Europe of Dictators 1922-1953: course description
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Using Fascist Italy as the basis for this comparative and transnational course, we will emphasize Italy, the USSR, and Germany, and briefly examine three traditional dictatorships, Franco’s Spain, Horthy’s Hungary, and Pilsudski’s Poland. Our goal will be to think beyond the biographies of these ruthless politicians who understood how to make their regimes popular. The comparative dimension of this course will be evident as we open each unit with an examination of Machiavelli’s The Prince as a standard for evaluating each dictator’s political choices. We also compare the techniques used by each to forge regime loyalty across regions, generations, genders, and classes. Benito Mussolini, chronologically the first of these dictators to seize power, makes an ideal comparative pivot because he grasped the potential of modern states to facilitate dictatorship (like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin), but he operated in a country that lacked the infrastructure to carry out his strategies (like Miklós Horthy in Hungary, Józef Pilsudski in Poland, and Francisco Franco in Spain). The transnational axis of the course will become clear as we examine the impact of major trends across national borders: World War I, aesthetic modernism and realism, the Great Depression, industrial mass production, and bio-political initiatives (in eugenics, race science and ethnic culture).
The course will follow a chronological format and emphasize a standard set of variables for each case study. Against this chronological background, in each unit we will identify each dictator’s strategy for accumulating power and building international alliances. Particularly in the German, Soviet, and Italian case studies, public culture will be in the foreground: the urban spaces created to forge mass identities, the art commissioned to glorify leaders and subject-citizens, the festivals staged to celebrate ideological holidays, and leisure programs for ordinary party loyalists. Ethnic understandings of national (and “natural”) belonging will be central. Each unit concludes with an investigation of the country at war: the decision to fight, civilian reactions; diplomatic negotiations; and treatment of ethnic minorities. In conclusion, we will discuss identity and violence in contemporary global settings.
Course Outline
This course may be taught in either a seminar or a lecture format. In the former case, I would emphasize individual students’ critical reactions to readings in class discussions; in the latter I would include discussion time for particular questions posted on the Blackboard site. In either case I introduce visual as well as written texts.
Students will take one in-class final exam and write bi-weekly essays in response to prompts I will formulate. Assignments will challenge students to transform an interesting question into a research topic and explore it using secondary works and primary materials, including films, posters, and memoirs. In a seminar format, I would structure individual presentations about key issues raised by the texts we read and view; in a lecture format, I would divide the class in four groups based on birth date and schedule team debates. Some essays will require students to use the ProQuest historical newspapers and evaluate the view points of contemporaneous journalists writing at the time. Other essays may prompt students to reflect on their travel experiences, such as thinking about Socialist-Realism (and National Socialist Realism) in museums, about public buildings built in the inter war period, or about conversations with elderly Europeans who recall their lives in a dictatorship during the Second World war.
