220155 German and Italian societies and fascist regimes: topics and debates (S) (SoSe 2020)

UPDATE (14.04.2020)
Due to the Coronavirus recent developments, the course will take place via E-Learning. Every change will be communicated promply here and/or via e-mail.

This course has at its center the rhetoric, the ideology and the political action of Fascists and Nazis respectively in Italy and Germany. At the center of the historical contextualization will be the Partito Nazionale Fascista and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei from their birth, through the construction of the two fascist totalitarian states, and up until the end of World War II. The lessons will be centered around the critical analysis of the causes of the ascent of the two parties – the traumas and memories of conflict, the difficult reconstruction, the political, economic and social instability – and the solutions that they offered to national societies touched by deep crises, through the exploitation of diffused fears and uncertainties, a capillary construction of the “enemy”, and the act of pursuing national grandiosity. Together with the question related to the way totalitarian regimes such as those in Italy and Germany came to exist and consolidate, a central issue in the course will concern the role (through action but also in-action), that Italian and German societies played to this regard.

Bibliography

Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the dynamics of racial exclusion. Violence against Jews in provincial Germany, 1919-1939. [Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung. Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz, 1919 bis 1939, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2007].
Franz Bajohr und Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2009.
Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs (Ed.), Probing the limits of Categorization. The Bystander in Holocaust History, Berghahn, New York/Oxford 2019.
Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher (Eds.), In the society of fascists. Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy, Palgrave MacMillan, London 2012.
Richard James Boon Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (Eds.), Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation, Palgrave MacMillan, London 1999.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945, University of California Press, Berkeley 2004.