Abstract
The article considers the relationship between history and literature, through the analysis of a strand of contemporary literature, mostly European, characterized by the desire of authors to measure themselves with the history and memory of the twentieth century. It is non-fiction that rejects the use of invention, unlike the classic genre of the historical novel. Moving at the intersection of history, testimony and memory, this literature aims on the one hand to reconstruct the truth of facts and individual stories that would otherwise remain unknown, "mimicking" the work of the historian; on the other, it aims to investigate the complicated work of memory through time. Some common elements occur in the different authors examined: the centrality of the family as the protagonist of the narrative; the strong autobiographical involvement of writers whofeel heirs of a family history; the use of oral testimonies and traces left by the protagonists as privileged mode of access to the past; a particular sensitivity for the victims of history, conceived as a succession of violence and grief; a poetic of the "fragment" that enhances the gaps of the past, what is likely to he lost and falling into oblivion. This way of representing the past - which is both a form and a content - is configured as a master narrative that also involves a part of contemporary historiography. Many historians today "become writers": they give up argumentation and debate, enhance the emotional and ethical aspects of their work over the cognitive ones, expunge a number of aspects of reality (economics, demography, climate ...) in favor of a narrative that is centered on the values of individual life and family memory.