Narratives of Innocence and Victimhood: The Reception of the Miniseries Holocaust in Italy

Abstract

In Italy, the heavy politicization of public discourse, together with dominant cultural narratives positing the country as a “victim” nation in the Second World War, influenced the reception of NBC's miniseries Holocaust. These influences revealed themselves in three main trends: the discussion of the country's involvement in the Holocaust in highly self-acquitting terms that perpetuated a variant of the “good Italian” stereotype; the peculiar domestication of the debate on the “Americanization of the Holocaust”; and the substantially uncontested circulation of various universalizations in the discussion of the program's “meanings.”