In Europe (43 page)

The driving force for all Italians, in all their hope and rage, was above all the inferiority factor: Italy was always missing the boat. In the second half of the nineteenth century, while all the major nations of Europe were concentrating on the expansion of their industries, the conquering of new colonies and the building of armies and fleets, the Italians were still battling for their own unity. By the time Italy had finally become a single entity on the map, it lacked the military and economic power to achieve its great aspirations. ‘The Italians have such a great appetite, and such bad teeth,’ Bismarck said, and so it was.

In 1914, Italy's share in the world's industrial production was 2.4 per cent, as compared to Britain with 13.6 per cent and Germany with 14.8 per cent. (Today those figures are 3.4, 4.4 and 5.9 per cent respectively.) Large landowners and speculators had bought up the estates belonging to monastic orders, and hundreds of thousands of hungry farmers had moved to the cities or emigrated. The traditional social structure had been destroyed for good. Those were years of ambition, poverty and frustration.

Was Fascism, then, simply a phase in the development of the Italian nation state, a growing pain that went away half a century ago? Predappio indicates the contrary. This same Fascism is still alive, it can be given vent to here with a form of innocent pride. Certain elements of it still resonate in Italian politics, and within Europe as well it still constitutes an important undercurrent. Fascism was, and is, more than a historical fluke.

In the 1930s the
Münchener Post
was already using the terms ‘Fascists’ and ‘Nazis’ interchangeably, and today the two movements are usually seen as one and the same. Yet, in the beginning, Mussolini had little use for Hitler. He considered him ‘sexually degenerate’, and his hatred of the Jews completely insane. When the Nazis tried to seize power in Austria
in July 1934, following the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss, he assembled his troops threateningly at the Brenner Pass. What is more, he actually had a personal bond with Dollfuss: on the day of the murder, the Austrian chancellor's wife and children were visiting the Mussolini family, and Il Duce himself had to deliver to them the sorrowful news. One year later he decided to invade Ethiopia – earlier than planned – for he believed that within two or three years he would be at war with Germany.

The conquest of Ethiopia was the first step in Mussolini's drive to establish an empire of his own, just like the British and the French. It was to have been a fast and easy victory, and the Italians used every means – fair or foul – at their disposal: gas attacks, chemical weapons, random bombardments of the civilian population. The Ethiopians were virtually defenceless, and were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. In the end, the expedition was Mussolini's greatest diplomatic blunder. The whole world saw it as a cowardly, villainous undertaking, and to his dismay his putative ally Britain turned against him as well. After that he had no choice but to join forces with Hitler, in an unholy embrace.

Hitler, on the other hand, had been a great admirer of Mussolini from the start. The Braunes Haus in Munich contained a life-sized bust of Il Duce. To the Nazis, he was the prime example of a dynamic leader saving his divided fatherland. Less than a week after Mussolini's famous ‘March on Rome’, the crowd in Munich's packed Hofbräuhaus was shouting: ‘Germany's Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler!’ From that moment on Hitler was referred to as ‘Führer’, in imitation of Mussolini. And a year later in Munich, at the time of his first attempted coup, he spoke of it as the ‘March on Berlin’.

But didn't they bear a striking resemblance, National Socialism and Fascism? Didn't both movements spring from the same soil? After all, Germany and Italy were both young nations in search of their own structures, and both had been formed as confederacies of small states. In both countries, stymied nationalism played a major role as well: Versailles had been a humiliating experience for the Italians too. The Germans mourned publicly for Saarland and Alsace-Lorraine, the Italians had their own ‘oppressed’ minorities in Austria and along the Dalmatian coast.

Another important similarity was the culture of violence. Italian has more words for ‘gang’ than any other language. As early as 1887 there
had been a major uprising by federations of peasant farm workers, in associations known as
fasci
, against the large landowners and the state. Tax offices were plundered and large estates occupied, all under the banners of Marx, the Virgin Mary and ‘good King Umberto’. Mussolini built upon those rebel traditions, upon the rural anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, upon the struggle against the ‘alien’, elitist state. The
Arditi
, the ‘fearless ones’ – crack units formed during the First World War and operating on the fringe ever since – were the Italian counterparts of the German
Freikorper
. These commandos, some 10,000 in all, went about dressed in black, wore a skull and crossbones as their emblem and spoke only in the form of exchanges screamed back and forth between the commander and his troops. Their language, clothing and folklore was adopted by Mussolini as that of the ‘typical Italian male’, and later by Fascists and Nazis all over Europe.

Within a short time of Mussolini setting up the Fasci di Combattimento on Milan's Piazza San Sepolcro, on 23 March, 1919, his
fasci
could no longer be distinguished from the
Arditi
. In the first month of their existence, the Milanese
fasci
attacked and destroyed the offices of
Avanti!
, the socialist party organ that Mussolini had led with such verve in his younger years. Three years later, with the help of the large landowners, they effectively and brutally stamped out the socialist and Catholic workers’ movements and purged local politics of their representatives by murder, beatings, arson and intimidation.

Terror paid off: this, too, was what Hitler learned from Mussolini. On 16 October, 1922, Mussolini and his men – under pressure from the
fasci
– decided to take Rome within the next two weeks. On 27–28 October, 1922, the legendary March on Rome was held. Some 20,000 poorly armed Fascists moved on the capital and stopped only thirty kilometres from the city; at that point, half the men turned and went home. (Mussolini himself, by the way, had simply taken the
direttissimo
, the express train, from Milan to Rome.) The government, however, was thrown into such a state of panic that it resigned. King Victor Emmanuel III refused to declare a state of emergency. Instead, the next day he asked Mussolini to form a new government. Like Franz von Papen later in Germany, the king hoped in this way to co-opt the Fascists. But Mussolini had no intention of disbanding his gang of thugs. In the April 1924 elections his government received
two thirds of the vote. When the socialist Giacomo Matteotti stood up in parliament and stated that the election results were based on fraud and terror, which was nothing but the truth, it cost him his life.

By 1925, everything the Nazis could only dream of in the 1920s had already been achieved in Italy.

Then, for most Italians, began the years of indifference, of
Gli Indifferenti
as the title of Alberto Moravia's 1929 novel went. From 1925, the ‘Roman salute’ was mandatory at schools and universities, and almost everyone complied. The textbooks were placed under strict government censorship and every civil servant had to sign a declaration of loyalty to Mussolini; only a few avoided doing so. Making compromises and toeing the line, according to the American author Alexander Stille, constituted the norm in Fascist Italy; most people led their lives in a world of moral greyness, searching blindly for ways to maintain their integrity – to do their jobs well, to avoid the worst forms of obeisance, to lead a morally impeccable life – rather than follow the path of direct resistance.

All the more exceptional then were the few young men who actually did begin active resistance – those, for example, associated with Vittorio Foa's Giustizia e Libertà movement. In 1937, after giving the call to fight against Fascism in Spain – ‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy’ – the move-ment's leaders, the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, were murdered by French fascists operating on behalf of the Italian secret police. Foa himself spent eight years in prison, even though he could have obtained his freedom at any time by requesting a pardon from Mussolini. His friend, the brilliant Leone Ginzburg, lost his job at the University of Turin in 1933 because he refused to take the Fascist oath. In 1934 he was sentenced to two years in prison for his work for Giustizia e Libertà, and from 1940 he lived with his wife and young children in internal exile in the remote Abruzzi. He did not survive the war. Foa later asked himself why Ginzburg had waited to become an Italian citizen before taking part in ‘the conspiracy’. His own answer was: ‘It was precisely the Italian tradition which he considered to be the foundation for his own anti-Fascism.’

At first, however, Mussolini's experiment – unlike National Socialism – was viewed in Europe with a certain sense of appreciation. Many intellectuals
found Fascism, like communism, an attractive alternative to ‘weak-kneed’ democracy. Terror was a price they were willing to pay. Mussolini's new society seemed to stand head and shoulders above debilitating party politics, religious feuding and the class struggle. Everywhere the dictator was lauded for his fight against ‘political corruption, social anarchy and national degeneration’. The newspapers were amazed by the speed with which he carried out building projects and set up pension funds and other social services, and the comment heard wherever Europeans compared notes was that ‘at least the trains in Italy are running on time again’. Winston Churchill called him a ‘Roman genius’, and in 1927 he assured Italian journalists that if he was Italian he would follow Mussolini ‘wholeheartedly, from start to finish, in your triumphant fight against the beastly predilections and passions of Leninism’. The Indian freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi praised him as the saviour of Italy. In October 1927, the readers of the Dutch daily
Algemeen Handelsblad
chose him as ‘the greatest figure of his day’, second only to Thomas Edison.

Mussolini's greatest diplomatic triumph was the concordat of 1929, which defined relations between the Vatican and Italy. When he embarked on his Ethiopian foray in 1935 – even as the Germans were expanding eastward, Mussolini wanted to build a colonial empire around the Mediterranean – the expedition was bid Godspeed by Pope Pius XI. In the cathedral at Milan, Cardinal Alfred Schuster blessed the banners which would ‘bear the cross of Christ to Ethiopia’.

After that, an end came to the international appreciation for Fascism. Mussolini changed colours like a chameleon; he had always done so, but now it became obvious even to the most casual observer. In late 1937, he converted to anti-Semitism. Not only did he hope in this way to establish himself in Hitler's good graces, but he was also angry about the growing criticism of his Ethiopian adventure by the international ‘Jewish’ press. Criticism was something to which he was not accustomed. In imitation of Germany, marriages were forbidden between Jews and ‘persons of Aryan descent’, Jewish teachers and students were banned from the schools, restrictions were imposed on Jewish entrepreneurs. Leone Ginzburg, who successfully applied for Italian citizenship in 1931, despite his Jewishness, had it rescinded in 1938.

Even so, under Mussolini, neither Ginzburg nor Foa were ever persecuted for being Jewish. Italy never became a truly anti-Semitic state. The
reluctance with which Italian officials and police – the Fascists among them – carried out the anti-Semitic measures stood in stark contrast to the punctuality shown, for example, by German, Austrian and Dutch officials. The deportation of Jews from Italy only began after the Germans had seized power, after September 1943. The number of Italian Jews killed was therefore significantly lower than in Germany: close to 7,000, a total of 16 per cent of the country's Jewish population. (By way of comparison, in France almost 25 per cent of all Jews were killed, in Belgium 40 per cent, in the Netherlands around 75 per cent.) In few European countries was the Holocaust sabotaged as thoroughly as in Fascist Italy.

The Fascists’ racism was as void of content as many of their other slogans. It was not fanatical and principled, as it was with the Nazis, but opportunistic. From the beginning, the Fascist movement had Jewish members and Jewish financiers. Of those who took part in the March on Rome, 230 were Jews, after which Jewish party membership rose to more than 10,000. Anti-Semitic theoreticians like Giovanni Preziosi had little influence. When Il Duce and Pope Pius XI met in 1932, it was not Mussolini but the Pope who uttered overtly anti-Semitic comments. In a report unearthed by Mussolini biographer Richard Bosworth, the church's problems in the Soviet Union, Mexico and the Spanish Republic were, in the Pope's words ‘reinforced by the anti-Christian spirit of Judaism’. For years, Mussolini himself had a Jewish mistress, and as late as 1932 he appointed a Jew as his minister of finance. During the first years of German persecution he granted asylum in Italy to at least 3,000 Jews. The Germany Nazi-pioneer Anton Drexler openly expressed his suspicion that Mussolini was himself a Jew.

Fascism, therefore, was an essentially Italian movement. ‘Italy knows no anti-Semitism, and we believe it never will,’ Mussolini wrote in 1920. Italians never cultivated any nostalgia concerning a lost ‘Italian’ tribe the way the Germans dreamed of a ‘Germanic’ tribe and an ethnically pure ‘folk community’. Throughout the centuries, Italy had been populated by a shifting mixture of Etruscans, Celts, Greeks, Visigoths, Lombards, Franks, Saracens, Huns and other peoples, some of them original inhabitants, but most of them conquerors who had stayed. When Italy became a unified nation in the nineteenth century, there was no way Italians could form
a ‘conceptual community’ by applying such terms as ‘folk’, ‘race’ and ‘tribe’. The Italian symbols of unity were completely different: language, culture, the liberty of the French Revolution and
virtù
, that form of creative civilisation that had for centuries allowed the Italians to feel superior to the barbarians from the North.