Italian Partisans Research Articles

Nicola Cacciatore. Italian Partisans and British Forces in the Second World War: Working with the Enemy Italian and Italian American Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. 248. $129.99 (cloth).

Nicola Cacciatore. Italian Partisans and British Forces in the Second World War: Working with the Enemy Italian and Italian American Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. 248. $129.99 (cloth).

Eric Kurlander. Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich.

Historians who set out to chart the relations between the Third Reich and the occult are faced with many challenges. On the one hand they must confront the all-too-present specter of Nazi occultism within the contemporary popular imagination, fed by innumerable crypto-historical films, video games, and the like. On the other hand, they must also contend with the uncomfortable silence on the part of many historians regarding these relations, which probably reflects a concern that to highlight them risks trivializing the regime’s monstrous deeds. The task is made more difficult by the highly inconsistent nature of the Nazi regime’s attitudes toward the occult. Take the story of the regime’s crackdown on astrologers and their ilk following the sudden flight of Nazi Party deputy Rudolf Hess, a notorious dabbler in mysticism, to Scotland in the spring of 1941. This so-called “Hess Action” resulted in the arrest of numerous clairvoyants, soothsayers, and others. But as Eric Kurlander shows in Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, many of those arrested were subsequently released from camps within a matter of weeks. Even more surprising is Kurlander’s finding that the regime subsequently recruited many of these very same figures—in certain cases directly from the camps where some were still interned—to help find Benito Mussolini after the Italian partisans who overthrew him went to great lengths to hide him. Even if their efforts contributed nothing to finding Il Duce, this incident attests to the remarkable confluence between National Socialism and esoteric science.

Violence and resistance: Joyce Lussu’s minority revolution in trans-lation

This article explores the theme of violence in the autobiographical work of Joyce Salvadori Lussu, an Italian partisan, political activist, writer and translator, who experienced many wars and violent conflicts throughout her life: the Great War; the Second World War; the anti-imperialistic struggles; and the protests of 1968. As a premise, the author will reconsider the philosophical notions of violence and force in relation to the concept of resistance, by first situating all these categories within a physical sphere. Second, the author proposes a rethinking of the subject of violence from a female perspective, by studying Joyce Lussu’s theoretical discourse about women and war. Therefore, through the analysis of images of violence gathered from Lussu’s literary work, the author interprets the essential role of women as ‘resistants’ as well as bearers of pacifist values. Finally, the author uses the category of minority revolution, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, to underline Lussu’s political commitment on the side of renegades through her activity as a translator of minor literature. The methodological perspective adopted aims at challenging the contemporary domination of the anti-humanist discourse, by endorsing the secular values of Humanism, reemerged and theorized in Italy between the 1930s and 1960s.

Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women (review)

Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women (review)

Book Review: Resisting Bodies, Narratives of Italian Partisan Women

Book Review: Resisting Bodies, Narratives of Italian Partisan Women

Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women

Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women

Making Anti-Fascism into Fascism: The Political Transformation of Tiro al Piccione (1961)

On rare occasions a single political event can grossly alter, even subvert, a film's public reception. In 1 961 , the distortion of Giuliano Montaldo's Tiro ed Piccione Pigeon Shoot makes this film a vital historical artifact for an exploration of Italy's memory of fascism and bears the ultimate witness to the power of the political context to shape a film's meaning. Tiro is based on the 1953 semi-autobiographical novel (of the same name) by Giose Rimanelli, which recounts the author's experiences fighting for Mussolini's Italian Social Republic in the last y ears of World War II. Though he sharpened its critique of fascism, Montaldo remained largely faithful to the novel and, according to many reviewers, employed considerable artistry in his directing. So Montaldo had every reason to expect Jiro to be a hit. Even while he was completing the film, however, a small but vocal and militant neo-fascist party, the MSI (Italian Social Movement), provoked a violent clash with Leftist workers in Milan. Police repression in Milan prompted a wave of demonstrations across the country, which were violently put down by former fascist police chiefs with the authority of President Tambronni himself. resulting Tambronni Affair - the largest clash between fascists and the Left since 1945 - transformed the reception of Montaldo's film. director sat in shock as Tiro was booed at the Venice film festival.2 Most film reviewers condemned the film as dangerous, even fascist. Not surprisingly, its success in 1961 was limited, and it was almost forgotten by film historians until its recent revival in Italy. THE NOVEL Few nations have more charged memories of their past than Italy does of fascism. And that memory directly influences the content and significance of fascism 's representation in Italy. As Kriss Raveto points out, The historic events of World War II have been repeatedly read and reread in terms of contemporary politics, linking 'the event' to transtemporal questions of morality and responsibility to the past.3 Tiro presents the interesting case of a story produced in one context and debuted in another. Giose Rimanelli wrote Tiro al Piccione upon his return from the war, in 1945, a war that had torn apart Italy in the previous two years. In the summer and fall of 1943, the country had been split Its south was nominally under the authority of King Victor Emmanuel III, who had abandoned the Axis and joined the Allies, but really the southern region was controlled by the British and Americans. In the north, Hitler had installed Mussolini in a puppet state called the Italian Social Republic (RSI), known pejoratively as the Republic of Salo (the spa town that was headquarters to Mussolini's ministry of propaganda). While the British and American armies slowly fought their way up the peninsula, Italian partisans battled the Germans and Italian fascists from within the RSI. battle for Italy was not the struggle imagined by so many in America and Italy then and now. It was not a simple struggle between an Anglo-American political liberalism and a Germ an- sponsored fascism. Italy was at war with itself, fighting both for and against the Allies, both for and against the fascists. partisan war inside the RSI, moreover, was exceptionally cruel, driven by irreconcilable political differences. Most of its combatants fought with certainty that their victory or defeat would determine the political future of Italy: Left or Right. Rimanelli's novel testified to the fact that neither partisans nor Black Shirts bothered to take prisoners. stakes were huge, and Italians on both sides fought viciously. book, however, especially targets Mussolini's regime for its atrocities. Although written by a former defender of the fascist republic, Tiro is clearly and stridently anti-fascist. protagonist, Marco Laudato, is forced to enlist in the fascist Black Brigades. He knows nothing of fascist ideology, rejects his Captain's racist indoctrination, and comes to despise fascists' hypocrisy and sadism. …

From Suspicious Observation to Ambiguous Collaboration: The Allies and Italian Partisans, 1943–1944

During the first months of the Italian Campaign, partisans' activity was isolated and spasmodic, and Allied support was minimal. In fact, it took the Allies nine months to consider the Italian partisans not so much as a threat as a potential opportunity. This article seeks to explain the Allies' attitude toward the Italian partisans. Relations among the Allies, the Italian government and the partisans involved a combination of military and political problems. The Allies' weak support for Italian partisans was in fact the by-product of an overall strategic plan in which means were limited and priorities had naturally to be established in a context of world war. It also revealed their fears: the common suspicion toward irregular fighters, the growing fear of communists and the fear of possible Italian post-war demands.

The Red and the Blue: The Depiction of the Italian Partisan Resistance in Fenoglio's "Il partigiano Johnny"

This article is one of a series in which I seek to argue that Beppe Fenoglio's most famous work, published posthumously as Il partigiano johnny,is more dependent on and informative of its historical context than is commonly accepted by literary critics. As I have suggested elsewhere,2 the book is not a work that transcends history, but is a kind of fictional memoir, or rather, a fictive autobiography, built around the dialogic relationship between Fenoglio andJohnny.3 In the text, as with other examples of this genre of writing,4 this relationship means that the point of view and 'voice' of the narrator Fenoglio, who recounts events from a I950s perspective, is blended with the point of view and 'voice' of his 1940s protagonist/ focalizer, Johnny. The impression given is that there are two narrators, one 'internal' (Johnny) and the other 'external' (Fenoglio). This stereo system, which I describe with the phrase 'Fenoglio's binoculars, Johnny's eyes', leads to a kind of dual perspective, an awareness of which is crucial to an historical interpretation of the text.

Pasolini's Gramsci

When discussing those who perhaps most influenced the thought of the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, novelist, critic and filmaker, one critic recently spoke of 'il suo Gramsci.1 Implied in this possessive is the highly personal interpretation that Pasolini attached to the example and writings of Antonio Gramsci, revolutionary political theorist whose famous notebooks survived their author's death in 1937 after eleven years of Fascist imprisonment. What follows attempts to qualify this implication through a survey of Pasolini's writings directly linked to a reading of Gramsci. Demonstration should emerge to bolster those claims of a subjective interpretation whose ultimate complexity can best be described generally as a curious admixture of confraternity and contradiction. The closing section of L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (1958), containing verse composed between 1943 and 1949, carries the subtitle, La scoperta di Marx. War and the Italian Partisan response had transformed Pasolini, leading him to the conviction that life demands qualcos'altro che amore/per il proprio destino.2 For the young Pasolini, that something other prompted a probe into an

Observations on body immersed in water for six years.

There have been no previous cases documented in the medical literature with gross and microscopic findings on a body immersed in fresh water for six years. The purpose of this article is to describe in detail the findings in such a case. The legal aspects of this case are not considered here. The guilt or innocence of suspects is not properly the concern of medical authorities. A brief review of the background of this case is, however, necessary to indicate the circumstances that led to the discovery of the body and to provide substance for the statement that this body was that of the individual said to have been submerged in water six years before. Two Italian partisans confessed to complicity in the murder of a U. S. Army officer in December, 1944. They claimed that he had been shot twice through the head with a Beretta pistol, after unsuccessfully