Nora Pincherle, Savina Rupel, Milojka Mezorana: il lungo processo dell’elaborazione narrativa del trauma

In this article two recently published testimonies (by the Italian Nora Pincherle and the Slovenian Savina Rupel, both of them Ravensbrück survivors) are compared with their previous testimonies, which were different in language, media or literary genre, with an aim to demonstrate to what extent every narrative elaboration of trauma is conditioned by the discourse, its rhetorical work and contingency. In the early eighties, simultaneously with the important turn in the professional, academic and media interest in testimonies, Pincherle wrote her remembrances in French, and two decades later she gave the interview to the Italian historian Marco Coslovich (the transcription of the interview was published in 2006). The difference between her oral and written expression showed how much the rhetoric rules of memoir writing obstructed the dialogical style of her witnessing. Savina Rupel spoke three times to various interviewers, once in Italian and twice in Slovenian, her mother tongue. It led to the publication of two books and one documentary film between 2000 and 2007. The striking differences in her telling about some pivotal parts of her experience, specially those connected with ethical questions, are indicative of the difficulty of working through the most traumatic parts of her experience, displaying the impossibility of witnessing elaborated in the psychoanalytic theory of trauma (Cathy Caruth). Other differences in the testimonies of Savina Rupel demonstrate how the ideological pressure of the social environment and of the interviewer can affect the testimony. The third text this article deals with is Milojka Mezorana’s war diary and the after-war remembrances, written in Croatian in 1945 but published (partly) not earlier than 2006. The text opens the discussion about the competence of various disciplines - historiography and literary criticism above all - in the interpretation of the testimonial literature. The literariness of the testimonies displays a necessity of dealing with their continuous subordination and contemporary rebellion against the rules of the narrative structures.