Why is Italy getting rid of the past?
by Rossana Rossanda, from the December 1994 issue
Nuto Revelli
The missing man from Marburg
Einaudi, Turin 1994
Twenty years ago, while collecting material for the World of the vanquished, Nuto Revelli came across a memory that was not his own but that of a partisan friend, Marco. Speaking of 1944 in the Cuneo area and the mood of the peasants, between support for the guerrilla war and fear of reprisal, Marco had suddenly evoked a reprisal that had not taken place, after an action he did not know by whom and on what date, against a German officer who left a surprising image of himself. Every morning he went out on horseback, alone, from the San Rocco barracks, and went into the countryside, calmly passing the banks of the Gesso river, exchanging greetings with the farmers he met, offering a cigarette where the horse watered and perhaps saying a few kind word to the children. One morning the horse had returned to the barracks without him, the Germans had gone out looking for him, his body had never been found. And there had been no retaliation. All unusual.
For over ten years, until 1986, the image of this German lurks in Nuto Revelli. He does not return with what he knows and thinks about the Germans from the experience on the Russian front, which turned his life upside down, and then in the Resistance. The Germans present themselves as ferocious and in packs, the opposite of that courteous and solitary knight. Is a “good” Wehrmacht officer conceivable, one whom people did not fear? He died, because if he had deserted and joined the partisans he would have become more than well known; killed without any plausible sense, how and by whom? Doesn’t that calm image call into question the idea of the enemy, doesn’t it question the ruthlessness of the partisan response? The opening “Lied” of Missing from Marburg it echoes that of Claudio Pavone’s book on the moral problems of every civil war, where you can end up resembling the enemy. This isn’t a killing between Italians, but that German seems separate, more of a person than an enemy, and the dilemma presents itself again. Nuto Revelli will not give it a solution, except in considerations on the immense and indiscriminate devastation of a war. But since he is not a pacifist with good feelings, the message is more complicated. It doesn’t come out at the end of the story, it’s in the story. Which is the story of how he can’t get rid of that “good German”. When we know – soon – that the body remained for months on the pebbles and bushes of an islet between two narrow river arms, exposed to animals and the summer sun, and then carried by a flood, we will think that asked to be buried. It is not only with the earth that one gives rest to a lifeless body, but by pronouncing its name. This gesture, not of forgiveness but of ancient piety, will be made by Revelli. One April 25th, in 1986, the image that inhabits him makes him ask some companions if they knew anything about it. Several know something about it, none with precision. Marco has partly forgotten about it. Who was he, someone who went out alone every day in one of the harshest occupation zones where clashes, ambushes and reprisals were constant? The officers had orders not to go out except at least two. Was he a German? Or a Russian or Ukrainian or Polish, among the former Wehrmacht prisoners recruited and unleashed in the repression battalions? Searching the uncertain traces – it is not even easy to know who was stationed in that barracks in the late spring or summer of 1944 – Revelli even encounters some Czechoslovakian echoes. But only a German would have allowed himself to violate a peremptory provision. And again, it must have been someone who cared little about life, if he preferred a solitary ride to safety, every day and at the same time, through the fields. And why had his unit looked for him so little, and hadn’t retaliated as a rule when one of their officers was hit? And which partisan group had killed him? It seems like an impossible search, the one commanded by the ghost who wants to have a name, and darkly asks what is right or wrong in dying in an ambush on a summer morning. It is not a particularly glorious episode to be reconstructed among the Piedmontese partisans, but which ones? Only misfits, “hit-takers”: not very serious, not very organised, more inclined to a cruel and poorly managed action – that horse that runs away, that body left unburied a short distance from the barracks. Nobody wants to talk about it, assuming they know. The Italian archives are less than approximate, and in the very tidy German archives you can find everything, just to have a name, because they are in alphabetical order. We must first approach it, grab that shadow and then they will respond. So it will take four years to establish the date of that death – some put it in May, some in July and some in August – and to get someone who participated to speak. Because then it wasn’t an ambush by “strikers”, they found that German in front of them, scared like him, as they moved from one place to another. They had never seen him before. He was tall, slim, blond, in his early twenties; they could neither leave him nor take him with them; those who shot him were not even twenty years old. It will take another year for a young researcher, Carlo Gentile, to find the name of a missing person, Rudolf Knaut of the 617 battalion, having established at least with certainty that he was in San Rocco at the time: Rudolf Knaut. And it will take more than another year for it to happen, and for everything that could be known about his short life to be known. Then the dead man will be appeased, and he, Revelli, will be so too.
He was no more a victim than others. He was twenty-four years old, a student, not a member of the Nazi party but incapable of refusing to operate in a repression unit. He didn’t forget himself on solitary rides – he made a connection. He didn’t care much about security, perhaps the loss of his brother on the Russian front weighed on him. He was not a born killer, but perhaps he would have commanded one of the following reprisals. A fragment dragged by events that he could not or would not have refused. Primo Levi would have called him a grey. But the end of the grays is also very sad. Looking back on those years, Revelli, like all those who were there for real, is left with a very bitter taste in his mouth. This path towards the identification of the lone horseman makes the book fascinating, which can be read in one sitting. Carlo Ginzburg once admitted that in the historian there is the detective – a need to discover the other in his exceptionality, what everyone could also be or have been. But in Missing from Marburg there is not only this, which is also an internal journey that is inscribed in a sort of very minute cartography: the locations, the distances, the times, who and for how long stayed in those places, before or after the furious reprisals of that glimpse between spring and summer. “Never before has the small story been the only one that fascinates me,” wrote Revelli in March 1988. The commission’s report on the events of Leopoli, a German concentration camp for Italian soldiers about which no one wants to know, has just been archived in Rome. But if the big story is crossed by the choices of the winners who manipulate it by filling it with what wasn’t there or emptying it of what they wouldn’t want there, the small story isn’t much more inspiring. Memory plays in it, which is not recorded forever – lives pass over it, and when they do not obscure or erase, an even unconscious economy of the person makes the arrangements destined to keep us going.
The same people who remind Revelli of that episode remove it. Many farmers went to the fields knowing of that corpse that was falling apart on the riverbed a few steps away, between fear of being involved and some bitterness towards those who, having killed him, had left a body of remains next to them which, if discovered, would have unleashed German fury on them. or, undiscovered, it left a feeling of guilt in those who did not dare to put it back together. A boy or a girl in the age of questioning ran away to secretly see the German on the river, the horror of a body falling apart, the relief when the flood finally takes it away, leaving a shred of shirt caught in the branches. And if many know of the killing, the date oscillates between fleeting images, it overlaps, it is falsified, until it is anchored by an elderly woman to a small certainty of everyday life, a certain market day. And even the scariest memory fluctuates, how many German soldiers went out armed to look for him: some remember a flock of them, some four or five. And the Lone Ranger? Those who remember him as young, those who think they remember him and for that composure make him forty, make him slip into another person – a major doctor who is also “missing”. Only the five who killed him and still speak in 1990 on the condition that their names not be mentioned have the figure, the how and the time engraved in their minds – even that is silent in the other memories, which work on the unusual and gratuitousness of a ride without purpose.
But when checks and rechecks stretch out the last edge of that creased fabric, it will be the “big” story that allows it to be read. In it lie the modest truths of the German, of those who saw him pass and also of those who killed him and then disappeared, in the mountains or otherwise. When events precipitate, they determine the spaces and movements of lives: without the “large” story the “small” one loses meaning. You can’t even remember. And this is not the last concern that the book leaves. Why does Italy get rid of the past, destroy it, move on? In the midst of the defeat, something in Germany kept papers and documents collected and saved. The German archives are immense, a lot of people work there. In the same storm we scattered the papers, neglected the memory, let the not simple facts sink in (what is simple?). The Institutes of the History of the Resistance are almost an archaeological excavation, kept up more by the passion of some men and women than by a collective need. Italy of this century does not like to remember. Nothing is guarded, nothing processed, nothing is buried, much rots.
Tags: archive Rossana Rossanda Nuto Revelli
