Abstract
Reviewed by: R. J. B. Bosworth, Jesus College, Oxford, UK
The year 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the appearance in Italy of Nuto Revelli’s La strada del davai, a title hard to translate accurately, but signifying the hard, cold and often death-dealing road that Italian POWs traversed after they fell into the hands of the Red Army. ‘Davai’ was the Russian word the imprisoned soldiers heard most often, a shouted demand that they hurry up and get on with it, even when they were depressed and demoralized, starving, their uniforms in tatters, beset by frost-bite or worse, all their detachable property seized by their captors, anything but superb legionaries of a militant Fascist state. Revelli was a pioneer of what would come to be called oral history and which, in time, developed stricter rules and a more complex methodology than he employed. La strada del davai arose from interviews which he conducted in the Piedmontese hills above his home town of Cuneo. He interviewed 42 Alpini survivors from the Russian front, 29 of whom had been POWs and 13 others who, like himself, had somehow escaped the catastrophic defeat from the Don river that began on 17 January 1943 (as a number of his respondents recalled with automatic Catholicism, St Anthony’s Day; this saint is the patron of lost things and causes and was elevated to become a doctor of the Church in 1946). In recording such testimony, Revelli did not take what was then cumbersome and distracting recording equipment with him. First in shorthand and then at greater length, he allowed himself to craft what he recalled as mattering from his respondents’ discourse.
Revelli had already begun his mission of painting the social history of war from below in La guerra dei poveri (1962). He would continue his work, notably in two oral-based studies of peasant life, Il mondo dei vinti (1977) and L’anello forte (1985, focusing on women). Such labours made him an important, if idiosyncratic, figure in Italian cultural life, since he was publishing history that was neither academic nor what Italians call the rotocalco, cheaply suitable for the illustrated magazine. Yet Revelli’s politics were ‘anti-Fascist’ of a recognizable type and thus linked well with the leftist sector of the university world, as well as being rather more effective than austere university writers in opposing the popular appeal of Fascist nostalgia in the rotocalchi. Revelli’s relics of the Eastern Front were bearers of the banality of good, ordinary men, Italian-style. In no sense, therefore, were they ‘Mussolini’s willing executioners’. As Revelli claims in his introduction, ‘they knew nothing of fascism’ (5). Their ignorance of high politics was total, he claimed. ‘The alpini know nothing of the “final solution”. They don’t know there are concentration camps. … They don’t know that millions of Russian prisoners were murdered by the Germans. [In transit] the alpini look at the Jews but they don’t understand!’ (9).
In Revelli’s vivid prose, the Alpini were not perpetrators but victims as they tried to survive (many failed) the catastrophe of war. Ironically they shared their cruel fate with what Revelli emphasized were ‘the immense sufferings of the Soviet people’. As one respondent murmured: ‘the Russian people are kind and have pity on us’ (23) and as another recalled from his moment in a town bombed by the Germans: ‘When we look at the civilians we feel sick at heart; they look at us with compassion. We understand each other without talking’ (42). While the Italians were still in their pomp, heading for the front, they regularly handed out bread and sympathy to those they saw in need and suffering, including Jews, and frequently lamented among themselves over the merciless ‘barbarity’ of their Nazi ally (114). When imprisoned or in flight, they found that Soviet peasants, especially peasant women, despite blows and punishment from their guards, charitably smuggled them food and other support.
It is a touching story and it is good now to have it available in English. It will give comfort to those who still believe, as Revelli announces on his first page ‘the poor always pay for other people’s sins, and I knew monuments and commemorative plaques are the final passage of the sponge over the slate of unpunished sins’ (1). But fifty years later is fifty years later. Revelli’s credo is recognizable as that of the global wave of 1960s and 1970s social history, well embodied in the Anglo-Saxon world by E. P. Thompson, with his determination to give voice to ‘the deluded followers of Joanna Southcott’ and so to each of the humble, suffering and meek. But what critics see as sentimental populism is no longer the credo of that historiography which survives under neoliberal hegemony.
Much of the dilemma of a present-day reader of La strada del davai is summed up in the misleading title that the University of Kansas Press have given the book and in the translator, John Penuel’s, naive introduction (with his own humility, he does introduce himself as a ‘hobbyist’ and not a historian). The term ‘death march’ is most associated with the appalling fate of those Jewish and other concentration camp survivors who, in 1944–45, were dragged west by the Nazis as the Red Army advanced, while the use of Mussolini’s name must be a sales ploy in our marketized world where, we are told, it is the individual who matters.
But were the Alpini only innocent victims? Over the last decade, Italian historiography has rather been focused on perpetrations, with Davide Rodogno, for example in his Fascism’s European Empire (Cambridge, 2006), insisting that the Fascist regime believed purposefully in its own malign version of a new world order, and with the German historian, Thomas Schlemmer, in his Invasori, non vittime: la campagna italiana di Russia 1941–1943 (translated by Laterza, 2009, from the German original of 2005), comparing the Italian invaders with their death-dealing comrades in the Wehrmacht. The best quick summary of where the debate currently lies is Filippo Focardi’s Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano: la rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Laterza, 2013), a scathing attack on the national Italian failure to accept responsibility for their Second World War (in Europe).
Such revisionism may go too far (Schlemmer’s case is notably exaggerated). Moreover, from a different angle, there is a major problem of Eurocentricity in all the literature, given that Fascist Italian killing fields were at their worst, not in the Balkans or the USSR, but in the empire of Libya and Ethiopia where, if local historians are to be believed (and the tabulation is complex), up to half a million indigenous peoples came to premature death as a result of Fascist and Italian intrusion. It is regrettable that Revelli (an omission ignored by Penuel) did not bother to ask harder questions of his respondents about the experience that a number of them had during the Ethiopian war and its immediate aftermath.
In his heralding of Revelli’s book, Penuel implies on more than one occasion that it should be compared with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man as a humane account of the ‘impurity’ of the human condition. I fear the parallel is false and Revelli’s peasant soldiers are overwhelmingly portrayed as victims and nice people. Yet ‘impurity’ can be found, the best example being one testimony that began in passage through German-governed Poland: We put a [Jewish] woman doctor in our car, young, beautiful and sharp. She speaks good Italian, says that the Germans are cremating all the Jews, that her life isn’t worth anything either. We are wily; we hide her well so the officers won’t notice. The woman has a little white dress, all narrow pleats. We take it from her; she is left in her slip with a grey-green [military] shirt over it. We give her food, take turns going in to make love. A lot of other cars have their Jewish women, too; we travel that way for two days. But then the chaplain notices it, there’s trouble, the major intervenes, and we have to leave the Jewish women at the first station. (220)