Books & Special Issues
L’abile uso dei media e della propaganda rappresenta una delle caratteristiche più evidenti dell’... more L’abile uso dei media e della propaganda rappresenta una delle caratteristiche più evidenti dell’era fascista e nazista. Finora la storiografia si è concentrata prevalentemente sul lato politico di questa storia, tralasciando la cosiddetta «propaganda commerciale», la pubblicità, che nell’arco degli anni Trenta venne a costituire uno degli elementi chiave della strategia del consenso di entrambi i regimi.
Attraverso un misto di terrore e seduzione, i totalitarismi reclutarono ampi settori dell’industria pubblicitaria per fabbricare una visione distintamente fascista di (futura) prosperità da proiettare sulle masse di aspiranti consumatrici e consumatori.
Basandosi su approfondite ricerche d’archivio in Italia, Germania e negli Stati Uniti, questo studio propone una sostanziale reinterpretazione del rapporto tra fascismi e consumi, sfatando così il mito della natura imprescindibilmente democratica delle società dei consumi.
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Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, 52, 3 (July 2017), pp. 491-687.
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International Journal of Cultural Property 28, 3 (2021), 2021
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La pubblicità in Italia. Che ruolo ha svolto dalla belle époque alla Prima guerra mondiale, negli... more La pubblicità in Italia. Che ruolo ha svolto dalla belle époque alla Prima guerra mondiale, negli anni del fascismo e del “miracolo economico”, e poi nella fase che dalla prima crisi petrolifera ci ha portato sino ad oggi? Questo libro offre una documentata e agile risposta a queste domande, ripercorrendo oltre un secolo di storia italiana, attraverso l’analisi delle principali campagne pubblicitarie, i loro autori, i prodotti che ne sono derivati, l’impatto che hanno avuto sulla società.
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La pubblicità in Italia. Che ruolo ha svolto dalla belle époque alla Prima guerra mondiale, negli... more La pubblicità in Italia. Che ruolo ha svolto dalla belle époque alla Prima guerra mondiale, negli anni del fascismo e del “miracolo economico”, e poi nella fase che dalla prima crisi petrolifera ci ha portato sino ad oggi? Questo libro offre una documentata e agile risposta a queste domande, ripercorrendo oltre un secolo di storia italiana, attraverso l’analisi delle principali campagne pubblicitarie, i loro autori, i prodotti che ne sono derivati, l’impatto che hanno avuto sulla società.
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Articles in Class-A Journals
Journal of Modern European History, 2023
This article illustrates the role played by restitution in bringing about the first substantial c... more This article illustrates the role played by restitution in bringing about the first substantial changes in the political and public awareness of Italy's anti-Jewish persecutions after the end of the Cold War. More specifically, it analyses how political discourses changed between the years 1989 and 2003 vis-à-vis restitution campaigns on one side and historiographical advances on the other. This proves particularly relevant in the case of post-war Italy, which was exceptional in turning the restitution of national collections into a moment of cathartic rebirth while whitewashing - or all together forgetting - fascism's persecution of its Jewish and colonial subjects. As the article demonstrates, the conflation of international and domestic factors played a crucial role in pushing Italy (as well as several other countries) to start confronting – albeit partially – its antisemitic past. Restitution constituted only a piece of this puzzle, but a crucial one. It afforded the opportunity to document the involvement of many Italians in the persecution of their fellow citizens and to highlight the state’s responsibility for the deportations. Furthermore, it provided an international platform for voicing some of the most explicit admissions of accountability, which had until that point found little if any space in the domestic realm. Restitution thereby represented one of the most visible ways for Jewish communities to exercise their newly found political weight to foster the long-awaited recognition of Italy’s persecutory behaviour.
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Passato e Presente. Rivista di storia contemporanea, 2023
A new controversy has been polarising German history and public memory since 2020. Dubbed Histori... more A new controversy has been polarising German history and public memory since 2020. Dubbed Historikerstreit 2.0 in reference to the 1986 debate on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the dispute revolves around the memory politics of the Holocaust and of German colonial-era atrocities, but it is also very much about how Germany deals with its xenophobic present and its attitude to Israel’s current settlement policies.
This discussion forum takes a broader view in order to contextualise the debate within the wider scope of contemporary German historiography and memory culture and introduce a nuanced assessment of the issues at stake to the Italian public, in a country which still struggles to own up to its antisemitic past, let alone its skewed post-colonial memory and racist present.
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International Journal of Cultural Property, 28, 3, 2021
In April 1942, former carpet manufacturer Felix Ganz wrote to his daughter Annemarie with a sketc... more In April 1942, former carpet manufacturer Felix Ganz wrote to his daughter Annemarie with a sketch of their new home. After their business had been forcibly aryanised and they were evicted from their family home in spring 1941, Felix and his wife Erna were coerced into moving to smaller and smaller quarters three times, until their deportation to Theresienstadt in late summer 1942. Both would be murdered at Auschwitz the following year. In his letter, Felix illustrated how they had furnished the one-room apartment with what was left of their furniture and artworks. Stripped of most of their cultural belongings – including Felix’s gramophone and record collection – the couple had attempted to keep the pieces of material culture most significant to them, such as a Persian lamp or a few family portraits. Theirs was not a prominent art collection but rather a brilliant exemplification of Wohnzimmerkunst, that “living-room art” of more modest artistic quality which fulfilled a central social function for the upper middle-class milieus of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as illustrated by Emily Löffler. A visual and material marker of their social status, of their level of education and also of their family as well as individual identities. Besides the evident economic intent of fascist plundering, it was precisely this sense of self and of belonging that the Nazis (and the Fascists) set out to annihilate.
This collection of essays results from one central question which underpins our work as historians dealing with restitution matters: what role does research into fascist-looted art play in the bigger picture? How, if at all, does it enhance our knowledge of 20th-century history, how does it contribute to our understanding of broader historical developments? And what is so special about cultural property anyway, as it is sometimes asked by fellow historians still critical of the cultural or visual turns? As this Special Issue shows, compelling results can be achieved through a thorough historicisation of cultural restitution. From cross-examining pictorial analysis with coeval psychological interpretations to examining the social role of “everyday art” as identity marker, intertwining the study of material culture with the politics of gender, nation-building processes, identity politics or Cold War history opens up an entire new realm of possibilities. Historicizing also means counteracting one of the main pitfalls of mainstream cultural restitution, i.e. its class disparity, by moving past causes célèbres and world-renowned collections to analyze the nitty-gritty of Alltagsobjekte, everyday objects, or of the “living-room art” that adorned Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeois homes as an expression of the owners’ status and identity. Furthermore, it allows us to
see how the meaning of objects changed over time – not only in their political significance, as in the case of the world-renowned Ghent altarpiece, but also in their materiality. This is once again evidenced by the varied fate of those family objects that upper or middle-class Jews decided to bring with them from home to home during the moves forced upon them during their persecution and up to their deportation.
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European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 28, 2, 2021
This article examines how cultural restitution was presented and
debated in public discourses in ... more This article examines how cultural restitution was presented and
debated in public discourses in the three main post-fascist countries
of Western Europe, i.e. Austria, Italy and (West) Germany, from
the end of the Second World War to the 1998 signing of the
‘Washington Declaration on Nazi-confiscated Art’. The study
focuses on the role played by restitution in the process of memory-
building vis-à-vis the development of these three countries’
Vergangenheitsbewältigung, their ‘struggling to cope with the
past’. In particular, it examines the transition from a mild
Vergangenheitspolitik, ‘the politics of the past’, typical of the early
post-war period, to later attempts at a more fully fledged
Vergangenheitsbewältigung that characterized the détente and
especially the post-Cold War years. Building on a selection of
Austrian, British, German, Italian and US printed primary sources,
the paper investigates in comparative and transnational fashion
how liberal-democratic narratives surrounding the three countries’
dictatorial past were constructed in order to tackle one central
question: what role did cultural restitution play in the construction
of post-war memory politics, and, vice versa, how did the memory
and legacy of fascism impact restitution debates during and after
the Cold War? Far from constituting a mere exercise in cultural
diplomacy, the restitution of cultural property played an integral
role in these three countries’ attempts at rebuilding a sense of
national cohesion designed to overcome the ghosts of their fascist
past. This often happened at the expense of an in-depth processing
of their involvement in the Holocaust. Indeed, restitution came to
perform a central function in the shift from amnesty to amnesia of
the early post-war years in that it often reduced Wiedergutmachung
to an economic transaction through which these countries could
‘make amends’ without effecting any deeper political and social
defascistization.
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Introducing the Journal of Contemporary History Special Issue 'The Restitution of Looted Art in t... more Introducing the Journal of Contemporary History Special Issue 'The Restitution of Looted Art in the 20 th Century', this article proposes a framework for writing the history of looting and restitution in transnational and global perspective. By comparing and contextualizing instances of looting and restitution in different geographical and temporal contexts, it aims to overcome existing historiographical fragmentations and move past the overwhelming focus on the specificities of Nazi looting through an extended timeframe that inserts the Second World War into a longer perspective from the nineteenth century up to present day restitution practices. Particular emphasis is put on the interlinked histories of denazification and decolonization. Problematizing existing analytical, chronological and geographical frameworks, the article suggests how a combination of comparative, entangled and global history approaches can open up promising new avenues of research. It draws out similarities, differences and connections between processes of looting and restitution in order to discuss the extent to which looting and restitution were shaped by – and shaped – changing global networks.
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Articles & Book chapters
The Wiley Companion to the Holocaust, 2020
Chapter 34 of The Wiley Companion to the Holocaust, edited by Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl (L... more Chapter 34 of The Wiley Companion to the Holocaust, edited by Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl (London: Wiley 2020)
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Journalism Studies, , Vol. 14 (5), pp. 663-680, Oct 2013
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Il Mulino, 2017
Chapter VII in S. Cavazza e F. Triola (eds.), Parole sovrane. Comunicazione politica e storia con... more Chapter VII in S. Cavazza e F. Triola (eds.), Parole sovrane. Comunicazione politica e storia contemporanea in Italia e Germania (Bologna: Il Mulino 2017), pp. 135-156
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Discussion fora and book reviews
Quellen und Forschungen aus den Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 101 (2021) [in print], 2021
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Storica, 74, 2019
Over the last fifty years, the study of late modern and contemporary history has enormously expan... more Over the last fifty years, the study of late modern and contemporary history has enormously expanded in Italy and elsewhere. The field attracted many scholars from younger generations, strengthened its presence in university curricula, and assumed a central role in funding programs for historical research. The growing status of the field appears to be characterized by two contradictory aspects: on the one hand, an extension of the spatial perspective of analysis, with a new interest in the global dimension; on the other hand, a contraction of the period under study, as new research has often narrowed its focus to the twentieth century. The editorial board of «Storica» drew up a document that tackles this paradox and the complex relationship between modern history and the social sciences, and asked a group of six Italian modern historians to debate it in a workshop. This section contains their reflections.
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Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken
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Il mestiere di storico, IX / 2, 2017
Discussioni: Il nazismo attraverso la biografia di Hitler (a cura di Andrea di Michele e Filippo ... more Discussioni: Il nazismo attraverso la biografia di Hitler (a cura di Andrea di Michele e Filippo Triola) Peter Longerich, Hitler. Biographie, München, siedler, 2015. Ne discutono Gustavo corni (Università di Trento), Bianca Gaudenzi (Universität Konstanz-university of Cambridge), Gerhard Hirschfeld (Universität Stuttgart-University of Cambridge), Nicolas Patin (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne), Wolfgang Schieder (Universität Köln, emerito)
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conferences
While the glaring differences between Holocaust-era and colonial-era persecutions and expropriati... more While the glaring differences between Holocaust-era and colonial-era persecutions and expropriation instances are indisputable, inquiring into the similarities in post-fascist and post-colonial restitution practices and discourses appears crucial to better understand not only the political relevance of heritage and its role in memory- and nation-building, but also the persistence of anti-Jewish and racist stereotypes in the post-1945 world order and the recurrence of restitution motives in present-day nationalist propaganda.
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While the glaring differences between Holocaust-era and colonial-era persecutions and expropriati... more While the glaring differences between Holocaust-era and colonial-era persecutions and expropriation instances are indisputable, inquiring into the similarities in post-fascist and post-colonial restitution practices and discourses appears crucial to better understand not only the political relevance of heritage and its role in memory- and nation-building, but also the persistence of anti-Jewish and racist stereotypes in the post-1945 world order and the recurrence of restitution motives in present-day nationalist propaganda.
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Books & Special Issues
Attraverso un misto di terrore e seduzione, i totalitarismi reclutarono ampi settori dell’industria pubblicitaria per fabbricare una visione distintamente fascista di (futura) prosperità da proiettare sulle masse di aspiranti consumatrici e consumatori.
Basandosi su approfondite ricerche d’archivio in Italia, Germania e negli Stati Uniti, questo studio propone una sostanziale reinterpretazione del rapporto tra fascismi e consumi, sfatando così il mito della natura imprescindibilmente democratica delle società dei consumi.
Articles in Class-A Journals
This discussion forum takes a broader view in order to contextualise the debate within the wider scope of contemporary German historiography and memory culture and introduce a nuanced assessment of the issues at stake to the Italian public, in a country which still struggles to own up to its antisemitic past, let alone its skewed post-colonial memory and racist present.
This collection of essays results from one central question which underpins our work as historians dealing with restitution matters: what role does research into fascist-looted art play in the bigger picture? How, if at all, does it enhance our knowledge of 20th-century history, how does it contribute to our understanding of broader historical developments? And what is so special about cultural property anyway, as it is sometimes asked by fellow historians still critical of the cultural or visual turns? As this Special Issue shows, compelling results can be achieved through a thorough historicisation of cultural restitution. From cross-examining pictorial analysis with coeval psychological interpretations to examining the social role of “everyday art” as identity marker, intertwining the study of material culture with the politics of gender, nation-building processes, identity politics or Cold War history opens up an entire new realm of possibilities. Historicizing also means counteracting one of the main pitfalls of mainstream cultural restitution, i.e. its class disparity, by moving past causes célèbres and world-renowned collections to analyze the nitty-gritty of Alltagsobjekte, everyday objects, or of the “living-room art” that adorned Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeois homes as an expression of the owners’ status and identity. Furthermore, it allows us to
see how the meaning of objects changed over time – not only in their political significance, as in the case of the world-renowned Ghent altarpiece, but also in their materiality. This is once again evidenced by the varied fate of those family objects that upper or middle-class Jews decided to bring with them from home to home during the moves forced upon them during their persecution and up to their deportation.
debated in public discourses in the three main post-fascist countries
of Western Europe, i.e. Austria, Italy and (West) Germany, from
the end of the Second World War to the 1998 signing of the
‘Washington Declaration on Nazi-confiscated Art’. The study
focuses on the role played by restitution in the process of memory-
building vis-à-vis the development of these three countries’
Vergangenheitsbewältigung, their ‘struggling to cope with the
past’. In particular, it examines the transition from a mild
Vergangenheitspolitik, ‘the politics of the past’, typical of the early
post-war period, to later attempts at a more fully fledged
Vergangenheitsbewältigung that characterized the détente and
especially the post-Cold War years. Building on a selection of
Austrian, British, German, Italian and US printed primary sources,
the paper investigates in comparative and transnational fashion
how liberal-democratic narratives surrounding the three countries’
dictatorial past were constructed in order to tackle one central
question: what role did cultural restitution play in the construction
of post-war memory politics, and, vice versa, how did the memory
and legacy of fascism impact restitution debates during and after
the Cold War? Far from constituting a mere exercise in cultural
diplomacy, the restitution of cultural property played an integral
role in these three countries’ attempts at rebuilding a sense of
national cohesion designed to overcome the ghosts of their fascist
past. This often happened at the expense of an in-depth processing
of their involvement in the Holocaust. Indeed, restitution came to
perform a central function in the shift from amnesty to amnesia of
the early post-war years in that it often reduced Wiedergutmachung
to an economic transaction through which these countries could
‘make amends’ without effecting any deeper political and social
defascistization.
Articles & Book chapters
Discussion fora and book reviews
conferences
Attraverso un misto di terrore e seduzione, i totalitarismi reclutarono ampi settori dell’industria pubblicitaria per fabbricare una visione distintamente fascista di (futura) prosperità da proiettare sulle masse di aspiranti consumatrici e consumatori.
Basandosi su approfondite ricerche d’archivio in Italia, Germania e negli Stati Uniti, questo studio propone una sostanziale reinterpretazione del rapporto tra fascismi e consumi, sfatando così il mito della natura imprescindibilmente democratica delle società dei consumi.
This discussion forum takes a broader view in order to contextualise the debate within the wider scope of contemporary German historiography and memory culture and introduce a nuanced assessment of the issues at stake to the Italian public, in a country which still struggles to own up to its antisemitic past, let alone its skewed post-colonial memory and racist present.
This collection of essays results from one central question which underpins our work as historians dealing with restitution matters: what role does research into fascist-looted art play in the bigger picture? How, if at all, does it enhance our knowledge of 20th-century history, how does it contribute to our understanding of broader historical developments? And what is so special about cultural property anyway, as it is sometimes asked by fellow historians still critical of the cultural or visual turns? As this Special Issue shows, compelling results can be achieved through a thorough historicisation of cultural restitution. From cross-examining pictorial analysis with coeval psychological interpretations to examining the social role of “everyday art” as identity marker, intertwining the study of material culture with the politics of gender, nation-building processes, identity politics or Cold War history opens up an entire new realm of possibilities. Historicizing also means counteracting one of the main pitfalls of mainstream cultural restitution, i.e. its class disparity, by moving past causes célèbres and world-renowned collections to analyze the nitty-gritty of Alltagsobjekte, everyday objects, or of the “living-room art” that adorned Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeois homes as an expression of the owners’ status and identity. Furthermore, it allows us to
see how the meaning of objects changed over time – not only in their political significance, as in the case of the world-renowned Ghent altarpiece, but also in their materiality. This is once again evidenced by the varied fate of those family objects that upper or middle-class Jews decided to bring with them from home to home during the moves forced upon them during their persecution and up to their deportation.
debated in public discourses in the three main post-fascist countries
of Western Europe, i.e. Austria, Italy and (West) Germany, from
the end of the Second World War to the 1998 signing of the
‘Washington Declaration on Nazi-confiscated Art’. The study
focuses on the role played by restitution in the process of memory-
building vis-à-vis the development of these three countries’
Vergangenheitsbewältigung, their ‘struggling to cope with the
past’. In particular, it examines the transition from a mild
Vergangenheitspolitik, ‘the politics of the past’, typical of the early
post-war period, to later attempts at a more fully fledged
Vergangenheitsbewältigung that characterized the détente and
especially the post-Cold War years. Building on a selection of
Austrian, British, German, Italian and US printed primary sources,
the paper investigates in comparative and transnational fashion
how liberal-democratic narratives surrounding the three countries’
dictatorial past were constructed in order to tackle one central
question: what role did cultural restitution play in the construction
of post-war memory politics, and, vice versa, how did the memory
and legacy of fascism impact restitution debates during and after
the Cold War? Far from constituting a mere exercise in cultural
diplomacy, the restitution of cultural property played an integral
role in these three countries’ attempts at rebuilding a sense of
national cohesion designed to overcome the ghosts of their fascist
past. This often happened at the expense of an in-depth processing
of their involvement in the Holocaust. Indeed, restitution came to
perform a central function in the shift from amnesty to amnesia of
the early post-war years in that it often reduced Wiedergutmachung
to an economic transaction through which these countries could
‘make amends’ without effecting any deeper political and social
defascistization.
The Restitution of Looted Artefacts since 1945: Denazification and decolonization in entangled perspective
German Historical Institute in Rome, 16-18 May 2022
Darüber hinaus schließt Olga Grjasnowa an die Essays von Daniel Kehlmann (Heft 1), Lukas Bärfuss (Heft 2) und Julia Franck (Heft 3) an und betrachtet das Verhältnis von Geschichte und Literatur; Dan Diner überlegt, was aus der deutschen Geschichte geworden wäre, wenn an den entscheidenden Weggabelungen andere Richtungen eingeschlagen worden wären; Dieter Gosewinkel, Barbara John und Kyung-Ho Cha sprechen darüber, was „Staatsbürgerschaft“ mit Fußball und deutschem Hip-Hop zu tun hat; und die Comic-Zeichner*innen Reinhard Kleist, Sebastian Lörscher, Ulli Lust, Nicolas Mahler und Sophia Martineck zeigen ihren je individuellen Blick auf die Zeitgeschichte.