Longing for Purity: Fascism and Nazism in the Italian and German Satirical Press (1943/1945–1963)

The Publications

Some of the satirical publications under review in this essay were reported to have a weekly readership of 100,000, while others reached an audience of more than 200,000 readers, and one even claimed 450,000 readers. ⁸ To speak of public opinion in East Germany is, at the very least, controversial due to the communist dictatorship’s powerful control of the media. Yet, even in the case of East Germany it is possible to identify examples of more or less autonomous initiatives of some satirical authors ⁹ and, as we will later see, the spontaneous reactions of their audiences, as recorded in police reports.

Both Italy and Germany had important satirical traditions. However, while in the years following the Second World War, the Italian satirical press flourished and dozens of magazines with different political orientations and often significant reach were founded, there were comparatively few satirical magazines in both East and West Germany. The not particularly florid state of the German satirical press comes as an even greater surprise if we consider that that same period has been described as a ‘paradise for the magazine press’. ¹⁰ How can we explain such a striking difference? It is tempting to argue that the scarcity of German satirical magazines might be a result of the trauma Nazism produced. ¹¹ Yet, no evidence supports such a conclusion. In fact, the German satirical press had suffered a significant decline even before 1933 and under the Nazi regime no successful satirical publication emerged. ¹² In Italy, by contrast, some very successful satirical magazines commenced publication during the 1920s and 1930s and a new generation of satirists became popular. Most of them were based in Milan or Rome and worked for magazines such as Il Travaso (Rome), Marc’Aurelio (Rome), Bertoldo (Milan) and Guerin Meschino (Milan). It is significant that three of these four reappeared in circulation after 1945 bearing their pre-war names, while the fourth one (Bertoldo) had a direct follower (Candido), with the same pre-war publisher (the tycoon Angelo Rizzoli), as well as the same editors and many of the same contributors.

The post-war Il Travaso, Marc’Aurelio and Guerin Meschino shared with Candido a moderate-conservative outlook. Candido (1945–1961 with a weekly circulation of 225,000) was founded by the cartoonist and writer Giovanni Guareschi, the creator of the fictional character of Don Camillo, ¹³ and by the cartoonist Giovanni Mosca; both ranked among the founders of Bertoldo. Il Travaso, first founded in 1900 and published until the Liberation of Rome in 1944, was published again in Rome between 1946 and 1966 (100,000 copies a week). Its editor, the cartoonist Guglielmo ‘Guasta’ Guastaveglia, had carried out the same role in 1922, when Mussolini became Prime Minister of Italy. At that time Guasta was a harsh critic of Fascism, which he attacked through his cartoons. Later on, he was forced to resign as editor and in the following years ended up backing the regime’s policies. Marc’Aurelio, first founded in Rome in 1931 and published until 1943, was brought out again between 1948 and 1959, first in Rome by its founder, Vito De Bellis, and later in Florence, with 80,000 copies a week all together.

The radical anti-fascist magazine Cantachiaro also sold in strong numbers (100,000 copies a week); however, it was only published from 1944, just days after the Liberation of Rome, until 1948. Its founders were two intellectuals with little or no experience in the satirical press: Raffaello Ferruzzi, a civil servant in the Ministry of Public Education who had contributed to the anti-Fascist satirical paper Il Becco Giallo, and the journalist Franco Monicelli. The anti-clerical and radical anti-Fascist magazine Don Basilio (130,000 copies a week) was published in Rome from 1946 to 1950, and was probably financed with money from the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Its contents often provoked outrage in Catholic circles. The Vatican asked in vain for the Italian Government to withdraw the magazine’s licence and eventually the Church excommunicated the journals’ authors and publishers.

Two magazines of neo-Fascist orientation achieved less substantial circulation figures. Il Merlo Giallo (Rome, 1946–1957, after which it was converted into an annual magazine) printed 22,000 copies a week in 1954 – a point at which the magazine experienced financial difficulties. It was founded by satirist Alberto Giannini, also founder of the aforementioned Il Becco Giallo, a paper that proved one of the harshest critics of Fascism in the early 1920s until it was shut down by the regime. After that Giannini (not to be confused with Guglielmo Giannini, the founder of the successful political movement ‘L’Uomo Qualunque’) moved to France and became a Fascist and probably a spy for the regime. Asso di Bastoni (Rome, 1948–1957, 30,000 copies a week), meanwhile, was a nostalgic paper of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI), founded by activists from the neo-Fascist party, Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI).

It is important to point out that between 1948 and the 1960s, no significant new satirical magazine began publication in Italy and that in the 1960s all satirical magazines ceased publication entirely, leaving a vacuum in the satirical press that would not be filled until the following decade. One possible reason for this decline is perhaps the Italian satirical press’s inability to create new content and styles in the post-war period. Furthermore, from 1951 to 1959 there was no Italian left-wing satirical magazine in circulation. This might be a consequence of the fact that the recent and strong Italian satirical tradition was a conservative, and even pro-Fascist, one. By contrast, the leftist parties, such as the PCI, did not invest in satire’s potential for political mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s.

Between 1945 and 1946 in the Western zones of Germany, a number of satirical magazines with different political outlooks were published. None of them lasted very long. Among the most prominent ones was the communist magazine Ulenspiegel (1945–1950, probably 100,000 copies weekly; it moved from West Berlin to East Berlin in 1948). It was founded by Jewish cartoonist Herbert Sandberg and the writer Guenther Weisenborn, both of whom had suffered persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Another left-wing magazine was the radical anti-Nazi Der Simpl (published in Munich between 1946 and 1950, totalling 50,000 copies a week). Its director was a little-known writer, Markus Schrimpf. The paper Das Wespennest, founded by writer Wolfgang Bechtle (Stuttgart, 1946–1949, 35,000 copies per week), adopted, by contrast, a moderate political outlook.

Unlike in Italy, during the 1950s new satirical magazines of some importance were founded in West Germany. The most significant of these was the Bavarian Simplicissimus (1954–1967, probably exceeding well over the originally planned 60,000 copies a week), a moderate-conservative publication which revived the very successful magazine founded at the end of the nineteenth century, that had closed down in 1944. Its director was the cartoonist and former Nazi supporter Olaf Iversen.

Again, unlike in Italy, in West Germany a leftist satirical magazine was published in the 1950s. Der Deutsche Michel had a communist outlook and was published in Düsseldorf from 1953 to 1957 with a circulation of 25,000–30,000 copies. Its publisher, Johann Fladung, was a former member of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) who had been persecuted by the Nazis. The free-press satirical paper, Tarantel, was founded in 1951 in West Berlin by the controversial Heinz Wenzel, a journalist who in the early post-war period had been detained for four years in the Soviet occupation zone. This monthly magazine, which had a clandestine circulation in the GDR, had a strong anti-communist orientation and was financed by US donors. ¹⁴ Its activity was closely followed by leading West German politicians such as Kondrad Adenauer and Hans Globke, the latter writing about Wenzel in complementary terms. ¹⁵

In East Germany, only one satirical magazine emerged, albeit with a very large circulation. This was the Berlinese Frischer Wind, which in 1954 claimed a circulation of 450,000 copies a week. In the same year, it changed its name to Eulenspiegel and it is still published today under this title. This magazine was founded in 1946 probably on the initiative of the Communist Party of the Soviet Zone (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands – SED) and over time employed different editors. ¹⁶

There are different reasons why I have chosen to analyze the German and Italian satirical press during the twenty-year period after the end of the Second World War. On the one hand, I wanted to look at both the years when Fascism and Nazism remained a recent experience and the years when the two regimes became a more distant, albeit still controversial, subject. On the other hand, the early 1960s marked a significant political turning point for Italy as well as for West and East Germany. In 1961, the GDR government built the Berlin Wall. The government of Konrad Adenauer in the FRG ended in 1963. In the same year, the first centre-left government in Italy was formed. Most importantly, during the early 1960s both the Italian and the German satirical press underwent profound changes. As noted, by the late 1960s no Italian satirical magazine survived. In contrast, in West Germany from 1962 onwards, the new and successful satirical magazine Pardon was published. Its style and content marked a significant turning point in the German satirical tradition.

The Content

As a starting point for this analysis, I have chosen the year 1945 for Germany, a date that marked the beginning of the post-war period across the whole country. The post-war period in Italy started at different times depending on the specific city, however: for Rome, this was in June 1944; for Milan, April 1945. I also looked at the so-called 45 days of the Government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio; that is, the period between the arrest of Benito Mussolini in July 1943 and the occupation of most of Italy by German troops in September 1943. What the satirical press published during this short period is interesting and important, as a large number of both articles and cartoons focused on the Fascist experience.

The German anti-Nazi and the Italian anti-Fascist satirical presses often subjected Fascism and Nazism to a process that I define as ‘externalization’. By this, I mean that the two regimes were represented as a sort of ‘foreign body’ in Italian or German society, in two different though overlapping ways. The first, which could be found in the early post-war period (from 1944 in the liberated parts of Italy and from 1945 in Germany, until 1948) but which was particularly prevalent after 1948 in Germany, was to represent Fascism and Nazism as foreign, extraneous and (still) dangerous phenomena. The second way, especially prevalent in the early post-war period, was to depict the regimes as ‘outmoded’, superficial, ridiculous and no longer dangerous phenomena. The contradiction of representing the two regimes as simultaneously inoffensive and threatening phenomena appears not only within the same magazine, but sometimes even within the same article. ¹⁷ Such a duality of representation had significant implications in the Italian case. This is because it made it possible for both anti-Fascist and conservative magazines to attribute similar features to Fascism (such as its assumed ridiculous character), and thereby to draw conflicting conclusions: for the anti-Fascists, that Fascism was to be despised; for the conservatives, that Fascism was not as ‘bad’ as Nazism.

With regard to the first kind of externalization, in both post-war Germany and Italy, leading intellectuals such as Friedrich Meinecke, Gerhard Ritter and Benedetto Croce provided interpretations of Nazism and of Fascism (respectively) as ‘a sort of parasitic sub-growth … existing alongside generally healthy and positive development’, ¹⁸ or as a barbaric ‘parenthesis’, ¹⁹ of national history. These narratives proved highly influential and seemed to have significantly inspired satirical authors’ representations of the recent Nazi or Fascist past as an extraneous phenomenon. Depicting a person as having Fascist or Nazi features was a way of suggesting that they were dangerous to society, even if they might appear as a respectable anti-Fascist or anti-Nazi. This very same technique – assigning Fascist or Nazi features to someone or something in order to call their sincerity into question and undermine their reputation – was also used against political parties, nations and ideologies. ²⁰ For example, many of the images of horror connected with Nazism in the East German satirical press were produced and published in the second half of the 1950s in order to attack the FRG. ²¹ In particular, when the dramatic experience of the Jews proved of some use as a weapon to attack the FRG, it found a significant place in the GDR satirical press. ²² Such was the case with a drawing by Leo Haas published in the East German magazine Eulenspiegel in 1958 (Figure 1). ²³ Haas had been a prisoner both in Mauthausen and in Auschwitz, where his two brothers were killed. He had also held a special status as a prisoner, as Nazis used him to counterfeit ‘enemy’ money. ²⁴

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Figure 1.

On the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism.

We do not know the specific meaning Haas meant to attribute to this image when he produced it. Yet we do know the use that was made of it several years later in Eulenspiegel. It is interesting to note that a similar image, that of a small group of prisoners from a concentration camp showing numbers tattooed on their arms, appears in one of the most famous paintings of post-war Germany, Nacht über Deutschland by Horst Strempel (1946). ²⁵ In Haas’s drawing, however, it is the detail of smoking chimneys which suggests an extermination camp with crematoria. Below the drawing by Haas, a poem gives voice to the chorus of murdered Jewish children. Through an image of high-intensity pathos, children from the camp admonish readers to ‘save [them]selves’, because those who had ‘marked numbers on [them] and those who had gassed’ them still held ‘power and weight in West Germany’. The testimony of Leo Haas’s own experience in the Nazi concentration camps therefore becomes, in agreement with the author, a weapon against the FRG.

The combination of Haas’s drawing with the poem is an example of ‘demonizing’ externalization of Nazism. Here, supernatural and innocent entities such as the ghosts of the Jewish children killed in Auschwitz warn the GDR public of the potentially lethal menace the former Nazi leadership constituted. These figures lay hidden in the GFR, possibly planning further, future genocides. Such images on the one hand metaphorically removed Nazism from reality by confining it to the realm of supernatural horror; on the other hand, however, these representations, by attributing the source of horror to an external enemy of the GDR (i.e. the GFR) must have produced a reassuring effect on readers. A statement concerning Leo Haas himself, recorded in a report by the Stasi, who wanted to verify his loyalty to the GDR regime, would seem to confirm this point. Haas, according to the examined anonymous witnesses must have been ‘progressive’ because ‘only someone progressive’ could have known ‘how to depict Evil in such an appropriate manner’. ²⁶

The second kind of ‘externalization’ of Fascism and Nazism (i.e., the depiction of the two regimes or their supporters as basically inoffensive) had prestigious precedents as well. ²⁷ According to the official Communist International’s interpretation, Fascism and Nazism constituted the end-stage of Capitalism. ²⁸ In the case of Fascism, important personalities insisted on the regimes’ alleged ridiculous features. Croce himself, for instance, often depicted Fascism in ridiculous terms, describing the Fascists as ‘savage donkeys’ or ‘ugly mugs’ and Mussolini as a ‘poor wretch’. ²⁹

The Socialist-Communist Turin-based magazine Codino Rosso published a cartoon in 1945 depicting two men urinating in a public toilet with the insignia of a ‘fascio littorio’ (lictor fasces) – the symbol of Italian Fascism – above them (Figure 2). ³⁰

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Figure 2.

‘And people say that Fascism did nothing for the needs of people!’.

The object of satire here is twofold: first, it ridicules the common argument that Fascism was positive as it delivered many public works. On the other hand, however, it also mocks the regime itself: in Italian, ‘bisogni’ means not only ‘needs’ but also ‘excrement’, and therefore ‘needs’ in the sense of ‘physiological needs’. As testimony to the imperial projects of Italian Fascism, the future is nothing more than a public toilet. The regime itself therefore appears as something ‘dirty’. With their words, these two men, along with the artist of the cartoon, are metaphorically urinating on Fascism, disputing its claim to purity.

The juxtaposition of regime and toilet also appears in a German cartoon with a different satirical object: this time not the broken promises of the regime, but the alleged failure of the German de-Nazification (Figure 3). ³¹ The gears, tools, and machinery in the background were metaphorically supposed to ‘hang up’ Nazism in the form of a painting, but this attempt has been unsuccessful. ³² Even more important is the location that the author has chosen finally to ‘settle accounts’ with Nazism. In the bottom right corner is a toilet. Mikhail Bakhtin has described the regenerating role that representations of ‘debasement’, through exposure to excrement, play in Western early modern cultures. ³³ By juxtaposing Nazism and excrement, the cartoonist suggests that Germany needs first to expel waste from its society in order to start a new, democratic path. Meanwhile, the hand-written label behind the painting, whose face is hidden to the viewer, reveals that the representation of Nazism (referred to as ‘The Thousand-Year Reich’) is actually an ‘original copy of the monumental fresco by Benito Mussolini’. This represents a further attempt to ‘externalize’ Nazism, as it is attributed to a foreign source, notably an Italian one. The juxtaposition between Nazism and excrement appears in another 1946 cartoon from Der Simpl, while in a letter to ‘Ulenspiegel’, writer Alfred Doeblin describes Nazism as a ‘bath of slime and sewage’ for the Germans. ³⁴ In the satirical press of the early post-war period, supporters of Nazism and Fascism are often subjected to a similar process of ‘debasement’. They are often ridiculed and described as cowards forced to hide from, and sometimes justify, their actions. ³⁵

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Figure 3.

Denazification Machine. ‘If only this evil machine wasn’t so complicated I would be able to finally hang up this old piece of crap’.

As noted when I mentioned the ambiguity of the second kind of images of externalization – those representing Fascism or Nazism as an external, ‘negative’ and ridiculous phenomenon – they go hand in hand with more positive and palatable images representing the two regimes as a home-grown and familiar experience.

Representations in which both regimes are depicted in a more benign and banal way were especially typical of the Italian moderate-conservative satirical press. In these kinds of images, Fascism appears as a complex political experiment which had many sides – some negative but others, somehow, desirable. ³⁶ I call this a ‘sweetening internalization’ of Fascism or Nazism: by internalization, I mean an attempt to represent the regime as a phenomenon which was an ‘internal’ product of society; by ‘sweetening’, I mean a benevolent depiction in which, for example, its inherently violent and undemocratic characteristics are downplayed or, almost entirely denied in the case of Fascism. Such benevolent images were often not only based on banal renderings but also on the recognition that both Fascism and Nazism succeeded, at least for a limited period of time, in achieving widespread approval within the Italian and German populations. Clearly, these images challenged the dominant interpretations of Fascism and Nazism as external and transitory phenomena. Interestingly, while images depicting Italian Fascism as ridiculous sometimes imply that the regime was practically harmless, the inherent violence of Nazism was very rarely openly questioned by the satirical press in both Germany and Italy. ³⁷

‘Sweetening images’ of Fascism were already quite prominent in the satirical publications of the so-called ‘45 days’ government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, between Mussolini’s fall on the 25 July 1943 and the Nazi occupation of the greater part of Italy. A cartoon published in Bertoldo in August 1943, for example, presents a crowd at an information desk asking an employee: ‘Excuse me, after gaining freedom of thought, we are looking for a thought’. This unambiguously implies that Fascism had at least a strong ideology, while it was still unclear if the subsequent less authoritarian regime would develop a coherent ideology. ³⁸ Interestingly, in the days following Mussolini’s fall, these publications rarely stigmatized Fascism as a negative phenomenon per se, but instead concentrated on attacking some specific and immoral categories, which included both Fascists and their victims. Among these immoral categories were Fascists who illicitly enriched themselves, ³⁹ Anti-Fascists whose behaviour often echoed that of the Fascists, ⁴⁰ and the Jews, who were portrayed through the anti-Semitic stereotype of greed. ⁴¹ Accordingly, the major Italian satirical magazines in this early period expressed the view that if comparisons could be drawn between Fascists and their victims, then the true dignity had to lie not in being anti-Fascist, but rather in remaining faithful to an ideological and cultural tradition that not only had survived under Fascism, but had often supported it in good faith. ⁴²

A later example of a sweetening image of Fascism was a drawing by Walter Molino, published in the moderate conservative Milan-based paper Candido at the beginning of 1946, which addresses the alleged intention of anti-Fascists to erase the former regime from history (Figure 4). ⁴³

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Figure 4.

Let’s Kill the Past. ‘How old are you, darling?’ ‘Twelve, honey. Let’s forget the unfortunate years of Fascism’.

The title of this cartoon, Let’s Kill the Past, has two connotations: that of violence and that of the absurd: the past cannot be killed. Yet it also refers to a saying in Italian to the effect of ‘let’s forget the past’. The drawing itself has no satirical meaning. The cartoon’s satirical content is twofold. On a political level, it mocks the sterile and ‘cosmetic’ attempt, which the artist most likely attributes to anti-Fascist forces, to ‘kill’ the last 20 years of Italian history much as Mussolini was killed (a period, the cartoon suggests, which should not be written off as merely ‘unfortunate’). At a sociological level, the cartoon might be alluding to the efforts of many people to regain their ‘political virginity’ by drawing a veil over what they had done during the dictatorship. The cartoon points to an unrealistic attempt to change the course of the events and even of nature itself. The reality, however, clearly reveals that the woman has a different age and that the Fascist years are also unfortunate because they remind her of the inexorable flow of time. The aim of the cartoon is to attack those who want to boast of purity that they simply do not possess. Without knowing the context of Candido, this cartoon could be read simply as a mockery of the propensity to remove Fascism from the present without reflecting deeply on this experience with all its contradictions. In the context of partisan violence, which Candido would regard critically in the following years, the cartoon’s reference to ‘killing’ the past opens up a second possible interpretation, not one necessarily incompatible with the first. Fascism, in fact, may have been not only ‘unfortunate’, but also something more complex and perhaps positive. The cartoon does not say this openly, but alludes to it in an ambiguous way. There is indeed a contrast between this understated description of the Fascist period, the bourgeois, relaxed and snobbish ​​environment that the couple portrays (they address each other with words like ‘darling’ and ‘honey’) on the one hand, and the very real tragedies that Italy had just experienced on the other. The cartoon deliberately attributes a hypocritical connotation to the word ‘unfortunate’, or at the very least describes it as the sign of a superficial and opportunistic interpretation of a more complex phenomenon.

Some years later, again in Candido, the ambiguity portrayed in this type of cartoon disappeared. Over time, a shift occurred, moving from the initially timid denial of the alleged purity of anti-Fascism. Little by little, Italian conservative-moderate satirical magazines (later than the neo-Fascist ones, which had already in 1946 started following this path with much more conviction) started attempting to depict Fascism as something that was, at least in part, ‘pure’. They began to stress the decent personal history of Italians. In 1951, a point at which Giovanni Guareschi was bitterly disappointed in the ruling Italian Christian-democratic party (DC), Fascism represented a reassuring memory. In one cartoon, he depicted Fascism in an affectionate context, where the public and the private are closely intertwined, and where the contingent circumstance of a married couple serves as a metaphor for post-war Italy (Figure 5). ⁴⁴

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Figure 5.

Night. ‘Who knows what he is dreaming!’.

This man is not Guareschi, but his alter ego. He sleeps beside his wife, who awakes suddenly and looks at him worriedly. Why? He is dreaming and, as the realm of sleep is the realm of the unconscious and of spontaneity, of passions freed from inhibitory restraints, he can express a hidden desire. This passion is connected to a man and a time when everything seemed to be in order. Perhaps a psychoanalyst would define this ‘Roman salute’ in bed as a nocturnal erection for Mussolini. The ‘night’ actually refers to a political situation: it is the ‘night of the nation’. The Roman salute is in this context an act of rebellion, even if unconscious, towards the status quo. Guareschi suggests that the political situation in democratic Italy was so bad in comparison to that of the Fascist period that it provoked in him, as well as in the ‘ordinary man’, a sort of conditioned reflex of affection for the recent Fascist past.

More often, however, laudatory images of Fascism represented it as something ‘pure’, almost in religious terms, as in Figure 6. ⁴⁵

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Figure 6.

Old Shirts. What is it, Dad, a rag? – Yes, my son, a rag which may once again be helpful to clean up Italy!

In this drawing, the image of Fascism as something abandoned (the shirt had been placed in the attic) acquires a new character, an archaeological one, so to speak. ⁴⁶ The cloth is like a sacred object that is rediscovered and can release its regenerative potential, which had so far remained hidden.

We must not think, however, that the Italian satirical press in the years after 1948 provided only nostalgic images of Fascism. In an editorial from the moderate-conservative magazine Il Travaso published in 1950 – a time when, as we have seen, explicitly sympathetic representations of Fascism were becoming common – the journalist uses unusually evocative and harsh words to remember Fascism: ⁴⁷ ‘How beautiful our mother used to be in 1915!’ It is a metaphor for Italy, which ‘brought us into the world to liberate our dear little sisters, [the cities of] Trento and Trieste’, but

then, four years later, the boys returned home … Mum was at their cot’s bedside and was sleeping heavily, without realizing that the good boys were caught in a nightmare; a poisonous snake called Fascism had crept into the room, that was soon to contaminate their blood, till driving them in the crazy adventures that everyone knows. Many of them trusted the blandishments of the snake, believing they were going to fight to save their country and their mother but only one day they found themselves fighting and slaughtering each other like wolves. And now here we are, alone, exhausted, abandoned, torn apart and without a mother. We need affection, we look for Mum frantically, we turn to the right and to the left and we are not aware of the dear little woman who stretches out her hand at the corner of the street.

Let us now turn to another example of a ‘demonizing’ image of Nazism, which this time however is depicted as an ‘internal’ phenomenon. In a drawing published in 1948 in the moderate Stuttgart magazine Das Wespennest, the Nazi regime appears to play a significant role within the German national community (Figure 7). ⁵⁰

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Figure 7.

Inside Every German is the Good and Evil of the German Past.

A German man is presented here, walking through the rubble of his country, probably towards the future. Along this path, however, he is not alone, as behind him crowd the spirits and ghosts of his past. The ‘Good and Evil’ of German history will perhaps follow him forever. These companions are depicted partly as a persecution and partly as a moral support. The German in fact appears as a victim of his own ‘bad’ past, which is represented by a procession of skeletons in arms headed by a figure with an SS armband and a smoking gun. At the same time the ‘good’ German past, consisting of a group of figures with positive attributes of divinity, such as the laurel crown and the lyre, referring to an Apollonian environment, exerts its own influence on the German man. What unites these two spheres, one malignant and one benign, is their claim to something larger, namely the history of Germany: the man who walks forward is conditioned both by the skeletons who haunt him, and by the gods who support him. The mind of the German appears cluttered with myriad memories and reminiscences, ranging from the highest elevation of the spirit, of the arts and poetry, to its lowest point of murderous violence. What is more significant for the purpose of our discussion is that in this image Nazism appears in its horrific aspect. At the same time, it is demonized and ‘internalized’ in German society and becomes the object of a kind of examination of conscience. There are other similar numerous examples in Western Germany in the aftermath of the war. ⁵¹ Throughout the early 1950s, almost no self-reflection on Nazism is to be found, although Nazism continued to feature as a hideous phenomenon, one often used as a political weapon against opponents during the Cold War. The theme of Germans’ examination of their conscience grew increasingly prominent in the late 1950s and early 1960s in West Germany in conjunction with a new wave of trials of Nazi criminals.

The title of the cartoon shown in Figure 8, published in 1961 by the moderate-conservative Simplicissimus, alludes to the six million Jewish victims of Nazi extermination and is most likely connected to the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem. The image depicts in foreground the disquieting, expressionistic face of a human being whose gender we cannot guess and whose bald head looks shaved like those of the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. The person’s nose has the clear appearance of a skull and the same applies to the lower part of her left ear. In the background is a mountain of naked corpses that bear a strong resemblance to some photos of liberated Nazi concentration camps released in the early post-war period by the Allied occupation authorities. There are also others skulls in the background. ⁵²

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Figure 8.

Six million.

Below the picture is the text of a poem by Helmuth M. Backhaus, which states inter alia ‘the sky was red above the chimney. This was true for your neighbour, and next it was you! Swept from the table as a crumb of bread. He said the final solution. And God looked on’. Unlike the drawing by Leo Haas published in Eulenspiegel (Figure 1), the horror in this case is not a weapon used against a political opponent. On the contrary, it is a means of internalization of the regime that includes a stimulus to inner reflection as well as an example of demonization of Nazism. ⁵³

Contributions encompassing an examination of conscience with regard to the experience of the regime are much rarer in the Italian satirical press than in that of West Germany, and they approach the topic in an ambiguous way, if at all. ⁵⁴ Pietro Garinei, who became an acclaimed playwright and theatre producer, provided in the first issue of the moderate, Roman-based magazine Soffia, so’… an interpretation of the effects of Fascism on Italian society by presenting Fascism as an alien phenomenon. ⁵⁵ He links his discourse with that of the Italian national character and at the same time urges an ‘intimate distancing from the past’. Garinei writes that the ‘killings and arbitrary arrests of Fascists and quislings’ committed by the partisans in the post-war period caused him ‘a veil of sadness’ because those ‘committing these’ crimes had been ‘victims of the Nazi-Fascist systems’. These acts, continues Garinei, could not be defined as ‘acts of squadrismo’. This was not only because ‘the cause and the reasons in the name of which North Italians are soiling their hands are the right cause and the right reasons’. It was also because squadrismo consisted of ‘only truncheons and the distribution of castor oil, while in one of these cases 13 prisoners were rounded up and indiscriminately bombarded with machine gun fire. At this point, Garinei asks: ‘How could we imagine an Italian capable of such cruelty?’ He describes Italians as almost genetically incompatible with Fascism. However, after having ‘breathed and absorbed’ it for 20 years, and after having been in contact with the war and with a merciless and furious late Fascism, Italians had been dehumanized and committed excesses that had nothing to do with the origins of Fascism itself. Garinei in fact provides a dual interpretation, according to which the Italian population was foreign to Fascism and Fascism was originally foreign to the inhumanity of war and of the late Fascism of the ‘human slaughter’ and ‘massacres in the squares’. The author does not see, however, these acts of violence of the partisans as ‘the premises of a new Fascism’ but as ‘the consequences of the old Fascism’ and states that the Italians, recognizing themselves in each face of a Fascist:

feel the need to let this face, that tastes of unpleasant memories, disappear, just as the monkey who looks in a mirror and its first impulse is to break it. But the thousands of fragments of the shattered mirror, as many as the anti-fascist violent crimes, will multiply and reproduce the face which was afraid of the mirror.

It is significant that although a ‘sweetening’ attempt as widespread as that undertaken in relation to Fascism in Italy was not to be found in Western Germany in relation to Nazism, still images emerge in the moderate-conservative satirical press, which react to the connotation of the horror of the regime. These images not only ‘externalize’ the horror of Nazism, but also trivialize and even deny it. The same applies to Nazi racism and anti-Semitism.

In 1946, Wolfgang Bechtle, the editor of the moderate West German magazine Das Wespennest, published a story – which he claimed he received in a letter from a reader – whose main characters are three former prisoners of a concentration camp. Dishonourable characteristics like drunkenness, rudeness, arrogance and vulgarity are attributed to the former prisoners. ⁵⁷ They speak loudly, they curse and they misleadingly portray their experience. According to the story, the time in the camps was not so dramatic, as there was, supposedly, an abundance of beer and black bread. The former prisoners lie to obtain privileges and take advantage of the good faith of the community from which they had been excluded. In particular, they enter a bar demanding wine, white bread and butter and, when the waitress answers that she does not have those products, they react brutally, showing a concentration camp certificate, as if this were a licence to have all their requests granted. It is worth noting that black bread and beer are foods traditionally associated with ordinary German people, while wine and white bread were once the attributes of the German upper class. It is likely that the prisoners in the story were Jews, who were often represented by anti-Semites as rich and alien to German culture. ⁵⁸ Against the context of the Nuremberg Trials, during which many Germans perceived that the whole nation had been put on trial by the Allies before the whole world, this article depicted the general public’s bitter reaction to what they perceived as an unfair and disproportionate attack on the German people. In its counterattack, the article addressed a topic that seemed inviolable (at least by what the text calls the ‘high spheres’): that of the concentration camps. The entire article challenges the supposed purity of the prisoners. Significantly, Bechtle removes the element of horror of Nazism from its representation of the concentration camps, replacing it with a falsified and more reassuring image for the non-Jewish Germans.

Anti-Semitic articles or cartoons where the suffering of the Jewish people in the concentration camps was belittled or, at times, even the subject of mockery, could be also found in the Italian satirical press. For instance, some editorials by Giovanni Guareschi and cartoons appearing in leftist papers all represented Jewish people as somehow ‘impure’. ⁵⁹

A cartoon published in 1961 by the West German conservative magazine Simplicissimus takes a similar approach, although with an implication that is not anti-Semitic but more generally racist (Figure 9). This was a time, as we have seen, in which the theme of the examination of conscience resurfaced prominently in West German public discourse. ⁶⁰

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 9.

Rapid Development in Progress. ‘Yesterday we were still in the Stone Age and today we have our own version of the whites’ Thirty Years War – If we do not linger too long on revolutions, Auschwitz, and so on, we will have the atom bomb in no time’.

In this cartoon two elegantly dressed African men pose casually in the foreground. Their features are exaggerated, however, and their stereotypical and caricatured faces with protruding lips, crushed noses and menacing expressions reflect the racist prejudice of the artist. Behind them, a savage battle rages in the jungle, in which two typically modern items – a rifle and a helmet – can be seen. Since the German verb ‘nachmachen’ in the caption means ‘to imitate’, the meaning of the cartoon is clear: the two African men are the image of a clumsy imitation of Western civilization, while in the background is represented the perceived genuine essence of Africans; that is, barbarism. The caption juxtaposes the supposedly inborn barbarity of the Africans with the induced barbarity of the Europeans at war: the Thirty Years’ War, revolutions, Auschwitz and the atomic bomb are all stages of a twisted and pernicious development. The end of colonialism, the cartoon implies, has given free rein to this perceived ancestral barbarism of the Africans. If the Europeans have in fact regressed towards barbarism, now the real barbarians, that is the Africans, want to forge ahead with the achievements of the Europeans in order to add to their innate barbarism the barbarism of modernity. It is an apocalyptic scenario. What I want to emphasize here is that from the reasoning underlying this cartoon, the public might come to the aberrant conclusion that Auschwitz represents a barbaric component of the human being in general; a component which the Europeans have been able to avert, thanks to the end of the Second World War, and that the Africans might instead pursue to its bitter end, i.e. the destruction of mankind. Auschwitz, in short, is represented in this cartoon as an abomination that is ultimately pertinent to the Africans.

Longing for Purity

Most references to Fascism or Nazism in the satirical press are concentrated in the early post-war period. In the following years and throughout the 1950s, these were less present in satirical publications, although they were often addressed in order to attack political enemies, or, in the case of the Italian satirical press – which in that period was only either of conservative or of Neo-Fascist orientation – to claim that Fascism had been a partly positive experience. In the early 1960s, during the celebration of new important trials of certain Nazi criminals such as Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, there were once again several references that pointed critically at Nazism in these publications. In the same period in the Italian satirical press, Nazism was either criticized in order to claim that Fascism had not been not as ‘bad’, or rendered banal in order to criticize Communism. This periodization further confirms the findings of previous investigations regarding the frequency of references to the two regimes in the public discourse of post--war Italy and Germany. ⁶¹

As we have seen, many images of Fascism and Nazism in the satirical press from the period we have considered assign characteristics of impurity and contamination to the two regimes. ⁶² A similar verbal and visual lexicon could also be found frequently in moderate-conservative, even neo-Fascist, Italian satirical magazines, as well as in moderate-conservative West-German satirical magazines, though this was rare. I have mentioned the representation of simulated anti-Fascist purity in Candido (Figure 4), the image of simulated purity of former concentration camp prisoners in the short story in Das Wespennest, as well as those depictions of a ‘bastard Fascism’, condemned by the neo-Fascist publication Asso di Bastoni. What can we make of such frequent references to the sphere of contamination? I argue that such references should be interpreted as evidence of the development of two different states of anxiety in post-war Italy and Germany. The first one, which I have called ‘political-moral anxiety’, is to be connected primarily to a sentiment of shame, while the second one, which I have called ‘existential anxiety’ is to be linked to a sense of guilt.

Jennifer M. Kapczynski has coined the expression ‘the German patient’ to describe a very common attitude surrounding Germany in the first years after the war. ⁶³ This approach, promoted by both Allied occupiers and German anti-Nazi figures, conveyed the image of Germany as a patient, suffering from Nazism. At least in the immediate post-war period, there was also an ‘Italian patient’. Consider the widespread use at that time of terms such as ‘epurazione’ (‘purification’) in Italian and ‘Säuberung’ (‘cleansing’) in German. ⁶⁴ They refer to a specific intention to remove thoroughly, even violently, any ‘leftovers’ of the two regimes in German and Italian society. This desire for purification and regeneration introduced an element of contradiction to a large part of Italian and German society, threatening personal coherence but also the coherence of the nation, which up to this point had been represented as a ‘sacred body’. ⁶⁵

Similar needs for purification and regeneration provoked, or at least intensified, the state of anxiety to which many of the sources I have analysed can attest. ⁶⁶ My hypothesis is that this kind of anxiety, which I define as a ‘political-moral anxiety’, originated from a diffused sentiment of shame, which must have spread to large sections of post-war Italian and German societies, with respect to the winners, i.e. the Allies (and, correspondingly, from a desire to put others to shame). ⁶⁷ According to literature on the topic, shame is a ‘highly self-focused … emotion’ as ‘the person in the midst of the shame reaction is concerned not so much with the implications for others of his or her failure or transgression. He or she is more concerned with the implications of negative events for the self’. ⁶⁸ Shame affects both individual and collective identities, and implies a judgement upon the self and its inadequacy, involving feelings such as embarrassment and humiliation. ⁶⁹ In the early post-war period, when a significant part of society was under Allied scrutiny for its recent past, a large number of Italians and Germans perceived Fascism and Nazism, which until very recently played a crucial role in their lives, as a considerable threat to their present. Evidence of a Fascist or Nazi past could often result in detention or in serious consequences for the career of the person concerned. This threat could be averted by making a clean break with everything that could signify a link with these regimes. The contents of anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi satirical papers also show an attempt to influence the public’s attitude toward Fascism or Nazism through a sort of ‘emotional pedagogy’ made up of representations of the regimes where images of disgust and disdain play a significant role. ⁷⁰ Describing Fascism or Nazism as contaminating leftovers or excrement, as something to be ‘dis-infected’, worked as a way to confirm and reinforce negative feelings against the two regimes. Yet, shame can often ‘motivate denial and defensive anger’. ⁷¹ This is of some importance when we consider that particularly in Italy (and to a lesser extent in West Germany with regard to Nazism), the ‘political-moral anxiety’ related to Fascism soon dissipated ⁷² and a need or desire emerged to deny, sometimes in a particularly aggressive way, that the alleged contamination of Fascism (or of Nazism) did in fact take place. ⁷³

Yet, the images of horror produced by the satirical press in reference to Nazism express a different kind of anxiety, which seems to be less related to shame than to a sense of guilt. Unlike shame, guilt arises from a negative judgement about one’s actions (both individual actions and those of a collective body) rather than about the self. ⁷⁴ Moreover, guilt is a ‘moral’ emotion that leads people ‘to stop and rethink’ and ‘to responsibly own up to their failures, mistakes or transgressions’. ⁷⁵ This kind of anxiety, which I define as ‘existential anxiety’, emerges almost entirely from the debate about Nazism. ⁷⁶ It appears to derive from a conviction that was reached through recent experience, as if the Nazi crimes were the incarnation of an absolute, bestial evil charged with a high potential of abjection. However, shame must have also played a crucial role within existential anxiety in the German context, ⁷⁷ while in the Italian context this existential anxiety found its expression within a discourse of contempt and reprobation towards the Germans, who were made responsible for an absolute evil to which the Italians were represented as unrelated, or at least not directly related. ⁷⁸

The satirical magazines which are the subject of this essay can be included in Aleida Assman’s category of the ‘media of memory’; that is, of the ‘media that provide the material support underlying cultural memory, framing it and interacting with individual human memories’. The cultural memory in fact ‘does not come into existence or persist of its own accord; it has to be created, established, communicated, continued, reconstructed and appropriated’. ⁷⁹ Assmann highlights an aspect of the structuring of memory that should be emphasized for the purposes of the present discussion, arguing that emotions are the ‘true preservers of memory’. ⁸⁰ This claim is supported by neuropsychological studies. ⁸¹

In regard to the ‘power’ attributed to images, art historian David Freedberg has spoken about the capacity of images that ‘bleed …, that even hint at the lively quality’ of our bodies to raise ‘a sympathetic horror’ which resists our ‘emotional detachment’. ⁸² It is possible that Freedberg is correct in assigning visual texts a particular emotional strength; ⁸³ however, my hypothesis, partly following Julia Kristeva, ⁸⁴ is that all types of texts generally related to the sphere of abomination are compelling on an emotional level, and are more effective than other texts in structuring memory. As we will see below, I claim that both verbal and visual images expressing existential anxiety have proved more ‘durable’, i.e. emotionally effective than those of political-moral anxiety. This is because of their component of abomination, which allowed them to be perpetuated by the ‘media of memory’, simultaneously feeding on and reinforcing a ‘fear of a return to horror’. ⁸⁵

The significant emotional effect of the images of horror emerges in different cases amongst the sources that I have analysed. We have already seen that images of Nazi crimes drawn by Leo Haas had a strong impact on the anonymous testimonies questioned in 1957 by the GDR political police. Representations of the mountains of naked corpses produced by the East and West German satirical presses (such as the picture from 1961, shown in Figure 8 and analysed above) were influenced by the publication of photo shootings of liberated Nazi concentration camps. Similarly, two authors from the Italian satirical journal Il Travaso speak, in 1950 and in 1959, about the shock they experienced years earlier when looking at photos of the victims of the concentration camps. One of the two editorials says that ‘We felt like tearing apart while looking at the first pictures of the concentration camps and could feel the accusing finger of those poor dead people pointed against us as well, even if we have never hated the Jews’. ⁸⁶ The other editorial uses the term ‘horror’ (raccapriccio). ⁸⁷

At the same time, it is interesting that in reaction to the existential anxiety, as occurred in reaction to the political-moral anxiety, a need or desire to at least partly deny the alleged contamination of Nazism developed, as some of the sources analysed testify. We have seen, for example, that a West German author like Wolfgang Bechtle represented the concentration camps as places where prisoners were treated in a quite decent manner. In the cartoon by Manfred Oesterle reproduced above (Figure 9), the horror of Auschwitz is somehow transferred to a ‘savage’ world, a world represented by Africans.

In a similar vein, in Italy in 1960, Giovanni Guareschi published an editorial in which he claims that the Soviets were responsible for a series of anti-Semitic attacks in the FRG. He argued that ‘everything that is humanly possible to write, to photograph or to film about the infamous German extermination camps had been already written and photographed’. The reason for the ‘relaunch of this topic’ in that period – Guareschi hints at the above-mentioned anti-Semitic attacks – was an ‘anti-German propaganda-offensive’ whose aim had been ‘to balance the admirable free Germany with the horrible Germany of the extermination camps’. ⁸⁸ Again, during the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, Guareschi noted polemically that a new ‘fresh Nazi monster’, namely Josef Mengele, was needed, in order to keep the topic of Nazi crimes in the public eye. ⁸⁹

Despite such attempts in the satirical press and elsewhere to play down the seriousness of Nazi crimes, however, the existential anxiety linked to the horror of Nazism did not dissipate either in Italy or in West and East Germany. The emotional impact of images and narratives from the concentration camps has thus remained present until today. ⁹⁰ In contrast, images of political-moral anxiety, such as those describing the Italian ‘epurazione’ and the German denazification, almost disappeared in both countries by the beginning of the 1950s.

What is also interesting is that in the Italian satirical press a component of horror emerges often with regard to representations of the dead body of Mussolini. In moderate-conservative papers, references to the public exposition of Mussolini’s body at Piazzale Loreto in Milan were very common. The author of the above-mentioned 1950 editorial in Il Travaso, for example, juxtaposed the horror of the Nazi concentration camps with the horror of the violent revenge of the Italian Resistance on Mussolini. ⁹¹ The Italian leftists, in contrast, could satirize the horrific image of the stealing of Mussolini’s corpse in 1946, presenting the neo-Fascist thieves as perverse fetishists. ⁹² However, when in 1957 the remains of Mussolini were placed in a family tomb in his home town of Predappio, Candido published on the front page a long report in which the ceremony was represented, through numerous references to the sacred sphere, as a new wedding between Mussolini’s wife, Rachele, and her deceased husband. ⁹³