['KAPUTT' (1944), BY CURZIO MALAPARTE]
"During the summer of 1941, Curzio Malaparte was the only frontline war correspondent in the whole of Russia. The Italian writer's dispatches for the Corriere della Sera, which traced the failure of Operation Barbarossa, earned him the ire of Joseph Goebbels, who had him expelled from Nazi-occupied Ukraine. But these unsparingly reported articles, later collected in "The Volga Rises in Europe" (1948), were merely an aperitif. At the same time Malaparte had been working on his magnum opus, "Kaputt" -- an autobiographical novel whose German title evoked the broken pile of rubble that much of wartime Europe had become.
The great paradox of "Kaputt" is that it is a stunning indictment of fascism written by an unrepentant fascist. First published in 1944 (the English-language translation two years later became a bestseller in the U.S.), "Kaputt" proposes an unparalleled insider's look at a Nazi regime whose cruelty and capriciousness were matched only by its debauched frivolity. Malaparte had a ringside seat, both as a roving war reporter and as an ephemeral part of Mussolini's diplomatic corps.
It is often said that history is written by the conquerors. "Kaputt" is rare not only for having been written by a representative of the vanquished but also for its immediacy. In it Malaparte drew on all that he witnessed to examine the Axis powers' spheres of influence in Europe and the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943. It was a new kind of autobiographical novel written as a series of observed vignettes, each one more graphically grotesque than the last; the whole given extraordinary panoramic sweep by Malaparte's travels through Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Romania and Croatia.
Malaparte's descriptions of modern war have not aged an iota. "For miles and miles around there was only dead iron. Dead bodies of machines, hundreds upon thousands of miserable steel carcasses."
Malaparte's nonfiction book "Coup d'Etat: The Technique of Revolution" (1931) had already marked him out as a writer unafraid to expose the political fault lines of fascism and communism. In "Kaputt," fiction helped him to expand the psychology of two contrasting worlds: the one of glittery diplomatic dinner parties hosted by bumptious Nazi bigwigs and the other of a "lean, pale throng" that stretches from the ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow to the Ukrainian steppes. Throughout the novel Malaparte grapples to understand the nature of evil and in particular what drove the Nazis to commit their outrageous war crimes.
In the book Malaparte dines in Warsaw with a host of Nazi dignitaries, including Hans Frank, whom Hitler appointed governor-general of the occupied Polish territories. He describes Frank's personality as "a peculiar mixture of cruel intelligence, refinement, vulgarity, brutal cynicism and polished sensitiveness." He wonders what it is that drives men like Frank to such cruelty and can explain it only in terms of their own fear: "Fear of the oppressed, the defenseless, the weak, the sick; fear of women and of children, fear of the Jews."
One of the book's most startling features is its bursts of slapstick-style humor. The chapter where Malaparte takes a Finnish steam bath with a dozen senior Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler, is a master class of farce.
Another trait of Malaparte's writing, which often alludes to painters (Chagall, Repin, Grosz and Bosch to name but a few), is his vivid way of expressing the strange and incongruous.
At one point he is in Zagreb for a meeting with the Croatian prime minister Ante Pavelic, who removes the lid from what looks to be a basket of mussels. "It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes," Pavelic tells him. In Finland he describes the terrible sight of hundreds of horses trapped in a lake where the water had suddenly frozen over: "Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The wild flame of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes."
In fact, the way that war impacts the animal kingdom is one of the book's recurring themes. The gruesome fate of birds, dogs, mice, pigs, reindeer, even flies, in addition to horses, is linked to man's folly and appetite for destruction.
The Czech writer Milan Kundera captured some of the unclassifiable nature of "Kaputt" by describing it as "reportage [that] is something other than reportage; it is a literary work whose aesthetic intention is so strong, so apparent, that the sensitive reader automatically excludes it from the context of accounts brought to bear by historians, journalists, political analysts and memoirists."
One can only wonder whether the chaos of "Kaputt" is really behind us.” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Masterpiece: History as Told by the Vanquished
Grey, Tobias.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 10 Sep 2022: C.14.
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