Chartbook 344: Curzio Malaparte's war

Two of the most shocking books about World War II were written by the Italian fascist, litterateur and dandy, Curzio Malaparte. His “novels”, Kaputt and The Skin have been canonized through incorporation into the wonderful series of New York Review Classics. They are hailed by luminaries like Milan Kundera, Gary Indiana and Rachel Kushner.

Kaputt (1944) is a kaleidoscopic vision of Axis Europe’s upper class between 1941 and 1943.

The Skin (1949) is a notorious account of Naples following its liberation by the Allies in 1943.

But Malaparte also published a third book during the war that is far less well known. The Volga rises in Europe, a collection of his war reportage, was first intended to appear in 1943, but was impounded by the German censors. A second edition was destroyed in bombing. The collection finally appeared in 1951 with an English translation in 1957.

The Volga rises in Europe has not attracted the label of great literature. It does not have a fancy new edition. It has a cover of the kind that graced 1970s popular histories of the war. And yet I would argue that if you read only one book by Malaparte on World War II this should be it. Without The Volga Rises as preface, Kaputt is barely intelligible. The Skin, read merely as a sequel to Kaputt rather than as part of a trilogy, also loses much of its meaning. Taken together the three books make a far larger statement about Europe in the mid 20th century than Malaparte is usually credited with.

Unlike both Kaputt and The Skin, The Volga rises shows us Malaparte commenting on the war itself. Unlike in either Kaputt and The Skin, in his journalistic writing Malaparte’s programmatic intellectual project is clearly spelled out. He is involved in updating tropes from Italian futurism of the earlier 20th century, into the context of World War II and the Eastern Front. He wants his readers to understand the war in the East not just as a military clash. He specifically wants to rid us of cliches about West v. East - hence the point in the title that The Volga rises in Europe, not Asia. Malaparte wants to show the war as a civil war between different modes of industrial, mechanized modernity.

“Here, more than on any other sector of the front, it has assumed the form and the significance of an antithesis - not of the usual, too facile antithesis between East and West, between Asia and Europe, but rather of a kind of trial of strength between the two forces that have clashed on the frontiers of Western civilization. Here the West comes face to face with itself, and that too at its most sensitive, most vulnerable point: the point where the most backward and the most modern civilizations of Europe meet, size each other up, pit themselves against each other.”

The original title for the book was War and the Strike Weapon.

In this industrial war, the Germans are, of course, the paradigm. The book starts in June 1941 with Malaparte embedded in a German armored column.

“Far above my head formations of German and Soviet aircraft weaved in and out of enormous banks of fleecy white clouds. And below me, on both sides of the hill, down in the valley and again on the opposite slope, I could see, slowly advancing, not an army, but an immense travelling workshop, an enormous mobile foundry that stretched as far as the eye could reach in either direction. It was as if the thousands of chimneys, cranes, iron bridges and steel towers, the millions of cog-wheels, the hundreds and hundreds of blast-furnaces and rolling-mills of the whole of Westphalia, of the entire Ruhr, were advancing in a body over the vast expanse of corn-fields that is Bessarabia. It was as if an enormous Krupps Steelworks, a gigantic Essen, were preparing to launch an attack on the hills of Zaicani, of Shofroncani, of Bratosheni. Yes, that was it: I was looking not at an army but at a colossal steel-works, in which a multitude of workmen were setting about their various tasks with a streamlined efficiency which at first sight concealed the immensity of their effort. And what amazed me most of all was “was to see this gigantic mobile steelworks ”“ leaving behind it no trail of smoking ruins, no heaps of rubble, no blackened fields, but only peaceful villages and unscathed expanses of corn.”

Malaparte would later claim that he was the only quasi independent journalist to have the privilege of riding with the German armored columns into the Soviet Union. And he communicates in fascinated tones to his readers about the new model of warrior that this war is shaping.

“Dressed in black, their big berets tilted over their ears (each beret has a steel badge in the form of a death's head), the German crews move around their tanks, bend down to examine the tracks, tap the wheels with heavy hammers like railwaymen checking the brakes of carriages. From time to time a man climbs on to a tank, raises the hatch, pops in and out of the giant's belly. A temporary smithy has been erected under a large tree. A soldier turns the handle of the bellows. Another beats with a hammer on an anvil. A third dismantles an engine, others check the pressure of the lorries' tyres. A smell of burning oil, carbonic acid, petrol, and white-hot metal re-creates in the wood the characteristic atmosphere of a smithy. (This is the smell of modern war, this is the authentic smell of mechanized war.) … “I watch them working; I note the way they use their hands, the way they hold things, the way they bend their heads over their implements. They are the same soldiers as I have seen 'working' in the streets of the Banato, outside Belgrade. They have the same impersonal, alert expressions, the same calm, deliberate, precise gestures, the same air of unsmiling equanimity. They reveal the same indifference to everything that is unconnected with their work. It occurs to me that perhaps the peculiarly technical character of this war is leaving its mark on the combatants. Rather than soldiers intent on fighting they look like artisans at work, like mechanics busying themselves about a complex, delicate machine. They bend over a machine-gun and press the trigger, they manipulate the gleaming breech-plug of a field-gun, they grasp the double handle of an anti-aircraft weapon with the same delicate gaucherie, or rather with the same rude dexterity, as they reveal when they tighten a nut, or when, with the palm of the hand, or merely with two fingers, they control the vibrations of a cylinder, the play of a large screw, the pressure of a valve. They[…]” “indeed - they look more like artisans at work than soldiers at war. Their very gait, their very manner of speech, their very gestures are those of workmen, not of soldiers. The wounded have that tight-lipped, slightly angry air of workmen injured in an industrial accident. Their discipline has about it the same flexibility and informality as the discipline maintained by a gang of workmen. Their esprit de corps is an esprit d'équipe, a team spirit, and at the same time it as an esprit de métier. They are bound to their unit by the same bonds of loyalty and affection as unite a team of factory-hands to their machine, a team of electricians to their dynamo, a team of artisans to their lathe, to their boiler, to their rolling-mill. In the mechanized armies of today the officers are the technicians, the N.C.O.s are the foremen, the gangers. This small formation of Panzerwagen is commanded by a sergeant, not by an officer. A corporal is in charge of the twenty lorries. All the men are specialists -that is to say, they are experts at their various trades. They all know what they are expected to do,

The Soviets are not as complete in their industrialization of warfare. But to Malaparte’s eyes they are more remarkable, since the new Soviet man and women are products of no more than a few decades of forced industrialization, urbanization and modernization. It is, therefore, in the Soviet worker-peasant that you truly see the process of making new human beings. What Malaparte seeks to do justice to is:

“the back-breaking effort, the perseverance, the sacrifices, the years and years of technical selection that are required to turn a simple peasant, a builder's labourer, a navvy, in fact a worker of any kind, into a skilled craftsman, a specialist, a 'technician' in the true sense, in the modern sense of the word ….

“At one point during that brief skirmish with the Soviet rearguard I had a vivid impression that the machines were behaving like living creatures, almost like human beings, that they had a will, an intelligence. And those men who walked amid the corn, firing at the hard steel shells of the panzers, seemed to me extraneous to that violent episode, to that terrible clash of machines. I walk over to the Soviet dead, I examine them one by one. They are Mongolians, nearly all of them. They no longer fight as once they did, mounted on the scraggy horses of the steppe, armed only with rifles or long lances. They fight with machines, oiling the parts, listening intently to the throb of the engines. They no longer crouch over a horse's mane, they bend over a dashboard covered with instruments. The Stakanovites of Stalin's Army, the udarniki, the authentic creatures of the Pyatlyetki, the product of Lenin's famous formula, 'Soviet + electrification=Bolshevism,' prove their ability to sustain the terrible, bloody struggle against the soldier-workers of the German Army. (The mechanization of armies involves not only the 'specialization' of labour but the technical training of the masses through the[…]”industrialization of agriculture.

It is only when we understand the symmetry between both sides that we grasp the essence of this gigantic conflict:

Here is the essential meaning of this war, the essential significance of this conflict between Germany and Russia - a conflict not of men alone but of machines, of techniques, of systems of industrialization; a conflict not only between the engineers of Goring and of Stakanov but between National Socialism, with its stupendous feats of reconstruction and organization, and Soviet Communism, with its Pyatlyetki, its Five Year Plans; a conflict, in short, between two peoples who, through industrialization, or rather through the 'mechanization of agriculture,' have acquired not only technical proficiency but that industrial 'morale' which is indispensable to those called upon to fight in this war. The protagonists in this Russian campaign are two armies consisting primarily and essentially of specialized workers and 'industrialized' peasants.) From the manner in which the Soviet soldier fights it is clear that the modern muzhik too is a skilled craftsman, a typical product of the machine age. This is a conflict - the first in history - between two armies in which the military spirit is allied to the industrial spirit, to 'industrial morale', and in which military discipline is blended with technical discipline, with the discipline of organized labour, with the discipline of[…]”“organized labour, with the discipline of the team of specialists.”

The contrast to both Soviet and German troops in the war in the East is provided for Malaparte by the Romanian allies of the Germans, whose cavalry bivouacs are a reminder of a 19th-century mode of war-fighting.

Malaparte starts his campaign on the Southern Front. But in the autumn he shifts from the South to the Northern Front where he witnesses the Axis encirclement of Leningrad. Malaparte, typically, has no time for nostalgia, Whereas André Gide famously quipped that what he loved most about Leningrad was St Petersburg, Malaparte is fascinated by Leningrad’s revolutionary history. Unlike in its campaign in the South, in assaulting Leningrad Nazi Germany is striking at the very heart of revolutionary politics.

““Ahead of us, forming a back-cloth to this battlefield, is one of the largest and most populous cities in the world, one of the greatest of modern metropolises. It is a scene in which the essential elements are not those created by nature - fields, woods, meadows, rivers, lakes - but those created by men: the high grey walls of the workers' houses, pierced by innumerable windows, the factory-chimneys, the bare, rectilinear blocks of glass and concrete, the iron bridges, the colossal cranes of the steelworks, the bells of the gasometers, the gigantic trapezoidal frames of the high-tension electric pylons: a scene which seems to reflect, with the precision of an X-ray photograph, the true nature, the essential, secret nature, of this war, in all its technical, industrial, and social aspects, in all its modern significance of a war of machines, of a technical and social war: an austere scene, smooth and compact as a wall, as the boundary-wall of an immense factory. Nor will such an image appear arbitrary to anyone who considers that Leningrad, this former capital of the Russia of the Tzars, this capital of the Communist revolution of October, 1917, is the greatest industrial city in the U.S.S.R., … Today Leningrad is in its death-agony. Its factories are empty, deserted, its machines are silent, its blast-furnaces are extinguished. The arms of its powerful steam-hammers, their great steel fists poised aloft in the sinister silence, are broken. Of its eight hundred thousand workers some have been transferred to the industrial centres of the East, beyond the Volga, beyond the Urals, some have been drafted into the 'technical' commandos of specialized workers and Party activists (spyetsi and Stakanovites), specially constituted with a view to a desperate, last-ditch defence of the city.” … “The defensive tactics adopted by the military and political authorities in Leningrad are in many respects, and particularly in their basic principles, the same as those employed by the revolutionary Committee in 1917 against the Cossacks of the Dikaya Diviziya, the 'Savage Division,' and later against the 'Whites' of General Yudenich. The nerve and sinew of Leningrad's resistance are provided, now as then, by the workers in the metallurgical industry and the sailors of the Baltic Fleet.” … “Last summer, hanging on a wall in the assembly-room of the Soviet House at Soroki, on the Dniester, alongside the usual maps of the U.S.S.R., the usual coloured charts containing agricultural and industrial propaganda, the usual posters issued by the Ossoaviakhim (the propaganda-organization for chemical warfare and aviation), alongside the inevitable portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Voroshilov and Budenny, I found the original topographical plan of the October insurrection, comprising an ordnance-map of Leningrad with the dispositions of all the revolutionary forces (distribution of Commands, deployment of shock-troops, workers' brigades, etc.) shown in red in the minutest detail.” “That topographical plan of the October rising might very well serve to illustrate the basic features of the current defence of Leningrad. It is probable - indeed, it is quite certain - that the purely tactical dispositions - the distribution of Commands, etc. - are different from those of 1917, and that the headquarters of the Soviet Military Command are not located in the Smolny Institute. (I should not wonder however, if that building were now the headquarters of the political Command.) But from all the news and information that reaches the Finnish General Staff from inside the beleaguered city it emerges clearly and unmistakably that Leningrad's resistance is far more political than military in its inspiration. It is, in fact, to the exceptional importance of Leningrad as capital of the October revolution and as the citadel of Communist extremism that the resistance in question owes its special political and social character.” … In a sense, this siege marks the return of the proletariat of Leningrad (which from the Marxist viewpoint is the most advanced and the most intransigent in the whole of the U.S.S.R.) to the Communist spirit, as well as to the tactics of the civil war.” “The squads of armed workers, lacking military training but technically very efficient and animated by the most violent fanaticism, retain the characteristics of those shock-brigades of spyetsi, udarniki and stakanovtsi which were formed in the course of fifteen years of total industrialization and of Pyatlyetki or Five Year Plans.”

In a highly imaginative way, Malaparte imagines that the inner politics of Leningrad during the siege of 1941-1943 must echo not only with the history of the revolution in 1917 but also with the the Kronstadt uprising and its brutal suppression.

“First-hand news has been received of serious discontent, of bitter party strife, of a growing tendency to subordinate wholly military problems to those of a purely political nature. The Left Wing of the Communist Party, with which the overwhelming majority of the proletariat of Leningrad identifies itself, grows daily more outspoken in its criticism of the political and military authorities in Moscow, whom it accuses of having failed to adopt, in their conduct of the war, what the extremists call 'Communist strategy'.” “Many will recall the ferocious policy of repression carried out by Lenin in 1920 (This is a misdating. The uprising was in 1921, AT) against the workers of Leningrad and the sailors of Kronshtadt, in other words against the 'old guard' of the Revolution, which was accused of menacing the solidarity of the Party and of endangering the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The memory of these massacres is still alive in the minds of the working masses of the revolutionary capital and of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, and this will certainly not make for a conciliatory attitude on the part of Leningrad and Kronshtadt in the event of a political rift with Moscow”

Leningrad, like Paris in the 19th century, is more than merely the second city of the Soviet Union, it is the true revolutionary capital. The defense of the city, Malaparte imagines as inspired both by the spirit and the tactics of the revolutionary militarism of 1917. The great guns of the Soviet fleet pound the Axis lines. The banner of the cruiser Aurora is raised in 1941 over Kronstadt.

Remarkably, Malaparte, who as Italian military attache witnessed the Russo-Polish war of 1920, also draws a parallel to that other great besieged city of revolution, Madrid.

“Its topographical design (the defenses of Lenigrad) is distinctly reminiscent of Vauban; and, as an example of the art (in which the Communists excel) of transforming a modern city into a fortress, it shows unmistakable signs of having been based on the experience of Madrid. (In the matter of siege-warfare the experience of Madrid is still topical today. And a chapter apart could well be devoted to discussion of the indisputable fact that the Communists have shown, alike in the Spanish Civil War and in the present campaign in Russia, a supreme mastery of the technique of defending a city even against an army equipped with”

But, fascinated as he is by the Red Army soldiers that are brought in as POWs or defectors, Malaparte is even more impressed by the Finns. For Malaparte the absolute epitome of a new kind of societal war are the Finns. He sees them as fighting to defend a social democratic civilization. They are modern men, but no mere mechanics. They fight in highly organized and well-motivated teams, epitomized by their lethal ski troops, who at night sail out onto the winter ice to assault the vast steel mass of Soviet battleships.

Malaparte’s commentary on the Leningrad siege peters out in 1942. Whereas in 1941 Leningrad was at the heart of the war, by 1942 the central focus of the world historic struggle has moved on.

“the red factory-buildings the engines, the machines, the tools of shining steel lie dying on the concrete floors. The deserted streets, littered with dead horses and gutted vehicles, are reflected through the windows in the misty mirrors of the imperial palaces. An atmosphere of lethargy, of repose, almost of remoteness veils and softens the forms and aspects of the war. Already Leningrad has ceased to be a part of our age, already it has moved on to the margin of this time of strife.”

It is in the burned out aftermath of the great struggles that 1941 that Kaputt begins. If you read Kaputt against the backdrop of The Volga rises the contrast is electrifying. Whereas the first book gives us sharp-edged sociology and history, with Kaputt it as though we enter a nightmarish, hallucinatory dream, in which both the horrible present and the events of 1941 constantly reappear before us.

This shift is anticipated by Malaparte’s haunting account in The Volga rises of his visit to the home of Ilya Repin, the great Ukrainian-Russian realist painter, who after the revolution had chosen self-exile in a villa on the Finnish side of the border, close to what was now Leningrad. The visit to Repin’s villa also features in Kaputt. But again, in the earlier book, Malaparte is more explicit. He spells out the way in which the 19th century furnishings conjure up for him the surrealism of the 20th century. As Malaparte remarks about the interior decoration:

“Despite its age, it is astonishingly reminiscent of the surrealist furniture of Salvador Dali, of the sculptures of Giacometti, of the plastic creations of Archipenko, of the tables and chairs with women's legs, the chair-backs embellished with carvings of young breasts, and the armchairs resembling seated girls, which characterize - I will not say adorn - Hugo's settings for Cocteau's Orphée, the interiors of the surrealist painters, the photographs of Max Ernst. Those features which surrealism has borrowed from the taste of the fin de siècle Europe of the last years of Queen Victoria, and from that of the precious bourgeois age of Fallieres, D'Annunzio, and Jean Lorrain, represent”“an inheritance which not even Salvador Dali can ignore: and it is singularly gratifying to find in the house of Repin, situated in this suburb of Leningrad, within range of the guns of Kronstadt, these archetypes of the most bizarre and Freudian forms of modern surrealist furniture.)”

The stress on anachronism becomes explicit when Malaparte and his companion find Repin’s tomb stone:

… “The cross is no longer there; the Bolsheviks have removed it and, in accordance with their custom, have erected on the mound a wooden pillar, on which are inscribed in letters of fire, the name of Repin, his date of birth - 1844 - and the year of his death - 1930. It seems as though he had been dead a hundred years, so legendary is his world, so remote his age. He was a contemporary of the Russian master-spirits of the nineteenth century. He survived Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Turgeniev, Mussorgsky. He even survived himself. He died in a foreign land, an exile not so much from his country as from his age, from his world. ”

The analysis of anachronism and the association with surrealism that are laid out so clearly in The Volga rises, are the key to understanding the mysterious imagery of Kaputt.

Kaputt is a nightmarish tour through the degenerate upper class civilization of Axis Europe, impelled by a surrealist eye and with the genocidal horror of the war on the Eastern Front, which Malaparte largely brackets in The Volga, put back in.

This framing of Kaputt is anticipated by the account of Malaparte’s visit to the Repin villa, but also in a scene in which Malaparte in August 1941, in Soroki (on the Dniester), stumbles out of the mayhem of a town under bombardment into the faded elegance of a bourgeois family home, where the traditions of 19th century gentility are still compulsively enacted. Here he witnesses an old Europe continuing with old habits of courtesy and form that are literally being blown to pieces all around them.

Beyond this genteel setting Malaparte gives us in The Volga rises only occasional glimpses of the violence unleashed by the war. Overall his account of the early days of the campaign is sanitized. It is only once the fighting intensifies later in the summer, and he sees more of the occupation that his guard slips. Glimpses of an alternate reality appear in short, shocking passages that Malaparte marks as having been removed by the censors.

At one point Malaparte casually remarks that he would not give a penny for the chances of a group of Jews and peasants who have been rounded up for “looting”. Clearly, mass execution was just a fact of life. In another passages, which he claims was cut by the censored, he alludes to the brutal murder of a young woman on a collective farm. In another passage he describes how Ukrainian peasants seek to reconsecrate a chapel that had been degraded to an oil seed store by the Soviets. Watching the peasants at work, a German officer casually order his horses to be stabled in the same building.

For all the horror that he is describing, Malaparte’s tone is noticeably cool. As he insists to his readers, his interest in morality is not for the sake of making normative judgements. His interest is sociological.

“… of course, by 'moral’ qualities I do not mean those which are associated with personal conduct, with the notion of good and evil. I use the word in a sociological and technical sense, not merely in a human sense.”

The basic question that animates his writing, could be taken to be: what kind of moral systems are at work in the war?

Machine civilization gives us new forms of morality and solidarity. In one unforgettable passage he describes how a Soviet POW is drawn out of his reserve by his fascination with a German tank. When the prisoner notices a loose bolt on the tracks, his anxious gaze alerts a German mechanic, who thanks him for noticing the problem they had missed during their routine daily check. What bonds the men together, across all the deep differences of conflict and culture, is the common care for machinery.

As Malaparte remarks, this is a deeply secular civilization. On the Soviet side in particular, he claims, there is no conception of an after life. Visiting a Soviet cemetery outside Leningrad, unleashes a startling train of association in Malaparte:

“And now this deep, muffled, rhythmical boom, this cadenced hammering on the grey steel plate of the horizon, reverberates amid the frozen silence not like the boom of gunfire but like the banging of an iron mallet on a strip of metal. I almost have the impression that this cemetery has just been abandoned by an army of workers. For, by a strange association of ideas, it reminds me of a factory-yard after an abortive strike: when, in the sinister light of defeat, machines, tools, everything assumes an unwonted appearance, an almost abject appearance of melancholy and desolation. At such a time the idle machines resemble strange beasts of steel standing motionless outside a closed door, before a smooth, solid white wall. They are like symbols of a vitality strained to the precise limit beyond which no machine can continue to function.”

This is a civilization without conventional constraints. At its upper levels, notably in the upper class of the Axis powers, as Malaparte shows in the savage satire of Kaputt, it is steeped in denial and hypocrisy.

In Kaputt which unfolds principally between 1942 and 1943, Malaparte’s personal position is only intelligible if you understand him as the author of the reportage collected in The Volga rises. He is by this time notorious across Europe for his reporting. This is why he is indulged at illustrious dinner tables as a gadfly, but this is also why he has to deal warily with the Gestapo and why his itinerary through Axis Europe is eccentric and centered on Finland. He may not be safe in Germany.

The narrative frame of Kaputt is formed by lavish feasts and dinner table conversations with a grotesque array of dignatories and aristos. What drives the text along, are the moments in which banter tips suddenly into more or less horrifying reminiscences of events at the front, or in the ghettos of Bessarabia or occupied Poland. If The Volga Rises is marked by restraint when it comes to the horror of the war, Kaputt is characterized by surreal disinhibition. Whereas in the presence of the machine warrior of The Volga rises, Malaparte adopted a position of humility, the theme of Kaputt is the utter degeneracy of the European upper class. Compared to the stark, hands-on truths of the frontline, compared to the life and death struggle for the future that is at the heart of the war, Malaparte presents himself to us in Kaputt as shocking the drawing-room world of the Axis elite into reality by means of savage satire and the most extreme rhetorical provocation.

Reading the books sixty years later, one cannot help wondering whether we don’t need a Malaparte for our own age of polycrisis.

And then you get to The Skin ….

It was the increasingly obvious defeat of the Axis war effort that drew Malaparte back to Italy in the summer of 1943. Whereas Kaputt only really becomes intelligible once we read The Volga rises, The Skin can stand alone. Its account of Naples - one of the most ancient city of Western Europe - prostituting itself to its Allied occupiers, can be read without further context. Those who are tempted to think that Malaparte may be exaggerating are invited to check out Norman Lewis’s Naples ‘44, which describes a shockingly similar scene from the vantage point of a British occupation officer.

The Skin, it should be said, is disturbing and obnoxious in every way. The first pages of the book are an unsparing account of racial politics of the city, rendered in the argot of the time. The chapter “Black Wind”, which is perhaps the toughest to read, juxtaposes the agonizingly protracted death of an American soldier by disembowelment, the vivisection of Malaparte’s own dog and the crucifixion of a group of Jewish men in Ukraine.

This is a truly horrifying book. It is also unforgettable.

But if, rather than reading them separately, we juxtapose all three books - Volga-Kaputt-Skin - we realize that Malaparte is painting a tripytch of the war.

The decadence of old Europe in Kaputt is framed on one side by Malaparte’s analysis of the ethic of the machine war in The Volga rises, and on the other side by Naples and Italy, whose population are fighting not so much for their lives, a struggle which for Malaparte is inherently full of meaning, but to avoid death, which means simply to save their skins - hence the title of the book.

In Malaparte’s writing this triptych of struggle is rendered not in the abstract but viscerally, in the most literal sense. On the one hand there is mass rape by both sides on the Eastern front, which Malaparte hints at but does not elaborate, on the other there is the sale of bodies of every kind for every form of sexual gratification, the gruesomely explicit theme of The Skin.

Though The Skin, is a horrifying book, Malaparte stays true to his manifesto. His aim is not to judge but to understand the “moral” logics of action. To this end he spells out the way in which Neapolitan hustlers bought and sold the right to fleece American soldiers, particularly African-American soldiers who were thought to be particularly easy to part from their money. He spells out the logic and the geography of the market for child sex, as he also describes the progressive plundering of the Neapolitan aquarium, which culminates in a scene in which a horrified dinner table of occupation officers and visitors from America are served a fish that resembles nothing more than a naked, young girl who has been boiled alive.

Already in The Volga rises Malaparte had suggested an association between US and Soviet machine culture, which by the 1930s was already something of a cliché. As he remarks:

(Beneath the surface of Communism there is a surprising undercurrent of 'Americanism'.) Elements of 'Americanism' are very evident in Soviet life and Soviet philosophy. They recur like a refrain not only in various public assertions and well-known formulas of Lenin (his 'American' definition of Bolshevism as the equivalent of 'Soviet+electrification' is proverbial), but also in certain of his characteristic manias, which became more and more obtrusive during the last months of his life, when he lay dying in a villa near Moscow. In the days that preceded his death Lenin spent hours and hours stretched out in an armchair drawing the outlines of machines and skyscrapers with a pencil on odd scraps of paper. In the Lenin Museum, Moscow, an entire wall is covered with these drawings. They include dynamos, cranes, steel bridges and skyscrapers - scores of skyscrapers, a whole vast panorama of enormous, highly elaborate skyscrapers. Undoubtedly the man was the victim of a kind of obsession. (Incidentally, a whole literature has been written on the subject of this relationship between the American 'ethic' and the Soviet 'ethic', between 'Americanism' and 'Soviet-ism' - an extremely interesting literature, comprising reports by technicians and workers from America, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Scandinavia, etc., who have found employment in Soviet industry. They are for the most part brief, simple documents, based on an experience - sometimes hard, but always highly interesting - of three, four or five years in the factories and shipyards, in the kolkhozi and mines of the Soviet Union, and published by responsible firms whose impartiality is beyond question. All are agreed on the 'American' character of the Communist 'ethic' and of Communist society. The reader will come to understand many things, not least” “about the political relations of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., if he takes account of this analogy.)”

From this vantage point it might be said that both The Volga rises and The Skin describe Europe under the impact of “American”-machinic civilization.

But the juxtaposition of the first and third books of this trilogy actually suggests something more disturbing. In the war that Malaparte witnessed in 1941, he is able to imagine the Germans, the Soviets and the Finns as engaged in a civil war of machine civilizations, each with their own logic, each with its own ethic, unified by a common historical moment. Leningrad, a city stamped out of the ground by Peter the Great a mere 200 years before, is a giant fortress of industrial and revolutionary politics, a model for Stalingrad in 1942-1943. Naples, with its millennia of history, offers a stark contrast. Malaparte describes a surging mass of people, not disorganized or merely chaotic, but animated by a horrifyingly anachronistic combination of ancient rites and rituals, the new promise of freedom and liberation trumpeted by the Americans , and the naked struggle for bare life.

This, of course, has a backdrop. Naples was not always like this. Between September 27 and 30 1943, a large part of the city’s working-class had risen heroically in revolt against the German occupiers. The city that the Allies occupied was not for nothing exhausted and traumatized. Many were disillusioned by the emptying out of meaning produced by Fascism and its collapse. The horror of German repression and Allied bombing inflicted relentless terror. But Malaparte will allow no evasion. It is the presence of the Allies themselves, their limitless affluence, their willingness to bury history under the promise of freedom that unleashes in this ancient city a new and utterly disinhibited “civilization”, organized around bare life and the economy of bodies.

Malaparte does not place himself outside this horror. In WWI he was a combatant himself. In this war he is not a fighter. But he wants to be there. He wants to see. He wants to hear. He never says no.

He describes visiting the brothels where Jewish women are worked to the point of exhaustion before being shot to death. He witnesses some of the most grotesque scenes in Naples and does not hide from the nausea, disgust and rage this induces in him and the American officers he accompanies. He was a fascist of the first phase of struggle in Italy and he makes no secret of the contempt and suspicion that this earns him from some on the left. Kaputt and The Skin turn entirely on his experience and narration and on his notoriety and fame.

In Kaputt, in every conversation in which Malaparte participates, he lets us know that he is always already marked as the edgy war correspondent. Everyone he speaks to knows that he wrote the pieces collected in The Volga rises. Likewise, in The Skin he appears as the author of Kaputt, which by that point was already a controversial wartime literary sensation. This extreme self-consciousness renders the entire relationship with the reader fragile. We as readers, like the people that Malaparte describes himself conversing with in Kaputt and The Skin, are left wondering who we are actually dealing with.

Malaparte wants us to know that he was himself highly conscious of this tension and, in a characteristically grotesque move, he exploits this to full effect.

In 1944 at a dinner he is challenged by allied officers about the veracity of his account in Kaputt. Malaparte responds by staging a provocation. Earlier in the conversation the Allied officers had been discussing the dangers posed by German booby-traps for unwary troops. That day a soldier had been badly wounded. As he listens to the fellow diners casting doubt on Kaputt, Malaparte surreptitiously arranges the bones in his stew to resemble the dismembered hand of the maimed soldier. He then calmly announces that his hosts have unwittingly served him the flesh of their own infantryman for dinner. Rather than scoffing at him, or calling his bluff, his hosts react with nausea and horror.

The point is made. Doubt Kaputt if you like. Clearly, Malaparte is having his way with us. But who at this point can any longer tell, what is fiction and what is grotesque truth? And who would dare to err on the side of caution? Malaparte’s account of the 20th century leaves us in a liar’s paradox of horror.

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