Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction Violence, Normality, and the Construction of Postwar Europe
- 1 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and World War II
- 2 Between Pain and Silence
- 3 Paths of Normalization after the Persecution of the Jews
- 4 Trauma, Memory, and Motherhood
- 5 Memory and the Narrative of Rape in Budapest and Vienna in 1945
- 6 “Going Home”
- 7 Desperately Seeking Normality
- 8 Family Life and “Normality” in Postwar British Culture
- 9 Continuities and Discontinuities of Consumer Mentality in West Germany in the 1950s
- 10 “Strengthened and Purified Through Ordeal by Fire”
- 11 The Nationalization of Victimhood
- 12 Italy after Fascism
- 13 The Politics of Post-Fascist Aesthetics
- 14 Dissonance, Normality, and the Historical Method
- Index
12 - Italy after Fascism
The Predicament of Dominant Narratives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction Violence, Normality, and the Construction of Postwar Europe
- 1 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and World War II
- 2 Between Pain and Silence
- 3 Paths of Normalization after the Persecution of the Jews
- 4 Trauma, Memory, and Motherhood
- 5 Memory and the Narrative of Rape in Budapest and Vienna in 1945
- 6 “Going Home”
- 7 Desperately Seeking Normality
- 8 Family Life and “Normality” in Postwar British Culture
- 9 Continuities and Discontinuities of Consumer Mentality in West Germany in the 1950s
- 10 “Strengthened and Purified Through Ordeal by Fire”
- 11 The Nationalization of Victimhood
- 12 Italy after Fascism
- 13 The Politics of Post-Fascist Aesthetics
- 14 Dissonance, Normality, and the Historical Method
- Index
Summary
introduction
National collectivities – like all collectivities – cannot exist without some shared sense of their past. They tell and consume stories about themselves. They explain who “we” are, what “our” history is. As in fairy tales, they establish who the villains and the heroes are. These narratives are formed, evolve, and are challenged by other narratives. Some are dominant, hegemonic, and manifest; others are subordinate, dormant, and hidden. Groups within nations – parties, regions, ethnicities, churches – elaborate their own stories, confirming or denying the dominant narrative, or simply coexisting with it. The conflict is continuous, part of the life of modern nations.
These struggles are fought with unequal means. The dominant historical narratives achieve their status because they are produced and promoted by dominant groups and by those entrusted with the task of diffusing them. Politics and economics play a preponderant role because the construction of these narratives requires a disproportionate access to the means of circulating ideas. Politicians, journalists, press magnates, those in charge of the mass media, but also educators, prestigious intellectuals, textbook writers, publishers, filmmakers, songwriters, and, occasionally, historians have a considerable advantage over those with reduced access. Unlike the myths of antiquity, the historical narratives of the post-traditional age are not necessarily taken on trust but must conform to some well-known and established facts. They cannot be made up out of thin air and cannot totally contradict the actual experience of those to whom they are addressed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Life after DeathApproaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s, pp. 259 - 290Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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