I said and repeated that I would only ever fight and serve under the Italian flag (I am not Graziani!). That I was aware that they were victors and I one of the vanquished insofar I was not personally responsible for [the victory]. I said this to distinguish myself from all the fervent supporters of the victor, beyond a certain limit. The general was a bit surprised, then he commended me.8
Another anti-Fascist had difficulty getting an English general to understand that he was not ‘dealing with adventurers’. The general was amazed that ‘men of value could devote their lives, and risk those of persons dear to them, for a cause which involved as a logical consequence the defeat of their own country in war’; and the anti-Fascist, giving his explanation to the general, was grieved ‘to lay bare his sorrows and those of his people’.9
A testimony of the difficult situation faced in Yugoslavia by the soldiers who, having succeeded in avoiding being captured by the Germans, joined the partisans, reads: ‘But for us Italians one reason for national pride still held: we needed to redeem our name from the shame inflicted on it by the anti-men who spoke our language’.10 A sailor who had toured the world was to recall that for a long time, ‘Wherever we went, nobody could stand us. Oh: “Italian? ’eaven forbid!” Nobody could stand us because of this ’ere fact of the dictatorship that this ’ere Fascist party ’ad. And it was then we began to understand: “Why is it no one can stand us?” No one could stomach the sight of us’11
After 8 September it was true that ‘no one could stand’ the Italians because they were ‘branded as treacherous by old and new allies alike’, and because ‘one way or another, we had fought against everybody’. In the hierarchy of the concentration camps, the Italians found that they were superior only to the Jews. ‘Mamma mia, to see the look of hate in people’s eyes’, a woman imprisoned at Ravensbrück recalls.12
But consciousness of the abyss could turn into that of an unexpected rediscovery. Pietro Chiodi was struck by the revelation that had enlightened him as early as 27 July 1943:
I had never realised that the Liceo was so shining and full of light. I feel that it is a small part of my patria. That part in which I am called on to do my duty towards her. It is the first time that I have realised I have a patria as something that is my own, entrusted, in part, to me as well, to my intelligence, to my courage, to my spirit of sacrifice.13
On 9 September Emanuele Artom noted in his diary: ‘Half of Italy is German, half is English and there’s no longer an Italian Italy’; and then on 16 December, with a combination of shame and clarity of conviction, he wrote that to his parents he spoke only of the practical reasons for his decision to be a partisan,
and I kept quiet about those ideals: I don’t quite know why, but I’m ashamed to talk about them. Perhaps so many years of patriotic and political rhetoric inhibit one from speaking of these subjects with fresh and spontaneous simplicity. Yet here too great progress is being made. The mysticism of the last century, both the cause and effect of the Romantic and Mazzinian concept of nations that have a mission to accomplish, has by now had its day.14
Natalia Ginzburg has effectively evoked the stupor and emotion that many anti-Fascists, or simply non-Fascists, of her generation had on rediscovering their sense of a patria to defend:
The streets and squares of the city, which had once been the theatre of our adolescent’s boredom and the object of our haughty contempt, became the places that it was necessary to defend. The words ‘patria’ and ‘Italia’, which had nauseated us between the school walls because they had always been accompanied by ‘fascista’, because they were swollen with emptiness, suddenly appeared to us unqualified by adjectives and so transformed that we seemed to be hearing and thinking about them for the first time. All of a sudden they rang true to our ears. We were there to defend the patria and the patria was those streets and those squares, our loved ones and our childhood, and all the people passing by. So simple and obvious a truth seemed strange to us because we had grown up with the conviction that we didn’t have a patria and that we had been born at a point swollen with emptiness. And what seemed still stranger was the fact that, for love of all those unknown people who were passing by, and for love of a future unknown to us but whose solidity and splendour we could make out in the distance, between privation and devastation, each of us was ready to lose him- or herself and his or her life.15
Mixed with all this, perhaps, was the more or less conscious desire to free oneself of the recurrent oscillation between self-denigration, which had also acquired the guise of a defence from the stereotypes imposed by the regime,16 and self-pity, fed by the myth of the ‘goodness of the Italians’, which others stubbornly refused to recognise. ‘Since the formation of the first groups of so-called “rebels”, we have seen the name “Italy” pronounced with a certain sense of admiration, no longer with contempt’, a Garibaldi commissar was to write.17
The ‘Preliminary Report on the Activity of the Partisans of the Province of Arezzo’ states that the birth of the patriot formations ‘had, through a psychological process that was quite comprehensible in a Fascist climate, initially to overcome the reluctance to believe that finally something essentially “Italian” was taking shape, authentic in the true sense of the word.’18
In another document a Tuscan partisan recalls that, when his band liberated a village, ‘our greatest satisfaction was to speak in Italian to people who were expecting to hear other, guttural sounds. The liberated Italians understood then that even if there was a defeated Italy there was however a victorious Italy as well. And the victorious Italy was us.’19
It is this kind of profound expectation that allowed even the regular troops of the Italian Liberation Corps to be in many cases gratified by the warm welcome they received from the populations of the liberated territories.20
‘Italia, Italia, cosa importa se si muore’ (‘Italy, Italy, what does it matter if one dies’), sang a wounded partisan in an SS prison, using the words of a national-Fascist song, re-utilised also by the partisans; and the same partisan, hearing the Italian SS men singing ‘Italian songs to German rhythms’, remarked, almost as if to explain these reversals, ‘They’ve poisoned them.’21 The fact that Italians were fighting against Italians and that both were invoking Italy in fact made the reacquisition of a sure sense of the patria more difficult, but also more tormenting.
‘The spring of patriotism against the German on home soil has been released’, recounted a Garibaldi partisan educated by the nuns, who was sensitive to the nationalist myths of Fascism, but after 8 September had felt the ‘fascination of the rebel linked to the Italian Risorgimento in anti-Austrian terms’. And she added: ‘At that moment I jettisoned not the patria, not what Mussolini had taught me: I jettisoned Mussolini.’22 A Bolognese butcher tells this tale of a carabinieri marshal: ‘the marshal first served the Fascist state, then as an Italian he recognised the value of the “resistance”, for which he gave his life’. In 1937 the marshal had arrested the butcher’s brother, who was then sentenced to four years by the Special Tribunal.23
In explaining his decision to join the Resistance to his family, a police chief’s son wrote: ‘For a long time I’d been seeking the truth in myself … it would have been a poor show if I, who have always professed the religion of the patria, backed out at the moment of action. Here what is involved is not heroic spirit, it’s the human spirit which is on its feet and every man with it.’24
Revelations, discoveries, reworkings of ancient cultural undercurrents, continuities going under a different name, interweave in this attempt to reconstitute an idea and a sense of the patria. It is hardly surprising, therefore, if in those who unambiguously and painfully had committed themselves in this enterprise – the declaration of war against Germany by the Royal Army of the South – aroused, beyond strictly politico-diplomatic evaluations, a sense of extraneousness, if not irritation or even anger. Ada Gobetti wrote in her diary:
The news has left me cold. It makes no difference to us.
Perhaps it will have a certain importance for those who were awaiting orders from Badoglio (who have, however, calmly gone home by now): not certainly for our mountain folk from here, nor for the Turin workers. It’s we who are fighting the war, our war – and the official benedictions of a debased authority that no one believes in any more mean little to us.25
The same position was expressed by the Action Party’s Rome newspaper:
If the king and Badoglio formally declare war on Germany now … it’s a gesture that fools nobody and adds nothing to the present state of affairs. The real war against Germany has been declared by the Italian people since 9 September … And it’s war declared not against Germany, but against Nazism, which is so much more inhuman and reactionary than Fascism.26
Avanti! in its turn stated that the war against Nazism and Fascism was being waged by the people, and the king and Badoglio had nothing to do with it.27 More brusquely, the newspaper of the Communist Movement of Italy defined the declaration of war as ‘another instance of royal buffoonery’.28 In its poster launched for the occasion, the Communist Party stated that unity, which was indispensable for war, required trust in one’s leaders, but ‘this trust can’t be given to men who, co-responsible for Fascism and the Fascist war, have deceived and betrayed the Italian people’.29 In a longer and more closely argued article, L’Unità went back to the authoritative pages of the Storia del PC to establish the distinction between just war and unjust war, naturally bracketing that against Nazi Germany in the former category, ‘of immense, unprecedented significance’, but for that very reason denying that it could be directed by the Badoglio government: ‘How can this government which has feared the people conduct a people’s war?’30 Even La Democrazia del Lavoro, the newspaper published by the bloodless party of that name, which on 20 March had called the war against the Germans a war ‘of redemption’, on 23 March 1944 warned that, to avoid the war being fought only as a selfish Italian affair, it must not be conducted by men compromised by Fascism.
The high party ranks were to change their tune after the Salerno ‘turning-point’ and the creation of governments of national unity whose declared aim was indeed to give priority to the war. Nevertheless, it is highly significant that in the resistenti’s conscience the war against the Germans/Nazis needed no external legitimisation appealing to criteria of legality embodied in the institutions of the old state. On the contrary, it was these very institutions that had to legitimise themselves by conducting the war with moral scruples. Only one newspaper of declared monarchic inspiration could write that the war had to be fought under the orders of the legitimate head of state, namely the king.31 Most resistenti must also have found needlessly contorted Benedetto Croce’s thesis that the laceration suffered by the soul of the Italians between one war waged by Fascism, ‘legal in appearance but odious’, and another, which was ‘dear to the heart of every true Italian’ and ‘tenaciously pursued the spirit of the Risorgimento’, had been finally healed: in fact the second war had, according to Croce, become legal ‘because it is carried out on the same priniple as that marked by the sole government legally existing now in Italy’. (The scant clarity of this argumentation may also be ascribed to the fact that Croce was inviting men to enlist for a war that had not been declared, in a volunteer corps that was not recognised by the royal government.)32 Among the resistenti, even those who sought the help of legality like this saw it only as ‘legal clothing’ provided after the event to the ‘popular declaration of war’ that had already occurred.33 Only to the Italian partisan formations in the Balkans did the declaration of war bring, within certain limits, tangible and immediate benefit, because it gave them greater legitimacy in the eyes of their former enemies. The Command of the 2nd corps of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (Montenegro) issued a communication in which, even going beyond the way things actually stood, it stated: ‘With the declaration of war against Germany and the recognition of Italy – by the Anglo-Soviet-American coalition – as an ally in war, its international position has changed.’34
Rejection of the king, the generals and the discredited government of the South as guides, or even simply as fully fledged comrades in the war against the Germans, could even reach the point of questioning the very opportuneness of that war. By this I do not mean certain strictly class attitudes, to which we will have to return, but to a form of abstract moralist–revolutionary intransigence, which was nonetheless able to identify several genuinely problematic questions. The clearest formulations of this sort of populist, aristocratic and self-punitive fence-sitting are found in the press of the small Partito Italiano del Lavoro. A people still widely polluted by servile behaviour was not – it was claimed – worthy of participating in a war that free peoples were waging. To avoid being confused with the turncoat reactionaries, the only viable path remaining was to abstain from fighting the new war that the latter were now sponsoring, following the ‘umpteenth betrayal’ by that ‘despicable dwarf’, the king.35 A declaration inspired along these lines states:
The reasons for which the Italian revolutionaries have been fighting against the Germans since 1 September 1939 and those for which the monarchic clique has been fighting since 13 October 1943 are too different to reconcile. The former are fighting for liberty against tyranny; the latter for the winners against the losers. The former are fighting for the people; the latter against the people.36
From this it was deduced that ‘Italy’s war against Germany is immoral and politically absurd’.37 Within this moralising pessimism, which underrated the northern population’s capacity to react and fight, immediate objectives were nevertheless posed that did not widely differ, save in the stress laid on the defensive spirit, from that envisaged by those who strongly advocated war against Germany and the Fascists: armed defence of people, houses and cities, assistance to the persecuted and their families, refusal to collaborate in public services and public offices. Almost a year later another newspaper of the same group was to write: ‘It’s wrong to think that the mere fact that we speak of defensive struggle means that we’re lukewarm in the struggle itself: what we’re doing is exactly the same as what the partisan or Gappist is doing.’38 But this group was a unique case in Resistance circles in knowing how to give a positive connotation to what would then be the southern ‘non si parte’, (‘we aren’t going’): ‘If Badoglio doesn’t manage to scrape together those divisions – which will however unfortunately happen – to offer as cannon fodder to the English, that would give the Allies the impression of a real popular will which no speech or congress will succeed in giving.’39
Emerging from these positions was a problem that, to varying degrees of intensity, as hope or fear, ran through the Resistance: that of the link between war and revolution, to which we shall need to return. For La Voce del Popolo the answer was drastic: ‘The possibility of coupling the war with social revolution is lost for the Italian people: by stubbornly insisting on pursuing it we’ll end up doing neither the one nor the other’.40
Emphasis on the nation could lead to the two foreign armies occupying Italy being mechanically equated with each other. This formula, which led to the anti-Fascist character of the war being placed in parenthesis, was appealed to instrumentally, in some cases, even by voices above all suspicion, such as Radio London which, through its commentator Candidus, broadcast the appeal to accelerate, fighting alongside the Allies, the liberation of Italy from the ‘two foreign armies’.41 Some strictly observant Mazzinians equated the Germans who had ‘brought Fascism to Italy’ with the Allies who ‘are bringing the monarchy back to Rome … and it’s not enough simply to serve, one must also applaud in order to serve the interests of the foreign government that is protecting the adversary’.42 At times there are traces of this argument, stripped of its Mazzinian emphasis, in the Action Party press, which uses it in anti-monarchic and anti-Badoglian terms.43
In the Republican Party press the equation of the two foreign armies led to populist – or rather prequalunquis
tico – words like those that appeared in Rome on the monument to the early nineteenth-century Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli: ‘Clear off, the lot of you. Leave us to weep alone!’ This appeared to La Voce Repubblicana as ‘an exclamation vibrating with all the dejected anguish of the drama of our nation … in these words there’s the light of a new conscience. This withdrawing into ourselves, this probing our hearts embittered by grief is what it means. Andatevene tutti!’44
In deeply considered and heartfelt terms, the student newspaper La nostra lotta declared on the one hand that ‘the struggle for liberation and independence will make us independent of the allies as well’, and on the other showed as strong a contempt for the monarchic regime of the South as repulsion for the Social Republic. In fact, between these two poles ‘which are opposites only geographically … a large number of the Italian people are again sinking wretchedly into an attitude of passivity and fatalism’.45
One of the minor Roman newspapers spoke ironically (we are still in 1943) about the fact that Radio Munich and Radio London both broadcast Garibaldi’s hymn, ‘Va fuori d’Italia, va fuori stranier!’, while the Italians stood by watching the two foreign armies confronting each other, both courageously, on their territory.46 More cautiously and realistically, a Christian Democrat newspaper invited its readers not to delude themselves, but recalled too that the Anglo-Americans would never treat us as the Germans were treating us, and that linked to the victory of the former was the future of democracy in Italy.47 La Democrazia del Lavoro drew a parallel with the wicked neutralism that had broken out against the other war,48 while at the other extreme, La Voce del Popolo spoke of the ‘two current stumps of capitalism in Italy’, each protected by a foreign army, so that one had to fight ‘against every occupation’.49 Even the most circumspect equation of the two foreign armies could give grist to the mill of monarchy. ‘Friends? Enemies? Allies?’, a clandestine paper of that persuasion asked itself. And answered: ‘From natural tendency, confirmed by experience, the foreigner who in any guise whatsoever sets foot on the soil of others wants somehow or other to assert himself as master.’ Only the legitimate sovereign – this was the moral – could place himself above the two foreign armies contending for Italy.50
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