6 - A New Europe: Erasing the Destruction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2021
Summary
Abstract
Monte Cassino became a fitting symbol for post-war recovery efforts. Its lived experiences account for the abbey's role in the second half of the twentieth century as the binding agent and promoter for a unified Europe. This chapter makes sense of this unique designation by examining the way(s) in which the abbey's fractured past has been harnessed into this synthetic vision. It asks how Monte Cassino's ‘destruction tradition’ – that evolving narrative and shared reality from the Middle Ages to the present day – served as an instrument for promoting the abbey's faith and prosperity well into the twentieth century. It shows how the abbey's cumulative experiences with death and resurrection were transformed into a secular and religious rhetoric of hope, unity, and essential European identity.
Keywords: identity; unity; Europe; historiography; representation; culture; memory; civilisation
‘Monte Cassino Never Dies.’
The English travel writer Donald Hall was enamoured by Monte Cassino. The abbey dazzled him ‘with fickle brilliance’, even before he drew near its summit. ‘For nearly a millennium and a half,’ he wrote, ‘men have been halted by that watch-tower of religion and culture rising above the crossroads, Lombards, Saracens, Normans, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans, and then again Germans with Englishmen and their allies in hard pursuit’. Their fascination with the Benedictine house was ‘usually angry and gnawed by a frustration which they resolved by destroying, looting and all manner of nastiness directed at the object in their path’. Their reasons for doing so were varied:
[W]hether they were pagans who disliked Christians or Christians who disliked monks, a desire for loot or just a natural bent for destruction, the ultimate devastation being in the name of the Western civilisation of which the monastery was a beacon, a very knotty point.
This modern representation of the abbey's victimisation is common but not universally shared. When Hall asked one of the monks about the most recent destruction in the Second World War, he was reportedly told: ‘We hardly ever speak of it here. […] For us it is already only an incident in our history’. This striking interpretation of the abbey's near annihilation in February 1944 is not altogether surprising given the longer tradition of destruction and rebuilding examined throughout this book.
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- The Destruction and Recovery of Monte Cassino, 529–1964 , pp. 187 - 212Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021