Relato, história e memória

Abstract

This happened in the past: from the first war, said Walter Benjamin, men came back speechless. The shock had liquidated the transmissible experience and, consequently, the experience itself: what is experienced as shock is too strong for "the tiny and fragile human body." The dumb men could not find a way to tell what they had experienced, and the landscape of the war kept only the clouds from the past. Benjamin points out precisely: “the clouds”, because above all the rest had flown the hurricane of a change, unpredictable when the first columns of soldiers headed towards the fields of the first battles. Memory invests in the present as much as history, but in a different way. Even in these years, when the critique of the idea of ​​truth has already been exercised to its last consequences, memory narratives seem to offer an authenticity that we were used to radically distrust. The suspension of this distrust has, in the case of the memories of the repression, moral, legal and political causes.