ABSTRACT
Hastily scribbled ‘field’ diaries, hidden and forgotten as the resistance fighters moved on or died but then retrieved, typed up and circulated; cups of coffee and mugs of home-brewed beer drunk at oral history interviews; words full of hate
and neo-Nazi slogans defacing the monuments to the resistance movement and its martyrs; yellowing letters written to worried parents at home; sketchbooks and sketches; bullet holes and bullet wounds; military draft posters calling the youth of the fatherland; love poems; scarves, lockets and other belongings of the dead; the resentful anti-memorials to the Fascist victims of the civil war; abandoned, burned out or destroyed villages and streets, haunting in their melancholy materiality; mass graves and their memories; the bodies of those telling stories about the war; and the tears shed for those who did not make it – these are the bread-and-butter of Second World War materiality past and present.
