Meaning of Fascism in Contemporary Italy

Moving from an article written by the American historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat concerning the relationship between Italian people and the monumental legacy of Italy’s Fascist past, this paper aims to tackle the broader issue of Collective Memory of Italian Fascism. Namely, the memory of a rather benign form of totalitarianism which is not stained by the horrible crimes of its Nazi counterpart, and towards which the Italian population – because of its inherent goodness - never totally adhere to. To determine the way in which this image established itself, the topic is approached through the tools supplies by Memory Studies, in an attempt to identify those intellectual and cultural traditions which have framed this particular representation of the past and those active memory agents who selectively adapted and manipulated history. In particular, attention is given to the specificity of the historical period in which the process of establishing a collective memory took place, the failure of the purges against the Fascists and the lack of persecution against war criminals, which lead to a misleading evaluation of the legacy of Fascism and the war. Furthermore, active agents of memory are individuated in the work of the scholars who dealt with the history of Fascism, in the Allies and the propaganda techniques they deployed during the war, and finally in the visual media and their active role in forging specific exculpatory memories. What this paper ascertains, therefore, is how these policies of re-elaboration of the national past mainly pointed towards establishing an aura of social amnesia around Fascism, its crimes and the connivance of Italian people. This collective amnesia, however, left gaps and ‘black holes’ into the collective memory of Italians. As this paper argues, these gaps were fulfilled thanks to a constant comparison with Nazi Germany and the brutality of its crimes, thus establishing what is known as the ‘bad Germans/good Italians’ trope which is central in evaluating what has established itself to be the collective memory of Italian Fascism.

1999

Modern Italy

This article consists of interviews with five world experts on the memory of Fascism. Taking the centenary of the March on Rome as an opportunity to rethink the development of Italian collective memory, the five interviewees were asked to reflect on different aspects of the Italian memory of Fascism, addressing the dominant conceptualisations, limits, and transformations of the discourses used to narrate Fascism in Italian culture. The result of these conversations, which touch upon issues related to the memory of the Resistance, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and colonialism, is a rich overview of the main trends and current trajectories of Italian memory culture, which can help us imagine the future directions of the Italian memory of Fascism and enhance interventions in this field by memory scholars and memory activists.

Modern Italy, 2019

Italian Culture , 2024

This article examines the moral and political questions raised by Fascism through an analysis of three canonical postwar Italian novels: Vasco Pratolini’s Cronache di poveri amanti, Cesare Pavese’s La casa in collina, and Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere. By exploring the specific memory of Fascism that these texts create, the article shows that their different approaches to the past depend on distinct conceptualizations of responsibility, which are defined as “antagonistic,” “multiperspectival-butrestricted,” and “perpetrator-centered.” Pratolini’s novel condemns the regime and portrays ordinary Italians as resistant to the fascist regime. Pavese’s work offers a more nuanced, multiperspectival approach, yet limits its ethical reflection to the Italian Civil War, leaving other crucial aspects of fascist history unaddressed. In contrast, Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere foregrounds a memory centered on both individual guilt and collective responsibility for fascist and colonial crimes. The article argues that the modalities informing Pratolini’s and Pavese’s works are related to approaches to the fascist past that dominated Italian collective memory in the 1960s and early 2000s, while the mnemonic modality of Flaiano’s novel has been largely subordinate in Italian memory culture. Through this comparative literary analysis, the article challenges existing interpretations of these canonical works, and it underscores the role of postwar literature in shaping diverse memories of Fascism.

This article focuses on the Italian transition from the Fascist regime, which lasted from 1922 (although officially evolving into a dictatorship in 1925) to 1943, to the democratic Republic, which was proclaimed in 1946 and established in 1948. It will analyse how Italy has been dealing with Fascist and Nazi crimes, and in particular with its own national responsibilities related to those crimes. In the vast, heterogeneous and controversial spectrum of the Italian transition, the article will highlight the role of the Italian judiciary in the trials against the Fascist criminals, the outcomes of the criminal prosecution of Fascist crimes and the effects on the creation of a collective memory of those events.

U. Engel, M. Middell and S. Troebst (Eds.) Erinnerungskulturen in transnationaler Perspektive., 2012

In U. Engel, M. Middell and S. Troebst (2012). Erinnerungskulturen in transnationaler Perspektive. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag

Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2008

This article uses the memorial to the 1944 Fosse Ardeatine massacre in Rome as a case study that demonstrates how the symbolic function of memorials can alter over time. Focusing on the changing meanings of the monument in a post-Cold War context, it examines how, during the 1990s, the memorial was transformed from a central, national symbol of the Italian anti-fascist Resistance to one which evoked the Holocaust. It argues that this shift in meaning recast the monument – and the massacre itself – as a site and an event at the margins of national history and memory.

Italian Culture 42:2, 2024

This article introduces the concept of “multidimensional forgetting” and the theoretical framework of the special issue "Italian Amnesias: Multidimensional Forgetting in Contemporary Italy". Building on recent developments in memory studies, postcolonial studies, Black Mediterranean geographies, political theory, narrative hermeneutics, and Italian literary and cultural studies, the introduction argues that to understand Italy’s relationship with its past, we need to consider multiple forms of forgetting and weave together the concepts of cultural memory and political responsibility. Italy’s difficulties in coming to terms with its past are the result of enduring cultural narratives that have shaped a self-absolving doxa about Italy’s past wrongdoings and ongoing structural violence. To challenge the cultural stereotypes, national myths, and narrative habits that feed the disavowal of Italy’s implication in histories and present scenes of violence, we need to consider the multiple causes, means, and effects of Italy’s distorted self-image. This introduction invites us to do so by addressing Italy’s politics of memory in a cross-referencing, expansive, and intersectional fashion and by introducing the ten articles included in the special issue. The goal of these contributions is to map the construction of social forgetting in Italy’s cultural and public debates, explore its consequences throughout the decades, and identify attempts to counter it through forms of critical interaction that foster transcultural solidarity and responsibility. We aim to intervene in Italy’s relationship with its past in order to problematize the present and the future of a country that is currently at the heart of the global far-right, white nationalism, and neo-fascist political resurgence, and that plays a crucialrole in the racially exclusionary politics of Fortress Europe.