Abstract
Historians of Italy tend to agree that the collapse of the Italian Fascist government in September 1943 ushered in the country’s most difficult phase of the Second World War, and with it a divisive national legacy. Politicians, academics and journalists have maintained that the ‘civil war’ which resulted from the absence in Italy of a legitimate administration was the cause of a divided post-war nation, placing Italian national identity under threat.1 Wartime and post-war calls to re-create a unified Italian national identity on the foundation of a unified national memory have made reference to past and present external threats to the nation. From Benedetto Croce’s 1944 Eliseo speech2 to the 1997 Italian trial of those responsible for the Nazi Ardeatine massacres, an external enemy has been invoked in the interests of patriotism and national cohesion, often unfettered by feelings of responsibility for the Fascist past. The object of these invocations has usually been a German enemy, but the focus of this chapter is the lesser studied theme of Italian victimisation at the hands of a ‘Slav’ enemy on Italy’s north-eastern frontier, bordering Yugoslavia.3 I show how, before 1943, cultural representations of a ‘Slav’ communist national foe were intrinsic to the Fascist imagining of national and political homogeneity on that border and to Fascist policies for eradicating political and cultural differences within the Italian nation in the inter-war period. I then look at how, since 1945, the threat posed to the integrity of the Italian nation by ‘Slav’ communists during the ‘civil war’ period has been the concern of diverse regional interest groups and successive Italian governments seeking to create a shared Italian memory of the Second World War. In general, after the war, the ‘Slav’ threat was exploited as a means of reducing the importance of ideological divisions among Italians, and redefining Fascism. I also examine a peripheral counter-commemoration of the Second World War in this border region in order to question the relationships among the three themes of the ‘Slav’ enemy, Fascism and Italian national memory and identity.
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Notes
See, for example, E. Aga-Rossi, Una nazione allo sbando: L’armistizio italiano del settembre 1943, Bologna, 1993;
In this speech, made in September 1944, Croce attempted to heal internal divisions by focusing on a German external enemy: see D. Ward, Antifas-cisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46, Madison, 1996, pp. 75 ff.
G. Orfei, ‘Scuola e nazione: Una rappresentazione da manuale’, Limes, 4, 1994, pp. 165–76.
G. Bandelli, ‘Per una storia del mito di Roma al confine orientale: Archaeologia e urbanistica nella Trieste del ventennio’, in M. Verzar-Bass (ed.), Il teatro Romano di Trieste. Monumento, storia, funzione, Rome, 1991, p. 261.
A. Tamaro, Anonimo, 1933, p. 14, cited in G. Bandelli, ‘Per una storia del mito di Roma al confine orientale’, p. 253.
S. Benco, Trieste, Florence, 1932, pp. 8, 11.
See L. Cermelj, Life and Death Struggle of a National Minority, Ljubljana, 1945, (2nd edn) for a survey of Fascist policies in the area and their claimed effects on the local Slovene and Croat population from a Yugoslav perspec-tive. Cermelj accused Fascists of genocide, and implicated the Vatican and local Catholic representatives. Elio Apih, by contrast, stressed the efforts of some Catholic clergy to mediate on behalf of Slovenes:
E. Apih, Italia. Fas-cismo, anti-fascismo nella Venezia Giulia 1918–1943, Bari, 1966.
See also P. Stranj, The Submerged Community: An to Z of the Slovenes in Italy, Trie-ste, 1992. Discriminatory legislation was enacted in the other frontier regions, particularly the former South Tyrol, where it was directed against German minorities.
D. Rusinow, Italy’s Austrian Heritage 1919–1946, Oxford, 1969, p. 200.
P. Stranj, The Submerged Community, p. 78. ‘Slavic teachers’ were portrayed as the personification of ‘the resistance of a foreign race’: Corriere della Sera, 7 April 1931, cited in G. Salvemini, Racial Minorities under Fascism in Italy, Chicago, 1934, p. 14.
E. Collotti, ‘Prefazione’, in S. Gherardi Bon, La Persecuzione antiebraica a Trieste (1938–1945), Udine, 1971, p. 12.
A. Vinci, ‘Il fascismo nella Venezia Giulia e l’opera di snazionalizzazione delle minoranze’, Il Territorio, 6, 1996, p. 15.
J. Walston, ‘History and Memory of the Italian Concentration Camps’, Historical Journal, 40, 1997, p. 170. Walston cites an Italian army order from early 1943 demanding ‘[t]he internment of able-bodied people from ethnic minorities [allogeni] from Venezia-Giulia between the ages of 42 and 55 and non-able-bodied people from 19 upwards and families of rebel supporters’, as ‘a matter of extreme urgency’, p. 175.
For an examination of the pro-Yugoslav administration and its objectives see G. Sluga, ‘Identity and Revolution: The History of the Forty Days of May 1945’, Annales: Annals for Istrian and Mediterranean Studies, 8, 1996, pp. 125–40.
See, for example, M. Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering, Berkeley, 1997.
M. Isnenghi, ‘Memoria pubblica della Resistenza’, in F. Ferratini Tosi, G. Grassi and M. Legnani, L ’Italia nella Seconda Guerra Mondiale e nella Resistenza, Milan, 1988, pp. 559–63.
See also P. Dogliani, ‘Luoghi della memoria e monumenti’, in B. Dalla Casa and A. Preti (eds), Bologna in Guerra 1940–1945, Milan, 1995, pp. 461–78.
A. Vinci, ‘Bellicismo e culture diffuse’, in A. Vinci (ed.), Trieste in Guerra: gli anni 1938–1943, Trieste, 1992, p. 84.
R. Pupo, ‘Violenza politica tra guerra e dopoguerra’, in G. Valdevit (ed.), Foibe: il peso del passato, Venezia Giulia 1943–1945, Venice, 1997, p. 36. Pupo’s essay is reprinted in Clio, 32, 1996, pp. 115–37.
Some of this discussion of the foibe is based on G. Sluga, ‘The Risiera di San Sabba: Fascism, Anti-fascism and Italian Nationalism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 1, 1996, pp. 401–12.
N. Gallerano, ‘Memoria pubblica del Fascismo e dell’antifascismo’, in G. Calchi Novati, L. Canfora, E. Collotti, M. Flores, N. G.llerano and L. Passerini, Politiche della Memoria, Rome, 1993, p. 16.
F. Zidar, ‘Il processo del-la Risiera’, Dallo squadrismo Fascista alle stragi della Risiera (con it reso-conto del processo) Trieste-Istria 1919-1945, Trieste, 1978, pp. 157–80.
For a fuller discussion of the Risiera trial and this historical evidence see G. Sluga, ‘The Risiera di San Sabba’, pp. 401–12; F. Zidar, ‘Il processo della Risiera’, Dallo squadrismo Fascista alle stragi della Risiera (con it resoconto del processo) Trieste-Istria 1919–1945, Trieste, 1978, pp. 157–80.
E. Collotti, ‘Le stragi di San Sabba trent’anni dopo: it processo dimezzato’, San Sabba: Istruttoria e processo per it Lager della Risiera, Milan, 1988, p. 145; ‘La sentenza giudicata’, San Sabba, pp. 229–34.
S. Ortaggi, ‘Nationalism and History in an Italian Classroom’, History Workshop, 6, 1978, pp. 229–34.
Cited in R. Spazzali, Foibe: un dibattito ancora aperto, Trieste, 1990, p. 280.
In 1991, the Anti-Fascist historian Galliano Fogar noted that, ‘There has not been a single political or administrative event of significance in recent Triestine and Giulian history… in which the problem of the foibe and deportations has not emerged furnished with amplifications and statistics lacking consistency or any critical apparatus which could justify the figures of 10 to 20000 infoibati, figures literally thrown into the piazza with unscrupulous self-confidence, and often in instrumentalist forms’. G. Fogar, ‘Venezia Giulia 1943–1945’, in Trieste 1941–1947, Trieste, 1991, p. 108.
C. Cernigoi, Operazione foibe a Trieste; P. Parovel, ‘Foibe in Neoiredentizem: Zgodovina in politicni mit’, Delo, 28 January 1995, p. 34.
‘Miles’, ‘Il richiamo dei Balcani: Quali Balcani convengono all’Italia’, Limes, 3, 1995, p. 26.
The neo-fascist MSI party became the so-called ‘post-fascist’ coalition, Alleanza Nazionale, in 1994. For a discussion of the late twentieth-century use of the term ‘post-fascist’, see M. Berezin, ‘Introduction’, in Making the Fascist Self The Political Culture of Interwar Italy, Ithaca, 1997.
The autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia was created in 1963. L. Galmozzi and E. Nizza, Monumenti alla Libertà: Antifascismo, resistenza e pace nei monumenti italiani dal 1945 al 1985, Milan, 1986.
See G. Sluga, ‘Inventing Trieste: History, Anti-History and Nation’, The European Legacy, 1, 1996, pp. 25–30.
M. Coen, Bruno Pincherle, Gorizia, 1995, p. 71.
R. Starn and N. Zemon Davis, ‘Introduction’, special issue, Representations, 26, 1989, p. 2.
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Sluga, G. (1999). Italian National Memory,National Identity and Fascism. In: Bosworth, R.J.B., Dogliani, P. (eds) Italian Fascism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27245-7_11
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