Mussolini’s Links with Hitler’s Reich
Mussolinis Vorposten in Hitlers Reich

mussolinis vorposten in hitlers reich falanga gianluca
September 2008 / 336pp
Non-Fiction

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review

‘Looking at events soberly and free of any sentiment, I have to admit that my unwavering friendship for Italy and Il Duce can go down as one of my mistakes’. So Hitler is recorded as saying in his bunker in spring 1945, and the story of the unhappy alliance of the two dictators is a fascinating one indeed. Gianluca Falanga recounts it with the emphasis on personalities, particularly of the four Italian ambassadors to Germany who were variously en poste during those years. His story also contains a prologue in which the last of them, Filippo Anfuso, who has vowed to follow Il Duce even unto death, journeys in the spring of 1945 through a ravaged European inferno that might have been imagined by Dante to a Berlin reduced to ruins and awaiting the final onslaught of the British and Russian armies.

In this sinister mix of politics and personalities there are many sidelights and little-known details to offset the main theme. We are all aware of Hitler’s brutal power-game. Now we can see how Mussolini, perhaps the one major statesman in Europe in a position to talk to him, was unable to change anything. An almost classical tragedy.

about the author

Gianluca Falanga was born in Salerno, Italy, in 1977. He studied literature in Turin and is now a translator, journalist, author and bookseller in Berlin. His many publications include Italien in Berlin (2006) and Berlin 1937. Die Ruhe vor dem Sturm (2007).

rights information

Ch. Links Verlag
Tel: +49 30-44 02 32-0
Email: foreign-rights@linksverlag.de
Contact: Maria Oehlschlegel
www.linksverlag.de 

Ch. Links Verlag was one of the first independent publishing houses to be launched after the abolition of censorship in the German Democratic Republic in the autumn of 1989. The list concentrated on the history of Stalinism and communism in the GDR, before expanding to cover such nonfiction areas as the Federal Republic of Germany, the history of German colonialism and the legacy of National Socialism. It now includes international history and politics.

translation assistance

Applications should be made to the Goethe-Institut.

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