Mussolini's Ghost: The Afterlife of a Dictator

The Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini was killed in 1945 and his body was exhibited upside down in Milan before an angry crowd. The repudiation of the dictator who had led his people to disaster was complete. But his story did not end there. The Duce lived on thanks to a multifaceted and complex legacy. He remained a constant topic of interest due to the activism of his widow and the work of the mass media. He symbolised deeply-rooted ideas about masculinity, national identity and political leadership. His image was embedded in various ways in the physical environment. He haunted the postwar republic after having dominated the political landscape in life. In Mussolini's Ghost Stephen Gundle explores the many aspects of Mussolini's strange afterlife, be it through the fate of his statues and the places that Mussolini was most associated with, his depiction in film and television, his impact on political life, his treatment in public history and his place in popular culture. Gundle argues that the root causes of Il Duce's disturbing persistence lie in the way Italians negotiated the transition from war to peace and from Fascism to democracy. Instead of acknowledging the enthusiastic backing many had given to a criminal dictatorship, many Italians behaved as though Fascism had never really existed. The dictator was instead re-cast as a flawed but well-meaning family man. Thanks to this and other strange reconfigurations, the grip Mussolini established over the popular mind was never properly dismantled. Gundle employs tools of collective psychology to develop a bold new interpretation of the causes of Mussolini's posthumous endurance that makes comparisons with the situation in West Germany.

Table of Contents:
Introduction PART I: DECLINE AND FALL 1: The people and the dictator 2: Mussolini's dismissal 3: Divided nation 4: Death and damnation PART II: 'OUR' MUSSOLINI 5: Getting over dictatorship 6: Family and nation 7: Anxieties of masculinity 8: Imaginary trials PART III: MATERIAL LEGACIES 9: The fate of Duce statues 10: Mussolini's places 11: Fascist art and kitsch 12: Political ghost signs PART IV: HISTORY AND MEMORY 13: Biography as monument 14: Performing the Duce 15: Pop culture and cultural memory 16: The shadow of M Conclusion

About the Author :
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of several works of political and cultural history, including Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91 (2000), Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (2007), Glamour: A History (2009), and co-author of Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (2007).

Review :
Mussolini's Ghost is a tour de force in the history of cultural memory and collective psychology. Through innovative exploration of written and visual sources, memorabilia, artifacts and physical places, Stephen Gundle reveals the ways in which Mussolini's cult resonated in the post-war decades, while guiding the reader through the complex intricacy of aftermaths more generally. Benito Mussolini died in April 1945, shot by Communist partisans and famously hung from his feet from a garage in Milan. But, as this fascinating book shows, he lived on in Italy in so many ways, haunting the country and continuing to provoke debate, but also books, plays, imaginary trials, artworks and numerous other cultural engagements. Stephen Gundle's original and brilliant study unpicks the way that Mussolini has continued to inspire love and hatred, in troubling but also extraordinary ways - from the serious to the absurd. Based on deep and creative research this book will change the way we see the impact and understanding of Italian fascism, and its afterlives. Delving into the psychological legacy of the 1930's cult of the Duce, Gundle gives us a vivid, perceptive, and convincing explanation of why, almost 100 years on, the ghost of Mussolini still haunts the contemporary political scene in Italy. Arguing that Italy has failed to come to terms with its fascist past, he helps us understand why, despite the disaster of World War II, the fascist leader still retains his fascination for many Italians. Moreover, in confronting the complex relationship between past and present, this study invites us to reflect seriously on the broader question of the formation and role of memory itself. Over the course of two decades of Fascist dictatorship, the figure of Benito Mussolini exerted a profound emotional and psychological grip on Italy. His hasty execution on the shores of Lake Como in April 1945, and the desecration of his lifeless form in Milan's Piazzale Loreto just afterwards, were never going to be enough to break the Duce's spell. Stephen's Gundle's fascinating and elegantly written study draws on an astonishing range of sources to account for Italians' enduring obsession with Mussolini, and their simultaneous inability to stage a collective reckoning with the hold that he had over them. Gundle's analysis is subtle, profound and utterly absorbing. This is a book destined to be a landmark in our understanding of Fascism's insidious legacy. Gundle's book offers much of interest. It is well-written, ably structured, and draws on a wide range of sources and texts which are carefully discussed. This is a well-researched and thought-provoking book with a pressing modern relevance ... [Gundle] makes good points about how important history is to politics (****). [Gundle] does an excellent job in explaining how the dictator's family ... worked tirelessly to humanise the Duce's posthumous image in the 1950s. ... Gundle is surely right to say that the lack of a full national reckoning with Mussolini's rule is unsettling.