Contested Anti-Fascisms in Luigi Zampa’s Anni Difficili, 1948–1949

Abstract

The article explores the contested meanings of Fascism and collective guilt in postwar Italy. A large body of recent scholarship suggests that the myth of the Italiani brava gente served to suspend questions of collective responsibility and to conceal striking continuities between the fascist regime and the postwar republic, creating a kind of national ‘amnesia’ by 1947. Focusing on events of 1948–1949, the article takes issue with this view, citing examples of widespread awareness and fears of a return of Fascism. Luigi Zampa’s film, Anni difficili, created a controversial definition of Fascism — its origins and its consequences — and addressed collective guilt in a manner that made the film a sensation between 1948 and 1949. The public, far from complacent to programmes of national repression of the memory of Fascism, was in fact eager to examine these issues, even to the point of discussing widespread guilt. Making particular use of newspaper reviews, the article examines the public interpretations of Anni difficili in order to expose the terms by which different political orientations defined the fascist past and imagined its future danger in the emerging republic