A Civil War (150 page)

As I have said, it was the revenants of various shades who proved, at least initially, to be least sympathetic towards the young, almost as if, paradoxically, they had assimilated one of the aspirations of aggressive nationalism – the substitution of the class struggle with the generational struggle.
²⁶

‘Old and new democracy', an article possibly penned by Ivanoe Bonomi, derided those who blamed the advent of Fascism on the old institutions and the older men: the culprits were either the young, ill-educated by Fascism, or older men who failed, at the opportune time, to give their leaders the support that would have enabled the latter to ‘react in quite another way'.
²⁷
Those who spoke in terms of the ‘ruins of the Aventino' met with a contemptuous reply: ‘The young who, if only out of necessity, up until 25 July kept that party membership card “from which the ruins of the Aventino, and not just they, remained immune, and above all kept their anti-Fascist sentiments locked in their breasts, should wait a bit before seeking the limelight. Certain infections require a period of quarantine.” '
²⁸

To complete the reassurance, the youth paper of the same ‘Party of Democracy and Labour' trembled with indignation against those who were going around saying that ‘the young don't feel the need for authority, for order, for control'.
²⁹

Before extremist positions of this sort there shone the good sense of those wise and well-balanced young people who recognised that it was not easy to free oneself from Fascism, which had penetrated into their brains, but added that this was no less applicable to the old than to the young.
³⁰
More often than not the elderly assumed indulgent tones, shading into blandishments. The Liberal Paolo Serini, having described as confused and suspicious the young people who had believed in Fascism ‘with the fideistic abandon typical of their age', concluded: ‘We want to draw near them in order to help them.'
³¹
The ‘New Year's message
to the young' of the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP) spoke of young people who had been duped and betrayed, and invoked an ‘obscure sentiment of pity for yourselves and your vanished illusions'.
³²

The Catholics swung between the most diverse positions. There were young people who claimed to have ‘gone over spiritually to anti-Fascism even if, out of a false formal conscience, they did not dare enter into contact with the anti-Fascist organisation'. Therefore, they added, there was no sense in the accusations of incoherence levelled at the young by the old: ‘Shouldn't they perhaps accuse the more mature generations instead?'
³³

But there were also young Catholics who, acknowledging themselves to be ‘miseducated and bewildered', seemed to step aside respectfully to make way for their elders,
³⁴
and older people glad to acknowledge that ‘the best young people' understood that ‘it was natural that the helm of the ship of the nation should be taken up again by the “first men”.'
³⁵
Still in April 1946, Attilio Piccioni, a former member of the Italian Popular Party would accuse the young, ‘used to the wicked climate' of Fascism, of having derived from it ‘aridity of heart, career-ism and contempt for any dedication consisting of humility', thereby attracting this pitiless reply from the young Carlo Donat Cattin: ‘The experience of our contact with the anti-Fascist political class is a bitter one and only adds to the experience of Fascism, which it would be absurd to deny.'
³⁶

In political terms, the problem was that of the relationship between the Italian Popular Party and the Christian Democrat party. If experience had taught that ‘making way for the young' demanded caution, entrenchment in ‘making way for the old' was no less advisable. It is no accident that Alcide De Gasperi explicitly made himself the promoter of an intergenerational line, quite different from the model of the ‘long generation', the equivalent rather of the inter-class policy. In an article that appeared in the clandestine edition of
Il Popolo
, he wrote: ‘We are younger and older people who have given each other a hand to build a bridge between two generations, between whom Fascism had attempted
to dig an abyss': namely, the First World War generation, who later ‘experienced the turbid social struggles' and tried in vain to oppose Fascism, and the generation who had lived through Fascism ‘without getting contaminated'.
³⁷

Elsewhere we have seen how, for the Communists, the conflict between generations sometimes figured as being between the old guard, more or less
bordighista
in origin, but whose roots also lay in the temperamentally fence-sitting attitude of ‘neither adhere nor sabotage', and the lively fighting spirit of the young. Those of the Communist leaders who preferred the latter attitude did however denounce, realistically but with pedagogic indulgence, certain features that the Garibaldini had inherited from Fascism: ‘Certainly one cannot ignore the fact that our volunteers are all young men who have undergone twenty years of Fascist rule and who therefore are in need of intense and continuous explanation, clarification and persuasion', says one report.
³⁸
And another blames the difficulties that the partisans sometimes had in their relations with the population on the ‘evil consequences of Fascist miseducation, which cannot be wiped out just like that in young twenty-year-olds brimming over with life and energy'.
³⁹
The instructions of one Command are inspired by undisguised pedagogy:

This was a far cry from the behaviour of those Communists, exiles for years in the USSR, who addressed the Italian prisoners ‘in the wrong tone, in committee-room jargon, which was mostly incomprehensible, and with inquisitorial and illogical questions like: “Why have you come? Why didn't you rebel? Why didn't you desert?”.'
⁴¹
In the case of the Communists, too, it was the most prestigious leader who assumed responsibility for ensuring that the manner adopted towards the young was consistent with the general line of the ‘partito nuovo'. Togliatti made numerous approaches to the young, even, as we have seen, to those fighting on the opposite side in the civil war.
⁴²

Interwoven with the generational problem within the Communist party was the other, more complex, one of the partial ‘succession' of the PCI to the PSI. This phenomenon occurred at times within the same family nucleus, precisely as if it were something being handed over by one generation to another.

‘Was your dad a Socialist?' – ‘Yes, in those days he was a Socialist because the Communists weren't around yet', is the answer a Turinese worker born in 1904 recently gave to her interviewer.
⁴³
‘Here's to the young partisan recruits and their parents!' said a Romagnolo poster that intended to thank the parents for having persuaded their children to join the Garibaldini.
⁴⁴
By contrast, ‘a seventy-year-old man, who had stuck to the pre-1914 war positions', called the Communists ‘figliol prodighi' (‘prodigal sons'), and interpreted the contemplated fusion between the two parties as a wish to ‘return to the fold'.
⁴⁵

I myself personally remember various episodes of the initiation into Communism within traditionally Socialist family circles. Here I have to add
that, on numerous occasions, the Communists showed intolerance towards the human and political dotage of the Socialists, and we have already seen some examples of this; ‘they've remained stuck in the same old positions of 1920–21'; their activism is scant, but they enjoy ‘a certain amount of sympathy among the older workers'; they are ‘survivors'.
⁴⁶
Then again, their claim, as in Modena, to invoke the relations sanctioned by the 1921 election appears absurd.
⁴⁷
It is evident that, in judgments of this kind, no account is taken of the minority young people's wing of the PSIUP, originating from the MUP (Movement of Proletarian Unity), whom the Communists suspected of ‘leftism'.
⁴⁸

But, leaving aside the competitive dislikes and fears on the left, the Communists were capable of lucid foresight. Thus, at a ‘meeting of PCI representatives in several Padua plants', to combat the opinion that ‘the Socialists didn't exist', this was said: ‘Tomorrow at the polling-stations you will see how many folk who are today singing the praises of the Soviet Union and Communism will be more willing to give their vote to the Socialist Party than to the Communist Party.'
⁴⁹

The Action Party too had put itself forward as the bearer of a new and ideologically up-to-date socialist message, to succeed the old PSI. The Action Party,
it was claimed, ‘is the Socialist Party of the new generation'.
⁵⁰
This conviction was shared by many of the party's leaders, from Parri to Calogero and Foa. That things did not turn out like this is an issue that goes beyond that of different generations.
⁵¹

If the Resistance was anything it was an attempt to settle accounts with the past. ‘Il miserabile crollo dello Stato fascista fa sì che oggi tutti i nodi vengano al pettine', said
L'Italia Libera
¹
– a declaration which might be translated as follows: ‘The wretched collapse of the Fascist state means that today no one will escape a whipping'. Here
tutti
should be interpreted in a sense that goes beyond the problem of the state and power, the one immediately posed by the Action Party newspaper. Many threads of my argument so far are in fact connected by a series of questions: How responsible were the Italian people for the birth, advent and dominion of Fascism? How was it possible to transform the sense of guilt, the desire for expiation, the proclamations of innocence into a project for the future? Not the social, economic, institutional and political programmes, elaborated and achieved to a greater or lesser extent, that were put forward at the time, but fundamental aspirations and the desire that that exceptional historical opportunity should not be missed. Nor, as far as the past is concerned, do I mean to examine the historiographic validity of the theses formulated at the time, even if some points of view of the
resistenti
have inspired the historians' subsequent arguments to various degrees. What I wish to do, rather, is seek to glean some features that distil the experience lived at the time – an experience which was later bracketed, to a greater or lesser extent in manipulated and distorted form, among the different facets of the shared collective version of things. It should never be forgotten that the victory of the
resistenti
was ‘the work of a minority – the work of a large minority, but still in no sense the achievement of the whole Italian people'.
²

But nor should it be forgotten that the intensity of the experience of that large minority, who truly wanted to settle accounts with the past, was to reverberate throughout the entire Italian people, who absorbed, though partly debased, its achievements. Rosario Romeo, the last great Italian liberal historian, has formulated a fundamentally correct judgment on this point:12

Early on, a poet and essayist warned, with one of his paradoxical proposals, against the consequences of this attitude: ‘As from 1 January of the year 2000 no politician or political party or similar movement will be able to declare themselves not responsible for their errors, nor expect a diminution of public blame by pleading that there was Fascism.'
⁴

There is one aspect of Italy's responsibility which more or less all the documents and testimonies of the Resistance period choose to keep quiet about, and which clearly exemplifies what has just been said: the question of responsibility in the persecution against the Jews. The racial campaign, when it is spoken about, is blamed exclusively on the more fanatical of the Fascists, and even then insofar as they were dominated by the Nazis. Rather than becoming a stimulus for a critical examination of the forms that anti-Semitism had assumed in a country such as Catholic Italy, the way in which the racial campaign had been conducted and the resistance it had encountered, that resistance became a source of self-congratulation for being better than the Germans, whose treatment of the Jews in Russia was denounced at times in the Resistance press.
⁵
As is well known, the far from transparent attitude taken at the time and later towards the persecution of the Jews was paraded by the Catholic Church as proof of its extraneousness to Nazi-Fascism. When the newspaper of the Catholic Communists wished to indicate what was most despicable about anti-Semitism, it made the following gaffe: ‘To attack men for what they cannot
liberate
themselves from.' The self-criticism of many Italians, both secular and religious, for their personal responsibility towards the Jews took the form of concrete action, offering them help and refuge, even if other Italians behaved ignobly.
⁶