Christof Dipper. Deutschland und Italien 1860-1960: Politische und kulturelle Aspekte im Vergleich. München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005. 284 S. (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-486-20015-7.

Reviewed by Andreas Fahrmeir (Historisches Seminar, Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Published on H-German (February, 2007)

Parallel or Divergent Histories?

The histories of Germany and Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear to have much in common. Both countries experienced the belated formation of a nation-state by force of arms rather than through the intensification of statehood within stable borders or as a result of a popular uprising; both emerged from the First World War with a sense of grievance and loss; both underwent a period of fascist dictatorship; and both combined the opportunity of postwar reconstruction with a political orientation towards Christian Democracy. In this volume, post-1945 "Germany" refers to West Germany only. As Christoph Dipper highlights in his introduction, comparing the historical experiences of Italy and Germany has been neither a particularly frequent nor a particularly popular approach in either country. The difference between comparatively benign Italian fascism and German National Socialism appeared to pale into insignificance before the more obvious similarities between "totalitarian" Hitlerism and Stalinism. The more centralist, more liberal Italian, and the more federal, conservative German experience of nation-state formation could also be seen as marking the beginning of divergent special paths to modernity with different starting points: an industrialized country in the case of 1860s Germany and an agrarian one in Italy.

What Christoph Dipper's volume proposes is a comparative re-examination of these histories. Its focus is not on economic affairs, where transnational perspectives have become a standard approach to explaining industrialization. Likewise, social history is not the volume's primary focus, largely due to shifts in historiographical fashion, though Dipper argues that the field warrants further exploration. The question the volume addresses is how the experience of "modernity" influenced Italian and German history. This question is examined in three broad contexts: "land," "state" and " culture." Each of the three sections consists of thematic articles which are explicitly comparative.

"Land" begins with Marco Meriggi's article on regionalism, where Italy and Germany would appear to differ markedly. Whereas the German historical experience was deeply marked by regional differences, between the south and Prussia, for example, the Italian nation-state appeared much more successful in promoting national administrative unity. Meriggi argues, however, that a brand of regionalism focused primarily on localities took root in Italy as well and after 1945 both the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy experienced variants of regionalism, introduced from above as potential defenses against the standardization imposed by National Socialism and fascism. Gustavo Corni's contribution on the relationship between landscape and the environment appears to offer clearer contrasts: a proto-ecological debate in Germany as early as 1900, driven by the experience of industrialization's negative side-effects and never entirely submerged, and a more utilitarian, exploitative approach to nature in more rural Italy, which was challenged only by a more politicized movement of the left in the postwar period.

"State," with six articles on political ideology, social history, administration, and political events, is by far the volume's largest section. Pierangelo Schiera opens the debate with a contribution on the idea of the common weal (Gemeinwohl, bonum commune), which expands beyond Germany and Italy to embrace the entire European and American debate on the relationship between individual rights, state competence, and subsidiarity from the American Revolution to the 1940s. The more explicitly comparative dimension returns in Franz J. Bauer's discussion of how bourgeois Germany's and Italy's nation-states were. He questions the almost instinctive association between the rise of the middle classes and the rise of modernity by concluding that Italy's nation-state was more bourgeois, but less modern than the German Empire, while neither route to modernization was ideal. Fabio Rugge's study of the relationship between localities and states arrives at similar conclusions. Prussian local autonomy and formalized differentiation between cities and villages was combined with massive restrictions on participation, while broader electoral rights, which gained ground in Italy after 1900, went hand in hand with a sharp limitation of local autonomy.

The second part of the section on the state is more directly concerned with Italy and Germany as authoritarian, illiberal political entities. Lutz Klinkhammer deals directly with state repression as a political instrument. He contrasts a "liberal" tradition of repression, exemplified in the use of martial law against protest movements in southern Italy or exceptional legislation in Imperial Germany, with a dictatorial one established by fascism and, more radically, national socialism. He notes that while both countries distanced themselves from a dictatorial version of repression, a return to the liberal repressive tradition proved possible, after the Second World War, in the course of anti-communist measures and, more specifically in Italy, a Vatican-sponsored drive for a return to traditional morality, which reached its limits in the early 1960s, when successful mass agitation against government policies became possible. Wolfgang Schieder's article on fascism, National Socialism, and modernization is a passionate plea against regarding either political system as a consciously or unconsciously modernizing regime, though they did result from "an accumulation of crises of modernization" (p. 179). The final article of this section, by Rolf Wörsdörfer, deals with ethnic minorities in Germany and Italy.

"Culture" probably gives rise to the most diverse expectations, and it is this part of the volume which appears least homogenous. Bunello Mantelli explores the role of racism as a scientific explanation of the world, arguing that, far from acting merely as a pseudo-science legitimating political goals originating from considerations of power or economic gain, racism forms a key to understanding late nineteenth-century worldviews, particularly in Italy. Hans-Ulrich Thamer considers the public approach to the past in the German and Italian nation-state and transfers the conceptual approach of Geschichtspolitik to the Italian case from the more comprehensively explored German one. The final essay, by Lutz Raphael, deals with German and Italian experiences with national culture between 1800 and the 1960s. He argues that Germany and Italy's dictatorial regimes were successful in creating a popular national culture that proved to be one of the "few successful competitors of the expanding American cultural industry in interwar Europe" (p. 272), so that "the military catastrophes of both dictatorships also dragged their national-cultural ambitions into the abyss" (p. 273).

This excellent collection of essays thus covers a broad range of methodologies and perspectives. Indeed, an interesting note at the beginning indicates that the conference from which it came produced impassioned debates. It is recommended reading not just for specialists on Italian and/or German history, but for anyone interested in the comparative study of nation-building. The volume, as mentioned above, resulted from a conference held in 1999 at Munich's Historisches Kolleg, one of the many centers of historical research in Germany threatened by cutbacks or closure. This volume documents how much could be lost in exchange for a relatively small gain to the Bavarian public purse.

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Citation: Andreas Fahrmeir. Review of Dipper, Christof, Deutschland und Italien 1860-1960: Politische und kulturelle Aspekte im Vergleich. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12896

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