Abstract
This article probes culture as a site of both cooperation and rivalry by examining two exhibitions, of 1939 and 1942, which were jointly supported by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. These under-researched exhibitions reveal how the two regimes shared a common belief in culture as a tool of mobilization, but differed in their visions of race, culture, ideology and war.
As the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist regimes moved toward a military and political alliance in the wake of the wars in Ethiopia and Spain, cultural or soft diplomacy became an increasingly utilized mode to convince their respective populations of the advantages of the emerging partnership. With the signing of the Pact of Steel on 22 May 1939, the two dictatorships strengthened the Axis alliance first proclaimed by Mussolini in November 1936 with an offensive military treaty. In addition to committing the two regimes ‘to work side by side and join forces for the security of their living space’, the Pact of Steel led to an expansion of the use of culture to manifest the friendly relations and shared goals of the two regimes. Yet, despite the rhetoric of mutuality and friendship, the subordination of Fascist Italy to Nazi Germany, Italian opposition to the alliance at the level of the Fascist leadership and the Italian populace, and Mussolini's desire to establish Italy's unique contribution to the Axis were visible in all aspects of the relationship. With these persistent contestations in mind, Nazi-Fascist cultural diplomacy following the signing of the Pact of Steel reveals the complex and unequal relationship between the two regimes and the ways each wanted to be seen by the other.
In the months prior to the signing of the Pact of Steel, the Fascist government and party mobilized culture to introduce intellectuals, cultural elites, and the larger public to the ideas of the Nazi-Fascist New Order. As Christian Goeschel writes in reference to the 1940 Tripartite Pact, ‘substance and style were not mutually exclusive categories … instead “real” and representational politics shaped each other’. 1 Collaborative film productions, exhibitions, conferences, and cultural exchanges brought together German and Italian intellectuals, artists, and writers with the intention of forging common ground and asserting the priorities of a fascist-dominated Europe. 2 Italian-German joint cultural initiatives included co-produced magazines such as Berlin-Rom-Tokio (Berlin-Rome-Tokyo) and international exhibitions such as the 1942 Venice Biennale Mostra del cinema – renamed the Italian-German Film Festival. 3 Co-produced feature films, such as Assedio del Alcazar of 1940, a blockbuster film detailing the bravery and faith of Spanish nationalists trapped in the Alcazar of Toledo, replete with film stars and romance, offered opportunities for collaboration and joint propaganda initiatives.
Italian Fascist cultural bureaucracies supplemented joint Axis projects with a domestic cultural programme designed to sell the Axis alliance and the coming New Order. The Centro di studi e azione per l’ordine nuovo (The Centre for the Study and Activity of the New Order), for example, offered lectures and publications on the glories of the New Order and the dangers posed by its enemies. 4 In an effort to educate the public about the dangers of the Axis’ Bolshevik enemy, the Quaderni della Vittoria (Victory Notebooks) in 1941 and 1942 published pamphlets such as Bolscevismo contro Dio, contro la famiglia (Bolshevism Against God and Family) and Stato totale – Spazi vitali (The Absolute State – Vital Spaces). 5 Projects such as these shared the goal of introducing a sceptical Italian public to the idée force of an Axis future and to the total war against the Axis’ political and racial foes. As the journalist Giovanni Ansaldo wrote in the October 1942 issue of Berlin-Rom-Tokio, a German monthly dedicated to the ‘development of cultural relations among the people of the Tripartite [Pact]’, ‘the intimate alliance between Italy and Germany’ will ‘renew the Continent’. 6 The renewal, argued Ansaldo, would come through the ‘organizing principle of race’ and of ‘military strength’.
The cultural diplomacy highlighted here took place in the context of interwar Europe's refinement of cultural diplomacy as a tool with a broad range of ends, actors, and audiences. As detailed by Ben Martin and Elisabeth Marie Piller in Contemporary European History, the years between the wars saw both an explosion of and evolution in cultural diplomacy. 7 As Europe descended into ideological and, then, renewed military conflict between 1919 and 1945, culture was mobilized for diplomatic outreach, national projection, and ideological competition, leading, for example, to the widespread creation of student exchanges and international festivals and congresses, as well as the nearly universal establishment of national cultural ministries. 8 In the process, as Martin and Piller write, ‘dictatorships and democracies alike embraced these new tools of international politics, thereby transforming European foreign relations as well as the continent's cultural life’. 9 In the cases of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, cultural diplomacy was especially critical after 1939, as the two regimes used cultural exchanges to convince their respective publics of the advantages of the alliance and its ideological and military agenda.
The exhibition was a form at the centre of Nazi-Fascist cultural diplomacy. Despite the fact that the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist regimes had conflicting visions of the ideal relationship between art and the state and of the state's official aesthetic preferences, they agreed that the exhibition – a flexible, mobile, modern, and, potentially, ‘total work of art’ – was an essential tool that could fulfil an array of functions. From their early days, both regimes put exhibitions at the centre of their cultural crusades. 10 Not only fascist regimes utilized the form of the exhibition for diplomatic ends. As is well documented, the nations of interwar Europe all promoted exhibitions and international expositions as a form of cultural and diplomatic exchange. The 1937 Paris Exposition stands as one of the great examples of art and architecture in the service of ideological competition, as was visible in the rival Nazi and Soviet pavilions. 11 The possibilities embedded in the exhibition as a cultural form – its ability to contain and propagandize any message, to direct the gaze, to control the narrative, and to regulate emotions – made it a ubiquitous presence and a defining aspect of the Fascist and Nazi cultural imaginary. Moreover, exhibitions offered a physical meeting-place and mixing-point for cultural producers and consumers, as well as fulfilling the propaganda exigencies of the regimes.
Exhibitions played a long, complex, and, now, well-documented role in Italian Fascist culture. The technical prowess, design quality, and artistic interest of these multi-media exhibitions varied, with some, such as the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution) (1932) and Mostra aeronautica (Aeronautics Exhibition) (1934), celebrated for their avant-garde character, skill, and artistic innovation. Overall, the artists, architects, and designers who built the Fascist exhibitory universe drew inspiration from the work of European avant-gardes from Weimar Germany to the Soviet Union. Many worked to engage viewers on multiple levels – the aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional – creating three-dimensional installations, blending art and artefact, and building self-contained environments. 12 History was a particularly compelling subject for Fascist exhibition culture, as it allowed the regime to reshape the past in concert with its priorities. 13 At the far end of the historical timeline from the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista stood the Mostra Augustea della Romanita, celebrating the bimillennium of the birth of the Emperor Augustus. 14 Held in the heart of Rome in 1938, this exhibition mobilized the ideas of Roman civilization, military strength, and classical culture to connect Mussolini to Augustus and Fascist Italy to the Roman Empire. In addition to a celebration of history according to Fascism, the offices of the Fascist party and government used the exhibition form to introduce its publics to a range of policies and initiatives, from autarchy, as in the National Exhibition of Autarchy in Italian Minerals (Mostra Nazionale del Autarchica del Minerale Italiano) (1937), to empire in the Colonial Exhibition of the Imperial Victory (Mostra coloniale celebrativa della vittoria imperiale) (1937), to government and party support for sports in the National Sports Exhibition (Mostra nazionale dello sport) (1935). 15 The Nazi regime too employed exhibitions to promulgate its priorities, especially its anti-modern, anti-Jewish policies, as in the Degenerate Art Exhibition (Entartete Kunst Ausstellung) (1937), and its anti-communist crusade, as with the Soviet Paradise Exhibition (Das Sowjet-Paradies) (1942). 16
While historians, including art historians, have looked closely at the large-scale national exhibitions promoted by the Nazi and Fascist regimes, such as the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution and the Degenerate Art Exhibition, the exhibitions on which the two regimes collaborated and which travelled between the two Axis powers between 1939 and 1942 have not been studied. 17 With this lacuna in mind, this article analyses two jointly-promoted exhibitions created with the goal of introducing their respective populations to the ideological priorities of the other. The National Socialist Exhibition (Mostra di Nazionalsocialismo) of 1939 and the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists (Mostra degli artisti Italiani in armi) of 1942 to 1943 offer a fruitful comparison because their similar purpose as acts of self-presentation were created to convince other members of the Axis alliance of the commonalities they shared. Further, the two exhibitions reveal both areas of consensus, such as a vision of the enemy which these exhibitions hoped to mobilize the population against, as well as conflicts around race, ideology, and religion. The small-scale collaborations of the Exhibition of National Socialism and the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists expose the limits – aesthetic and political – of the Nazi and Fascist collaboration. In the end, the two exhibitions offer critical clues as to what made successful acts of cultural diplomacy and what produced failures. Through these small-scale, low-budget exhibitions, we see the ways that the Nazi regime wanted its Fascist ally and the Italian public to understand Nazism and vice versa at two critical turning points: first, in 1939, the moment of greatest shared confidence in a fascist-controlled Europe and, second, in late 1942 and early 1943 when military defeats challenged that vision.
As foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop of Germany and Galeazzo Ciano of Italy negotiated the Pact of Steel, the two nations’ ministries of propaganda agreed on the exchange of ‘political and documentary exhibitions’. 18 The catalogue of the National Socialist Exhibition later explained: ‘Alfieri, Minister of Popular Culture took the initiative in agreement with Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, for an exchange of exhibitions which have as their purpose making it possible for the Italian people to know the work of National Socialism and for the German people to know what Fascism is’. 19 ‘The goal’ of the travelling exhibition, continued the catalogue, ‘is to make a significant spiritual contribution to the strengthening of the Axis’ and ‘to build more intimate and knowledge-based relations between the two peoples’. 20 The two propaganda ministries organized the exhibition and Mussolini's office approved a written outline and selected the dignitaries to be present. 21 Waldemar Steinecher, Director of the Institute for German Cultural and Economic Propaganda, curated the exhibition based on designs provided by his institute. The Italian Ministry of Popular Culture oversaw the logistics, with the ENTE Provinciale Turismo paying for the costs of travel and installation. According to the original itinerary approved by Mussolini, the National Socialist Exhibition was to travel to the summer festivals of 12 Italian cities between April and December 1939 with a final stop in Rome on 31 December 1939. 22
The National Socialist Exhibition opened one year after Hitler's triumphant visit to Italy, during which the two fascist regimes and their leaders strengthened their ties and presented a united front against the backdrop of escalating diplomatic crises with Britain and France. 23 At the time of the signing of the Pact of Steel and the simultaneous National Socialist Exhibition, the Axis powers were ascendant and revisionist powers: Germany had completed the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, the occupation of the Sudetenland in October 1938 and the absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939; Fascist Italy had consolidated its empire in Africa and would invade Albania in early April 1939. The ascendant Axis appeared a united front, but the resentments and unequal power continued, with the Nazi occupation of Austria without Italian consent still rankling.
While the National Socialist Exhibition opened in a moment of celebration for the two fascist revolutions, it was also when the Fascist leadership needed to sell an unpopular military and political alliance to the public. Many Italians disliked and distrusted Hitler and feared being dragged into a European-wide war from which Italy might well emerge a ‘satellite of Germany’. 24 Informers and police reported widespread fear that an Axis victory would mean subjugation to Germany. 25 Elements in all ranks of Italian society expressed anxiety and contempt for an alliance with Nazi Germany, including members of the monarchy, the armed forces, the Vatican, and some Fascist leaders. 26 Anti-German feeling predominated ‘in university, professional, and intellectual circles’ as well. 27 And none of this was new, as already, on the occasion of Hitler's May 1938 visit to Italy, Fascist subordination to the Reich and the discomfort of many Italians with the alliance was clear. 28
The Exhibition of National Socialism was given pride of place at the 23rd annual Bologna Fair, with its inauguration taking place at 9:30am on the morning of 14 May 1939. Renato Ricci, then Undersecretary of the Minister of Corporations and previously Vice Secretary of the Fascist Party and Head of the Fascist youth organization, the Opera Nazionale Balilla, inaugurated the National Socialist Exhibition in a ceremony held one hour prior to the official opening of the fair. In his speech that morning, Alessandro Melchiori, Head of the Fascist Militia, explained that Alfieri and Goebbels had organized ‘this initiative in order to introduce the Italian people to Nazism and the German people to Fascism’. 29 Next, the Duke of Pistoia contributed an enthusiastic ‘Heil Hitler’. 30 Cesare Colliva, Podestà of Bologna, then read the telegrams exchanged between himself and Goebbels in which Goebbels declared that the goal of the exhibition was make ‘a great spiritual contribution to the strengthening of the Axis’. Colliva responded with his wish that ‘this initiative might deepen and consolidate the political and cultural union between the two young nations and their revolutions’. 31 Also in attendance that morning was the Head of the Brownshirts in Italy and German Embassy official, Erwin Ettel, who ‘praised the indissoluble fraternity between the two peoples’. 32 German Consul General Baron von Rautenberg, also present, reiterated that the exhibition's goal was for ‘the two peoples/friends to grow in ever greater appreciation and knowledge of one another’. 33 The assembled dignitaries then departed the inaugural stand for an official tour of the National Socialist Exhibition. 34
The high hopes of the organizers and both ministries of propaganda is clear in the ways in which the exhibition was presented as the focus of the Bologna Fair, as well as from the pomp and circumstance around its inauguration. In addition to organizing an exhibition designed to travel to 12 cities for their summer fairs and, thereby, exposing large audiences to it, the regime gave the Exhibition of National Socialism extensive media attention: the exhibition's inauguration figured prominently in the LUCE newsreel of 24 May 1939: in 49 seconds of footage, the newsreel shows Fascist and Nazi officials inaugurating and touring the exhibition. The newsreel narrator repeats the theme of the show as building ‘better knowledge of each other among the allied peoples’ and celebrates the ‘triumphs of the brownshirts’ and the ‘regeneration of the New Germany’. 35 The discourse of ‘friendship’ between the two nations which ran through Nazi-Fascist collaborations is central here as well, repeated in both the exhibition and the press surrounding it. 36
The exhibition's Italian promoters carefully selected the opening location for the testing of Italian attitudes toward Nazism and the Pact of Steel. They chose Bologna because ‘it was the city which had given the greatest number of martyrs to the Cause of the Revolution’. 37 Martyrdom in the name of the fascist cause was a central theme of the exhibition, and its organizers synchronized the inaugural events with the show's content, holding the opening ceremony in the ‘former city council hall because of the prestige that the ceremony would derive from the memory of Giulio Giordani's sacrifice’. 38 Nineteen years earlier, in one the most violent and decisive clashes during the Fascist rise to power, Fascist squadristi – the movement's paramilitary forces – attacked Bologna city hall in an attempt to prevent the installation of a Socialist municipal government. The incident, known as the Battle of Palazzo d’Accursio, led to the death of 10 people, including Nationalist Party activist Giordani, and had repercussions far beyond Bologna. This squadrist attack early in the movement demonstrated the power of violence and of martyrs, as it inspired a similar wave of squadrist assaults on municipal governments and working-class institutions in Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Tuscany, and Puglia. 39 As a result of early Fascist activism in Bologna, Mussolini named the party section there the Decimo Legio (Tenth Legion), after the legion used by Caesar to invade Gaul. As Corriere della Sera reported, Bologna and the Decimo Legio hosted the Exhibition of National Socialism because ‘it had written heroic pages in the history of the Fascist revolution and had given the greatest contribution of its blood to the Cause’. 40
The Exhibition of National Socialism was housed in a stripped-down, unadorned brick pavilion with a Rationalist façade crowned only by sans-serif lettering declaring, MOSTRA NAZIONALSOCIALISMO. Flanked by a sea of Nazi flags and eagles, stood the exhibition pavilion, the Padiglione della Montagnola. By locating the exhibition in the heart of the annual Bologna Fair, the organizers hoped that the introduction to Nazism and the celebration of the Pact of Steel would be a natural stop for fairgoers. Divided into three sections among seven rooms, the exhibition presented Hitler's and Nazism's struggle and rise to power as the nation's great act of redemption. Curated with display cases and wall installations, the seven rooms pivoted around the trope of ‘before’ and ‘after’ the Nazi revolution. The curators from the Institute for German Cultural and Economic Propaganda structured each room around the dichotomy of chaos, Marxist subversion, race defilement, disease, and the destruction of the German people before the Nazis came to power versus the natural order, purity, health, and strength of Germany after. 41
As in many Fascist and Nazi exhibitions, visitors entered through a solemn Salon of Honour dedicated to the leader. The Salon of Honour introduced Italians to the cult of Hitler, or as the catalogue narrated it, ‘the personality of Hitler, as leader of the German people, and founder of the Reich and Greater Germany’. 42 Here fairgoers faced a bust of Hitler, flanked by two titles: ‘The Fuhrer of the German People’ and ‘Creator of Greater Germany’. In this room hung a large map of the Reich in its newly extended May 1939 form, including Austria and Czechoslovakia. The loud assertion of the Greater Reich and the dominating figure of Hitler as leader and conqueror asserted Nazi might and reminded the viewer of Fascist Italy's growing subordination to Germany.
The Salon of Honour led to a large room detailing Hitler's World War I combat experience, the Beer Hall Putsch, and the writing and publication of Mein Kampf. By linking World War I to the Beer Hall Putsch and Mein Kampf, the exhibition conflated the German national struggle with the Nazi struggle, making Hitler's fate synonymous with Germany's. The narrative that the Nazi seizure of power was the natural outcome of the tragedy of World War I would have been familiar to Italian audiences, as the Fascist regime interpreted history similarly. 43 According to the exhibition's narrative, Hitler's triumph resolved the tensions of the national past and embodied the unified and glorious future that lay ahead. A wall-sized photo of Hitler dating from his 1923 trial occupied the centre wall with the words ‘Faith in the Future’ above his image. Flanked by text celebrating his brief spell in Landsberg Prison, this room presented the birth of the Nazi political doctrine: ‘in the enforced quiet of his detention was born Nazism's profession of the faith, Mein Kampf’. 44 The room, which mentioned no Nazi leaders other than Hitler, taught Italians that Hitler was the sole creator, and the intellectual, political, and military leader of the Nazi revolution.
The Exhibition of National Socialism unequivocally proclaimed the centrality of race and race ideology. The wall of the second room bore the statement: ‘National socialism lives the belief that blood and race are the eternal forces which maintain the life and survival of a people’. 45 On an adjacent wall hung National Socialism's political oath: ‘National Socialism acknowledges that blood and race are the eternal forces which conserve the life of a people. Proceeding from this knowledge National Socialism intends to maintain and strengthen the natural energies and traditional values of the Nordic-Aryan race’. 46 By the time that Italian audiences faced the Nazi declaration of radical race ideology, Fascist Italy's Racial Laws, which declared Italians ‘Mediterranean Aryans’ and excluded Jews from most professions and schools, forbade intermarriage, and circumscribed the economic life of Italian Jews, had been in force for seven months. While Italians would have been familiar with Fascist biological racism from the propaganda campaign of the summer of 1938 which preceded the passage of the Racial Laws, the vehemence, implications, and eugenic assertions of the Nazi version would have been shocking.
These rooms offered didactic lessons on the Nazi reorganization of society, its social programmes, its demographic battle, and its Five Year Plan for industry and agriculture. They described the social services and organizations created by the regime, from the Hitler Youth to the German Labour Front. The focus on labour, especially manual labour, as a spiritual force able to cleanse and unite the German people was a core element of Nazi ideology and had been a core theme in the German Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition two years earlier. 47 Through photographic displays of poverty, social conflict, and moral turpitude (represented by photos of clubs and cabarets) during the Weimar Republic, the exhibition argued that the Nazi revolution had transformed German society and saved it from moral and economic collapse. The conspiracy of Jews and Marxists, with repeated references to the ‘Red Terror’ which the Nazis had battled, to destroy Germany and these groups’ responsibility for the suffering of the German people informed each policy presented.
The National Socialist Exhibition openly detailed and celebrated the Nazi eugenic crusade against the disabled and the chronically ill. The display dedicated to eugenics listed in large letters the conditions under which German citizens could be legally sterilized, including ‘congenital idiocy, schizophrenia, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary blindness, manic-depression and deafness, serious physical deformities, and acute alcoholism’. Below the list of conditions calling for sterilization stood a figurine of a German family accompanied by the declaration, ‘We stand for the health of the German family against Jewish-Marxist corruption’. 48 The celebration of forced sterilization for a broad range of medical and psychological conditions would have shocked the Catholic sensibilities of many Italians. The same room contained displays focused on the before and after of the ‘Jewish Problem’: for before, the declaration read that ‘Jews had infiltrated the political and economic life of the nation, with ever increasingly levels of race mixing’, and for after, a statement celebrated ‘the separation of the Jewish element from Germans and the elimination of Judaism from the life of the German people’.
Fascist Italy was mentioned only in the final room, even though the exhibition outline approved by Mussolini had planned for a quarter of the exhibition to focus on ‘the mutual aid in the development of the living space of Italy and Germany and in the maintenance of peace and order in Europe’. 49 Instead, a single room centred on a wall-sized photograph of Mussolini and Hitler in a friendly handshake, nearly eye to eye, above which ran the phrase: ‘The Berlin-Rome Axis Guarantees Order and Peace in Europe’. The body language of the two leaders conveyed friendship, through Hitler's grasping of Mussolini's hand, and collaboration through the way they gaze directly at each other and away from the audience. The display was in keeping with the repeated themes stressing unity and ‘the uniqueness of the Italo-German friendship’, albeit in an abbreviated nod to the Axis alliance’. 50
The aesthetic of the National Socialist Exhibition was static and, even retrograde, as it explicitly rejected the exhibitory innovations of the 1920s and 1930s, including the by-then standard photomontage. It also rejected the design features central to Fascist exhibitions, such as the Futurist innovation plastica murale and the monumental dynamism of Rationalist exhibition design. These techniques had given the Fascist exhibitions of the 1930s their power and energy, and had drawn audiences in for the emotional experience such aesthetics offered. 51 In contrast, the National Socialist Exhibition consisted of flat wall displays with unadorned graphics and photos, devoid of accompanying artwork.
The Italian national and regional press extensively covered the Exhibition of National Socialism in its first iteration, presenting it as the top attraction at the XII Bologna Fair. National newspaper articles on the opening of the Fiera di Bologna foregrounded the Exhibition of National Socialism, naming it in the article's headline and mentioning it in the first paragraph. 52 The reporting was consistent with a repetition of key points and phrases, especially the fact that the Exhibition was organized at the behest and desire of Ministers Alfieri and Goebbels and that its goal was to ‘ensure that the two friendly peoples appreciate and know each other better and better’. 53 Another shared theme in the press was that the exhibition demonstrated the strength, solidity, and closeness of the Axis alliance. For Il Tevere, the hard-line antisemitic and pro-Nazi newspaper, the exhibition was proof of ‘unbreakable brotherhood between the two peoples’ and for Giornale d’Italia and Il Regime Fascista it was proof of the ‘strength of the Rome-Berlin Axis which acts as a guarantor of peace among nations’. 54
With regard to the content of the National Socialist Exhibition, Corriere della Sera hailed it as ‘a collection of exceedingly great political and social interest’ and as ‘a glorious and fertile demonstration of the New Germany of Adolf Hitler’. 55 Calling the Salon of Honour with its focus on the figure of Hitler, ‘large and bright’, the article celebrated the coordination of the German economy as detailed in the exhibition. Offering an optimistic reading of the assertion of German power, Corriere della Sera concluded that the Exhibition of National Socialism, ‘affirmed the overriding reality of present day Europe, a reality created by the Rome-Berlin Axis, one in which the Fascist and Nazi revolutions reciprocate[,] helping in the growth and development of one another and in together forging a new European order based in justice’. 56 The Rome-based booster of the regime, Giornale d’Italia, devoted its only article on the Bologna Fair to the Exhibition of National Socialism and the ways in which it demonstrated the ‘friendship of the two peoples’. 57
Upon its closing, Cesare Colliva declared the exhibition a great success, citing an attendance of 300,000 people.
58
Writing to Mussolini, he hailed the ways in which ‘the fascinating event has contributed to the strengthening – through greater knowledge – of the ties between the two Revolutions’.
59
Colliva assured Mussolini that the XII Bologna Fair and the Exhibition of National Socialism have concluded after an intense period in which economic autarchy and Italian-German solidarity were profoundly strengthened. The organizers and exhibitors are certain that the success of these events will lead to greater achievements in Your name.
60
Yet, the archival record loudly rejects Colliva's assertions, suggesting conflicts, ambivalence, and failure on both sides. The record also shows a lack of interest on the part of the public: Colliva's attendance figures must be read against the fact that the National Socialist Exhibition opened within several much larger fairs of which it was only a small part, so the 300,000 visitors figure refers to the total number of visitors to the Bologna Fair, of which Colliva was also the president. In addition, as we know from Fascist cultural events generally, the significant train fare discounts given for attendance at designated exhibitions attracted visitors coming on holiday. 61 In fact, the use of discounts to attract crowds was so common that bureaucrats worried that tourists participated in government and party events – festivals, exhibitions, and even rallies – in order to receive the coupons for discounted theatres, restaurants, and train tickets, rather than to join in official events. 62 Even prior to its inauguration in Bologna, official correspondence reveals that the National Socialist Exhibition's itinerary was reduced to five cities, and, in the end, it opened only in Bologna, Padua, and San Remo in May, June, and August 1939. 63
A lack of official and public interest is clear from what happened after Bologna. For its second stop in June 1939, as the Nazis prepared for war with Poland, the Exhibition of National Socialism opened quietly as part of the XXI Padua Fair and ran from 8 June to 25 June 1939. 64 The change in official attitude towards the exhibition was obvious from the start: despite having been initially advertised as a core component of the upcoming Padua fair, by its 8 June 1939 inauguration, Fascist officials sidelined and demoted the Exhibition of National Socialism, giving it almost no attention. 65
The contrast in inaugurations signalled the failure of the Exhibition of National Socialism and the Fascist regime's desire to direct attention away from it. In Padua, there was no opening ceremony and no official inauguration, no warm greetings between German and Italian officials, no official exchange of telegrams with Josef Goebbels. The Duke of Pistoia, along with the Secretary of State for Reclamation, various representatives of the Senate, the Chamber of Fascists, and the Council on Corporations, representatives from the German Labour Front (DAF), the Governor of Albania, and the family of the ‘illustrious’ Luigi Negrelli, builder of the Suez Canal opened the Padova Fair. 66
In press coverage of the fair's opening day, the Exhibition of National Socialism was an afterthought, or perhaps, an embarrassment, as it was only mentioned in passing after the hailing of the Albanian Exhibition and an exhibition on Italian contributions to the building of the Suez Canal. 67 La Tribuna celebrated the Padua Fair as ‘A Great Celebration of Autarchy’ and focused heavily on the pavilions demonstrating Italian economic self-sufficiency; Avvenire failed to mention the Exhibition of National Socialism in its long report on the fair and it was ignored in the advertising for the fair which accompanied the article; Il Messaggero mentioned it only in a list of attractions. 68
When the press did mention the Exhibition of National Socialism in Padua, as did Corriere della Sera, it recounted the focus on Hitler and the Nazi revolution, and then quickly pivoted to a discussion of the exhibition's focus on autarchy. 69 When the Prince of Piemonte visited the Padua Fair, Corriere della Sera reported a stop at the Exhibition of National Socialism, but emphasized instead a military parade, the Albanian Exhibition and the Exhibition of the Suez Canal. 70 L’Avvenire's coverage of the Prince's visit failed to mention the exhibition at all. 71
Rather than focus on the Exhibition of National Socialism, the regime and the press highlighted new shows with national themes: the Marghera Pavilion held ‘an exhibition which hails the magnificent person, Luigi Negrelli, the Italian engineer who first conceived of the Suez Canal Mostra and whose plans were used in the realization of [the] arduous undertaking’. 72 This exhibit introduced visitors to the history and technology behind the Suez Canal and it stressed that ‘even if the labour was foreign, the brains were Italian’. 73 The Albanian Exhibition, an obvious assertion of Italian Fascist power and a response to the expansionist assertions of the Exhibition of National Socialism, was added to the fair less than two months after the Italian invasion of Albania. A celebration of the good works of the Italian occupiers – from road building to school construction – the Albanian Exhibition had pride of place in the Salon of Honour. 74
Events following the initial iterations in Bologna and Padua remain a mystery, as well as any discussions which shifted the Exhibition of National Socialism from a major attraction gaining national party and media attention in Bologna in mid-May 1939 to a minor footnote at the Padua Fair three weeks later. Then, after an unaccounted for break, the exhibition travelled to San Remo where it was to be open for only five days in the Pavilion of the Villa Comunale. 75 There was no press coverage whatsoever of the San Remo iteration, and it may well have been cancelled. A letter of 16 June 1939 between Alfieri and Melchiori refers to ‘a month's interval because the stop in Ancona has been cancelled and the exhibition will be inaugurated in San Remo at the beginning of August’. 76 Attempting to revive a failing exhibition, Melchiori requested Alfieri's presence at the opening in San Remo, pleading, ‘Because in San Remo it will be a special edition of the exhibition, I would be grateful to know you might inaugurate it’. 77
In addition to the cancellation of the vast majority of the National Socialist Exhibition's itinerary, tensions flared over which officials would attend the inaugurations. Colliva invited Mussolini to Bologna and San Remo, but he declined. Mussolini sent Renato Ricci, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Corporation, instead. 78 Dino Alfieri, Minister of Popular Culture, also refused to attend any of the inaugurations, despite the fact that the exhibition had been his idea. 79 No high-ranking Nazis wanted to be there either. Italian officials expressed irritation that they had to invite their German counterparts to their own event, as evidenced by a letter from the Italian Embassy to the office of the Ministry of Popular Culture one week before the Bologna opening: ‘it seems strange that we have to find German officials to attend an exhibition that they organized’. 80 In the end, the Nazis sent one minor official and a local Nazi leader to the show – a consular officer in the German Embassy in Rome and the leader of the Brownshirts in Italy. In addition, they argued over who was to pay for what: Italian organizers had to ask for customs waivers for exhibition materials coming from Germany. 81
The propaganda ministers of Italy and Germany intended the National Socialist Exhibition to build Italian support for the alliance, but instead the Nazis sent an exhibition packed with messages about German military, economic, and racial strength. The emphasis on the total coordination of German society under Nazi rule, the explicit language of racial corruption and cleansing, and the obvious marginalization of Fascist Italy from the narrative of expansion and war all speak to a power play on the part of the German organizers.
Rather than a celebration of the Axis, which, as we saw, was referred to only in the final room of the National Socialist Exhibition, they conveyed a message about Nazi domination within the partnership. In the end, the startling fact that the National Socialist Exhibition's itinerary was cut from 12 cities to three and the addition by the regime of celebrations of its recent military expansion, such as the Albanian Exhibition in Padua, demonstrate the limits of cultural diplomacy in the context of the Rome-Berlin Alliance. Moreover, the fact that the Italian equivalent promised in the original bilateral agreement to travel to Germany never came to fruition suggests further conflicts between the Nazi and Fascist organizers. Did the Italian version never happen because the Germans did not want to expose their populace to a different interpretation of fascism? And was the Italian itinerary of the Exhibition of National Socialism suspended because of a lack of attendance or because of conflicts among the organizers?
Despite the failed exchange of ideological exhibitions, Nazi-Fascist cultural diplomacy accelerated as the two powers fought side-by-side in Africa, the Balkans, and the Eastern Front. Wartime Axis culture focused on joint projects asserting the unity and friendship of the Axis nations, as well as the points of commonality in their visions for the cultural world of the New Order. 82 Such wartime collaborations included writers’ conferences, film festivals, co-produced film productions, magazines designed for an Axis-wide audience, and, of course, exhibitions. 83 During the war, Nazi cultural initiatives with allied and neutral nations accelerated, often with art at the centre. In both the lead up to the Second World War and during the hostilities, exhibitions of approved German art travelled through occupied Europe. 84
In the summer of 1942, the Propaganda Office of the Italian Army under the leadership of wounded World War I veteran, army lieutenant, and art critic Francesco Sapori, organized the First Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists. The exhibition, Sapori's brainchild, debuted the work of Italian artists serving on the frontlines. 85 The Propaganda Office of the Military designed this exhibition with the intention of using art produced by soldiers at the front to expose audiences in Italy, Germany, and other Axis-allied nations to the humanity and civilizing nature of Fascism at war. As Ben Martin has written, the idea of Italian cultural superiority was a central plank in the Nazi-Fascist relationship which began in the 1930s as Fascist bureaucrats ‘present[ed] Italy as uniquely able to lead Europe because of its brilliant Roman and Renaissance legacy and fascism's supposedly more spiritual sense of Europe's meaning and ideals’. 86 After opening in Rome at the Palace of Exhibitions and then shown as part of the Venice Biennale in the summer of 1942, the exhibition travelled to Berlin, Munich, and Vienna between 28 October 1942 and 22 March 1943, and to Budapest and Bucharest in the May and June of 1943. 87
While the National Socialist Exhibition of 1939 attempted to draw Italians into a celebration of the nearly-formalized Pact of Steel by introducing Italians to Nazi ideology and practice, the First Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists, an exhibition of art produced by artists on the battlefield, had the goal of convincing Italy's Nazi ally of its unique military and cultural contribution to the war. Despite their similarity as acts of self-representation designed for export, where the National Socialist Exhibition failed to draw popular support and was pulled, the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists was hailed by audiences from Munich to Vienna, from Budapest to Bucharest. While the two exhibitions differed in format, as one was a documentary presentation of Nazi politics and ideology and the other an art show with a political purpose, they shared a common goal as acts of self-representation. The form of an exhibition of art by soldiers was not new, having been done by Nazi Germany with German artists in 1941 and 1943. 88 In this case, the powerful emotional immediacy of art produced by frontline Italian soldiers in 1941 and 1942 demonstrates one route Fascist Italy, already struggling militarily, took to promote itself to its stronger ally and to share its vision of the values of the coming New European Order.
The Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists offered a prescribed, sanitized, and compensatory vision of victory and sacrifice on the front lines. As a display of the successes and humanity of the Italian military, at a time when neither existed in reality, the show reveals the identity that the regime hoped to carve out for itself in the New Europe as culturally superior and the home of the most important European cultural traditions. The show featured paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculpture by conscripts and volunteers, by those with international reputations and by those with regional careers. It presented 797 works of art by 126 ‘soldier-artists’. Artists both ‘asked’ and ‘were asked’ by Sapori to participate. 89
This display of art from the battlefield made the argument that Italy offered a vital spiritual and artistic contribution to the Axis’ New Order. The exhibition circulated a vision of Fascism's many wartime fronts, which, by depicting the power and humanity of the Italian forces, attempted to counter the rumours of failure and defeat circulating at home and abroad, as well as to offer a cultural event gathering together the nations of the New Order. The idea that art represented the best of each ‘people’ or ‘volk’ coincided perfectly with Nazi cultural ideology and accounts in part for why it was warmly received in Berlin and Munich in the autumn of 1942. For the Nazis, the new Europe would be ‘marked by a distinctive, nationally rooted conception of art and culture’. 90
On 7 June 1942, to fanfare and cheering crowds, King Victor Emanuel III inaugurated the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists in a solemn ceremony on the steps of Rome's Palace of Exhibitions. The King was accompanied by the Chief of the General Staff of the Italian Army and undersecretaries from the Ministries of the Armed Forces, Popular Culture, and Education, as well as representatives from the Senate, Council of Corporations and Ministries of National Education. 91 National newspaper coverage stressed that the King was ‘greeted by the cheers of the crowd, which stretched along the Via Nazionale to the steps of the Palace of Exhibitions’. 92
Two days later Mussolini visited the exhibition on the second anniversary of Italy's declaration of war. The party secretary, the chief of staff of the army, and several high-ranking generals accompanied Mussolini on his tour of the show. 93 At the end of the tour, Mussolini expressed his ‘great pleasure with the [Exhibition's] perfect presentation’. 94 According to Il Messaggero, as Mussolini departed the Palace of Exhibitions, ‘the crowds grew in size and cheered him with a renewed and ardent demonstration of its enthusiasm and deep faith’. 95 The media visibility given to the exhibition, as well as its high profile inauguration by the King and then Mussolini's official visit the following day highlight the regime's faith in the event and the art to encourage support for the war and for the Italian troops at the front. Open to the public until 2 September 1942, the exhibition, according to the Corriere della Sera, attracted over 100,000 visitors in Rome, its first stop. 96
Arguing for Italy's unique cultural contribution to the Axis, the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists was meant, at this pivotal moment in the Nazi-Fascist war for European domination, to distinguish Italy from its German allies, to demonstrate to audiences in the Third Reich the critical place of art and artists in Italian society, especially in wartime, and to underscore the civilizing mission of Fascism's wars. The exhibition catalogue and the accompanying press coverage stressed the unity of art and war and the power and humanity of Italy's military. 97 In his catalogue introduction, Francesco Sapori focused on the long history in Italy of the ‘coexistence in the same person of the artist and the soldier’ and of art in the service of war, from Trajan's column to Andrea Mantegna's Saint George the Avenger. 98 In fact, continued Sapori, Italian art itself had been a protagonist in the struggle against the barbarians – from the ‘barbarous violence of the Persian King Darius to Tintoretto's depiction of Christian armies against the brutal Muslim hordes’. 99 In this narrative, the current Fascist war against barbarous Bolsheviks and duplicitous plutocrats represented the culmination of Italian triumphs throughout history, beginning with the battles against the Dacians under the Emperor Trajan through the Muslims who challenged early modern Christian Europe to the Libyans who sought to deny Italy its empire in Africa in the late nineteenth century. In Italy, art and combat went hand in hand and were ‘proof of the tangible nobility that will stand through time of the spirituality of the Italian armed forces’. 100 The theme of Italian spirituality in war as opposed to the barbarism of Fascism's enemies accelerated as the exhibition travelled through Axis-occupied Europe, with a review of the Hungarian edition declaring that ‘They fought and sacrificed their life for human goals and ideals, for a better humanity. This human element, this profoundly Italian feeling characterizes the entire exhibition’. 101
According to the exhibition organizers and the press coverage, the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists’ introduced the public in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Romania to what daily life at the front was like. ‘For this collection, the organizers demanded the exclusion of symbolic or allegorical subjects, and they postponed portraits of leaders and officers to another day’, wrote Fidenzio Pettile in Il Popolo d’Italia.
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‘The desire’, continued Pettile, ‘was to limit the field to documentation of direct lived experience, to events and moments personally experienced’.
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The reviewer for Il Tevere celebrated the emphasis on first-person direct accounts, writing that Each artist tells us frankly and candidly what he has seen and what he experiences daily: the impact of the assault, the moments of garrison life, the look of the prisoners of every race and colour, the battered environment of war…
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The Exhibition's emphasis on the civilizing nature and competence of the Italian military reflected Mussolini's determination to prove Italy's special contribution to Axis military campaigns. 105 By November 1942, as the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists toured Germany, the Italian forces on the Eastern Front numbered 235,000 men. Despite awareness among the Italian military and political leadership of the limited preparedness of Italian troops, the lack of war materiel, and German disparagement of Italian participation, Mussolini committed an ever greater number of men and arms. 106 Motivated as much out of fear as desire, Mussolini demanded that Italy ‘demonstrate its worth’ to the Germans and insisted that it could ‘not be less present [on the Eastern Front] than Slovakia’. 107
The Exhibition of Italian Solider-Artists or Feldgraue italienische Künstler stellen aus welcomed visitors in Munich and Berlin in November 1942 through January 1943, as German and Italian military forces on the Eastern Front renewed their offensive against the Soviet Union, aiming to capture Stalingrad on the Volga River and the Caucasian oil fields. 108 Despite the massive scale of the Axis war in the east, within months its offensive stalled. 109 In late autumn 1942, Soviet troops launched a counter-offensive at Stalingrad and on 2 February 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviets. The Italian lines in the east collapsed, bringing the final rout of the Italian Eighth Army, the death of 30,000 Italian soldiers, and the capture of another 54,000 men. 110 On the North African front during the summer of 1942, the losses and the Italian retreat from Libya of a year earlier were briefly reversed, but, here too, the eventual Axis defeat would begin within months. 111 The defeats of the winter of 1943 confirmed what Italians already knew – that the ‘parallel war’ was really a subaltern war and that the Germans considered the Italians more a liability than an ally. Those defeats, combined with Allied bombing and food shortages, catalysed existing discontent on the Italian home front, leading to widespread strikes in Northern Italian cities such as Milan and Turin. 112 It was an unpopular war, and the regime met growing domestic discontent with a propaganda campaign designed to convince Italians and their allies of Italy's indispensable contribution to the war effort.
The Propaganda Office of the Army coordinated the selection of artists with the Syndicate of the Fine Arts which nominated artists from among its members. 113 In a number of cases, artists were solicited by the army and asked to participate and to choose which battlefront they would go to. The art came in a range of styles, albeit more limited than the official art of the 1920s and 1930s. 114 The press stressed the notion that ‘technique’ and ‘aesthetic’ did not matter, ‘as long as the work was clear and respected the truth, that it was able to evoke that truth with emotion and artistry’. 115 In its promotion of art that it claimed to represent the physical and emotional reality of the frontlines, the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists depended upon legible and realist aesthetics. The styles varied from the illustrationist to attempts at impressionism or expressionism, from naïve or folk styles to the neo-classical and Novecento styles. 116
Many of the works connected Fascist Italy to Imperial Rome, employing the stile littorio – a Fascist imitation of Roman art. Fascism's dependence on the Roman past as a source of legitimacy and inspiration meant Roman-inspired art, especially the public arts of statuary, mosaics, and bas-relief, was a recurring element of official culture and, in this instance, it highlighted Fascism's direct lineage from ancient Rome and the idea that Italian military expansion brought civilization. 117 A reviewer at the exhibition's final stop in Budapest in July 1943, stressed the ‘shared Roman roots’ of these two Axis powers and suggested that ‘the third Roman Renaissance’ would soon arrive. 118 The artwork in stile littorio emphasized a conquering and civilizing military equipped with modern weaponry, such as in Egidio Giaroli's Spirit Builders at the Front, a Fascist version of the bas relief on Trajan's column. The references to Rome's achievements and universality drove home Italy's claims of cultural superiority. 119 Biagio Piodimani's marble statue, Departure of the Legionary, combines Romanita with the exhibition's central theme of the humanity of the Italian military. The statue depicts a legionary in uniform, kit and rifle at his feet, lifting his toddler son for a farewell kiss. While material and pose of the figures harken back to classical statuary, the scene evokes the tenderness of the Italian family and a father's devotion to the Patria.
For the German, Austrian, Hungarian, and Romanian audiences who attended in late 1942 and early 1943, the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists proposed a two-fold lesson in both the discipline and skill of the Italian military and its humanity, faith, and civilization. If battlefield landscapes and combat scenes predominated, so did depictions of fellowship and comradery among the soldiers at the front; there were emotional scenes of soldiers departing from home and family, and depictions of the good works and charity of Italian soldiers. The fraternal bonding of frontline soldiers, the military success of the war (represented through scenes of forward movement, depictions of military technology, and of bombardments), and the weakness of the enemy (often implied through racial coding) dominated.
Not surprisingly, the battlefield and military camp scenes emphasized the orderliness, discipline, and unity of the Italian armed forces. The exhibition came a year after the brutal Italian defeats of 1940 and 1941 gave the lie to Mussolini's proposition that Italy could fight an independent war. 120 The representations of the Italian military on the offensive mocked the reality of Italy's rescue in the Balkans and North Africa and its dependence on Nazi Germany. Mussolini's declarations of la guerra fascista and his fantasies of transforming Italians into a warrior race had been proven false in the actual military campaigns, making it all the more important that they remained alive in paint, pencil, ink, and watercolour.
Technology stood in as another sign of Italian military competence and for Italy's value as an ally. From late 1940 forward, in anticipation of hostilities and with the knowledge of Italy's lack of preparation for a multi-front war, Fascist propaganda underscored Italy's supposed technological advantage – its aeroplanes, its tanks, and, especially, its new parachute squads. The compensatory stress on technology – that is, the representation of technology because the actual technology was either non-existent or very limited – was apparent in the exhibition. 121 The exhibition included a number of ‘portraits’ of frontline radio and telephone communications, anti-aircraft gunners, tanks, and artillery.
Scenes demonstrating the Catholic piety of Italian soldiers appeared in a number of the artworks, including a diffusion of saints, angels, and scenes of mass and last rites. Baccio Maria Bacci contributed a painting of Canossian nuns; Antonio Santagata executed drawings of Saint George, Patron Saint of the Cavalry, Saint Barbara, Patron Saint of the Artillery, and Saint Martin, Patron Saint of the Infantry. Santagata's patron saints received great attention in reviews of the show, with Popolo d’Italia celebrating ‘the three large charcoal panels by Santagata [which] give noble form and modern meaning to the heavenly patrons of the military’. 122 Vittorio Di Colbertaldo offered a vengeful Archangel Michael, protector of the Fascist militia.
As the exhibition, named Feldgraue italienische Künstler stellen aus for its German tour, prepared to travel to Germany, the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment objected to the preponderance of Catholic themes and demanded that those works not travel to the Reich. However, while Catholic-themed works were excluded from the exhibition in Munich, Berlin, and Vienna, they formed a very popular and reassuring element of the show in Italy and Hungary, with Santagata's patron saints occupying the first room in Budapest. In Budapest, critics celebrated that Italian soldier-artists ‘put themselves in the service of sacred art’. 123
Not surprisingly, images of the enemy figured prominently in the exhibition, with a number soldier-artists illustrating captured British, Balkan, and Russian soldiers. By 1942, the ferocity and barbarism of the Axis’ enemies had replaced positive explanations of what victory would bring. As the military campaigns failed and as Italy's subordination to Nazi Germany grew more obvious, the civilization-destroying qualities of Fascism's enemies became the central official explanation for the war. The war was increasingly represented as a clash of civilizations between the virile Fascist warrior descended from the Romans and the racially degenerate and the weak who would destroy Western civilization, the Catholic Church, and the Italian family. The show included depictions of the enemy after capture, disarmed, without a uniform, and no longer a threat. In a series of 22 pencil and watercolour images, Fulvio Bianconi, a 27-year-old lance corporal in the artillery, drew portraits of Australian, South African, Indian, Serb, and Sudanese prisoners of war. At the exhibition's first showing in Rome, curators dedicated a separate, small room to these faces of the enemy. Bianconi's work, according to the reviewer in Il Popolo d’Italia, was ‘lively and appealing, if a bit caricatured, and his depiction of POWs is done with clarity and movement’. 124 For Il Tevere, Bianconi's ‘portraits of prisoners of every race and nationality presented the most varied and bizarre characters with effective vividness’. 125 Bianconi's Sudanese Prisoner displays a Sudanese POW in profile, bearded and wearing an exaggeratedly large cap, which makes him seem small and thin. The image has an anthropological quality of observation of ‘the other’, combining a colonial and racist gaze.
If the Catholic themes represented a challenge to Italy's Nazi allies, the presence of work expressing racial stereotypes, particularly ones evoking ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, represented a shared priority. The exhibition singled out the Soviet enemy for special condemnation and gave visitors across Fascist Europe, as the catalogue explained, a chance to see ‘the tragic and inhuman consequences of the Bolshevik utopia’. 126 Instigating fears about Russian primitiveness, immutable biological flaws, and more recent tropes about Bolshevik barbarism and immorality, official representations of Fascism's and Nazism's historic enemy – the communist – put forward a racially degenerate, godless peril from the East bent on the destruction of Western civilization and on the desecration of the Italian family and the Catholic faith. 127 A series of drawings at the heart of the exhibition depicted ‘the regime which has forsaken the laws of God and humanity’ and explained ‘the justified military intervention of Fascist Italy’. 128 Nowhere was the racialized enemy depicted as vulgarly as in a series of ink drawings by Ezio Castellucci, painter and captain in the Italian Expeditionary Forces on the Eastern Front. Castellucci gave aesthetic form to ideas about communist/Russian racial degeneracy. 129 He drew the soldiers of the Red Army and Russian women and children as subhuman objects in a brutal landscape of deprivation and violence. His portrait of a Soviet POW ironically titled ‘Comrade’ shows a clumsy, lumbering figure with raised arms, close-set eyes, and a distorted physiognomy and confused gaze – all designed to convey the supposed racial inferiority of the Soviet forces. Italian reviewers presented Castellucci's work as a frightening omen from the Eastern Front and one which meshed perfectly with Fascist propaganda then circulating in Italy. Most reviews of the exhibition noted Castellucci's work. Both Italian and German reviewers cited the drawings as realistic depictions of a terrifying Soviet and Russian enemy. In Il Tevere, Giulio Pettroni observed that Castellucci's drawings from Russia ‘have a diffused effectiveness’. 130 Walter Schultz in the Völkischer Beobachter found the work a representation of ‘people and folk life in Russia in the Old Dutch style’. 131
From its opening in Rome, Italian reviewers echoed the official theme of the exhibition, citing the art's connection to Italian history and to the Italian national character. ‘The general tone of the collection is noble, elevated both at the emotional and ethical levels’, wrote Il Popolo d’Italia, both for its aesthetic and technical success. Our established artistic tradition, from the ancient Romans to the First World War, running through the Medieval and Renaissance, has always exalted our warrior values through magnificent and sublime artistic masterpieces … This continues and is reaffirmed in many of these soldier-artists with their works full of sincerity, decorum, power, and quality.’
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Il Tevere agreed, writing, We must without a doubt say that our overall general impression is of an excellent exhibition, not only from a strictly artistic perspective, but also for its unique character as a display of soldier-artists. What emerges above all is the spontaneity and sincerity of the work, that it is free of polemics and interpretation, but rather, true to the immediacy of the subject matter.
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In Germany, as well, the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists found popular and critical success. The Italian press enthusiastically repeated the praise of the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten; the Munich newspaper hailed the art as ‘unified and moving’, adding that ‘once again one can see the vibrant artistic talent of the Italian people’.
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For the reviewers in the Nazi-controlled German press, the exhibition was unanimously celebrated. In the Völkischer Beobachter, Wally Schultz, pronounced the Munich iteration, held in the Neue Pinakothek, ‘a pleasure’ and ‘instructive’. He found the artists ‘deeply connected’ to their subjects and he cheered their ability to depict ‘a world transformed by war’.
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Schultz's review focused on the more heroic pieces, highlighting two winged Victories and the bust of ‘Emperor Victor Emanuel’, and noted the immediacy of the sketches of the frontlines. Schultz praised the fact that ‘our men and brothers’ were in the war ‘together with the sons of Italy’. All in all, the Völkischer Beobachter found the exhibition, a ‘captivating testimony to the strength and the soul of the Italian army’.
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Writing in the art journal Die Kunst für Alle: Malerei, Plastik, Graphik, Architektur, Schultz continued his praise of the exhibition's purpose and artwork: The gesture of dedicating our best gallery to the works of our Italian brothers in arms was not only a sign of respect for our friend, but also a way to stress the uniqueness of an Italian art show in Germany and, on top of that, of an artistic representation of the Roman genius.
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The German reaction to the exhibition reflected the theme of friendship emphasized in the Exhibition of National Socialism and supported the notion of a special Italian aesthetic capability.
In contrast to the cancellation of the vast majority of the itinerary of the Exhibition of National Socialism in 1939, the First Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists continued its travels on schedule into the summer of 1943 despite the collapse of the Eastern Front and the defeats in North Africa. According to reviews in both Germany and Italy and internal Fascist reports, the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists was positively received in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest. The office of the Chief of Staff of the Military wrote to Mussolini's office in April 1943 to report that in Germany the show attracted ‘lively and attentive interest, with a considerable number of visitors, all of whom offered flattering appreciation’. 138 In Budapest, officials and reviewers also reported large audiences and positive responses to the art on display. 139 A vision of the Axis frontlines as places with kind and pious soldiers, yearning for their families at home and fighting to defend them, and equipped with the most modern and effective weaponry was something audiences in Germany, Hungary, and Romania wanted to believe in – and the Italian military gave it to them. This episode, one of the last, in Nazi-Fascist cultural diplomacy achieved its goal of circulating a cultural event across the Axis and offering values to which audiences in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Romania could relate. Even though the possibility of an Axis-dominated New Order was fast receding, the search for a common culture through which to connect its peoples continued.
In the rapidly changing environment of ascendency and defeat between 1939 and 1943, the National Socialist Exhibition and the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists offered their audiences alternate realities and met opposing fates. While the first laboured to convince Italians of the advantages of an alliance with Nazi Germany, while simultaneously signalling Nazi dominance, the second represented the Fascist regime's effort to assure the Italian and Axis publics of the capabilities and humanity of the Italian military and to offer, through a vision of an Axis civilizing mission, common values of the New Europe. In 1939, the two Nazi and Fascist Ministries of Culture hoped that the National Socialist Exhibition would help to forge support for the alliance with Nazi Germany. In 1942 and 1943, the Exhibition of Italian Soldier-Artists was meant to convince restive populations, against all evidence to the contrary, that victory was imminent. 140