“ You see, it is as if we were crossing a bridge.
Does one build a house on a bridge? ” 
Alba De Céspedes
Image: Maria Eisenstein, courtesy Carlo Spartaco Capogreco.
Program
Giorno della Memoria
Ceremony of the reading of the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian territories.

January 27, 9:00 am - 3:30 pm
Consulate General of Italy
696 Park Avenue


Twenty-four years have passed since the establishment of January 27th as the day to commemorate the victims of Nazi-Fascism in Germany. The date was subsequently adopted as the first shared European commemoration of the Holocaust.

The designation of January 27th as International Holocaust Remembrance Day occurred over time, spearheaded by the the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research and some of the countries where Nazi-Fascist totalitarianism came forth: Germany in 1996, France in 1997, Italy in 2000, followed by many other countries in Europe. It assumed an international dimension in 2006 when the United Nations officially marked an annual commemoration establishing their Holocaust Education Programme.

Within the European community, conflict over the representation of history has progressively grown in the political arena leaving scholarly debates on the margins or subjecting them to the oversight of the law.

At a time when history is increasingly called upon to support or counter present ideologies, it is ever more important to ensure that no opportunity to make available proper critical tools is missed.

Image: Deportee tracing card of Ettore Ghiron. Massimo Adolfo Vitale Collection. CDEC Digital Library, Milan.
What exactly is a concentration camp?

January 30, 6:30 pm
Italian Cultural Institute
686 Park Avenue


Dramatic reading of Maria Eisenstein’s diary Internee n. 6, (1944), one of the earliest testimonies of life in a fascist concentration camp. 

Featuring Katarina Vizina.

Introduction by and Q&A
Carlo Spartaco Capogreco (Università della Calabria).

Maria Eisenstein was a Viennese woman who moved to Italy in the early 1930s to study literature in Florence. On June 10th, 1940, Mussolini ordered the arrest of all Jews who did not have, or had been stripped of Italian citizenship. While living in Sicily she was immediately incarcerated. She spent the following three years in an internment camp and at various confinement locations.

Her writing is ironic, worldly, and unapologetic. Her Italian is beautiful to the point that her diary, first published after she crossed the Allied front and fled South, was for decades considered fiction. It took 30 years before the historian Carlo Spartaco Capogreco identified her and traced her story. Eisenstein’s daily chronicle of arrest and internment, her depiction of what she calls “official” and “unofficial” abuse, fear, and despair, resonates with today’s debates on the detention of foreigners within the logic of national security.

Maria's experience cautions against the simplistic relativization of suffering and maltreatment and points to the possibility that the link between segregation and elimination is, as Primo Levi suggested, a matter of time.

Indeed, time is the primary element of Maria’s “suspended life” —“waiting for a resolution that will probably be negative and will end with my death”—she wrote. Her words, written before the war ended, foreshadow the difficulties we see today in understanding the nature, consequences and specificities of civilian detention. “What is exactly a concentration camp?” —She pondered in 1943— “We completely lack data and try to find a common denominator between the Isle of Man and Dachau …”. Read

Mussolini's Camps

February 3, 6:30 pm
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò
24 West 12 Street


“Many people— many nations—can find themselves believing, more or less consciously, that “every stranger is an enemy.” For the most part, this conviction (…) is not the basis of a system of thought. But when this happens, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, stands the Lager”. Primo Levi

Carlo Spartaco Capogreco’s classic volume Mussolini’s Camps: Civilian Internment in Fascist Italy (1940-1943) (Routledge, 2019) will be the topic of a panel co-presented by NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and Centro Primo Levi. Silvana Patriarca (Fordham University), Carlo Spartaco Capogreco (Università della Calabria). Discussants: Mary Gibson ( CUNY Graduate Center), Rudolf Mrazek (University of Michigan).

Capogreco’s book focuses on the Italian concentration camps between 1940 and 1943 and contextualizes them in the history of civilian detention between the rise of colonialism and the totalitarian era. When originally published in the popular Einaudi series of Gli Struzzi , Mussolini’s Camps made a statement, both historiographical and political, on the lack of public focus on the history of state violence and the parallel crystallization of the memory of Auschwitz to stand for every form of abuse perpetrated in the Nazi-Fascist era. Read

Modernity, Fascism & Resistance
How four Ethiopians confronted, maneuvered and survived the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935-1941

February 6, 7:00 pm
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò
24 West 12 Street


Yemane Demissie  (NYU Professor/Filmmaker) in conversation with  Heran Sereke-Brhan , (Ph.D. Cultural Historian /Interim Executive Director, Commission on the Arts & Humanities).

Filmmaker Yemane Demissie’s forthcoming social-history documentary series, The Quantum Leapers: Ethiopia 1916-1975 , focuses on the buoyant and tumultuous experiences of Ethiopians during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie I.

Synthesizing imagery and narratives from more than 500 interviews and thousands of photographs unearthed from the interviewees’ collections and dozens of international archives, the series considers how the 1935-1941 Italo-Ethiopian War and Occupation compelled the country to reevaluate its age-old traditions in the face of war and modernity.
At this lecture, Yemane will present stories revolving around the airplane—long an emblem of modernity—to explore the interlinked lives of four individuals who confront, embrace or glide with the sudden and immense changes brought about by war, occupation and liberation. Read

Co-Sponsors: Department of History Tisch School of the Arts, Center for the Study of African and the African Diaspora (CSAAD).
Exhibition. Leo Yeni: An Artist's Paper Life
Opening: January 29 - February 26, 10 am to 6 pm
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, 24 West 12 Street - Visit
THANKS
Centro Primo Levi is the recipient of the endowment fund established by the Viterbi Family in memory of Achille and Maria Viterbi. CPL's activities are supported by Lily Safra, Jeffrey Keil & Danielle Pinet, Sarah Wolf Hallac and Toby Wolf, Robert S. and Ellen Kapito, Peter S. and Mary Kalikow, Claude Ghez, Joseph and Diane Steinberg, Alan and Caryn Viterbi, Ezra K. Zilkha z'l, Andrew and Joan Milano, Lice Ghilardi, Bruce Slovin and Francesca Slovin z'l, Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky, Ira and Andrea Jolles, Alan Berro, Isabelle Levy and Nugi Jakobishvili .
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