In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  Scrubbing the streets with toothbrushes was one of those things people could not get enough of: women and children were dragged out onto the street and on a few occasions even doused with acid. Brownshirts herded hundreds of Jews to the Prater, where they were beaten and chased around the big carousel, some of them were even forced to eat grass. The crowd stood and watched.

  The Kristallnacht held later in Germany was merely an imitation of the pogrom organised by the Austrians in Vienna nine months before. The Kristallnacht had to be carefully orchestrated, while the Viennese pogroms had largely flared up of their own accord. In Das Schwarze Korps, the SS correspondent in Vienna wrote admiringly: ‘The Viennese have managed to do overnight what we have failed to achieve in the slow moving, ponderous past. In Austria, a boycott of the Jews does not need organising – the people themselves have initiated it.’

  For the Austrian Jews, all this sudden misery had one bright side: they at least knew right away where they stood. In Germany, the occasional naïve soul could still hope that it would turn out all right, but for every Jew in Austria it was clear that he had to get out while the going was good.

  Gitta Sereny's theatre school emptied out. The drama teacher, an extremely kind-hearted man, jumped to his death from a fifth-floor window. Two other teachers left for the United States. Then it was her turn. One evening in May, Gitta's mother received a warning that she and her Jewish partner were no longer safe. They packed their belongings that night, and caught a train to Geneva the following day.

  The eighty-two-year-old Sigmund Freud was also harassed in his home at Berggase 19. On 4 June he was given permission to leave the city where he had lived from earliest childhood. He went to London, where he died one year later. Before being allowed to leave, the Nazis demanded that the world-famous doctor sign a document stating that he had been treated well. Freud signed without batting an eye, and added a sentence of his own: ‘I can strongly recommend the Gestapo to one and all.’

  By May 1939, a little more than a year after the Anschluss, more than half of Austria's Jews had left the country.

  Chapter TWENTY

  Predappio

  ‘MY NAME IS VITTORIO FOA. I WAS BORN IN 1910, SO I'M ALMOST ninety years old. Sometimes they call me the grandfather of progressive Italy, but that's nonsense of course. I did lead the union for years, that much is true. And I was an anti-Fascist, yes, that I was, from the very start.

  ‘My grandfather was the chief rabbi of Turin. A matter of family tradition, nothing more. Like most Jewish families in northern Italy, we belonged to the city's upper classes. It was only in Rome that one had a large Jewish proletariat. No, my anti-Fascism had little to do with my Jewish background. I considered myself a son of Italy, of the Renaissance, of the Enlightenment, of freedom. It was the Germans who finally drove us Jews together.

  ‘When did I start becoming aware of all this? I believe I was about thirteen at the time, in 1924, with the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, you know, the Socialist Party secretary who had the courage to protest openly in parliament against the Fascist terror. They abducted him right away and stabbed him to death. I was completely engrossed by that whole affair. I was only a boy, but I understood perfectly well that that murder was more than an attack on democracy, it was also an attack on the workers’ movement.

  ‘After that I saw the true face of Fascism everywhere I looked, even in my own city. I saw the violence in the streets, the arrogance of the blackshirts, the nationalism. The Fascists had burned down the union hall, I saw the workers standing silently around their burned homes.

  ‘When I was a little older I started writing booklets and pamphlets. They were printed in France. I was part of Carlo Rosselli's underground movement, Giustizia e Libertà, along with people like the publisher Leone Ginzburg, the writer Cesar Pavese and Alessandro Pertini, who later became president of Italy. We worked out of Turin, Rosselli was living in exile in Paris. In those days I saw Fascism as the rape of Italian history, as an excess, something that had nothing to do with Italy. I think differently these days. Fascism has deep roots in Italian history. It lasted twenty years here, while National Socialism lasted only twelve years in Germany. Liberalism, freedom, the government of law had to conquer Italy, and we're not nearly there yet.’

  ‘In spring 1936, when I was twenty-five, a Fascist judge sentenced me to fifteen years in prison. Purely on the basis of what I had written. The secret police had informants everywhere, and one of the “champions” on our side turned out to be a Fascist. I hadn't taken part in a raid or anything like that, it was only about words and paper. I was released in 1943, just in time to join up with the resistance. It was insane: no one in prison ever asked whether I was Jewish. I was actually very safe there.

  ‘During that whole seven-year period I heard almost no news from outside. We were totally isolated: no visitors, no newspapers, no radio. Once a week a censored letter from your parents. When I got out, I looked around in amazement. The world had changed so drastically! Germany was all over Europe, in France, in Belgium and the Netherlands, they had even occupied part of Italy. In 1936 there had been almost no anti-Fascists in Italy. We felt very much alone. But by the time I was released, all the young men were itching to fight against Germany.

  ‘After that I started organising the political actions and the propaganda for our resistance group. Of course we knew that our struggle barely added up to anything amid that huge war, that the Russians and Americans were the ones who really made the difference. But we fought along anyway, because we wanted to be part of it too. We didn't want the new Italy to exist only by virtue of other people's sacrifices and other people's decisions. We wanted the new democracy to be stronger than the old one.

  ‘And we felt a new unity. During my time in the resistance I made friends with people like Andreotti and Cossiga. After the war we were appointed to the assembly that was to draft the new constitution. We would argue all morning, work hard in the afternoon, and voted in unison in the evening. That sense of unity was a product of the resistance.

  ‘Liberalism and democracy have had a hard time of it here. The Italians invented Fascism. We did that! We mustn't try to avoid that responsibility. But the anti-Fascist constitution we drew up back then is something they've never been able to take away from us.’

  ‘Today I'm so old that I'm almost blind. When I first opened my eyes to the light, in 1915, all the countries of Europe were busy slaughtering each other. And each of those countries felt that justice was on its side. I can still remember a few things about the First World War. The whole thing is surrounded in my mind by an atmosphere of emotion and tragedy, yes, our family was quite occupied with the war. I still remember when Italy joined the war in 1915. I was four at the time, and I stayed afraid throughout the entire war.

  ‘Now that my eyes have almost completely dimmed, I see, by that last light, that the countries of Europe are embracing each other and forgetting their borders. That whole turnaround took place within the space of my almost ninety years. I still find that unbelievable. But I also know how difficult it has been.’

  If motorways are the cathedrals of the twentieth century, then the Brenner Pass is its St Peter's, a miracle of road building, the artery carrying the lifeblood of Europe. After days of waiting I was finally able to leave the North, across the pass, in a long, lazy convoy. Huge orange snowploughs were working everywhere, the men driving them worked in their T-shirts, they were the heroes of the mountain. Close to the top the trucks stood growling and steaming in a traffic jam without end, at least ten kilometres of washing machines from Holland, cheese from Denmark, Velux windows from Germany, a family's belongings being moved down from Venlo, Ikea furniture from Sweden, refrigerated trailers full of frozen pigs, chickens and cows, tankers full of wine and lubricant, everything Europe had on sale was being dragged back and forth across that pass.

  And then the road slopes down, and suddenly the last vestiges of winter disappear, the world becomes spacious and clear, at Tren
to the vintners are cheerfully spraying their vines, the grasses are flowering and it's Pentecost in Verona.

  At Bologna, the road is blocked. I stumble for the first time upon the new war. While Northern Europe sits quietly in front of the TV, looking at distant victims in unfamiliar towns, here the protests echo in the streets. The procession is led by a ramshackle Fiat with three loudspeakers on the roof, then the banners and red flags and behind them some 2,000 socialists, communists, anarchists, even Gypsies. In the course of a single weekend I count forty such demonstrations reported in the Italian papers: in Milan, Rome, Genoa, Naples, Cremona … Workers from Fiat and Alfa Romeo are rallying to the aid of their colleagues at the bombed Zastava plants. The collecting boxes rattle for Belgrade and Novi Sad.

  In the old centre of Bologna the protest songs ring through the galleries, drums and trumpets are heard everywhere, a few proletarian leftist comrades have even brought along an antique air-raid siren, to make us feel as though we are in Belgrade. The group consists largely of older combatants who walk down the street conversing calmly between the shouted slogans – ‘Adolf Clinton, go home!’. Their greetings are warm – ‘Mio caro,’ long time no see’ – and amid the strains of the ‘Internationale’ you can hear the cheeks being kissed. In the crowd, another mobile phone rings loudly. At set intervals the progress grinds to a halt, as the boys up in front have to push-start their Flat. The communists are singing ‘Bella ciao,’ the collective feminists and lesbians of Bologna form a solid bloc of floral dresses, two blind men try to cross the street between them all, groping along with their white canes, the proletarians let their siren wail, the anarchists wave their black-and-red flags, this is demonstration raised to a science, a speciality of the city.

  I spend the night in my van close to the city's huge exhibition grounds. The perfume and lipstick merchants of Italy are holding a convention there. At the entrance to the car park lot stands a gigantic man with a friendly face who charges 10,000 lire for each car, and tears off vague little ticket stubs. One hour later he is arrested, but there's no hurry, he's even allowed to buy himself a sandwich before he is carted off. This is obviously a daily ritual. At night the exhibition grounds are deserted, yet a certain hecticness remains: prostitutes, shady deals, young boys, brothels on wheels. There is nothing dangerous about it, everything takes place calmly and routinely.

  The next day I take the fast road to Ravenna, through the hills and the light green of spring in the direction of Predappio, the village where Mussolini was born. Driving there I almost collide with a rubbish bin along the road, stunned as I am by what I see across the street. One shop after another is selling everything that has been anathema in the rest of Europe since 1945: SS and Wehrmacht uniforms, Italian Fascist caps, weapons, books, swastikas. The village is one huge souvenir shop for all things from the wrong side of the fence.

  The architecture of Predappio is remarkably uniform. These buildings were meant to breed model Fascists: the housing blocks with their typical square-jawed style, the warehouses of the Caproni aircraft company, the now abandoned Casa del Fascio on the village square. Mussolini pampered his birthplace. Between 1926–38 the town was converted into a Fascist città ideale. The order of the box of blocks rules supreme, the pillars stand rigidly to attention, the windows stare arrogantly at the sky, the barracks of the carabinieri greet the robust party headquarters across the square, arms raised in salute, heels clacked together.

  Today the underground bunkers are used for growing mushrooms. All reference to Il Duce has been rigorously removed from the buildings, but his chunky face – complete with jutting chin – comes back a thousandfold on ashtrays, vases, lighters, buttons, posters, T-shirts and wine bottles. The house where he was born is kept in perfect condition, and one can take guided tours on request. The meter box by the front door is covered in inscriptions: ‘Il Duce, I love you.’

  Was Fascism an incident, a strange twist in the course of Italian history, a kind of disease that descended on the Italians around 1920 and of which they were finally cured in 1945? Or was Fascism, as the liberal Giustino Fortunato wrote in 1924, ‘not a revolution, but a revelation’, a movement that mercilessly exposed the weak spots in Italian society? What does Fascism tell us about Italy?

  From the day the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci were left dangling upside down from a sign beside a Milanese petrol station on 29 April, 1945, almost every Italian historian has racked his brains to answer those questions.

  To the outside world, Fascism was and is always seen as a single ideology, a single movement. In reality, however, the Fascists, with their many connections and backgrounds, formed a strange and motley crew. They reflected in every way the turbulent Italy of the 1920s. They included frustrated officers and industrialists, but also many frightened citizens and angry farmers. There were staunch nationalists among them, but also many who wanted little or nothing to do with the state. It was only to the outside world that Mussolini looked like the uncontested leader. In reality, he had constantly to play a game of give and take with all those different factions.

  The driving force for all Italians, in all their hope and rage, was above all the inferiority factor: Italy was always missing the boat. In the second half of the nineteenth century, while all the major nations of Europe were concentrating on the expansion of their industries, the conquering of new colonies and the building of armies and fleets, the Italians were still battling for their own unity. By the time Italy had finally become a single entity on the map, it lacked the military and economic power to achieve its great aspirations. ‘The Italians have such a great appetite, and such bad teeth,’ Bismarck said, and so it was.

  In 1914, Italy's share in the world's industrial production was 2.4 per cent, as compared to Britain with 13.6 per cent and Germany with 14.8 per cent. (Today those figures are 3.4, 4.4 and 5.9 per cent respectively.) Large landowners and speculators had bought up the estates belonging to monastic orders, and hundreds of thousands of hungry farmers had moved to the cities or emigrated. The traditional social structure had been destroyed for good. Those were years of ambition, poverty and frustration.

  Was Fascism, then, simply a phase in the development of the Italian nation state, a growing pain that went away half a century ago? Predappio indicates the contrary. This same Fascism is still alive, it can be given vent to here with a form of innocent pride. Certain elements of it still resonate in Italian politics, and within Europe as well it still constitutes an important undercurrent. Fascism was, and is, more than a historical fluke.

  In the 1930s the Münchener Post was already using the terms ‘Fascists’ and ‘Nazis’ interchangeably, and today the two movements are usually seen as one and the same. Yet, in the beginning, Mussolini had little use for Hitler. He considered him ‘sexually degenerate’, and his hatred of the Jews completely insane. When the Nazis tried to seize power in Austria in July 1934, following the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss, he assembled his troops threateningly at the Brenner Pass. What is more, he actually had a personal bond with Dollfuss: on the day of the murder, the Austrian chancellor's wife and children were visiting the Mussolini family, and Il Duce himself had to deliver to them the sorrowful news. One year later he decided to invade Ethiopia – earlier than planned – for he believed that within two or three years he would be at war with Germany.

  The conquest of Ethiopia was the first step in Mussolini's drive to establish an empire of his own, just like the British and the French. It was to have been a fast and easy victory, and the Italians used every means – fair or foul – at their disposal: gas attacks, chemical weapons, random bombardments of the civilian population. The Ethiopians were virtually defenceless, and were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. In the end, the expedition was Mussolini's greatest diplomatic blunder. The whole world saw it as a cowardly, villainous undertaking, and to his dismay his putative ally Britain turned against him as well. After that he had no choice but to join forces with Hitler, in an unholy
embrace.

  Hitler, on the other hand, had been a great admirer of Mussolini from the start. The Braunes Haus in Munich contained a life-sized bust of Il Duce. To the Nazis, he was the prime example of a dynamic leader saving his divided fatherland. Less than a week after Mussolini's famous ‘March on Rome’, the crowd in Munich's packed Hofbräuhaus was shouting: ‘Germany's Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler!’ From that moment on Hitler was referred to as ‘Führer’, in imitation of Mussolini. And a year later in Munich, at the time of his first attempted coup, he spoke of it as the ‘March on Berlin’.

  But didn't they bear a striking resemblance, National Socialism and Fascism? Didn't both movements spring from the same soil? After all, Germany and Italy were both young nations in search of their own structures, and both had been formed as confederacies of small states. In both countries, stymied nationalism played a major role as well: Versailles had been a humiliating experience for the Italians too. The Germans mourned publicly for Saarland and Alsace-Lorraine, the Italians had their own ‘oppressed’ minorities in Austria and along the Dalmatian coast.

  Another important similarity was the culture of violence. Italian has more words for ‘gang’ than any other language. As early as 1887 there had been a major uprising by federations of peasant farm workers, in associations known as fasci, against the large landowners and the state. Tax offices were plundered and large estates occupied, all under the banners of Marx, the Virgin Mary and ‘good King Umberto’. Mussolini built upon those rebel traditions, upon the rural anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, upon the struggle against the ‘alien’, elitist state. The Arditi, the ‘fearless ones’ – crack units formed during the First World War and operating on the fringe ever since – were the Italian counterparts of the German Freikorper. These commandos, some 10,000 in all, went about dressed in black, wore a skull and crossbones as their emblem and spoke only in the form of exchanges screamed back and forth between the commander and his troops. Their language, clothing and folklore was adopted by Mussolini as that of the ‘typical Italian male’, and later by Fascists and Nazis all over Europe.