Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

edited by Helen Roche and Kyriakos Demetriou (Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception, Volume 12), Leiden 2018.

The first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships.

The memory of the past is a powerful tool to justify policy and create consensus, and, under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the legacy of classical antiquity was often evoked to promote thorough transformations of Italian and German culture, society, and even landscape. At the same time, the classical past was constantly recreated to fit the ideology of each regime. This volume caters to a wide readership, including anyone interested in the classical tradition, Fascism, Nazism, totalitarian culture and aesthetics, or in twentieth-century history more generally.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors

Introduction

“Distant Models”? Italian Fascism, National Socialism and the Lure of the Classics
 Helen Roche 

Part I: People

The Aryans: Ideology and Historiographical Narrative Types in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
 Felix Wiedemann

Desired Bodies: Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, Aryan Masculinity and the Classical Body
 Daniel Wildmann

Ancient Historians and Fascism: How to React Intellectually to Totalitarianism (or Not)
 Dino Piovan

Philology in Exile: Adorno, Auerbach, and Klemperer
 James I. Porter

Part II: Ideas

Fascist Modernity, Religion, and the Myth of Rome
 Jan Nelis

Bathing in the Spirit of Eternal Rome: The Mostra Augustea della Romanità
 Joshua Arthurs

“May a Ray from Hellas Shine upon Us”: Plato in the George-Circle
 Stefan Rebenich

An Antique Echo: Plato and the Nazis
 Alan Kim

Classics and Education in the Third Reich: Die Alten Sprachen and the Nazification of Latin- and Greek-Teaching in Secondary Schools
 Helen Roche

Classical Antiquity, Cinema and Propaganda
 Arthur J. Pomeroy

Part III: Places

Classical Archaeology in Nazi Germany
 Stefan Altekamp

Building the Image of Power: Images of Romanità in the Civic Architecture of Fascist Italy
 Flavia Marcello

Forma urbis Mussolinii: Vision and Rhetoric in the Designs for Fascist Rome
 Flavia Marcello

National Socialism, Classicism, and Architecture
 Iain Boyd Whyte

Neoclassical Form and the Construction of Power in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
 James J. Fortuna

General Index