Ruth Ben-Ghiat - The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s "Life is Beautiful"

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful

“This is a simple story. But it’s not easy to tell. Like a fable, there is sor-row, there is wonder and happiness.” So begins Roberto Benigni’s Lifeis Beautiful, a comic’s meditation on the tragedy of the Holocaust. Setin fascist Italy, the movie recounts the story of the Italian Jew GuidoOrefice, who is deported to a Nazi concentration camp together withhis son Joshua and his Christian wife Dora. Guido is an endearinglyhapless buffoon whose world is shaped by a combination of happen-stance, both felicitous and unfortunate, and by his belief in love’s abil-ities to sustain and transform. Both of these things mark his life in thecamp, where he dedicates himself to shielding his son from all knowl-edge of the ghastly surrounding reality by telling him that they andthe other prisoners are really competitors in an elaborate game. Al-though Guido is ultimately killed in the Lager, he saves the spirit aswell as the life of his son, who, following the fiction his father has cre-ated, exalts that he has won the game when he is reunited with hismother at the end of the film.

Already known to international audiences for his manic perfor-mance in Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law, Benigni gambled inmaking his trademark bumbler the vehicle of a Holocaust narrative.Although a sardonic and dark humor is present in some camp mem-oirs, such as Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gen-tlemen, Benigni’s use of the comedic genre has sparked a new round ofdebate about the parameters and possibilities of Holocaust represen-tation. Benigni also risked a more specific censure in his native coun-try. Comedy has proved to be an acceptable way of publicly address-ing the sensitive subject of Italy’s participation and defeat in WorldWar II, but the unmartial anti-heroes of Italian post-war militaryspoofs neatly avoid the issue of fascist aggression. Benigni’s film onlypartially perpetuates this disavowal of homespun violence. It black-boxes the Holocaust as a wholly German phenomenon, but remindsItalians of their complicity in creating a persecutory climate throughtheir enforcement of fascism’s racial laws. Benigni and his co-screen-writer Vincenzo Cerami thus hedged their bets by doing extensive re-search, by hiring historical consultants from Milan’s Center for Jewish

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Documentation, and by screening the film for Italian Jewish groupsbefore its release. Such care paid off: while the movie drew some crit-icism abroad for its optimistic and sentimental tone, within Italy thecritical and audience response was mostly positive. Benigni’s subse-quent international success—which included prizes at Cannes,Jerusalem,Warsaw, and Hollywood—cemented his popularity amongItalians as an ambassador of the “essential” national qualities of fantasiaand humanism. Indeed, overseas publicity for Life is Beautiful empha-sized its inventiveness rather than its historical accuracy. In America,the movie was billed as an Italian fable “that proves that love, family,and imagination conquers all,” and Benigni told the magazine Indiethat he made the movie less as an historian than as “a director . . .whose duty is to invent stories, so I invented this completely. It is a fa-ble but invented from the truth.”1

The theme of the slippage between reality and fiction lies at thecore of Life is Beautiful and finds articulation in both the film’s con-tent and in its narrative structure.“I am what I want to be” is Guido’smotto, but dreams of transformation also obsessed the Nazis and fas-cists; ultimately, Benigni’s film calls attention to the potential of fan-tasy to work both evil and good.The destructive consequences of to-talitarian utopian thinking are ubiquitous. Dreams of empire and racialsuperiority drive the Italian fascists, who throw parties with colonialthemes and reassure one another that they are Aryans and “the best ofall races.” But the director also finds a positive function for fantasy, asGuido repeatedly transforms ugly situations into opportunities forjoyful conspiracy. In his hands, a school lesson on racial doctrine be-comes an occasion to show the absurdity of all racism, and a horse thatfascist thugs have covered with anti-Semitic slogans becomes a meansfor him to whisk Dora away from her fascist fiancé to begin their newlife together. Once in the camp, he interprets rules, rituals, and sym-bols for his son under the rubric of the game, countering the Naziwill to power with a demonstration of the power of the will to makesense of the senseless and so interrupt the process of dehumanization.

The film’s scenography, which juxtaposes careful period detail withover-the-top artifice, also emphasizes the film’s deconstruction of theboundaries between reality and fantasy. Viewers familiar with the artand iconography of the Italian regime will recognize as “authentic,”for example, various individual images of the Duce: the image in thefascist prefect’s office Guido must visit, the futurist portrait with sun-glasses, the monumental bust by Adolfo Wildt, and the photographicportrait of him as uniformed statesman—all these were produced (andoften reproduced in the media) during the dictatorship. Grouped to-gether, though, they create an absurdist aesthetic of semiotic excessthat undercuts the scene’s “reality effect” even as it stands for fascism’srhetorical overkill.This surreal sensibility also permeates Benigni’s re-

t h e ya l e j ou r na l o f c r i t i c i s m

constructions of the death camp, which have been criticized for theirsanitized quality.Typical is his depiction of mass death: through densefog, we glimpse a circular arrangement of skeletons whose theatricalarrangement calls to mind the rounds of Hell imagined by Benigni’sliterary hero Dante rather than the squalid results of genocidal rage.

The film’s narrative voice(s) only furthers this ambiguity.While theopening voice-over tells viewers that the story they are about to hearis “like a fable” (but not a fable, and therefore perhaps possessed ofsome truth), the closing voiceover reveals that the storyteller is actu-ally Guido’s son Joshua, now an adult. Joshua has supplemented hismemories of being in the camp with what must per force be imagi-native recreations of his parent’s histories, motives, and actions. Thus,the third-person voice of the opening comment—“this is a simplestory”—, which implies and foregrounds an “objective” narration ofthe historical drama that follows, is revealed at the end to beJoshua’s—“this is my story”—and the subjective voice of childhoodmemory. This disclosure allows for an after-the-fact interpretation ofthe film’s fairy-tale look, feel, and plot under the rubric of childhoodperspective, but maximizes its truth value for first-time viewers whoare not aware of the source of the narration. Indeed, Benigni has statedthat his sources of inspiration for the film’s mix of humor and pathoswere historical and contextual as well as cinematic and intertextual:along with Charlie Chaplin and a certain Italian comedic tradition, hedrew on the stories about the war told to him from childhood onwardby his father, Luigi, who spent two years in a German concentrationcamp. In interviews Benigni has recalled how his father sought to pro-tect his family from knowledge of the horror by favoring humor andhumanistic anecdotes as he related his experiences. The character ofGuido, as well as the film’s overall tone and approach to its subject, re-spect and reflect these paternal images and memories. Guido’s un-worldly and apolitical nature seems to mirror Benigni’s perception ofhis father as an unfortunate innocent who comprehended little of thereality around him at the time of his deportation. “He didn’t knowwhy he was there,” Benigni has said of his father’s experience in thecamp. “He didn’t know why the German people were so mean tohim; he couldn’t understand.” Joshua’s film-homage to Guido is thusalso Benigni’s film-homage to his father, the survivor, whose “storyand face came to me each day during the making of the movie.”2

One crucial fact complicates this scenario. Luigi Benigni was not anItalian Jew but a young member of the Italian fascist army who hadserved as part of the occupation forces in Albania as part of the Axisalliance. Deported to Germany along with over , other Italiansoldiers after Marshal Pietro Badoglio (who became head of state af-ter Mussolini’s July ouster from power) surrendered to the Alliesin September , he became one of the . million Italian prison-


ers of war whose experiences were largely excluded from the canonsof national memory.3 In the remainder of this essay, I would like toexplore the historical circumstances and critical traditions that con-tributed to the production of a Holocaust narrative based on thetransmutation of a fascist soldier into a Jewish victim. I will argue thatLife is Beautiful, which has been received by critics and audiences as acourageous reminder of a tragic episode in Italian history, also offersinsight into the politics of repression about Italy’s position as both aGerman ally and an anti-Semitic state during World War II. From thisperspective, the story that “is not easily to tell,” in the words of theopening voice-over, is not only that of a Jewish victim of the Holo-caust, but also that of a generation of Italians (Luigi Benigni was fourwhen Mussolini took office) who were groomed for war from birthon and sent to fight alongside Hitler for a new rightist Europe, onlyto become, as ex-soldiers, shameful symbols of fascism and Italian mil-itary defeat.

I will address two issues here. First of all, their brutal treatment inthe camps by those who had been their former allies left many ItalianPOWs feeling victimized after the war.This worked against the recog-nition of their roles in fascist aggressions against the populations of Al-bania and other Italian-occupied countries. It also resulted in a cultureof public silence about the experiences of Italian POWs that gave pri-vate and familial narratives such as Luigi Benigni’s a special import astestimonial. Second, this culture of victimization—which extended tocivilian populations as well due to Italy’s postwar diplomatic ostracismand material devastation—also mitigated any coming to terms withItaly’s own identity as a country engaged in anti-Semitic persecution.In many literary, cinematic, and journalistic accounts of the war, Ger-many served as the emblem of racial hatred and genocide, while Italyemerged as a collective of “brava gente” (good people) who, even dur-ing the war, had remained largely unaffected by twenty years of fas-cism.These historical and cultural factors must be taken into accountin considering the ideological operation carried out by Benigni in histransformation of his soldier father into a Jewish bumbler. Life is Beau-tiful lays bare the limits of what can be told in Italy, even after fiftyyears, about painful subjects: not just the Holocaust, but also the sagaof the millions of non-Jewish Italian soldiers who were trained by theregime to kill and command but who became, instead, as POWs,haunt-ing reminders of military defeat, civil war, and foreign occupation.

From Conquerors to Captives

Rhetoric of victimhood had long been part of the landscape of Ital-ian political discourse, but gained new meaning and popularity in thewake of World War II.4 A series of debacles marked Italy’s participa-


tion in the conflict, including setbacks in Greece, Albania, Russia, andthe loss of Italy’s colonies. The Italian war experience culminated inthe unique humiliation of being invaded by its own longstanding ally.The abrupt change of sides, which was a result of Badoglio’s armistice with the Allies, had grave consequences for those Italianswho, like Luigi Benigni, were abroad fighting alongside the Nazis.Like the senior Benigni, most were then in their early to mid-twen-ties and had been raised amidst fascist ideologies of “victory at anycost.” Their war diaries and memoirs convey their shock at theircountry’s sudden volte-face, their shame at their forced disarmament bythe Germans, and their incredulity at their former comrades’ vindic-tiveness. A peer of Luigi Benigni’s in Albania, Adolfo Bandiera,recorded that he awoke to find his camp surrounded by “Teutonicwarriors” who “paralyzed the entire [Italian] headquarters in five min-utes, officials included, without firing a single shot.” As he and his unitwere marched to a concentration camp, the first of many they wouldendure, he reflected on the shifting identities that accompanied thedramatic turn of events. Referring to the Albanian partisans who hadoften been executed for resisting Italian occupation of their country,he noted that “we have gone from being oppressors to being, likethem, oppressed by the ‘German steamroller,’ and a sense of sympathytoward them is born.”5

The grim routines of life in concentration camps such as Flossen-bürg must have completed the sensitization to the experience of vic-timhood. Perhaps because they viewed the Italians as traitors, theNazis were particularly brutal in their treatment of their former allies.Classified as “military internees” rather than POWs by their captors,they received no Red Cross aid and were ranked above only Jews,Russians, and Poles in the ethnic hierarchy of the camp system.6 Ital-ians of all ages shared fears about physical and mental disintegration.However, anger at their loss of freedom, feelings of abandonment byfamily and country, and feelings of humiliation were particularly acuteamong Luigi Benigni’s cohort, which had imbibed twenty years offascist demands for military glory. Their diaries and memoirs air fearsabout the loss of their youth due to the rigors of confinement. As onenineteen-year-old soldier confided in his Lager diary, his generation ofItalians had been “sentenced to a tragic fate that, in a very short time,has made us old in every part of our body and even more in our spirit.Hunger, cold, and nightmares are the three great monsters that haveconspired against us.”7 Some soldiers—Luigi Benigni was not amongthem—escaped the camps by accepting offers to collaborate with theGermans, which for them meant being repatriated to serve in thearmies of the Nazi-controlled Salò Republic. Most of those who in-stead refused to collaborate returned home in a pitiful state—RobertoBenigni, for example, has reported that his father weighed eighty


pounds upon release. Overall, the death rate for Italian captives wasone in ten.

For many Italian POWs, liberation did not mean the end to theirsufferings. Rather, the experience of repatriation often tended to ex-acerbate trauma by intensifying pre-existing feelings of shame as de-feated soldiers and abandoned members of a pariah nation. Aloneamong fighting nations, the Italian government had no coordinatedrepatriation plan, and the Allied powers were disinclined to offer menstill associated with fascism precious spots on transports going West.Captured Italian soldiers thus remained abroad long after their Alliedcounterparts; whereas % of French POWs were home by July ,one-third of their Italian contemporaries did not repatriate until or .8 When they did reach Italy, many faced an indifferent recep-tion and inadequate state aid that was only partially offset by the as-sistance programs of the Catholic Church. Interviewed decades afterhis return from Germany, one Italian spoke sarcastically of the “bigcelebration” that had awaited him in Bolzano, his point of arrival onnational soil:“we got six cigarettes, a cup of broth, and an apple: all theRed Cross packages were long gone.”9

While economic and political factors played a role in creating thissituation, psychological considerations are also relevant. In particular,POWs—as particularly visible symbols of the regime and of its de-feat—met with aversive responses from Italians.With their haunted airand their often-mutilated bodies, they stood out even among Italy’slandscape of devastation as disturbing reminders of the abyss betweenexpectations and outcomes of World War II—between the past idealof the fascist conqueror and the present reality of national impo-tence.10 No political party took on the advocacy of soldiers’ issues,state aid remained spotty, and for many decades public commemora-tions of the war focused on the contributions of Resistance partisanswho had come out on the winning side. The publication history ofex-POWs’ war diaries and memoirs provides a sense of their difficultyin gaining an audience for their testimonies in the public sphere. Of atotal of full-length POW diaries and memoirs that had appearedas of , only were published in the years –; not until thes, when the fall of Communism and the Italian First Republic al-lowed for the emergence of new configurations of national memory,did this aspect of Italy’s defeat become an acceptable topic for majorpresses. Still, self-censorship among ex-soldiers has remained opera-tive. Like many other POWs, Italians came away from their imprison-ment with feelings of guilt and unworth that were magnified by thepublic dismissal of their experiences. Traumatic states reinforced feel-ings of victimization among Italian camp survivors, leading many to asilence about their sufferings that lasted for decades.11 Thus, although


many newly liberated ex-POWS had a burning desire to “tell, speak,and express all that inspires and torments us,” relatively few of themfound the open ears and arms they wished for after the war.12

I have discussed the vicissitudes of Luigi Benigni’s cohort in theGerman camps in some detail because they are little known outsideItaly and because they are essential to understanding Life is Beautiful asa text founded on the tension between family memory and publichistory. Indeed, the failure of these men to find public forums inwhich to communicate their experiences meant that the transmissionof testimony in private and familial settings took on an extraordinaryweight and importance. The act of telling one’s war stories to an at-tentive audience of sympathetic listeners assumed a special meaning ata time when Italian institutions and cultures were united in their de-sire to forget the fascist past. Yet these stories were often transformedin their transmission from parent to child. Elisions and underdisclo-sures—born of trauma, shame, political caution, or a conscious desireto shield loved ones from pain—characterized many intergenerationalcommunications by World War II veterans in Italy and elsewhere.These could take the form of verbal omissions or, as in the case ofLuigi Benigni’s accounts, of masking strategies such as the use of hu-mor, understatement, or irony.13

Seen in the light of Roberto Benigni’s position as the recipient ofsuch testimony, Life is Beautiful thus takes on a performative meaningas an act of bearing witness to his father’s experiences and as a wish to“fill in the blanks”—to understand the harsh realities of the Lager thatwere hidden from him as a child. Yet the director’s reconstruction ofhistory is founded on dissemblance. It reproduces, through the ruseand fiction of the game, the element of protective denial that markedhis father’s communications to his family. As he has stated, his fathertold him the story of his imprisonment “like in the movie, like a fa-ble. He was afraid to make us fearful. He was protecting us like I amprotecting the son in the movie. . . . ”14 Joshua’s innocence at the endof the film about the raison d’être of the camps mirrors Benigni’s child-hood innocence about the scope of the horror his father had faced.Yet Benigni’s transfiguration of his father the Axis soldier into a casu-alty of both the fascists and the Nazis is another kind of evasion of re-ality—one that respects the boundaries of a collective memory thataffirms the portrait of Italians as casualties of the war rather than as itsco-belligerents.15 For the fulfillment of this particular fantasy, thechoice of an Italian Jew as protagonist was all but overdetermined.Thenext section of the essay briefly explores another facet of the culturalclimate that made possible the creation of Life is Beautiful: how has thisculture of victimhood mediated the reception and representation offascist anti-Semitism and the Italian Holocaust in Italy?


“We are all Victims”

The reluctance of many Italians after to recognize their compa-triots’ sufferings in the service of the defunct fascist military did notnecessarily translate into sympathy for a group that was targeted forpersecution well before the war: Italian Jews. Rather, multiple factorsworked against a collective coming to terms among Italians with state-sponsored racism under fascism and its links to the larger project ofJewish genocide. First, there is the meritorious behaviors of manynon-Jewish Italians, who risked their lives to save and shelter theirJewish neighbors within Italy and foreign Jews in Italian-occupiedterritories such as Greece and Yugoslavia. An % survival rate, one ofthe highest in Europe, has ensured that the narrative of Italian-Jewishrelations during the war has been dominated by tales of heroism onthe part of Italian clergy, military, and civilians from every walk oflife.16 Second, there is also the pervasiveness of feelings of victimiza-tion among non-Jewish Italians, who endured the effects of Germanoccupation, Allied invasion, and a bloody civil war. The writer Cor-rado Alvaro’s characterization of Italy as “a poor lamb, offered upin holocaust, who fights to defend itself the best it can” contained animplicit disavowal of Italians’ identity as persecutors at a time whenJews were being deported to death camps from the Salò Republic.17

These factors influenced the formation of paradigms of popularmemory and critical inquiry regarding the fate of the Jews underMussolini, paradigms that remained predominant until recently andwhich inform Life in Beautiful.These paradigms tended to produce ac-counts of the Salò Republic—the site and synecdoche of nationalcomplicity with Nazi genocide—that removed all Italian agency. Salòwas bracketed off as a “German” episode, its ideology renamed andexternalized as “Nazifascist.”18 They also dissuaded rigorous investiga-tions into fascism’s racist ideology and culture, which were reduced toan imitation of Nazi anti-Semitism, or, as in Benigni’s film, to some-thing that can be subverted and caricatured. Recent research has re-vealed instead the scope and virulence of that culture, and has clari-fied that the implementation of the Final Solution in Italy relied onbureaucracies and climates of opinion created by Mussolini’s dictator-ship.19 Since , censuses, concentration camps, and confiscation ofJewish assets had formed part of Italians’ attempts to force Jews’ con-version, expulsion, and ghettoization; during the war, these measuresbecame essential links in a chain of persecution that culminated in thedeportation and extermination of over , Italian Jews.20

Finally, these paradigms favored the memorialization of the valorousactions of the many Catholic laypeople and clergy who saved Jews atthe expense of investigating the influence Catholic anti-Judaism hadon the formulation and implementation of racist policies in fascist


Italy. In fact, Catholic voices such as the authoritative L’Osservatorio ro-mano justified the racial laws as merely a return to centuries-old papalmeasures of segregation, expulsion, and coerced conversion; populardistrust of Jews was cultivated from provincial pulpits as well as fromthe fascist press.21 This last critical and historiographical tradition,which still remains influential, speaks to the overwhelming strength ofCatholic culture in Italy, where religious tropes and symbols have longsaturated the rhetoric and imagery of secular and even anti-clericalgroups, including the Italian Communists.22 The measure of thehegemony exerted by Catholic discourse—with its attendant repres-sion of recent and remote episodes of Catholic intolerance—can betaken from the explanation of a kindly Italian Gentile who was inter-viewed in the s about her decision to hide Italian Jews during thewar: she said, without a trace of irony, that “one had only to be Chris-tian” to take the action she did.23

The fate of state legislation aimed at the “reintegration, restitution,and compensation” of Italian Jews after World War II suggests thatpopular reluctance to come to grips with the consequences of fascistanti-Semitism was shared by Italian policymakers.24 While more re-search needs to be done in this area, the example of the academy isenlightening. Starting in , a series of laws provided for the rein-statement of Jewish scholars who had been forced out of their uni-versity posts six years earlier. The many restrictions and loopholes inthese measures, however, ensured that relatively few regained their jobswithout a long wait. Many who had survived exile, deportation, or alife in hiding never managed to reclaim their prewar positions. Instead,they saw prominent fascist intellectuals remain in their jobs, undis-turbed by state purges or informal peer censure.25

It is clear that, as several scholars have argued, official (non)responsesto the plight of the Jews must be subsumed under the larger issue ofthe continuity of the state from the dictatorship to the republic.26 Yetthe obstructionism practiced by the state functionaries charged withimplementing this compensatory legislation also reveals a continuingambivalence toward Jews that translated into an unwillingness to con-firm their juridical status as victims of the regime. In fact, postwar Ital-ian governments long refused to place Jews in the category of the“politically persecuted,” reserving this term for anti-fascists and otherChristian casualties of totalitarianism.This exclusion of anti-Semitismfrom the category of the political reinforced tendencies in academicand popular culture to remember racism (if it was remembered at all)as a marginal and “extremist” element of fascism, rather than as a nor-malized component of later fascist ideology.27 Indeed, only in the lates, occasioned by the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the raciallaws, did a spate of new laws rid Italian institutions of the last residuesof anti-Semitic legislation. This astonishing delay, however, did not


stop Italian politicians from upholding the myth of Italians’ superiorhumanity and tolerance. “Racism never entered the collective con-sciousness of Italians,” asserted Senator Giovanni Spadolini, a historyprofessor and ex-prime minister of Italy, who was the primary politi-cal backer of this juridical action. Writing in , Spadolini’s an-nouncement that the new legislation meant that “the Italian Repub-lic had now paid its debt to the Jews in full,” betrays a certain defensivewish to consider closed a chapter of Italian history that so contradictsthis part of the national imaginary. It is significant that the wordSpadolini used throughout his speech to refer to the redemptive ab-rogation—rimozione—translates as both removal and repression.28 Forthis purely juridical “solution” to Italy’s “Jewish question” buries issuesof Italian complicity in Jewish persecution during the war and thecontinuation of fascist attitudes in the postwar period, as well as thepersistence of the more ancient sentiment of anti-Judaism.29

As I have argued elsewhere, the initial aims of fascist racism were notto eradicate the Jews but to coerce changes in Jewish behavior so asto fulfill Italian and Catholic fantasies about a total Jewish assimilation.Soon after he allied with Hitler, Mussolini gave a preview of this kindof thinking. “Il troppo ebreo fa nascere l’antiebreo” (“The excessive Jewgives rise to the anti-Jew”), the Duce declared. “Anti-Semitism is in-evitable wherever there is exaggerated Semitic visibility, interference,and arrogance.” In the years to come, removing the “overly Jewish”from Italian life was pursued through policies that encouraged“Aryanization,” baptism, and conversion to Catholicism, and punishedstubbornly “Jewish” Jews by segregating them from civil society. By, Mussolini commented happily that the high rate of intermar-riage meant that the “Jewish characteristics” of Italian Jews would beabsorbed by the Aryan bloodline within a generation.30 Such policiesconverged perfectly with preexisting Catholic desires for an “integra-tion” of Jews that entailed the eclipse of their religious and culturalidentities, and played on the assimilatory anxieties of a Jewish popula-tion saddled with the unique privilege and burden of cohabitationwith the Papacy. Indeed, among the legacies of this assault on Jewishspecificity from both Church and state was a protective tendencyamong Italian Jews to minimize difference from and conflict with thesurrounding Christian population.This protective tendency may havebeen exacerbated by survival of the Holocaust.31

In conclusion, Life is Beautiful offers a means of considering how thefeelings of victimization among Italians that resulted from the warhave continued to influence public and private memories of fascismand Italian racism. Although it reminds Italians of a shameful episodeof national history, it is also shows the influence of established tradi-


tions of popular memory and critical inquiry that ultimately haveworked against a collective reckoning with the scope and conse-quences of Italian anti-Semitism. Benigni’s representations of Jews inthe film are a case in point. His Jewish characters’ dialogue and be-havior contain historically correct elements, but also conform to Ital-ian Catholic ideals of an acceptably assimilated and disarmed Jewishidentity. Throughout the film, Guido’s Jewishness is alluded to ratherthan referred to explicitly; he has so little Jewish affiliation that his sonJoshua is unaware of his family’s religion, and Guido’s uncle refuses totell Guido why he was beaten by fascist thugs or to lodge a protest,commenting only that “silence is the most powerful cry.” Althoughsatire is used to ridicule Italian fascists in this movie, the humorous andbittersweet tone of the grown Joshua’s recollections also blunts angertoward the compatriots who made possible his father’s deportationand demise.

Still, as we have seen, there is also another layer of meaning here,one connected to Benigni’s own childhood memories of a paternaltragedy at the hands of the Germans whose fascist origins could notbe narrated.These two strands of storytelling, that of private memoryand public history, come together in Guido, the film’s protagonist. Ahappy-go-lucky apolitical bumbler, the character of Guido may havebeen designed to maximize audience empathy. Yet these qualities re-flect both a long tradition of state and Church ideals of a docile andassimilated Jewish population, as well as Benigni’s understanding of hisfather as an innocent camp victim. Indeed, the inclusion of a self-sac-rificing Christian wife in the narrative affirms that Jews have no mo-nopoly in Italy on the state of victimhood, even as they remain the themost acceptable public symbols of fascism’s inhumanity.

In an interview soon after the release of his film, Benigni explainedhis unusual choice to narrate the Holocaust through the lens of com-edy as a means of helping people to “smile at the Holocaust” and placeit behind them.“Even though I can’t say if it is wrong or right to getover it, it has to be done somehow.”32 This desire for closure, whichechoes Senator Spadolini’s assurance that Italy has “paid its debts infull” to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, is certainly not limited to Ital-ians. It takes on special meaning, though, in a country that has beenslow to acknowledge the consequences of its history as a Nazi ally andparticipant in state anti-Semitism. In the slippage between Guido andBenigni’s father—in that space created by the transmutation of a fas-cist soldier to a disarmed Jew—lies the oblivion of the Italian past. Inits voyage from private to public memory, Life is Beautiful reminds usthat histories take shape through a dialectic between the burden ofrecollection and the allure of fantasy.


Notes

I thank Elliot L. Jurist for his discerning comments on drafts of this essay, Julia Benghiat-Ju-rist for exhibiting uncommon patience for a newborn, and the Mellon Foundation and theLibrary of Congress for funding my research on Italian prisoners of war.

Text from Miramax promotional display mounted outside the Paris movie theater in NewYork City, where Life is Beautiful enjoyed a lengthy run; second from Erika Milvy, “TheBeautiful Life and Art of Roberto Benigni,” Indie (September/October ): .

Statements by Benigni from Milvy,“The Beautiful Life and Art of Roberto Benigni,” ,and Alessandra Stanley,“The Funniest Italian You’ve Probably Never Heard Of,” The NewYork Times Magazine, October , –.

On the experiences of Italian prisoners of war, see Flavio Conti, I prigioneri di guerra ital-iana (Bologna: Mulino, ); Angelo Bendotti et al: Internati, prigioneri, reduci [special issueof Studi e ricerche di storia contemporanea (Bergamo: Instituto Bergamo,)], and, in Eng-lish, the essays by Bob Moore and Kent Federowich in their edited volume Prisoners of Warand their Captors in World War II (Oxford and Providence: Berg, ).

I am referring here to Mussolini’s use of the trope of the “proletarian nation” to mobilizesupport against the “plutocratic” countries of England and France after World War I. Suchrhetoric was especially prominent during the Ethiopian War, when fascist propaganda pre-sented League of Nations sanctions against Italy as confirmation of this victimization.

Adolfo Bandiera, Io fui della IX Armata d’Albania (Bologna: Massimilano Boni, ), p. ;for similar sentiments expressed by those stationed in Russia and Greece, see CostantinoBelluscio, I giorni dell’orrore: Diario di guerra e di prigionia, 1943–45 (Cosenza: Effesette, ),p. ; Mario Lerda, Russia e Germania: Diario di guerra e di prigionia di un cappellano alpino(Ravello: Nuova Stampa, ), p. . For German attitudes toward Italians in the periodsurrounding the Armistice, see Gerhard Schreiber,“Gli IMI ed i tedeschi,” in Fra sterminio esfruttamento: Militari internati e prigioneri di guerra nella Germania nazista 1939–45, ed. NicolaLabanca (Florence: Le lettere, ), esp. pp. –.

See Bendotti,“I prigioneri degli altri paesi nella memoria degli internati italiani,” in Fra sterminioe sfruttamento, which is based on interviews with Italian veterans of the camps.

Giuseppe Lo Conte, Vita nel lager 1243 (Milan: Todariana, ), p. . On the difficult return of Italian POWs, see Nicola Labanca,“Il ritorno degli prigioneri,” in

Internati, prigionieri, reduci, pp. –. R. S., interviewed in Angelo Bendotti et al, Prigionieri in Germania: La memoria degli inter-

nati militari (Bergamo: Il filo di Arianna, ), p. ; see also Carlo Vicentini, Noi soli vivi:Quando 60 mila italiani passarono il Don (Milan: Mursia, ), p. .

In the daily Roma, one commentator singled out veterans as “those who are the most hor-rifying to us, reduced as they appear to be to mere shadows of human beings when theywere for us symbols and paragons of physical performance.” Mario Stefanile,“Hanno per-duto il loro nome,” Roma, September .

The long silence maintained by Alessandro Natta, chief of the Italian Communist Party inthe late s, is symptomatic. Natta was captured by the Germans as a young soldier inItalian-occupied Greece and spent time in the Küstrin, Sandbostel, and Wietzendorfcamps. After his reflections on these years were rejected by one press in , he did notpublish them until , although his prominent position would have assured him a con-tract. Natta cannot explain exactly why he left them in his desk drawer for forty years, butassures readers that no “veterans’ complex” was responsible for his “renunication.” Alessan-dro Natta, L’altra resistenza (Turin: Einaudi, ), pp. xxviii. On the traumatic states thatresult from captivity and interpretations of the POW experience as a process that extendsfrom initial capture to reintegration into community and family, see Judith Herman,Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, ), pp. –; and Col. Robert J. Ursanoand Major James R. Rundel, “The Prisoner of War,” Military Medicine (April ), pp.–.

Oddone Usai, Kriegsgefangener 23533 (Genoa: Laterna, ), entry of June , , p. .The oral history research group headed by Angelo Bendotti, which has studied POWrepatriation and its memorialization, concludes that this group of Italians faced “delusion,


bitterness, rejection, and incomprehension.” Bendotti et al, Prigionieri in Germania, p. . On the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of traumatic experience, see

Michelle R. Ancharoff et al,“The Legacy of Combat Trauma. Clinical Implications of In-tergenerational Transmission,” in International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies ofTrauma, ed. Yael Danieli (New York and London: Plenum Press, ), pp. –; alsoRobert Rosenheck,“Impact of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder of World War II on the NextGeneration,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (June ), esp. pp. –.

Benigni, in Milvy, . On the issue of ex-POWs’ consistent elision of their pre-capture experiences as occupiers,

see Angelo Bendotti, et al, “‘Ho fatto la Grecia, l’Albania, la Jugoslavia. . . ’: Il disagio dellamemoria,” in Italia in guerra ed. B. Micheletti (Brescia: Fondazione Micheletti, ), pp.–.

This is the tenor of many essays in Ivo Herzer, ed., The Italian Refuge (Washington D. C.:Catholic University of America Press, ); and Nicola Caracciolo, Gli ebrei e l’Italia du-rante la guerra, 1940–45 (Rome: Bonacci, ). For more balanced views that favor, re-spectively, pragmatic considerations of Allied good-will and economic benefit as well ashumanitarianism, see Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: the Axis and the Holocaust (Lon-don and New York: Routledge, ), and Daniel Carpi, Between Mussolini and Hitler:TheJews and Italian Authorities in France and Tunisia (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of NewEngland, ). Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books,), remains the best historical overview, while Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal(New York: Summit Books, ), gives a sense of the range of Italian Jews’ political affil-iations and familial situations as they faced the racial laws and the Holocaust.

Corrado Alvaro, Italia rinunzia? (, reprint: Palermo: Sellerio, ), p. . The effectsof such sentiments as they mediate the representation of Italian anti-Semitism have beenexplored by David Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan: Il Saggiatore, ).

For a historiographical survey that focuses on the motivations for fascist racism, see MeirMichaelis,“The Current Debate over Fascist Racial Policy,” in Fascist Anti-semitism and theItalian Jews, eds. Robert S.Wistrich and Sergio Della Pergola (Jerusalem:Vidal Sassoon In-ternational Center for the Study of Anti-semitism, ), pp. –. This tendency is re-inforced in popular memory among both Jews and non-Jews as reported by Carla Forti,Il caso Pardo Roques. Un eccidio del 1944 tra memoria e oblio (Turin: Einaudi, ), p. .

I am referring here to works that detail the mobilization of the intellectuals for the for-mation of a racial bureaucracy and the consequences of racial policy in the academy:Roberto Finzi, L’università italiana e le leggi antiebraiche (Rome: Riuniti, ); Carl Ipsen,Dictating Demography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), esp. pp. –; andGiorgio Israel and Piero Nastasi, Scienza e razza nell’Italia fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino,).

The definitive work on the conditions of capture and deportation of Italian Jews, whichgives the biographies of each known victim, is Liliana Picciotto Fargion, Il libro della memo-ria (Milan: Mursia, ).

See the articles by Monsignor Cazzani and Francesco Capponi in the L’Osservatorio romanoof – January and August respectively, both reproduced in Le interdizionidel Duce eds. Alberto Cavaglion and Gian Paolo Romagnoni (Turin: Albert Meynier,), pp. –. See also G. Miccoli, “Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggeantiebraiche del ,” La legislazione antiebraica in Italia e in Europa: Atti del Convegno nelcinquantenario delle leggi razziali (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, ), pp. –.

See on this issue Stephen Gundle, I comunisti italiani tra Hollywood e Mosca (Florence:Giunti, ).

Sister Luisa Girelli, interviewed by Sy Rotter for his documentary Debt to Honor (Wash-ington, D.C.: Foundation, ).

On this legislation see L’Abrogazione delle leggi razziali in Italia 1943–87 (Rome: ServizioStudi del Senato della Repubblica, ), which gives the texts of all postwar laws regardingthe Jews.The citation is from the essay therein by Mario Toscano, “L’abrogazione delle leggirazziali e il reinserimento degli ebrei nella società italiana,” p. .

On this issue see Finzi, L’Università italiana e le leggi antiebraiche, pp. –. For this argument see Toscano and Finzi.


On this point, see Toscano, p. . See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–45(Berkeley: University of California Press, ), chapter , which examines the nationalgrievances and hopes addressed by fascist racism and the support it enjoyed among someItalian intellectuals.

See Senator Giovanni Spadolini, preface to L’Abrogazione delle leggi razziali in Italia 1943–87,esp. pp. –.

Italian Jews may also have unwittingly facilitated this repression of the memory of anti-Semitism within Italian society.Trauma, fear of continued victimization, and the desire fora peaceful reintegration into their communities all contributed to weaken Jews’ collectivevoice about their recent persecutions at the hands of officials and neighbors. It is illumi-nating that most Italian Jewish testimonials about the Holocaust did not appear until thes. As was the case with the Italian ex-POWs who have been discussed earlier, how-ever, some of the silence was imposed from without. Like the ex-POWs, Jewish survivorsof the Lagers found that Resistance partisans occupied most of the available places in thepantheon of the Nazi-persecuted for the first decades after the war. One of the earliestItalian Holocaust testimonials, Primo Levi’s classic Survival in Auschwitz, was famously re-jected in by the Jewish writer and Einaudi editor Natalia Ginzburg (whose own hus-band had been executed by the Germans); the first widely circulated history of Italian fas-cist persecution of the Jews, by the Italian Jewish historian Renzo De Felice, appeared onlyin . I would like to emphasize that any remarks on this subject must be speculative,since, as the historian Mario Toscano has noted, the historical literature on Italian Jews justafter the war is “practically inexistent”—a situation that is itself significant.Toscano, p. .

Mussolini, interview with Yvon De Begnac, October , in De Begnac, Palazzo Venezia(Rome: La Rocca, ), p. ; Mussolini,“Il troppo storpia,” Il Popolo d’Italia, Decem-ber . For rates of abjurations, conversions, and “Aryanizations” among Italian Jews af-ter , see Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, ), pp., –.

A provocative study by Carla Forti (Il caso Pardo Roques, cited in n. ) on the mem-ory of fascist persecution of the Jews in Pisa offers insight into the long-term effects ofsuch assimilatory anxieties. Using archival research and extensive oral testimony, Forti setout to reconstruct the mystery of who informed on a Jewish Pisan notable who was exe-cuted by the SS in . In the process she uncovered a more generalized desire amongmany Pisan Jews to “protect the conditions of coexistence” with their non-Jewish com-patriots by minimizing or “forgetting” the entire painful episode of fascist anti-Semitism.As Forti tells it, this “protective” identity survived even the test of genocidal persecution;only further research will reveal if other Jewish communities were guided after the war bythe triple mandate of ensuring continuity, community, and conciliation.

Benigni, in Stanley, .


Ruth Ben-Ghiat - The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s "Life is Beautiful"

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