Laboratoire Italien (Sep 2023)
Un Mussolini munichois ? Construction et utilisation du culte du « Duce » dans différents cercles de sociabilité bavarois (1922-1943)
Abstract
In the Munich of the interwar period, many personalities from the political, industrial, intellectual and social spheres were looking towards Fascist Italy and its “Duce”. In the early 1920s, with the founding of the NSDAP in Munich and the spread of Nazi ideas, the Bavarian elite developed a strong political interest in the Fascist experience taking place on the other side of the border, since its leader, Benito Mussolini, had risen to power. Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933 and the birth of a German “Führer”, however, marked a turning point in the interest that the Bavarian elites had – and were allowed to have – in the “Duce” and his fascism. At a time when two Providential men were rising in Europe, how did the cults of these two leaders co-exist? Was it even possible for a German citizen to promote Italian fascism in Germany or to praise another “Duce”? Munich thus presents itself as a privileged observatory of the complex relationship that tied those Bavarian elites interested in Italy to the two leaders of nationalism in Europe. Through two case studies, that of the “salon” hostess Elsa Bruckmann and that of the director of the NSDAP press office in Munich, Adolf Dresler, both great admirers of Hitler and Mussolini, we would like to examine two different relationships and two different ways of making these cults of personality coexist, in a double totalitarian context.
