Conflicts of Memory: The Reception of Holocaust Films and TV Programmes in Italy, 1945 to the Present

Situated at the confluence of history, media and cultural studies, this book reconstructs the often deeply discordant and highly selective memories of the Holocaust in Italy in the postwar era. The author’s core method is one of reception analysis, centered on the public responses to the many films and television programs that have addressed the Holocaust from the 1940s to the present day. Tied to the heritage of fascism, antifascism and the Resistance, public memory of the Holocaust in Italy has changed greatly over the years. Self-acquitting myths of Italian innocence and victimhood, and universalizing interpretations grounded in Catholicism and Communism, provided the initial frameworks for understanding the Holocaust. However, the last two decades have seen an increasing centrality of the Holocaust in memory culture but have also witnessed the establishment of a paradigm that relativizes other fascist crimes and levels the differences between fascism and antifascism.