Fascism - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2015

In the years between the two world wars a fledgling radical force that we today call ‘fascism’ was transformed from a tiny fringe movement into a dominant international political paradigm that challenged liberal ‘mainstream’ values and violently reversed decades of progressive change. Fascism’s spectacular and devastating success underlined how limited, resented, and reversible the alleged liberal consensus was in large parts of Europe during the interwar years; and how much demand for radical ultranationalist and authoritarian alternatives lay just below the fragile veneer of the liberal-democratic mainstream. The worldwide economic crisis was a catalyst for, rather than the primary cause of, this transformation, revealing and legitimising strong pre-existing concerns and resentments, both among the elites and public opinion.

What is the relevance of this sombre historical precedent for contemporary Europe, haunted by perceptions of unprecedented existential, economic, and identity crises? How robust is the current mainstream consensus around liberal values and what kind of challenge does the continuing popularity of the radical populist right pose for ‘mainstream’ politics and society? More importantly, even if the new radical right still commands minority – though growing – support, are some of its extreme discourses becoming normalised and embedded into the mainstream?

In Italy, cinema has contributed to constructing a paradox of memory in which the rememberer is asked to prevent past mistakes from happening again and yet is encouraged to forget what those mistakes were, or that they ever even took place. Through an examination of the long-term trends in Italian cinema about the Fascist period, this article explores its recurrent tropes alongside its recurrent absences, isolating in particular the act of killing and Italy’s African Empire as crucial absences in Italy’s memory. The dominant narrative of italiani brava gente explains popular amnesia and institutional silences that still surround the darkest and bloodiest pages in Italy’s history. From the narratives of innocence and sacrifice that populate the canon of Italian film about Fascism to the sanitised representations of Italy’s wars of aggression or the boycott of Moustapha Akkad’s The Lion of the Desert (1981), this paper argues that recurrent presences and absences in Italy’s cinematic memories of the long Second World War have not been random but coherent, cogent and consistent.

This article focuses on the transfer of the Nazi legal and ideological model to East Central Europe and its subsequent adoption, modification and fusion with local legal-political practices. To illustrate this process, we explore the evolution of the anti-Semitic policy of the Antonescu regime in Romania (1940–1944) from an under-researched perspective: the activity of the Nazi ‘advisors on the Jewish Question’ dispatched to Bucharest. Based on a wide range of published and unpublished archival sources, we attempt to provide answers to the following questions: To what extent did the Third Reich shape Romania’s anti-Semitic polices during the Second World War? What was the role played by the Nazi advisors in this process? In answering these questions, special attention is devoted to the activity of the Hauptsturmführerss Gustav Richter, who served as Berater für Juden und Arisierungsfragen [advisor to the Jewish and Aryanization questions] in the German Legation in Bucharest from 1st of April 1941 until 23 August 1944. We argue that, by evaluating the work of the Nazi experts in Bucharest, we can better grasp the immediate as well as the longer-term objectives followed by the Third Reich in Romania on the ‘Jewish Question,’ and the evolution of this issue within the context of the Romanian-German diplomatic relations and political interactions. By taking into account a variety of internal and external factors and by reconstructing the complicated web of political and bureaucratic interactions that led to the crystallization of General Ion Antonescu’s policy towards the Jews, we are able to provide a richer and more nuanced analysis of German-Romanian relations during the Second World War.