A Civil War (9 page)

The non-presence of the state might be felt with a sense of disorientation or as an opportunity to make a bid for freedom. But first of all it might be experienced immediately as an exceptional moment of harmony in a community freed from the shackles of power.

Perhaps the finest testimony we have of this experience, almost of a blissful, miraculous and fleeting aurora, is that of an English colonel:

Strictly speaking, the situation described here does not typify the Resistance. In the Resistance nobody chooses anything, but interpersonal relationships are lived with self-sufficient spontaneity. It does, however, display some traits shared with the solidarity extended to entire communities above all in the very first days after the collapse, but subsequently in several free zones too, or in territories where the presence of German and Fascist authorities was not strongly felt. Thus, a protagonist who was ten years old at the time recalls the formative value of experiencing the intense altruism shown by one and all, ‘without orders' and ‘freely chosen', at Borgo Anime in the province of Ravenna.
⁵

‘We behaved well towards one another, in fact we were fonder of one another', recalls a tradesman from the Terni area speaking of the mass exoduses from the city.
⁶
No doubt these are transfigurations of memory, filled with nostalgia for the moments when the absence of authoritarian ties did not give rise to the
bellum omnium contra omnes
. But a book of memoirs, still hot from the event, of the Umbrian countryside which generously took in the fugitive Allied prisoners points out that ‘for once the eternal rancour of traditional disagreements, which divide and have always divided peasants sharing the boundaries of a field or a wood, had an unexpected outlet of goodness'.
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Generalising, a sociologist has written: ‘Partisan aggregation was favoured by small local communities, by a not hostile or a favourable local community environment.'
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When the German occupying troops began to give a minimum of formalisation to their violence, which had flooded the space left vacant by the eclipse
of the Italian authorities, and when, immediately after, the Fascists created the Social Republic – when, that is, the institutional void was somehow or other filled by a different system of authority – the choice became more difficult and more dramatic, because the spontaneous human solidarity of the first days no longer sufficed. Now the choice had to be made between disobedience, for which the price to pay would be ever higher, and the allure of Nazi–Fascist normalisation, grim though it was.

The words with which Sartre begins a famous work – ‘Never have we been so free as under the German occupation' – pinpoint this core of Resistance experience: a choice all the more authentic the more one was compelled by events to choose, and the stakes could be summed up in the formula ‘rather death than …'. Out of this grew, writes Sartre, ‘in shadow and in blood … the strongest of Republics … without institutions, without an army, without police'.
⁹
Some years later, a text as dry as a library catalogue would reach a conclusion that endorses Sartre's eloquent position: ‘On pourrait presque soutenir que les conditions difficiles égalisent les chances et favorisent les plus résolus, jamais presse ne fut plus libre que cette interdite.'
¹⁰

Sergeant Cecco Baroni, who ended up in a POW camp in Germany, puts the same situation simply: ‘You see those sentries behind the barbed wire? It's they who are Hitler's prisoners, not us. We say no to Hitler and Mussolini, even when they want to starve us out.'
¹¹

The first meaning of liberty, acquired by the decision to resist, is implicit in its being an act of disobedience. It was not so much a question of disobeying a legal government, since it was a moot point who possessed legality, as of disobeying those who had the power to make themselves obeyed. In other words, it was a revolt against man's power over man, a reaffirmation of the ancient principle that power should not prevail over virtue.
¹²
The fact that the power you were revolting against might subsequently be deemed illegal as well as illegitimate in the strong sense of the word simply completes the picture. The Fascists' decision to join the Social Republic – this is a difference that we would do well to highlight from the start – was not enveloped in this light of critical disobedience. As we know, ‘I did it because I was ordered to do so' was to be the main argument used by the Fascists and Nazis to defend themselves in the trials instituted
against them after the war.
¹³
So intrinsic was this to the Nazi–Fascist ethic that it was to relegate to second place, and not just for reasons of courtroom expediency, the independently inspired choices which, as we shall presently see, some Fascists also made.

For the first time in the history of united Italy, the Italians lived, in one form or another, an experience of mass disobedience. This was particularly important for the generation who had been made, at elementary school, to learn by heart these words from the only state textbook: ‘What must be the first virtue of a
balilla
? Obedience! and the second? Obedience!' (in gigantic letters).

A second thing to consider is that that the link between necessity and liberty, which it is always so difficult to put one's finger on, appears in the at once problematic and limpid decision to resist. The thorniest aspect of its problematic character lies in the fact that the choice was made in that ‘total responsibility in total solitude', which Sartre has called ‘the very revelation of our freedom'.
¹⁴
So profound was this solitude that not even the Catholics could escape from it, even though they had the backing of the only institutions that had not collapsed; but in those weeks those institutions too had left consciences to dangle in the void.
¹⁵
A letter sent on 25 September by Cazzani, bishop of Cremona, to the archbishop of Milan, Schuster, is sincere in registering this attitude. The monsignor wrote to the cardinal that he ‘assume[d] no responsibility for advising a definite line of action. I tell them the possible dangers of one or the other path, and that they are to do as they wish.'
¹⁶

One consequence of the choice made in solitude was that, when the spontaneous solidarity of the first days no longer sufficed, the Italians were compelled to size each other up again, to demand new credentials of each other, to establish who was an accomplice and who a victim of persecution.
¹⁷
No one any longer
could predict for certain the behaviour of others according to the old canons. Something similar, if more devastating, had occurred in France after the June 1940 catastrophe. As Léon Blum wrote, ‘Friends, meeting each other, never knew beforehand whether they would find themselves in agreement or not.'
¹⁸
Earlier still, immediately after the
Anschluss
, there had been ‘a terrible solitude. No one could trust anyone any more, no one knew any longer who the other was.'
¹⁹
The very opposite of this was to occur in April 1945, when, in the euphoria of victory, everybody seemed certain that they could recognise the sentiments of others. Thus Ada Gobetti:

It is as if solitude, that is, full individual responsibility for one's decisions – ‘I've done this of my own free will, so you mustn't cry', a man condemned to death was to say
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– is exalted and at the same time redeemed by the realisation of the unavoidable need to choose between one or other form of behaviour bearing inscribed values, which immediately implies an objective situation, shared by all (‘Those who are not with us are against us', a German proclamation threatened).
²²
Again, this is not just true of Italy. An Austrian awaiting execution wrote that several times he had asked himself whether he ought not to have behaved differently: ‘But I always come to the same conclusion: “I could not have done otherwise”.'
²³
Of France it was written: ‘The defeat puts paid to any possible way out … and thus the imperative need to make fundamental choices.'
²⁴
‘Desperate necessity' is the expression used by Vittorio Foa.
²⁵
A similar kind of ‘desperation' seems to inspire these words of Arturo Jemolo's: ‘curious, this
terrible
freedom of choice
concerning the most important things, this already marked out path concerning the things of least importance'.
²⁶

Roberto Battaglia wrote that it was the first time that society ‘had put him with his back to the wall'.
²⁷
Franco Venturi evoked the ‘sense of necessity lying at the basis of this creation of freedom, a sense of serene acceptance of the fact of being finally outlaws of an impossible world'.
²⁸
When Ada Gobetti notes in a boy the ‘fascinating normality' of his being a partisan,
²⁹
she is simply registering a concrete case of the experience illustrated by Franco Venturi, which is also recalled by these other words: ‘Today, despite the wreckage, the situation is better … therefore, despite the collapse, liberty lives today among us'.
³⁰
Immediately after the Liberation, Massimo Mila was to speak of 8 September as a ‘self-revelation' of a new possibility of life.
³¹

This sense of life ‘beginning anew', though it had in many respects assumed the guise of politics, went well beyond that ‘politician's risk-taking' which, in Schmittian terms, has been considered the ineluctable consequence of the fact that ‘all citizens are obliged to take sides in a civil war'.
³²
Rather, there is the ‘sudden perception (or illusion) that I am able to act to change society for the better and, what is more, that I am able to unite with other people of like mind' and that all this is ‘pleasurable and indeed inebriating'.
³³

This inebriation sprung from a singular fusion – which does not mean that it was felt always and by everyone – between the tragic sense of life and the
joy of living.
³⁴
Roberto Battaglia spoke of the ‘unbridled joy' that seized him at the moment of the partisan formation's arrival, and evoked the ‘blessed days, a new infancy of ourselves and our guerrilla, at the memory of which that dark sense of being survivors that we bore imprinted in us seems to vanish'.
³⁵
When Calvino read Ada Gobetti's diary, he exclaimed: ‘My God, what fun you had!' This comment was in line with the ‘Ariostesque' character he had given to his novel
The Path to the Nest of Spiders
.
³⁶
In her
Diario partigiano
, Gobetti herself resorts to expressions such as ‘as if we were going on vacation', ‘a new, free and adventurous infancy', ‘gush of sudden joy', ‘moments of the most perfect serenity' – ‘fulfilment, completeness, harmony – felt at the very moment of greatest danger'; and recognises the ‘providential' character of the ‘absurd, widespread irresponsibility'.
³⁷

‘We went up into the mountains like that … it seemed such a merry thing, so to speak': not even deportation to Mauthausen was enough to cancel the memory of it in this survivor.
³⁸
And a Catholic officer, who described his experience in Venezia Giulia with one of the first mixed Italo-Slovene formations as being ‘a joyous rush towards the large dark mountain, the partisans' stronghold', felt, thanks to the ‘seriousness, enthusiasm, fervour of life' that he found there, that ‘his childhood faith regained a singular virginity, a freshness, and grew more profound'.
³⁹
Again hot from the event, the Tuscan Garibaldino Attilio De Gaudio spoke of ‘happy moments – and they were the best in my life – that I lived with my division in that ideal environment, where, to use an apt expression of the railwayman Bonassai, we were all for one, one for all, as in 1919–22, when liberty was no myth but a living, concrete reality'.
⁴⁰

Here emerges a thread that we shall encounter again: the recovery of the historical memory of the
biennio rosso
. Another Tuscan, a political commissar
of the Potente Garibaldi division (the Arno division that had taken the name of its commander Aligi Barducci, who fell during the battle for the liberation of Florence), was to write in his final report: ‘Often, in moments of melancholy solitude, I feel nostalgia for those almost carefree moments, for that was the time when our attention was centred on how to surprise, offend and dodge our enemies' – almost a game that concentrated and absorbed all one's energies.
⁴¹
Many years later the Roman Gappist Rosario Bentivegna was to declare to Robert Katz: ‘Strangely enough we felt free, close to everyone.'
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