Yet despite a small number of transnational initiatives, the dominant memories of bombing are sharply differentiated along national lines. In Britain, the Blitz has been woven into the fabric of national identity. In France, by contrast, bombing was, until very recently, filtered out of narratives of the ‘dark years’. In Germany, a revival of interest in bombing, generated by the writings of authors as Jörg Friedrich and W.G. Sebald, has been complicated by the issue of war guilt and comparisons with the Holocaust. Italy is an amalgam of the French and German cases, in which the Allies appear first as enemies in Mussolini’s war and then as liberators who still claimed Italian civilian lives.
What differentiates these national memories? This paper suggests and evaluates, for the UK, France, Germany and Italy, five possible variables : (a) the scale of bombing in each case (tonnage dropped, death toll) ; (b) the relationship between air raids and the main national narrative of World War 2 ; (c) the action of wartime governments in mobilising the population for civil defence against air raids ; (d) the role of capital cities ; and (e) the nature of cultural production related to bombing both during and since the air raids themselves.
