In the collection of essays to be released on 6 September for Rizzoli, the events that have marked the eras reread by the essayist and journalist: Julius Caesar, the Middle Ages, the wars, Ukraine
Once it has been inflicted, is there really a possibility of healing a wound? A physical injury – large or small, like the scratches we got on our knees as children -, a psychological wound or a historical wound. But what is a historical wound? It is something that has not only affected one person; but that, immediately or with time, it has become a lesion, a damage that has marked an entire people or that, from the past, like a ghost has made its way to us. I’ll explain. If we look at our knees carefully, we will find traces, increasingly faded but still present, of the children we once were. On once peeled and now healed knees, we can find our story. If we look at it from this point of view, then, is it really possible to heal a wound?
In Wounds still open, his new essay, Paolo Mieli, journalist and historian, questions this crucial point. Examining, reconstructing, deconstructing, placing in a different perspective critical moments in the history of humanity – from the peaceful crusade of Frederick of Swabia to the burning of witches, from Hitler’s Germany to the Russia of Peter the Great, from the Risorgimento to the founding of Rome, from the birth of the Christian religion to the importance of women in politics of all times – delves into one of the most difficult roles of the historian: try to clarify events near and far, dismantle the prejudices that have accompanied the well-established tradition of certain historical facts, but above all to highlight how nothing that happens today is born from the present. The blade of grass that we tear from the lawn today comes in some way from the dawn of time.
Understanding the past to understand the present. Wounds still open (to be released on Tuesday 6 September for Rizzoli) begins with an essay of disruptive topicality: relations between Ukraine and Russia over a hundred years. What led to the war that today we see going crazy for more than months, bloody, and that affects us all? Mieli starts from the First World War, goes through the revolution of 1917 and the Second World War, and reaches today. It tells how Putin’s narration on live TV, “three days before he crossed the borders of Ukraine with his troops”, a narrative that purported to convince the world that Ukraine, as a nation, does not in fact exist, since it was “Entirely created” by Russia is a false narrative. Ukraine has gained independence several times over the decades, the first on January 25, 1918, the day the Republic of Ukraine was born. Putin – and not only – is trying today to rewrite history. And the historian’s role is precisely to row against this rewriting, to be based not on invention, but on experience. Which, as Italo Calvino said, “is the memory plus the wound it left you, the more the change it brought in you and that made you different”.
So, I repeat, is it possible to heal a wound? Mieli replies: «The wounds of the past never heal». And again: «Nothing can be considered definitive as regards the more or less apparent healing of the injuries produced years, decades, centuries, even millennia ago (…). So we should consider the study of history as a way of keeping them under control. If necessary, reopen them on purpose, with all the necessary precautions. Investigate better what caused her. And medicate them with care ». Since – and here Mieli’s discourse on wounds becomes not only historical but also human, even literary – the wounds serve to understand that “problems are never solved, once and for all. They recur, often in such forms as to appear new, whereas instead they are nothing more than a repetition of ancient traumas. Traumas that we have known, faced, in a certain sense resolved. But then making the mistake of forgetting about it ».
And that’s exactly what we have to do: remember, and study. Remember, and study, for example, how the power of women – in religion, in politics, in knowledge (as Mieli recounts in several essays in this book) – has been opposed in every way by male power: who can claim that it still does not happen today? Nobody. But to make sure that doesn’t happen again, a very powerful weapon is knowing where that wound comes from: what was the first scratch that crossed the body, and the mind, of women, and where the fear of men comes from to recognize a role of power in a female individual. And so we study the women burned as heretics – women who were acquiring power, who had acquired it -, or Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione, who played so much part in the political events of the European nineteenth century, but who was in no way delivered. to historical memory. But with Mieli, we also delve into other issues that still concern us today.
In the chapter “Why Frederick of Swabia is in theInferno Dante’s? ”, for example, the historian tells us about Frederick II’s“ crusade for peace ”, who, despite everything, was never withdrawn from excommunication. Because Federico was a man of change and, then as now, those who try to change the world on a small or large scale are never frowned upon. Federico’s definition as wonder of the world and a wonderful changer – astonishment of the world and wonderful innovator – in fact, explains Mieli, it did not have a positive connotation: “The order of the world was an expression of the will of God, who had created it in that way, and, therefore, every change, as well as he who provoked it was necessarily viewed with suspicion ». It’s still, Mieli goes back over the centuries to reach a crucial point in history: the moment when God ceased to possess an “overwhelming physicality” and became “transcendent, invisible and incorporeal”, and what are the reasons that led to a fracture between the divine and the human.
We enter these essays fascinated, we immerse ourselves in the Middle Ages and re-emerge in the twentieth century, we go back to the times of Hannibal, Caesar, Trajan and then we run to the days we are living, now able to better understand what is happening around us. Guided by a powerful red thread that is ultimately the acceptance that wounds exist, for each of us and for every historical moment, but that the wounds of history “concern us. They are wounds inflicted on ourselves. Although, in most cases, centuries and centuries before the time we came into the world. Wounds which it is useful for every generation to take care of ».
September 4, 2022 (change September 4, 2022 | 11:11)
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