LIFE DURING WARTIME: Italian Fascism is back in vogue, at least in some scholarly circles. The culture, art, and fashion of Italy under the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini have been re-examined in numerous recent monographs and edited volumes.
This new research can be found in broad studies such as Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton University Press), by A. James Gregor, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, and Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Cornell University Press), edited by Claudia Lazzaro, a professor of art history at Cornell University, and Roger J. Crum, an associate professor of art history at the University of Dayton. Other studies explore narrower questions in this arena -- including Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini, by the independent scholar Simon Martin, and Fashion Under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt, by Eugenia Paulicelli, an associate professor of Italian and comparative literature at Queens College of the City University of New York. (Both books were released by Berg Publishers.)
In her 1986 book, Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (University of Chicago Press), Marjorie Perloff, now a scholar in residence at the University of Southern California, declared that “the equation of Italian futurism and its cognates with a later fascism is ... a simplification.” Indeed, the lure of research into Italian arts and letters under Mussolini rests in artists’ complex relationship with fascist politics.
Where Germany’s National Socialism -- led by a failed artist named Adolf Hitler -- sought to obliterate artistic innovation via vitriolic contempt (including the infamous “Entartete Kunst” or “Degenerate Art” exhibit of 1937) and to replace it with a banal perversion of classicism, Italian Fascism boasted prominent supporters such as the Futurist artist Filippo Marinetti and such poets as Gabriele D’Annunzio and the American expatriate Ezra Pound.
Among the artistic figures allied with Italian Fascism was Kurt Erich Suckert, better known by his pen name, Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957). A talented writer and keen political observer, Malaparte was also an ardent follower of Mussolini. Indeed, Malaparte’s best-known work before World War II was his 1932 book, Coup d’etat: Technique of Revolution, a ball of contradiction wound from wickedly pungent analysis (Malaparte is brilliant on the 1917 Russian Revolution and Hitler’s seizure of power) and an absurdly romanticized first-person account of Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome. His self-designed villa on the island of Capri (built between 1941 and 1943) is among the most beautiful houses in the world. (It was used by the French director Jean-Luc Godard as a setting for his 1963 film Contempt.)
On this wave of renewed interest in Italian Fascism, Malaparte’s fiercely controversial work, Kaputt, has now been brought back into print by New York Review Books Classics, with a new afterword by the writer Dan Hofstadter.
Kaputt is part fiction and part reportage, and much of its controversy resides in the impossibility of sorting out the truth from its author’s inventions. Malaparte compiled material for the book as a war correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, during which he covered Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and hobnobbed with officials of the Axis powers and their puppet governments.
Malaparte’s dispatches have been published as The Volga Rises in Europe (Birlinn), but Kaputt is a different book altogether. With savage relish, Malaparte juxtaposes macabre diplomatic politesse with vivid accounts of Nazi atrocities. The result is a vivid tableau that Kaputt’s author himself called “horribly gay and gruesome.” Nearly 60 years later, Kaputt’s literary trapeze act -- its frenzied swings from embassy to atrocity and back again -- retains its brazen audacity.
Part of that audacity resides in the seeming truth of Malaparte’s untruths. As Mr. Hofstadter notes in his afterword, Malaparte was not a witness to some of Kaputt’s more horrific moments, including a Nazi pogrom in Moldavia. According to one account, Malaparte rewrote the book’s first section as an indictment of its central characters only after it became clear that the Axis was crashing to defeat. The uncertainty resting in the marrow of the book adds to Kaputt’s immediacy; Malaparte does not foresee an ending of his catalog of horrors.
Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books Classics, says that bringing Kaputt back into print fits in well with the press’s “publication of a number of books this season that had to do with war,” including reprinting the British historian C.V. Wedgwood’s history of the Thirty Years War and two essays on The Iliad and war written by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff. He adds that Italian authors, including Cesare Pavese and Leonardo Sciascia, constitute “a sub-line within the line” at his press.
One thing that is not new about Kaputt is the translation. The new edition sticks with the one by Cesare Foligno, originally published in 1946 by E.P. Dutton & Company. (An edition of Kaputt published by Northwestern University Press in 1995 also used Foligno’s translation.) A new translation “just wasn’t within our budget,” says Mr. Frank.
In light of the continuing post-invasion trials of Iraq, another Malaparte book that has fallen out of print in English may be ready for a new audience. By turns fiercely acerbic and teasing about American naïveté, The Skin adopts a blend of fact and fiction similar to Kaputt to chronicle the Allied occupation of Italy.
Typical of Malaparte’s take is an incident in The Skin where an American colonel mistakes the ruins of the Colosseum for the work of Allied bombers. “Then spreading out his arms,” writes Malaparte, “he added apologetically: ‘Don’t worry, Malaparte! That’s war!’”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 51, Issue 40, Page A15