A Civil War (149 page)

‘There are short generations and long generations', Marc Bloch has written, ‘and only observation enables us to identify the points at which the curve changes direction'. ‘Generation', in this sense, should be seen as meaning a historical–cultural fact, and not just a question of people's literal dates of birth. It derives from a ‘shared imprint' created by a ‘shared age' or, as has also been written, by a fusion between ‘personal time' and ‘social time', due to ‘great historical events' lived through together between their twenties and their thirties by people ‘who have associated their age not with fashion but with history'.
¹

H. Stuart Hughes endorses this view in the following comment on Bloch's words: ‘individuals who have participated in psychologically decisive events in company with people fifteen years their seniors may feel closer to these latter than they do to individuals only slightly younger than themselves who just
missed this great experience: the generations of the two world wars are a case in point'.
²

However, there may also be a generational overlap, given the different dates and durations of the formative processes experienced by those involved, and the dissimilar effects that the very same great, and in so many respects unifying, experiences, like the two world wars, may nevertheless have. Thus the opposition between Fascists and anti-Fascists should be seen above all as a clash between two long generations, which intertwine in different ways with the natural generations. The Fascist generation was a long one. On the eve of its fall the regime had made an effort to weld the young people that it had itself forged (of whom Aldo Vidussoni, the twenty-eight-year-old penultimate party secretary, was to be the emblem) to the comrades of the early days, like the last secretary, Carlo Scorza, who did not intend to give up the fight. During the Social Republic this long generation attempted to rediscover its identity in the myth of the return to origins and in re-proposing the ‘irresistibile ebrezza' (‘irresistible inebriation') of risk to ‘young men who are not such only because the registry office has them filed as the representatives of the last drafts'.
³
Mussolini himself recognised that the only men on whom the Republican Fascist Party could rely were the veterans and the very young.
⁴
And a long generation too was that born of the encounter between the anti-Fascists of the
ventennio
and the young
resistenti
of various backgrounds and inspirations.

The middle generation remained, by contrast, a short generation. Its liveliest members joined either the Fascist generation or the anti-Fascist one. Not even the generation of the Second World War, oppressed by the burden of defeat, managed to establish itself as a long generation. In spite of the tendencies towards ex-servicemen's solidarity that surfaced after 25 July and after 8 September, that generation was rent by the civil war. A powerful majority of it converged into the anti-Fascist generation; a more restricted minority sank into the Fascist one.

Within the anti-Fascist long generation, the younger ones had specific accounts to settle with the veterans. They reproached them for the errors they
had committed and undertook not to repeat them. It is no accident that the creation of the long generation was more successful among the Communists and members of the Action Party and GL – that is, in the movements which in their pre-Resistance activities had already succeeded in presenting themselves as new.

The break with the defeated anti-Fascists was created more by the defeat than by age. In a previous chapter, I recorded Filippo Turati and Claudio Treves's bitter reflections during their Paris exile. After 25 July 1943, during the Resistance, and then during the days of the Liberation, irritation and often contempt for the revenants are evident.

Ada Gobetti, who was actually no longer that young, presents the two vice-mayors, the Socialist (Domenico Chiaramello) and the Christian Democrat (Giacchino Quarello), designated for Turin, as follows: ‘Tranquil and satisfied like heirs finally coming into possession of an inheritance to which they had a right and of whose possession there was no longer any doubt.'
⁵
Franco Calamandrei is crueller than this when he describes his encounter in Rome with two Socialists: ‘The older one is afflicted by a slight stutter, the younger one is slightly cross-eyed. From their persons, their manner, the vanity of their plans, I get a sense of discomfort, and am almost embarrassed for them because of their incompetence and evident inferiority complex.'
⁶

The reproaches levelled at older people, and particularly parents, for having been Fascists was so painful and profound that the very connotation of the word ‘Fascist' was at times watered down. There was the withering accusation of not having told the truth, of having hidden their pre-Fascist past even when it was part of their biography, of having exhorted them to play safe, of having in short betrayed their mission as educators:

This is how a young man was writing as early as 1934.
⁷

The son of the secretary of the pre-Fascist internal commission of the Galileo works in Florence has recounted how he never ‘heard
babbo
[father] utter a word of political orientation for me to become this or that, never'; and he tries to explain that his parents

Nuto Revelli does not hesitate to reproach fathers who did not speak out in time.
⁹
When Piero D'Angiolini, a law student, read the newspapers of 1924–25 in the library, he became indignant with his father, a divisional chief in the Ministry of Finance, who had never spoken to him about the murder of Matteotti.
¹⁰
Artom writes of a young partisan that ‘he feels the abyss separating fathers and sons and knows that it cannot be bridged. The abyss opened by the partiality of parents' opinions and by the shame that prevented their children from revealing the transformations that have come about in them, a more yawning abyss than ever, now that centuries seem to have passed between one generation and another.'

As far as he personally was concerned, Artom presented his youth as a reason for elitist pride: on 30 July 1943 he went to a GL meeting, and ‘it galled them a bit when I said that of all those present I was the only one who had never shouted: viva il Duce'.
¹¹
Without mincing words, a GL newspaper wrote: ‘If the previous generation had had the courage to brave death in order to conserve liberty, today we wouldn't have needed to fight this war.'
¹²

At times the confrontation took the form of tit-for-tat exchanges between the young and the old. An ‘Appeal to the Young' by the Youth Front contains a curt declaration: ‘Nothing can be expected from the old generations. Only we
young people can make the new Italy.' To which comes the crude rebuke: ‘Death and deportation do not respect age.'
¹³

In taking youth as the highway to salvation, there was the risk of making people slip towards the position of those who made invocations identical to those of the RSI in their attempt to distance themselves from decisions made on behalf of it. We young people, they wrote in one of their newspapers which came in for a rough time from the Fascist authorities, ‘tomorrow, however things turn out, will have to impose our will on the country. Old men and old systems continue to dominate more or less everywhere: it is with this stale garbage that we have to make a clean break if we are to present ourselves as free and rejuvenated in the post-war fray'; but such was the fracture created by the civil war that the same newspaper invoked firing-squad executions to avenge comrades killed by the partisans.
¹⁴

The intellectuals were called to account particularly heavily: ‘We can shout at them that they didn't educate us' – and, besides, what did one encounter in the Italian literary tradition? In Manzoni there was the ‘hidden hypocrisy … midway between the priest and the bourgeois', in Carducci and D'Annunzio ‘the rhetorical bombast of the mixture of a classical formalism and an oratorical and popular low romanticism'.
¹⁵

There were invocations, together with warnings, not to betray a second, and irremediable, time. Bewildered, and anxious to find in the professors ‘not only masters of knowledge, but men, defenders of that honour and that humanity which were the pride of the free school of Italy' is how the students declared themselves when they implored the professors not to take the oath to the Social Republic. ‘If we have been given the task of paying for the errors of a past that we refuse to recognise as our own, it is for you to offer us your doleful experience, so that youth is not betrayed once again.' Emphatic, diplomatic and menacing words: whoever swears the oath ‘will be expelled from teaching after the war'.
¹⁶

Weighing heavily on the young was the inheritance of the Fascist-style slogans ‘Make way for the young' and of ‘Giovinezza! Giovinezza!' Repudiating one's elders might have been a way of getting out of a tight corner. A clandestine Catholic newspaper spoke of Fascism as a ‘gerontocracy of the generation who wanted the war'
¹⁷
– so vivid was the memory in certain Catholic circles of the papal condemnation of ‘useless slaughter', which in other respects, like democratic belligerence, formed, by contrast, one of the fundamental elements of the long wave of secular anti-Fascism.

‘Make way for the young?' wrote a newspaper of the Italian Students' Union for Liberty, but the young people worth their salt would in any case come forward, while it was as well for the others to stay where they were.
¹⁸
Actually, in that context the very word
goliardica
(university student) rang a bit false, though it was adopted also by a newspaper of the Youth Front
¹⁹
‘Trovarsi smarriti' (‘Finding yourself at a loss') is the title of an article that appeared in a Young Socialists' newspaper. The article describes the bewilderment provoked in the young by the youth-obsessed Fascist mottos, and immediately adds: ‘And anyway how can we be blamed for it?':

In the same paper, ‘l'anziano di turno' (that day's older contributor) offered his reply. He seemed to be frightened by so much fury, and, before the claim that what the future demanded did not mean adhesion to a party programme, was ready to offer the reassuring picture of the ‘inevitable destiny of socialism,
a supreme good lying at the end, not far-off by now, towards which mankind is being driven' – a description in heartfelt tones that could well have been found in a newspaper at the turn of the century.

Outbursts of hatred against the Fascists, based on the generation factor, were frequent:

Books like Ruggero Zangrandi's pioneering work,
²²
and prominent personalities like Pietro Ingrao, have attributed to the ‘long journeys' of the young, primarily students, from so-called left-wing Fascism to anti-Fascism (and Communism above all) a more important role than they actually had. Significant, though, on the issue of generations, is the regret expressed by a Fascist paper, mentioned earlier, that the young had found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades.
²³

If we shift our sights to the older people, by and large we find that, the less engaged they had been in militant anti-Fascism and the less they were now engaged in the active Resistance, the more severe they were in their attitude to the young – a severity mitigated only by paternalism. While the anti-Fascist survivors of jail, internment, exile, did have doubts and prejudices about the young who had been born and educated under Fascism, they were also, witnessing their commitment, ready to overcome these.
²⁴
For their part, the young, above all with regard to the survivors of exile, felt admiration and respect, though fear too that the latter had lost contact with the real state of affairs in Italy. This applied not just to the political plane but to social customs too: it was hard for even the best-intentioned veteran to understand certain changes that had come about in those who had lived ‘legally' in the years of Fascism. ‘Oh! Una capocellula che
balla!' (‘Oh! A woman partisan leader dancing!'), exclaimed a horrified older comrade about a former partisan; and the latter explained: ‘We already had a different vision of life … We had seen nuns taking part in the Resistance!'
²⁵