A «sick culture»: essays and manuals on the formation of a racial consciousness in Fascist Italy. A case study (Brescia 1940-1944)

Abstract

This article, through a ‘case study’ of essays and textbooks for primary school teachers published in Brescia, a town in Northern Italy, would provide a contribution to the reconstruction of a national history’s page (not yet completely studied and known), in which all intellectuals – although restrained in what they could say under a dictatorial regime – had to choose if they would provide a cultural contribution to an ideology that all democracies born in Europe after the Second World War would strongly reject and condemn. By adopting a research method intended to combine the history of the education system with political, cultural and social history, the reading of these texts offers a glimpse of the multifaceted cultural environment within which racist legislation was born and implemented in Italy. These authors demonstrate, at different degrees and levels, how their writings helped to spread the racist ideology of the regime. This page of the history of Italian racism and anti-Semitism, resulting in the end in concentration and death camps and extermination, shows us how words and ideas can become, once disseminated and assimilated, facts justifying the killing of innocent people.