Literatura in cenzura - Društvo za primerjalno književnost - ZRC SAZU

Literature and Censorship: Who is Afraid of the Truth of Literature?208most prominent ones were Arnoldo Mondadori, whose support for theregime predated the March on Rome, and the Florentine publisher AttilioVallecchi. They published numerous works that were publicly favouredand often directly financed by the regime. In exchange, they were oftengiven commissions for lucrative contracts for schoolbooks and officialpublications, and allowed to publish popular books – particularly translationsof foreign fiction, in the case of Mondadori – which were at the verylimits of the censors’ tolerance.There is a sense that Mussolini never stopped preferring to settle censorshipissues outside formal channels and explicit legislation. Publishersor authors were often just given a phone call, or asked to stop in at theministry, outside of official and formal procedures. Exceptions weremade according to the status of the author or the influence of the publisher.On the surface, the regime could then boast that Italy was still acountry with a non-nationalized, independent publishing industry, andauthors and publishers could hope to benefit from the many distinctionsand exceptions.A final acceleration to the organization of censorship in Fascist Italywas the result of the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation in the autumnof 1938. This was a racial policy single-handedly imposed by Mussolini,although historians are still divided as to whether his decision was mainlyinstrumental to his social policies or it was the final outcome of deeplyfelt racism. 15 Since 1936, there had been a slow build-up towards an officialstance of the regime. The publishing industry was put into motionin the summer of 1938 when Dino Alfieri, then minister of popularculture, set up a Commission for Book Reclamation. Its aim was tocreate a list of works that were contrary to the principles and values ofFascism. Representatives of the publishing industry were invited to participate,along with other bodies such as the Royal Academy of Italy, theInstitute of Fascist Culture, the National Fascist Party, and the FascistConfederation of Artists and Writers (this last represented by the popularculture minister-to be, Alessandro Pavolini, and Futurist maestro FilippoTommaso Marinetti). The workings of the committee continued throughoutthe last years of the regime, but it was the publishers themselves thatwere asked to do most of the “cleansing.” In September 1938 Alfieriordered an internal census of Jews working in the publishing industryand started to ban novels written by foreign Jewish authors (particularlyGerman and Austrian exiles). All publishing houses were then requiredto identify works by Jewish writers, translators, or editors publishedsince World War I and to start self-purging their catalogues. The processreached a climax in March 1942 when, following a similar initiative