Kaputt (1944)

זועות במלחמת העולם השנייה. אבי העריץ את הספר​ ( )

Le lac était comme une immense plaque de marbre blanc sur laquelle étaient posées des centaines et des centaines de têtes de chevaux. Les têtes semblaient coupées net au couperet. Seules, elles émergeaient de la croûte de glace. 'foutes les têtes étaient tournées vers le rivage. Dans les yeux dilatés on voyait encore briller la terreur comme une flamme blanche. Près du rivage, un enchevêtrement de chevaux férocement cabrés émergeait de la prison de glace... Les soldats du colonel Merikallio descendaient. au lac, et s'asseyaient sur les têtes des chevaux. On eût dit les chevaux de bois d'un carrousel.

Kaputt is an intriguing, disturbing, interesting book, and I am indebted to "irley" on librarything.com for having introduced me to it, and to Curzio Malaparte. According the wikipedia bio, Malaparte (1898-1957) was born in Tuscany as Kurt Erich Suckert. His mother was a Lombard, and his father German; he used the name Malaparte from 1925; it means "he of the bad place" and is a pun on "Bonaparte". This indicates a certain irreverence and ironical touch, both of which are abundantly in evidence in Kaputt. Malaparte originally supported Mussolini, but later turned against both him, and Hitler, and for that he spent several years in jail, at various times. Malaparte had a remarkable knowledge of Europe and of the arts: architecture, literature, painting all of which shines through in his book. He also served in the Italian diplomatic service and as a correspondent from which he established friendships and connections with a wide range of senior, aristocratic, and influential people across Europe.

Kaputt is described as a "novelistic" account of Malaparte's experiences as a wartime correspondent, primarily on the eastern front, in Finland, Poland, Germany, other countries on the eastern border. He writes in an often lyrical style with considerable, detailed attention to the architecture and organization of places, to the play of light in nature and inside rooms, almost sensual descriptions of food and drink harmonized with the moods of people and of nature for good or ill, tactile descriptions of odours and sights both beautiful and horrific, and sharp observations on the characteristics of different nationalities. There is almost a touch of surrealism in some of his stories and this is appropriate trying to convey the extremes of emotions and situations that he experienced. He recounts a couple of remarkable dinners with Frank, the German Governor General of Poland, and other Germans, that are shot through with irony, which goes completely over the heads of the Germans when he talks, for instance, about conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and the high "culture" of the German nation; the exchanges are practically hallucinatory in their divorce from any human reality or empathy. He highlights, in his description of Frank, the complexity of character that puts lie to the assumption of some that these people were all one-dimensional madmen. He describes Frank as a "particular mixture of cruel intelligence, refinement, vulgarity, brutal cynicism and polished sensitiveness" but with a, "deep zone of darkness within him."

A description of a pogrom in Jassy, Romania is horrific in its inevitability, its detail, its inhumanity and degradation and the futility that Malaparte felt in witnessing it, but being able to do very little to mitigate it. He recounts a brilliant and horrific story of the "dead fighting with the living" when corpses burst from a cattle car and bury a friend; his humanity, his rage, and his sense of impotence come through in the descriptions and the writing.

Malaparte had no illusions about who would win the war on the eastern front, and his frank dispatches got him into considerable trouble. He is also exacting in his analysis of the Germans and their reactions:

"The winning war was over, the losing war had begun. I saw the white stain of fear growing in the dull eyes of German officers and soldiers. I saw it spreading little by little, gnawing at the pupils, singeing the roots of the eyelashes and making the eyelashes drop one by one, like the long yellow eyelashes of the sunflowers. When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless. This is when the Germans become wicked."

Malaparte clearly sees the war as an end of a time or an era in Europe, but he remains hopeful that from the ashes and the destruction something good can emerge with the removal of the evil of fascism in both its German and Italian variations. His moving description, at the end, of the horrors of war-shattered Naples which has been left to the poor and the homeless because all the aristocrats and wealthy people have fled, is an empathetic counterpoint to the world of privilege and wealth, tinged with not a little hypocrisy and falsehood, that Malaparte knew and moved in, and observed throughout his life and career.

I enjoyed this book. Its mixed kaleidoscope of people, relations, emotions, horror, brutality and sensitivity, reflect the complexities of the times and the extremes produced by war.

As a journalist for the Corriere della Sera Malaparte native of Prato, Italy found himself in some unique situations--one can check out 'The Volga rises in Europe' for some of the war correspondence he sent home. Kaputt is another fictionalized account of that correspondence. Malaparte traveled all over Eastern Europe to the Finnish-Russian front, the German Russian front into Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary etc. and back into Germany itself and sometimes home to Italy. He knew most of the hoi polloi of Europe and had occasion to run into many of the movers and shakers behind the Nazi war machine. This novelized version of the events was written during this time and separated into three parts and left in the hands of people he trusted because of the severe antipathy he had for the German war machine and the German population whom he often describes as 'kranken volk' sick people. Malaparte renders his war scenes in collosal and very descriptive landscapes. This is a painful book to read in the sense that it describes human atrocity in a clean and very elegant and very clear eyed manner as if these people were not just committing atrocities on others but also in reality and in their ignorance on themselves. What it finally sets out to describe is an European culture that has been destroyed through hate. ( )