An embodied approach to Second World War storytelling mementoes: Probing beyond the archival into the corporeality of memories of the resistance

Abstract

What happens when we include materiality and corporeality into an exploration of the Second World War resistance experience? Although an understanding of veteran storytelling as ‘feeling’ and sharing of emotional memories may appear obvious in the context of a human experience like resistance, academic literature on the topic is rare. When war mementoes are considered in the context of oral sources, they are at best conceptualized as archival items, museum pieces, or memory aids. However, semi-structured interviews with Italian and British resistance activists suggest that their experience was grounded in the body and the world, and is shared through storytelling that is also perforce grounded in the body. This article explores the ‘worlds of feelings’ of veterans through their interaction with mementoes used in storytelling, and contends that these objects constitute not only sites of memory or relics, but also sites of feeling. Implicating the bodily sphere into a hitherto predominantly military narrative produces a more holistic and bottom-up understanding of conflict experience.