With the one-hundredth anniversary of Fascism's seizure of power approaching, the time seems ripe for reconsidering how Italian culture negotiated the legacy of its totalitarian past. The current dominant paradigm, supported by major scholars of Italian Fascism, contends that Italy has proven unable to deal with the difficult heritage of the dictatorship(Ben-Ghiat 1999; Pavone 2004; Labanca 2005; Schwarz 2010; Focardi 2013; Carter and Martin 2019). Despite its validity, this paradigm remains incredibly ill-defined and under-theorised, since the scholarship has not openly addressed the reasons why Italy's long process of negotiation over its totalitarian past should be deemed deficient. Recent developments within the field of Memory Studies can offer a way forward to better understand this aspect of Italian memory culture. Thanks to studies that managed to go beyond the victim-perpetrator dichotomy by considering the various degrees of individuals implication in a history of injustice (Meister 2010; Thanh Nguyen 2016; Robbins 2017; Rothberg 2019), we now have a nuanced theoretical language to explore the complex ethical positions that people occupy vis-à-vis the past. Presenting some preliminary results of my postdoctoral research project on the construction of a sense of Responsibility for Fascism in the Italian literature and cinema of the postwar decades, I will examine the articulation of the idea of implication in a corpus of Italian novels that represented the Fascist dictatorship. The analysis will show that within Italian culture the idea of the implication of the Italian people in the crimes of the dictatorship was developed only in extremely selective and partial manners. The limited articulation of the notion of implication has constituted, I will argue, one of the major shortcomings of the Italian memory of Fascism during the twentieth century, which facilitated the narrativisation of the past through a series of self-absolving strategies.
