Against Redemption

WINNER, HELEN AND HOWARD R. MARRARO PRIZE IN ITALIAN HISTORY

Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics.

How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory.

During Italy’s transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country’s break with Mussolini’s regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that character­ized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the newborn democracy.

Franco Baldasso is Assistant Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Program at Bard College. He is Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and co-Director of the Summer School program at Sapienza University in Rome, “The Cultural Heritage and Memory of Totalitarianism.”Franco Baldasso is Assistant Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Program at Bard College. He is Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and co-Director of the Summer School program at Sapienza University in Rome, “The Cultural Heritage and Memory of Totalitarianism.”

A critical engagement with the past: with Against Redemption, this is what Franco Baldasso offers powerfully, with intellectual finesse and conceptual precision.---Rosario Forlenza, Journal of Modern Italian Studies

An ambitious, wide-ranging, and masterful rethinking of postwar Italian culture. Baldasso challenges the narrative—embraced by both Christian Democrats and Communists—of redemption and regeneration that was to undergird Italian society. In doing so, he gives us new ways of re-reading Italian postwar history. With a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings and their repercussions, he shows that the period of 1943-1948 was marked by an extraordinary and liminal ideological fluidity.---Stanislao Pugliese, Hofstra University

Deflating clichés, debunking myths, filling in gaps: Baldasso’s book brings to light a much more multifaceted and controversial picture of the transition from fascism to democracy in Italy. With sharp arguments, remarkable interdisciplinary breadth and crisp prose, Baldasso delivers a must-read book for anyone interested in how collective memory is institutionalized—and perhaps even dismantled.---Maria Anna Mariani, Assistant Professor of Italian Literature, University of Chicago, and author of Primo Levi e Anna Frank: tra testimonianza e letteratura