The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility by Guido Bartolini, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, xii + 263 pp., £74.99 (hardback), ISBN 9783030631802

Abstract

Does it make sense to study the Italian literature of the Axis War – the military campaigns fascist Italy fought between 1940 and 1943 – and its influence on Italy's self-absolving discourses almost 80 years after the end of the conflict and the fall of the regime? What may seem a rhetorical question in fact reflects a current debate in Italy following the new far-right government's attempt to set aside the Resistance component from the 2023 annual 25 April Liberation Day commemoration in the name of a ‘restored national harmony’, or the fact that the largest European conflict since the Second World War is currently being fought in Ukraine in the name of – according to the official Russian rhetoric – the ‘denazification’ of a country led by a ‘Jewish president’. In view of this new wave of historical revisionism and attempts to rewrite (or abuse) history, Guido Bartolini's book is a timely and analytical attempt to explore and understand the role played by postwar Italian literature in the startling marginalisation of the memory of Italy's participation in the Axis War and its crimes.