A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  In the Resistance there were also traces of that tradition of the rebel woman which, although broken after the Paris Commune had, at least partly, acquired a new lease on life among the women factory workers.168 The struggles waged by women workers since before Fascism may in fact be seen as a connecting link with the Resistance struggles.169 And these struggles were interpreted even by a partisan commander as ‘an act of rebellion against national tradition and the moralistic mentality of our country’170 – a tradition and a mentality which had a death camp survivor compelled to hear these words addressed to her by her husband and nephew: ‘If you hadn’t got yourself involved in certain things no one would have come to get you’, and ‘You asked for it; if you’d stayed at home knitting …’.171

  On one point sexual morality and political morality came face to face: that of how women who had relations with the enemy were to be judged, not only in the sense of sexual relations but also in the other sense that any contact they had with the enemy was to be classed as both treason and impurity.

  Attitudes varied widely here. An enlightened Gappist, Elio Cicchetti, prevented two girls from being executed only because they flirted with the Germans (though later they were executed because they were found to be spies): ‘Certainly they deserved to be given a thick ear as a lesson in dignity, but we didn’t want our mission to sink to the level of moralistic exercises, which seemed rather more the task of the vice squad than of a formation of combatants.’172

  An Action Party pamphlet said: ‘For women who keep accompany with Germans, unworthy of the name either of woman or of Italian – contempt and humiliating, exemplary punishments.’173 La Voce delle donne, organ of the ‘Gruppi di difesa della donna’ denounced the ‘brazen females who sink so low as to fall into the hands of our tyrants … Does it not occur to these wretches that the hands that caress them are still stained with Italian blood?’174

  The enemy’s women could only be whores – this was a view widely held by partisans and Fascists alike. A Garibaldino document speaks of an ‘ardent Fascist … notorious also for her private conduct, who denounced people in the questura’.175

  The partisans often associated sexual corruption with Nazi-Fascist ferocity. When Rosanna Rolando was arrested and taken to the Sitea hotel in Turin, headquarters of the RAU (Reparto arditi ufficiali), she recalls that ‘in front of my bedroom there was the night-club; they were up until two in the morning drinking and dancing with their mistresses’.176

  Head-shaving became the act that symbolically summed up the punishment to be inflicted on the woman enemy. There was nothing new about this practice. The paratroopers of the Royal Army had adopted it for the young men they regarded as draft-dodgers, in order to emphasise and humiliate their effeminacy.177 The RSI Fascists did no less: they shaved the head of a girl who had danced with the partisan ‘Pillo’ (Paolo Spriano).178 There seem to have been cases of girls shaved twice – first by the Germans, then by the partisans.179 Quazza recalls the head-shaving inflicted on four female spies (given the accusation, a mild enough punishment) and on four young men and four women ‘for having relations with the Germans’.180 Two Veneto parish priests justified, as ‘harsh lessons’, the complete head-shaving of women who had gone to bed with Germans.181 As early as 15 December 1943 the Rome edition of L’Unità was announcing that the few women who kept company with the Germans were coming to the North with their heads shaven down to nothing.182 In the days of the insurrection mass head-shaving became a practice above all against the women auxiliaries of the Fascist army. L’Unità published two photographs side by side with the caption: ‘Our combatant comrades and the so-called auxiliaries’, also defined as ‘ausiliarie-spie’.183

  Attitudes towards sexual morals also indicate a more general way of living the Resistance experience, revealing as they do profound and differentiated tendencies.

  At a meeting of Communists at the 3rd Lombardia Aliotta division, a trial was improvised against Italo, who frequented ‘the house of a certain “mamma” with girls’. His prosecutors were the elderly and rigid militant Riccardo and the neophyte intellectual Albero. Albero warned: ‘The Communists must give an example concerning everything, and therefore dongiovannismo [Don Giovanni-ism] as well. If we set a bad example, how will we be able to reprimand the Garibaldini?’ Italo was backed by Piero, according to whom, ‘when the men are off duty it doesn’t do to be excessively moralistic’. Italo was accused of being too light-hearted and flippant, and on this point his defence was: ‘I don’t take the mickey, but I have fun; life should be taken merrily’, to which another who was present, Mascheroni, retorted: ‘Being merry is often the cause of inconclusiveness at meetings. One needs to be serious.’ But Italo was not to be beaten: ‘Even at meetings you can joke and laugh. And besides, I’m not the only one.’184

  This expostulation and reply gives some idea of the relationship between severità and allegria, whatever might have prompted the latter, in a situation that permitted no slackening of tension. The commissar Michele reprimanded commanders who participated in dances and ‘little parties’.185 Alongside the appeal to reasons of security, there appears at times, in these reproaches, the tendency to involve in the condemnation of rich people who were living it up in the midst of tragedy, those who, among the partisans, did not seem equal to their role. At work in these cases is the memory, in a new guise, of the age-old conviction that the poor have been deprived even of the possibility of enjoying life: this fact should be a cause for pride at a time when they were struggling to reverse this state of affairs. Witness the contempt with which what was going on in the hotels of Madesimo was denounced, where ‘the pleasure-seeking folk of Milanese and local high society had got together, and, in utter disregard of the sufferings of the population, were living it up.’186

  Also linked to the question of the personal dignity of those invested with a noble mission was the reproof of ‘ferocious bickering even over access to drinking water’, of down-market bravado, of useless ‘multi-coloured ribbons and frills’, of personal dirtiness, inadmissible ‘even if one’s clothes are in tatters and one’s feet are bare’.187

  ‘It is not dirtiness and slovenliness’, says another document ‘that distinguishes the partisan – a conscientious combatant of the people and of liberty – from the Fascist mercenary, but the care and propriety of his person, even in the difficult situation he is in, which attracts prestige and general respect.’188

  All the same, it would be mistaken to conclude that the ideal of the perfect partisan was embodied in a type of human being rigid and severe to the point of surliness. What I have in mind here are not the numerous and well-documented somewhat mannered invitations to be good-humoured, which smack rather too much of the ‘santa allegria’ of Catholic moralism. Nor do I mean to stress the gap (a hallmark of the Communists, but present in the Actionists as well) between the man of today – the severe and inflexible militant – and the man of tomorrow, who alone will be allowed to enjoy a life in joyous expansion. My purpose, rather, is to recall the theme of the ‘Resistance for man’s happiness’ (the formula that Simone de Beauvoir, in The Mandarins, puts into the mouth of one of her characters) – a happiness that can be partially anticipated insofar as the cost of conquering it is in itself a bearer of hope and even of gaiety. ‘I wish to make it known that there is no melancholy among the partisans’ – these words appear written on a mural newspaper.189

  Roberto Battaglia, in his book of memoirs, put this point well. On the eve of his wedding, a partisan blows up a factory commandeered by the Germans. His reply to the question ‘Why did you do it?’ is: ‘Just like that … for fun … I was about to get married.’ Battaglia speaks of the ‘light-hearted and jokey wind of folly’ that was rustling through the partisans, and remarks: ‘Almost as if the Italian need to reacquire, after so much indifference or meanness or selfishness, a mobile and light childlike spirit before reality so as to know how to live and die without emphasis.’190

  The literature about t
he free zones has brought to light how a sudden and almost incredulous joie de vivre broke forth in those zones. In the precocious zone of Visso, in the Marche, Battaglia found an inebriating atmosphere; he felt ‘cheered by the environment’, invested with a ‘new warm-heartedness’.191 Ada Gobetti, during the first occupation of the Val Germanasca, was caught up in a climate of allegra complicità, almost holiday-like and almost playful, a climate of normality and serenity.192 In the Republic of Montefiorino, the Catholic Gorrieri was struck by the excessive number of dances and of women, which seemed to him to be dangerous phenomena, comparable to the ‘flaunting of red’.193 In the free zone of Cascia (February 1944) the festivities that were taking place inspired a Dutch colonel who had taken refuge there to remark: ‘This is how we should live, given what is befalling us.’ Portelli observed (though his comment cannot be taken as generally applicable): ‘A liberated zone, like a festivity, is a protected space where new relations flourish; an upside-down world where workers and peasants feel they have power (and the fear that it is precarious only reinforces its festive connotation).’

  A partisan fighting in the same zone remarks in turn: ‘We can’t always be thinking in terms of shooting’; merry-making is necessary ‘especially for the young, to soothe their spirits … otherwise one might go barmy’. Before the indecision of the inhabitants of Leonessa, another small town which had been liberated, Portelli’s observation is this: ‘The very gap between the facts and the version we are given of them gives voice to the dream of the free zone as a fragment of a future already achieved.’194

  3. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE GENERATIONS

  The resistenti experienced their connection both with anti-Fascism and with Fascism as a relationship between generations.

  ‘There are short generations and long generations’, Marc Bloch has written, ‘and only observation enables us to identify the points at which the curve changes direction’. ‘Generation’, in this sense, should be seen as meaning a historical–cultural fact, and not just a question of people’s literal dates of birth. It derives from a ‘shared imprint’ created by a ‘shared age’ or, as has also been written, by a fusion between ‘personal time’ and ‘social time’, due to ‘great historical events’ lived through together between their twenties and their thirties by people ‘who have associated their age not with fashion but with history’.1

  H. Stuart Hughes endorses this view in the following comment on Bloch’s words: ‘individuals who have participated in psychologically decisive events in company with people fifteen years their seniors may feel closer to these latter than they do to individuals only slightly younger than themselves who just missed this great experience: the generations of the two world wars are a case in point’.2

  However, there may also be a generational overlap, given the different dates and durations of the formative processes experienced by those involved, and the dissimilar effects that the very same great, and in so many respects unifying, experiences, like the two world wars, may nevertheless have. Thus the opposition between Fascists and anti-Fascists should be seen above all as a clash between two long generations, which intertwine in different ways with the natural generations. The Fascist generation was a long one. On the eve of its fall the regime had made an effort to weld the young people that it had itself forged (of whom Aldo Vidussoni, the twenty-eight-year-old penultimate party secretary, was to be the emblem) to the comrades of the early days, like the last secretary, Carlo Scorza, who did not intend to give up the fight. During the Social Republic this long generation attempted to rediscover its identity in the myth of the return to origins and in re-proposing the ‘irresistibile ebrezza’ (‘irresistible inebriation’) of risk to ‘young men who are not such only because the registry office has them filed as the representatives of the last drafts’.3 Mussolini himself recognised that the only men on whom the Republican Fascist Party could rely were the veterans and the very young.4 And a long generation too was that born of the encounter between the anti-Fascists of the ventennio and the young resistenti of various backgrounds and inspirations.

  The middle generation remained, by contrast, a short generation. Its liveliest members joined either the Fascist generation or the anti-Fascist one. Not even the generation of the Second World War, oppressed by the burden of defeat, managed to establish itself as a long generation. In spite of the tendencies towards ex-servicemen’s solidarity that surfaced after 25 July and after 8 September, that generation was rent by the civil war. A powerful majority of it converged into the anti-Fascist generation; a more restricted minority sank into the Fascist one.

  Within the anti-Fascist long generation, the younger ones had specific accounts to settle with the veterans. They reproached them for the errors they had committed and undertook not to repeat them. It is no accident that the creation of the long generation was more successful among the Communists and members of the Action Party and GL – that is, in the movements which in their pre-Resistance activities had already succeeded in presenting themselves as new.

  The break with the defeated anti-Fascists was created more by the defeat than by age. In a previous chapter, I recorded Filippo Turati and Claudio Treves’s bitter reflections during their Paris exile. After 25 July 1943, during the Resistance, and then during the days of the Liberation, irritation and often contempt for the revenants are evident.

  Ada Gobetti, who was actually no longer that young, presents the two vice-mayors, the Socialist (Domenico Chiaramello) and the Christian Democrat (Giacchino Quarello), designated for Turin, as follows: ‘Tranquil and satisfied like heirs finally coming into possession of an inheritance to which they had a right and of whose possession there was no longer any doubt.’5 Franco Calamandrei is crueller than this when he describes his encounter in Rome with two Socialists: ‘The older one is afflicted by a slight stutter, the younger one is slightly cross-eyed. From their persons, their manner, the vanity of their plans, I get a sense of discomfort, and am almost embarrassed for them because of their incompetence and evident inferiority complex.’6

  The reproaches levelled at older people, and particularly parents, for having been Fascists was so painful and profound that the very connotation of the word ‘Fascist’ was at times watered down. There was the withering accusation of not having told the truth, of having hidden their pre-Fascist past even when it was part of their biography, of having exhorted them to play safe, of having in short betrayed their mission as educators:

  The oldies know how to defend themselves well, and what a huge lie they tell to defend themselves!… On the one hand, they say that they are indeed conscious that liberty is the best of things, and on the other hand they deny it in saying that they are old, and have a family and so many other moral ties that can’t be dissolved. The paradox is this … And they believe they love us and that they are doing right by giving us this advice, which fundamentally we could call selfish advice

  This is how a young man was writing as early as 1934.7

  The son of the secretary of the pre-Fascist internal commission of the Galileo works in Florence has recounted how he never ‘heard babbo [father] utter a word of political orientation for me to become this or that, never’; and he tries to explain that his parents

  loving us as they did, knowing how much they themselves had suffered, did not wish us to take the road they had taken … Possibly in their heart of political hearts they would have been happier if we had done so, yet they were afraid of being responsible for guiding us along a road that might lead us to jail … or worse.8

  Nuto Revelli does not hesitate to reproach fathers who did not speak out in time.9 When Piero D’Angiolini, a law student, read the newspapers of 1924–25 in the library, he became indignant with his father, a divisional chief in the Ministry of Finance, who had never spoken to him about the murder of Matteotti.10 Artom writes of a young partisan that ‘he feels the abyss separating fathers and sons and knows that it cannot be bridged. The abyss opened by the partiality of parents’ opinions and by
the shame that prevented their children from revealing the transformations that have come about in them, a more yawning abyss than ever, now that centuries seem to have passed between one generation and another.’

  As far as he personally was concerned, Artom presented his youth as a reason for elitist pride: on 30 July 1943 he went to a GL meeting, and ‘it galled them a bit when I said that of all those present I was the only one who had never shouted: viva il Duce’.11 Without mincing words, a GL newspaper wrote: ‘If the previous generation had had the courage to brave death in order to conserve liberty, today we wouldn’t have needed to fight this war.’12

  At times the confrontation took the form of tit-for-tat exchanges between the young and the old. An ‘Appeal to the Young’ by the Youth Front contains a curt declaration: ‘Nothing can be expected from the old generations. Only we young people can make the new Italy.’ To which comes the crude rebuke: ‘Death and deportation do not respect age.’13

  In taking youth as the highway to salvation, there was the risk of making people slip towards the position of those who made invocations identical to those of the RSI in their attempt to distance themselves from decisions made on behalf of it. We young people, they wrote in one of their newspapers which came in for a rough time from the Fascist authorities, ‘tomorrow, however things turn out, will have to impose our will on the country. Old men and old systems continue to dominate more or less everywhere: it is with this stale garbage that we have to make a clean break if we are to present ourselves as free and rejuvenated in the post-war fray’; but such was the fracture created by the civil war that the same newspaper invoked firing-squad executions to avenge comrades killed by the partisans.14