La Guerra in casa nell’epica antiresistenziale di Giampaolo Pansa

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.