THE EXORBITANCE OF EVIL
I
In 1953 the young lawyer Fidel Castro, thrown into jail by the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, uses the time to read the book „The Technique of Revolution“ by Curzio Malaparte. In 2002, „while a coup d'etat is underway in Venezuela, Castro lends the book to Hugo Chávez for the latter to understand the situation better and respond to it rapidly.“ In less than 47 hours President Chávez is in control again after having fought off the coup by Venezuela's business elite. (See Stacy Hardy's essay „A brief history of presidential libraries“ in the review Chimurenga, Johannesburg 2013.)
Toppling governments or fending off attacks on the state – Malaparte's book of coups seems to offer itself as an instruction manual for both sides to the present day. What's it about? Published in 1931 it is strikingly close to the political and historical turning points of the early twentieth century – from October revolution to Kapp putsch –, and with reference to the antagonistic couple Trotsky-Stalin, the then 32-year-old Kurt Erich Suckert (Malaparte's birth name) emphatically suggests the superiority of the Trotskyist strategy: It is not the belief of the broad masses, but rather the skills of merely a few determined engineers of the revolution that suffice to ideologically unhinge a country, a political system to put it on a different basis. In case of defense the state needs to keep those few hundred people likely to threaten the state in view and protect possible neuralgic points or targets necessary to keep the society-machine running.
The present sees new revolutions on the edges of Europe year after year – Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, the Ukraine. Everywhere, across all political camps the „Technique of Revolution“ seems to have established itself, from the uprisings in the global capitals to the surgical interventions of Russian special forces on the Crimea. In Germany, however, we are still in a position to remain impassive in the face of these regime changes and local wars. Moreover, we may benefit personally from these changes: for example, we can book a flight to the beach paradises of Cuba and rub our eyes in amazement that 60 years of economic sanctions have really gone to the people on the ground on this lovely Caribbean island. Poor but oh so happy! Is it perhaps the condition sine qua non for our comfortable situation in the centres of peace of Central Europe that other countries and tens of millions of people at the peripheries of our hegemonic sphere have to undergo radical changes for us to be able to live a carefree life? That they become like us? That they want to become like us?
II
In 1941 Malaparte, who is well-acquainted with all the greats of Mussolini's empire, goes to war. Wearing an Italian uniform of the Alpini mountain troops he visits the front lines in the East as an „embedded“ journalist of sorts. His coverage for the newspaper Corriere della Sera oscillates between factual journalistic and imaginative novelistic prose, poetic language and lyrical play of words. At times he gets as close as can be to the most atrocious events, at others he seems as remote as any European ethnologist who wants to explore African cultures trying to grasp the characteristics of the Black Continent from the shelter of a protected hotel complex with pool and spa facilities. In these passages exaggeration rules; spinning war stories, he creates myths and legends like the sauna anecdote about Himmler's scrotum (shrivelled and wrinkled!) and other naked Nazi truths.
Somewhere in the intermediate realm between fact and fantasy Malaparte, our literary leader, takes us on a journey to the German governor general at the Wawel in Cracow, Hans Frank. We follow him to the Italian embassy in Belgrade and attend the mansion of the Italian ambassador at the shores of Wannsee, the terrace of the Café Esplanada in Agram or the Bar Excelsior and the golf club in Acquasanta. In these circles people drink a lot – vermouth, cognac and booze stuff such as bordsbraennvin made in Finland. And they eat fancy things like fried bear paws, smoked reindeer tongue, salmon from the French Oulas river. Malaparte invites us to accompany the likes of Augustin de Foxa, the Spanish emissary, and Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian foreign secretary and husband to Duce Mussolini's daughter Edda. We get insights into the heart and mind of Hohenzollern princess Louise of Prussia, granddaughter of Wilhelm II, and we encounter the Princesses Isabelle Colonna and Anne Marie von Bismarck dining at opulently laden tables. Like in Balzac, kiss and tell stories, “who does what with whom“-gossip and historical and political events including the haggling over positions and influence form a single unit. If one believes the confessions in the salons and lip service, these historical players have only one issue at heart: the „freedom of the peoples of Europe.“
Nazis and officers – in Malaparte's presence they act the educated, they celebrate and drink, and they laugh a lot while - almost incidentally, it seems - they are fighting a terrible war. The Italian novelist presents us with a psychology of the Fascist murderers that is very different from Hannah Arendt's „banality of evil“ mapped out in the context of the Eichmann process, where she identified an army of bureaucrats who were making charts, dispatching trains across the country and stamping documents to seal the fate of people's lives like book keepers. Malaparte, however, recounts tales of lust and drunkenness, sadism and obscenity, as he describes the exorbitance of evil.
In part apocalyptic and religiously inspired, his descriptions evoke paintings by Hieronymus Bosch painted in language; or, more worldly perhaps, they seem to sound out the peripheries of psychology like a poem by Baudelaire. The novel's key word, however, is „laughter“. There is a lot of laughing going on. At Hans Frank's banquet: „Gas the Jews!“ Laughter. Ukrainian women and children who get caught between the front lines of the German wehrmacht and the partisans - „Shot them!“ Laughter. Young women abducted to work in the brothels of the wehrmacht in Moldavia - it's a laugh! We are presented a whole morphology of laughter – there is the laughter of stupor, the laughter of drunkenness, abysmal laughter, the laughter of desperation. Like in George Grosz' early drawings the laughter is distorted, reality's true content can no longer be framed in any symbolically meaningful form. Laughter meant to make the catastrophic effects of their appalling imaginary more bearable. Laughter - the last line of defence in the face of moral capitulation.
Kaputt's dramaturgy is designed to specifically create emotional impact, it is meant to overpower the reader with fast cuts and scene changes between front lines and fascist decadence in bourgeois salons. With every page the horror increases. The turn of the torturous screw is inevitable. The extreme value on the scale of the catastrophic can be accurately determined: total dehumanisation and annihilation of the planet. Malaparte's lucid descriptions reveal the similarities of the workers' armies in both East (symbolized by the apparently self- and sexless Skoptsy warriors) and West, acting as proletarian war machines. Facts and terribly graphic testimonies of eyewitnesses stick in the readers' minds: The devastation of Ukrainian villages in which „the surge of the German retaliation was raging.“ Human beings burnt to death along the banks of the Dnieper. „The corpses of hanged Jews were dangling from the branches.“ Stiff and frozen corpses of Red Army soldiers rammed into the snow-covered ground to serve the following wehrmacht troops as a signposts for better orientation. This war novel which is at once an anti-war novel reminds us that Europe and Berlin as its ruling heart of darkness was not always the peaceful, democratic construct as we are currently experiencing it. The novel conjures half-forgotten names of collaborators, rendezvous and private audiences that took place on the geographical edges and in the countries of the newest EU-members. There's the encounter with Mihai Antonescu, an aficionado of „roses“: „He wanted to speak to me“ and „he received me cordially and graciously“ with his „black and shiny reptile eyes.“ „No other eyes in the world resemble a snake's eyes more than Mihai Antonescu's.“ What follows are descriptions of the Iași pogroms committed by the Romanian fascists of the „Iron Guard“, partly in cooperation with German troops. In April 1941 Malaparte met Ante Pavelić: „This quite unpretentious, good and generous man, who had a fine sense for humanity“; „I liked to listen to him speak.“ Entering Pavelić's office for the first time, he probably imagined the story about the basket full of what looked like shelled oysters but were in fact human eyes of Serbs who had been slaughtered by the murdering Ustashi, the basket which the Croatian Pavelić had had put next to his desk like a trophy.
And again and again Eastern Europe, particularly the Ukraine: Who remembers the debates in Germany about compensation payments for forced labour that went on for years with a maximum degree of indignity on our part? It was only in the noughties, when hardly anyone who had been deported from Galicia, the Carpathians, Kiev, the Crimea or the Donbass region as a teenager was still alive, only then could the German state and a handful of industrial corporations bring themselves to offer reparations, which in more than a few cases trickled off in the channels of corruption of local distributors. Malaparte meets these „ostarbeiters“ or „Usnikis“ who must wear „Ost“ or „P“ sewed to their work clothes, in the 1940s in Berlin, in Ruhleben, more precisely. The stolen ones had to work in the armament industry assembling warheads in the northern suburbs of Berlin, from Spandau to Reinickendorf. Malaparte addresses the problem for what it was – an industry relying on slaves, „white slaves” – that's how the Reich treated the people from our ancestors' then direct neighbourhood.
It's always human beings who inflict pain and torture on other human beings. In an attempt to reflect the innocence of nature, as counterpart to the barbaric traits of human civilisation, Malaparte offers stylized representations of animal life. In his own particular, religiously inspired language of mysticism animals are portrayed as the downtrodden creatures, and Jesus Christ as He who cannot be deceived, and both take all sin and guilt onto themselves like Saints, and – in a nod to Schiller – embody the ultimate freedom by engaging in “free play”. In humans, however, the free play reveals its dialectical flip side: the transgression of all rules and limits, rule violations with the potential of complete extinction of the species. Spin – the Belgrade-based Italian ambassador's dog – makes Malaparte wonder: „It's a hunting dog and, as we are well aware, war is a kind of hunting event, with human beings as both game and hunter; it's a kind of play in which people armed with guns are hunting other people.“ In World War II and under Fascism the mechanisms of containment to control the game failed entirely. „All human laws, even natural laws were unmade. The world collapsed.“ For Europe and large parts of the world the 8th of May 1945 was not so much a day of victory as the beginning of a grievous act of balancing the books of death.
III
On the ruins of all things Kaputt, the various „peoples of perpetrators“ developed a striking moral flexibility described and analysed by Malaparte in his novel „The Skin“ and in his coverage of the war of liberation in Italy from 1943 onwards. As liaison officer he was in contact with both the Italian administration and the allied armies, particularly US army which had invaded Sicily. Vivisecting the situation, he describes how Italian soldiers in Naples change fronts - literally and on the level of political beliefs and convictions. From one moment to the next the defeated fighters of the fascist Mussolini units have transformed themselves into the victors over the German occupiers. Shoulder to shoulder with the Americans. Only „the goodness and innocence of these great guys from across the Atlantic, who had landed in Europe to punish the evil ones and reward the good people“ can redeem „these nations and individual human beings from sin.“ At first only Italians are infected with goodness – Malaparte variably uses the synonyms plague, chewing gum or money all of which may transform any perversion, or honest feelings and even the naked skin into a commodity, a tradable good.
Today we Germans, the third-generation post-war progeny, are graded AAA+ not only in economic, but also in political and moral terms. The evil, which once infiltrated our Nazi minds, has changed sides and splatter-like infected the political body of other nations and governments. „Preventing Auschwitz“ – ever since the Balkan war this slogan has been used to tune us in to a postmodern line of argument allowing to project our own history onto the political actions of others to legitimize the breaches of law and war in our name. The underlying movement is from critical self-reflection to accusation, we are no longer searching our own hearts, instead we are pointing the finger at the East and South of Europe, at the anachronistic and militaristic despots and dictators who undermine the freedom and liberal rights of their good citizens. While we, who are wholly innocent, mean only to do good...
Our self-perception seems to depart more and more from the neoliberal reality that surrounds us. Living in the centre of hedonism, we, the bearers of affirmative political attitudes, are performing happiness. We speak of freedom and democracy telling everyone how they must be imposed across the globe and universally. But the true yardstick of our moral behaviour is, in addition to our being protected by acquired or inherited private property, our boss's pal who might be our next employer. Whatever his or her name, we lean on the master signifier as pillar echoing what we are expected to say or do anyway. No banana skin on our way up the career ladder. Isn't this a modern-day version of emotionally charged, opportunistic International Combat League that occupies the post-heroic and transnational European space ideologically? And hasn't the political alliance of the North American claim to unilateralism with the God of the Office of the Federal Chancellor – the ideology of 1.5 percent annual growth - generated a fatal front line on the borders of the „free“ western European world? While in the southern parts of our fair continent the fences and walls are rising up in order to protect us against the people escaping poverty from the post-colonial zones of dependency, transatlantic combat units are positioned in the East, and that is by no means weird spawn of some folklore group in camouflage colours, but the most potent global military alliance by far, installed to protect western „values“ and trade areas.
In the last 25 years, the fissure along the borders described by Heiner Müller in a postscript for the 1989 edition of Malaparte's collection of front line reports „The Volga rises in Europe“ has shifted to distant regions in the East, currently crossing the Dnieper. And it is this fissure that separates Müller's „two Europes“ - one shaped by Byzantium the other shaped by Rome – while „Poland, Hungary, the CSSR and the GDR are waiting for their own history in a delicate state of balance“. The „Technique of Revolution“ seems to serve as an instruction manual of the malcontents in today's metropolises of uprising. At the same time it can be read as a textbook advising – in analogy to Castro's advising Chávez – state leaders on how to defend the key positions of power and crucial geostrategic front lines from within the centre. Our highly dynamic capitalist system accomplishes this task in an equally highly dynamic reversal of Trotsky's conception of „permanent counter-revolution“ framing any attempt to revolt or radically change the system as both impossible and unnecessary.
If there is anything we can learn from Malaparte, the chronicler of a western Europe perishing in doom and death, then it is the idea that our gladly embracing endless working hours and being oblivious to strategic geopolitical expansion are ideological constructs, the result of a compromised understanding of freedom. We need to realise that our economic system depends on expansion and a lifestyle customised to the permanent availability for work, a lifestyle tied less to our (well-)being than to the production of efficiency as its invisible twin. And we should be aware that our imaginary likeness to rebelling minorities in foreign countries, the minorities we love to declare our solidarity with, can only serve emancipatory goals if we are willing to become a minority ourselves in our home countries, and carry out visionary artistic and political coups that do not just echo our moral and economic high ground or regurgitate views and opinions held by the majority.
Text Sebastian Kaiser; translated by Bettina Seifried
