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The never-ending liberation

2005; Routledge; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13545710500314082

1469-9583

David Ellwood,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Barberis is the author of, among other works, Il bisogno di patria (Barberis 2004 Barberis, Walter. 2004. Il bisogno di patria, Turin: Einaudi. [Google Scholar]). 2 Cf. Serneri (2004 Serneri, Simone Neri. 2004. ‘Resistenza e storia d'Italia. Una storiografia “civile”?’. Memoria e ricerca, May – August(16): 91–112. [Google Scholar]), which is the introduction to a round-table discussion, and see, in particular the contributions by Francesco Traniello, Gloria Chianese, Marco Palla and Paolo Pezzino to this discussion. 3 See Kuper (2005 Kuper, Simon. 2005. ‘Delivered from evil’. Financial Times, 22 – 23 January [Google Scholar]); cf. Lagrou (2000 Lagrou, Pieter. 2000. The Legacy of Nazi Occupation. Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe 1945 – 1965, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]). 4 Cf. Luzzatto (2004 Luzzatto, Sergio. 2004. La crisi dell'antifascismo, Torino: Einaudi. [Google Scholar]: 23, 30); also the ‘Introduction’ in the special number of Journal of Modern Italian Studies dedicated to ‘The hidden pages of contemporary Italian history: war crimes, war guilt, collective memory’ (Pavone 2004 Pavone, Claudio. 2004. ‘Introduction’. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 9(3): 279[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]: 279). 5 Cf. Focardi (2005 Focardi, Filippo. 2005. La guerra della memoria. La Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi, Bari: Laterza. [Google Scholar]). 6 The state of mind of the population in the various wartime phases is a key preoccupation of Renzo De Felice (1995 De Felice, Renzo. Rosso e nero , 3rd edn, Edited by: Pasquale, Chessa. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi. [Google Scholar]: 21 – 2); a large selection of wartime private correspondence is surveyed in Cavallo (1997 Cavallo, Pietro. 1997. Il tempo della prova, Bologna: Il Mulino. [Google Scholar]). 7 Discussion in Serneri (2004 Serneri, Simone Neri. 2004. ‘Resistenza e storia d'Italia. Una storiografia “civile”?’. Memoria e ricerca, May – August(16): 91–112. [Google Scholar]: n. 2, 110). 8 An important new contribution in this sense is Gribaudi (2005 Gribaudi, Gabriela. 2005. Guerra totale. Tra bombe alleate e violenze naziste. Napoli, il fronte meridionale, 1940 – 1944, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. [Google Scholar]). 9 The Day of Memory was chosen officially as the anniversary of the application of the Peace Treaty of 1947, which sanctioned the division of Istria. It is worth noting that it came little more than a week after the worldwide commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. 10 These realities are discussed in the special number of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, op. cit., n. 4; cf. Capogreco (2003 Capogreco, Carlo Spartaco. 2003. I campi del Duce, Turin: Einaudi. [Google Scholar]) and Di Sante (2005 Di Sante, Costantino, ed. Italiani senza onore, Rome: Ombre Corte. [Google Scholar]). 11 The most important historical discussion took place at the seminar organized by the Province of Turin, and the Istituto piemontese per la Storia della Resistenza e la Società contemporanea, Turin, 9 Feburary 2005 (details at http://www.provincia.torino.it/speciali/giorno_ricordo05/programma.htm). This featured Raul Pupo, the author of the most important recent study of the Istria events (Pupo 2004 Pupo, Raul. 2004. Il lungo esodo, Milan: Rizzoli. [Google Scholar]), and two other commentators, Guido Crainz and Gianni Oliva (see Crainz 2005 Crainz, Guido. 2005. Il dolore e l'esilio. L'Istria e le memorie divise d'Europa, Rome: Donzelli. [Google Scholar]; Oliva 2005 Oliva, Gianni. 2005. Profughi: dalle foibe all'esodo, Milan: Mondadori. [Google Scholar]); the diplomacy of the 1954 accords is recounted in Valdevit (1999 Valdevit, Giampaolo. 1999. Il dilemma Trieste: guerra e dopoguerra in uno scenario europeo, Gorizia: Libreria editrice goriziana. [Google Scholar]). 12 The partisan massacres have received widespread attention, culminating in the publication of the best-selling novel, La sangue dei vinti (Pansa 2004 Pansa, Giampaolo. 2004. La sangue dei vinti, Milan: Sperling and Kupfer. [Google Scholar]); for historical treatments of this theme, with detailed statistical analyses, see Battini and Pezzino (1997 Battini, M. and Pezzino, P. 1997. Guerra ai civili. Occupazione tedesca e politica del massacro, Toscana, 1944, Venezia: Marsilio. [Google Scholar]) and Dondi (2004 Dondi, Mirko. 2004. La lunga liberazione. Giustizia e violenza nel dopoguerra italiano, , 2nd edn, Rome: Editori Riuniti. [Google Scholar]). For the most authoritative new general history of the Resistance see Peli (2004 Peli, Santo. 2004. La Resistenza in Italia, Turin: Einaudi. [Google Scholar]). Guderzo (2002 Guderzo, Giulio. 2002. L'altra guerra. Neofascisti, tedeschi, partigiani, popolo in una provincia padana. Pavia 1943 – 1945, Bologna: Il Mulino. [Google Scholar]) offers the most substantial ‘traditional’ narrative of the Resistance effort in one particular locality, the fruit of many years of research and reflection. 13 Cf. Galli della Loggia (2003 Galli della Loggia, E. 2003. La morte della patria. La crisi dell'idea di nazione tra Resistenza, antifascismo e Repubblica, , 3rd edn, Bari: Laterza. [Google Scholar]: 21 – 44, 66 – 7, 98 – 122). 14 The Alleanza nazionale draft bill was introduced into Parliament on the Day of Memory for Istria. Its official pretext is a sentence of the national Military Tribunal of 1954, which appears to have recognized the military status of the RSI's armed force, while admitting that the RSI was not a legitimate government. On the political atmosphere of the time that favoured such a position, see Focardi (2005 Focardi, Filippo. 2005. La guerra della memoria. La Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi, Bari: Laterza. [Google Scholar]). At the same time as Alleanza nazionale introduced its draft bill, another one, proposed by the Left to fund the sixtieth anniversary of the Liberation, was due to be discussed. The subsequent confrontation is reported in La Stampa, 10 February 2005. 15 Had the Duce succeeded in his plans to raise four divisions of a new Italian army from prisoners of war in Germany, and deploy them against the Allies, these demands would surely have been more difficult to sustain. The Duce was also deeply disappointed by the lack of native resistance to the Anglo-American invaders, a reality whose full comparative significance begins to appear in the light of events in Iraq since 2003; cf. Ellwood (2003 Ellwood, D. W. 2003. “‘Occupazione alleata’”. In Dizionario del fascismo, Edited by: de Grazia, Victoria and Luzzatto, Sergio. Vol. 2, Torino: Einaudi. [Google Scholar]: 253). 16 On the history of the proposition that Italian armies were always more humane and less totalitarian than those of the Nazis, see Focardi and Klinkhammer (2004 Focardi, Filippo and Klinkhammer, Lutz. 2004. ‘The question of fascist Italy's war crimes: the construction of a self-acqutting myth (1943 – 1948)'. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 9(3): 330–348. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 17 Bocca in La Repubblica, 7 December 2003, 18 February 2005; Rusconi in La Stampa, 12 February 2005; Canfora in Corriere della Sera, 25 February 2005; Viroli in La Stampa, 12 February 2005. For formal protests over the pro-RSI law, go to www.anpi.it. This site of the Associazione nazionale partigiani d'Italia contains a petition signed by forty historians, led by Nicola Tranfaglia of Turin. 18 Cf. De Felice (1995 De Felice, Renzo. Rosso e nero , 3rd edn, Edited by: Pasquale, Chessa. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi. [Google Scholar]: 76 – 7); Sergio Romano in Corriere della Sera, 12 February 2005. 19 Rusconi (1993 Rusconi, Gian Enrico. 1993. Se cessiamo di essere una nazione: tra etnodemocrazie regionali e cittadinanza europea, Bologna: Il Mulino. [Google Scholar]); an important guide to the relationship between the crisis of anti-Fascism and the fate of Italian democracy is also supplied by Rusconi (1996 Rusconi, Gian Enrico. 1996. “‘La memoria della Resistenza in una nazione vinta’”. In Italia 1939 – 1945. Storia e memoria, Edited by: Carlotti, Anna Lisa. Milan: Vita e Pensiero. [Google Scholar]: 43 – 70). 20 Italy of course was not alone in showing this pattern of self-interrogation. A brief survey of comparable debates in the Baltic and East European States, and in Eastern Asia was offered by Shmemann (2005 Shmemann, Serge. 2005. ‘Still fighting, 60 years later’. International Herald Tribune, 2 March [Google Scholar]). 21 Luzzatto (2004 Luzzatto, Sergio. 2004. La crisi dell'antifascismo, Torino: Einaudi. [Google Scholar]: 92 – 3); this analysis highlights the parallels between Mussolini's precocious understanding of the role of mass media in building his plebiscite-like consensus, and Berlusconi's unique power position in Italian television and print media today.