The Tragedy of War and Curzio Malaparte

Curzio Malaparte, born Kurt Erich Suckert,^[3] German from Saxony on his father’s side, Lombard on his mother’s, was born in Prato on June 9, 1898, and died in Rome on July 19, 1957. In between, straddling two world wars, the terrible two decades of European dictatorships and a tormented postwar period, he was a prominent figure on the Italian cultural, literary and journalist scene. The biographers who narrate his life emphasize his opportunism, the chameleon-like changing of his tunic, selfishness and a certain cynicism.^[4] At the same time, they recognize his marked freedom of thought, his being true to himself and against the tide, sometimes naively, as the good Tuscan he was and who loved freedom above all.^[5]

Writing about Malaparte today is perhaps easier than a few decades ago, because time has established a more objective critical distance. In any case, a prior choice has been imposed: to put aside biographical aspects, which would alone provide material for several articles.

As a journalist his output was unstoppable. Let us recall only a few experiences, as editor of La Stampa in Turin from 1929 to 1931; as correspondent for Corriere della Sera, for which he worked from 1933 until 1944. There were his reports as war correspondent from the Russian front, which found their way into the volume Il Volga nasce in Europa. They were much loved and caused Corriere sales to soar. After the war similar, even greater, success awaited Malaparte, with his column Battibecco in the weekly Il Tempo. When he died, the paper – which until then had sold about 300,000 copies weekly – all of a sudden lost 50,000 readers.

After the war Malaparte was a writer of plays, film scripts, and director of a film, The Forbidden Christ (1951).^[6]

He was condemned by the Vatican on June 17, 1950, for his novel La pelle (The Skin). Published in 1949, it was placed on the Index. In the last weeks of his life, terminally ill in hospital, he asked for and obtained baptism sub condicione^[7] from Fr. Felice Cappello, SJ, and the sacraments of Confirmation, Reconciliation and Eucharist from Fr. Virginio Rotondi, SJ. He also obtained an Italian Communist Party membership card directly from Palmiro Togliatti. He thus died a Communist and a Catholic.^[8]

In the face of such a varied character, what part of Malaparte’s body of work do we wish to present in this article?

Our choice falls on Malaparte the war-witness. He experienced World War I firsthand as a very young volunteer (he had just turned 17), from September 1915 until the end and beyond,^[9] suffering severe lung damage from mustard gas poisoning when in July 1918 he was in Bligny, serving alongside Italy’s French allies fighting against the German army. Again he found himself on the front lines on June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, as an Italian officer with the rank of captain, in his role as a correspondent for Il Corriere della Sera. Returning to Italy after July 25, 1943, with the arrest of Mussolini and the handover of power to General Badoglio, he reached Naples and, because of his perfect knowledge of French and English, spent several months serving as a liaison officer between the Italian army and the Allies.

There are three works that stem from his military experiences, and Malaparte’s accounts are always lucid, expressing the tragic nature of what he experienced and witnessed, being frank in his condemnation and his relating of the consequences in Viva Caporetto!, Kaputt and La pelle.

‘Long live Caporetto!’

Returning home from World War I, Malaparte wrote and published at his own expense – unable to find a willing publisher – a pamphlet with the provocative title Viva Caporetto! It was his first work and already contained in nuce the style, sensibility and some of the themes dear to the writer in the forty years of activity that were to follow. It went against the official rhetoric, which proclaimed the battle of Caporetto as the “disgrace” of a military defeat where the Italian infantry had failed.^[10] The vivid, heartbreaking and at times bitter and painful account of these military events, retells the experience of the war: its senselessness, bloody inanity, and the desolating loneliness of those who civil society has no desire to hear from about the reality of hunger, fatigue and death experienced in the trenches. It is the sense of being marginalized by those who accused them of “defeatism.”

Malaparte, a 23-year-old veteran who had returned home to study law, was attacked and beaten by students at Rome’s La Sapienza university. The pamphlet was seized in 1921 by the Giolitti government, then again by the Bonomi government the same year, though it changed its title to The Revolt of the Damned Saints, and in 1923 by the Mussolini government. These are the tales of trench warfare that are analogous to those in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front,^[11] serialized in a newspaper between 1928 and 1929, and in Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 Farewell to Arms.

Kaputt, the masterpiece

Kaputt is universally recognized as Curzio Malaparte’s masterpiece. We can say that it is one of the major works of 20th-century Italian literature. Emanuele Trevi, speaking of works born in the tremendous forge of that century, cites Nadežda Mandelstam’s Memoirs, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad and Life and Fate, Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil.^[12] We think that some chapters of Kaputt (if not the whole book) can also be placed on this list.

The novel was written between 1941 and 1943, the first part in Ukraine, the next in Poland, and then in Smolensk in 1942, while he was an officer in the Italian army and at the same time a front line correspondent for Corriere della Sera. He wrote the rest of the book during his time in Finland, except for the last chapter, which he compiled in Italy after returning there following Mussolini’s arrest on July 25, 1943. Kaputt was first published in October 1944, by a small Neapolitan publisher, Giuseppe Casella, his publishing house Bompiani in Milan being inaccessible as it was home to the headquarters of the occupying German army, and with Italy split in two at Monte Cassino. Like much of what concerns Malaparte, the publishing history of this book was adventurous.^[13]

Action in Kaputt takes place along the entire length of the Eastern front: Ukraine, Bessarabia, Romania, Poland, Karelia, Finland, Belgrade, Budapest, with Rome and Naples in the finale. To read the description of the war-torn landscapes and conflicts, some of which took place in Ukraine, in the light of the news that is published in our newspapers in recent months cannot leave us indifferent. Malaparte traverses places and settings, coming into contact with nobles, Nazi leaders ,ordinary people, soldiers and diplomats. He tells of them employing an identity that is only loosely biographical and much more literary in style, adopting a point of view that helps his readers immerse themselves in the scenes and situations described, writing in a traditional narrative, rather than a biographical style.^[14]

It is difficult to summarize Kaputt, because the very structure of the work constitutes a new kind of literature: part memoir, part fiction, some reportage, in part a postmodern novel, and also a historical novel without a clear plot. It is composed of memories, fragments, extensive ambient tapestries or sketches, cameos or tales within tales. It is a literary ensemble, in which the authorial intention is so powerful that it is removed from history and better regarded as literature.^[15] Emanuele Trevi, focusing on Józef Czapski, author of The Inhuman Land – published in France in 1949, the Polish writer’s summative work about Polish deportees to Russia – writes, “Where does history end, in short, and where does literature begin, if it must begin anywhere? […] The reality is that literature has nothing to do with writing well. […] Literature is not an elegant expression of experience, but the only way we possess to understand and value human existence considered from the point of view of the individual.”^[16]

The pages of Kaputt are full of literature, in the fragmentary form that brings it close to today’s film montage and the open forms of the postmodern novel. In the composition of episodes, memories and recollections, Malaparte is similar to Proust in his desire to evoke a lost world.^[17] “The essayistic framing and extremely fragmentary nature of the writing, in the constant tremors of a ‘lyrical memory’ wandering among so many episodes, remote and proximate, of a particularly varied and rich worldly experience, make Kaputt’s industrious compositional technique quite unusual.”^[18]

Some have spoken of a “paratactic structure,” in the sense that Malaparte accords equal dignity to kings and prostitutes, and if a choice is made, the writer decides to be on the side of the victims, the vanquished, “on the side of the goose.”^[19] Malaparte even considers nature to be, with a postmodern and topical sensibility, among the victims of human violence. There are several symbolic and visually striking tales: that of the horses frozen in the lake in Karelia; that of the wounded reindeer that reaches Helsinki by crossing the frozen sea, around which representatives of European diplomacy huddle at night; the struggle between the German general and the salmon that “taunts” him and eludes his attempts to fish in the remote north of Finland.

The choice to resort to animals, based on Malaparte’s well-known love and appreciation for them, has been praised by critics.^[20] The use of this symbolism, in Malaparte’s literary universe, far from being a negative aspect of humanity, constitutes on the contrary an enhancement, relying as it does on simplicity.^[21] For example, in The Skin, the “passion” (totally fictional because it is an invented episode) between the beloved dog Phoebus and the mortally wounded American soldier is insistent. It is “the universality of suffering and creaturely continuity between these disparate figures.”^[22]

The words of the novel’s introduction, written by Malaparte in the form of “A History of the Manuscript,” where he says, “Kaputt is a cruel book,”^[23] are still relevant today. He adds that war is not a protagonist in this book, but perhaps it is a secondary character, an observer, or like a landscape. In what sense should we understand this statement, which, placed at the beginning of a book about war, is disorienting? Kaputt is a novel about the end of Europe, which is destroyed by the war, not only materially, but especially spiritually. The dream of a renewal of the human spirit that animated the hearts, minds and wills of European citizens remained unfulfilled, was crushed by cruelty, which emerges at so many points in the narrative as in the description of the Warsaw ghetto,^[24] in the account of the pogrom in Ia?i and in the terrifying image of a “cascade” of hundreds of bodies of dead Jews from the train doors at the small station of Podu Iloaiei,^[25] in the basket full of eyeballs gouged from prisoners of war by Croatian Ustashas and given to their general, in the encounter with the prostitutes of Soroca, in the account of the execution of Russian soldiers who “can read,” in the description of the German soldiers met in the café in Berlin, without eyelids, lost due to frostbite during the retreat, and in the description of the bombing of Belgrade, which are equally effective only in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

Falling within the spectrum of immense cruelty is the bewildered and sorrowful “irony” with which Malaparte describes lunches in Poland at the table of Reichsminister Frank, Governor General of Poland or, as his host liked to call himself, der deutsche König von Polen.^[26] Imagining he is an Italian renaissance prince, he gathers around himself a court of prominent figures and guests who in their conversation intersperse amusing jokes, learned quotations, and comments on German racial superiority and Jewish racial inferiority.^[27] Kaputt contains a certain acerbic moral assessment^[28] in the description of lunches in European diplomatic circles and the Acquasanta golf club in Rome,^[29] before and after the outbreak of war.

It must be said and repeated: war is cruel, and Malaparte takes upon himself the radical commitment to denounce the misery into which Europe has fallen. This determines the birth of a new literary form. Milan Kundera says of Malaparte, “With Kaputt he not only wrote an important book, but he found an entirely new and original form.”^[30]

In Kaputt, Malaparte’s literary skills, particularly expressionist ones, come to maturity. Indeed, the Tuscan writer is considered one of the champions of this Italian literary movement. His descriptive technique leaps from realism to imaginative and pure expressiveness. His linguistic mastery manages to draw the reader into a powerful experience of sensory immersion: sight, taste, smell, touch. He manages to transfigure reality by consciously evoking paintings and painters: Manet, Renoir, Holbein,^[31] Grosz,^[32] Chagall, Dürer. There are banquet scenes as found in Renaissance canvases, war scenes as found in Dürer etchings or Chagall canvases.

Two examples best express them. The first is the futurist taste evident in the description of the decomposition of armored vehicles, visible signs of the new era, which replaced the sweet smell of the corpses of men and horses with the ferrous smell of the rust of the new war machines.^[33]

The second is the surrealist flavor of various dreamlike scenes, such as the dream of the Jews who come to visit Malaparte before the start of the pogrom. Recall that it was Malaparte who introduced foreign Surrealist authors to Italy, referring to translations of Breton, Éluard, Aragon, Joyce and García Lorca in the magazine Prospettive.