| The transition from the fall of the Fascist regime in 1943 to the establishment of a new political order in 1948 is still today a most controversial period in Italian culture and history. Against Redemption sheds light on the range and fluidity of opinion in years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, offering a more nuanced understanding of this transition.;My dissertation focuses on the heterodox voices that, during the transition, stressed cultural and political continuity between the new democracy and the previous regime, and denounced the lack of the alleged moral regeneration of Italy. In the early postwar period, coming to terms with this historical continuity implied the haunting problem of Italian responsibility in WWII, the working through of national defeat, as well as the firm disavowal of past cultural and political models. Such past models engendered the definitive shipwreck----not the rebirth----of the national state born with the Risorgimento. After experiencing Italian totalitarianism, writers like Curzio Malaparte, Alberto Moravia, Giuseppe Berto, Vitaliano Brancati and Carlo Levi spelled out a radical critique of undisputed beliefs like the preeminence of the State and of History over the lives of individuals.;The firm rejection of any political finalism----of any political theology----was for these intellectuals the standpoint for a wealth of compelling inquiries into the debris of prewar ideas and the anxieties of early postwar society. With their writing, they ventured well beyond the borders of Italian history into the crisis of European civilization that led up to WWII and the Holocaust. |
