Postwar Italian Journeys: Narratives of Homecoming, National Cohesion and German–Italian Friendship

Abstract Scholars, journalists, diplomats and even archivists routinely assert that to understand German–Italian relations one must start with Goethe. Without denying Goethe’s importance, this article suggests that the emotional pull and prominence of Italy for postwar Germans may have had less to do with Goethe than with the Italian journey’s importance as a shared script. By providing familiar sets of baseline behaviours and roles on which Italians and Germans could rely and to which they could attune their expectations, the script of the Italian journey helped smooth postwar tensions. It eased early West German travels and the pangs of national division, and for a time it also worked to salve Italians’ own national wounds, in addition to bringing in much-needed tourist revenues. As a framework for social interaction, moreover, the Italian journey helped both Italians and Germans work around their complex relations and uncomfortable pasts. That it lives on as an explanation for foreign relations and a popular trope also points to the tradition’s reinvention in the postwar period and its distance from the historical referent. The location of the Italian journey in the eighteenth century and the timeless quality that this long history gave to Germans’ yearning for Italy continued to offer postwar Germans a claim to national cohesion. It served (theoretically) to unite, first, West Germans and then, after 1990, Germans east and west. As a salvageable national tradition, it had few competitors.