A Gnawing Fascist Nostalgia

...What has reinforced such efforts recently, and brought them to the forefront of public discussion, is the country's sharp political shift to the Right following the victory last year of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Center-Right "Freedom House" coalition...

...As the writer Gabriele Romagnoli put it: "Up until six months ago, the city was governed by a gentleman mayor who...

...For despite the fact that many Italians acted to protect Jews during the War, most mainstream Italians did little to protest or combat the racist laws when they were implemented...

...This has led to a less ideological examination of history that seeks to separate myth from fact...

...The late Mussolini loyalist and longtime MSI chief, Giorgio Almirante, described the scene: "The central station of Trieste was unusually full of people—young people, the elderly, former soldiers, simple housewives and ladies in furs: they were waiting for Mussolini with banners and a band....' It was in Trieste, too, on September 18, 1938, that Mussolini chose to launch his regime's harsh new anti-Semitic campaign with a speech outlining "the Italian way to racism...

...The new restrictions hit particularly hard in Trieste, home to one of Italy's largest, most prosperous, most patriotic, and most highly integrated Jewish communities...

...But they are, in fact, the disturbing face of a trend that is much deeper and much darker: a gnawing nostalgia for the Fascist past that is indicative of an attempt to reevaluate the bedrock ideals of Italy's postwar history...

...It is a reflection of serious changes in Italian society and politics...

...Overnight, Italy's deeply acculturated Jews were stripped of their rights as citizens...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular contributor to The New Leader...

...Often, a river divides them, with opposing flags deployed in a threatening manner on one or the other of its banks...

...Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe, has just been published by the University of California Press...

...Since then, he has sought to shed the jackboot image and transform the AN into a mainstream Rightist force...

...But the media magnate, who is Italy's richest man, sets alarm bells ringing with unabashed maneuvers to consolidate power in his hands: In January, he forced out Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero and assumed the post himself...

...Shame...

...That is the date Italy and several other European countries now mark as a "Day of Memory" of the Holocaust...

...The country's postwar intellectual elite was firmly grounded in the Left, which had deep ties to the anti-Fascist resistance but was dominated by the Italian Communist Party, Italy's second largest political formation after the conservative Christian Democratic Party...

...The calendar was issued by a publishing house based in the town of Forlì, near Predappio, and run by a nephew of Mussolini...

...mussolini.it—serves as an online shopping mall for such memorabilia...

...In a step many viewed as an outrage to memory, the new Mayor appointed one of Trieste's most controversial and outspoken Right-wing politicians, Roberto Menia, to be the city's chief cultural assessor—and thus head of the commission governing the Risiera, now a museum memorial...

...It derives from a series of personal actions and activities that seem morally incompatible with the symbolic significance of [a post] whose responsibility is to guarantee the care of that place of suffering in the name of us all...

...For decades, this created an emotional and political block that was explored only gingerly by historians, politicians and individuals...

...It is dedicated to the memory of Il Duce, Italy's Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1922 and led the country into World War II alongside the Nazis...

...His presence, however, split the commemoration...

...Indeed, local Jews, joined by other minority groups, specifically asked him to take part in the ceremony as a counterbalance to Menia...

...Through the 1990s, as firsthand memory of the Fascist period faded, new debates over its "true" nature and legacy arose...

...It teaches you about the fragility of the human condition.' Zevi escaped to the United States...

...Her new book...

...there were also Fascists who helped the Jews...

...Under the circumstances, his carefully chosen message had a particular resonance: "If we want a different future, we cannot lower a veil of forgetfulness over a past that is still all too present...

...I have a wonderful series of satiric woodcuts that the Triestine artist Carlo Wosfry made in those years, cynically depicting the alacrity with which people in the town changed allegiances...

...In Italy, the so-called "Clean Hands" political corruption investigations were launched in 1992...

...The stately port that curves around the northern tip of the Adriatic is one of those frontier cities whose history—like its borders—has shifted seismically over the years, and where political passions run high...

...The AN's leader, Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, is a suave politician who in 1994 forged his party out of the old neo-Fascist MSI...

...The latest seismic shift in Trieste took place last year, when the liberal Leftist local government was voted out of office and replaced by Berlusconi allies...

...Today, as one recent guidebook to Italy put it, the place is a "pilgrimage site for creeps...

...Each month, too, important dates from his life are noted...

...Meanwhile, about 100 Trieste Jews boycotted the Risiera ceremony altogether and instead held their own commemoration in the city's Jewish cemetery...

...The new tensions revealed themselves vividly on January 27...

...Shocking as they are, the calendar, the Web site and the Predappio scene are almost too kitschy to be taken seriously— just as old films and photographs of Mussolini in his tasseled hat and bombastic posturing can seem laughable and caricaturish from our vantage point now...

...Each month features big black and white photographs of him in various attitudes of strut and swagger, plus color reproductions of hagiographie Fascist-era posters andmilitant quotes from his speeches and writings...

...Some Italians, though, have clearly chosen "different" ways of remembering...

...On a personal level Berlusconi is popular among the electorate...

...It was in Trieste, in 1920, that Mussolini, who used irredentist ardor to feed Fascistic aims, had his first taste of public acclaim after he egged on Fascist squads to beat up local Slavs...

...A Predappio-based Web site—www...

...Sixty years later she was still angry...

...But as many as 1,000 Jews were killed and incinerated there, in addition to thousands more Croats, Slovenes and anti-Fascist Italians...

...It was bitter...

...I'll never forget the indifference," she told me...

...Even the Mayor then, Enrico Paolo Salem, was Jewish, but he had to quit once II Duce's laws came into force...

...Here in Trieste many of these complaints have converged...

...The cover shows a uniformed Mussolini, with his bald bullet dome and jutting jaw, standing arms akimbo in front of huge Fascist symbols...

...He is known for what have been described as "nostalgic attitudes toward Fascism"—not to mention for being a proponent of refurbishing "historic truth" and of "Italianizing" Trieste, where there is still a considerable Slavic minority...

...But about 300 Left-wing demonstrators, crying "Shame...

...second act was to rehang the portrait of the [Fascist Mayor] Pagnini, 'in power' from 1943 to 1945...

...produce a beautiful historical calendar dedicated to my father...

...One of these equates both Fascists and partisans as patriots fighting for their own national vision...

...I could not help noting that the figure was almost identical to the number of Czech Jews killed in the Shoah—77,297—whose names are inscribed on the walls of the Pinkas synagogue in Prague...

...It served mainly as a concentration transit camp for deportees who were en route elsewhere, including Auschwitz...

...II Duce's son, Romano, provided a brief preface: "Each year my cousin Giorgio and a mutual friend...

...It's not fashionable in the National Alliance to be anti-Semitic," said a friend of mine who is active in Trieste's 600strong Jewish community...

...never wore a tie and organized exhibits of the painter Basquiat...

...They shattered old political parties, swept away many veteran politicians, and opened the door wide to a reassessment of the past...

...In addition to the kitsch, for instance, there have been cases up and down Italy in the past five years of towns naming, or trying to name, streets and squares after leading Fascist figures...

...Little more than 10 years ago, Menia —joined by Fini—staged irredentist demonstrations vowing that Italians "will return" to Istria, the Dalmatian Coast and Slovenia...

...Trieste and the contested area around it were incorporated into Yugoslavia in 1945...

...Both are largely products of the fall of Communism over a decade ago, a paradigm shift that triggered a process of historical re-examination throughout Europe on many fronts...

...Cloaked honor guards stand vigil at II Duce's tomb and souvenir shops sell Mussolini T-shirts, baseball caps, portraits, and other keepsakes...

...Thanks to people like them, the memory of a great man who sacrificed himself for his country and his ideals remains alive in the minds of all...

...Italian troops entered it in 1918...

...June 14, for example, the date in 1934 when "in Venice, he meets for the first time Adolf Hitler, who is on an official visit to Italy...

...On the day I checked the site, the hit counter said it had been visited by 77,325 people since May of last year...

...Or June 23, the day in 1923 when "Il Duce speaks for the first time from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia" in Rome...

...This present rehabilitation of the man who allied himself politically and militarily with the Nazis, who persecuted Italian Jews without prompting from Hitler, who dragged Italy into a disastrous war, is not surprising," wrote historian James Walston of American University in Rome last year...

...This year too, they have created a work worthy of consideration...

...Long under Hapsburg rule, Trieste was the center of Italian irredentism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries...

...Several thousand people gathered solemnly for the wreath-layings and speeches by prominent figures, including Amos Luzzatto, the president of Italy's Jewish community...

...Another finds its voice in more dramatic efforts to rehabilitate Mussolini and his regime...

...Besides Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, the coalition consists of the Northern League, which once aimed at separating northern Italy from the rest of the country and is known for its overt anti-immigrant policies, and the National Alliance (AN), which has its roots in neo-Fascism...

...This winter, protesters around the country have criticized what they see as his attempt to subordinate the judiciary to the government by reining in the independence of prosecutors...

...Berlusconi has also come under intense fire for conflicts of interest...

...He controls Italy's three main private television networks, it is noted, and at the same time his government controls the three state-run TV channels...

...Trieste is the site of the only Nazi death camp to have operated on Italian soil— at an abandoned rice-processing plant called the Risiera di San Sabba...

...We are in a frontier region, where all too often rivalry, aggressiveness, even violence between different persons and peoples is nourished...

...in 1920 the city and surrounding areas, including Istria, were ceded to Italy...

...But it is always possible to put up a bridge...

...Nostalgic Fascist sympathizers, grouped around the small neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement Party (MSI), were shunned as dinosaurs on the fringes of mainstream politics...

...Included as a bonus was a self-contained guide to Predappio, the little town in Romagna where Mussolini was born and is buried...

...From one day to the next, we became nobodies, ghosts," Tullia Zevi, the former leader of the Italian Jewish community, once recalled to me...

...Let this be the commitment of today, which sees gathered together Italians and Slovenes, Christians, Muslims and Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox: a commitment to construct these bridges together, so that the cultural specificity of one can enrich the other, because only reciprocal knowledge— which alone can be the terrain of admiration and brotherhood—leads to peaceful coexistence among peoples...

...An open protest letter to Mayor Dipiazza from a number of Trieste intellectuals, published in local newspapers, declared: "The problem with Menia [as director of the Risiera] does not directly derive from his political convictions and from the party he belongs to...

...Postwar Italian democracy was built on a sacrosanct foundation of anti-Fascism that exalted the wartime resistance while minimizing the number of Italians who supported—and fought for—Mussolini's regime...

...So Menia expresses himself against the Slovenian minority...

...Although only 40, he is a leading figure in the AN and has a checkered past as a hardline activist in the old MSI...

...Currently those territories form part of Slovenia and Croatia...

...Or May 9, the day in 1936 when "Il Duce proclaims the foundation of the Fascist Empire...

...Luzzatto, who makes no bones of his skepticism regarding the success of Fini's attempts to transform the AN into a mainstream party, was well aware of the tensions before he arrived in Trieste...

...Nobody took a stand...

...The items for sale include Mussolini lighters, flags, berets, busts, ties, stickers, sweatshirts, money clips, pins, scarves, figurines, coins, music, watches, ashtrays, key chains, medals, statuettes, playing cards, and pens...

...Then they elected Roberto Dipiazza, whose...

...As Walston suggests, fascination with the Fascist era is not brand new, nor is the effort to reinterpret Italy's history...

...In power' has to be put in quotation marks, though, because at that time the city was occupied by the Nazis and they were the ones who were in charge...

...It was not until 1954 that a fourpower conference in London finally fixed the frontier: Trieste became Italian, but its hinterland and Istria went to Yugoslavia...

...heckled Menia loudly from outside the gates and waved posters bearing old photographs of him giving the Fascist salute...

...It was Menia who presided over the solemn January 27 ceremonies at the Risiera di San Sabba...