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L'Ultima Notte Nina Kerschbaumer at the Istituto Svizzero
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L'Ultima Notte
December 11, 2025, 18:00–19:30
Istituto Svizzero
Via del Vecchio Politecnico 3
20121 Milano
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With L'Ultima Notte, Early-Career Fellow Nina Kerschbaumer curates an event at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan examining the common conditions of both Western liberal democratic society and fascism in light of current political developments. Convened as a conversation, it draws on historical, cultural, and theoretical perspectives.
On December 11, 2025, the day before the 56th anniversary of the bombing at Piazza Fontana in Milan, which is widely regarded as the first major event of the Anni di Piombo, this evening seeks to detect parallels, resurrections, continuities and not least differences between the sudden rise of neo-fascist violence at the end of the 1960s with today.
The event bridges Nina's research during her residency 2024–2025 at the Istituto Svizzero on political violence with her work at the Collegium on forms of violence related to prosperity, juxtaposing neo-fascist lone-actor terrorists of the 1970s with contemporary so called amok-runners.
Contemporary historian Sara Troglio (Milan) will offer a concise historical overview of Italy’s “strategy of tension” and examples of the related “strategy of confusion,” examining how these events are—or are not—represented in school textbooks. Artist and writer Inka Meißner (Berlin) will discuss the emergence of the psychopath as a cultural figure between the late 1970s and 1980s, from literary representations such as Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho to their echoes in real-life contexts shaped by free-trade routes such as NAFTA. Writer and journalist Davide Coppo (Milan) will reflect on his debut novel La parte sbagliata (2024), whose plot traces the ideological and intellectual development of a young neo-fascist, and on his choice to adopt a fictional framework. Writer and cultural theorist Diedrich Diederichsen (Berlin) will analyze Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another in relation to Christian Petzold’s The State I Am In , exploring how both works address what it means for individuals who identify a system as fascist to have children—particularly in contrast to the solitary terrorism of recent decades. Finally, the contribution by Nina Kerschbaumer will intersect literary and cinematic perspectives by a comparative interpretation of the novel Un borghese piccolo piccolo by Vincenzo Cerami from 1976 and its filmic adaption—same title, utterly different ending—by Mario Monicelli the year after.
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