The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010

Robert Gordon

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804782630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians—Jews and others—were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.

Part I

§1 The Shape of Italy’s Holocaust

This book is about the wide field of cultural responses to what we call the Holocaust or the Shoah, as it emerged in Italy over the long postwar era.¹ In recent years, a great deal of research has been devoted to Holocaust legacies, memories and cultures in key national arenas such as Germany, Israel, France and America, and an array of other countries and areas, including, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the nations of Eastern European and Russia.² But relatively little work of either analysis or synopsis has been produced on Italy.³ Although varying widely in discipline and methodology—from history, to literary or film studies, to sociology, political theory or cultural studies—this body of work dovetails sufficiently well to allow us to shape out a common, cross-border chronological template of phases in the cultural elaboration—what the Germans call ‘working through’ (Vergangenheitsbewältigung)—of knowledge about the Holocaust:

1. Mid-1940s: following the camp liberations of spring 1945 and the rapid spread of horrific newsreel and print imagery of the survivors and the dead,⁴ there is widespread revulsion at the Nazi crimes, elaborated further at the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–46. Early testimonies appear, but very few gain a wide readership.

2. Late 1940s to late 1950s: in a period of reconstruction and Cold War tension, there is a widespread indifference to, even silence surrounding, Nazi crimes against Jews and the camp system. An exception is the spreading international reputation during the 1950s—as book, Broadway play and Hollywood film—of Anne Frank’s diary.⁵ The establishment of the State of Israel is linked to the Holocaust (as will be the counternarrative of the Naqba, the displacement of Palestinian populations in the war of 1948).

3. 1960s: the Final Solution begins to emerge as a key historical phenomenon and as a distinct subject for memory and historical understanding. Most accounts point to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 as a crucial turning point, but also relevant are the generational politics of the 1960s, with the young challenging the settled narratives of the war and their parents’ complicity; and the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War, which brought the very survival of the Jews back into vivid play, before Israel’s dramatic victory.

4. 1970s–80s: awareness of the Holocaust emerges on a wide scale as a newly central feature in national histories and memory. France ‘rediscovers’ from the early 1970s, through books, films and trials, the extent of Vichy’s collaboration and complicity (e.g. Marcel Ophuls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié, 1971). In 1978–79, America, Germany and much of Europe learn the term ‘Holocaust’ through the hugely popular television miniseries of that name.⁶ France and Germany struggle with scandals of negationism (the Faurisson affair of 1979 in France) or revisionism (the Historikerstreit, the historians’ debate, in Germany in 1986–87).⁷

5. 1990s–2000s: mass awareness peaks in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, and translates into a pervasive Americanisation of the Holocaust, through the global success of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and the opening of the Washington Holocaust museum in 1993, among many others.⁸ Following the events of 11 September 2001, as well as accelerated globalisation and multiculturalism, there is a geopolitical shift away from the ‘postwar’ paradigm, towards a new phase of war and tensions between Muslims and the West: the Holocaust remains, however, a powerful shadow over the West and its newly uncertain role in the world.

With many local variations, this broad-brush ‘history of memory’ flows with remarkable consistency across different national contexts, perhaps especially in the ‘Western’ sphere (US, Western Europe, Israel). The story of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was tellingly different, since until the revolutions of 1989 the Soviet vulgate of the war as a heroic struggle of Communism against Fascism left little room for the racial aspects of Nazism. A very different account would also be needed for a history of responses to the Holocaust in the Arab world or beyond. Nevertheless, one of the striking features of the field of Holocaust memory seems to lie in its transnational, deterritorialised dynamics, frequently decoupled from local history.

This macrohistorical picture should not, however, preclude national particularities: on the contrary, as Arjun Appadurai has argued in relation to local-global intersections, the two levels are in constant symbiosis.⁹ At the local level, the microhistories of each nation which confronts the Holocaust interweave highly specific national discourses of culture and tradition, history and politics with this emerging transnational phenomenon. The particular mediators and operators within a cultural sphere have a crucial role to play in the timing and nature of local engagement with the Holocaust; and the particular inflections of a national setting determine how talk about it will, in turn, spread back into political and cultural spheres and into the collective cultural memory. Furthermore, elements of particular, national discourses can then emigrate in turn to become global Holocaust artefacts or events in their own right.

. . .

The relative neglect of Italy within this field is surprising, not least because it presents compelling instances of continuity and discontinuity with the template above.

Fascist Italy was the model and origin for Hitler’s totalitarian racial state and adopted many of the latter’s racist laws from the late 1930s onwards, although debate still rages as to how far, and how early, Fascism was (or was not) inherently racist.¹⁰ Fascist Italy was also Nazi Germany’s prime European ally as the genocide of the Jews was undertaken and was responsible for administering anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic policy in several occupied regions (e.g. Slovenia), often with ferocious violence, just as it was responsible for horrific colonial crimes in Africa, and just as it had operated forms of racial politics and ethnic cleansing in home border areas, such as Alto Adige, before the war; although important historiographical work has also proposed that Italian officials—up to Mussolini himself—did much to frustrate deportations and massacres of Jews during the early phase of the war.¹¹ Italy was, then, both part progenitor of and collaborator in genocide, and part uncertain fellow-traveller, even filibusterer. After July 1943, this already complex status was made notably more so as Mussolini fell, and Italy signed an armistice with the Allies and found itself split in two, invaded from the south by the Allies and occupied in the centre and north by Germany (with the help of a restored Mussolini and the diehard Fascists of the Salò Republic), with a civil war or partisan Resistance war raging. The Nazis now started deporting Jews from Italy (mainly to Auschwitz), although the numbers were relatively small, in the thousands;¹² and also approximately 30,000 political prisoners (mostly partisans), deported to Mauthausen, Gusen and nearby; and large numbers—up to 750,000—of Italian soldiers were imprisoned in brutal internment camps.¹³ Now Italians were victims of the whole gamut of Nazi violence, although the Salò Republic was also an active perpetrator of deportations and massacres, and the racial bureaucracy of the former Fascist state was still in place to abet the deportation of Jews. Once again, however, alongside this picture of complicity runs an alternative narrative of many individual or local acts of solidarity with the Jewish population, the product of an apparent Italian immunity to racism built into the Italian ‘national character’.¹⁴

This tangled history left Italy with an immense baggage of unresolved questions about itself, its historical responsibilities and its future after the war. It is commonly argued that the entire postwar era in Italy, up to the turn of the 21st century, was spent working through answers to those questions. Initially, 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 Fascism’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, adding layer upon layer of complexity and daunting challenge.

In response to this history, postwar Italian culture has thrown up striking clusters of writers and filmmakers, artists and architects, historians and intellectuals intent on coming to terms with the phenomenon of the Holocaust. Several of these have taken up prime places in the vast international spectrum of responses to the genocide—authors such as Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Natalia Ginzburg; and directors such as Vittorio De Sica, Lina Wertmüller, Francesco Rosi and Roberto Benigni. Merely for this weight of cultural production, the relative neglect of Italy in accounts of the spectrum of Holocaust culture is surprising.

But the aim of this book is neither to restate the history of Fascist Italy’s entanglement with Nazi Germany; nor to collate a canon of the worthiest works about the Holocaust to have come out of Italy. It aims rather to survey and embed those works in the wider field of responses that produced and shaped them, and thereby to trace the progress of the slow, but profoundly illuminating encounter between Italian culture and the Holocaust. The field it draws on includes a wide range of cultural artefacts, agents, works of testimony, events and practices, collectivities and debates. And this field is presented as in turn embedded in a series of other local fields, giving local inflections to the reception and understanding of the Holocaust. So, talk of the Holocaust in Italy is shown persistently to mask questions about Fascism, the anti-Fascist Resistance and its legacies, national character, Cold War politics, the role of the Church, European identity, immigration, multiculturalism and so on.

The book describes the circles of production and reception of this field of knowledge and representation of the Holocaust in Italy, tapping into the work and activism of concentration camp survivors and their associations, the Jewish community and its organs, spreading outwards into the wider culture through culture industries and media, civic commemorations, institutions and all the varied arenas of modern cultural practice. It traces how, by the late 20th century, a vast tranche of Italians—from ageing survivors to young children—came to know something of what was referred to by the terms Holocaust or Shoah, to have some sense of what Norberto Bobbio meant when he described the genocide as ‘the monstrous event in world history’.¹⁵

As indicated above, the Holocaust can never be wholly contained at the ‘national’ level, neither in its history of perpetrators, victims and bystanders, of individuals, groups, ethnicities and states; nor in its a posteriori cultural representations. It is and was always a porous, plurilinguistic, transnational phenomenon. This is evinced by the extraordinary, migratory global reach of the pivotal cultural events in our template, from the liberation photographs to Anne Frank’s diary, from Eichmann in Jerusalem to Holocaust on TV to Schindler’s List at the movies. This book, then, looks not only at the specifics of Italian responses to Italy’s role within experience of the Shoah; but also at the interactions of this field with that larger, transnational phenomenon. In Italy as elsewhere, these two strands—the Holocaust at its broadest and the Italian case at its most local—co-exist and are mutually dependent layers in history and in the production of discourse around it; and the nature of this co-existence is central to the story told here. To give two examples, as Manuela Consonni has shown, Italy had its own responses to the Israeli—and global—media event of the Eichmann trial, even as the Italian press reflected on the extraordinary global attention it was garnering.¹⁶ Conversely, an Italian film such as Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella, 1997) was a product of deep and largely hidden local and generational histories, masquerading as a Holocaust story (Benigni’s father was a military internee);¹⁷ and yet as it was marketed across a global circuit of cinema festivals and mass distribution, filtered through American success, it entered the sphere of transnational Holocaust culture, acquiring new meanings along the way.

This mutual dependence operates wherever the Holocaust establishes itself as a datum of cultural knowledge; but it seems to be charged with particularly interesting dynamics in the Italian case, because of the strange interplay of centrality and marginality in Italy’s encoun...