwitz has constituted a historiographical ‘before’ of great importance, again forcing us to revise – but perhaps, directly to identify – the problematic areas where individual and collective memory merges, to thematize public and political use of memory and to implicitly signal the not-always-clear attempt to build a “shared” memory, where the arduous and indispensable exercise of comparing may slip into retaliation, and, substantially, into self-absolution. Referring to another, but certainly not far from it, context of reflection as regards Auschwitz, that of anti-Fascism, Sergio Luzzatto has rightly spoken of the attempt at constructing a “common” memory[32]: everybody has to know as much as they can, and in any case they share a common past, yet in the public use of history the effort of sharing is often confused with the tendency to adjust and select critical aspects of that past, because everybody can recognise themselves there without questioning their own reasons, their own ideas and experiences. Memory, on the contrary, develops both its historiographical and civil effectiveness at the minute when it recognises wrongs and reasons, and helps understanding through knowledge. There is certainly no lack of concrete examples of a not-very-rigorous vision of memory (also in the toponomastic, a faithful mirror of the public spirit), which has an effect on those large-consumption products where the reformed baddie (as Oskar Schlinder of the Spielberg famous film is), has too often ended up, as exemplifying the single national cases, to then rise up to the level of the positive main character of history. Here, the all-too-ample question of the media treatment of the testimonies, and in general of Auschwitz, would open up. Think, once again, of the cinema fiction as a further moment for mediation, till the construction, in recent decades, of a real cinematic “genre”, not lacking in effectively expressed criticism, among others by Annette Wiewiorka, when she criticizes a certain “Americanisation” of the genre having it coincide with a divulgatory method of communication which gathers together images and sensations till it risks ahistorical proportions. We permit ourselves to signal as perhaps more imminent than the risk of Americanisaton, and for sure most pertinent to the idea of the ahistorical dimension, that of self-absolution: a risk that has shown itself to be avoidable with great difficulty in the collective and institutional reconstructing of the great traumas of history.

It is precisely from the link between storytelling and memory – and of invaluable worth, “non-negotiable” of the testified personal experience – that we reveal the final observation that we would like to propose, and that is – once again – the thick relationship between Auschwitz and modernity. If we look at the “before”, indeed, the over-all more pertinent comparative background, is that linked to the inaugural event of the 20^th Century and of full contemporaneousness (so much so that Eric J. Hobsbawn, and many others in his wake, considered 1914 as the first year of the 20^th Century), an event which, like Auschwitz, may aspire to the definition of “unique”, in the sense that we tried to propose: and that is the Great War and its extraordinary capacity to produce experience, which in turn was processed and told in a quantitatively immense way. The gathering in of those crops of testimonies, more or less mediated, came from nationalistic rhetoric and was fully received by modern historiographical practice in relatively recent times (doubtlessly “after” Auschwitz), acting as determining explanatory factor for understanding contemporaneousness: the capacity to reflect and tell – this, too, is an outcome of modernity – in some way, having redeemed the dehumanizing catastrophe of the Great War, making up the priceless value of individuality into a process which Auschwitz will lead, in every sense, to extreme consequences.

On the temporal level, the Great War precedes Auschwitz, and to some degree it determines it through a traditional-type chain of causality. Though, we would here like to highlight especially how, by way of the European 1914-1918 period, the catastrophe of modern man – as Mosse, recently taken up again by Emilio Gentile[33], defined it – shows itself. First and foremost, explains the historian, the war was «a mass death, programmed in its minutest detail, by the State […] a mass death legitimated by the State and planned with precision, experienced by millions» which «sheds new light on the mass death of the Holocaust that occurred twenty-five years later»[34]: total and indiscriminate war, haphazard even in its apparent organisation, it made its way into history. Secondly, and more in general, the line that goes through the Great War and Auschwitz elucidates very strongly, and perhaps definitively, that which may be called the weight of history throughout human events. It manifests itself, at the beginning of the 20^th Century and progressively in ever more evident forms, through the more and more all-absorbing (and totalitarian) authority of the State in respect of the individual; the progressive biologisation and ethnicisation of the nation; the picklock of politics and of the ideology (even before, of the myth) used to dominate, even by way of an ever more pervasive and detailed system of checks of the means of mass communication. In the mass society of postwar times, the citizens, at times just reached, deteriorates into homologation, into constructing negative stereotypes which erect ever-higher enclosures between “us” and “them”, and prepares catastrophes of which it is useless to measure the prefiguring dimensions well “beyond” the second half of the last century, and “beyond” that Western world where our considerations have taken place. Notwithstanding that, as is well known, historiography divides up on this aspect, we believe that the connection between «modernità e Olocausto» (modernity and Holocaust)[35] in its greatest sense may be fully taken in two directions: either underlining the increasing mechanical and bureaucratic dimension of the relationship between State and citizens, which is cause of moral atony and deresponsibilisation, “grey zones” that produce, beside torturers and victims, ample masses of spectators, and not few makers of the mass extermination, those «common men» of whom Christopher Browning wrote; or evaluating the negative weight of myths and ideologies in the development of that relationship. Not just apocalyptic and thousands-of-years-old myths that were reinvigorated by the catastrophe of war and by defeat, wherein sometimes the base of Nazism has been identified, but also historically profound ideologies constantly reviving in various new forms, such as anti-Semitism; and also, over an apparently non-linear course, convictions and principles linked with the contemporary development of middle-class society, such as nationalism which is more and more aggressive and ethnicity-based, and even the respectability and aesthetic taste, which collected – and collect – a constant reason for alarm in the fear that “someone else”, an internal or external “enemy”, a “foreigner” or better, an “outsider”, was to subvert and pollute, the order of their «well furnished home»[36]. Activation and political exploitation of that fear were able to produce Auschwitz.

In this framework, storytelling and memory are, certainly, «revenge», compensation and a warning for future generations; but they are also impulse to a constant and renewed reflection, to knowledge as a right and a duty for all and to the responsibilisation of one’s own behaviour of citizen and scholar. Auschwitz, therefore, demonstrates being a dense and privileged place of work due to a vast quantity of disciplinary approaches. Anything but “unutterable”, the very name indicates a roadway;  tragic sentinel of the history of the 20^th Century invites us to consider history as a field open to the relations between events and disciplines; like a prism, whose numerous façades reflect the multiplicity of the real.