A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The resistenti could generously repeat that peoples are not responsible for the sins of their governments.86 But peoples and governments were one thing, and states another; and if the Italian state had signed an armistice inspired by the anti-Fascist principle of unconditional surrender, this was the point of departure that had to be free of any kind of reservation (like Foa and Diena’s memorandum, quoted at the beginning of this chapter). Participation in the war of liberation therefore had to be utterly alien to the ‘shameful cynicism with which Mussolini demanded ten thousand dead’ to wield at the peace table.87 By contrast, according to the Roman monarchic newspaper Italia nuova, co-belligerence ‘nullifies, by abrogating them de facto and by law, all the clauses of the armistice regarding any form of disarmament’.88

  The first public declaration of foreign policy made by the government of national unity set up in Salerno condemned the ‘invasions [the word ‘aggressioni’ was avoided] that had occurred in France, Greece, Yugoslavia, Russia and Albania – the last of which we wish to see independent as soon as possible’; and the wish was declared ‘to adopt a policy of friendly cooperation to repair the ravages of the war and to conduct careful and rigorous investigations to identify Fascist misdeeds and acts of violence and to adopt the most severe penalties for the culprits’.89 This is the least that could be asked in public declarations. But it is possible that the non-participation of France and Greece at the armistice negotiations with Italy fed some absurd hope in what remained of Italian diplomacy, nostalgic for the old mythical card of the ‘determining weight’ of Italy in the contest between the powers.90

  The declaration just quoted made no mention of the borders and colonies. The government, represented by Carlo Sforza, made its first semi-official declaration about these on 20 August 1944: independence for Ethiopia and Albania, the Dodecanese islands to Greece, the old colonies (Eritrea, Libya, Somalia) to be entrusted to an international organisation or to be left in the possession of Italy.91 Sforza was the minister without portfolio in the government presided over by Ivanoe Bonomi, a revenant who believed that the problem could be placed once again in the context of the debates at the beginning of the century. In fact, in Bonomi’s preface to an old and well-known book of his, he underlined his claim that it might be in Socialism’s interest to support colonial expansion.92

  Behind this preoccupation with the organisation of the international scene lay different convictions and intentions. It might have been a mere tactical ploy and a message sent to the other colonial countries. The memory of the old League of Nations mandates might have had something to do with it.93 Finally, there might have been a genuine desire to give the problem of the colonial peoples an international breathing space. But this breathing space was choked in several Liberal, Christian Democrat and Action Party writings by appeals to prejudicial formulae such as ‘porta aperta’ (‘open door’), free access to raw materials, and outlets for emigration.94

  The long and the short of it was that no clear-cut anti-colonialist stance was taken that sought in unilateral renunciation the only argument that could give it credibility.95 This is probably one of the cases where the distance is greatest between the diplomatic preoccupations of the governments and, to at least some extent, the parties, cowed by the old Fascist accusations of ‘rinunciatari’ (‘renouncers’), and the conscience of the resistenti. The latter, even when they did not openly proclaim anti-colonialist principles, certainly did not regard Italy’s preservation of its colonies as one of the motivations for their choices. On the contrary, there is good reason to believe that most Italians, at heart, could not have cared less about the colonies, which represented, at the very most, as Parri put it, a ‘question of amour propre’.96

  Writing about the PCI, Ernesto Ragionieri has said: ‘Nationalism, definitely a dead letter rejected in terms of dealings with the European peoples, still conserved a certain vitality when it came to colonial peoples’, so that opinions about the fate of the Italian colonies were ‘divided’.97 To this frank confession it needs to be added that, in the middle ranks of the older Communist militants, anti-colonialism was too deeply ingrained to be easily placed in parenthesis. The leaders, on the other hand, felt themselves bound to prudence until the USSR made its position in the matter clear (it is well known that at a certain point there was talk of a Soviet request for a mandate to govern Libya).98 Worthy of mention, therefore, are both the clear stand taken by Italia all’Armi!, the newspaper printed by the PCI in Switzerland for the Italian internees, and a discussion between the leaders and workers of the Milan party membership. The Italo-Swiss paper vindicates the USSR’s anti-colonialist birthright, and adds:

  Besides being a danger for peace and their aggressive tendencies, Pan-Europeanism, all pan-theories [sic] and racism, falsify the history of humanity by establishing fallacious proportions and perspectives of historical evolution and even falsifying the facts. It is precisely for this reason that the study of the history of the colonial countries in relation to the history of the whole of humanity has been organised on a vast scale in the USSR.99

  The second example, recorded in a report from Milan, is the intervention of a comrade, presumably a quadro (senior party member), who, ‘in the matter of the abandonment of the colonies’, recalls: ‘Socialists have always been for the autonomy of peoples. The colonial peoples have always been exploited by the capitalistic countries, with the excuse of bringing them civilisation. We need to liberate them and offer them solidarity, but we must offer solidarity above all to the USSR in its thrust for socialist construction.’

  A correspondent from Il Centro was more clear-cut on this score, and more realistic too. He explained: ‘If we declare the liberty of the peoples of our colonies we’ll put England in difficulty: if instead we insist on conserving them, England will appear as a liberator.’100

  Against the ‘empty nationalist affirmation of the inviolability of borders’, L’Italia Libera resolutely declared that it was a matter of safeguarding ‘national integrity’ rather than ‘territorial integrity’.101 The aim of this affirmation was to sound the alert against German manoeuvres for the annexation of the Alto Adige, Trentino, Venezia Giulia and Istria. All the more reason why the principle should hold with respect to the Anglo-American, French and Yugoslav victors. Despite the difficulties it had to face on the eastern border, the ‘patriotic war’ of the Resistance was not a war over borders. In fact, implicit in the reconquest of national identity was the principle of respect for the wishes of all peoples, who must no longer be ‘traded in the gaming house of diplomacy’.102

  But what does appear, in some far-sighted writings, is a deeper concern, though one held in check by enthusiasm for the alliance between the great powers that was bringing Nazi-Fascism to its knees: namely, the concern that Europe and tomorrow’s world would be governed by a directorate of victors. It was the old theme, dear to Carlo Rosselli, of the international autonomy of anti-Fascism, which was here singing a noble and anxious swansong.

  Since June 1943 Emilio Lussu had considered it ‘highly unlikely that the Anglo-American occupation could allow free political action’; and, providing one of the few instances of a realistic prediction of the post-war order, had added: ‘The influence that the great nations will exercise over continental Europe will in itself be immense in every field: it is up to us not to contribute to making it excessive.’ The Italians, in fact, would have only a ‘second-class freedom, overseen and measured out’.103 L’Italia Libera, repelled by a vision of the future so much at odds with the Resistance spirit, came to criticise as ‘rhetorical and vague’ the formulae of the Atlantic Charter, and openly denounced the risk of a new Holy Alliance being born, ‘without the seriousness and concreteness that yet animated that alliance initially’.104 A stand was taken against either direct or indirect expansionism, called direzione politica dei popoli, by a Christian Socialist newspaper, which sharply criticised ‘the game-playing of the old, myopic and selfish diplomacy’.105

  Avant
i! reminded its readers that in 1918 the victors had not essentially interfered in the internal politics of the defeated countries. But this time, it added, when everyone had become used to seeing ideology incarnated in a state, things would be different, ‘even though they’re still talking in terms of the self-determination of peoples’.106 The Socialists did in fact oscillate between claiming a classist and, for some of them, revolutionary autonomy and opting for the USSR. Avanti! wrote:

  If Italy gets bogged down in conformism, it will be an Anglo-American colony whose lot it will be to grow old on the crumbs of the decomposing capitalistic economy. If it aligns itself with the revolutionary countries, marching at the head of which is the Soviet Union, it will regain its joy in living in the creative effort of a new civilisation.107

  The Communists had little doubt as to how things stood. Maintaining the alliance between the three ‘great powers’, even after the end of the war, represented for them an objective that they had stressed many times, and one that might be thwarted only by the forces of reaction.

  3. THE REDISCOVERED ENEMY

  Appeals to the Risorgimento, to the First World War, to traditional allies, converged in the figure of the German as enemy and invader, an invader who this time had not been stopped on the Piave but had got as far as Naples. From arrogant ally, the German became once again the ‘real enemy’,1 far more ‘real’ than the Frenchman, the Englishman, the American, or the Russian had ever been. The negative epithets to attribute to the German enemy, elaborated by a long tradition, could lead to the German being made into an ‘absolute enemy’, disqualified ‘in moral as in other terms’ and thus transformed into an ‘inhuman monster’.2 Justifying their struggle by appealing to the great values that went beyond ‘the political’, the resistenti tended on the one hand to see their enemies as actually incarnating absolutely negative values; while on the other hand, in the values they professed, insofar as they were universal, they had the antidote against this degeneration. It was, in reality, the enemy’s ruthlessness that went well beyond ‘the political’, but that ruthlessness needed to be combated without being imitated.

  The risk inherent in using old stereotypes against the Germans were denounced in a GL document that spoke ironically of expressions like ‘barbarous invader’, ‘age-old enemy’, ‘hated German’, ‘sacred soil of the patria’: these formulae, dear to ‘a few more or less conscious latecomers or a few nostalgic traditionalists’, merely demonstrated the ‘inadequacy of stale patriotic models’.3

  In effect, these and similar expressions often appear in the Resistance press, in unison with the widespread opinion that German barbarity was capable of every kind of excess. As early as 10 September 1943, Emanuele Artom noted in his diary: ‘The Germans entered Turin yesterday and the wildest rumours are going around; that they’re cutting off people’s hands to take their wrist watches, et cetera.’4

  It seems clear here that the memory of 1914–18, when in Belgium it was sworn that the Germans had cut off children’s hands and when Giovanni Preziosi, who later became one of the most fanatically racist and Germanophile Fascists, spoke of the ‘German octopus which stretches its tentacles and applies its suckers everywhere’.5 The appeal to eternal German barbarity had already appeared in the period of non-belligerence,6 and is present in the entire European Resistance.7 In Italy, Fascist propaganda had rechristened the Germans (‘tedeschi’) as ‘Germanici’ (not Germani, so as to avoid classical reminiscences), but during the Resistance the word ‘tedeschi’ became dominant again, flanked by the still more fearsome word ‘teutoni’. According to the Christian Democrats of Il Popolo, ‘the truth of the matter is that the Germans have remained exactly as Caesar’s and Tacitus’s Romans had found them to be’.8

  This recurrent theme appeals to history, and may come to refer to the race: ‘The descendants of the Teutons, whom not even twenty centuries of history have tamed and refined out of their savage, primitive nature’;9 or again: ‘people of Genoa, barbarous Teutonic power is falling apart’.10

  More elaborately, a Veneto newspaper writes: ‘German people, you are powerful: you crave world supremacy: you are also capable of appearing civil and kind, or shall I say courteous, but beneath the skin you are savage! For you civilisation remains a myth, and every effort you make to achieve it ends in a bestial snarl!’11

  If here the enjoinder is not to let oneself be deceived by the good manners that the Germans are at times capable of displaying, elsewhere the discourse touches on ‘the Nazi enigma, the sinister phenomenon of a learned people, turned beasts’.12 The most elementary form of this enigma lay in the fact that the Germans, whose technical civilisation was beyond question, were devoid of a more profound human civilisation. A Friuli Communist paper says:

  It’s undeniable that in Germany the inventive spirit is highly developed, that she occupies one of the foremost places in industry and the sciences; but that she has the delusion of being designated by God to dominate the whole world is ridiculous and rash. Let her keep her precious culture when this has to be paid for with blood. Let her also keep her inventions and her astounding inventions, when to make use of them it is necessary to pay in terms of the grimmest slavery … We want one thing only: Liberty … Better naked and free than snugly padded and slaves.13

  In this text there appear echoes of the ancient chants of revolt, like that of the Lyonese canuts, and reminiscences of the propaganda of 1915–18 against Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany: ‘The modern Huns, free of moral scruples and other technical imperfections, advance with the aid of science … The Germans don’t understand that one can possess a hundred universities, a thousand laboratories, innumerable perfect factories, the most thriving commerce and still be barbarians. In 1915, shortly after Italy’s entry into the war, that is how the Rivista di patologia nervosa e mentale (‘The Review of Nervous and Mental Pathology’) was speaking about the Germans.14 A Resistance document was to set ‘the most ferocious obscurantism, the scientific kind’ against ‘the most open enlightenment: that which draws its origins from ineluctable historical premises’.15

  The formula ‘Teutonic automaton’ well sums up the loathing of the ancient barbarian and the dehumanised technician, enemies of ‘Garibaldino humanism’.16 This sensation aroused by the Germans is described by Ada Gobetti in a page of her diary that recounts how a group of women who had come to bring food and messages to their imprisoned spouses were dispersed with rifle butts: ‘While they were performing the brutal act, their faces didn’t even express brutality: impassive, soulless; and in their brutal deeds there was no fury, nor cruelty, but something frighteningly mechanical’.17

  More traditional appear the appeals to the women not to fraternise with the invaders: ‘Girls of Italy! Not a look, not a smile for the German occupiers. Women of Romagna! You who more than anyone hear the Prussian’s insult, you who feel yourselves dishonoured by the bestial German.’18

  By contrast, there is a biblical tone in this appeal by the Belluno Garibaldi division: ‘Prune the fruit-trees, so that they bear no fruit for the invaders!’19

  The German soldier had often aroused admiration and shyness in the shabby, uncertain Italian soldier.20 ‘They fascinated us’, an RSI Fascist was to write of the Germans.21 The resistenti, by contrast, felt satisfaction at having liberated themselves from any sense of inferiority. Typical of this is the pleasure they feel at seeing that also the Germans flee: this is the exhilarating essence that Revelli draws from the tale of the first day of a roundup in Valle Stura. For that matter, he had already seen them in Russia fleeing ‘like hares’.22 From some SS men who had turned tail, Chiodi captured a document with the words: ‘The bandits are cowards who flee the moment they hear the word “German” ’; on it he affixed the stamp of the 103rd G. Nanetti brigade and mailed it to the Turin SS Command.23 ‘Eccoli i conquistatori del mondo!’ (‘So these are the conquerors of the world!’), thought an anti-Fascist on seeing two Germans escaping through a train window following an air-raid alarm.24 ‘They
too were scared of dying’, says a partisan about the Germans engaged in a roundup.25 Seeing the Germans escaping and being afraid of death was the confirmation that they were men like the rest of us. This was the discovery made, with a sense of liberation, by one of Sartre’s characters.26 The Germans, who were in the habit of underestimating their adversaries, were moreover the first to arouse these reactions in those capable of standing up to them.27 And when the partisans had the cheek to break the rules of the game, the Germans grew more arrogant, and the partisans more gleeful at getting their own back.28 The prestige of the German warlords nevertheless remained such that at times the partisans actually seemed to be awaiting from them some acknowledgment of their own military qualities. This is what was written about the Garibaldi commander Rocca, who negotiated an exchange of hostages with the Germans: ‘He was received and treated with the greatest respect and paid the honours due to a military chief, a recognition of our valour.’29 Another Garibaldi commander recalled with satisfaction that some German divisions preferred to surrender (a rare event) to the partisans rather than to the Americans.30