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While public intellectuals are typically thought of as inherently nonconformist and critical of established power, in practice many adapt themselves to the views of the majority—particularly in the context of repressive governments and dictatorships. When the political winds change, such figures often refashion themselves to fit the new paradigm. Ghosts of Fascism follows the trajectories of four major Italian intellectuals who, despite their passivity and at times collaboration with Fascist institutions, became some of postwar Italy’s iconic anti-Fascists: Federico Chabod, a prominent historian who would join the Resistance; the jurist Piero Calamandrei, who later participated in drafting the Italian democratic constitution; the influential literary critic Luigi Russo, who presided over the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; and Alberto Moravia, the internationally renowned novelist. Simon Levis Sullam weaves together their histories to show how postwar Italian intellectuals quietly revised their previous political positions, redefining themselves—and their recent pasts, together with that of the entire nation—as consistently anti-Fascist.

Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe.

The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.