Introduction: The Cultural Axis Between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

I

A large tapestry from the collection of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, made sometime between 1936 and 1939, embodies the close cultural and political ties between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at that time. ¹ Italy and Germany are represented by their most recognizable national monuments, the monument of Victor Emanuel II in Rome and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The Axis is symbolized by a Corinthian column connecting the two countries and decorated with a fasces and swastika. In representing the inheritance of antiquity, classical architecture embodies the sense of cultural superiority claimed by two Axis countries. While small images of Naples and Nuremberg at the bottom of the tapestry suggest centuries-old traditions, the image of the Autobahn links the two countries as modern regimes. Throughout, the tapestry points to culture as a force that bound the two regimes and underpinned the existence of the Axis.

Benito Mussolini proclaimed the beginning of ‘an Axis with which all European states driven by the will for collaboration and peace can collaborate’ in a speech given in the square in front of Milan's Cathedral on 1 November 1936; that is, in the wake of the signing of the German-Italian Protocol and months after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. ² Although often used interchangeably to indicate the military alliance between Italy and Germany of 1939, Mussolini chose the term Axis for its vagueness, which was able to express the ambiguity of Italo-German relations – an ambiguity that persisted until 1945.

From the beginning, the alliance between Italy and Germany joined unequal partners. Whereas in some ways Fascist Italy had inspired the Nazis on their ascent, the hierarchical relationship between the two regimes inverted after Hitler's rapid consolidation of power. As relations between the two countries grew warmer after 1936, their later alliance started to appear inevitable. However, Italy and Germany were linked as much by conflict and competition, as by cooperation and agreement. Despite being united in their promotion of a New Order, the Fascist and Nazi regimes could never agree on what form that order might take. Nevertheless, as their international isolation increased, they entered into a bond of dependency and, although Italy's military inferiority during the Second World War put a strain on their relations, the two regimes maintained an image of unity until the end. ³

This special issue brings into sharper focus the relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, as the most important and destructive of Europe's fascist dictatorships. While historians have long viewed that relationship, including its global links with Japan, through the lens of military, political and diplomatic history, its nature as a cultural partnership remains largely unexplored. This is despite the fact that, from its emergence in 1936, the Rome-Berlin Axis stood not only for a new form of politics that would supplant the liberal regime represented by the League of Nations after 1919, but also for a new cultural order, which might overcome the alleged hegemony of Jewish and capitalist forces in modern culture. ⁴ In short, the Axis was not simply a military and political alliance, but also a cultural and ideological project. Culture was central to Fascist and Nazi efforts to bring about change in the world, which had lasting effects upon the post-war era.

II

The historiography of the Axis reflects, more broadly, how Fascism and National Socialism have been viewed from 1945 until the present day. Despite growing cultural ties between the two regimes in the period after 1936, hardly any German publications appeared with Achse in the title under the Third Reich. In Italy, by contrast, more than twenty books were published between 1938 and 1944 with the term asse in the title, which points both to a greater involvement of intellectuals in the Fascist regime and to a greater investment in the nation's cultural superiority within the context of the axis. ⁵ Amid military disaster in July 1943, the Italian King dismissed Mussolini, bringing the Fascist regime to an abrupt end. Soon afterwards, Nazi Germany occupied northern and central Italy, and reinstated Mussolini as the leader of the Fascist Italian Social Republic (RSI). ⁶ Although the Axis’s defeat in Europe became ever more likely after Mussolini's downfall, a stream of pro-Axis publications continued to appear in Italy. Thus, as the military alliance weakened over the course of the war, culture became more important as a way to sustain and preserve that alliance. ⁷

Initially after 1945, the historiographies of Fascism and National Socialism developed separately, as national experiences and memories of the Second World War weighed heavily on the writing of history. The few works written on the Axis in the early post-war period focus almost exclusively on its diplomatic and military dimensions, rather than on culture or ideology, as exemplified by The Rome-Berlin Axis of 1949 by the British journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann. ⁸ The book portrays Mussolini's Italy as inefficient and weak compared to Hitler's Third Reich – an interpretation that reflected a stereotypical view of Italians as incapable of strong political beliefs, and which ignored the fact that Mussolini's regime acted as a model for the Nazi rise to power. ⁹

The first scholarly works on the Italian-German alliance appeared in the 1960s. A historiographical milestone was the 1962 study of the ‘brutal friendship’ between Mussolini and Hitler by the military historian F. W. Deakin. ¹⁰ In focusing on the final years of the war (1943–1945), when Hitler had reinstalled Mussolini as the head of the nominally independent Italian Social Republic, Deakin emphasized how the relationship between the two dictators influenced the decisions of the Axis. In 1963, the Italian historian Enzo Collotti published an archivally-based monograph on the German occupation of Italy, highlighting the complex and chaotic nature of an alliance that was marked by both hostility and cooperation, even in the last phase of the war. ¹¹

Yet few accounts of this period went beyond a stereotype that emerged in Italy after 1943, and which pitted the ‘good Italian’ who is benign, humane and incapable of evil, against the ‘evil German’ who is ruthless, brutal and genocidal. Such views drew on anti-German clichés that dated back to at least the nineteenth century, when i tedeschi were identified with the Austrian rulers of northern Italy. As Filippo Focardi has shown, this narrative of self-exculpation allowed Italian elites to dissociate themselves from the wartime alliance with the Third Reich and to promote an amnesia of Italian atrocities and war crimes as committed, for instance, in Ethiopia, North Africa and the Balkans. ¹²

In the last few decades, historians such as Angelo del Boca and Davide Rodogno have sought to refute the myth of the benign Italian by highlighting the brutality of Fascist policies of conquest and occupation. ¹³ Nonetheless, much of the historiography has supported a rhetoric of Italian ‘innocence’. Historians of modern Europe, especially in the English-speaking world, have also tended to view Italy as a marginal and backward country, reinforcing centuries-old and patronizing stereotypes. ¹⁴ While that view has helped to minimize Italy's role within the Axis, it stands in opposition to studies that have shown how, especially from the nineteenth century, Italy served as a political ‘laboratory’ for Europe, as evidenced by the fact that it was the birthplace of the first fascist movement. ¹⁵

Meanwhile, in post-war West Germany, the public memory of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, which surpassed Italian war crimes in scale and gravity, emerged only gradually and to a great extent after the end of the Cold War. Soon after 1945, the alliance with Italy became marginal within official accounts of the Second World War. At the same time, the myth of Italy as a useless, even treacherous, ally that stopped Germany from winning the war gained momentum among German war veterans. In this tendentious interpretation, unsupported by evidence, Nazi Germany could have prevailed had it not been for Italy's poor military performance in the Balkans and North Africa. ¹⁶

As the most influential Italian historian of Mussolini's regime, Renzo De Felice put forward a canonical view of the Axis, which was popularized by Italy's mainstream press. ¹⁷ De Felice flatly denied the existence of any substantial parallels between the ideologies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In his 1975 Intervista sul fascismo, published at a time marked by political violence and instability in Italy, De Felice dismissed attempts to subsume the two regimes under a generic concept of fascism and introduced an implausible distinction between Fascism as revolutionary and Nazism as reactionary. De Felice's comments sparked a public controversy around the memory of Fascism. Liberal and left-wing historians attacked De Felice for being naïve or tendentious, especially in his claims that Fascism in Italy garnered a broad consensus at certain moments. ¹⁸ However, De Felice's characterization of Fascist rule as benign compared to that of the Nazis found fertile ground in Italy, as it absolved the millions of Italians who had participated in the Fascist project and later allowed the new Italian Republic to deny any responsibility for Italy's alliance with the Third Reich. This interpretation gained further ground after 1994, when the fall of Italy's First Republic brought the collapse of the anti-Fascist parties that had led Italian politics since 1945, and the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi brought neo-Fascists into his first coalition government.

III

In the 1960s, at a time when most historians of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany showed little interest in comparative perspectives, two German historians from different political backgrounds, Ernst Nolte and Wolfgang Schieder, adopted comparison as a way to look behind the scenes of the Italo-German alliance. ¹⁹ Nolte's 1963 Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche was among the first non-Marxist approaches to fascism in Italy, Germany and France. However, given that Nolte focused exclusively on ideology, his work has little to say about how fascism operated on the ground. By contrast, in works published from the late 1960s, Schieder explored Italian influences on the Nazis during the Weimar Republic. While acknowledging the importance of national differences, Schieder underlined how Hitler imitated Mussolini in the early 1930s and how the two leaders rose to power through a similar combination of violence and semi-legal action. Schieder attributed the emergence of fascism in Italy and Germany to their Sonderwege, and to common experiences such as a supposedly belated nationhood, a crisis of modernization and a lack of democratic legitimacy. While the strength of Schieder's work lies in its combination of comparative history with a study of political transfers, it gives less attention to how influences flowed in the opposite direction – that is, from the Nazis to the Fascists ²⁰ – an observation which also applies to Jens Petersen's 1973 study of diplomatic relations between the two regimes. ²¹

Partly due to the influence of the student movement, the 1970s saw a renewed interest in the theory of fascism, although the debate soon became stagnant due to an obsession with norms and a lack of empirical evidence. As a consequence, the fascist paradigm largely disappeared from historical discourse, prompting the Marxist historian Tim Mason to ask ‘Whatever happened to fascism?’ in 1988. ²² As non-Marxist theories of fascism developed in the 1980s–1990s, British scholars such as Roger Griffin and Roger Eatwell sought to define fascism by identifying a fascist ‘minimum’ or essence, with a view to reaching a ‘consensus’ in fascist studies. ²³ While influential, such contributions are perhaps less relevant to those interested in how fascism worked in practice or in relation to society and culture. Eventually, comparative history would step in to fill this gap; as evidenced, for instance, by the 2002 monograph by Sven Reichardt that compares paramilitary violence among the Fascist squads and the Nazi SA, and which sheds light on the origins and nature of fascism as a lived practice. ²⁴

As comparative history became more influential from the 1970s, interest in Italo-German relations gradually increased, as exemplified by the work of the military historian MacGregor Knox, who depicted the Axis in a long-term perspective and explained the rise of fascism in both countries as a consequence of their Sonderwege. ²⁵ While older studies in this field tend to emphasize tensions between Italy and Germany, newer scholarship tends to present the alliance as held together by a shared ideology. However, in the 1990s, comparative approaches met with an obstacle when the Holocaust emerged as the focal point in the history of Nazi Germany, and National Socialism came to be viewed as an unparalleled phenomenon. ²⁶ Although recent studies have shown the significance of racial engineering and the extermination of the Jews for Mussolini's regime, it remains debatable whether those elements were as central to Italian Fascism as they were to National Socialism. ²⁷

Having emerged in the 1990s, transnational history began to leave a mark on the field from the early 2000s, for instance with the publication of an essay collection on the crossovers between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, edited by Sven Reichardt and Armin Nolzen. ²⁸ The relatively small circle of scholars who engaged with the transnational history of the two regimes took issue with a common view of the Axis as ineffective and fractious, focusing instead on convergences between Fascism and National Socialism. Those scholars explored the development of Italo-German networks, which included contacts between Italian and German police forces, experts on race and politics, youth groups, Fascist and Nazi officials, and particularly Mussolini and Hitler. ²⁹ Structural and ideological affinities between the two regimes facilitated exchanges that, in turn, strengthened affinities. As such, conferences or informal exchanges could be as important as official political meetings. Transnational networks also supported the persistence of the Axis alliance in the war, despite strategic disagreements that were exacerbated by Italy's poor military performance.

While such studies help to draw a more nuanced picture of the Axis alliance, they run the risk of overestimating the political importance of networks and transfers. ³⁰ In stressing the divergent trajectories of the two dictatorships, comparative history can offer a counterbalance to transnational perspectives. However, comparative and transnational studies often draw largely on Italian and German sources, which can obscure influences that extend beyond those two countries. In this respect, the recent growth of global history is valuable in that it helps both to revisit the narrative of the Axis and to situate Italo-German relations within a broader context. ³¹ Seen from a broader global perspective, the forging of the Axis was not the inevitable outcome of transnational networks, but rather the result of strategic interests, a shared political culture, and the larger global crises that produced fascism. ³²

IV

Traditionally, historians have focused overwhelmingly on the crucial role of political, diplomatic and military strategy. More recently, however, they have begun to acknowledge the existence of cultural ties between Italy and Germany, which predated the Axis by centuries. ³³ Thanks in part to the advent of transnational history in the 1990s, work on cultural aspects of the Axis is now growing. Even before the transnational ‘turn’, a small number of historians traced the development of cultural networks between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. For instance, in a 1988 publication, Jens Petersen explored the cultural accords signed between the two regimes in November 1938 in the wake of the passing of Italy's racial laws, the Munich conference (which was a major triumph for the two Axis powers over the ‘old democracies’ of Britain and France) and the Nazi pogrom against the Jews. Petersen identified the accords as a basis for further ideological alignment and political cooperation – a process which culminated with a formal military alliance (Pact of Steel) in May 1939. ³⁴ Inspired by Petersen, Andrea Hoffend expanded the topic in a 1998 monograph on cultural cooperation, but Hoffend came to the opposite conclusion that there was more disunity than collaboration between the two regimes. ³⁵

Instead of looking to culture as a reflection of politics, or as a prelude to political cooperation, Benjamin G. Martin examined interdependencies between the cultural and political realms. Martin's 2016 book departs from the premise that, while Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany strove to instate a new political order, they also sought to create a cultural order that would outstrip the influence of Hollywood, and elevate the traditions of ‘Aryan’ Germany and ancient Italy. Italian Fascist officials believed that Italy was culturally superior to Germany due to the glories of the Roman Empire. As the balance of power within the alliance tipped in Germany's favour after Italy's belated entry into the war in June 1940, Italians clung to the cultural capital of their nation, as evidenced by debates among Italian intellectuals around the nature of the New Order in the 1940s. ³⁶

Culture played a major role in defining, supporting and representing Italo-German relations. Christian Goeschel has interpreted the seventeen encounters between Mussolini and Hitler as powerful performances of unity and friendship between the two nations. Those encounters stood in opposition to the bureaucratic and secretive style of politics associated with liberal democracies, which Hitler and Mussolini promised to supplant. During Mussolini's triumphant visit to Germany in 1937, and Hitler's Italian trip in the following year, political choreography was meant to strengthen perceptions of a strong alliance between the two leaders among a domestic and foreign public. While this image of unity resonated within Italy and Germany, it also led outside observers to overestimate the strength of that alliance. Without overvaluing the power of political theatre, the personal relationship between the two dictators helped to smooth over the cracks in the Axis, particularly during the Second World War. In this sense, the style and substance of the alliance were interrelated. ³⁷

Acknowledging that link between politics and culture, in the last few years historians have delved into academic and artistic cooperation within the Axis. For instance, a highlight of recent work is the 2020 monograph by the musicologist Tobias Reichard, which demonstrates that music was essential to Italo-German relations. Through music performances and tours of German and Italian ensembles, the two regimes built and maintained the image of an alliance between culturally superior nations. Yet, those exchanges were an effect of the Italo-German bond, rather than a cause, and tensions and rivalries remained. ³⁸ Another recent contribution is Bianca Gaudenzi's 2023 book, which compares how, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, advertisements and commercial products representing the dictator or regime helped to build consensus. ³⁹ The book shows that, despite an apparent hostility to consumerism, consumer culture played a major part in politicizing Italian and German society.

Clearly, as these examples show, culture and politics are never separate spheres. Rather, drawing on the work of Jeffrey C. Alexander, we argue that culture has the power to create political meaning. ⁴⁰ In that sense, the display of cultural bonds between Italy and Germany was meant to signal the creation of a new political order in Europe. At the same time, the persuasive powers of culture were essential to the allure of Fascism and Nazism. In short, this special issue harnesses the potential for new work by exposing cultural synergies between the two regimes that have often been overlooked, in part because Fascist and Nazi propaganda celebrated the uniqueness of national cultures. The aim of this collection is to move beyond a tendency for cultural history to concentrate on aesthetics and propaganda, to build upon recent research on the interplay of culture and politics, and to integrate cultural, social and political history. The articles originate from a conference on ‘Comparing the cultural history of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany’, which the editors organized at the Freie Universität Berlin in March 2019. ⁴¹

In their article, Joshua Arthurs and Kate Ferris show the benefits that are to be had by applying to Fascist Italy methods stemming from the German tradition of Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) – methods that help to counter a nostalgic, rose-tinted and depoliticized view of Fascism, which arose in Italian public discourse from the 1990s. Through a series of vignettes, the authors illustrate how ‘ordinary’ Italians encountered the Fascist state within the spaces of daily life.

Questions of cultural cooperation and political rivalry feature in Marla Stone's article, which examines two exhibitions of 1939 and 1942–1943 that were jointly supported by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. These under-researched exhibitions reveal how the two regimes held a common belief in culture as a tool of mobilization, but also how they promoted divergent visions of race, ideology and war.

Similarly focused on transnational exchanges, Helen Roche's article uncovers a series of trips to Fascist Italy that were undertaken by pupils of Nazi elite schools in their role as youth ambassadors of the Third Reich. As a form of cultural diplomacy that continued during the war, these trips were part of Fascist and Nazi efforts to foster a new cultural order but, although they were intended to strengthen ties between the two regimes, they also laid bare national differences.

Culture exposes fundamental points of contact between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. While cultural affinities between the two regimes were often obscured by propaganda celebrating the distinctiveness of Italian or German culture, they were fundamental to the identity and survival of the Axis. Approaching the cultural history of the two dictatorships from a transnational or comparative perspective raises key methodological questions. There is the challenge of comparing national cultures while accounting for their specificity; looking at culture seriously without taking it at face value; examining culture both in its own right and in the service of power; assessing the reception of culture by different groups and individuals; and connecting cultural history with social and political history. This special issue belongs to a growing body of literature that demonstrates how culture is a fertile ground for new research – research which can change our understanding of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and their impact on the modern world.