Story of an Ordinary Massacre: Civitella della Chiana, 29 June, 1944

and irrelevant. On the contrary, the presence of the past is the result of acts of compassion, love, and mourning. The categories of space and time that Kantian philosophy identifies as preconditions of human knowledge do not, according to Freud, exist in the realm of the unconscious and the emotional. Trauma is something indelible; rationalization can remove, but not cancel it from the individual's psyche. It lasts forever. There must be something analogous for the lives of collectivities. In premodern societies, catastrophes gave rise to myths, to metahistories which, handed down from generation to generation, told time and again of the eternal confrontation between good and