Pasolini in Weimar, 1942

Robert Gordon will discuss  a little-known journey that a young Pier Paolo Pasolini made in Summer of 1942 to Weimar, in the heart of Nazi Germany where  a major cultural festival of European Nazi and Fascist youth gathered thousands of delegates from 14 countries across Axis and occupied Europe.

What was Pasolini doing in Weimar? And what can his journey tell us about his own formation as a poet and intellectual, about his generation, and about his later, complicated relationship with Fascism and ideology?  Pasolini went on to become a writer, poet, filmmaker and later one of the most contrarian voices of the Marxist left.

Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge) works on 20th-century Italian literature, cinema and cultural history, and on Holocaust studies. His work on cinema includes Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, 1996) and the BFI FIlm Classics book on De Sica / Zavattini’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) (2008). He has also published on early cinema and literature, Holocaust cinema, Hollywood and European art cinema (Fellini, Antonioni), and censorship. His DVD commentary on Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) appeared in 2007 (BFI) and his Blu-ray/DVD commentary on Bicycle Thieves in 2011 (Arrow). His book on narratives of luck in cinema and literature, Modern Luck, appeared in 2023. CPL Editions published his book on Primo Levi Outrageous Fortune–Luck and the Holocaust.

Image: Hitler’s Youth Festival, Weimar 1942