Edizioni FrancoAngeli - Last issue of ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA (264/2011)

Oscar Luigi Scalfaro

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

The beginning of the end. Nazis and civilians fleeing Reichsgau Wartheland, January-March 1945

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Matteo Ermacora
This essay outlines the end of Nazi domination in Wartheland, a western district of Poland annexed by the Third Reich in 1939. Gauleiter Arthur Greiser had carried out the germanization of the country by the settlement of Volksdeutsche immigrants, the expulsion of the Polish and the extermination of the Jews. In 1945, the advance of the Red Army in Wartheland forced a massive migration; Ermacora examines the plans that the Nazis put to evacuate the population, their paths and forms, eliciting their ideological and propagandist basis. Drawing on official reports to the Nazi party headquarters, he reconstructs the unsuccessful mobilization of the Volkssturm, Greiser’s cynical and irresponsible conduct and the crumbling of Nazi administration. The flight of the German civilians was harshened by Soviet violence, the concomitant Wehrmacht retreat and Polish hostility. Likewise difficult turned out to be the assistance to the refugees at home, where they met with a mistrustful reception.

Resistance, reprisal and the village memory. Robecco sul Naviglio, July 20- 21, 1944

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Bianca Pastori
On the 20th and 21st of July 1944, after the killing of a German soldier by a group of young partisans, the small village of Robecco sul Naviglio (Milan) and the surrounding countryside suffered a ferocious reprisal. The A. revisits those tragic days and the stratification of the memory of the events in the course of the subsequent decennia. The village appears to react according to a scheme retraceable in similar cases of reprisal against the civilian population in Italy during the Second World War, that is by elaborating a memory not exactly in line with the national and institutional one, in particular as regards the partisans’ behavior. And yet, thanks also to the initiative of the local authorities (the municipal bodies and the Church), in the post-war period the community succeeds in reaching a shared narrative; partial, reticent and simplified as it might be, by contributing to establish a sense of cohesion inside the village such common tale is able to cancel out resentments and divisions that can be often found elsewhere.

Italy and the Holy See facing of the 1929 uprising in Palestine

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Paolo Zanini
The Arab revolt of August 1929, a major turning point in the history of mandatory Palestine, is also of some interest for the appraisal of the Catholic attitude toward Zionism. In Italy, where the events were widely reported, there was an attempt to carve out a national presence in the region by exploiting the religious factor. Such ambitions, though backed by important Catholic circles and by the government itself, did not find any success in the Vatican, where altogether different were the concerns raised by the Arab revolt, on which the top Vatican emissaries in the region, Barlassina and Valeri, maintained somehow discordant stands. While Barlassina actually judged the revolt and the Hebron massacre to be an Arab reaction against Zionist arrogance, Valeri, though a fierce opponent of Zionism, believed that any revival of radical Arab nationalism was dangerous for the Catholic interests. The 1929 Palestinian revolt thus offers a crucial benchmark for measuring the divergences between the most nationalist fringes of Italian Catholicism and the policies of the Holy See; furthermore, it helps us distinguish the different positions existing within the Church hierarchy on the Palestinian issue.

Political confinement "from outside": the women of the antifascists. With an interview to Giovanna Marturano

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Camilla Poesio
This essay deals with the topic of political confinement in Italy during the fascist regime from a new viewpoint, that is through the stories and testimonies of relatives of the anti-fascist internees. If scanty remains scholarly production on the direct experience of fascist confinement, nothing short of nonexistent is the investigation on the indirect experience lived by thousands of people, mostly women, who bore from outside the condition and consequences of political internment, in personal but also social and economic terms (finding themselves very often isolated from their community and generally deprived of the sole source of income in their family). From the interview we learn how Giovanna Marturano - a lifelong politically committed and by now centenarian daughter of a confined woman, fiancee and later wife of Pietro Grifone, he also confined in Ventotene - experienced the persecution and violence, also physical, Fascism inflicted on her by the political confinement of her dear ones.

Patriot, bishop, scientist: Cardinal Maffi remembered, 1931-2008

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Giovanni Cavagnini
Pietro Maffi, Cardinal, Archbishop of Pisa and acknowledged astronomer, as well as ardent patriot and patron of the Catholic movement, died in 1931. His figure, formerly highly popular among both the clergy and the laymen, is still reminded in the public speech of the Italian Catholics. Since the Thirties, the curators of Maffi memory would regularly stress the aspects of his life and personality more suitable for the political and ecclesial requirements of the moment: at the obsequies, his patriotic commitment during the Great War; on the centennial of his birth (1958), his fierce opposition to the Left; on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, his broad-mindedness toward science; on the 150th of his birth, his charitable activity in favor of those in need. Rather different at first glance, these commemorations had in common the purpose of a re-Christianization of society (indeed a long-term worry of the ecclesiastical institution since the French revolution) and witness to the memory policy promoted by the Church.

Will they come back? Notes on the Italian missing soldiers of the Great War

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Fabio Todero
This essay tackles a topic for many a reason not thoroughly examined yet by the relevant historiography. While a complex of rules, passed since the time of the Italian colonial campaigns, already provided for the families of missing soldiers, at the end of the First World War new significant efforts were made for the research and identification of the nameless bodies. Despite the exaltation of the Unknown Warrior, however, the results were far from being satisfactory. With the advent of Fascism, a pall of silence would hover for years and years over an issue too contiguous to that of prisoners of war, and not seldom confused with that of desertion - an issue therefore deemed rather unfit for the construction of the Great War myth, the base and nourishment of the symbolic and ideological store of the fascist regime. The mourning would thus go on until it happened to be tragically revived by the further casualties of the Second Word War, especially as regarded the Russian campaign: the problem of missing soldiers then returned forcefully into the limelight.

Political nationalism and Labor nationalism in Basque Country, 1911-1936

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Dario Ansel
The essay focuses on the complex link between the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) and the reference workers’ organization of the Basque national movement, Solidaridad de Obreros Vascos (Sov), since 1933 Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos (STV). By examining periodical and archival sources, the author raises questions about the real nature of the relations between political nationalism and labor nationalism since 1911, year of Sov foundation, up to the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, in 1936. The basic thesis is that, despite the close dependence between party and trade union in the 1910s, since the early 1920s and particularly during the Second Republic (1931-1936), the nationalist workers’ organization gradually enfranchised itself from the traditional party tutelage. In the 1930s, Sov-Stv became a modern mass trade union and was affected by an intensive class radicalization process that allowed to assume an autonomous political and ‘worker’ identity.

Rassegna bibliografica

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Guido Formigoni, Fabio Vander, Davide Baviello, Marco Fincardi, Tiziano Sguazzero

Schede

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Abstracts

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

The authors

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT