Lidia Brisca Menapace (1924-2020)

July 25th 1943, the day of the fall of the Fascist regime, caught her on a train bound for Novara: her family had been living in an apartment near the central station but Allied bombing had necessitated her displacement to Baraggia di Suno, near Lake Maggiore. Once back in the city, she attended the festive popular demonstrations for the fall of Fascism, but the belief that the war was over and that normal life would soon return was short-lived^[9] . Her father, Giacomo Brisca, had been recalled to military service a few months earlier, as he was on leave from the army and therefore still eligible for enlistment^[10]. With the signing of the armistice and the arrival of Reich troops in the city (September 12th 1943), Lidia’s father was disarmed and deported to Poland^[11]. After refusing to take the oath to the Republic of Salò –the new Fascist government– he became a Military Prisoner (IMI) and only saw his family again when the war ended after two winters spent in the Stalag^[12].

Giacomo Brisca’s deportation forced the family unit to return permanently to Novara, where they could count on a network of solidarity that would guarantee their livelihood^[13].

These tragic events allowed Lidia to make a final decision: “Already since the end of September,” she wrote, “I have decided that I want to act: I want to get in touch with the partisans, I want to do something to help the Jews, I want to do something positive against Nazism, against Fascism, and I try to listen, to see and to learn. I am a member of FUCI and we have big debates under the direction of Don Gec, our assistant: we decided that if they ask us to join the GUF (Fascist University Groups) we will suspend our studies: before July 25th, membership was a kind of mechanical formality, now it would become adherence to reborn Fascism, it would mean siding decisively with Hitler. We also discuss a lot whether the government of the new Fascist republicans is legitimate and come to the conclusion that it is not. Thus, the boys are bound to disobey, if they are recalled and it must be arranged how to hide them and how to send them to the mountains”^[14].

Through Don Giacomini, her high school religion teacher, she was introduced to the first Catholic-inspired partisans who were organising in the city. Since as a university student she had to shuttle between Novara and Milan, she was used as a courier girl^[15]. After getting herself a new bicycle and taking on the battle name of “Bruna,” she transported medicines, carried information to the mountains, accompanied some Jewish boys to the Swiss border and distributed “Il Ribelle”, an information periodical of the Catholic “Green Flames” formations, as she recounted in her autobiography: “So with the shopping basket on the handlebars of the trusty bicycle, the missalino inside and a packet of “Rebels” casually rolled up, I went out when it was still night and there were obviously no lights in the streets. At certain gates or doorways I knew, I laid down a newspaper; then I ran to get in line at the still closed store and with one meat packet more and one newspaper packet less, I went to Church (bicycles can be brought in). When I came back I felt Iike I have lived enough”^[16] .

In 1951 she moved to Bolzano with her husband – a doctor from Trentino. In the early 1960s, she reconnected there with the DC, because it was the only political force who supported the South Tyrolean autonomy line. That means, they wanted to promote a development, in which the different language groups, now intertwined in the same territory, would cooperate through a self-government with broad legislative and administrative powers^[27]. In this debate, Lidia became a prestigious intellectual figure: following the results of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which aimed at a renewal of the Church, she showed interest in Catholic youth groups that began to theorise about overcoming ethnic barriers in South Tyrol.

In 1964 she promoted a conference with the title “Christian Consciousness and the South Tyrolean Problem”. Catholic and Protestant pacifist associations were invited and that’s where for the first time the proposals of the high school student Alexander Langer (later a strongly committed pacifist and environmentalist) emerged^[28]. In the same year she ran for the provincial elections from the ranks of the Christian Democrats and became the first woman elected to the Bolzano provincial council, together with Waltraud Gebert Deeg of the Südtiroler Volkspartei.

In that same legislature, she was also the first woman to join the provincial council as local minister for Social Affairs and Health, dealing with the construction of the Bolzano psychiatric hospital in the wake of Franco Basaglia’s groundbreaking thesis^[29].

Since 1948 she had also been teaching, with annual assignments as lecturer at the chair of Italian Language and Methodology of Literary Studies at the Catholic University of Milan, whose previous holder was Mario Apollonio. She had already experimented with new teaching methods that involved the active participation of students in the lesson, moving beyond the cathedratic mode. The wave of youth protests that swept Europe in 1968 profoundly marked her political path: she participated in the occupations and sympathised with the students, sharing their goals and methods of struggle to the extent that she was reported to the Police^[30].

In July of that year she published a political document titled “For a Marxist Choice,” in which she accused the DC of misusing the term Christian, since it did not strive to remove disparities between human beings but, on the contrary, governed to accentuate them. She then revived the need to use Marxism as a method to understand those changes taking place in society that the DC, in her view, locked into mechanisms of power, was no longer able to grasp. At the same time, she resigned from all the positions she held for the Party, writing a letter to Secretary Mariano Rumor^[31]. These utterances caused her exclusion from any position at the Catholic University and the end of her academic career^[32].

She approached the Communist Party (PCI) without ever joining it and, at the end of 1968, she joined the group of the newborn newspaper “Il Manifesto,” along with Luciana Castellina, Rossana Rossanda, Lucio Magri and Pietro Ingrao. She wrote on various issues, dealing in particular with the feminism of the 1970s: following the publication of a highly critical article on U.S. feminism, she left the group (while continuing to write for the newspaper) and began to show interest in various formations of the so-called “new left”^[33].

She was among the promoters of the Movement of Christians for Socialism, which aimed to synthesise the theses that emerged from the struggles of the ‘60 with the opening operated by the Second Vatican Council. At the founding convention in Bologna (September 1973) she argued that there was no need to create a new Catholic left-wing party but to act through broad alliances among the various movements that arose from below in Italian society^[34].

In 1981 she ran in the municipal elections in Rome among the ranks of the Party of Proletarian Unity (PdUP), but left it in 1984 when the majority decided to merge with the PCI. During the following year she joined the Democrazia proletaria (DP) party and was elected regional councilwoman in Lazio. She judged this experience negatively and claimed that a low level of political theorising was present that made discussion uninspiring^[35].

During the 1980s, she distinguished herself with her many speeches on pacifism and antimilitarism and spoke out against nuclear energy and rearmament. She promoted peace marches and coined the distinctive motto of the pacifist movement, “Let the War be out of History.” Her total opposition to war was in Lidia’s view entirely consistent with Article 11 of the Italian Constitution. For these reasons she was always opposed to the framing of partisans as soldiers, framing that started since the official recognition of General Alexander, because, “it disturbed me to be placed in the army, which I did not really care about, which I rejected even then altogether. The definition contrasted with the Resistance itself, that was actually an experience full of discussions, empty of hierarchies, in short anything but an army”^[36].

In 2006 she ran for the Senate as an independent on the lists of Rifondazione Comunista (PRC), supporting the broad centre-left coalition that narrowly won the April general elections. With the fall of the Prodi government in April 2008, her period in Parliament ended^[37].

In 2011 she was elected to the National Council of the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI)^[38].

Convinced that capitalism could no longer be reformed, she joined Rifondazione Comunista in the following years, was elected to the governing bodies of the Party and ran for office on two occasions in the lists proposed by the party, but was not successful^[39].

She died in Bolzano on December 7th 2020, following complications from Covid-19^[40].