Authors: Claudio Pavone
In agreement on this point are the women's testimonies collected in
La Resistenza taciuta
, where, however, the sense of death is prominent:
For me it was the best period of my life. It was also tragic for me, because I saw so many lads die when I would have liked to give my life twenty times over to save theirs, and this made me suffer atrociously. We risked death, but there was such joy in living! Every so often I read that my companions were gloomy. That's not true. We were serene. Indeed, we were actually happy, because we knew that we were doing something very important â¦Â That time was fantastic, a wonderful period. I have never lived such a fine life since then. There were sufferings all right, but what an experience!
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In testimonies of this kind, individual choice has already been transformed into a sense of collective responsibility.
Speaking very generally of the Second World War as a whole, E. P. Thompson remarked that it was an âextraordinary formative moment in which it was possible to be deeply committed even to the point of life itself in support of a particular political struggle that was at the same time a popular struggle'.
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In an Italy that had been for so long repressed and alienated by the conviction, âWe all are all of one mind', this process was favoured by the conviction, âThis last-minute opportunity to intervene, once and for all to become participants,
was not to be missed.' This commitment of Franco Calamandrei's is all the more relevant for being accompanied by the scrupulous admission that âperhaps it has come looking for me more than I have gone looking for it', and by the awareness of the part played in his choice by the âtaste for danger' and âescape from a bourgeois upbringing sought in adventure'.
45
A GL women's newspaper wrote, with equal pregnancy: âIt is not just that “finally one can speak without danger” of the forty-five days, but “finally one can do something and one can do it at the cost of sacrifices, dangerously”.'
46
Beppe Fenoglio succeeded in expressing with poetic force the conjunction of liberty and energy that followed the decision to resist:
And at the moment when he left, he felt himself invested â
death itself would not have been divestiture
â in the name of the authentic people of Italy, to oppose Fascism in every possible way, to judge and to act, to decide militarily and as a citizen. Such supreme power was intoxicating, but infinitely more intoxicating was the consciousness of the legitimate use he would make of it.
And even physically he had never been so much a man, herculean he bent the wind and the earth.
47
Natalia Ginzburg, in turn, has lovingly re-evoked the significance of the rapid coming of age that the Resistance experience had for many:
They were years in which many became different from what they had been before. Different and better. The sensation that people had become better circulated in the streets. Each person felt the need to give the best of his or her self. This spread around an extraordinary well-being, and when we remember those years, we remember the well-being together with the discomfort, the cold, the hunger and the fear, which during those days never left us: and thus one discovered that âone's neighbour' was different from the âstupid multitudes yelling lies in the squares'.
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âThat 8 September I suddenly became an adult â¦Â from that day I made my choice', a protagonist recalls today.
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This invigorating discovery of oneself and of others included a powerful desire to set things right, a desire to punish oneself for one's own offences and those of one's generation. âIn our confused way we felt that somebody at least had to suffer for what had happened in Italy; at certain moments it seemed to us a personal exercise in mortification, at others a civic commitment. It was as if we had to bear with us the weight of Italy and its misfortunes.'
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Ferdinando Mautino speaks of the âsacrifice of the anti-Fascist forces to redeem the crimes committed by Fascism',
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and Franco Calamandrei of the âconsciousness of all the impurity that remains incorrigible within me'.
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A forty-year-old who had anticipated the decision to resist by deserting in favour of Tito's partisans was convinced that only âthe hardest personal sacrifices', to the point of âoffering my very life', would liberate him from his atrocious remorse at having behaved in so cowardly a way in 1922, just to obey the âexhortations of family and friends'.
53
There is scant evidence of this desire for redemption and self-punishment among the combatants of the South. A paratrooper from the Corpo Italiano di Liberazione (Italian Liberation Corps) writes that he fails to understand why one should be fighting âto redeem oneself from strange offences which only the day before were considered merits'.
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Within the picture traced so far, a wider variety of individual motivations may be identified: the intolerableness of a world that had become a theatre of ferocity;
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rebellion against abuses of power coming from near and far, at times against the very smallest of abuses;
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a self-defensive instinct; the desire to avenge a dead relative;
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the spirit of adventure;
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love of risk together with a not fully
conscious awareness of it;
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family traditions; long-standing or more recent anti-Fascism; love of one's country; class hatred.
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These motivations, of differing cultural weight, often interweave, and we can only grasp how they unfolded in people's consequent behaviour if we bear in mind the entire span of Resistance experience. We shall in fact encounter these various substructures again.
Here all that needs stressing is that the choices, whatever motivated them, belong to a climate of moral enthusiasm that is a far cry from the resigned, gloomy and resentful mood of many combatants in the weary army that the Royal government was attempting to put back on its feet way down in the South. Witness the following letter:
Today the only reality that exists is our defeat with all its tremendous consequences: hunger, unemployment, moral disorganisation. Don't you too feel what uncertain times we're living in, how impossible it is to reconstruct anything solid? We must await the Armistice, the real one, and ignore the stupid accident of a year ago. Only then will we be able to start again, and there will be a lot of hard work to do.
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When, after the Liberation, the magistracy wanted to apply general mitigating circumstances for the crimes committed by the partisans during the Resistance, it was to invoke the climate of âmoral disintegration' in which the combatants had, in its view, acted.
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The upshot of this was that, out of good intentions, it damagingly assimilated the Resistance spirit with the lowest points reached by the public spirit in those twenty months.
Some clarification is necessary at this point on what we have said so far about the founding value of choice. On the one hand, liberty as a value is attributed to the very act of choosing; on the other, it seems impossible to avoid putting off the choice actually entailed in practical terms. There is no getting around this contradiction. We do, however, need to be clearly aware of it if we wish to recognise the fact that the republican Fascists too (at any rate, the committed, militant ones) also made their choice and, at the same time, to hold fast to the
difference between the two choices. Possibly it might help in such a difficult attempt, and one that will become extremely difficult when we get on to the theme of violence, to warn of the quicksands of ambiguity, in its multiple senses: an attempt to shirk the choice; subterranean affinities between opposing forms of behaviour; and the coexistence, in the crisis of the weeks immediately following 8 September, of possibilities of divergent courses of action.
Many episodes bear witness to this tendency to be chosen rather than to choose, to the point of yielding to a resigned and bloodless moralism; to remain up there in the âhouse on the hill', rather than choose the partisan mountain or the Fascist city.
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A significant case in point is that of Second Lieutenant Giorgio Chiesura, to whose diary I have already referred. Chiesura managed to return to his home in Venice possessed by this state of mind: âAll I knew was that for me it was over; let the others do what they wanted.' But he was so tired that even hiding was too much of an effort for him. So when the Germans issued the public summons to present oneself, he gave himself up â and was to be deported to Germany â âbecause he did not want to recommence doing what the so-called
patria
orders us', nor, to avoid this, did he want to âlive amid flights, subterfuges, expedients, compromises, shiftings': hitherto his life had consisted of âserving without any premises for doing so'; now he no longer wanted to collaborate. On 8 September he was prepared to fight against the Germans: if the generals and colonels now wanted to wage their war again in the service of the Germans, let them go ahead and do so. They could count him out. This behaviour, and the motivations adopted in support of it, are certainly a special case, rationalised after the event; but they do express a kind of reaction that is less paradoxical and rare than might at first appear. Indicative too are the attitudes of those nearest and dearest to Chiesura. His girlfriend says: âBut are you crazy?' His parents, on the other hand, advise him to give himself up, because they can't conceive the idea of disobeying an order issued by an authority, of whatever kind it may be. In a state of such extraordinary emergency, all they are able to do is conduct themselves in obeisance to traditional resignation before the fate of their sons called to the hazard of military service.
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Evading the choice is at times presented as standing above the contending parties: âSince there are two governments in Italy, the king's and Mussolini's, I have advised the young peasants to stay at home, work their land and procure bread for all Italians â¦Â Let the Germans and the Allies pass through, the poor Italians have to be fed.' Speaking here is Sandro Scotti, who, during the Resistance, tried to revive the Partito dei contadini d'Italia (The Party of the
Peasants of Italy), which he had founded after the First World War. The âcolonna rurale Monviso', which he organised as an instrument of peasants' self-defence, was to approach first Democrazia Cristiana and then GL, thereby demonstrating the impossibility of remaining well and truly impartial, let alone in a state of indolence.
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Resentment against the artificers of the defeat, anger against those responsible for the collapse, contempt for the king, Badoglio and the fleeing generals involved a still more insidious risk than the one described above. They could produce â I am still referring to the weeks immediately following 8 September â a zone of uncertain and oscillating reactions, which still fell short of choosing between the Resistance and the Social Republic.
With pragmatic open-mindedness, Palmiro Togliatti was later to talk in terms of a âmisunderstanding â¦Â inadequate though the word might be as a description of so profound a political and social event' â that somehow or other had been created âbetween us and some of those who were fighting against us'.
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More penetratingly, Calvino had put into the mouth of the partisan Kim these words: âBasta un nulla, un passo falso, un impennamento dell'anima, e ci si trova dall'altra parte' (âJust a trifle, a false step, a tipping of the soul, and we find ourselves on the other side').
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This ânulla' (âtrifle'), which was, all the same, capable of generating an abyss, might be, particularly in the case of young men from bourgeois families, a chance encounter with the right person or the wrong person, and could hark back to reactions during the days following 25 July, when haughty spirits viewed the vital explosion of popular joy that âtook possession of the
fait accompli
' as a last-minute
volte-face
,
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â a camouflage, what is more, for the most opportunistic, and those who had most seriously compromised themselves with the regime.
âThe people to whom bootlicking is nothing new are now indulging in cowardly outrage', Emanuele Artom had written in his diary.
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Nuto Revelli's testimony is candid enough to admit this. On 12 October he noted in his diary:
If it hadn't been for Russia, on 8 September perhaps I'd have hidden myself like a sick dog. If on the night of 25 July I had let myself be beaten up, today perhaps I'd
have been on the other side. Those who say they've always understood everything, who continue to understand everything, give me the willies. It was no easy thing to understand 8 September!
And on 1 February 1944, surer now of his decision to join the Resistance:
On 26 July you could also make the wrong choice. If they'd hit me, if they'd spat at me, perhaps I'd have joined the other side, with the Fascists, with the victims of that precise moment. Today I'd be with the scoundrels, with the Barabbases, with the Germans' spies. I wouldn't be in the Todt or in a district, that is, I wouldn't at any rate have been among draft dodgers.
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There appear to have been a few weeks of uncertainty and crisis in the province of Modena.
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âThe drama of indecision' is the title of an article that recalled that period about a year later.
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There were thoughts and second thoughts, as in the case of some Nembo paratroopers who, in Calabria, first followed Captain Eduardo Sala in joining the retreating Germans, then returned to their regiment that was awaiting the Allies.
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Several paratroopers of the Ciclone battalion, whose commander, Major Giovanni Blotto, fought with the Social Republic, participated in the defence of the Futa pass against the Germans.
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Officers who had initially been part of the âapolitical' bands then went over to the Social Republic.
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This was a sort of prelude to the changes of sides which, in two senses, would later occur on more than one occasion. After several weeks of torment â âCalosso from London didn't convince me. Alessandro Pavolini from Salò made me ashamed of myself' â a prominent figure like Davide Lajolo,
the future Garibaldi commander Ulisse, but a militant Fascist at the time â made a choice that was decided by his meeting with an old Socialist uncle.
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Thus it is possible to detect genuine regret, alongside the obvious propagandist intent, in these words that appeared a year later in a Fascist newspaper: âOne need only skim the collections of youth weeklies: not only would we understand why many youths who went unheeded are unfortunately not with us now, but we would find the same reasons that could be used to argue our case.'
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