RISULTATI RICERCA

The political and ideologic antagonism and the social conflicts wich caracterized the seventies reintroduced subversived and illegal activities. The files on political opponents resurfaced in a contest marked by the right-wing terrorist violence as a moment of the press campaign of new left groups’s alternative information following the attacks carried out by fascist paramilitary groups in 1969. However in a very short period, this practice lost its primary investigative trait and was steered towards a rising use of the political violence. In the end the files on political opponents were used by left-wing terrorist groups in the factories, in the cities’s quarters or in the attacks against the police force and the State’s representative in one of the most dramatic period of the Italian republican history.

The author examines the evolution of «Peace History» as a distinct field of research (its birth in the ‘60s and ‘70s, its growth in the ‘80s and its ultimate success with the end of the Cold War) in the USA, in Germany, in Great Britain, in France and, at last, in Italy. Many of peace historians’ books are scholarly written, stimulating and well documented. The majority of them, however, remains still far too parochial in perspective and shows an open militant attitude inclined to condemn war history and to separate it from peace history. Further, as a result of their tight connection with «peace research», peace historians lean often towards theoretical frameworks, as in the cases of their use of categories like «pacifism» and «pacificism» which are proposed not as historically based but as timeless experiences (even if they depend in most cases only on value judgements, like a short history of the words themselves may prove). The author argues that peace history has to grow not as a separated history but as a field of research deeply connected with history of society, history of war, history of mass politics.

This essay, based mainly on the new sources made available by the opening of the East German Communist party archives, but also on the historical records of the Italian Communist party, moves from Eurocommunism as a comprehensive political and media phenomenon even though not an homogeneous one as it appears in the joint declarations and press releases of the French, Italian and Spanish communist party leaders in the late 1970s, and in the common principles they stated and in the unanimous criticism they directed to the shortcomings of Communism in Eastern Europe. The article then focuses on how Eurocommunism was perceived by the strongly orthodox communist leadership of the German Democratic Republic, and discusses the cautious and vigilant counter-strategy in spite of the conventional, harsh language used in public adopted by the SED. The essay takes into consideration such issues as whether Eurocommunism was really considered as a challenge to the unity of the international communist movement, and it analyses the most controversial matters in the relations between East German and Western European communists.

In the frame of the analysis of Italians’ general attitude toward the awkward memory of the totalitarian experience, this article tries to assess the still controversial question concerning the legacy of Fascism in Italy. Focusing on the transition to post-Fascism of the young intellectuals grown up during the fascist regime, the author suggests that the difficult relationship between the anti-Fascist movement and the younger generation and its attempt to reject both Fascist and anti-Fascist ideologies and values reveals, as a result of the totalitarian formation, the permanence of an integralist attitude among the post-war youth. In this sense, the so called long journey from Fascism to anti-Fascism was accomplished by many young intellectuals mostly within the frame of the new democratic system.