Propaganda, Diplomacy and Ideological Crisis: Sonic Cultures and Italian Fascism During the Early 1940s
Résumé
Italian participation in the WWII was not a simple subordination to Hitler’s imperialism. For the
fascists, the war was a means to strengthen the autonomy and prestige of the regime following the
military successes in Ethiopia (1935-6) and Albania (1939). Early setbacks in Greece and North
Africa, however, dashed fascist hopes for a successful ‘parallel war’ fought independently from the
Nazis. As the military endeavours failed, culture took an increased centrality as a means of affirming
Italian prestige within the Axis’ new order. After the famous economic and technological ‘battles’
of the 1920s and 1930s – for ‘grain’, for ‘the lira’, for ‘the land’, for ‘births’ – the fascist regime
undertook a final battle in the field of culture. According to the Minister Giuseppe Bottai, in
wartime Europe, Italy was the only and best guardian of civilisation and culture.
Since the end of the 1930s, the cultural resistance of Italian fascism was increasingly practiced
both inside the nation, with songs recorded on discs, and across its borders, by means of radio
broadcasts designed for allied countries such as Hungary and Romania. Through sonic recordings
and broadcast, the thwarted Italian Empire continued to exist at least on a symbolic level and to
revendicate its Lebensraum in the Mediterrenean while maintaining a dialectic of resistance and
alliance with Nazi Germany.
The complex nexus between propaganda, cultural diplomacy and cultural resistance, increasingly
foregrounded in recent historiography, have been scarcely investigated by musicologists and sound
scholars alike. By focusing on a set of musical and archival sources, this paper aims to understand
the role of sounds in shaping this process of national crisis, imperialist ambitions and ideological
bankruptcy, thus sheding new light on a relatively unknown chapter of Italian fascist culture.
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