Kolloquium: Emotional Attachment or Manipulation? Fascist Italy and the Commemoration of Fallen Soldiers of the First World War

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2018/2019 colloquium:

Hannah Malone, Freie Universität Berlin

Emotional Attachment or Manipulation? Fascist Italy and the Commemoration of Fallen Soldiers of the First World War

Italy suffered unprecedented losses in the First World War—losses which, once in power, the Fascist regime sought to exploit for purposes of propaganda. In the late 1920s, Mussolini decided to exhume the remains of thousands of soldiers who had died fighting over a decade earlier, and to re-bury them in vast ossuaries, or bone depositories, to be built along the former front lines. On one hand, the new ossuaries embodied a Fascist rhetoric of pride and triumph, but, on the other, they reflected private stories of grief and sorrow.

Hannah Malone is a historian interested in death, architecture, and politics in modern Italy. As an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, she is currently writing a book on Italy’s Fascist ossuaries. Previously, as Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome, she worked on Mussolini’s favourite architect, Marcello Piacentini. Her book, Architecture, Death and Nationhood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth-century Italy (Routledge 2017), explores political and social change at the time of Italian unification, and has recently come out in paperback.