Mussolini's Ghost

The Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini was killed in 1945 and his body was exhibited upside down in Milan before an angry crowd. The repudiation of the dictator who had led his people to disaster was complete. But his story did not end there. The Duce lived on thanks to a multifaceted and complex legacy. He remained a constant topic of interest due to the activism of his widow and the work of the mass media. He symbolised deeply-rooted ideas about masculinity, national identity and political leadership. His image was embedded in various ways in the physical environment. He haunted the postwar republic after having dominated the political landscape in life. In Mussolini's Ghost Stephen Gundle explores the many aspects of Mussolini's strange afterlife, be it through the fate of his statues and the places that Mussolini was most associated with, his depiction in film and television, his impact on political life, his treatment in public history and his place in popular culture. Gundle argues that the root causes of Il Duce's disturbing persistence lie in the way Italians negotiated the transition from war to peace and from Fascism to democracy. Instead of acknowledging the enthusiastic backing many had given to a criminal dictatorship, many Italians behaved as though Fascism had never really existed. The dictator was instead re-cast as a flawed but well-meaning family man. Thanks to this and other strange reconfigurations, the grip Mussolini established over the popular mind was never properly dismantled. Gundle employs tools of collective psychology to develop a bold new interpretation of the causes of Mussolini's posthumous endurance that makes comparisons with the situation in West Germany.

Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of several works of political and cultural history, including Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91 (2000), Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (2007), Glamour: A History (2009), and co-author of Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (2007).