A Civil War (119 page)

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':

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:

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:

and

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 Piedmont, 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 Mas
¹⁰⁷
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 prisoners
¹¹⁹
(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 hands
¹²⁴
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: