Mussolini, Twilight and Fall

by Roman D-Abrowski

English, Polish (translation)

248 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1980

Reviews

[Michael Schmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

It may date from 1956, but Polish historian Dąbrowski's* excellent history of the fall of Fascism in Italy, and then the puppet regime of Salo, cannot be beat, even today. Unusually nuanced for a work overshadowed by the political polarisations of the Cold War, Dąbrowski reveals a very human - if not humane - Mussolini, the man who initiated the Fascist project in Europe and who had many quasi-immitators, not least in Imperial Japan, Peronist Argentina, and my own benighted apartheid South Africa, but most notoriously in Nazi Germany, where his earstwhile student of national palingenesis, Adolf Hitler, came to despise him and plunge the continent into an unprecedented immolation of increasing radicalism. An undeservedly forgotten key text on the initiator of the Fascist counter-revolution.

* The correct surname is Dąbrowski