„Novecento“ namísto „storia contemporanea“? Úvahy o italských soudobých dějinách
Has “Il Novecento” Superseded “Storia Contemporanea”? Some Thoughts on Italian Contemporary History

Summary/Abstract: This article, which is one of a series in Soudobé dějiny on the development of the discipline of contemporary history and its current state in selected countries of Europe, was originally published as “Novecento statt Storia contemporanea? Überlegungen zur italienischen Zeitgeschichte” in Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder (eds), Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004, pp. 107–27). The author argues that in Italy, unlike Germany or France, there is no distinct term for “contemporary history” to denote this clearly defined discipline of historical research. The term storia contemporanea had three meanings since 1945. First, it was used to denote an historical period of roughly the last two centuries. Second, it meant only the “short” twentieth century (il novecento). Last, the term served to denote any historical event in its “contemporary” dimension, that is to say, its instrumentalization according to current needs, political or otherwise. The author illustrates these meanings by providing examples from surveys and textbooks of Italian history and from current debates on the historical actions of the popes and the Roman Catholic Church, the bright and dark sides of Italian unifi cation in the 1860s, and the alleged left-wing ideologization of post-war Italian historiography. In this historiography was born the “myth of resistance” to the German occupation of 1943–45, the other side of which was the marginalization of Italian Fascism or even its being made taboo.

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