Introduction

In 1939, “We’ll meet again” is played on British radio, sung in a dulcet voice by Vera Lynn. The song, poignant and very catchy, is a promise that there will be a “later” when it will be possible to meet again and start living a happy life again. It is a song of hope that entered the hearts of English-speaking soldiers and civilians involved in the war effort.

“We’ll meet again” became very popular during World War II and was played on the radio after the bombings to try and boost the morale of the population. There would have been an aftermath of the war, one had to keep that in mind.

We find this same song exactly 40 years later, quoted in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Roger Waters had lost his father in the Battle of Anzio. He was one of those children who had not been able to re-embrace their father. For Waters, after the war there wouldn’t have been a great reunion, but an emptiness filled with terrifying fantasies and the feeling of being somehow out of sync with the joy of rebirth he felt around him.

 Vera Lynn had lied: there is not always a happy ending at the end of wars. In fact, a frightening number of young men had died as “rats in the trenches” (Pink Floyd, 1979), there never was a future for them, and even the future of their loved ones had been crippled.

Even those who had fought and returned home bore the marks of war: they were either maimed in their bodies or otherwise carried within them the long shadows of horrors suffered or acted upon.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline book “Guerre” (War) starts with him waking up after a bombing raid. He is the sole survivor of a carnage that can only be told in detail. Bodies, disemboweled and desecrated by howitzers, lay in a mush that no longer allows to tell them apart from those of their horses.

Céline tells us immediately that he will never be able to erase from his mind the horrors of those battles: “I have always slept like this in the atrocious noise since December ’14. I got the war in my head. I got it locked in my head. […] I learned to distinguish external noises from noises that would never leave me again. […] in order to think, even a little, I had to take it in bits and pieces like when two people talk to each other from a station platform when a train passes by. One piece at a time of well-crafted thinking, one away from the other. It is a tiring exercise, I assure you. I’m trained now. Twenty years, one learns. My soul is harder, like a bicep. I no longer believe in shortcuts. I have learned to make music, sleep, forgiveness, and, as you see, even beautiful literature, with little touches of horror wrested from the noise that will never end” (Celine, 2022, 25-27)[1].

War leaves an indelible mark, individually and collectively, now and in the future.

The book “All Quiet on the Western Front” (Remarque, 1928) begins with these lines: “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with

1. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war”

Generations. War butchers’ generations: both those directly involved in the battles and those to come.

In “The Wall”, we can clearly see how the death of his father is causing the child to experience a grief so deep that, as he grows up, he will find himself filled with anguish and in the grip of an increasingly radical fragmentation. War tears generations apart; the nightmares become less and less perceptible to the consciousness and yet they do not disappear: if anything, they infiltrate deep inside and become transgenerational results.

War leaves such a long-lasting mark that it exceeds the life span of those unfortunate enough to participate in it. Thus, we see how war destroys lives and things but also destroys the flow of time.

We are still here wondering why -“Why war?” (Freud, 1933), why another war? And bitterly we have to realize that this depends on the fact that the previous war was not yet over: its unconscious offshoots were still only partly in process, poisoning institutions and sickening individuals.

In the summer of 2021, I had found myself writing for the website of the Veneto Center for Psychoanalysis a short memoir to acknowledge the 30-year anniversary since the beginning of the war in former Yugoslavia.

I was upset finding that very few people cared about that.

In that situation, I came across an interesting article by Paolo Fonda in which he recalled being in Istria in the very beginning of the outbreak of war between what is now Slovenia and the rest of Yugoslavia. It was the start of a violent conflict that lasted ten years.

I soon found myself discussing with him and Vlasta Polojaz on the need to talk about war. Paul and Vlasta, both psychoanalysts at our center, are Slovenian-Italians and in their lives have crossed paths with war and ethnic persecution very often. They have been involved in training analysts in Eastern Europe for decades, and no one is as capable as they are of reading the deposits left by that war.

We felt it was important to have memory of the events of the 1990s, partly because the Yugoslav conflict had been a wound for us Italians as well, so close and often related to those territories, and partly because it seemed to me that no one was willing to acknowledge that 1991 was a past too near to be able to say we were free of it. I wondered what kind of removal was going on, whether it had the mixture of the defensive cleavages typical of present-day trauma or whether it had to do with omertous claustrations of ambiguous nuclei (Bleger, 1967).

However, there was another reason why, in the summer of 2021, that issue seemed crucial to me: as I had the opportunity to tell them, I was very much worried about what I could see from the window that is the Web. There was a strange electricity in the air.

We were still absorbed in the second wave of Covid, and perhaps that pre-apocalyptic mood was justified by the upheavals caused by the pandemic. Yet it wasn’t just that: populism was becoming more and more disengaged, socio-political supporters more paranoid, and the economy seemed most fragile. And it was.

At school we studied how the Spanish flu pandemic broke out during World War I, and I, who had never witnessed any war, had a strange feeling of déjà vu. I asked Paul and Vlasta what they remembered about the war in the former Yugoslavia and, going further back in time, the border persecutions of the first half of the 1900s.

Between them and me lies a generation, and what was being created in the conversation we had was a scene that had a powerful transgenerational mixture (Spiller, 2022): I was sensing the rise of a karstic river that had invaginated many decades earlier without ever dying out. They were telling me what could be remembered but they were also aware of how forgetting is part of the processes of trauma processing.  “It takes time to come to think about trauma. Decades. Generations must pass,” Paolo Fonda said.  

There came a desire to broaden the dialogue to colleagues who were interested in war trauma care. We could have had a study group and perhaps a conference.

However, history was ahead of us, and on February 24th, 2022, Russian troops invaded eastern Ukraine. War had indeed returned back to Europe.

We all remember the anguish that gripped us over the news of civilians attacked and of the massacres that, week after week, came to light. Almost immediately the counter-information also began: the massacres had never happened, the children had never been abducted, the bombs were ones of liberation, not attack.

One of the first epiphanies of war is the collapse of agreement on reality: if until earlier it seemed possible to determine whether a fact had occurred, then each side was already shouting its own truth. In war, lies and truth are relative matters: whoever wins will determine how to read the events.

One is incredulous to see how difficult it becomes to state definitively that something evil occurred. Inside, each person feels the emotions strongly and seeks out those who mirror their feeling to reinforce their sense of reality.

Those outside the conflict cannot fully understand the anguish produced by this relativism that destroys the contours of reality. Those on the outside invite the parties to mediation in an attempt to reconstruct a framework for dialogue. And, as we have been able to discover in the facts, sometimes this attempt becomes offensive to the parties in conflict, especially to those who have been attacked.

Those who seek mediation, those who are fortunate enough not to be directly involved in the war, must therefore remember that the position of being impartial and the ability to have a thought that integrates the split parts are two high-level products of the psyche and are a luxury we can afford when we do not have to fear for our survival. Asking someone who is struggling for his or her own life to have a triangulated thinking and reality may hide a radical non-understanding of one’s  experience.

We were here, in a partially-involved Europe, still convinced that we could be moderate, that the war had not already changed the usual parameters by which we understand reality. Yet, the contagion ran fast.

I remember feeling that I had to quickly learn the meaning of war-thinking: the public opinion was clogged with an increasingly radical polarization, voters chose right-wing governments, and we were already beginning to feel nostalgic for a past that, not long ago, we considered wretched. We all had to realize that war has the power to affect relations between people even thousands of miles away from where the bombs fall.

What we needed was to stop and think.

On the initiative of Vlasta Polojaz and Paolo Fonda, the Polojaz Foundation offered the Centro Veneto di Psicoanalisi to create together an international meeting on the topic of war experiences. I am very grateful to the CVP’s assembly and executive group for wholeheartedly embracing this initiative, which was then held on October 1st, 2022.

[1] This quote has been translated literally from the Italian version of the book.