A lesser evil? Italian fascism in/and the totalitarian equation

The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages 137-153

  Ben Ghiat, Ruth ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84906595682     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780203504949     Document Type: Chapter

References (73)

1. For the articulations of this concept within Italy alone, see Emilio Gentile, 'Fascism in Italian Historiography', Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986), esp. pp. 200-3.
2. The question of an Italian variant of totalitarianism is addressed explicitly in Renzo De Felice, Il Fascismo. Un totalitarianismo all'italiano? (Turin, 1981);
3. Emilio Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarianismo. Il partito e lo Stato nel regime Fascista (Rome, 1995).
4. The most comprehensive collection of historiographical views on Italian Fascism is Renzo De Felice, Il Fascismo. Le interpretazioni dei contemporanei e degli storici (Rome-Bari,1998).
5. Here I am punning the title of an article by Gilbert Allardyce, 'What Fascism is not: Thought on the Deflation of a Concept', American Historical Review, 84 (1979).
6. For a sense of the range of this international bibliography regarding Italian Fascism alone see Renzo De Felice, Bibliografia orientativa del Fascismo italiano (Rome, 1991).
7. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1997), p. 1.
8. On this see David Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan, 1993).
9. An important contribution to the critical historiography of Italian Fascism, which begins by questioning such perceptions, is Richard Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London, 1998).
10. Fundamental work on the construction and postwar utilization of the Italian-German comparison has been done by Filippo Focardi, 'L'ombra del passato. I tedeschi e il nazismo del giudizio italiano dal 1945 a oggi', Novecento (July-December 2000), pp. 67-81;
11. Focardi, '"Bravo italiano" e "cattivo tedesco": riflessioni sulla genesi di due immagini incrociate', Storia e memoria, 1 (1996), pp. 55-83.
12. Among the few studies that explicitly compare the two regimes are Alexander De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (New York, Routledge, 1995);
13. Carl Levy, 'Fascism, National Socialism, and Conservatives in Europe, 1914-1945: Issues for Comparativists', Contemporary European History, 8, 1 (1999), pp. 97-126.
14. See also MacGregor Knox, Common Destiny (Cambridge, 2000);
15. Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Comparisons and Contrasts (Cambridge, 1996).
16. On anti-Fascist and Fascist uses of the term 'totalitarian' in 1920s Italy, see Jens Petersen, 'Die Entstehung des Totalitarismusbegriffs in Italien', in Manfred Funke, ed., Totalitarismus (Dusseldorf, 1978), pp. 105-28;
17. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford, 1995), pp. 14-20.
18. I have written about these initiatives more fully in Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-45 (Berkeley, CA, 2001), but see also Michael Ledeen, L'internazionale Fascista (Bari, 1973).
19. Giulio Santangelo, 'La Russia: Questione di civilita', L'Occidente (July-September 1933).
20. On public attitudes towards the Soviets, see Pier Giorgio Zunino, L'ideologia del Fascismo (Bologna, 1985), pp. 332-44;
21. Luciano Zani, 'L'immagine dell'URSS nell'Italia degli anni trenta', Storia contemporanea (December 1990), pp. 1197-224;
22. Rosaria Quartararo, 'Roma e Mosca: l'immagine dell'Urss nella stampa Fascista (1925-1939)', Storia contemporanea, 27 (1996), pp. 447-72.
23. General overviews of the Nazi-Fascist relationship and Italian-German relations are Ruth Ben-Ghiat, 'Italian Fascists and National Socialists: The Dynamics of a Difficult Relationship', in Richard Etlin, ed., Art, Culture and the Media under the Nazis (Chicago, IL, 2002);
24. Jens Petersen, 'Italia e Germania: percezioni, stereotipi, pregiudizi, immagini d'inimicizia', Storia contemporanea, 6 (1992), pp. 1087-124.
25. see H. James Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918-1940 (Westport, CT, 1997), pp. 70-100;
26. Jens Petersen, Hitler-Mussolini. Die Entstehung der Asche Berlin-Rome 1933-1936 (Tubingen, 1973)
27. Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922-45 (Oxford, 1978).
28. Enrico Rocca, 'Dove va la nuova Germania letteraria?', Italia letteraria (9 October 1930).
29. On the differences between German and Italian ideas of race, see Aaron Gillette, The Defense of the Race: Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (New York, 2002);
30. Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews;
31. on the Vatican's acceptance of these differences, see Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernity, pp. 152-3.
32. See Mino Argentieri, L'Asso cinematografo Roma-Berlino (Naples, 1986);
33. Jens Petersen, 'Vorspiel zu "Stahlpakt" und Kriegsallianz: Das deutsch italianische-Kulturabkommen von 23. November 1938', Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 36 (1989), pp. 41-77;
34. Ben-Ghiat, 'Italian Fascists and National Socialists'
35. Bruno Mantelli, Cesare Bermani and Sergio Bologna, Proletarier der 'Asche': Sozialgeschichte der italienischen Fremdarbeit in NS-Deutschland 1937 bis 1943 (Berlin, 1997).
36. Focardi, 'La memoria della guerra e il mito del "bravo italiano"', p. 393.
37. Quote from Gregory Dale Black, The United States and Italy (Lawrence, KS, 1974), p. 13;
38. Ron Robin, The Barbed-Wire College (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 6-8, makes a similar point regarding the different attitudes Americans held toward German and Italian prisoners of war in the USA.
39. Focardi and Klinkammer, 'La questione dei "criminali di guerra italiani"'.
40. Palmiro Togliatti, 'Totalitarianismo?', Rinascita (November-December 1946);
41. see Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 143-6, on the Italian Communists' and Christian Democrats' uses of such rhetoric.
42. On the histories and silences about partisan violence, see Luca Alessandrini, 'The Option of Violence - Partisan Activity in the Bologna Area, 1945-48', in Jonathan Dunning, ed., After the War: Violence, Justice, Continuity, and Renewal in Italian Society (London, 1997), pp. 59-74;
43. Paolo Pezzino, Anatomia di un massacro (Bologna, 1997).
44. Quotation is from Focardi, 'La memoria della guerra', p. 393. This image was carried forth in films such as Carlo Borghesio's Come persi la guerra (1946).
45. Gleason, Totalitarianism, p. 32.
46. Paul Tillich, 'The Totalitarian State and the Claims of the Church', Social Research (November 1934), p. 433;
47. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York, 1946);
48. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York, 1941), esp. p. 232.
49. See his Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (New York, 1944), pp. 75-7, 462-3.
50. Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 33-8
51. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship, pp. 210-12, offer more detailed discussions of German émigré views of Italian Fascism.
52. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973), p. 258.
53. See for example Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933 (Chicago, IL, 1994), pp. 86-8;
54. The memories of George Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978), pp. 104-5.
55. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 257.
56. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 308
57. For a critique of Arendt's views on Italy and a discussion of their reception within Italy, see Meir Michaelis, 'Anmerkungen zun italienischen Totalitarismusbegriff: Zur Kritik des Thesen Hannah Arendts und Renzo de Felices', Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 62 (1982), pp. 270-302.
58. See Steven Ascheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York, 1996), pp. 9-10
59. In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans and Jews (Madison, WI, 2001), pp. 54-6.
60. On English perceptions of Italy and Italians through the modern era, see Maura O'Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New York, 1998). The ways such views intersected with national notions of Italianness are investigated in Giuliano Bollati, L'Italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin, 1984).
61. See, for example, Gleason, Totalitarianism, passim, and Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship.
62. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1961), p. 59.
63. Dante Germino, The Italian Fascist Party in Power (Minneapolis, MN, 1959), p. 56.
64. See Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship, pp. 69-70 on the tradition of British superiority;
65. George Seldes, Sawdust Caesar: The Untold Story of Mussolini and Fascism (London and New York, 1935), for an example of popular historical/ journalistic writing; and Niccolò Zapponi, Il Fascismo nella caricature (Bari, 1981), for cartoon depictions of Mussolini and Fascism in the international press.
66. Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, 1919-1939 (Rome, 1990), tracks the Duce's image up to World War II.
67. Enzo Collotti, 'Introduzione', in Costantino Di Sante, ed., I campi di concentramento in Italia (Milan, 2001), pp. 9-10.
68. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL, 1996), p. 2;
69. see also Sonia Combes, Archives interdites: Les peurs françaises face a l'histoire contemporaine (Paris, 1994).
70. See the oral histories conducted by Costantino Di Sante, 'I campi di concentramento in Abruzzo', in I campi di concentramento, p. 205
71. Angelo Bendotti, '"Ho fatto la Grecia, l'Albania, la Jugoslavia ..." Il disagio della memoria', in Bruno Micheletti, ed., Italia in guerra (Brescia, 1992), pp. 964-79.
72. On this issue see Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York, 1996), esp. p. 40.
73. Mariuccia Salvati, 'Hannah Arendt e la storia del Novecento', in Flores, ed., Nazismo, Fascismo, Communismo, p. 241.