Christian Goeschel

A Parallel History? Rethinking the Relationship between Italy and Germany, ca. 1860–1945*

In 1901, Paul David Fischer, a former senior German government official, published the second edition of his account of contemporary Italy and the Italians. Fischer, a regular visitor to the peninsula since the creation of the Kingdom of Italy fifty years earlier, prefaced his book with a critical warning. He insisted that he had written his Betrachtungen und Studien über die politischen, wirthschaftlichen und sozialen Zustände Italiens for the many German Italophiles who were

The Cultivation of Mussolini's Image in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler frequently expressed his admiration for Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Prime Minister since the October 1922 March on Rome. In July 1941, weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler insisted that Mussolini’s coming to power was a ‘turning point in history’. Without the precedent of Mussolini’s seizure of power, Hitler declared, the Nazis would never have succeeded in establishing the Third Reich.2 To underline what he saw as the Duce’s historic role, Hitler also had his office in the Munich Nazi party headquarters embellished with a bust of the world’s first fascist dictator.3

Biography, political leadership, and foreign policy reconsidered: the cases of Mussolini and Hitler

Extract ----- Abstract For many historians writing today, person-centred or biographical approaches constitute ‘the shallow end of history’, a field better left to amateur historians. However, since the 1990s, under the influence of cultural history and because of a growing dissatisfaction with structuralist approaches, some historians have become interested in finding alternative approaches towards the genre of political biography, partly inspired by the ‘new cultural history’ of the 1980s that prompted a return to the individual as a site for micro-history. In this article, I explore from my perspective as a historian of modern Europe what can or cannot be gained from the study of foreign policy through a strong emphasis of leaders’ biographies, an approach which political scientists and IR specialists such as Jack S. Levy have recently advocated. I shall focus on two of the most significant statesmen of the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, leaders of the world’s first fascist dictatorships and allies during the Second World War. According to Fascist and Nazi propaganda, Mussolini and Hitler were charismatic leaders exclusively in charge of their countries and above all of foreign policy. The powerful propaganda image of the dictator in total control makes Mussolini and Hitler an ideal case study to rethink the biographical approach towards foreign policy analysis and to ask if and how a biographical approach can shed light on foreign policy more generally. In this way, the article goes some way towards provoking a fruitful dialogue between IR and History. Keywords: Mussolini, Hitler, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, leadership, psychology, dictatorship, biography ----- Bibliography: Goeschel, Christian: Biography, political leadership, and foreign policy reconsidered: the cases of Mussolini and Hitler, ERIS, 2-3-2017, pp. 5-19. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v4i2-3.01

Staging Friendship: Mussolini and Hitler in Germany in 1937

In September 1937, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met in Germany. Millions of ostensibly enthusiastic Germans welcomed the Duce. Here were the worlds first two fascist dictators, purportedly united in solidarity, representing the ‘115 million’ Germans and Italians against the Western powers and Bolshevism. Most historians have dismissed the 1937 dictators’ encounter as insignificant because no concrete political decisions were made. In contrast, I explore this meeting in terms of the confluence of culture and politics and argue that the meeting was highly significant. Its choreography combined rituals of traditional state visits with a new emphasis on the personality of both leaders and their alleged ‘friendship’, emblematic of the ‘friendship’ between the Italian and German peoples. Seen through this lens, the meeting pioneered a new style of face-to-face diplomacy, which challenged the culture of liberal internationalism and represented the aim of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to create a New Order in Europe. At the same time, analysis of this meeting reveals some deep-seated tensions between both regimes, an observation that has significant implications for the study of fascist international collaboration.