Travelling to See, Reading to Believe: Being Fascists after the End of the Second World War

Abstract

This article focuses on two practices which, while neglected by historiography, played a fundamental role in the re-emergence of the fascist community after 1945, namely travel and reading. Travel allowed fascists to realise that the political cause they were fighting for had remained alive even outside their own borders, and to strengthen and renew their transnational network, while reading books – often banned books – allowed them to reinforce their ideology and score a victory over the authorities. By leaving aside a reconstruction focused purely on political events, this article sheds light on how fascists were materially able to re-think their political identity and to influence, albeit to different degrees, the transformed political context of the immediate post-war period.