Italian Resistance to Fascism & its interpretation

A few slides put together surrounding Mussolini, the main parts of his rule, and public imaginaries on the man. “Mussolini was further to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals.” - George Bernard Shaw quoted in Socialism and Superior Brains.

The ideal of the unity of the Resistance is one of the most impervious myths of recent Italian history. Both historians and former partisans have propounded this ideal of unity, but the weight of historical evidence does not justify such a view. While operational unity certainly existed among the Resistance forces, this should not disguise the evident fractures and divisions within the Resistance movement as a whole. Through an examination of the Piedmontese Resistance, it becomes evident that ideological differences, pragmatic political issues and even the competing esprit de corps of the individual partisan brigades created suspicion, tension and hostility among Resistance forces at the local, regional and even national level.

Guglielmo Alberti – a Piedmontese antifascist intellectual of European importance, a friend among
others of Gobetti, Gide, Curtius, Debenedetti, Pavese, Berenson, Cecchi, a literary critic and translator
– and Gianfranco Contini met in Friburgo (Switzerland) in the Autumn 1943. Alberti had got in
Friburgo, where Contini was a Professor of Romance philology, as a refugee after the Nazi invasion
of Northern Italy. Their friendship is testified by an exchange of letters lasting from 1944 to 1959 and
counting 75 items. The article examines the first year of this correspondence, from April 3, 1944 to
April 25, 1945, documenting their shared anxieties about the civil war in Italy, their common work on
Italian literature and their active engagement in antitotalitarian politics. The two main common efforts
carried out by Alberti and Contini were the publication of an issue (edited by Contini in 1944) of
the periodical « Lettres » dedicated to Italian literature, and (from February to June 1945) of « Cultura
e Azione », a weekly literary supplement to the daily « Il Dovere », printed in Bellinzona. The fateful
day of 25 April 1945 will bring both the Liberation of Italy from Nazi-fascism and the announcement
of Alberti’s wedding, at which Contini will act as best man.

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.

Between the 1960s and the 1970s, anti-Fascism reached its peak of popularity and social consensus. However, such a consensus was not unanimous, as there were two main anti-fascist narratives, which had two different political goals. On the one hand, the official celebrations and the Constitutional political parties described the Resistance as a patriotic struggle; on the other hand, the far left young militants supported the so-called «existential» anti-Fascism (i.e. anti-Fascism as a moral and life choice). These two narratives dueled even very harshly; however, in 1973 a documentary tried to melt and at the same time to go beyond them. Not only it successfully realized a more objective description of the Resistance, but also it is probably the most explicit example of a period during which, despite many problems, the anti-Fascism reached the largest popular support in Italian society

Il presente articolo intende studiare le fasi che portarono ad una rinascita della scultura italiana dopo il primo conflitto mondiale. Lo studio inizierà con una breve analisi della produzione scultorea di regime al fine di chiarire le condizioni in cui operarono gli artisti durante il Ventennio e negli anni della guerra. L'indagine si soffermerà, in seguito, sulla campagna di distruzione delle opere plastiche e monumentali fasciste da parte delle forze partigiane; l'obiettivo di questa sezione della ricerca sarà di dimostrare come la scultura italiana subì pesantemente le conseguenze degli eventi bellici prima di poter rielaborare un linguaggio nuovo e originale. La parte centrale del saggio studierà la scultura del Dopoguerra, approfondendo alcuni casi esemplari; l'analisi permetterà di comprovare come gli scultori attivi all'indomani della Liberazione riuscirono a concilire la propria sensibilità creativa con i mutamenti storici sopraggiunti, dando vita ad un rinascita artistica, evidente, in particolare, nei monumenti alla Resistenza.

Draft of the biography of Luigi Ferrari (1878-1949), librarian and director of the Marciana Library under the fascism,
published in
Dizionario biografico dei soprintendenti bibliografici (1919-1972), Bologna, Bononia University Press, 2011, pp. 277-297 [ISBN 978-88-7395-659-4]

Nel libro l'allora sottufficiale Fortini, esule in Svizzera, narra gli eventi bellici di cui è stato testimone nell'estate del 1943. Con non poche modifiche, il testo de "La guerra a Milano" venne pubblicato vent'anni dopo, assieme al racconto "Sere in Valdossola" in un volume che testimoniava la partecipazione dello scrittore alla Resistenza. Grazie alla scoperta del dattiloscritto originale presso la Zentralbibliothek di Zurigo, quest'edizione critica offre per la prima volta il testo nella sua veste originaria e pubblica in appendice i frammenti manoscritti conservati presso l'Archivio Franco Fortini di Siena.

Biography of the librarian Pietro Zorzanello, director of the Marciana Library, by Stefano Trovato, published in "Dizionario biografico dei soprintendenti bibliografici (1919-1972)", Bologna, Bononia University Press, 2011, pp. 622-627 [ISBN 978-88-7395-659-4]

Draft of a paper about the Biblioteca Marciana and his director Luigi Ferrari during the Second World War, published in "Le biblioteche e gli archivi durante la seconda guerra mondiale. Il caso italiano", a cura di A. Capaccioni, A. Paoli e R. Ranieri, Bologna, Pendragon, 2007, pp. 509-533. About Luigi Ferrari and the Biblioteca Marciana there are other later studies by Stefano Trovato:
"Luigi Ferrari", in "Dizionario biografico dei soprintendenti bibliografici (1919-1972)", Bologna, Bononia University Press, 2011, pp. 277-297;
Un bibliotecario sotto inchiesta per antifascismo a Venezia al tempo della guerra d’Etiopia, in Nemla Italian Studies 35 (2013), pp. 51-71;
1938, Biblioteca Marciana: il direttore e il «personale di razza ebraica», in “Studi Veneziani”, vol. n. s. 70 (2014), pp. 487-497.

In this article, I present the Italian war documentary Giorni di gloria (collectively directed in 1945 by Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Marcello Pagliero and Mario Serandrei) as a detailed meditation on the trajectory of violent reversals that defined the relationship between Italian fascists and antifascists before and after the liberation. By presenting such serially occurring acts of reciprocal retaliation as collectively witnessed events, the film ultimately treats the recourse to political violence as unavoidable nation-building tool, the necessary stage in the process of the nation’s self-determination and identity formation. The film’s emphasis is on the hagiographic presentation of the partisan movement’s capacity to simultaneously endure martyrdom and retaliate against the enemy with comparable ferocity. With great attention to dramaturgy and collective spectatorial impact, the film basks into the shock value, graphicness, and incendiary potentials of a material whose arrangement has largely to do with making a certain vision of death a source of arousal. Yet, the film does not attempt to merely narrate, glorify, or justify the recourse to political violence and the excesses of postwar vindictiveness, nor does it artfully lie about the degree of active popular participation. Rather, the rhetorical tropes of film serve the filmmakers to valorize in epic-mythical terms the choice of those who did fight, manufacturing post facto a visceral bond, both human and ideological, between the few who fought and the many who simply witnessed the combat, so as to ultimately elevate the prise de conscience of the former camp as unquestionably representative of a whole nation’s political aspirations.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

"""""During Mussolini’s fascist regime, the Atlante internazionale del Touring Club Italiano – produced in Milan (1927-1938) and widely recognised far beyond the borders of Italy – included among its plates two maps of European ethnic groups. The makers of the TCI’s atlas passed on to us a specific approach to determine the kind of collective that ought to be considered an ethnic group.
The enigmatic second reprint of the fifth edition (1938) was inexplicably not accompanied by the symbolic features required by the fascist authorities, but, after World War II started, the new version of the “Europa etnografica” map – on a 1:12.000.000 scale – clearly showed the changes that occurred in the political context.
Link:
http://www.j-reading.org/index.php/geography/article/view/57/50"""""

L’ULTIMA LETTERA DI GIAIME PINTOR, SCRITTA AL FRATELLO LUIGI PRIMA DELLA MISSIONE IN CUI RESTERÀ UCCISO. UN PARTIGIANO ELEGANTE NELLA GUERRA ANTROPOLOGICA: ESISTENZE AD ALZO ZERO. «FISCHIA IL VENTO AL CALASCIONE»: LONGANESI E IL SENATORE. MERCUTIO VS. AMLETO: LA GIOVENTÙ DISPONIBILE

The present paper aims to analyze the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the Liberation. My goal is to show how the aforementioned celebrations did actually dismiss a topic that was central for the Italian identity since the very beginning of the Italian Republic. I am going to investigate this issue by both drawing a historical comparison between the 2015 celebrations and the public use of fascism-antifascism topic since mid-1970s, and conducting a content and rhetorical analysis of the public discourse during 2015 commemorations.
Since the mid-Seventies the antifascism paradigm, which was the established framework since 1960, was subjected to strong polemical attacks in the political and media debates. The dictatorial past and the civil war played a major role in public and political discourse: antifascist and anti-antifascist narratives clashed over the historical value of fascism and its duce, as well as over the Resistance and its actual value for the republican democracy. The debate grew so much in size and force that during the 60th anniversary, the antifascism paradigm substantially ceased to be the historical identity paradigm in the collective memory of the Country. In 2015, this topic disappeared almost completely, and it was replaced by celebrations built on weak historical identities, which have almost no explicit ideological content.
During the commemorations under investigation, public discoursed paid little or almost no attention to the past. The opposing concepts of fascism and antifascism were largely replaced with highly reconciled, weakly ideological reconstructions with almost no historical contents. Notwithstanding several commemoration events were organized and broadcasted through every means of communication, the issue of the actual relevance of antifascism identity was simply neglected (as most politicians did). Instead, the rhetorical instruments used in these events built up narratives in which there is no room for the past. In such a context, the ‘civil religion’ of the Resistance was replaced by celebrations characterized by vague values, such as ‘courage’ (as in the twitter campaign launched by the Government itself) or ‘liberty,’ without any bonds with the historical national roots, which were simply not mentioned (such as in the TV-show Viva il 25 aprile!).

Public space is the locus where citizens can receive, perceive, compare and reciprocally influence each other’s political views. After the fall of the Fascist regime Rome’s streets and piazze became arenas of conflict between fascists and anti-fascists, Germans and Americans, Italians and other Italians. In both the fascist and the post-war democratic era, uneven distributions of power in the built environment were expressed with words on buildings as a form of mass media. This public use of history became a tool for the manipulation of memory and identity that brought about social and political conflict by excluding dissenting voices and effectively disallowing expressions of lived experience. Persistent and structured antagonism between fascist and anti-fascist groups continues to resurface in sport rivalry and the unofficial political discourse of overlaid graffiti. Sites of partisan actions against Germans like Via Rasella and the reprisal killings at the Fosse Ardeatine find their contemporary counterparts during the Bullet Years of the 1970s in the streets of the Quartiere Africano and live on to day in both official and unofficial memory.

Il partito politico italiano Lega Nord si caratterizza per due tendenze fondamentali: il desiderio di potere reale e la fabbricazione di miti. La base emozionale dei suoi dirigenti si può collocare nella cornice di quello che W. Reich ha individuato come carattere fascista. Tuttavia, la società dello spettacolo, diluisce i tratti aggressivi e violenti di questo partito, in una prassi politica di occupazione delle istituzioni, che contribuisce da protagonista, alla ripresa di un più generale autoritarismo statale e economico.

El partido político italiano Lega Nord se caracteriza por dos tendencias fundamentales: el deseo de poder real y la elaboración de los mitos. La base emocional de sus líderes se puede colocar en el marco de lo que W. Reich identificó como carácter fascista. Sin embargo, la sociedad del espectáculo, diluye los rasgos agresivos y violentos de este partido, en una política de ocupación de las instituciones, en lo que contribuye como protagonista, a la reanudación de un más general autoritarismo estatal y económico.

The Italian Resistance of 1943-45 set Italian anti-fascists against the German army and its Italian
Fascist allies. By Spring 1945, the forces of the Italian Resistance had gained victory and had liberated much
of northern Italy before the arrival of Allied troops. Although men and women had both participated in this
liberation, the historiographical emphasis has been on the role of male combatants, thus relegating the role of
women to the margins of history. This paper will analyse one such group of women active in the
Piedmontese Resistance. Using oral testimony and archival material, the paper will assess their motivations
in joining the Resistance, their role as combatants, their aspirations for a new Italy and their role in the
liberation of Piedmont in 1945. Furthermore, the paper will attempt to establish if any factors set these
women apart from the majority of male anti-fascists. To what degree can they—and women like them—be
seen as the 'other' within the Resistance?

La violenza, materiale e psichica, di cui la Grande Guerra era stata levatrice attraversò la società europea dei due decenni successivi, fomentando dittature e resistenze, fino allo scoppio della seconda guerra mondiale. In Italia, le istanze di scontro e violento riordinamento politico-sociale rispondevano tanto alla natura del fascismo, quanto dei suoi oppositori. Il tessuto sociale si permeava così di una dialettica assai articolata che coinvolgeva anche soggetti indifferenti all’ideologia del regime, tacitamente consenzienti o contrari. Oltre che da azioni politiche e di propaganda esplicita, quella dialettica fu veicolata da fattori culturali e artistici – fra cui talune tendenze musicali. Dalle avanguardie colte, alle varie declinazioni dell’Opera, dalla musica funzionale per marce e celebrazioni, al nuovo fenomeno del jazz e della musica da ballo: certe violenze foniche e modi di scrittura, fra trasgressioni e ritorni all’ordine, stabilivano analogie e metafore di vario tipo con la realtà della vita quotidiana, o con quella restituita dai testi letterari, oppure esigevano movimenti del corpo di inaudita energia. Al pari di altre arti, la musica si fece specchio e fattore di una fase storica controversa non solo in quanto conflittuale, ma anche nel generale rapporto con la modernità. Le contraddizioni poterono scaturire da superficiali ragioni di opportunismo, come da impegnative dialettiche morali e filosofiche.

In 2001, renowned Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola released his film Concorrenza sleale. Upon its release, Scola stated repeatedly that his historical film about the anti-Jewish legislation of 1938 aspired to go beyond the historical setting in order to convey acritique of intolerance in contemporary Italian society. Moving from an analysis ofthe film's evolution from script to post-production, this article offers a textual and contextual analysis of Concorrenza sleale, investigating its relationship both to the period the film seeks to represent and to the time of its production. Questioning both the allegorical ambitions of the film and the political implications of historicizing the issue of racism in Italy, this article argues that Scola's film is ultimately unable to abandon the italiani brava gente template, thus leaving its ambitious questions about Italian attitudes towards the other not only unanswered, but also unasked.

Dall’archivio storico della Sezione di Modena dell’Associazione Nazionale fra Mutilati ed Invalidi di Guerra (ANMIG), da poco riordinato, sono emersi documenti assai rilevanti non solo per la storia di Modena, ma anche per vari aspetti del Novecento italiano. Da questi documenti nasce una narrazione capace di includere fatti ed idee della storia del combattentismo successivo
alla prima e alla seconda guerra mondiale, del declino dell’Italia liberale e delle compromissioni delle sue élites con il fascismo, della fagocitazione del combattentismo da parte del fascismo, nonché dell’ANMIG, che fu la prima associazione fondata dai combattenti nel 1917 e che è ancora oggi la più dimenticata dalla storiografia. Modena, quindi, diviene il caso locale su cui ricadono le politiche nazionali del governo, delle associazioni combattentistiche, dei partiti e dei movimenti politici. Ne emerge una storia in cui il combattentismo si é fatto portatore, attraverso la voce di intellettuali e politici che gravitavano nel suo alveo, di messaggi assai differenti nel corso del secolo, compresi i valori antifascisti oggi abbracciati e difesi da tutte le associazioni combattentiste. Il volume rappresenta un primo contributo per successivi approfondimenti dei tanti aspetti qui solamente accennati.

Until the 1990s the vast majority of Italian scholars, social scientists, and ordinary Italian citizens was convinced that the roots of their democratic, pluralist institutions lay in the Resistance and the anti-Fascist tradition. By the 1990s, however, revisionist historians began to question the importance of anti-Fascism as the foundation of Italian democracy. These historians argued that the anti-Fascist Resistance was better termed a 'civil war,' following which the anti-Fascists, led by the Communists, had destroyed Italian national identity by disseminating an anti-history of falsity and myth, thus preventing Italy's spiritual reconstruction. This theory would be instrumentalised during the 1990s. As the political mood in Italy shifted distinctly to the centre-right, new political forces found it useful to incorporate a vision of the past which rejected anti-Fascism as the moral guardian of national rebirth. The political and historical landscape of Italy was thus changed forever.

Among the most iconic images in world cinema, the final shot of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945) has inspired an effusion of critical commentary but little critical consensus, instead giving rise to opposing interpretations. I argue that the shot, in which the camera pans to follow a band of children as they march on a hillside overlooking the city of Rome, was shaped by a post-war dispute over the fate of Italian children after Fascism. Re-educating and re-claiming these children was felt to be one of the most pressing tasks facing Italy after the war, and I argue that it was this task that Rossellini and his collaborators sought to represent and even to undertake in their film. Thanks to their efforts, the final shot of Rome, Open City facilitated both a compelling confrontation with Italy’s Fascist past and a convincing – if far from straightforward – vision of its post-war future.

This is the story of Luigi Pistoni, a Christian partisan in Italian Resistance against Fascists.

References:
- http://www.anpi.it/donne-e-uomini/2147/luigi-pistoni
- Getto, G., Gino Pistoni. Ritratto di un caduto per la libertà, Roma, Editrice A.V.E., 1945.

Alcune centinaia di soldati azerbaigiani dell’Armata rossa furono fatti prigionieri dai nazisti durante l’invasione dell’Unione Sovietica, deportati in Italia e costretti ai lavori forzati o arruolati in truppe ausiliarie dai tedeschi. Evadendo dalle carceri, fuggendo dai campi di lavoro o disertando dai reparti filonazisti, costoro si unirono ai patrioti italiani nella lotta per la libertà del nostro Paese. Questo volume racconta, attraverso testimonianze dei contemporanei e documenti (molti dei quali inediti e provenienti dagli archivi di Baku, Mosca, Bologna, Trieste, Pistoia, Piacenza, Milano, Bergamo e Roma), grazie anche alla collaborazione dell’editore, le eroiche gesta dei partigiani azerbaigiani. Una pagina ancora del tutto sconosciuta della Resistenza italiana, che traccia una linea di collegamento inaspettata tra il nostro Paese e la poco conosciuta Repubblica caucasica dell’Azerbaigian, una nazione oggi emergente e in forte sviluppo.

Nell’Archivio Centrale  dello Stato a Roma è conservato  un 
fascicolo  riguardante  un’inchiesta  del  Ministero  dell’Interno  su Luigi  Ferrari  (1878­-1949),  direttore  della Biblioteca  Marciana  dal  1920  al  1948,  denunciato  in  una  lettera indirizzata  a  Mussolini  nel  1935,  nei  primi  giorni  della  guerra d’Etiopia,  come  antifascista  e  disfattista. Questi  documenti  sono molto interessanti perché permettono di verificare, per questo caso concreto, la fondatezza degli studi di Guido Melis e Alberto Petrucciani, secondo i quali il regime, almeno nei primi tre lustri, non si preoccupò di fascistizzare, epurandole dai funzionari sospetti, le biblioteche statali, e anzi lasciò margini di autonomia alla Direzione Generale delle Accademie e Biblioteche, dalle quali esse dipendevano.  L'articolo è stato pubblicato in Nemla Italian Studies 35 (2013). Special Issue: New Perspectives on Veneto Literary and Cultural Itineraries. Editors: Simona Wright [e] Giovanni Spani, pp. 51-71 [ISSN 10876715], consultabile in linea presso
http://nemla.org/publications/nis/archives/2013/NIS2013_Trovato.pdf