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Business English

Wartime drama rattles skeletons of Fascist past

von Guy Dinmore and Giulia Segreti

History v. politics: are historical re-enactments politically objective or is it possible that they betray covert nostalgia for and veneration of what some may consider an unsavoury past?

Two weeks ago German SS troops stormed the windswept slopes of central Italy's Gran Sasso mountain and liberated Benito Mussolini from his partisan captors, or rather a group of Italian military history enthusiasts did.

Just as the Germans recorded Operation Oak in 1943 for propaganda purposes in one of the most documented events of the second world war, so Italian military historians meticulously re-enacted the dictator's dramatic rescue from Campo Imperatore on the 65th anniversary of the audacious mission.

In camouflage gear and Nazi regalia, Massimo Castelli, president of a wartime enactment association, insists they are simply historians who do not have the slightest intention of praising or celebrating Mussolini's Fascist regime.

 Where do history, politics and patriotism converge?

"It has nothing to do with parties and Fascism; it's pure passion for military history," says Ivano Genovesi - speciality, war correspondents - who was ready with camera and typewriter for the gala, full-dress dinner in the ski resort that Mussolini built.

While historians indulge their passion for detail, Italy as a whole has a much hazier and more ambiguous relationship with its Fascist past. For a great many Italians it is regretted, gone and irrelevant. For others there is a lingering nostalgia and fascination which you see in Mussolini memorabilia on sale and adorning some rightwing bars, or in the straight-armed salutes of gangs of "ultra" football fans. Memorials to Mussolini's achievements still stand in some cities.

But with the shift to the right in the make-up of Silvio Berlusconi's third coalition government that swept April's elections, including victory for Rome's first rightwing mayor since the war, more serious attempts to reappraise Fascism are emerging as politicians on the right flex their muscles.

Gianni Alemanno, Rome's new mayor and a senior figure in the National Alliance - which has its origins in Mussolini's movement - caused a storm in Jerusalem this month. He was quoted as saying that Fascism was a "complex phenomenon" and that it was the 1938 racial laws imposed by Mussolini that were the "absolute evil" rather than the ideology itself.

The Israeli embassy in Rome had strongly backed Mr Alemanno's election, lobbying the capital's small Jewish community to vote for him on the basis that the National Alliance was a friend of Israel and that Gianfranco Fini, its leader, had repudiated Fascism when visiting Israel in 2003.

International relations

While Mr Alemanno's relations with the Jewish community have not been ruptured, some prominent figures are starting to question their support for him. Opposition centre-left politicians seized the moment. Walter Veltroni, former Rome mayor and Democratic party leader, resigned from the Alemanno-led committee to establish a Holocaust museum, and Giuliano Amato, former prime minister, quit a group working to develop the city's future.

Days later, Ignazio La Russa, defence minister, added fuel to the fire. On the anniversary of Italy's 1943 surrender to allied forces, the National Alliance minister tried to rehabilitate the Italian soldiers who kept on fighting for the Fascists in the Nazi puppet state led by Mussolini from Salò, in northern Italy, after his escape from Gran Sasso.

"They deserve respect as they fought for their homeland," he declared.

Speaking on the same stage, Giorgio Napolitano, Italy's ceremonial head of state and a former communist, praised the resistance "as they did not take part in Salò".

Political power strugggles

Some see these attempts to reappraise Fascism as a power struggle within the National Alliance as it embarks on the next stage of its evolution - a merger with Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia to form the People of Liberty party.

While disputes over the past are exposing fractures in Italy's rightwing political parties, this only benefits Forza Italia and Mr Berlusconi, the billionaire prime minister who eschews ideology and sees politics, like business, as a series of opportunities. Mr Fini, veteran architect of the National Alliance's move to the mainstream, is trying to reassert his authority.

But the wounds of Italy's past have been laid bare. Federico Iadicicco, a leader of Azione Giovani, the party's youth movement, wrote in an open letter: "I am sure that you will understand us. We can't be, we don't want to be and we never will be anti-Fascist."