6

MEMORY POLITICS

My examination of memorializing has so far focused on local communities in Sicily and Lampedusa, on those who witnessed the disaster’s consequences with their own eyes. The presence of physical bodies of the dead—and their disturbing absence—generated an obligation to memorialize. The obligation emerged from a biography, history, political leaning, religion, or ethics that defined the individual or community that memorialized. A citizenship of attentiveness to the dead as individual people with relationships emerged as a critical subjectivity that prevented indifference. This citizenship developed from the capacity for civil imagination, including an awareness of haunting specters of the past and the future.

However, public memorialization of the Lampedusa disaster is not limited only to these southern islands: it has expanded across Italy and Europe. In Villa Celimontana Park in Rome, a square is named as Largo vittime di tutte le migrazioni (Square of the victims of all migrations) in the memory of the disaster. In Foligno, Perugia, there is Piazzetta tre ottobre. Since 2016, the date, October 3, is observed as the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Immigration in Italy. Beyond Italy, examples include the “Lampedusa Cross,” supposedly made of wood from the boat that sank on October 3, 2013. The cross was acquired by the British Museum in 2015 and displayed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London during a service on June 19, 2016. In Dresden, photos of victims’ graves in Sicily were printed on rugs that were laid out in Theaterplatz in February 2017 to create an imaginary cemetery titled “Lampedusa 361” as part of the anniversary commemoration of the destruction of Dresden during the Second World War.

In this chapter, I analyze memorialization done by others at a distance, people who do not have a direct relationship with the dead nor have concretely witnessed the materiality of the disaster. I expand my analysis to the mediated witnesses, to the scale of the nation and to that of a transnational community, the European Union. The designation of October 3 as the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Immigration (Giornata nazionale in memoria delle vittime dell’immigrazione) in Italy is an important memorial that has prompted various forms of memorialization, as the ceremony involving the students at the cemetery in Castellamare del Golfo (in chapter 4) demonstrated. The story of the National Day of Remembrance, established through a legislative process in Rome, started in Lampedusa, however.

On the evening of October 3, 2013, Paola la Rosa, a lawyer who had worked with migrants since moving to Lampedusa some fifteen years earlier from Palermo, got together with nine other people to consider questions such as how the disaster would be remembered one year later (La Rosa 2015). What would the legacy of the disaster be? The disaster’s magnitude made them think that it would have an afterlife. Their aim was to create what they termed a Day of Memory and Welcome (Giornata della memoria e dell’accoglienza), to be observed on October 3. The idea encompassed both the remembrance of the dead and honoring those who rescued and welcomed the migrants. To this end, they created a committee, the Comitato 3 ottobre.1

When La Rosa explained to me in 2015 the initial purpose of the Comitato, she used the word riconoscimento, which translates as recognition, acknowledgment, or identification. According to La Rosa, the original philosophy of the Comitato was to afford riconoscimento to the victims in two ways: by commemoration and by identifying the dead though scientific methods. La Rosa had long been concerned that the anonymous dead found by local fishermen and the coast guard and buried in Lampedusa’s cemetery remained unidentified. She was active in Forum Lampedusa Solidale and had been among those locals who cared for the graves of unknown migrants at the cemetery and engaged with civic forensics. In the Comitato’s view, memorializing the disaster would eventually inspire people to ask who the dead were, ultimately forcing the authorities to seriously address the scientific identification of the dead. They acted upon the obligation to do justice. “It is justice that turns memory into a project; and it is this same project of justice that gives the form of the future and of the imperative to the duty of memory” (Ricoeur 2004, 88).

In one sense, the Comitato’s early initiative can be seen as a countermemorial, as the Day of Remembrance would be an acknowledgment of people whose deaths were not usually seen as worthy of public commemoration. The process of initiating the memorial would remind Italians what they have publicly forgotten, and because an official Day of Remembrance requires establishing a law, it would, in fact, challenge the border policies of the sovereign state itself.

In the context of the US-Mexico border, Jessica Auchter (2013; 2014, 129–32) and Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass (2016a; 2016b) have argued that countermemorialization is a form of continued witness, and that it has the political potential to make and keep injustice visible. Auchter also argues that countermemorialization “in specific contexts” reminds us that the state is something constructed and imagined (Auchter 2013, 310). Paradoxically, however, the Comitato advanced memorialization through the Italian parliament—an institution that was simultaneously involved in making the border.

The Comitato posted a draft for a law establishing the Day of Remembrance as a petition on the website Change.org and began to collect signatures.2 On November 13, 2013, three parliamentarians proposed the law to the Chamber of Deputies; it was passed by that assembly on April 15, 2015. On March 21, 2016, the law passed in the Italian Senate and October 3 became the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Immigration (Giornata nazionale in memoria delle vittime dell’immigrazione). By passing the law, the Italian parliament communicated that the deaths at Italy’s sea borders were worthy of public remembrance and that it was the duty of Italians to commemorate the victims. The term “victims of immigration” does not, however, point to any potential perpetrator—it instead implies that people suffer because they migrate (also because they choose to do so).

In his introductory speech in the Chamber of Deputies, the parliamentary committee rapporteur Luigi Famiglietti referred to the Lampedusa disaster as the reason for selecting October 3 as the day of remembrance, but that was his only direct reference to the disaster. He refers to the victims of the disaster only by the total number of the dead and does not mention any other details about them or about the disaster, not even the fact that the victims fled from Eritrea. It is somewhat surprising that at the scale of the national debate, Eritrea—a former colony of Italy—plays no role. There is no mention of the present-day problems that urge Eritreans to leave the country nor discussion about how those problems are rooted in European colonialism (discussed in Introduction). There is no awareness of the role the Global North played in the disintegration of European colonialism and in Ethiopian expansionism, in what Awet Tewelde Weldemichael (2013) terms as recolonialization, regional colonialism, and Third World Colonialism.

More important than who died is apparently where the deaths occurred. When death occurs in what the speakers often refer to as nostre mare, nostre Mediterraneo (our sea), the Italians and Italy as a nation become agents responsible for remembering due to their ownership of the site of death. The articulation of the duty to remember reproduces and reaffirms national boundaries.

According to the law, the purpose of memorializing the disaster is to raise awareness and educate young people on immigration. Article 2 of the law defines the aims of the Day of Remembrance: “to raise public awareness of civil solidarity with migrants, respect for human dignity and the value of the life of each individual, integration and accoglienza (welcome)” and “to raise awareness and train young people on immigration and issues of reception” (Senato della Repubblica 2016). Memorializing in this case is not about the specific event or the persons involved—not about knowing what happened on October 3, 2013, what led to the disaster, or who the dead were. The disaster is a symbol through which the public is expected to become aware of the phenomenon of migration and “sense”—imagine and know through feeling—what both crossing borders and saving lives are like.

Not only are the Italians the ones who have the duty to remember, they are also the objects of commemoration. The term “victims of immigration” in the title of the law allows the memorial to be broadly defined: it recalls past generations of Italian migrants and encompasses present-day Italian rescuers. The memorial can also be seen as part of a broader phenomenon of emigrant memorialization—monumenti all’emigrante and emigrant festivals—that have become popular both in Italy and among Italian Americans in the United States (see Ruberto and Sciorra 2022). In the parliamentary debate, Luigi Famiglietti (2015) invoked the mining disasters in Monongah and Dawson in the United States in the early twentieth century and the Mattmark Dam disaster in Switzerland in 1965 as examples of other disasters that could be remembered on October 3. In addition, he recalled how Italians have also suffered from the lack of the right to cross borders:

We must not forget the many Italian migrants who after the Second World War tried to enter France clandestinely, subjecting themselves, their women, and their children to very serious risks to their safety and to life itself. In fact, traversing the alpine passes often meant doing so without equipment or knowledge of the mountains and the difficulties they present, malnourished, poorly equipped, with a heavy load. In 1948, the municipality of Giaglione in Val di Susa asked Turin prefecture for help because they didn’t have enough resources to bury the illegal Italians. Every night, more than a hundred illegal Italian emigrants tried to cross the border in that area and there were at least two deaths every month. (Famiglietti 2015)

Through drawing a parallel between the past and the present, Famiglietti persuades his colleagues and the Italian public to act in solidarity with present-day migrants. As with mayor Nicola Coppola in Castellamare del Golfo (discussed in chapter 4), Famiglietti links the duty to remember with the cultivation of Italy’s heritage of emigration. Seeking such parallels from the past is typical of making sense of events and for memory. Michael Rothberg (2009) suggests that “we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing: as productive and not private” (Rothberg 2009, 3). In the memorialization of the disaster in Italy, migration plays a crucial part in both local identities and in the Italian national identity. The interaction between past and present migration is productive in two ways. On the one hand, memories of the past evoke understanding and solidarity with present-day border-crossers. On the other hand, present-day migration makes the past relevant and real. As Rothberg points out, there is a “productive and intercultural dynamic” of memories (Rothberg 2009, 3). However, the dynamic and directionality of memory is selective.

The memories that surfaced in the parliamentary debates were those that the supporters of the bill were willing to remember: histories of Italian labor migration and of escape from fascism. These memories highlight the good in past generations and describe their legacy as one of hard work and democratic values. But the memory of Italian emigration haunts the present society, to use the terminology of Avery Gordon (1997), who argues that social life is shaped by the “screaming presence” of what appears not to be present. The figure of an unwanted migrant is simultaneously absent (as the Italians no longer fit this category) and present (the migrants do). The shift in the embodiment of the unwanted migrant on the global scale enables the Italians as a nation to mark their social progress.

However, beyond the ghosts of Italian emigrants, there are also other “ghostly matters” (Gordon 1997)—or in psychoanalytic terms, “intergenerational phantoms” (Abraham and Torok in Davis 2005, 373–74)—in play. These ghostly matters are secrets or traumas transmitted from others or “the articulated and often disarticulated traces of that abstraction we call a social relationship of power” (Gordon 1997, 183). They are issues that seem to be missing from the public debate but which could have emerged. If the victims and their families had been centered, for example, the specters of the Italian colonial domination of Eritrea may have become visible. The connections that seem obvious for Eritreans and that are still so apparent in places like Asmara—the capital city built by Italians for Italians—remain hidden. Nor is the imperial expansion and rule during Italian Fascism and the creation of Africa Orientale Italiana articulated as the background for the present-day conflicts in the region that continue to force people to flee. The historian Alessandro Triulzi has argued that the Italian public ignores its postcolonial status and migrants’ claims to a common past, including the “ancient routes and connections” (Triulzi 2016, 151) that present-day border crossings in the Mediterranean have reopened.3

The centering of Italians is also evident in the lawmakers’ praise of those who rescue and welcome migrants. The parliamentarians considered Lampedusans to be hospitable and exemplary citizens, “extraordinary” as Khalid Chaouki (2015) described them in his parliamentary speech. In addition, parliamentarians included the Coast Guard, the Guardia di Finanza, the Navy, and the Carabinieri among those to be remembered on the Day of Remembrance—institutions that paradoxically control the border while also rescuing migrants at sea. This military-humanitarian nexus suited the political climate at a time when the center-left coalition led by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was collaborating with international donation-based rescue operations in the Mediterranean.

Micaela Campana (2015) was one of the parliamentarians who in the debate mentioned Operation Mare Nostrum, the military search and rescue operation that was launched a month after the disaster in 2013. “Mare Nostrum was an important operation not only because of the 150,000 people saved, but also because with this operation, Italy has lifted its head; it is a moment of dignity. With Mare Nostrum, we have demonstrated the greatness of Italy.” The memorial is therefore a means to celebrate and further demonstrate the grandezza dell’Italia, which according to Campana emerges from the combination of military and humanitarian strength.

In Italy, the Day of Remembrance was instrumentalized for a number of national interests: it produced a mental mapping of national boundaries (of “our sea”), it produced a hospitable identity for Italians—the model being the Lampedusans—and it created humanitarian clout and moral greatness for Italy’s military operations. It also marked and demonstrated social progress, as the present-day migrants were signposts of what Italians no longer were: unwanted border-crossers.

The parties that opposed the passing of the law and did not see the national interests in the Day of Remembrance were the nationalist-populist Lega Nord and the counterestablishment Five Star Movement. Cristian Invernizzi (2015) of Lega Nord saw the Day of Remembrance as an invitation for migrants to embark on fatal journeys, which he said would not end the “misery of hundreds of millions of Africans.” He claimed that the memorial was a “symbol of hypocrisy” and a “festival of buonismo ” (righteousness or do-goodism) for the governing parties. The populists’ opposition to the Day of Remembrance was primarily political: they opposed the memorializing because from their viewpoint, the governing parties did not have the right to memorialize and to create the obligation to memorialize in Italy.

Memory Politics on the European Scale

In 2014, Italy held the rolling presidency of the Council of the European Union, and migration from third countries—“the migration emergency”—as Italy’s presidency program termed it, was one of the key issues Italy wanted to raise. Italy was concerned about the Dublin II policy, which requires asylum applications to be processed in the first member country in which asylum seekers arrive and used the presidency to underline its unfairness to EU countries bordering the Mediterranean: Italy’s concern was “the particularly intense pressure on the national asylum systems of some Member States,” and it wanted to promote “solidarity at the European level” (Italian presidency of the Council of the European Union 2014). Solidarity in this context does not refer to solidarity with migrants but to sharing the “burden” of asylum seekers among the countries of the European Union.

As part of the EU presidency program, the president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, the president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies Laura Boldrini, and the Italian minister of foreign affairs Federica Mogherini (who was soon to be high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy) flew to Lampedusa to participate in a ceremony at the disaster site. On a Guardia di Finanza vessel, Martin Schulz with about forty survivors of the disaster lowered a wreath into the sea. Meanwhile, at the harbor, protesters who had been assembled by Askavusa, an anti-capitalist activist collective in Lampedusa, shouted “vergogna!” (shame, disgrace), “hypocrisy!” and “the truth about the third of October!”

At the harbor, I observed the confusion the politicians’ memorial had caused among the activists. Some of them had arrived in Lampedusa thinking that it was the lieu de mémoire of dissensual commemoration and were prepared to memorialize the disaster as a form of a protest against Italian and European leaders. In a panel discussion of Lampedusa in Festival on September 28, 2014, two activists of Boats4People, for example, explained how they had in previous years organized commemorative solidarity actions along the Mediterranean shore. They had organized vigils for those who had died at the border. The List of Deaths (UNITED 2022), the list of fatal incidents since 1993 at Europe’s borders was used in these vigils to make the massive number of deaths imaginable to the public through visualization and reading out loud details of missing and dead migrants. These commemorative performances revealed the murderousness of the European border. They were spectacles to counter the “border spectacle” (De Genova 2013)—the display of enforcement apparatus at the border, such as militarized gear, concertina wire, and detention facilities, whereby migrant “illegality” is made spectacularly visible. However, now the scene of the spectacles had changed. The representatives of the Italian government and European Union—the very individuals whose attention activists had sought in countermemorializing border deaths earlier—were about to memorialize the dead themselves. This shift in the politics of memorializing border deaths is connected to two broader political divisions that were taking shape in Europe’s political landscape at the time: the Eurozone financial crisis and the rise of right-wing political parties.

In 2014, Europe was on its way to deeper divisions. After the global financial crisis of 2009, some governments in the European Union, mainly those in the South faced serious fiscal problems, while countries in the North were less affected. In the common currency Eurozone, international cooperation became politically heated (Baldi and Staehr 2016; Schneider and Slantchev 2018). At the same time, the countries struggling with finances were more affected by irregular border crossings. In migration policy, the Dublin II agreement put more pressure on the countries at the southern border as they were responsible for reception and management of migrant arrivals.

Furthermore, nationalist, populist, Eurosceptic, and anti-immigration parties had had unprecedented success in the European Parliament elections in May 2014—just a few months before the commemorations in Lampedusa.4 Asylum-seeking and the border were issues that divided Europe, a development that has since escalated. The Europe that Martin Schulz represented was not unified, and he made this clear in his speeches during the commemorations. Memorializing dead migrants was an attempt to create cohesion in the divided Europe—unified by dignity, the virtuous from both sides of the division (Schulz of the North and the Italian leaders of the South) gathered at the memory of a mass death. It was a rerun of the commemorative spectacle at the Lampedusa airport hangar the year before when European leaders led by the President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso commemorated the rows of coffins (discussed in chapter 2).

Speaking at a press conference at the airport in Lampedusa on October 3, 2014, Martin Schulz (2014) referred to three issues from which his duty to remember the disaster stemmed. First, he reminded the public that Europe was not hosting as many refugees as countries closer to conflict zones were, such as Lebanon with its “one million Syrians.” Second, he was motivated by fear of rising right-wing nationalism in Europe. And third, he referred to European histories of both protecting refugees and being a source of refugees. Schulz seemed to argue that we have the duty to welcome migrants because we ourselves have migrated and because others host more migrants than we do. We have a duty to protect migrants because our ancestors protected them, too.

“On the third of October one year ago happened a tragedy which was,” Schulz paused and gestured toward the Italian leaders who were sitting at the conference, “for all of us, not only a humanitarian disaster. It was against our dignity that on the coast of one of the richest parts of the world hundreds of people must die under such circumstances.” Schulz was outraged because mass death was not what should happen in Europe. He defined the disaster in a way that incorporated the whole of Europe. It was not only a violation of the dignity of Others—the victims and the survivors, about thirty of whom sat in the front rows during the press conference—but also “against our dignity.”

The losses of the families or the experiences of the survivors had no role in the definition of “us”—they were not part of “Europe” but instead belonged to the “humanitarian” sphere. In his writing on the ethics of remembering war, Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016) argues that ethical outrage at the disproportionate death and suffering inflicted on others “is not enough, even though it may be more than many can allow themselves” (Nguyen 2016, 75). He points out that such outrage still reasserts “the centrality of the person feeling that emotion, which justifies viewing the other as a perpetual victim.” In his statement, Schulz characterized the Lampedusa shipwreck as more than just a humanitarian disaster, more than simply 366 deaths. His assessment elevated the disaster to the symbolic level, but in doing so, centered the “European” experience.

Martin Schulz also positioned himself in opposition to the nationalist-populist forces that he implicated in the disaster in his speech: “I want to say to those who criticize us: Yes, I am ashamed. But you should also know the reality in the European Union. I am the president of the Parliament where a fourth of those elected say we have nothing to do with them [the refugees]—they should stay at home and not come to Europe. These are the forces” (Schulz 2014). Despite feeling “ashamed,” Schulz did not move toward a restorative politics that would have included acknowledging culpability for the deadly border—for example, in the form of an apology. In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s (2016, 73) terms, he failed to recognize his own “capacity to do harm.” On the one hand, his presence at the ritual in which the wreath was lowered into the sea communicated the social importance of undocumented border-crossers and underlined that their mass death was a broader European issue and worthy of common remembering. In that respect, he did much more than other European leaders had in terms of taking responsibility for the deaths. On the other hand, memorialization offered a position of righteousness to those who participated in the commemoration and situated “Europeans” and “European” feelings at the center.

Europeanization of the Memorial

After Italy’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, Italian politicians continued to push for the memorialization of October 3 on the European scale. In 2015, Luigi Morgano, an Italian member of the European Parliament, proposed an amendment to the European Parliament Resolution on the Situation in the Mediterranean and the Need for a Holistic EU Approach to Migration (LIBE Committee 2015) that would designate October 3 as a European-wide Day of Remembrance. On April 12, 2016, the European Parliament voted in favor of the resolution, which read, in part: “3 October should be recognized as a Day of Remembrance for all the men, women and children who perish while attempting to flee their countries as a result of persecution, conflict and war, as well as all the men and women who risk their lives every day in order to save them.” The idea that the memorial would recognize both those who died while attempting to cross borders and those who tried to rescue them originated from the Comitato 3 ottobre. In an email, Luigi Morgano (personal communication 2018) directly referred me to the Comitato 3 ottobre for further information about the aims of the Day of Remembrance. Thus, my interpretation is that his amendment to the EU resolution was intended to expand the Italian Day of Remembrance to the European scale.

The Day of Remembrance was not discussed in the European Parliament; it slipped through without much attention, as one small section of the broader resolution. The debate focused instead on the “internal solidarity” of European Union member countries concerning asylum decisions and the relocation of asylum seekers. The European Parliament had once again concluded that the EU needed a more unified approach to asylum and migration policy, and perhaps parliamentarians hoped that a common memorial would function as a unifying point of reference in this process.

Within the European Parliament, the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (known as the LIBE Committee) and several of its members have been at the forefront in pushing for recognition of October 3 as a European memorial. Center-left Italian members of the committee, in particular, have been prominent in this respect. For example, Cécyle Kyenge, who served as Italy’s minister of integration in 2013, requested a minute of silence in the European Parliament plenary session on October 3, 2016.

Another important recognition of the disaster’s memory took place on October 3, 2019, when the LIBE Committee held a hearing on search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. The meeting was devoted to identifying gaps in legislation and policy that prevented or hindered humanitarian rescues. While the representatives organized themselves, MEP Magid Magid from the United Kingdom asked “if there was any point in the meeting today when we would have a minute of silence for the anniversary of the Lampedusa [disaster]” (Magid 2019).

Before the hearing began, the chair of the committee, Juan Fernando López Aguilar, announced that the meeting was dedicated to the memory of “all victims of the tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea” (López Aguilar 2019). The disaster that stood as the symbol for “all victims” was recalled as a reference point against which the ongoing border deaths discussed in the hearing were evaluated. The disaster itself was remembered by recalling the number of victims, its location, and its emotional effect on Europeans. López Aguilar (2019) opened the meeting by referring to the disaster: “It’s the third of October. It’s a national day in Germany [German Unity Day], but it’s also the anniversary of the very shocking sinking of a boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy. Off the Italian island of Lampedusa, more than 360 human beings perished in that shipwreck in 2013. . . . Six years after being so shocked, many people are still dying in the Mediterranean trying to set a foot on the European coast of the Mediterranean.”

Carola Rackete, a captain of the German donation-funded Sea-Watch 3 SAR vessel, offered expert testimony in English at the LIBE Committee meeting. She also marked the Lampedusa disaster as a key moment, starting her remarks by referring to the disaster:

I am particularly honored and also saddened to hold my speech on the occasion of the sixth anniversary of a famous shipwreck where more than 368 people died right in front of Lampedusa as a result of omission of rescue. Six years have passed, and instead of trying to avoid similar tragedies, the EU member states have engaged in a policy of externalization of responsibilities and a praxis of pushbacks and omissions of rescue, delegating responsibility to a country at war, Libya, in a breach of international law. And yet there is hope, represented by the European civil society at the Mediterranean Sea, defending to respect [sic] everyone’s right to life and the rule of law. (Rackete 2019)

The memorializing of the disaster from a European political platform and among civil society actors such as Carola Rackete of Sea-Watch shows how the disaster has become a Europeanized lieu de mémoire. The disaster serves an important function for those who memorialize, and the memorial itself provides them a means for identification (Koselleck 2002).

Those attending the LIBE hearing in Brussels had a personal or a professional connection to the disaster that (at least nominally) produced an obligation to memorialize. Members of the European Parliament represented an institution that was partly responsible for the bordering of Europe. Representatives of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex and the Italian Guardia Costiera—who were also heard at the meeting—represented institutions that controlled the borders where the deaths took place. Carola Rackete represented civil society actors who resisted bordering, and she herself had witnessed suffering at the border. Pietro Bartolo, a Lampedusan doctor and eyewitness of the immediate aftermath of the October 3 disaster, was also among the committee members, as a recently elected MEP. At the meeting, he said that the October 3 disaster was the very reason he became a member of the European Parliament.

A recommendation to memorialize border deaths at a European scale, coming from the European Parliament, does not become a practice among Europeans unless there are communities and individuals with whom the idea resonates. The civil society rescue operations in which ordinary citizens participate through donations might create such resonance, as Carola Rakete’s speech at the LIBE Committee suggests. As has been the case in Italy, memorialization needs to serve some function for the community that commemorates. The European version of the Day of Remembrance has not, at least to date, been observed in the EU member states to the extent its advocates had hoped. Most likely, if the narrative of October 3 resonated with a given community, the motivation to commemorate and the commemoration’s function would be articulated in ways dependent on the local context. Therefore, when considering the scale of the European Union, I must return to the scale of locality to make sense of what memorializing the Lampedusa disaster elsewhere in Europe might mean.

Memorializing Lampedusa in Dresden, Germany

In Dresden, Germany, October 3 resonated as a memorial for migrant deaths in 2016. Those who commemorated there, however, were unaware of the Day of Remembrance in Italy and the resolution in the European Parliament. In fact, their actions emerged from the assumption that deaths at the border were not being publicly commemorated. On October 3, 2016, about fifteen people dressed in black went to the banks of the Elbe under the Augustusbrücke with a large black banner that read in white letters: Deutsche asylpolitik toten (German asylum politics kill). They pushed eighteen white coffin-shaped pieces of polystyrene foam into the river. “R.I.P.” and “3.10.13 LAMPEDUSA” were written on the coffins with black marker (Michaelis 2016).

The performance was part of a wider leftist protest against the Day of German Unity that is celebrated as a national holiday on October 3. In 2016, the main festivities of the national commemoration took place in the formerly communist East German city of Dresden with the theme “Building bridges”; German chancellor Angela Merkel and the president of Germany Joachim Gauck attended. The event attracted two protests stemming from opposite ideological directions. The far-right movement Pegida and the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland organized a protest that drew 6,000 to 8,000 people. The antiracist and leftist coalition Solidarity without Limits attracted about 2,500 protesters with a call that made reference to the Lampedusa disaster:

Bridges are a good thing. You could build many bridges, for example over the Mediterranean to save the lives of tens of thousands of refugees and migrants. Especially on October 3, the third anniversary of the Lampedusa shipwreck, it would be the right time to think about how to make sure all people can cross the Mediterranean safely. This could be the beginning of the end of Fortress Europe. . . . German society is increasingly polarized [and] authoritarian and excluding tendencies are more and more popular. The gap between rich and poor widens. For us, these developments are good reasons for a critical intervention against this German national day on October 3. (Critiquenact 2016)

Three years after the protest, I contacted the Dresden anti-fascists (Undogmatische Radikale Antifa Dresden) to ask more about their motivation to publicly remember the Lampedusa disaster. They responded by secure email:

We are always disgusted by patriotic festivities—first and foremost (but not solely) because of Germany’s past and its crimes—but in this case, we had to act against this cynical slogan [building bridges]. It was cynical and it still is, because people, who are looking for a better life, are still being stopped at the European borders and they are still drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. It is an act of sheer ignorance to speak of “building bridges” on the 3rd anniversary of the boating accident near Lampedusa, where a lot of people lost their lives. (Undogmatische Radikale Antifa Dresden 2019)

The performance at the river Elbe instrumentalized the aesthetics of mourning and funeral (black clothing, coffins) in a protest against the bordering of Europe and social and political developments in Germany. The conflict that the date October 3 created in the local and national context—the irony of celebrating “the fall of the wall” on the same day that could be used to remember an existing fatal border—opened a space for transformative and critical politics. Such an opening may invite others to see border deaths differently and to recognize relationalities between the Germans who suffered from the violent border in the past and those who now suffer from Europe’s external border politics. The protesters made visible the relationality between the two borders and their victims across time and space. As one of the participants in the memorial performance said to the local newspaper Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten: “How can we celebrate a borderless Germany while building huge border fences across and around Europe where people die? That’s obviously a contradiction!” (Michaelis 2016).

The public’s ignorance of death at the border and the apparent normalcy of it made the protesters uncomfortable. Another person said: “I shocked myself. On September 21, again many people died in the Mediterranean, but instead of being sad, angry, and upset, I just skimmed the very brief report.” And a third explained: “We do not want it to be normal for men, women, and children to drown in the Mediterranean. We do not want to live in a society that is cold when refugees die” (Michaelis 2016). The protesters perceived the situation in the Mediterranean as a matter relevant to them and considered the conditions of the deaths to be unacceptable.

The anti-fascist protesters felt obliged to remember the Lampedusa disaster for the sake of who they were and the type of society they wanted to live in. Their duty to remember stemmed from critical self-reflection and from contextualizing the events and histories of two different border zones. Instead of merely skimming brief news items and accepting the deaths as something normal, the protesters refused to accept indifference and called upon everyone to take responsibility for the deaths that were turning society cold and unlivable. The October 3 disaster symbolized the broader issue of migrant deaths, and the lack of memorializing the disaster symbolized social indifference—“coldness”—toward refugees and their deaths. It made visible Europe’s indifference to sharing the world.

In this case, it would be easy to interpret the protesters’ actions as centering their own emotions. However, as in the case of the Castellamare del Golfo student performances (discussed in chapter 4), I contest this reading, instead arguing that attentiveness both to others and to one’s own actions and position constitute a form of citizenship that contests indifference. The protesters did frame their outrage in terms of political division—division within Germany, division between the rich and the poor, and the rise of nationalist forces. However, they did not transfer inhumanity and responsibility elsewhere (to the smugglers, to the far right, or to Europe) as tends to be the case in the arguments for memorializing at the scale of local governance (such as the Garden of Remembrance in Lampedusa, discussed in chapter 5), the nation (the parliamentary debates in Italy) and Europe (Schulz’s statement during his visit to Lampedusa). On the contrary, the protesters recognized their own culpability in the deaths and their own potential inhumanity, their “skimming over” of news about border deaths. They were haunted by specters of their future selves as they considered who they would become if they remained indifferent. Their position is critically different from that of other mainstream positions that seem to advocate for migrants, such as that of Martin Schulz who felt that mass deaths violated the dignity of the society he belongs to. Schulz did not fully recognize his own role in the scenario of border deaths, while the Dresden anti-fascists did.

The Dresden protesters cultivated a form of restorative activism that recognizes one’s own responsibility in the production of violence. They constituted a citizenship based on attentiveness to one’s own self-interest in the world we inhabit. Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016, 73) argues for an ethics of recognition that “recognizes our capacity to do harm.” That recognition is critical in creating potentiality for imagining alternatives. The critical opening in Dresden emerged from the collision of two kinds of memorials. The civil imagination of the protesters was sparked by the multidirectionality of memory, the cross-referencing, but of memories that were out of sync: the celebration of the removal of one border and the simultaneous lack of grief over mass death at another.

The dominant understanding of border deaths has been one of cultural amnesia rather than remembering. The fundamental criticism in recent academic work on border deaths is largely based on Judith Butler’s (2009) notion of “ungrievability,” arguing that these deaths are ignored and not remembered in a dignified way in Europe and by Europeans except in specific critical activist or artistic settings (e.g., Stierl 2016; Stümer 2018). Like the Dresden protesters, these scholars, artists, and activists consider forgetting to be a continuation of public indifference to border deaths. Memorializing, therefore, becomes an act of public recognition of migrants and is crucial for social power dynamics because representing groups, individuals, or events as worthy of common remembering highlights their social importance. From a Durkheimian sociological perspective, such commemorations communicate the society’s shared values, and common points of reference such as these function to reduce social instability and division (Connerton 1989, 49). Activist and local communities’ memorialization of border deaths has been interpreted through the lens of countermemorialization—as political acts of continuing witness of injustice that otherwise would be forgotten by publics (e.g., Auchter 2013; Alonso and Nienass 2016a; 2016b; Stierl 2016; Stümer 2018).

The abundance of memorializing at different scales examined in this chapter (and in chapters 4 and 5) raises a number of issues concerning the afterlife of the Lampedusa disaster. First, while the common understanding is that the impetus to memorialize border deaths emerges from a perceived lack of existent memorialization, in fact, most of the instances of remembering that I have examined have been prompted by other memorials and rituals. Public memorialization produces a communicative sphere in which people respond to how others have remembered dead strangers.

Second, the memorials and rituals related to border deaths have thus tended to produce more memorialization rather than attest that the border’s victims have gained a certain level of social importance. Writing about the abundance of Holocaust memorialization, Klaus Neumann (2014, 476) points out that the crucial question is not simply what and how much is being remembered, but rather one should ask: Who is remembering whom, and to what end? He reminds us that in Germany, Holocaust memorials are everywhere, but their existence is not a result of demands by survivors. Most memorials are the initiatives of local non-Jewish Germans. Their aim is “not the resuscitation of the dead but the redemption of those living with the shame caused by their association with previous generations of perpetrators” (Neumann 2014, 476).

Third, the communicative sphere of memorialization is produced through re-mediation—one form of memorialization inspires another—and consequently, the afterlives of border deaths are constantly transforming. Memorials attract rituals, and rituals may elicit the need to create longer-lasting memorials. The Day of Remembrance in Italy prompted the recognition of the date in the European Parliament, particularly in the LIBE Committee that works with issues of justice. At local levels, such as in Castellamare del Golfo in Sicily, the community that buried victims of the disaster, the obligation to memorialize stems from both directions—from “above” in the form of the National Day of Remembrance and from “below” from the uncomfortable feeling of having unknown bodies buried at a local cemetery (as discussed in chapter 4).

Fourth, while some selected pasts and present conditions fell into amnesia, across the scales of memorialization discussed in this chapter and in chapters 4 and 5, three kinds of haunting pasts were related to the motivations and functions of remembering: memories of past migration, past borders, and fascism in Italy and Germany. These “ghosts” as Avery Gordon (1997) would call them, haunt the memorializing communities, cause established certainties such as the differences between “us” and “them” to waver, and create a duty to remember.

The figure of the unwanted migrant and Italy’s heritage of emigration evoke remembering at the national scale. These specters remind Italians of their own social progress and their present position of power, in which they can be the ones who welcome and protect. At the level of European institutions, the memory of being both a source of and a host to refugees produces a duty to remember and produces a common point of identification for the divided European community—or so the institutions hope. In Dresden, the protesters dressed in black were perplexed by the contradiction contained in the erasure of one violent border while another past border was recognized. This contradiction was revealed to them by the date October 3, which encompasses the memory of two events.

In addition, in Italy, in Dresden, and in the speech of Martin Schulz, the memory of fascism lurks. As people die at Europe’s borders and their unidentified bodies are welcomed into Europe’s cemeteries, the specters of fascists, bystanders, the persecuted, and the dissidents who fled across the Italian border to France haunt Europe in a more or less visible and articulated form. The memorializing of dead strangers takes place in the memory of what happened in Europe seventy years ago.

What differentiates the Dresden protesters’ position on memorialization from the other memorial instances discussed in this chapter, those at the scale of the nation and Europe, was the personal responsibility that the protesters took for the world and their being in it. They instrumentalized memorializing to counter the far right in Dresden and a society that is “cold”—a society where one finds oneself “skimming over” the news about border deaths. The recognition of one’s own responsibility in the production of violence nurtures a restorative activism and is central for the capacity to imagine an alternative world in which living together is possible. The protesters in Dresden constituted a citizenship of attentiveness that was based on a haunting awareness of how their potential future selves might judge the present if they chose self-interest over attentiveness to the inequalities of the world. Their approach resisted reproducing the division between “good” citizens, who recognize dead strangers through memorializing, and “bad” citizens, who ignore these deaths.

This chapter concludes the section of three chapters that examines how the disaster has been memorialized by others—people who did not know the dead. In the next chapter, I discuss how those who knew the dead—survivors and relatives of the victims—relate to memorials and rituals created for “Italian” and other “European” audiences. The position of survivors and relatives as witnesses is crucially different. Rituals are always performative, and memorials can be reframed by visitors; neither are ever fixed to an intended meaning. Rituals and memorials often bring dissent and simmering social conflicts to the fore, as discussed in the three chapters of this section. In the next chapter, I examine what people who knew the dead do in the sphere of memorializing created by others. The chapter continues to explore the dynamics that I highlighted in chapter 5 in my analysis of scenes at the Nuova Speranza memorial in Lampedusa. I examine what kinds of contestations and politics emerge in the sphere of memorialization, and how survivors and relatives of the victims activate the ritual atmosphere and the existing memorial structures for their own concerns and causes.