In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Within a short time of Mussolini setting up the Fasci di Combattimento on Milan's Piazza San Sepolcro, on 23 March, 1919, his fasci could no longer be distinguished from the Arditi. In the first month of their existence, the Milanese fasci attacked and destroyed the offices of Avanti!, the socialist party organ that Mussolini had led with such verve in his younger years. Three years later, with the help of the large landowners, they effectively and brutally stamped out the socialist and Catholic workers’ movements and purged local politics of their representatives by murder, beatings, arson and intimidation.

  Terror paid off: this, too, was what Hitler learned from Mussolini. On 16 October, 1922, Mussolini and his men – under pressure from the fasci – decided to take Rome within the next two weeks. On 27–28 October, 1922, the legendary March on Rome was held. Some 20,000 poorly armed Fascists moved on the capital and stopped only thirty kilometres from the city; at that point, half the men turned and went home. (Mussolini himself, by the way, had simply taken the direttissimo, the express train, from Milan to Rome.) The government, however, was thrown into such a state of panic that it resigned. King Victor Emmanuel III refused to declare a state of emergency. Instead, the next day he asked Mussolini to form a new government. Like Franz von Papen later in Germany, the king hoped in this way to co-opt the Fascists. But Mussolini had no intention of disbanding his gang of thugs. In the April 1924 elections his government received two thirds of the vote. When the socialist Giacomo Matteotti stood up in parliament and stated that the election results were based on fraud and terror, which was nothing but the truth, it cost him his life.

  By 1925, everything the Nazis could only dream of in the 1920s had already been achieved in Italy.

  Then, for most Italians, began the years of indifference, of Gli Indifferenti as the title of Alberto Moravia's 1929 novel went. From 1925, the ‘Roman salute’ was mandatory at schools and universities, and almost everyone complied. The textbooks were placed under strict government censorship and every civil servant had to sign a declaration of loyalty to Mussolini; only a few avoided doing so. Making compromises and toeing the line, according to the American author Alexander Stille, constituted the norm in Fascist Italy; most people led their lives in a world of moral greyness, searching blindly for ways to maintain their integrity – to do their jobs well, to avoid the worst forms of obeisance, to lead a morally impeccable life – rather than follow the path of direct resistance.

  All the more exceptional then were the few young men who actually did begin active resistance – those, for example, associated with Vittorio Foa's Giustizia e Libertà movement. In 1937, after giving the call to fight against Fascism in Spain – ‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy’ – the move-ment's leaders, the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, were murdered by French fascists operating on behalf of the Italian secret police. Foa himself spent eight years in prison, even though he could have obtained his freedom at any time by requesting a pardon from Mussolini. His friend, the brilliant Leone Ginzburg, lost his job at the University of Turin in 1933 because he refused to take the Fascist oath. In 1934 he was sentenced to two years in prison for his work for Giustizia e Libertà, and from 1940 he lived with his wife and young children in internal exile in the remote Abruzzi. He did not survive the war. Foa later asked himself why Ginzburg had waited to become an Italian citizen before taking part in ‘the conspiracy’. His own answer was: ‘It was precisely the Italian tradition which he considered to be the foundation for his own anti-Fascism.’

  At first, however, Mussolini's experiment – unlike National Socialism – was viewed in Europe with a certain sense of appreciation. Many intellectuals found Fascism, like communism, an attractive alternative to ‘weak-kneed’ democracy. Terror was a price they were willing to pay. Mussolini's new society seemed to stand head and shoulders above debilitating party politics, religious feuding and the class struggle. Everywhere the dictator was lauded for his fight against ‘political corruption, social anarchy and national degeneration’. The newspapers were amazed by the speed with which he carried out building projects and set up pension funds and other social services, and the comment heard wherever Europeans compared notes was that ‘at least the trains in Italy are running on time again’. Winston Churchill called him a ‘Roman genius’, and in 1927 he assured Italian journalists that if he was Italian he would follow Mussolini ‘wholeheartedly, from start to finish, in your triumphant fight against the beastly predilections and passions of Leninism’. The Indian freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi praised him as the saviour of Italy. In October 1927, the readers of the Dutch daily Algemeen Handelsblad chose him as ‘the greatest figure of his day’, second only to Thomas Edison.

  Mussolini's greatest diplomatic triumph was the concordat of 1929, which defined relations between the Vatican and Italy. When he embarked on his Ethiopian foray in 1935 – even as the Germans were expanding eastward, Mussolini wanted to build a colonial empire around the Mediterranean – the expedition was bid Godspeed by Pope Pius XI. In the cathedral at Milan, Cardinal Alfred Schuster blessed the banners which would ‘bear the cross of Christ to Ethiopia’.

  After that, an end came to the international appreciation for Fascism. Mussolini changed colours like a chameleon; he had always done so, but now it became obvious even to the most casual observer. In late 1937, he converted to anti-Semitism. Not only did he hope in this way to establish himself in Hitler's good graces, but he was also angry about the growing criticism of his Ethiopian adventure by the international ‘Jewish’ press. Criticism was something to which he was not accustomed. In imitation of Germany, marriages were forbidden between Jews and ‘persons of Aryan descent’, Jewish teachers and students were banned from the schools, restrictions were imposed on Jewish entrepreneurs. Leone Ginzburg, who successfully applied for Italian citizenship in 1931, despite his Jewishness, had it rescinded in 1938.

  Even so, under Mussolini, neither Ginzburg nor Foa were ever persecuted for being Jewish. Italy never became a truly anti-Semitic state. The reluctance with which Italian officials and police – the Fascists among them – carried out the anti-Semitic measures stood in stark contrast to the punctuality shown, for example, by German, Austrian and Dutch officials. The deportation of Jews from Italy only began after the Germans had seized power, after September 1943. The number of Italian Jews killed was therefore significantly lower than in Germany: close to 7,000, a total of 16 per cent of the country's Jewish population. (By way of comparison, in France almost 25 per cent of all Jews were killed, in Belgium 40 per cent, in the Netherlands around 75 per cent.) In few European countries was the Holocaust sabotaged as thoroughly as in Fascist Italy.

  The Fascists’ racism was as void of content as many of their other slogans. It was not fanatical and principled, as it was with the Nazis, but opportunistic. From the beginning, the Fascist movement had Jewish members and Jewish financiers. Of those who took part in the March on Rome, 230 were Jews, after which Jewish party membership rose to more than 10,000. Anti-Semitic theoreticians like Giovanni Preziosi had little influence. When Il Duce and Pope Pius XI met in 1932, it was not Mussolini but the Pope who uttered overtly anti-Semitic comments. In a report unearthed by Mussolini biographer Richard Bosworth, the church's problems in the Soviet Union, Mexico and the Spanish Republic were, in the Pope's words ‘reinforced by the anti-Christian spirit of Judaism’. For years, Mussolini himself had a Jewish mistress, and as late as 1932 he appointed a Jew as his minister of finance. During the first years of German persecution he granted asylum in Italy to at least 3,000 Jews. The Germany Nazi-pioneer Anton Drexler openly expressed his suspicion that Mussolini was himself a Jew.

  Fascism, therefore, was an essentially Italian movement. ‘Italy knows no anti-Semitism, and we believe it never will,’ Mussolini wrote in 1920. Italians never cultivated any nostalgia concerning a lost ‘Italian’ tribe the way the Germans dreamed of a ‘Germanic’ tribe and an ethnically pure ‘folk community’. Throughout the centuries, Italy had been populate
d by a shifting mixture of Etruscans, Celts, Greeks, Visigoths, Lombards, Franks, Saracens, Huns and other peoples, some of them original inhabitants, but most of them conquerors who had stayed. When Italy became a unified nation in the nineteenth century, there was no way Italians could form a ‘conceptual community’ by applying such terms as ‘folk’, ‘race’ and ‘tribe’. The Italian symbols of unity were completely different: language, culture, the liberty of the French Revolution and virtù, that form of creative civilisation that had for centuries allowed the Italians to feel superior to the barbarians from the North.

  There was yet another way in which Fascism did not resemble National Socialism: unlike the Germans, the Italians were not particularly enamoured by the phenomenon of ‘the state’. From the sixteenth century, Italy had been exploited almost incessantly by Spain and Austria. In addition, the country's spirit had long been held in the iron grip of the Vatican, which had skilfully succeeded in stifling all joy in the Renaissance and the baroque. For three long centuries, in other words, the Italians had been learning to hate the state. To the average Italian, the state was an alien, an oppressor, usually corrupt, always inefficient, an institution that should best be avoided unless one could somehow profit from it. What is more, no distinct entrepreneurial class had ever developed in Italy: trade and industry had always remained closely intertwined with politics and the state, every business was part of a system of protection and preferential treatment, every businessman had some political connection, sometimes reaching even as far as the president himself. Against this background, the family was the most important place of refuge, the only alliance one could truly trust.

  The Italian image of the state, based as it was on suspicion, was the polar opposite of the Prussian one, within which a central position was reserved for total surrender to ‘the fatherland’. Hitler, therefore, was a very different kind of leader than Mussolini. The former had access to a finely tuned government apparatus of which the latter could only dream. Hitler led a movement of frustrated military men and merchants, while Mussolini, at least in the early years, had recourse largely to gangs of angry farmers. The roots of the National Socialist movement lay in the city. Those of Italian Fascism lay in the countryside.

  In the film Novecento, Donald Sutherland played the definitive Fascist: big hands, nasty eyes, ugly teeth, a villain through and through. One encounters no such wonderful Fascists in Predappio. These days it is largely seventeen-year-old boys who press their noses against the shop windows and politely excuse themselves for reaching past you to pick up a copy of Mein Kampf or The Fable of Auschwitz.

  For 150 euros here you can buy a Waffen-SS jacket, for 20 euros you have a brand new black shirt, but it will cost you twice that much for a cap and a Sam Browne belt to go with it.

  One can also visit Il Duce himself. Mussolini's crypt is close to the church. He lies in a big sarcophagus, topped by a bust of his own massive head, handfuls of candles at his feet, two dozen fresh bouquets all around, amid a constant stream of visitors.

  To his left and right lie his mother and his wife. ‘He liked sturdy women,’ his widow, Rachele Mussolini, announced after the war. ‘Today I can tell you that Mussolini's conquests were just as numerous as those of the average Italian man who is attractive to women.’ She insisted, however, that the truth be told: her husband had always slept at home, except when he was travelling. So when and where did he do it? ‘Where? I think I know: at his office, where he had a sitting room, without a bed, but with a sofa on which to rest. And when? In-between times, of course.’

  As individuals, Hitler and Mussolini were each other's polar opposites as well. The former was an unmarried artist, a vegetarian terrified of disease, the latter a family man with five children and any number of mistresses. The former displayed all the frustrations of the failed painter, at the age of thirty the latter was already the successful editor-in-chief of one of the biggest daily newspapers. In the eyes of the European elite, Hitler was always viewed as an erratic madman. Even before the First World War, Mussolini was seen as a promising politician. When Mussolini turned his back on socialism, Lenin sorely blamed his fellow party members in Italy for letting him go: in Moscow's view, he would have been the perfect leader for a great socialist revolution in Italy.

  Today, sixty years later, the myth lives on. Four boys with shaved heads are taking pictures of each other. One of them asks me in a whisper whether I would mind taking a group snapshot, to put on Il Duce's tomb. On the prie-dieu lies the big guest book with a thousand inscriptions of ‘Thank you, Il Duce!’ Touring cars full of senior citizens roll up into the car park many times a day. ‘Il Duce, you live on in our hearts!’

  Outside I talk to the woman selling souvenirs. ‘Today everyone here in the village is a communist,’ she sighs, standing amid her collection of Iron Crosses. ‘But in the old days they adored him.’

  A little boy stands in line to pay for three postcards: one showing a woman kissing the Fascist banner, a recruitment poster for the Italian SS legion and one on which Stalin and Uncle Sam join hands across the Atlantic: ‘Le Complot Juif’. The woman cries after me as I walk away: ‘That's just like the Italians! They never recognise a great leader!’

  Chapter TWENTY-ONE

  Lamanère

  THE NEXT EVENING I STAY AT MONEGLIA, A DESERTED TOURIST VILLAGE on the seaside not far from Genoa. These are the days of depression. The wind tugs at my van, the rain clatters on the roof and only Café Derna offers warmth and safety.

  The village is dominated by a highly unusual access road: a narrow strip of asphalt along the coast, consisting almost entirely of tunnels. All traffic, in both directions, must obey traffic lights that provide an opening to the outside world only three times an hour, down to the minute. The lights, therefore, determine the rhythm of village life as well: ‘Hurry up or you'll miss the green light at 3.45!’

  This strange road, they told me at the café, was all that was left of a railway line that had been built along the coast with great difficulty in the early years of the century. A huge job, but one which would serve for generations to come. The railway, in reality, was in use for scarcely twenty-five years. Then came yet another rail connection a little further along, electric, with two sets of tracks. Built, once again, for all eternity.

  Elsewhere I had seen the same thing: railway trestles, escarpments, built to last for all time, abandoned in the countryside. During the last half-century this continent has been criss-crossed and ploughed through with tunnels, bridges and concrete flyovers, an incredible amount of work. The Roman aqueducts did their work for centuries. Tomorrow, the twentieth-century tunnels and flyovers will already be antique. Never before has progress worn so thin so quickly.

  I drive on through the rain, along the coast, past Nice and the French Riviera. At Aix-en-Provence the mistral is chasing newspapers and plastic bags across the asphalt like little phantoms. Someone once told me that old women sometimes faint from agitation when the mistral blows: now I can imagine it, vividly. Nothing stays put, everything whips and foments in the face of this noisy wind: branches, leaves, birds, thoughts, moods.

  In the days that follow there are the comforting, colourful hills of southern France, the odours of earth and sun. At Perpignan I turn right into the Pyrenees. I drive past sleepy village squares with old men and tall plane trees, after that along a narrow road, a fifteen kilometre climb, and arrive at last in the southernmost of all French villages.

  ‘Every valley,’ an economist wrote about the Pyrenees in 1837, ‘is a still little world that differs from the neighbouring world as Mercury does from Uranus. Every village is a clan, a sort of state with its own patriotism.’ Villages hated each other for all perpetuity, and collectively they hated the nobility, the city and the state, for anything which came from that direction could only mean misfortune.

  Lamanère was just such a village. The hamlet consists of a handful of houses scattered along the sides of the valley. About 500 people lived here in the
1950s, today there are only thirty-six. I stay with friends. We go to visit the neighbours, Michel and Isabelle, a cheerful couple in their late forties. In their warm oak kitchen they tell the unswerving story of all little European villages: a local school, lively shops, all gone within twenty years. ‘There were two little espadrille factories here as well,’ Michel says. ‘When they closed down around 1970, the whole village just packed up and moved down into the valley, the young people leading the way.’

  ‘But we were poor, too,’ Isabelle says. ‘Toadstools, blueberries, we ate anything the earth gave us. And we tried to trap any animal that moved.’

  Michel: ‘Everyone went hungry from time to time. We smuggled pigs across the mountains. My mother made espadrilles, too, six francs for a dozen.’

  ‘And half of everything the land produced,’ Isabelle says, ‘went to the landowner. If you had two pigs, one was for M. Cassu. It was still that way in the 1960s. We worked like slaves.’