Shaping the New Man
Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
Alessio Ponzio
George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History
Steven E. Aschheim, Stanley G. Payne, Mary Louise Roberts, and David J. Sorkin, Series Editors
“Ponzio provides, above all, valuable new perspectives on the tremendous
influence of Italian Fascism on fledgling Nazi youth organizations, and the
cooperative and reciprocal relationships that flourished between the two
regimes.”
—Michael Ebner, author of Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy
Despite their undeniable importance, the leaders of the Fascist and
Nazi youth organizations have received little attention from historians. In Shaping
the New Man, Alessio Ponzio uncovers the largely untold story of the training
and education of these crucial protagonists of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and
he examines more broadly the structures, ideologies, rhetoric, and aspirations of
youth organizations in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Ponzio shows how the Italian Fascists’ pedagogical practices influenced the
origin and evolution of the Hitler Youth. He dissects similarities and differences
in the training processes of the youth leaders of the Opera Nazionale Balilla,
Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, and Hitlerjugend. And, he explores the transnational
institutional interactions and mutual cooperation that flourished between
Mussolini’s and Hitler’s youth organizations in the 1930s and 1940s.
Alessio Ponzio received his PhD in history and politics
from the Universitá Roma Tre and is now pursuing a second
degree at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in women’s
studies and history. He has held fellowships at the Newhouse
Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College and the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Praise
“Ponzio tells a nuanced story of the delicate and volatile relationship between interwar Europe’s two fascist regimes. . . . He highlights power struggles between leaders, curricula designed not to educate youth but to transform them into ideal representatives of their regimes, and strict gender policing within each of the organizations. Recommended.”
—Choice
“A valuable and original contribution to the historiography of the totalitarian
project in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Alessio Ponzio should especially be
commended for his transnational focus and for the rigor with which he traces the
interactions, influences, and tensions between the youth organizations of the two
regimes.”
—Joshua Arthurs, author of Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy
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Larger images
New in Paperback!
July 2017
LC: 2015008392 DG
316 pp. 6 x 9
17 b/w photos, 3 tables
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