The third and final film in Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist war trilogy, Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero, 1948), aimed to capture the reality of life in Germany after the country’s destruction and after Nazism. From the opening scene of Germans digging graves, the film offered an image of German suffering and hardship against the dramatic backdrop of bombed-out Berlin. Prostitution, trading on the black market, stealing, hiding from the police and suicide are commonplace means of survival, and even the most innocent – the child Edmund – cannot be saved, at least in this world, from his amoral education under Nazism. Germany, Year Zero failed at the box office but it nonetheless popularised the idea of Germany’s ‘zero hour’, that moment of total moral and physical defeat that helped Germans – and their new allies – draw a clean line between them and the Nazi past (Sorlin Reference Sorlin1996, 94). Historians of contemporary Germany such as Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Reference Hoffmann2011) and Paul Betts (Reference Betts2021, 102–124) have underscored the role images of defeated Germany, specifically a Germany in ruins, had for revising American and British perceptions of their former enemy. Feelings of triumph and the desire for justice and even revenge gave way to shock over the extent of the cities’ destruction and to pity for the silent and seemingly passive Germans living amidst the rubble. When looking to understand the transition from wartime to peacetime, the importance of that shift in the Western powers’ perceptions of Germans can hardly be exaggerated.
But what about the majority of Europeans, who were neither victor nor vanquished but were also critical to the transition from wartime to peacetime in Europe? Rossellini may have been surprised by the poor reception of Germany, Year Zero when it premiered in Italy and France, but his Communist collaborators were not (Gallagher Reference Gallagher1998, 259–266; Lizzani Reference Lizzani1987). Like many Europeans, Italians commonly understood German suffering to be deserved and to pale in comparison with their own. In Italy, national reconstruction was founded on the myth that the majority of Italians had not supported Fascism and, if anything, had regularly thwarted the regime in acts of everyday, passive resistance.Footnote 1 This itself rested on an even broader cultural myth of the ‘good Italian’, defined against the ‘bad German’ (Bidussa Reference Bidussa1994; Focardi Reference Focardi and Barnaby2023). After the war, politicians of all stripes sought to redeem the Italian nation by testifying to German barbarism and Italians’ distance from it. While not uncontested, the exculpatory anti-German discourse received support from prominent intellectuals such as the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce, who argued that Nazism and the atrocities committed by the Third Reich were the culmination of Germans’ aberrational history, and who contrasted this to an Italian culture and history entrenched in Christian humanist traditions (Zunino Reference Zunino2003). From this perspective, the German people and culture were spiritually, if not geographically, foreign to ‘Europe’ and European civilisation, and the country’s destruction was not unwelcome.
If gazing at German ruins played an important role in easing relations between occupied Germans and (Western) occupiers, this article argues that something similar occurred in German–Italian relations after the first postwar years.Footnote 2 Anti-Germanism did not disappear, but the image of the ‘bad German’ and the animus that accompanied it were tempered by the existence of another image, that of the defeated German, and corresponding expressions of Italian pity for German suffering. Obscured in later years by the more enduring ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ German, on the Italian side, and triumphalist narratives of postwar reconstruction on the (West) German side, these expressions of pity capture the early postwar moment in which established hierarchies were open for revision and, in the case of German–Italian relations, temporarily inverted. To be sure, not everyone expressed pity for postwar Germans, especially publicly. Italian Communists, for example, offered distinctly different views of defeated Germany. But pity was expressed by social and political elites to their right. It also circulated in firsthand accounts of Germany produced or consumed by lesser-known actors. It is present in media representations – in newspapers and popular weeklies as well as in leisure magazines and cinema newsreels. We hear it as well in the testimonies of young men about whom we know very little except that they ventured north in the early postwar years as part of peace missions and in search of adventure. Although many of these accounts and visual representations dated to the end of the 1940s and early 1950s, when travel first opened up, they differed little from those of Anglo-Americans in 1945. There are allusions to the rebuilding that had taken place in Germany but these observations are peripheral to descriptions of destruction and misery. Rossellini, it turns out, was not the only Italian to cast a pitying eye on the German population by the end of the 1940s. Instead, he expressed a perspective common to the liberal and Catholic milieus from which he came.
Since Aristotle, numerous scholars and philosophers have approached pity, compassion and sympathy interchangeably as the pain or discomfort experienced at another’s misfortune that moves one to intervene on their behalf (see, e.g., Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2003). The sense that pity is often passive and not always kind, however, has long inspired others to distinguish it from its more other-regarding ‘sister’ emotions (Kimball Reference Kimball2004). Hannah Arendt famously described pity as being ‘sorry without being touched in the flesh’, a definition that not only distinguished it from compassion but also elucidated the power dynamics inherent in the pitying gaze ([Reference Arendt1963] Reference Arendt1990, 85). Regardless of the exact extent of any one individual’s fellow-feeling, a ‘politics of pity’ structured the visual and emotional practices of those Italians who regarded defeated Germany with sympathy.Footnote 3 To witness and acknowledge German suffering in the early postwar years was an empowering act, whether one did so in person or from the comfort of one’s home, whether one sought to intervene or kept one’s distance. By participating in what quickly became an established, Western way of seeing Germans, the Italians involved confirmed their identity as brava gente and their place in the postwar order, not alongside the defeated but among the victors and staunchly on the side of anticommunism. Viewing postwar Germans with pity also bestowed on the viewer a position of comparable material and moral comfort, and in this way supported Italian claims to political and moral leadership in the construction of Western Europe.
Still, pity not only empowered the viewer, it humanised the object of their gaze. Like sympathy and compassion, pity requires the subject to identify at some level with the suffering other (Bodicce Reference Bodicce2023, 146–147). If they do not, or the suffering is perceived as exaggerated, irrelevant or unimportant, the witness is unlikely to feel pain at the other’s suffering – and may ignore it or even relish it. Many Europeans, including a significant number of Italians, certainly viewed German suffering with a dispassionate eye. However, the examples below, from an eclectic mix of popular media and non-elite documents drawn from liberal and Catholic milieus, demonstrate that, in the aftermath of war, some Italians found points of commonality with the defeated Germans, whether this stemmed from a sense of shared humanity or European culture, or something more specific like a love of cars or youthful innocence. At a minimum, the practice of acknowledging Germans’ suffering embraced a vision of universal humanity that generally rejected the notion of collective guilt and welcomed Germans back into the fold of European civilisation. Beyond that, public and private accountings of German hardship provided an opportunity to feel not only pity but a corresponding generosity of spirit and, possibly, forgiveness. For some Italians, in other words, bearing witness to German misery offered the means to perform and thereby reclaim a sense of moral dignity, to prove themselves not only ‘good Italians’ but also good Catholics. In both cases, one can see how claims to a leadership position in the construction of a unified, Christian Europe made at the level of high politics resonated in the pity articulated for Germans by Italian Catholics and liberals on the ground.
Bringing attention to German misery – warning and renewal
Studies of Italian newspapers and literature note the generally pessimistic and negative view of defeated Germany held by intellectuals and the elite reading public immediately after the war (e.g. Kuntz Reference Kuntz1997). When this changed – if it changed – it is understood to have changed among those circles close to the ruling Christian Democratic party and to the Church after the election of Konrad Adenauer in August 1949 suggested that West Germany was on the right path. Diplomatic historians have shown that warmer relations prevailed behind closed doors even before Adenauer’s election and the founding of the Federal Republic (Triola Reference Triola2017; Vordemann Reference Vordemann1994). Or, to not overstate the case, they argue that, early on, Italian politicians and diplomats understood Italy’s fortunes to depend on a united Europe – and a united Europe to depend on a restored Germany. For this reason Vitale Gallina, reporting to Rome from Frankfurt in November 1948, described Germany as a ‘sick’ patient in need of ‘loving care and assistance’ (quoted in Guiotto and Lill Reference Guiotto and Lill1997, 33; Kapczynski Reference Kapczynski2008).
My own examination of firsthand accounts of Germany that circulated in the mainstream press before 1949 confirms the pessimism and even negative orientation of their authors; at the same time, it shows that they were far closer in sensibility and timeline to the Italian diplomatic corps. Written by foreign correspondents and reporters with an audience in mind, many of these first accounts, particularly those published in the liberal daily La Stampa, bore witness to the ruins of Germany in an effort to move the Allies to action and their own countrymen to sympathy. They did so less for humanitarian reasons and more out of a fear of repeating the past, aware not only of what Germans had become but also of what they might become again if they were simply left to their own desperate devises. One particularly ominous account came from a journalist reporting on ‘Germany, how it is’ just one year after the country’s defeat (La Nuova Stampa 1946). The short answer was: not well. ‘The entire country is still an enormous oozing wound, a wound for which there is no medication and there is no cure.’ Although the wound described by the anonymous author manifested itself in many forms, it was idleness – of the cities and above all of the people in them – that was presented as the most worrisome. The shellshocked population, the large number of amputees and widespread hunger were certainly worth mentioning but the image of an aimless people, a powerless people, a people with no food, no work, no purpose – this was the postwar human tragedy versus the tragedy of war itself as the author saw it. And it was a postwar suffering not wholly unlike Italians’ own. At the time, British and American forces still occupied Italian territory and still influenced the Italian economy and society, not always for the better (Ellwood Reference Ellwood and Sambuco2019; Fantozzi Reference Fantozzi2016). If a reader were so inclined, they could draw parallels between Germans’ plight and their own. The author, in any case, openly critiqued the indecisive and bickering Allies who held power over them all.
To be clear, though: while the author viewed Germans as objects of pity and encouraged his readers to do the same, he did not identify with them. Just as crucially, he differed from British and American observers who perceived Germans as passive in defeat. From this Italian’s perspective, it was not idleness per se but Germans’ perceived obsession with work and productivity that made the situation in Germany dangerous. ‘The Teutonic mentality has need of certainty, a desperate need. And in Germany today there is nothing but uncertainty.’ To ignore German suffering, to deny their humanity was thus to court danger. Here, and in other liberal commentaries, pitying views of Germany commonly argued for a united Europe (for a later example, see Lilli Reference Lilli1950). They also emphasised Italian agency. Italians had a choice, not only to extend grace and ease Germans’ sense of existential crisis but also to show themselves leaders. In essays laden with cultural stereotypes, Italians were described as uniquely placed to help an emotionally impoverished and culturally misguided German people.
Descriptions of German misery and expressions of Italian pity were not limited to those circles or individuals for whom the ruins served a pedagogical purpose or as a warning against past mistakes. Evidence of this can be found in the popular Sunday illustrated weekly La Domenica del Corriere, which had the highest circulation of any Italian daily, weekly or magazine at the time (Murialdi Reference Murialdi, Murialdi, Luna and Torcellan1980). Much of this was due to the weekly’s accessible articles, strong focus on entertainment, and photographic essays that, often little more than captioned and curated images, invited readers to view for themselves the particular subject at hand. The captions accompanying the images guided readers’ perceptions and their emotional responses while leaving room for individual interpretations. Already in 1946 and 1947, the view of Germany found in the Sunday paper was consistently framed by two themes: German suffering and German tenacity, the latter – a more generous version of the same productivist German that appeared in La Stampa – all the more striking given the depth of the former. An early photograph of Dresden, taken from the vantage point of one of its main thoroughfares, showed the city’s inhabitants at the bottom of a ravine of rubble; surrounded by ruins, they board a tram and otherwise go about their business (Figure 1; La Domenica del Corriere 1946).
‘Life Reborn in Chaos’, La Domenica del Corriere, 7 April 1946, p. 3; Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.
The caption to ‘Life reborn in chaos’, as the editors entitled it, described Germans as victims of ‘one of the most terrible Allied bombardments’, in which ‘100,000 residents and refugees … met their death’. This and the city’s ‘near total destruction’ in just 40 minutes were declared ‘an atomic bomb record’, the bombardment’s brevity and impersonal nature the direct obverse of Germans’ ‘endless mourning and unspeakable suffering’. The text made no mention of Nazi barbarism or the events leading up to the aerial raid. Instead, it focused readers’ attention on civilian suffering, the terribleness of the new killing technologies, and ordinary citizens’ ability to keep going despite it all. It was a microcosm of the war experience, familiar to many Italians. The editor’s inaccurate and problematic reference to the atomic bomb amplified the subjective sense of German suffering and intentionally or not communicated an underlying anxiety about what might befall them all in a future war.
The ‘hunger winter’ of 1946–7 likewise gave rise to accounts of German hardship, sometimes in isolation and sometimes as one example of the hunger and cold threatening Europeans as a whole that winter. Photographic evidence of Germans’ ‘misery and mourning’ gained a recognisable aesthetic quality from the ruins and newly empty spaces in which it was shown (Figure 2; La Domenica del Corriere 1947b). Photographs of Germans – begging for bread at train stations; chopping down the last tree in a vast field of snow; standing in line for milk – offered Italians any number of emotional responses – pity, but also horror and even satisfaction. Images of German housewives scavenging for coal with large burlap sacks might conjure all three at once (Figure 3; La Domenica del Corriere 1947a).
‘Misery and Mourning in Defeated Germany’, La Domenica del Corriere, 16 February 1947, p. 5; Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.
At first glance, the women were indeed pitiable. With their bodies shapeless from the many layers they wore to protect against the cold and the distinctly unfeminine and debased nature of their labours, the mothers of the German Volk had been brought low – nature joining with defeat to deprive them of their womanhood and earlier presumption of superiority. In Communist circles, similar images of German women labouring were valorised; here, their fallen state captured the gendered disorder of the immediate moment and Germans’ particular nadir.Footnote 4 The caption underscored the dramatic shift in Germany’s fortunes, from the days when it monopolised European coal to the present, when German women, like women elsewhere, were also in the unfortunate position of having to ‘make do’. They were victims but not in any straightforward way. The swiftness and efficiency with which the ‘swarm of [German] housewives’ was said to have organised itself played to stereotypes of German productivity and of German women in particular. In contrast to Italian women, German women were often described as cold, driven and non-maternal, which is to say manly, and their ‘unnatural’ behaviour read as evidence of the aberrational nature of Protestantism, feminism and/or Nazism.Footnote 5 The image of scavenging women and their reported ability to secure the coal they needed in record time thus simultaneously incited admiration and confirmed what Italians knew to be wrong with German women. None of this negated the women’s terrible plight, however, driven to desperate acts by the bitter cold hitting the ‘slaughtered [massacrato] country’.
‘German Housewives Make Do’ in ‘Quadri di Stagione’, La Domenica del Corriere, 2 February 1947, p. 3; Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.
While the ‘hour of the woman’ in Germany was thus just as ambiguous for Italian viewers as it was for the Germans who lived through it, this did not preclude unequivocally sympathetic and even deeply human portrayals of German women’s particular plight – when those women suffered as wives and above all as mothers (Heinemann Reference Heinemann1996). The best example drawn from La Domenica del Corriere is a full-page sketch by Giorgio De Gaspari, one of Italy’s best-known illustrators then at the beginning of his career. The news item illustrated was the ongoing effort to reunite ‘hundreds of thousands of German children’ with their parents by including photographs of lost children in the newsreels shown before movies (Figure 4; La Domenica del Corriere 1947c). The sketch imagined the chain of events at the moment of recognition, showing a German mother torn from her seat, her upper body reaching for the movie screen as she exclaims, ‘It’s my son!’ Doing so, it captured the emotional impact of such a moment – and the universal evil of a war that targeted the innocent and laid waste to families. The hand-drawn illustration was seemingly free of commentary; what was on display was a human tragedy, and Italians were invited to feel the pain – and in this case also the joy – of a German mother.
‘It’s my son!’, La Domenica del Corriere, 6 July 1947, p. 12; article by Giorgio De Gaspari; Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.
Tales of ruin and Christian grace from the new West Germany
That some Italians could imagine a connection between themselves and the German ‘other’ had much to do with the Catholic and liberal milieus to which they belonged. Both Catholic and Enlightenment traditions taught that pity was an emotion owed to one’s fellow (human) beings, whether as an outward expression of neighbourly love or of one’s humanity. Historically, pity thus offered Christians and liberals a framework for feeling that shaped their social interactions and personal behaviour; it also provided a normative yardstick by which to judge moral and/or historical progress ‘towards God’ and a more civilised state (Barclay Reference Barclay2021). Travel accounts by scouts, Catholic and non-denominational, and the Vatican’s own public education efforts show that this remained true after 1945.
Among the few Italians who first headed north were Rover scouts – senior scouts ranging in age from 17 to 20 – who travelled to and from Norway in the summer of 1949 to attend the first World Rover Moot since the war began. Of these, 25 scouts from different troops in Lombardy made the trip on red motorcycles, as part of the Freccia Rossa della Bontà (the red arrow of kindness) charged with a mission of peace. The Freccia Rossa was the brainchild of Father Carlo Gnocchi, a former military chaplain since beatified for his work on behalf of disabled and orphaned children, and the priest and scout leader Andrea Ghetti, an active figure in the Catholic Resistance.Footnote 6 Both during the war and after, as spiritual leaders of their respective lay organisations, the two men served as models of caritas, exemplifying God’s love in action. They also captured the mobilising energy behind Catholic Action, the mass lay organisation dedicated to promoting the Catholic faith (Casella Reference Casella1992; Verucci Reference Verucci1988). Officially, the Freccia Rossa aimed to ‘bring hope’ to those living ‘amidst the ruins and the pain’; to demonstrate ‘the victory of love over hate’; and to draw attention to the specific plight of children wherever they went (R/S Servire [Reference Frattini1949] Reference Frattini2017). The scouts did not differentiate the West German segment of their tour from other destinations, a move that placed the former enemy on equal moral footing with its former victims. In many ways, the Freccia Rossa embodied the full potential of the early postwar moment in Italy. Sitting astride 25 gleaming vehicles – prime specimens of Italian engineering and manufacturing donated by Moto Guzzi, outfitted by Pirelli, and fuelled by Esso – the group asserted Italy’s moral leadership at the head of a renewed Christian Europe and its position as a modern economic power.
In contrast to the projected image of Italy and the optimistic youth of the 18- and 19-year-old biker pilgrims, the Germany they described – in diaries, letters home and to reporters – was a land of shadows and want. Coming from the Netherlands, one scout described Germany as ‘still completely destroyed’, in contrast to the other countries they had visited, and the experience of crossing the border into Germany as ‘oppressive’ (Frattini Reference Frattini2017, 84). The Catholic Action newspaper was more dramatic: ‘Entering Germany … is like passing through the gate of this immense [and] sorrowful city … The first thing that strikes you … is the silence … it is the only commentary on the indescribable landscape of destruction and death that Germany today offers its speedy visitors’ (Il Quotidiano 1949). On their way north through Bremen, Hamburg and Kiel, and back via Hannover and Cologne towards Luxembourg, the scouts detailed Germany’s physical collapse. In a letter to his parents, Giovanni Scandolara described the sharp contrast between the ‘truly magnificent’ Cologne cathedral and the ruins of the city above which it soared. His letter ended with an earnest tally of different German cities’ degree of destruction.Footnote 7 Alberto Anghinelli expressed similar disbelief at the rubble-lined streets of Cologne’s city centre, in contrast not only to the cathedral but also to the working factories on the outskirts of the city. As he put it, the Germans ‘rebuilt first labour [il lavoro] and then housing!’Footnote 8 ‘We asked ourselves, “Where do all these people who are working live?” Probably underground … an image that left a lasting impression.’Footnote 9 On their return trip home, the group arrived in Hannover late at night, in need of lodging. They were directed to the train station, whose basement had been transformed into a ‘squalid shelter for the homeless, frequented by men and women, elderly and children of all ages … amputees … The people sleeping in the station had lost everything’ (Frattini Reference Frattini2017, 109). Here and elsewhere, much space went to describing Germans’ particular subterranean plight – their life in cellars and under rubble.Footnote 10 Whether because it conjured up still potent memories of civilian war life (suffocating bomb shelters and deadly air raids) or simply captured the Germans’ fallen state, there is an undeniable horror to the telling. Rather than share the Germans’ fate in this instance, the Rovers opted to camp in the open air that night. There was no suggestion that Germans deserved this fate. Instead, the Italians expressed their disbelief and above all their pity. While doing so, they also ever so quietly communicated their comparable position of material and even moral comfort.
Descriptions of ruins and underground living quarters competed with those of needy children; different scouts mentioned the mobs of kids who met them and begged for bread. In a report to his troop back home, Duccio Jachia offered the bleakest picture. He described confronting the ‘profound misery’ of ‘children, dressed in filthy rags’, left on their own. ‘Many are the children of Nazis or soldiers who died in the last war. We are now very much moved by our motto: WE LOVE EACH OTHER, EVEN IF OUR FATHERS HATED EACH OTHER.’Footnote 11 The misery of adults is not absent from Freccia Rossa accounts. In Bremen, for example, Scandolara discussed the plight of a German soldier recently returned from a Soviet camp with a Red Cross nun serving them both breakfast (Frattini Reference Frattini2017, 22). His account of the POW is strikingly similar to that of the children roaming Germany’s streets. Both, at the moment of telling, are lost, deprived of a home and family and reduced to objects of charity, with the image of the emotionally destroyed POW evoking anticommunist alarm as well as pity (Conti Reference Conti1986). But the Freccia Rossa’s espoused aim was to bring attention to the war’s youngest victims, and that is what the scouts did. They continued a well-established tradition of mobilising youthful innocence for humanitarian causes, even as the group’s motto underscored the particularity of the postwar moment, when children often appeared to be, as Tara Zahra has observed, ‘the only “innocent victims” left standing’ (Reference Zahra2011, 241).
The work of the Freccia Rossa paralleled the work pursued by the Pontifica Commissione di Assistenza (PCA), the Vatican aid mission established by Pope Pius XII in January 1945 to help get international aid to those most in need. The PCA regularly won economic assistance from the faithful, governments and the United Nations by drawing attention to the particular plight of children in war-torn Europe. After the war, the organisation continued its international aid efforts at the same time as it turned its attention closer to home – and to the daunting task of reforming postwar Italian society (Santagata Reference Santagata, Unger-Alvi and Valbousquet2024; Ciampani Reference Ciampani2002). While children were the privileged subjects of the Church’s extensive pedagogical efforts, the PCA also cast children – specifically Teutonic children – as objects of pity before the general Italian public in lessons on Christian love and charity. It was a marriage of Pius XII’s efforts to combat communism at home and in Europe that targeted the ‘German crisis’ and the receding presence of the Church in Italians’ daily lives (Ventresca Reference Ventresca2013, 240). Starting in 1946, for example, the short newsreel La Settimana Incom provided Italian moviegoers with highlights from the week’s news, including footage of Germany’s destruction (e.g. La Settimana Incom 1946). In September 1948, however, a short PCA-sponsored segment shifted the narrative from war to peace and, not accidently, from Germany to the ‘sunshine of Italy’ (La Settimana Incom 1948). In just over one minute, the Italian audience witnessed a flood of children – Austrian, German and Swiss children identified as ‘traumatised by the war’ – spilling onto the beach in Cattolica, followed by images of them eating, laughing and recovering thanks to the beneficence of a Church-run vacation colony and the Italian sun. The image of Italy as a Kurort, or health resort, for German-speakers was well established, but this was not that. The pitying gaze turned on Germans, not as holidaying elites but as objects of humanitarian aid, fed a different narrative, sponsored by the Vatican and aimed at Italians specifically – namely, that of generosity, warmth and Christian values (Comerio Reference Comerio2023). The final frame is a close-up of a family portrait in which a blonde girl, shown just moments earlier writing a letter home, is seen smiling alongside her mother and her father, the latter in military uniform. It is a representation that domesticates the German soldier, not unlike the German POW described by the scout Scandolara. Whether or not Italian audiences responded positively to the images of needy Germanic children or were moved by the conjuring of family reunion, the newsreel – like the Freccia Rossa – contributed to Italy’s political and moral rehabilitation and offered Italians another way of understanding themselves in relation to Germans.
From their red motorcycles to their conscious mission of peace, the young men of the Freccia Rossa were exceptional. The brief mention of the PCA makes clear, however, that their views of Germans aligned with those of the Vatican and indeed with the efforts to re-Christianise Italy and Europe pursued by lay Catholics and clergy alike. Papal speeches, the 1950 ‘holy year’ of reconciliation, and peace monuments such as the Ara Pacis Mundi in Medea thematised charity and used the memory of common suffering to evoke first compassion and then solidarity among Europeans (Chamedes Reference Chamedes2019; Nicoloso Reference Nicoloso and D’Amelio2019; Santagata Reference Santagata, Unger-Alvi and Valbousquet2024). While often Germans were folded into universal narratives of wartime loss, when they were mentioned, it was to establish their place among the suffering. The future minister of education Guido Gonella, for example, used his position as the editor of the Christian Democratic newspaper Il Popolo to call on Italian Catholics to forgo vengeance and to instead feel ‘pity for the vanquished’ (Gonella Reference Gonella1945a). Hitler’s suicide elicited a sustained critique of the dictator but not of the German population, whom Gonella described as Hitler’s ‘first victims’, the first people to be ‘occupied and subjugated’ by his ‘motorised bands’ (Reference Gonella1945b). In Jesuit circles, recognition of German suffering appeared in lessons on Christian love, like the one in the fictionalised war journal written by the jurist and politician Gabrio Lombardi (Reference Lombardi1945). In an emotionally fraught scene, the protagonist encounters German soldiers who enter the village church, drawn by the sound of the organ. Knowing he should hate them for what they have done to his country, he instead confesses feeling love: ‘I think of your distant families, your women, your children. They suffer, you suffer, we suffer’ (Lombardi Reference Lombardi1945, 77). Set during the war, it nonetheless crafted an argument for Christian unity in the reconstruction of postwar Europe.Footnote 12
Others less tightly connected to the Catholic Church also provided firsthand accounts of defeated Germany resembling those of the Freccia Rossa, young men like Pio Cecchetto, a member of Italy’s smaller and nominally secular scouting organisation (Corpo Nazionale Giovani Esploratori Italiani), who also attended the World Rover Moot in 1949. Pio and his troop travelled by bus and hailed from the Veneto, an area that experienced fierce partisan fighting and even fiercer reprisals against the local population. The private diary he kept of his journey included sketches he made of a half-timber house and the autobahn, and the odd photo and souvenir he picked up along the way (Cecchetto and Vianello Reference Cecchetto and Vianello2018). From the very first entry, it captured the stereotypical and the unexpected, both the Germany of order and the Germany of ruins.
Crossing into West Germany from Basel, Pio described the picturesque villages and countryside of the Black Forest and Rhineland. Karlsruhe, their first night’s stop, was a town characterised by ‘small, low houses with their own, well-cultivated little gardens, utmost cleanliness’ (Cecchetto and Vianello Reference Cecchetto and Vianello2018, 14). But this picture fit uneasily with his description of the border crossing, where he described glimpsing ‘the face’ of Germany in the malnourished and poorly clothed bimbi he met. Pio did nothing to resolve or explain the discordant scenes. Typical of travel diaries, his account moved on to the next destination – and descriptions of one ruined city after another. By the time he looked out of the bus window at Hamburg, the sight of Germany’s destruction had lost its power to surprise: ‘Rubble to the left, rubble to the right’ was how he summed up the city’s state (Cecchetto and Vianello Reference Cecchetto and Vianello2018, 16). What continued to draw comment, however, were the West Germans living amidst that rubble. For Pio, Germany was a place of misery, full of pitiable people.
Nowhere in his or the other Rovers’ accounts was there mention of life back home, the suffering endured by Italians during the war, or the towns decimated by aerial bombings – this despite the fact that they came from some of the hardest-hit areas in Italy and would have experienced the destruction firsthand. In gazing at the ruins of Germany, these Italians instead assumed the same privileged position as Americans and British observers. One consequence of this was an upending of well-established power dynamics, vividly captured in Pio’s diary. From the first entry to the last, the stereotypical German–Italian travel narrative is placed on its head: it is Italians who gaze at German ruins. It is Italians who are cheated by Germans: Pio describes Germans in Hannover knowingly giving them ‘Soviet marks’ in exchange for their dollars (Cecchetto and Vianello Reference Cecchetto and Vianello2018, 32). It is an Italian – Pio – who comments on the fertile land he passed, and who notes the poverty and poor living conditions of its inhabitants and children in the streets. And lastly, it is Italians who take advantage of their buying power, rushing to purchase the items laid out on tables before them: harmonicas, toy jeeps and the like. One thing that does not happen, however, is that Germany is never mistaken for a land of milk and honey. Pio’s entry from 1 August included a ration card for ‘travellers of foreigner nationalities’, and one of the dominant experiences of Germany for him was hunger – his own hunger (Cecchetto and Vianello Reference Cecchetto and Vianello2018, 33).
Pio played with the bimbi to forget his hunger outside Hamburg and, later, in Karlsruhe, to stave off boredom while he and his troop were stalled on the return trip home. This play and communication, in whatever form, betrayed curiosity from both sides. From Pio’s descriptions at least, it is clear that Germans gawked at the Italians as much as Italians at Germans. But the bimbi always remained objects of pity. Pio’s statement that he and the other Venetian scouts would forever remember the ‘happy faces’ of the children they played with is redolent of the benefactor’s pride in having brought joy to the less fortunate.
Touring the ruins of (West) Germany
One place where one might not expect to find images and firsthand accounts of defeated Germany was in the leisure and travel publications of the Touring Club Italiano (TCI), but it, too, offered defeated Germany as a counterpoint to the broadly popular ‘bad German’ and did so at a time when stabilising international relations arguably required it. Founded in Milan in 1894, TCI resumed its activities in 1946 and, by the end of the decade, its international travel magazines (Pivato Reference Pivato2006). The magazines disseminated useful information for those already or soon-to-be engaged in international trade as well as dreams of far-off places for those seeking to escape the confines of their home, town or country, if only for a few minutes. As part of this, the club aimed to satisfy and further pique Italians’ perceived interest in Germany – or at least the interest of its largely liberal bourgeois readership. The magazines transformed Germany, East and West, into a possible travel destination, one whose primary attraction was its ruins.Footnote 13 Here, in a very different context, one sees further evidence of Italians’ participation in the witnessing and restoration of defeated Germany.
In what otherwise might have served as an advertisement for the Lambretta motorbike, the newly established Marco Polo published Giancarlo Tironi’s account of his 1949 trip from Milan to the Arctic (1950). Like the scouts, Tironi devoted considerable attention to describing present-day Germany, where the cities appeared as ‘a sequence of unending destruction’ unlike anything he claimed to have seen in Italy. Similar, too, was the motorcyclist’s assessment of substandard living conditions and Germans’ state of want. The example of utmost misery he offered his readers was the practice of the ‘autostop’, or hitchhiking, now commonly remembered as an act of independence and freedom in histories of postwar youth culture (Jobs Reference Jobs2017, 35–36, 45–47). Tironi’s autostop, however, was a product of wartime devastation, the only means of transportation for ‘the many mutilated and disabled people’ that he saw ‘on every [German] street’ (1950, 25). Precisely because they were not independent or mobile, the war-wounded hitchhiked. For this Italian observer in 1949, the autostop was thus not an act of liberation but another example of Germans’ pitiable circumstances.
Despite the grim picture Tironi paints of life in Germany, there were also signs of the tedeschi his Italian readers knew. Of all the countries he visited, he noted that the Germans were the most curious about the Lambretta he rode. They repeatedly pressed for detailed, technical explanations that, even if ‘fairly elementary’, conveyed what he knew to be Germans’ ‘extraordinary passion for engines’. Then, too, there was the autobahn, ‘perfectly calibrated’ for speed and safety while also allowing the lucky driver to connect with the natural environment. And members of Hamburg’s Italian colony testified to Germans’ known lack of restraint when it came to gelato (Tironi Reference Tironi1950, 24–25). In the end, Tironi offered a carefully balanced account, one that highlighted German misery and its certain alien attraction but also kept the country’s inhabitants accessible. They were foreign and pitiful but not repellent or intimidating. The new West Germany was a world simultaneously turned upside down and familiar, with points of shared interests and stereotypical understandings of the other helping to anchor the postwar present.
Readers’ interest in the ruins of Germany was judged great enough that in late 1949 the TCI commissioned a series of essays on the subject for its monthly magazine Le Vie del Mondo (Westphal Reference Westphal1950a). The author of the essays, Dorothee Westphal, was German, but the TCI’s commissioning confirms that there was an Italian market for the image of Germany she offered. The articles never appeared in German; they were made for and consumed by Italians. The first of the three essays focused on the destroyed art monuments of Bavaria (Westphal Reference Westphal and von Schwerin-Ferrini1950b). It was an unusual article for a magazine devoted to enticing Italian travel abroad, as it introduced Italian tourists and business travellers to what they would not see more than what they would and should see in Germany’s southernmost province. Unlike the other accounts discussed, this view of German ruins offered few glimpses of the people living there. The victim in this tour of postwar Bavaria was Germany’s built environment, not as brick and mortar or even as sites of emotional belonging but as achievements of European culture. At every stop from Munich to Upper Franconia, the author described what once was and what little remained of medieval and renaissance, church and bourgeois art and architecture, and provided before and after photographs to illustrate both the grandeur and the loss. From the Field Marshal’s Hall on Odeonsplatz in Munich (modelled on the Florentine Loggia dei Lanzi) to the ‘Pompeiianum’ in Aschaffenburg (a replica of the Casa dei Dioscuri in Pompeii), Westphal showed how the monuments of Bavaria were products of a shared artistic past indebted above all to Italy. If the other accounts of postwar Germany humanised the former enemy, this one Europeanised them, with the catalogue of lost monuments amounting to a forceful assertion of Germans’ historic home in Europe. It was not without ambivalence, however, as the author expressed ‘horror’, not at subterranean dwellings, but at standing before ‘the destruction of cultural values and ideals that can never be reconstructed’ (Westphal Reference Westphal and von Schwerin-Ferrini1950b, 231).
The photographs and descriptions of German ruins are not unlike the ‘ruin porn’ of post-industrial cities such as Detroit, in this instance appealing to a certain desire to gaze upon, consume and experience the remnants of a once powerful nation (Apel Reference Apel2015). For both the armchair and the active tourist at the time, the bombed cities of Germany offered a sensationalistic view of ideological failure and Germans’ self-inflicted ruin. The TCI essay fed this sort of voyeuristic interest at the same time as it sifted through the rubble to close the distance between the reader and the wreckage.
Dorothee Westphal was well positioned to write about what was lost and what, if anything, remained of the Germany of great artists and thinkers. Her father, a judge, was part of the formidable Berlin Mendelssohn family, while her mother was the only daughter of James Simon, the Jewish German magnate, art collector and philanthropist (Matthes Reference Matthes2000). An expert in Venetian Renaissance painting, Dorothee worked at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum her maternal grandfather had helped found until her dismissal in November 1933. She, like Simon, was part of the assimilated Jewish German educated upper-middle class who joined their non-Jewish counterparts in attributing a special importance to Italy for the German nation (Mosse Reference Mosse and Kosellek1990; Mauerer Reference Mauerer2021). Dorothee survived the war and the Holocaust in semi-hiding in Berlin; most of her extended family did not. They were part of an important strand of German–Italian relations irrevocably broken by the Third Reich.
Dorothee Westphal never mentioned the destruction of this Germany, although the view she offered Italians, which denied all attempts to exclude Germans from European civilisation, was almost certainly a continued assertion of her identity as a German. In the end, Dorothee drew on the Romantic tradition of gazing at ruins to differentiate the experience of gazing at the ruins of Germany from the experience of gazing at those of Roman civilisation. While Roman ruins stood as a source of cultural inspiration, she explained to her Italian readers that ‘in the age of atomic disintegration’, the ruins of Germany symbolised one thing above all: the potential for humanity’s destruction. Reading this, one understands that the article’s detailed cataloguing of bombs and incendiary air raids contained the horrors of Hiroshima and the new, Cold War present. Ultimately, Westphal arrived at a spot quite similar to the Rover scouts of the Freccia Rossa – and to American and British observers before them – viewing Germany’s ruins as a ‘dire warning to humanity’ against the universalised evil of war.
Conclusion
After the war, pity and the related feelings of sympathy and compassion took on particular importance as the obverse of the hate, fear and apathy that had come to define European relations on a continental scale. As a social emotion, it provided a blueprint for how to think and feel about the former enemy – and oneself – that, in postwar Italy, reinforced the image of the ‘good Italian’ and especially the Catholic and liberal frameworks for political and social reconstruction. To pity Germans after 1945 was thus also a political act. It communicated one’s position on postwar Germans’ guilt and the subsequent need (or lack thereof) for a comprehensive reform of the country’s economic and social relations, positions that mapped onto one’s political allegiances in the burgeoning Cold War. For this reason, the socialist writer Franco Fortini’s private expressions of pity for the Germans he encountered in 1949 remained just that – private – until the publication of his diary 40 years later (Fortini Reference Fortini1991).Footnote 14
Pity could also affirm one’s proximity to progress. This is because pity, or compassion, was and still is regarded as a ‘key “liberal” emotion’, associated with the evolution and spread of human rights and democracy (Hunt Reference Hunt2007 is exemplary; see also Barclay Reference Barclay2022). When Anglo-Americans and then Italians expressed pity for defeated Germans, they helped bolster the West’s claim to represent human liberty, progress and civilisation. Conversely, the comparative absence of pity coming from the left could be taken to prove Communism’s place on the wrong side of history. This very different politics of pity was implicitly and explicitly present in much of the commentary discussed above. However critical writers for La Stampa were of Anglo-American occupiers, for example, they reserved their worst criticisms for the Soviets, whom they often described as callous – devoid of any compassion for the suffering of civilians in their care (e.g. Murandi Reference Murandi1946). The Red Army soldiers’ purported lack of pity contributed to the demonisation of the Soviets (and Communists at home) as inhumane, uncivilised and atheist – in other words, to claims that they were everything the West, and above all Italians, were not (Moyn Reference Moyn2015; Forlenza Reference Forlenza2017).
Italian expressions of pity for Germans were, to be sure, short lived. By the early 1960s, anti-German sentiments saw a notable rise in Italy that paralleled West Germany’s rising political and economic power and the dwindling promise of a new Italy in a new Europe (Triola Reference Triola and Triola2020). Yet, while Italian portrayals of the ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ German were prevalent from the 1960s onwards, pity continued to function as an emotional bridge between the two postwar populations, not least because of its importance to constructions of East–West difference in the Cold War and to the Christian democratic groundings of Western Europe. These were the ingredients – if not guarantees – for stronger bonds based on more egalitarian feelings of solidarity and friendship that undergirded the political and economic (Western) European Community throughout its lifetime. And the values, practices and even symbolic importance of pity and compassion for the expanded European Union are worth contemplating. Present-day debates over ‘European’ values, particularly as they relate to immigration, the millions of refugees seen as threatening ‘Fortress Europe’, and the humanitarian aid that has defined the European Union’s role as a global power all support the argument for the historic importance of pity even as its ongoing and future relevance for definitions of European politics and community are uncertain.
Acknowledgements
An early version of this article was presented at seminars in Frankfurt, Saarbrücken, Stuttgart and Freiburg. The author thanks all the participants for their feedback; Christoph Cornelißen, Gabriele Clemens, Kirsten Dickhaut and Jens Späth for their hospitality; and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for supporting this work. Thanks, too, to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Karrin Hanshew is an Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary European History at Michigan State University. She is the author of Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge University Press) and co-author of Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, Society (Bloomsbury). This article is part of her current book project, ‘From Axis to Europe: German and Italian Entanglements in the Social (Re)construction of Europe After World War Two’.
Open access
