Performing wartime memories: ceremony as contest at the Risiera di San Sabba death camp, Trieste

Abstract

The paper examines contest over one of Trieste's most emotive sites of memory, the former Nazi death camp at the Risiera di San Sabba. Attention is paid to the Risiera as a site for ceremonial recollection of World War Two, and to the enmeshing of the local civic calendar of events within wider currents of academic and political revisionism affecting the upper Adriatic. The paper complements existing studies of former Nazi camps as memorial sites through attention to a distinctive geographical and political context, and by exploring the Risiera as an increasingly problematic site of performance.