Read an Excerpt

History

A Novel

Steerforth Press

19 – –

"... procure me a catalogue, a pamphlet, because out here, Mother, news of the great world does not arrive ..."

(from Siberian Letters)

1900–1905

The latest scientific discoveries concerning the structure of matter mark the beginning of the atomic century.

1906–1913

Nothing very new, in the great world. Like all the centuries and the millennia that have preceded it on earth, the new century also observes the well-known, immobile principle of historical dynamics: power to some, servitude to the others. And on this rule are based, in agreement, both the internal order of society (at present dominated by the "Powerful," known as the capitalists) and the international order (known as imperialism) dominated by certain Nations also known as "Powers," which have virtually divided the entire surface of the globe into their respective properties, or Empires. Among them, the latest arrival is Italy, which aspires to the rank of Great Power, and to reach it has already taken armed possession of some foreign countries — weaker than she — forming a little colonial property, but not yet an Empire.

Though always in menacing and armed competition among themselves, the Powers from time to time join in blocs, for common defense of their interests (which are also, on the domestic side, the interest of the "powerful." For the others, those in servitude, who have no share of the gain but still must serve, such interests are presented in terms of ideal abstractions, varying with the variations of advertising methods. In these first decades of the century, the favorite term is Fatherland).

At present, supremacy in Europe is disputed by two blocs: the Triple Entente of France, Great Britain, and czarist Russia; and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy (Italy will later shift to the Entente).

At the center of all social and political movements are the big industries, promoted, for some time now, with their enormous and increasing development, to systems of mass industry (reducing the worker to "a simple accessory of the machine"). The industries need the masses as workers and, conversely, as consumers. And since labor in industry is always at the service of the Powerful and the Powers, among its products prime importance is naturally given to arms (the armament race), which in a mass-consumption economy, find their outlet in mass warfare.

1914

Outbreak of the First World War, between the two opposing blocs of Powers, later joined by other allies or satellites. The new (or perfected) products of the armament industry go into action, among them tanks and gases.

1915–1917

Though most of the country's citizens are opposed to the war (and are therefore called defeatists), the King, the nationalists, and the various powerful interests prevail. Italy enters the war on the side of the Entente. Among others, the United States, a superpower, also sides with the Entente.

In Russia, end of the war against the great Powers, following the Marxist revolution for international social-communism, led by Lenin and Trotsky ("Workers have no Fatherland" "Make war on war" "Transform the imperialist war into civil war").

1918

The First World War ends with the victory of the Entente and its present allies (twenty-seven victorious nations, including the Japanese Empire). Ten million dead.

1919–1920

Representing the victorious Powers and their allies, seventy people are seated at the peace table, to establish among themselves the new division of the world and to draw the new map of Europe. With the end and dismemberment of the defeated Central Empires, the ownership of their colonies is transferred to the victorious Powers, and new independent European states are defined on the basis of nationality (Albania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland). Among other things, Germany is obliged to cede the Danzig corridor (valuable as an access to the sea for Poland), cutting its national territory in two.

The peace terms are contested as being unsatisfactory and temporary by some of the parties, among them Italy (the mutilated peace); and they prove unbearable for the peoples of the defeated countries, condemned to hunger and desperation (punitive peace).

Absent from the peace table is Russia, now surrounded and reduced to an international battlefield with the military intervention of the major Powers (France, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States) in the civil war against the Red Army. In this crucial test, and amid massacres, epidemics, and poverty, the Comintern (the Communist International) is founded in Moscow. It summons all the world's proletariat, with no distinction of race, language, or nationality, to the common goal of revolutionary unity, striving toward the International Republic of the proletariat.

1922

After years of civil war in Russia, ending with the victory of the revolutionaries, the new state, the USSR, has been formed. It is to represent the symbol of hope for all the "wretched of the earth," who from the war — lost or won — have gained nothing but a worsening of their trials; whereas it is to represent the famous "Specter of Communism," now menacing Europe, for the Powers and for the landowners and industrialists, for whom the war has been, mostly, a great speculation.

In Italy (headquarters of one of their most sordid branches) they join their servants and some ill-assorted objectors to the mutilated peace in a desperate fight to save their own interests. And they are not long in finding a champion and suitable instrument in Benito Mussolini, a mediocre opportunist, a "compound of all the flotsam" of the worst Italy. After having tried to launch his career under the banner of socialism, he has found it more advantageous to shift to the opposite side of the Powerful established figures (property owners, the King, and later also the Pope). With a platform consisting only of a guaranteed anti-Communism, truculent and vulgar, he has founded his fasci, a collection of vassals and assassins of the bourgeois revolution. And in such company, he defends his employers' interests with the terrorist violence of poor action squads of bewildered mercenaries. The King of Italy (a man with no title to distinction except the inherited title of king) gladly turns over the government of the country to Mussolini.

1924–1925

In Russia, death of Lenin. Under his successor, who has taken the name of Stalin (steel), the internal requirements of the country (collectivization, industrialization, defense against the Powers who have made a coalition in anti-Communism, etc.) cause an inevitable shelving of the ideals of the Comintern and of Trotsky (permanent revolution) in favor of Stalin's thesis (socialism in a single country). The dictatorship of the proletariat, predicted by Marx, after being reduced to the hierarchic dictatorship of a party, will eventually be degraded to the personal dictatorship of Stalin alone.

In Italy: totalitarian dictatorship of the Fascist Mussolini, who in the meanwhile has conceived a style of demagogy meant to strengthen his power at its roots. It is especially effective with the middle classes, who (through their pathetic ineptitude for true ideals) seek in his false ideals a justification of their own mediocrity: this demagogy consists of the appeal to the glorious race of the Italians, legitimate heirs of history's greatest Power, the Imperial Rome of the Caesars. Thanks to this, and to other similar national directives, Mussolini will be exalted as a "mass idol" and will assume the title of Duce.

1927–1929

In China, the guerrilla war of the Communist revolutionaries begins, led by Mao Tse-tung, against the nationalist central government.

In the USSR, defeat of the opposition. Trotsky is expelled from the Party, and then from the Soviet Union.

In Rome, the Lateran Treaty between the Papacy and Fascism.

1933

In a situation analogous to Italy's, in Germany the established Powerful men turn over the government of the country to the founder of German Fascism (Nazism), Adolf Hitler, a poor maniac, viciously obsessed by death ("The aim is the elimination of living forces"), who in turn is exalted to mass idol, with the title of Führer, adopting as his superpower formula the superiority of the German race over all human races. In consequence, the already-conceived program of the great Reich requires total subjugation and extermination of all the inferior races, beginning with the Jews. Systematic persecution of the Jews begins in Germany.

1934–1936

The Long March of Mao Tse-tung across China (7,500 miles) to elude the preponderant forces of the nationalist government (Kuomintang). Of the 130,000 men of the Red Army, 30,000 survive.

In the USSR, Stalin (also, by now, "mass idol") begins the "Great Purge," with the progressive liquidation of the old revolutionaries of the Party and the Army.

In accordance with the Duce's imperial formula, Italy employs armed violence to seize Abyssinia (an independent African state), and is promoted to the rank of Empire.

Civil war in Spain, provoked by the Catholic-Fascist Franco (called the Generalissimo and El Caudillo) for the benefit of the usual powerful forces, under the threat of the "Specter." After three years of devastation and massacre (among other things, in Europe for the first time whole cities, with their inhabitants, are destroyed from the air), the Fascists (Falangists) prevail, thanks to the solid assistance of the Duce and the Führer and the connivance of all the world Powers.

Führer and Duce form the Rome-Berlin Axis consolidated later in the military treaty known as the Pact of Steel.

1937

Having signed an anti-Comintern pact with the Axis countries, Imperial Japan invades China, where the civil war is temporarily halted so that both sides can make common cause against the invader.

In the USSR (politically isolated in a world of interests hostile to Communism), Stalin intensifies his system of terror at home, while in his foreign relations with the Powers increasingly adopts an objective Realpolitik strategy.

1938

In the USSR, the Stalin system of terror is extended from the higher echelons of the bureaucracy to the masses of the people (millions and millions of arrests, deportations to labor camps, indiscriminate and arbitrary death sentences in a convulsive multiplication, etc.). Still, the earth's oppressed multitudes — for that matter, ill-informed and deliberately deceived — still look to the USSR as the only homeland of their hope (hope difficult to give up, when there are no others).

Munich agreement between the Axis leaders and the Western democracies.

In Germany, after the bloody night known as the Kristallnacht, German citizens are virtually authorized to carry out unhindered genocide of the Jews.

Following the dictates of its ally Germany, Italy proclaims her own racial laws.

1939

Despite the conciliatory pledges given recently in Munich to the Western Powers, Hitler is determined to carry out his program, which demands first of all the satisfaction of German imperial claims against the punitive peace of twenty years earlier. So, after the annexation of Austria, the Führer proceeds to the invasion of Czechoslovakia (immediately imitated by the Duce, who annexes Albania) and then begins diplomatic negotiations with the Soviet Power of Stalin.

The result of the negotiations is a nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union — which allows the two parties to carry out double aggression on Poland, dividing the country between themselves. Hitler's immediate action against western Poland provokes response from the West; France and Britain declare war on Germany, initiating the Second World War.

This will be supplied by the tireless, incessant activity of the war industries, which, putting millions of human organisms to the machine, are already turning out new products (among the first, supertanks and super–armored cars known as Panzers, as well as fighter planes and long-range bomber planes, etc.).

Meanwhile, carrying out his own strategic plans (which already foresee an inevitable clash with Imperial Germany), Stalin, after the agreed invasion of Poland from the East, has proceeded to subdue the Baltic States by force, responding to Finland's incredible resistance, which will finally be quelled by Soviet arms. The Soviet industries also, in a totalitarian commitment, go into mass war-production, concentrating especially on new techniques of rocketry for carrying higher quantities of explosive, etc.

Spring–Summer 1940

The first phase of the Second World War is marked by the Führer's rapid advance. Having occupied Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, he overwhelms France and reaches the gates of Paris. Convinced of the imminent victory, the Duce, who has remained more or less neutral till now, decides, at the last minute, to live up to his part of the Pact of Steel ("a few thousanddead will be worth it, for a seat at the peace table"); and he makes his declaration of war against Great Britain and France, four days before the Germans enter Paris. But neither Hitler's triumphant successes nor his peace overtures succeed in achieving the withdrawal of Great Britain, which instead engages in a desperate resistance. Elsewhere, Italian intervention causes the opening of a new front in the Mediterranean and in Africa. The Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, of the Axis is extended and prolonged beyond all expectation.

Air war of Hitler against England, with uninterrupted bombings and total destruction of roads, harbors, installations, and entire inhabited cities. A new verb is invented: to coventrize, from the English city of Coventry, pulverized by the German air raids. The terroristic battle, continued without pause for weeks and months with the intention of breaking down British resistance (in view of a possible, decisive landing), does not, however, achieve the desired effect.

The action in progress in the West, meanwhile, does not distract the Führer from other secret projects of his own for an imminent action in the East against the Soviet Union (foreseen in the historic plan of the Great Reich, which calls for the extermination of the inferior Slavic race and the erasing from the earth of the Bolshevik Specter). But here again the Führer underestimates his adversary's resources, as well as the operation's risks.

Tripartite Pact: Germany-Italy-Japan, with the aim of establishing a "new order" (Imperial-Fascist) in Eurasia. The pact is signed also by Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Autumn–Winter 1940

Sudden Italian aggression against Greece, announced by those responsible as "an easy stroll." The ill-advised undertaking proves, instead, disastrous for the Italians. Driven back by the Greeks, in a disorderly rout, without supplies, they are overtaken by winter in the mountains of Epirus.

The Italian fleet suffers severe losses in the Mediterranean.

In North Africa, the Italians have difficulty defending their garrisons, threatened by the desert army of the British ...

One January afternoon in the year 1941 a German soldier was out walking in the San Lorenzo district in Rome. He knew precisely four words of Italian and of the world he knew little or nothing. His first name was Gunther. His surname is unknown.

1

One January afternoon in the year 1941, a German soldier was out walking, enjoying an afternoon's liberty, when he found himself wandering alone, through the San Lorenzo district of Rome. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon, and as usual at that hour there were very few people in the streets. None of the passersby looked at the soldier in any case, because the Germans, even if they were the Italians' comrades in the current world war, were not popular in certain working-class areas. Nor was the soldier in any way distinct from the others of the series: tall, blondish, with the usual excessive discipline in his bearing and, especially in the position of his cap, a provocative assertion of conformity.

Naturally, if anyone chose to observe him, he showed some individual characteristics. For example, in contrast with his martial stride, he had a desperate expression in his eyes. His face betrayed an incredible immaturity, although he was six feet tall, more or less. And his uniform — a really comical thing for a soldier of the Reich, particularly in those early days of the war — though new and fitting his thin body tightly, was short at the waist and in the sleeves, exposing his thick wrists, rough and innocent, like a worker's or peasant's.

---

Excerpted from History by Elsa Morante, William Weaver. Copyright © 2000 Steerforth Press edition. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---