Last Letters from the World Wars: Forming Italian Language, Identity and Memory in Texts of Conflict

Project Information

LAST_LETTERS

Grant agreement ID: 800049

DOI

10.3030/800049

Project closed

EC signature date 26 March 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 August 2020

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 175 866,00

EU contribution

€ 175 866,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK - NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, CORK
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LAST_LETTERS (Last Letters from the World Wars: Forming Italian Language, Identity and Memory in Texts of Conflict)

Reporting period: 2018-09-01 to 2020-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Last Letters from the World Wars involves the linguistic and thematic analysis of the last letters of people sentenced to death during the WWI and WWII, conducted with digital humanities tools. The Researcher digitized these epistolaries to explore the construction of post-War European identities and politics – in particular, the new perception of gender roles, attitudes towards the conflict itself, and the formation of Italian identity through language.

Last Letters objectives:
1. To create a corpus through archival research of unpublished and unanalysed letters of soldiers sentenced to death in WWI.
2. To compose the first digital survey of these materials.
3. To pioneer the computational investigation of the language used in these texts.
4. To analyse linguistically (e.g. grammar, lexicon) authentic historical documents belonging to a time when, as a result of Fascist language policies and the ensuing conflict, standard Italian superseded dialects throughout the nation. Special attention was paid to linguistic variations when the writer is undergoing intense emotional stress.
5. To examine linguistic nuances according to the gender of the letter writer and of the recipient, grounding the analysis in feminist socio-linguistics and gender performativity theory (see ‘methodology’) with attention to changing social roles during the two World Wars.
6. To interpret, using conflict theory, the lexicon dynamics that changed the relationship between the jailers and prisoners, resulting in physical violence initiated by either side.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work of Last Letters focused on 4 main activities:

ARCHIVES
The letters of WWI were collected mainly at the Central Archives of the Italian State (Rome) and following a donation of texts by Professor Procacci. The texts of WWII were collected in collaboration with the Istituto Centrale degli Archivi della Resistenza and the Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, both in Milan.

RESEARCH
Almost all the materials were transferred (about 80%) into plain text which allowed the lemmatization of the texts.

DISSEMINATION
From 2018 to 2020, the Researcher presented Last Letters works at 12 international events.

Conferences
15/07/20, Catholic U. of the Sacred Heart (Milan) What is a last letter? A Linguistic Preventive Analysis of Prisoners’ Letters from the Two World Wars
11/07/19, Utrecht U. (Utrecht) Mapping Fascist Repression, Following the Italian Resistance
28/07/19, U. of Edinburgh (Edinburgh) Our last words will be your heritage. Reading Italian Resistance through the last letters of the partisans who were sentenced to death

Invited Lectures
5/01/20, U. of Poitiers - L'antifascisme espagnol et italien: spatialisation des données
23/01/20, U. of Lorraine (Nancy) Représenter la violence de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. L’Atlas de la répression nazie et fasciste
22/01/20, U. of Lorraine (Nancy) Ce sont mes derniers mots. Les dernières lettres de Juifs et de partisans condamnés à mort pendant le fascisme
21/01/20, U. of Strasbourg - Rileggere la Resistenza. Analisi testuali e spaziali per rileggere la seconda guerra mondiale
28/11/19 Catholic U. of the Sacred Heart (Milan) I testimoni epistolari di Levi
21/11/19 Vrije U. Brussel (Brussels) Last Letters from the World Wars. Analysing Texts of Conflict through a Digital Approach
22/09/19, NYU (New York) Last Letters. A linguistic and thematic analysis
21/06/19, U. of Nice Sophia Antipolis - Last Letters. Les lettres des condamnés à mort italiens (1915-1945)
3/06/19, Comune di Latina - La corrispondenza clandestina al tempo del fascismo. Il caso di Primo Levi tra le lettere dei partigiani e deportati

Articles
- ‘What is a last letter? A Linguistic/Preventive Analysis of Prisoner Letters from the Two World Wars’, Quaderni di Umanistica Digitale (2020), 265-272
- ‘Visualising Second World War Violence through an Atlas of Nazi-Fascist Repression’, DSH - Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34/4 (2020), Forthcoming 2021
- ‘Le ultime lettere di Primo Levi e i suoi compagni ad ogni passo verso Auschwitz’, in Paolo Rigo, Laura Toppan and Maria Antonietta Garullo, (ed.), Scolpitele nel vostro cuore. Primo Levi a cento anni dalla sua nascita (Roma: Ensemble, 2020)

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
The Researcher disseminated his research through a YouTube channel (http://bit.ly/2UekHc8) that contains: readings of letters (https://bit.ly/32L4KBI) educational videos for secondary schools (https://bit.ly/30GdZAt) and videos dedicated to the digital analyses (https://bit.ly/32PcHFX).This project was built in collaboration with the third largest theatre in Milan, the Teatro della Cooperativa, which is responsible for recruiting actors for the videos and distributing the letters in secondary schools throughout the Milan area. This year the project was awarded €9,705.99 by the Waldensian Church of Italy for the dissemination of Last Letters documents in Italian high schools. The readings of the letters involved well-known actors, theatre schools, secondary schools, musicians, artists and relatives of deportees. The research project Last Letters also became a theatrical performance last year on 24/04/2019. The researcher was contacted by a theatrical company of actors that was interested in his work and would like to stage it. This is how the show CANTAMI (https://bit.ly/2OSkI4O) was born, and was then staged in Bologna. His research activities in recent years have been characterised by continuous exchanges with the wider community. In his activities on social networks there have been many exchanges and reactions to his research and he has been contacted by people who have entrusted him with the letters of their loved ones that they had not yet donated to archives and institutions for the enhancement of historical memory.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Last Letters is a research project that has involved many texts, data and historical memory centres. For these reasons, the project has been enriched by many new materials and, consequently, by new ideas for research and analysis compared to the initial idea.

The linguistic analysis of the texts has made it possible to establish some typical textual patterns of World War I and II writing such as, for example, some spelling irregularities, typical of less educated writers.

The project has opened up many other avenues of investigation. The material found, especially that relating to the Second World War, has made it possible to imagine and begin to draw up new projects of analysis that go beyond the linguistic issues of war in an Italian-speaking context.

The project overall has encompassed many spheres: it has contributed to a new understanding not only of the texts i.e. the last letters, but also of human behaviour when, in the context of conflict, people realize their life is about to end. The project’s outreach and impact have been significant to diverse spheres: both online and for a wider, non-specialist audience. The online platforms have rendered the letters accessible to a wider public and have contributed to raising awareness of both World Wars, especially with younger people, as seen in the theatre performances described above. The ripple effect of the project will continue long beyond the two years of the MSCA grant, both in terms of further research, new publications and ongoing outreach activities, online and in the real world.

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