Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945

The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory

G. Lichtner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137316622
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

From neorealism's resolve to Berlusconian revisionist melodramas, this book examines cinema's role in constructing memories of Fascist Italy. Italian cinema has both reflected and shaped popular perceptions of Fascism, reinforcing or challenging stereotypes, remembering selectively and silently forgetting the most shameful pages of Italy's history.

Part I

Revisionism

1

Remembering the Long Second World War in Europe

If any further proof were needed, European memories of World War Two since 1945 prove that remembrance, in both its private and public forms, constitutes a powerful historical force in its own right, able to shape opinions, actions and events. Almost without exception, the memory of that terrible conflict has haunted the continent. Far from being the inert prerogative of witnesses and survivors, it has formed bonds and assumed new, shared identities; often sanitised, it has served governments well, and yet at times it has mastered them, rediscovering itself raw and untreated. Taking on unexpected meanings, it has adapted to new generations of Europeans who had no memory of the war itself, or had only a second- or third-hand one. In its infinite incarnations, throughout its long lulls and sudden bursts onto European political and cultural agendas, remembrance has engendered countless narratives of the past that have shown remarkable ability in adjusting to local contexts, from the polished national narratives of textbooks and monuments to half-forgotten stories around oxidised bronze plaques in village squares.

The fact that the inevitable departure of witnesses of the war does not abate political debates on the meaning, legacy and morality of the conflict and its belligerents demonstrates two elements that it is important to bear in mind on the approach path to this slippery subject. In the first instance, it shows that the memory of traumatic historical events can become an integral part of the moral and political identity of a nation – or of groups within a nation – and that, when that happens, it develops an inter-generational significance, a life of its own, severed from the original events. In the second instance, it lays bare that memory is not primarily about the historical analysis of the past, but rather about the political interpretation of the present. These are the lessons that Pierre Nora, Jay Winter, Peter Novick and many other scholars, working on many case studies and through many different kinds of sources, have taught us since the late 1980s. In establishing the study of memory as a legitimate branch of the historical discipline, their work has led to a boom in memory studies, which has in turn overcome an early tendency to see history and memory as distinct and separate. They are not; they are linked inextricably by the media through which each is constructed and the political lenses through which each is interpreted.

Even as I write, a passing glance at English-language news in the first months of 2011 reveals not only this bond between history and memory, but also Europe’s ongoing sensitivity with regard to World War Two. In Germany, online retail giants Amazon.com and iTunes removed songs banned by the German government, such as the marching anthem of the Waffen-SS, Horst Wessel Lied, but not before being exposed by Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung on the week of Holocaust Memorial Day 2011.¹ Meanwhile, German politicians and civil society continue to debate the wisdom of Erika Steinbach’s crusade to institute a day of remembrance for Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after 1945, with the country torn between the desire to accord pity to affected individuals and the need to contextualise their historical presence in the East so as not to turn empathy into glorification.²

In Austria, much controversy has been caused by the failed extradition to Croatia of 95-year-old alleged war criminal Milivoj Asner,³ in 2008, and more recently by a provincial bakery specialising in Nazi-themed commemorative cakes.⁴ In Riga, on 16 March 2011, Latvian veterans of the Waffen-SS defied a government ban to carry out their annual march, flanked by supporters and detractors exchanging slogans of ‘Stalin kaput’ and ‘Hitler kaput’.⁵ Far from being a case of farcical playground politics, however, this was a thorny political issue, not only because of the large Russian ethnic minority present in Latvia, but because it revolves around a central question in the debates on national identity of most post-Soviet Republics: were Latvians who fought for the Germans anti-Communist patriots or Nazi collaborators and crude anti-Semites? Nor is history the only matter at stake here, because membership of the European Union requires a shared set of moral and political values, including the commitment to defend memory against neofascist and nationalist revisionism.

Elsewhere, issues of remembrance and interpretation of World War Two are more subtle but no less fractious. In Italy, the organisers of the annual Festival of Italian Song, known as Sanremo from the Ligurian town which hosts it, announced that the 2011 edition would pay homage to the sesquicentennial of Italian unification by having the contestants sing the history of Italy through popular song. The lineup was to include the Fascist anthem Giovinezza and the best-known tune of the anti-Fascist Resistance, Bella Ciao. Started in 1951, Sanremo is one of those shows that longevity and popularity have turned into a national institution, at the same time loathed and hallowed. The competition is also a bellwether event, which often can provide the popular cultural pulse of the nation.⁶ And, like all of Italian public television RAI’s doings, Sanremo is intensely, and carefully, political. Perhaps as intended, the suggestion of awarding equal visibility to Fascism and anti-Fascism did cause widespread outrage, which eventually persuaded the show’s organisers to pull both songs and seek refuge in the most political of apolitical apathies.⁷ The hypocritical equidistance of a popular music show is but a symptom of ongoing debates over Fascism, anti-Fascism and the narratives that have dominated their post-1945 commemoration. In January 2011, Fiat workers outside Turin’s Mirafiori plant joined in a rendition of Bella Ciao in protest against the company’s restructuring plans: not for the first time in industrial disputes, the workers sought to claim the legacy of the anti-Fascist Resistance and simultaneously position their counterparts in the opposing ideological camp.

World War Two is everywhere in Europe, not only as commemoration but also as moral example, as genesis narrative for national and political identities, as benchmark for current affairs, as historical and political outpost to scale or defend: from the French trials of collaborators René Bousquet, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon in the 1990s to the scandal surrounding European neofascist leaders in France, Austria and elsewhere; from the Dunkirk spirit regularly invoked in Britain to the ever-present ghosts of the Holocaust and of nationalism, most recently apparent in the Balkans; from the popularity of the History Channel’s seemingly endless World War Two spin-offs to revisionist historiography and the re-emergence of defeated narratives. Even the deservedly much-praised Academy Award winner The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010) managed to attract at least some criticism over its decision to skim over Edward VIII’s Nazi sympathies and George VI’s alleged anti-Semitism,⁸ though the real issue there should have been the recasting of the stuttering Prince’s relationship with Churchill,⁹ whose sainted postwar persona is itself a reminder of World War Two’s pervasiveness.

In keeping with the traumatic nature of World War Two, re-emergence of its memory in popular discourse coincides with the moments of most significant upheaval in post-1945 European history: 1968 and 1989. These seismic shifts allowed new plates to emerge and revealed new complexities in the territory of memory. Interestingly, each of these events contained a significant generational conflict, a moral repositioning of the young in relation to the old, whose choices were intimately challenged. But, if 1968 threw open some of the hypocrisies of accepted memory, especially in the West, by posing the dreaded question ‘what did you do in the war?’, it was the end of the Cold War that overthrew the 44-year-old status quo in which European memories had developed.

In Eastern Europe, that revolution signalled the end of a totalitarian narrative that had hidden the ambivalent relationship of many countries with the German and Soviet invasions. In the Ukraine, for example, Omer Bartov has shown how the fall of the Communist regimes has brought about a re-evaluation of the nationalist right that stretches back to its fierce collaboration with Nazism.¹⁰ In Western Europe, the end of the Cold War coincided with the second unification of Germany, a development that alone would reawaken continental memories of the Reich and, simultaneously, offer the country a chance to work on a joint historical memory of its National Socialist years. The first sight of German neo-Nazis, for example, or images of German troops in the Balkans during NATO’s mission there in the 1990s might send shivers down many old spines and yet also confirm that Germany had developed the antibodies to assimilate and repel nationalist threats. Elsewhere in Western Europe, the demise of European Communism shook dominant discourses on World War Two that had been substantially shared between the conservative and Marxist-inspired anti-Fascist forces. Until 1989, the anti-Fascist consensus had been so dominant that it precluded almost all unorthodox memories, except perhaps in the privacy of homes, the silence of cemeteries, or the shabby nostalgia of local party branches. Alternative memories existed, of course, and occasionally emerged, as they did in France through Louis Darquier de Pellepoix’s 1978 interview¹¹ or in Austria through the Waldheim controversy. In the 1970s in particular there was much debate in West Germany, France and Italy over the history of the war and the management of its legacy. Nevertheless, the legitimacy and morality of such counter-narratives were not items on the political agenda, as these memories remained essentially ghettoised by dominant anti-Fascist discourses of martyrdom and Resistance.

Since the late 1940s, the Soviet–American duopoly had dominated the development of European memories of the war, crystallising positions and encouraging the West to dilute processes of scrutiny, renewal and retribution for the recent past, even where they had barely begun. Instead, in countries such as France and Italy, these much-needed investigations were replaced with the twin narratives of unwilling collaboration and widespread resistance: the former stipulated that Philippe Pétain’s and Benito Mussolini’s pro-German regimes were little more than unpopular criminal groups supported only by a few ‘bad apples’; the latter established the two countries’ anti-Fascist guerrilla, in fact marginal numerically and militarily, as a ‘civic religion’ that restored pride and dignity to tarnished societies.¹² Even in West Germany, the Adenauer governments constructed an institutional memory centred on the victimisation of the German people at the hands of Hitler and his henchmen.¹³ Meanwhile, in the East, the Communist dictatorships faced the same task, rendered somewhat simpler, however, by the pretence of a clean break with the past: it was easy to suggest that the Nazis, like the capitalists, remained little changed across the border.

As events chased each other at a great pace, the geo-political restructuring of Europe occupied the corridors of power, while the necessary physical and psychological reconstruction of belligerent nations took precedence over making sense of a past which was rapidly being confined to history, and memory. Nevertheless, the two were inextricably linked, as national identities were rebuilt around a rupture with the immediate past in countries East and West of the Iron Curtain, perhaps with the exception of Great Britain and the partial exception of France. Supranational and domestic considerations determined form and content of national and group memories: the collapse of the Allies’ united front or the response to the attempted genocide of the Jews informed memory in all European countries, while national prerogatives – such as the separation of Germany, the anomalous strength of the Communist party in Italy or the necessity to legitimise Gaullist wartime leadership in France – deeply affected each country’s synthesis of the past.

In some nations the process attracted little dispute and thus took on less traumatic meanings. Although postwar memories in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands are being revealed as more complex than had previously been thought,¹⁴ they were nevertheless not as divisive as in many other parts of Europe. These were nations that had been invaded and occupied by Germany and that had, in their subjugation, held for the most part a coherently anti-Nazi position. Faced with defeat, the governments of Belgium, Holland and Norway, alongside many others, removed themselves to Britain, into an exile from which to sustain their war effort and their national pride. Reinstated after the liberation, they ensured institutional and cultural continuity and were able convincingly to dismiss wartime collaborationists in their countries as an extremist and unrepresentative fringe.

This was not the case everywhere, however. In France, defeated in June 1940, Paul Reynaud’s government turned down the chance to fight on, either from the colonies or from London, opening the door for Philippe Pétain’s Vichy regime and gifting it constitutional legitimacy. Interviewed in 1969 by Marcel Ophuls, even the British wartime Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, albeit hesitant to judge a former ally, could not conjure a way to justify the French government’s failure to seek representation in exile. The task was performed more easily in France, however, where the memory of Vichy would develop into what Henri Rousso has called ‘the Vichy syndrome’.¹⁵ At first, however, Vichy was erased simply by investing General Charles de Gaulle with a backdated authority that made him not just the political representation but also the moral embodiment of France. De Gaulle’s France, centred around the twin concepts of the ‘thirty-years’ war’ and the ‘forty-million resistance fighters’,¹⁶ was as inclusive as it was inventive. It suited the French Communist Party, which could boast a leadership role in the Resistance, but it also served the conservative supporters of the Vichy government, such as Robert Aron,¹⁷ who could use the General’s narrative to argue that Vichy had deliberately acted as a shield against the worst of German occupation. De Gaulle’s mythology enjoyed some longevity, not least because it was sufficiently malleable to soothe a battered but proud national identity.

Other occupied countries were less fortunate in their postwar settlements and less successful in accommodating different points of view. The Polish government, for example, had repaired to London after Germany and the USSR carved up Poland in 1939; Polish pilots had fought in the Battle of Britain, but the circumstances of their country’s liberation would not allow their return. Post-1945 Polish memories of World War Two would thus be split between an official Communist narrative and a myriad of unofficial memories of martyrdom and survival, squeezed between twin military occupations. In this context, issues such as the Soviet mass execution of Polish officers at Katyń in 1940, collaboration with Nazism and Polish–Jewish relations were subordinated to a sanitised national memory, which is being challenged only lately, and only selectively.¹⁸

To different extents, all Eastern European countries shared this ambivalent relationship between liberation and renewed occupation, whether in 1939 they had already been part of the Soviet Union or not, like the Baltic republics. Until the 1990s, the aggressive and far-reaching Communist control of institutionalised remembrance repressed unorthodox memories of the conflict in these countries.¹⁹ However, experiences among the former Soviet republics varied significantly along political, ethnic, gender and generational lines: in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, first invaded by the Soviet Union in September 1939, Russian occupation dominates contemporary narratives of World War Two, though that is not at all the case for their significant Russian minorities²⁰; in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, however, governments have been busy asserting a distinct pre-Soviet identity, while Soviet nostalgia remains a powerful factor in the formation of a budding and still fragile national story.²¹

In occupied countries an unopposed narrative of victimisation was for the most part easy to develop and able to create a synthesis between different experiences of the war. Yet the successful postwar coexistence of different group memories did not always coincide with their actual reconciliation. In Czechoslovakia, Slovakia experienced between 1940 and 1945 an unprecedented irredentist fervour harnessed by the clerical Fascism of Jozef Tiso, with a resulting ambivalence towards the German dismantlement of Czechoslovakia, which Bohemians and Moravians did not share. The situation was even more complicated in Yugoslavia, the Serbian-dominated multi-ethnic kingdom invented at Versailles. Here World War Two spelt defeat and four years of occupation by two foreign forces, Italians and Germans, as well as a multi-layered civil war ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Revisionism
• Part II: Resistance
• Part III: Reconstruction
• Part IV: Revolution
• Part V: Recurrences
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index