In the Fascists too the culture of death did not exclude the figure of the innocent victim. But between the crucifix and the lictorian fasces, as Georges Bataille had seen in 1938, the symbol that the Fascists found most congenial was the latter, including as it did the executioner’s axe.82 When in Terni in 1936 a monument had been unveiled to those who had died in accidents at the Acciao steelworks, the newspaper of the local fascio had written: ‘Not “victims”, but virilely and Fascistically “caduti” [“fallen in battle”].’83
Fascism is well known for its abundant use of appeals to virility and of sexual metaphors, as for its intimacy with the metaphors and symbols of war.84 Equally well known is how arditismo had been the cultural terrain for this symbolism: ‘Youth … which casts its smile at death, limpid as a virgin’s kiss. The war in which we are going towards death as towards love.’85
Both before and after 8 September, the Second World War paratroopers, of the Social Republic as of the Kingdom of the South, nourished themselves with the same food. In spring 1943 one of them wrote to his commander: ‘One day, speaking to the company, you said that we paracadutisti must make war as we make love. You exhorted us to make love a lot because we would be making a lot of war.’ Likewise, a member of the Italian Liberation Corps (CIL): ‘And we went into battle to joke with death as we had joked with girls.’86
Still in 1986, the RSI volunteer Carlo Mazzantini writes: ‘The inebriation of that violation gave greater strength to our voices’, and recalls the effect that the Fascist songs had on women ‘with incredulous eyes’ and men who ‘shuffled off uncertainly’. A few pages later, to make things clear, Mazzantini says: ‘We were exalted by that sense of violation, the impression of penetrating a hostile body which our songs made tremble’. And, to remove any residual doubts, he concludes: ‘These songs were our whole culture’.87
Death dealt to others by attacking them is part of Fascist culture: both one’s own death and the deaths of those fighting alongside one are an integrating element of this mysticism of death, which even drove the Fascists to exaggerate the numbers of their own dead.88 In the resistenti, by contrast, as we shall see better presently, the possibility of being killed appears above all as a pledge given to one’s conscience before the right one recognises in it to kill;89 and in partisan bulletins the number of enemy killed increases, often excessively, but never that of one’s own dead.
Carlo Mazzantini puts the following words into the mouth of one of his comrades engaged in roundups and executions:
To die for the patria, for the idea!… No, it’s a pretext! Even at the front you kill … To die is nothing: it doesn’t exist. No one manages to imagine his own death. The point is to kill! To cross that border! Now, that’s an act of your will. Because there you live, in another’s death, your own. It’s there that you show you possess something you feel is worth more than life: than yours and that of others.90
There are many variants on the theme of death in contemporary Fascist documents, even if, at the end of the day, they are pretty monotonous. A few examples will suffice, beginning with what might well be taken as a prototype: the paratrooper – later in the RSI – who describes the sensation he felt at his first jump: ‘The kind of joy you feel when you are “side by side with death”.’91 These words faithfully followed those of a paracadutisti’s song inspired in its turn by D’Annunzio’s ‘Canzone del Quarnaro’:
C’ è a chi piace far l’amore
c’ è a chi piace far danaro
a noi piace far la Guerra
con la morte paro a paro.92
[There are those who like making love
There are those who like making money
We like to make war
Face to face with death.]
In a poster that appeared in Rome, death figured both as the enemy and as a cause for pride: ‘To arms. Youths of Rome, liberate Italy from death, from the enemies who are liberating you from life. The Battalion of Death.’93 A young man training in Germany wrote to his mother: ‘Now I’ll no longer be able to go by the name “Volontario della Morte!” Now I’ll no longer be able to wear the black flames of the Arditi!… I’ll have to resign myself instead to being a Bersagliere.’94 A Dannunzian friar, who had been a chaplain in the wars of 1915–18, of Spain, and of 1940–43, and who was subsequently shot by the partisans, says: ‘I love sister death like a creature who takes me to my God and Father. I await sister death living in the grace of God and working in the vineyard of the Lord. I desire sister death as the Saints yearned for her and I prepare my heart for the coming of the Bridegroom.’95
In the letter of a nineteen-year-old this kind of attitude is accentuated by a paroxysmal nihilism that lacks, however, the tragic sense given by the levelling of everything with nothing:
The whole world, with the weight of its rottenness, is about to come crashing down on us. Let us stiffen ourselves! Let us dehumanise ourselves! Let us forget sentiments, everything regarding ourselves … Let everything, everything perish! Men, things, cities of yesterday and today. Let the whole of a past and the whole of a present die. Let the only idea that remains great be for victory and in victory. Let us lose everything! Friends, relations, joys. Let us remain naked! Let only our soul remain! But may the enemy clambering over our dead bodies feel on himself the condemnation of the blood crushing him, the invincible breath of a Faith that has moved mountains and overwhelmed skies and oceans.96
In another letter a woman auxiliary sees things in terms of a duel with death: ‘I shall be able to look death in the face, flee it, amuse myself with it; it must be fun playing hide-and-seek. As you can see, the blackshirted volunteers don’t fear death and take everything philosophically. That’s how we live … looking death in the face with a smile on our lips.’97
This tone, passing as it does from one’s own death to that of the enemy in a kind of exalted coming and going, aroused the greatest indignation in the other camp. ‘Enough with thirteen-year-old brigands who kill for fun!’, reads a poster addressed by the GL Women’s Movement to the ‘women of Piedmont’.98
The Fascists sang:
A noi la morte non ci fa paura
ci si fidanza e si fa l’amor.
[We do not fear death
We embrace it and make love to it.]
and
Le donne non ci vogliono più bene
perché portiamo la camicia nera.
[The women no longer love us
Because we wear the black shirt.]
The second song concludes concentrating all of Fascist virility in the encounter with ‘la Signora Morte’, while flesh-and-blood women are left to the malingerers, sissies, incapable of conquering them with violence.99 Compared with certain songs of the Rumanian Iron Guard, models of paroxysmal mysticism of blood and death (‘Legionnaires are born to die’, ‘death is a gladsome wedding for us’),100 there is something Catholicly materialistic about these Fascist songs, and the cocky tone fails to conceal the consternation pervading them.
Two extreme poles can thus be identified in the Fascist expressions. Fitting to the first are Georg Simmel’s words, born in a quite different context, about the ‘aesthetic form of the destructive impulse, which seems to be part of the existences of all pariahs to the extent to which deep down they are not completely slaves’.101 The second pole is one of arrogant defiance, as displayed by Enrico Vezzalini, chief of the province of Novara, who before being executed wrote that he disavowed nothing and that he would like to ‘die shouting: for Italy and for Fascism, Viva la Morte!’102 – a baldly Fascist retort to the ‘death to the kingdom of death’ in Filippo Turatti’s hymn of the workers. The approach of the final disaster enveloped the traditional elements of the Fascist culture of violence in a lugubrious and desperate atmosphere, which far from excluding ferocity could actually stimulate it. The ‘moderate’ Fascist Zerbino, minister of the interior, was being no more than consolatory when, on 23 April 1945, he telephoned Francesco Saverio Grazioli, high commissioner for Piedmo
nt, to say: ‘Bella agonia finisce’.103 A university student appears to be more sincere when he confesses: ‘I am young and I have reached a point at which life and the beauty it is purported to have repels me, and that is a crime.’104
Mazzantini summed up the sense of his experience like this, and not just because he was writing a posteriori: ‘And there was no afterward to that business.’ Mazzantini also puts these words into the mouth of one of his comrades: ‘We are burnt out … Once this war is over we’ll be of no use to anyone, we must disappear’; and recalls how Ernst von Salomon’s I proscritti (Die Geächteten, 1930) was a book that had an initiatory value for the Fascists of the Social Republic.105
This culture of death is a far cry from the sense that Piero Gobetti gave to the words ‘volontari della morte’ (‘volunteers of death’) when, as his wife Ada wrote after the killing of Sandro Dalmastro, he spoke of his generation ‘who face destiny as it is in its tragic aridity, with no need to embellish it, to clothe it in heroic auras: all the more heroes in that they do not want to be so, do not even know that they are’.106
‘Pietà l’ è morta’ (‘Pity the dead’) is an invention of Nuto Revelli, and owes much of its popularity to the forlorn and at the same time proud connotation that it carries. But the same words engraved on the machine-guns of the Decima Mas107 change meaning, becoming the motto of one of the most ferocious Fascist units which reckoned to flee the desperation of the exiled by flaunting gestures of aristocratic elegance borrowed from its leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese. When the Garibaldini of Chiodi sang ‘Siamo figli di nessuno / siamo carne da plotone’ (‘We are foundlings / we are platoon fodder’), there was nothing grim about this, but a case rather of knocking on wood or even, as Chiodi himself interprets it, of being tongue-in-cheek about oneself, in reply to Radio London which spoke of ‘cavaliers of liberty’.108 In some songs there also emerges the ancient tradition of making misery and sorrow reasons not for desperation but for revolt. The same song mentioned earlier, which speaks of the red blood of the flag and of rent flesh, also has the archaic and far from Fascist words: ‘We live on privation and affliction’. In another song death is defined as ‘cruel’. In the letters of those awaiting execution it can be called a ‘sad and at the same time fine moment’, a ‘majestic step’;109 one might marvel at the ease and resolution with which one faces it;110 one might point to its harshness: ‘I die murdered’, ‘shot dead’, ‘they are killing me’, ‘don’t make a fuss about the body or anything else. Where they fling me they fling me.’111 More frequently, compassion is asked for one’s mortal remains: a Sienese brigadier of the carabinieri speaks almost like Dante’s Manfredi: ‘My corpse lies this side of the river.’112 Elements of the culture of death appear almost exclusively in the Christian and Catholic transfiguration of the certainty of eternal life.
In the letters of condemned Italians, religious invocations, which were very frequent and far more numerous than in those of other countries, centre in fact on the life to come and on the heaven that awaits oneself and one’s loved ones. Out of 112 Italian letters, only forty do not contain religious appeals, and of these only a few contain explicit affirmations of laicity. With regard to European letters, Thomas Mann pointed out the shades of meaning that appear in appeals to divinity, and added that ‘it is singular to note that those who do not speak of God find higher, more spiritual and more poetic expressions for the idea of survival’.113
In the Fascists the lack of a future not only heightened their obsession with death, but made the figure of the enemy particularly monstrous in their eyes, contributing to his being transformed, far more than occurred among the partisans, into the ‘absolute enemy’. The enemy was no longer an obstacle to remove along the way, but became something whose annihilation absorbed the entire project of violent action. Even in this, its final incarnation, Fascist violence bore within itself the ambiguity that had always been its hallmark. On the one hand it was flaunted as the right of the strong over the weak, depicted as a coward and racially inferior, a bastardo, and was practised with ‘the proud cynicism which affirms the incurable mediocrity of a crowd to be dominated with a stick to the greater glory of few supermen’.114 On the other hand that violence precluded the gratification inherent in beating a strong enemy: and it may well be that most of the cruelty of Fascist violence was generated not least by the sombre attempt to fill this hiatus. It should be added that, as was suggested in Chapter 5, the Fascists of the RSI, whatever their aspirations to return to their origins, were unable, through the exercise of violence, to recreate that ‘paradox’, which is so well illustrated by Lyttleton when he speaks of the ‘ability to tie antisocial sentiments to the defence of the existing social order’.115 Even if their cultural roots remained the same, their fruits, in a context that did not allow any prospect of real success, could not but manifest themselves as pure violence. The Fascist thug had no space left to cultivate in himself the man of order whom he had borne in his breast from his origins and which he was used to embodying in the form of bullying and oppression. Moreover, the weakness of the RSI, its splintering into unmanageable bands and, of course, the birth of the partisans, made another of the historical characteristics of Fascist violence less solid: that of acting under the de facto and legal cover of established authority.
This contradictory aspect was grasped by Concetto Marchesi in an ‘open letter’ which, because of its somewhat contorted argumentation, has lent itself to various interpretations.116 Its basic meaning, however, appears clear. Addressing the Fascists, Marchesi writes: ‘The adversary [the Gappist] is assailing you with revolver shots in the streets. Honour compels you to seek to punish the culprits, or to do the same yourselves, to act as judges or as enemies: not both together.’
These words denounce RSI Fascism’s brazen summation of the two ways in which Fascism had, from its origins, exercised violence: the illegal and the legal way. You Fascists, says Marchesi, do not respond to violence as risk like men of honour, that is as equals, but with the customary cowardice of illegal violence protected by ‘justice’, that is to say, the established power of your republic.
The Fascists shot partisans who gave themselves up after promising them that their lives would be spared, a practice that ties in with their oft-expressed desire to have a free hand against rebels.117 They flaunted their joy at having killed three other outlaws with the weapon they had taken off the first partisan to be killed.118 They simulated executions to terrorise the prisoners119 (though it needs recalling that simulations of this sort occurred at times at the hands of the partisans as well).120 They took pleasure in the sufferings they inflicted.121 They urged the SS to treat those whom they tortured ferociously.122 A Fascist himself told his parents of the horror he felt at seeing his comrades laughing over the corpse of a nineteen-year-old boy they had shot.123 A monumental, and unintentional, documentation of the torture inflicted by the Fascists on those who fell into their hands124 was left by the Supreme Court of Cassation when, after the war, in its zeal to exclude the particular savagery which, according to the infelicitous formula used by the law, made the Togliatti amnesty inapplicable, it constructed a painstaking survey of torturing practices.125
The RSI introduced the practice of public executions and of leaving the bodies of the hanged and shot in the place of execution for a long time. ‘Afterwards they will display me to the public hung by a piece of cord’, wrote a condemned man.126 This was, as it were, a revival in the key of brutal contemporaneity of the ‘splendour of the executions’ of which Foucault has spoken in relation to the ancien régime. Indeed, some of the features that Foucault analyses are matched by the display of the corpses of the condemned which was to have it symbolic reversal in Piazzale Loreto. Foucault writes:
On the part of the law that imposes it, the execution must be clamorous, it must be observed by everyone, rather as its triumph. The very excess of the violence exercised is one of the elements of its glory … Hence, without doubt, those tortures that go on
after death: corpses burned, ashes thrown to the wind, bodies dragged on trellises, and exhibited on the roadsides.127
In another key, Thompson speaks of the public executions as a theatre aimed at generating the ‘terror of the example’; and, comparing the sophisticated resources available, for this purpose, to the contemporary state and those of the eighteenth-century state, adds that the latter had to resort ‘to forms of increasing the terror against transgressors’ by insulting the corpses in ways that ‘deliberately struck at popular taboos’.128 The republican Fascist state found itself compelled by its weakness to regress to these ancient forms of ostentation of their capacity to punish.
‘Any cyclist or pedestrian caught circulating in the territory in the possession of firearms without the authorisation of the competent authorities will be shot on the spot’, ran a proclamation by Armando Rocchi, head of the province of Perugia.129 The words ‘sul posto’ (‘on the spot’) indicated both the immediacy and the visibility of the punishment. As we shall see better presently, this formula and this practice were to become widely used and would be adopted by the partisans too when they wanted to demonstrate that they knew how to punish those among them who stepped seriously out of line. Thus the ‘provisions in the case of occupations of villages and towns issued by a command’ establish: ‘the death penalty will be inflicted by means of shooting in the back on all Garibaldini caught in the act and guilty of private violence, theft, vandalism. The execution is to take place in public in the same place where the offence is committed.’130 Or again: ‘The corpse of the executed man has been left with a card on his breast bearing the following words: “Executed by the partisans because unworthy of belonging to their ranks. Reason: rape and robbery”.’131
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