Authors of the deed: political assassination and selfhood in Weimar Germany and fascist Italy

Thesis

This thesis revisits a series of high-profile political assassinations carried out by secret right-wing organisations in 1920s Weimar Germany and Fascist Italy, with a focus on the assassins’ perceptions of themselves and their actions. It brings together four cases: in Germany between 1921 and 1922, the murders of Finance Minister, Matthias Erzberger, and Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, and a failed attempt on former Chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann; and, in Italy in 1924, the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the Secretary of the Unitary Socialist Party (PSU).

This study draws on a veritable mountain of sources not solely about, but also by the assassins themselves – from memoirs and diaries to contemporary oral and written statements, surveillance reports, and a mass of letters written to former comrades, lawyers, Mussolini, their mothers, and each other. It foregrounds how the assassins narrated and performed themselves across interrogations, trials, and later recollections, while tracing how these shifting self-portraits interacted with broader public scripts and how these figures were imagined by others in different contexts and regimes.

The first two chapters examine how witnesses and wider publics transformed the assassinations into spectacles of public meaning, through mourning, unrest, violence, and proliferating speculation and conspiracy. The next two chapters turn to the assassins, reading the interrogation room and the courtroom as distinct but connected contexts in which they sought to explain and perform themselves. Their repeated failures to meet expectations shaped by the wider narratives woven around their crimes expose the tension between personal interest and political performance – between imagination and outcome. The final chapter follows the assassin through dictatorship, war, and post-war reconstruction, asking how one lives – or is permitted to live – after political murder.

Bringing the German and Italian cases into comparison, this thesis explores the shared repertoires of right-wing violence, and both parallels and divergences in how these acts were absorbed, interpreted, and remembered across differing political trajectories and national cultures. Political assassination is reframed as violence that was both event and legacy: a site of narrative formation in which assassins became unstable symbols and their deeds reverberated far beyond the act of violence itself.

Authors: McQuaid, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-qajaaekkb
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: German history; assassination; Italian history; Fascist Italy; political violence; twentieth century Europe; modern European history; subjectivity; Weimar Republic; right wing violence
• Subjects: History, Modern; History