ABSTRACT
Mo-German relations are formally excellent, as is convenient for two countries with a common political interest in strengthening the European Community and a common economic interest in maintaining their close economic relationship. Germany, in fact, is Italy's most important commercial partner. Despite the deep social, political, and cultural transformations that have taken place in Germany and Italy, the historical complex created by Fascism and Nazism and their consequences represents a sort of trauma in collective memory that is only slowly being reworked and critically overcome. A certain suspicion of the influence of Germany's past on her present, a suspicion that derived from the anti-Fascist Resistance, was part of common Italian political culture. Apart from the bewilderment of the Left, the Italian mass media, even though they looked benevolently on German reunification, had for months disseminated an image of a Germany become "great and powerful once again."
