Against Redemption. Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy

In this book Franco Baldasso, assistant professor of Italian and director of the Italian program at Bard College, explores a yet unsettled question of modern Italian history: the way in which the cultural heritage of the Fascist “ventennio” transitioned, post-World War II, to the new democratic state. Writing against the political orthodoxy viewing the ideological transition from totalitarianism to democracy at the end of World War II as a sudden moral rebirth for the nation, Baldasso's monograph joins a stream of more recent interpretations addressing the complexities and controversies of that transition. He examines the ways in which, during Italy's journey to democracy and in spite of the emergence of a hegemonic discourse depicting the country's break with Mussolini's regime as political and personal “redemption” for the nation, heterodox intellectual voices in the country called out the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism.Against Redemption studies the way in which—in the crucial five-year span between Mussolini's downfall in July 1943 and Italy's first Republican elections in April 1948—prominent literary figures such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte and now lesser known intellectuals such as Guido Piovene, Giuseppe Berto, and Vitaliano Brancati offered more nuanced perspectives on the ideological premises of Italy's democratic transition by opposing the ways in which all sides of the political spectrum—right, center, and left—had chosen to ignore the very obvious burden that Fascism had laid over the nation's history.Baldasso argues that the two leading social forces behind the Resistenza—Communists and Catholics—shared, in spite of obvious differences in political vision, very similar eschatological readings of Italian history. They celebrated the war of liberation, the Resistenza, as a redemptive movement capable of bringing national progress and regeneration after what they saw as a twenty-year hiatus in the nation's teleology. Italian Catholics and Communists shared a myth of the anti-Fascist Resistance as a “Second Risorgimento,” granting the nation its moral rebirth through “patterns of conversion” that ended up integrating Fascist and liberal ideologies of Italian history into their redemptive narrative. Likewise, the so-called “Lictorian generation” (the more or less enthusiastic majority that had supported the rise of the dictatorship) established itself along the lines of what Enzo Forcella described as “the dialectical template of Error-Bewilderment-Redemption,” where former acquiescence with Fascism was redeemed through acceptance of defeat (the September 8 disaster) and subsequent participation in the Resistance. According to Baldasso, in the reconstruction years, both right and left chose to gloss over crucial questions relating to Italy's working through its defeat in World War II, its responsibility in the war, and the Holocaust, thereby fostering discourses that revealed how “the social, racial and gender biases that characterized Fascism survived after its demise,” only to haunt the newborn democracy.In the postwar years, Neorealism—arguably the most influential cultural phenomenon of the era—significantly contributed to manufacturing the myth of the “new beginning”; its way of documenting war traumas was one way of turning the singular private struggles into positive fragments of the new national epic. Likewise, the literature of the Resistance that flourished as a leading form of popular narrative, while emphasizing the struggle against Fascism as a template for the nation's democratic transition, also ended up trivializing the nation's larger responsibilities during the ventennio.“Heterodox voices” emerging at the end of World War II, on which Against Redemption focuses, spoke against those redemption narratives. Both former Fascist and anti-Fascist, these writers stressed the need to come to terms with the historical failures of the recent past. Instead of celebrating the victory over totalitarianism and the nation's rebirth after the ventennio, writers like Malaparte made the “burdensome legacy” of Fascism the “propeller of their writing”: admitting national defeat, he gave voice to “a discontent that was silenced in conventional resistance narratives” (21). Likewise, intellectuals like Emilio Gadda denounced the postwar symbolic identification with the victim on which much of the early Resistance literature had sustained itself. Moravia and Morante warned of the political accountability of the Italian people for the crimes perpetrated by Fascism. Former Fascist writers such as Berto, Piovene, and Brancati attempted to articulate an autonomous language reflecting the burden of their past choices. Finding in literature the appropriate outlet for admitting the national and personal defeat, argues Baldasso, they enacted “a consequential and thought-provoking dismissal of past models” (16).Against Redemption emerges as a very timely study: three-quarters of a century having elapsed since the demise of the Fascist state in Italy, its legacy continues deeply to disturb the nation's troubled democratic journey. Having proven Benedetto Croce wrong, Fascism and its violence, its politics of exclusion, and its false myths were not a “parenthesis” in European history, but rather, as Baldasso rightly points out, “integral parts of the larger development of European self-consciousness” (200). Reassessing the embattled political and intellectual legacy of Italy's democratic transition provides useful food for thought

Democracy · Political science · Politics · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law