By Marco Maria Aterrano
Eighty years after WWII’s end, Italy remains gripped by a battle over its wartime memory. As historians lose ground to politicized narratives, far-right forces reshape public discourse, recasting aggressors as victims and challenging the legacy of the Resistance in a deeply polarized cultural memory war.
This article is the sixth in our series commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Eighty years on, 1945 seems to be fading away as a foundational moment for Europe’s current political regimes.
And yet, even though the first months of 2025 have severely tested this reality through a fundamental reevaluation of consolidated geopolitical alliances, the end of the Second World War still marks the point of origin for the world we live in.
Historians have always been central actors in shaping how communities affected by the war make sense of it.
In the early post-war period, historical accounts played an important role in delineating broader collective memories, while also being used as a tool for the self-legitimation of the postwar states and societies that were the direct product of the war. The Second World War therefore provides, to quote the historian Rosario Forlenza, “a classic example of the public use of history, in which historical interpretations have served primarily to justify […] institutional and ideological ends”, including most notably the birth and consolidation of postwar political regimes.
In defeated states, the transition to the post-war period was often highly contested and framed by the experience of civil war and of foreign occupation. Therefore, the interpretation of the past was determined by cultural memories that transformed conflicting war experiences into a politically viable understanding of the war. The case of post-1945 Republican Italy is particularly instructive in this context, given the peculiarity of the Italian war experience: the country was at the same time aggressor and invaded, occupier and occupied, vanquished and victor. Such plurality of experiences has made it extremely difficult to produce a shared collective memory of the war within Italian society, leading to a divided, rather than unitary vision of the Fascist era and of the conflict’s legacies.
Historians such as Filippo Focardi, Paolo Pezzino, Luca Baldissara and Angelo Ventrone, among others, have reflected on the impact that the politics of memory have had on the public perception of the war and its significance. In the immediate postwar years, the historiographical discourse on the war was inevitably influenced by the delicate political balance that kept together the newly founded democratic republic. In this first phase, the focus was placed on reframing the Italian participation in the conflict as a war of liberation from Nazi-Fascist occupation, rather than as a war of aggression. This was achieved through the glorification of the Resistance movement, which in turn lent legitimacy to the anti-fascist parties that occupied a central position within the new post-war political order. A double, parallel process was at play: Italians were portrayed as victims of fascism, while the political heirs of those who had collaborated with the Nazi-Fascists in the civil war that raged between 1943 and 1945 were excluded from the political perimeter of the Republic.
The new political elites pursued a central goal during the early stages of memory building. They used the experience of the war as an instrument to define the sphere of political viability, or legality, within which the political, social, and cultural discourse of the new democratic regime was meant to develop. In this sense, the so-called First Republic adopted a proactive, almost militant anti-fascist spirit. The celebration of the sacrificial contribution offered by the partisans in their fight against Nazi-Fascism was, however, associated with the marginalization in public discourse of some of the ‘darker sides’ of the liberation effort. The extent of transitional political violence is certainly the most relevant of such aspects, with the killings of Fascist leaders and collaborators in the long and violent passage from wartime to peacetime initially being underplayed in historical accounts. This, in turn, contributed to the survival of contrasting memories, zealously cultivated by those cultural and political groups that represented the vanquished of the Italian civil war.
In the following decades, narratives about the war gradually morphed in response to changing historical contexts. Nowhere was this more evident than in the 1990s across Europe, when a new wave of historiographical revisionism prompted a wide re-interpretation of the war experience for many of the countries that had lived through the worse of it. This caesura often brought along with it a resurfacing of hitherto hidden stories and views on the conflict. In turn-of-the-century Italy, amidst a large-scale crisis that was financial, political and historical at the same time, this process became particularly apparent. With the end of the Cold War and the shedding of its rigid ideological framework, historians had the possibility to explore in depth more delicate issues linked to the conflict. Most notably, with his 1992 essay on the “morality in the Italian resistance,” Claudio Pavone introduced and legitimized the concept of a ‘civil war’ with reference to the final phase of the Italian campaign, which he argued was embedded within a triple conflict that was at the same time a class war, a patriotic war and, indeed, a civil war.
In Italy, such re-assessments of the war focused above all on two themes: first a re-consideration of the motivation and ideals of the vanquished; and, second, the identification of the violence and war crimes committed by the partisans in the long transition to peace. While these historiographical interventions highlighted important themes that shed a fuller light on the civil war, some of them also ended up setting the ground for the increasing attacks aimed at delegitimizing the Resistance and challenging the anti-fascist nature of the Italian Constitution. In those years, as the historian Luca Baldissara points out, the civic national festivity of Liberation Day on 25 April slowly but surely transformed into “an arena of the practices of mutual delegitimization” for the Italian political discourse.
Recently, the public memory of the Second World War has shifted profoundly in response to the deeper social and political changes that have taken place since the end of the Cold War.
The surge in reinterpretations of the Italian wartime experience has contributed to a broader reconfiguration of the public discourse, providing new political forces, such as most notably far-right parties, with opportunities to address the topic in a manner that matches their own politically loaded perspectives.
The reshaping of European politics that followed the 2008 financial crisis, characterized by the gradual electoral advance of new nationalist and revisionist movements, has created the conditions for the multiplication of instances in which political parties have willfully ignored or reshaped the historical memory of the war, bending it to their ideological needs.
This is most evident in countries where such movements have already reached positions of power and where, perhaps even more importantly, divided memories of the war have endured since the 1940s. For these reasons,
Italy sits today at the forefront of a hard-fought battle on public memory:
over the past two decades the country has seen a resurgence of nationalist narratives of the war that seek to rewrite the Italian participation in the conflict by framing Italian soldiers and civilians as victims, rather than as aggressors. Additionally, such narratives strive to emphasize the military role of the Allied forces in the Italian campaign with the express intent to diminish, comparatively, the weight of the Resistance movement, increasingly confined to and perceived as a politically connotated leftist affair. At the same time, a greater prominence is also given to certain episodes of the war and its aftermath, often intentionally or mistakenly deprived of their historical context. Most emblematic of them all is perhaps the dramatic case of the so-called foibe massacres, the mass killings of Italian civilians committed by Yugoslav partisans in the Adriatic borderlands at the end of the conflict. While largely and unfairly marginalized until the establishment of a Day of Remembrance in 2004, the foibe massacres have often been subsequently instrumentalized to highlight the wrongs suffered by Italians during the war.
Similarly, instances of major regional or national politicians downplaying the violent character of the Italian wars of aggression or, conversely, stressing the valor of wartime Italian military enterprises are expanding. A good example of the attempts at rehabilitating problematic historical figures is provided by a series of contested postage stamps. The Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy recently printed some to honor controversial figures of the Fascist regime, such as philosopher Giovanni Gentile, economist Maffeo Pantaleoni, or prefect Italo Foschi. Such moves confirm the historical and cultural hyperactivism of the right-wing governments to seek a redefinition of the meaning of the war and of the fascist experience in public discourse as part of what could be described as a larger ‘cultural memory war’.
In the public sphere, the war and its conclusion are still the subject of a fervent debate. Given the extreme polarization of the discussion, agreeing across the aisle on a set of shared celebrations and monuments is becoming more and more complicated. The establishment of a national museum on the history of Italian Fascism – to be placed either in Mussolini’s birthplace, Predappio, or in Rome – is, for instance, at the center of an intricate historical, political, and cultural exchange that resurfaces cyclically: a cumbersome reminder of a troubled past for some, at risk of becoming a pilgrimage destination for nostalgic visitors; an educational tool meant to ensure that a troublesome, yet fundamental page of Italian history becomes available to younger generations for others. Its fate, suspended and uncertain, encapsulates the mire that the politics of memory have been bogged down in for decades.
While the war still plays a major role today within the context of an increasingly polarized political debate, the presence and impact of professional historians in the public discussion about the war have declined significantly.
As a result, the necessary conversation on the interpretations of the conflict and on Italy’s role in it is sliding in the dangerous territory of non-informed political opinions, instead of being solidly anchored by historiographical inputs.
As 1945 becomes more distant every year, the space for informed historical discussion on the Second World War in the public and political arenas is visibly shrinking.
Marco Maria Aterrano is Assistant Professor at the University of Naples Federico II.
