Deicide and the Drama of the Holocaust: Gian Paolo Callegari’s Cristo ha ucciso (1948)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Gian Paolo Callegari’s prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone in Italy’s response to the Holocaust. Among the earliest Italian creative works to confront the genocide of the European Jews, Callegari’s play challenged the legacies of anti-Semitism in European culture. Yet it also concealed the troubling history of its author’s own Fascist anti-Semitism. Exploring this apparent paradox, the present essay situates both play and playwright in the post-war Italian context. I argue that Cristo ha ucciso makes possible a substantial reconsideration of the public reckoning that attended news of the liberation of the death camps. This is because, with its provocative claim that Christian forgiveness had to be abandoned as an impediment to justice, Callegari’s play offered a radical alternative to the Christian humanist framework predominant in Italian narratives of the Second World War.