Abstract
The archipelago of Aegean islands known as the Dodecanese has played a passive, but significant role in the history of the Mediterranean in the early twentieth century. It has been used as a pawn in Great Power diplomacy, cherished as a jewel in Italy’s imperial crown, and coveted by an expansionist modern Greek state. Occupied in turn by the Ottomans, Italians, Germans and the British, it remains a privileged site for the study of relations between occupiers and the occupied. This study will focus on the nature of such relations during the Italian Occupation, which began in 1912 and ended during the Second World War (1943).
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Notes
Luisa Passerini, ‘Oral Memory of Fascism’, in David Forgacs (ed.), Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture (London, 1986), pp. 185–96;
Detlev J.P. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, 1987);
Richard Cobb, French and Germans, Germans and French: A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914–1918/1940–1944 (Hanover, Conn., 1983).
For the diplomatic history of the Dodecanese, Renzo Sertoli Salis, he isole italiane dell’Egeo dall’occupazione alia sovranità (Rome, 1939) has not been superseded.
See also Stephen L. Speronis, ‘The Dodecanese Islands: A Study of European Diplomacy, Italian Imperialism and Greek Nationalism, 1911–1947’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1956.
Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 4–7.
J-L. Miege, L’imperialisme Colonial italien de 1870 à nos jours (Paris, 1968), pp. 193–4. The Dodecanese was essentially treated as a colony, and is referred to as such throughout this study. I also make no distinction between ‘foreign occupation’ and ‘colonial rule’. An good discussion of the status of the Dodecanese in the Italian imperial system can be found in Mia Fuller, ‘Colonizing Constructions: Italian Architecture, Urban Planning, and the Creation of Modern Society in the Colonies, 1869–1943’, PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1994, pp. HOff.
Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 1882–1941: Policies, Praxis and Impact (Uppsala, 1978);
Angelo Del Boca (ed.), Le Guerre coloniale del fascismo (Rome and Bari, 1991). There are some studies on the colonial wars, especially the conquest of Ethiopia,
such as Del Boca, Italiani in Africa orientale: la conquista dell’impero (Bari, 1979) and
Roberto Battaglia, La prima guerra d’Africa (Rome, 1958).
See also Luigi Goglia, Storia fotografica dell’impero fascista, 1935–1941 (Rome, 1985).
Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (London and New York, 1976);
Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience (London, 1985);
Claudio Segre, Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago, 1974); Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley, California, 1987).
Haile M. Larebo, The Building of an Empire: Italian Land Policy and Practice in Ethiopia, 1935–1941 (Oxford, 1994), p. vi.
Annalisa Pasero, ‘Madamismo, Meticciato and the Prestige of the Race in Italian East Africa’, The Italianist, 11 (1991), p. 182.
E.g. Peukert, op. cit; Ulrich Herbert, ‘Good Times, Bad Times: Memories of the Third Reich’, in Richard Bessel (ed.), Life in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), pp. 97–110.
Geoff Eley, ‘Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday - a New Direction for German Social History?’, Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989), pp. 315 and 323.
See also Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London, 1989), p. 152.
Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 41–3.
The cultural and social history of modern Greece is a relatively new field. Excellent studies include; Richard Clogg, ‘Elite and Popular Culture in Greece under Turkish Rule’, in John T.A. Koumoulides (ed.), Hellenic Perspectives: Essays in the History of Greece (London, 1980), pp. 107–43;
Nicos Mouzelis, Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment (London, 1978);
John Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause: Brigandage and Irreden-tism in Modem Greece, 1821–1912 (Oxford, 1987);
Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven, Conn., 1993).
The useful survey by Alexander Kitroeff, ‘Continuity and Change in Contemporary Greek Historiography’, European History Quarterly, 19 (1989), pp. 269–98, esp. pp. 294–6, shows the extent to which social history in modern Greece is ‘underdeveloped’.
Among the most influential works are Ernestine Friedl, Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece (New York, 1962) and J.K. Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford, 1964). This study has been greatly influenced by Michael Herzfeld, whose works include: ‘The Horns of the Mediterraneanist Dilemma’, American Ethnologist, 11 (1984), pp. 439–54; The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton, New Jersey, 1991); and Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass.
See also Anna Collard, ‘Investigating “Social Memory” in a Greek Context’, in Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald and Malcolm Chapman (eds), History and Ethnicity (London and New York, 1989), pp. 89—103. A more recent example is Yiannis Papadakis, ‘The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Cyprus’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 3 (1993), pp. 139–54.
Quoted from Kenneth Thompson, Entile Durkheim (London and New York, 1982), p. 14.
James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), p. 10.
Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1986), pp. 31–2.
Christodoulos Papachristodoulou, Istoria tis Ródou ápo tous proistorikoús chrónous éos tin ensomátosi tis Dodekanísou (Athens, 1971);
Vasilis S. Hatsivasiliou, Istoría tis Nísou Ko: Archéa, Meseonikí, Neóteri (Kos, 1990).
The development of folklore studies in Greece is dealt with by Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modem Greece (Austin, Texas, 1982).
See G. Koukoulis, H Kálymna tis Istorías (Athens, 1980).
See Hercules Millas, ‘History Textbooks in Greece and Turkey’, History Workshop Journal, 31 (1991), pp. 21–33.
Sample textbooks are K. Sakkadakis, Ellinikí istoría ton neotéron chrónon (Athens, 1972)
and G. Kafentzis, Istoría ton neotrón chrónon (Athens, 1976).
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© 1997 Nicholas Doumanis
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Doumanis, N. (1997). Introduction. In: Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376953_1
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