A still noble war. Warrior myths in Italy
in the post-heroic age (1945-61)
A well-established historiographical paradigm presents WWII as
a watershed in the history of war and warfare, and, more specifically,
as a point of no return in the public perception and cultural
representation of the war experience. Although it provides a fairly
adequate description of the second half of the twentieth century, this
paradigm cannot be accepted as it stands. Violence against civilians
brutally escalated between 1939 and 1945, but it was by no means
limited to the Second World War. Moreover, this change of paradigm
was a generational phenomenon. Well into the 1950s and 1960s, writers,
directors and artists were influenced by traditionalism of literary
style and by a conscious or unconscious adherence to a canon of virility,
defining masculinity in terms of courage, loyalty and devotion
to the community (comrades and motherland). In recent years, the
contribution of Italian intellectuals to the construction of an Italian
war culture in the republican era has become the object of numerous
studies. Scholars seem to have reached a general consensus on a few
shared conclusions: the notion the older narrative paradigm of war
was erased by the prostration of civil war and the necessity to distance
oneself from the fascist regime, whose legacy was inseparable
from martial rhetoric. According to this dominant paradigm, Italian
literature after 1945 comes across as a constellation of testimonies of
the downtrodden: defeated and humble people who were only waiting
for the murderous storm of war to pass. However, the scholars
who have worked to establish a canon of postwar Italian literature
(and cinema) have avoided the complexity of post 1945 Italian intellectual
field. The popularity of traditional war-novels and patriotic
movies was huge: they were neither minor nor marginal. On the
contrary, their influence and impact are obvious. This is one of the
reasons why the generally accepted but certainly simplistic thesis of
the «disappearance of heroes» (the idea that the sacrificial vision of
death in battle was anachronistic and irretrievable) needs to be thoroughly
reconsidered.
Parole chiave: Cultura; Narrazione; Seconda Guerra
Mondiale; Italia
Keywords: Culture; Narrative; Second World War; Italy