The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2001

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Fascist Italy was the model and origin for Hitler's totalitarian racial state and adopted many of the latter's racist laws from 1938, although historians disagree as to how far Fascist totalitarianism was or was not inherently racist from the outset. Fascist Italy was also Nazi Germany's prime European ally as the genocide of European Jews was undertaken and was responsible for administering anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic policy in occupied regions; although Italian officials - up to and including Mussolini himself - did much to frustrate the progress of deportations in the early period of the war. After 1943, this already complex status - as part collaborator, part saboteur - was made notably more so as Mussolini fell, Italy withdrew from the Axis and found itself split in two, occupied in the centre and North by Germany (with the help of a restored Mussolini), with a civil war or partisan Resistance war raging. Germany now started deporting thousands of Italian Jews and other Jews who had taken refuge in Italy (mainly to Auschwitz); and also tens of thousands of Resistance fighters (mainly to concentration camps in and around Mauthausen); and hundreds of thousands of Italian conscripts (to various internment camps). Now Italians were victims of the whole gamut of Nazi violence, although the rump Fascist state in the North was also active perpetrator of deportations and massacres and the racial bureaucracy of the former Fascist state was still in place.This tangled history left Italy with an immense baggage of unresolved questions about itself, its historical responsibilities and its future after the war. Initially, in Italy as elsewhere, what was later termed the Holocaust did not separate itself out as a discrete event within the mire of the war's and the Fascist regime's history and legacy; but once that distillation process did begin, the Holocaust too would pose deep and troubling questions to the polity and collective identity of Italy and Italians, with layer upon layer of complexity and daunting challenge. The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2001 aims to trace the progress of that slow, but dense and profoundly illuminating postwar encounter with the Holocaust in Italy by examining it through the lens of culture. It looks at a wide range of cultural artefacts, events and practices, at works of testimony and fiction, at cinema, art and architecture, at monuments, memorials and commemorative events, at songs, television features and documentaries, historiography, publishing history, public debate and journalism. In part, this is to underscore the sheer range and surprising wealth of the corpus of important Holocaust representations to have emerged from Italy, including work by Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Natalia Ginzburg, and films such as The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (De Sica, 1970), Seven Beauties (Wertmüller, 1974), and Life is Beautiful (Benigni, 1997). But more than this, the material is presented as deeply embedded in the local context, with inflections or coordinates that are distinct to Italian history and to the culture of both the Fascist and the postwar eras. Thus, talk of the Holocaust in Italy is shown to mask and modulate key questions about, to name a few: Fascism, the anti-Fascist Resistance and its legacies, national character, Cold War politics, the role of the Church, European identity, immigration and multiculturalism. The Holocaust, then, emerges as a matrix for understanding Italy's image of itself; and, conversely, the Italian case reshapes in illuminating ways many of the central challenges to history and representation posed by the general phenomenon of the Holocaust.The book that will result from this project aims to make a major contribution to large and important fields of historiography and cultural history on the Holocaust, on modern Italian history and cultureand on questions of cultural and collective memory more generally.