André Prah, Walter Murch, and the frozen horses of Lake Ladoga

André Prah and some of his artwork from "The Ice Horses of Ladoga"
Picture source

A couple of things related to Curzio Malaparte's chapter in Kaputt related to the ice horses of Ladoga…

André Prah "started to make his own visual representation of the tragedy. In wood from the shores of the Baltic Sea." The quote is from a Facebook page showing examples of his artwork (also see the photo album on the Facebook page. My favorite post from the page:

After photographing the horses on Lake Ladoga's ice, it was time for the three of us, Heimerson the reporter, Lundgren the photographer, and myself to leave Russia. At the border a stern-looking customs officer pointed at the horses in the trunk and required an explanation. The photographer then pointed at me and said: "The artist is mentally disturbed. Cuckoo." With an embarrassed smile, the customs officer politely replied: "Please proceed."

Radiolab recently had a podcast that includes discussion on Malaparte's story: the link can be found here. The guys at Radiolab focus on the story of the frozen horses of Lake Ladoga and the science behind it—could it have possibly happened? The results are interesting, even if they have no bearing on whether it actually happened. Walter Murch, last seen on this blog for his translation of selected works of Malaparte (The Bird that Swallowed its Cage: The Selected Writings of Curzio Malaparte), discusses how he came to discover Malaparte's writing. To his credit, Murch emphasizes that Malaparte mixed fact and fiction, implying that just because he wrote a chapter on this incident it doesn't mean it happened. There's a reason Kaputt is in the fiction section, after all. But the science behind the possibility of it happening is still interesting.

Update: Thanks to Øystein for the following YouTube link to a scene from My Winnipeg (The Cold Winter of 1926) and more ice horses. It definitely looks like Malaparte inspired this scene.

The Bird that Swallowed its Cage: The Selected Writings of Curzio Malaparte

The Bird that Swallowed its Cage: The Selected Writings of Curzio Malaparte
Adapted and Translated by Walter Murch
Afterword by Walter Weschler
(Counterpoint: Berkeley: 2012)
ISBN: 978-1619020610

I’ve written about Curzio Malaparte’s World War II ‘novel’ Kaputt. While I’m waiting for my library to get a copy of the recent NYRB Classics re-release of The Skin I thought I would post on two other works of Malaparte’s that have been translated into English, starting with this collection of excerpts. (The post on the other book, The Volga Rises in Europe, will come in a few weeks.)

Walter Murch, the famed film editor and sound designer, has provided translations and adaptations from several of Malaparte’s writings. I’m going to spend some time on Murch’s comments about his translation and adaptation since I think it important for a reader to know what and how things have been changed from the original.

How does an award-winning film guy decide to dabble in translation? When interviewed about film adaptation, Murch makes the analogy

that filmmakers adapting a novel are performing a kind of multilevel from the language of text to the language of image, movement, and sound, and that the old Italian adage traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor) particularly applies: an attempt to be overly faithful to the text often results in a damning-up of its deeper currents, so that an artful betrayal of the original work seems to serve an adaptation best, something along the lines of Picasso’s dictum: art is a lie that tells the truth. (8)

It’s a point I’ve made many times (although never quite so well) when reviewing films adapted from novels. Murch realized he had never tried actual translation so he turned to one of his favorite foreign authors, Malaparte. In doing so, he felt that some of the lines he translated naturally arranged themselves in lines of free verse.

Over the years, I worked on a number of Malaparte’s stories and meditations, none of which had yet been translated into English. Many of them…wound up also being “translated” from prose into free-verse format. With hindsight, there appear to be four reasons for this shift: the rich, almost overwhelming density of Malaparte’s original text; the fabulous nature of his imagery; his frequent use of repetitions and chantlike sequences (dented wheels, transmission belts, gleaming steel handles, bearings, gauges, gearings and crankshafts scattered on the factory floor); and the cross-sensory nature of his metaphors (the air filled with water and stone; a bitter blue light). (9)

Murch covers the game Malaparte plays with the truth in the translator’s essay “That Character Called ‘I’.”Murch highlights the layers of lies and truths at the heart of certain episodes, including Malaparte’s own self-referential prank pulled in The Skin. In this passage, Malaparte relies on his reputation of telling fantastical stories when pretending to eat a soldier’s hand supposedly blown off by a grenade and landed in the soup kettle. Malaparte uses imagined realities to heighten the reader’s feelings, employing the approach of the above quote attributed to Picasso. For more on Murch’s approach to translating Malaparte, I recommend this interview with Joy Katz at the Poetry Foundation.

If you have read any of Malaparte’s work you will recognize many common themes the author often focuses on in this collection, such as war, death, decay, betrayal, fear, and sadness. The following exchange from “Partisans, 1944” encapsulates how Malaparte seemed to feel about World War II in particular and the 20th-century in general:

This war is interesting for one reason only, laughed the Russian. It has murdered Europe.

Exactly, I said.

But Europe was already dead before it was murdered, said the Russian.

Not everybody knew that, I said. Now everybody does. (97)

Murch’s use of blank verse works most of the time for me since I find myself slowing down and focusing more on the word choices in a line than I would have in a prose line (which probably says more about my reading habits than anything else), and for the reasons Murch lists in his introduction. The prose, though, has no problem standing on its own and providing some of the same shock and humor as in Kaputt. One of the better stories of the collection, “The Traitor/El Traidor” was published in the London Review of Books. Malaparte (or rather the “I” of the story) finds himself at the siege of Leningrad when Axis troops capture several Russian soldiers who turn out to be from Spain. The farce and contradictions that play out between Malaparte and the Spanish Ambassador in Helsinki repeats itself during the absurd charade in Spain once one of the prisoners returns home.

A great inclusion in the collection is the “missing” chapter from Kaputt, omitted from Cesare Foligno’s English translation. Titled “The Gun Gone Mad,” it just as easily could have been titled “Dogs” to fit in with the novel’s animal-based chapter theme. The chapter takes place during Operation Retribution, the German bombing of Belgrade. Malaparte observes the bombing from nearby and visits the Italian embassy in Belgrade after the Germans take control of the city. He tells the story as if he had been in the embassy during the bombing, partly from the vantage point of Spin, the envoy’s setter. Readers of Kaputt will find passages about the bombing familiar:

And the city shook to its foundations, with howling crowds pouring into the streets. But every so often, between one explosion and the next, there would be a great silence: everything would hold its breath, immobile, death all around. It was exactly how the silence of nature will be when the Earth itself is dead—that extreme, immense sidereal silence of the Earth when it is cold and dead, when the destruction of the world will finally have been achieved.

Then suddenly another horrendous explosion would uproot trees and houses, and the sky would collapse upon the city with a clap of thunder. (128)

Unfortunately the closing comfort that Spin finds, turning him from sadness, despair, shame, and self-pity to his normal self isn’t available for humans…the war has changed everything.

The best parts of the collection achieve the haunting, lyrical nature of Kaputt while the lesser pieces provide additional insight into Malaparte’s vast catalog underrepresented in English translation. Highly recommended.

Kaputt summary

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, translation by Cesare Foligno

Kaputt proves to be a fictional memoir, or a fantasy intertwined with historical events, by Curzio Malaparte. Employed by an Italian newspaper during World War II, he was able to travel around Europe and to the Eastern Front, at ease with dignitaries, soldiers and peasants alike. A large part of the appeal of Kaputt (to me, anyway) lies with the uncertainty…the ambiguity…of and within many of the scenes. As Milan Kundera pointed out about the book, “It is strange, yes, but understandable: for this reportage is something other than reportage; it is a literary work whose aesthetic intention is so strong, so apparent, that the sensitive reader automatically excludes it from the context of accounts brought to bear by historians, journalists, political analysts, memoirists.” (italics in original) I have included quite a few lengthy quotes from Kaputt so anyone unfamiliar with the book can get a feel of Malaparte’s style and approach.

Malaparte is such an interesting character and World War II such an incredible event—why dress either one up beyond reality? Part of the answer lies in what Malaparte was trying to achieve, both personally and in his book. In “dressing up” history, Malaparte has shown what happened in a completely different light. It struck me at one point that, in some respects, Malaparte’s fictional memoir isn’t that different from the speeches in Thucydides’ work—they impart what happened even if not exactly word for word what was said, aiming for “what was nearest to the sum of the truth”. Then again, maybe not. The major difference lies with Thucydides laying out his methodology as attempting to recapture truthfully what happened. Malaparte never makes any such claim. The better analogy would be with Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories, both full of irony, ambiguity, and invention. Like Babel, what isn't being included feels just as important as what is detailed.

It is easy to critique Kaputt. His gothic fantasies go way over the top at times. His repetitions, hypnotic at times, can become tedious. He takes advantage of the fact that implausibility doesn’t really exist in such a surreal setting. Malaparte seems to be playing fast and loose with facts in order to delve into the truth. Does he succeed? It’s hard to tell since what he wrote for the newspaper at the time of the events and what ends up in Kaputt can be very different. Malaparte’s (the character) denunciation of Italy and Germany in Kaputt are firm, but how much of that comes from his conviction at the time of his writing the book of certain Axis defeat? I liked the comment in the Afterword by Dan Hofstadter that the book “challenges us to question its veracity much as a con man defies us to doubt his good faith.” Underlying his extended tropes of animals for facets or aspects of the war resides a metaphor that civilization in general, and Europe in particular, was committing suicide in the war.

Posts about Kaputt:

The Horses

The Mice

The Dogs

The Birds

The Reindeer

The Flies
Update (29 Mar 2013): An interview with Walter Murch on translating Malaparte.

Kaputt: The Flies

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, translation by Cesare Foligno
(For a note on this book as a literary work instead of a memoir, see the earlier posts on Kaputt)

For the first time during the four years of war, for the first time in the course of my cruel journey through slaughter, hunger and devastated towns, I heard the word “blood” spoken with sacred and mysterious reverence. In every part of Europe—in Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Poland, Russia and Finland—that word had spelled hatred, fear, contempt, joy, horror, cruel barbarous complacency and sensuous pleasure; it had always filled me with horror and disgust. To me the word “blood” had become more horrible than blood itself. I was less shocked touching blood, bathing my hands in that poor blood that was shed in every country in Europe, than I was when I heard the word “blood.” But in Naples, in commonplace Naples, in the unhappiest, hungriest, most humbled, forsaken and tortured city in Europe, I heard the word “blood” uttered with religious awe, with sacred respect, with a deep feeling of charity, in that high, pure, gentle, innocent tone in which Neapolitan people say: mother, child, Heaven, Madonna, bread, Jesus—with the same innocence, purity and gentle simplicity. Those toothless mouths, those pale, worn lips, cried ”’O Sangue! ’O sangue!” as if it were an appeal, a prayer, a sacred name. Long centuries of hunger and slavery, of robed, canonized, crowned and anointed barbarism, long centuries of want, cholera, corruption and shame had not succeeded in smothering the sacred reverence for blood in that miserable and noble people. Screaming, weeping, stretching their hands to Heaven, the crowd ran toward the Duomo; they invoked blood with stupendous rage. They wept for wasted blood, the blood shed in vain, the soil bathed in blood, the bloody rags, the precious blood of man mingled with the dust of the roads, the clots of blood on the walls of prisons. A pity, a kind of sacred fear was reflected in the feverish eyes of the crowd and in the hands lifted to Heaven and shaken by a violent tremor. ”’O sangue! 'O sangue! 'O sangue!” For the first time during four years of a ferocious, merciless, cruel war, I heard that word spoken with religious awe, with sacred respect, and I heard it on the lips of a famished multitude—betrayed, forsaken without bread, without homes and without graves. After four long years, once again that word had a divine sound. A sense of hope, rest and peace came over me at the sound of that word, ”’O sangue!”…

I asked a man beside me what had happened. A rumor had spread through town that a bomb had hit the Duomo and wrecked the crypt in which the two caskets containing the miraculous blood of San Gennaro are preserved. It was only a rumor, but it had spread like a fire through the town and reached the darkest alleys and the deepest caves. Until that moment during the four years of war, it seemed as if not a single drop of blood had been shed. Despite the millions of dead scattered over all of Europe, it seemed as if not a single drop of blood had moistened the earth. But as soon as the news spread that those two precious caskets had been shattered, that those few drops of clotted blood had been lost, it seemed as if the entire world were soaked in blood, as if the veins of humanity were severed to quench the insatiable earth. Then a priest came out on the steps of the Duomo, raised his arms asking for silence and announced that the precious blood was safe. ’O sangue! 'O sangue! 'O sangue! The kneeling people wept invoking the blood, and everybody was smiling; tears of joy ran down the faces hollowed by hunger; high hope filled everyone’s heart, as if no single drop of blood would ever drop again on the thirsting earth.

In a book full of strange people and surreal events, this section started slowly as Malaparte describes a day at a golf course in Rome with high society. The focus on Mussolini’s son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, highlights the tension and ambiguity apparent throughout the book. Malaparte pulls no punches in describing Ciano while at the same time acknowledging the debt he owes him (Ciano interceded for Malaparte’s release from prison). The social scene highlights a disconnect from a war they believe “has gone out of fashion.” Malaparte laments for more than just the social scene when he describes “the agony of a society that was fated to die.”

The second part of this section takes part in Naples as Malaparte has just been released (yet again) from jail. In contrast to the social scene he earlier described in Rome, most of the people left in Naples are disfigured or ailing because of the constant war there for three years. During a bombing raid he enters the caves with “the cripples: the halt, the twisted, the lame, the hunch-backed, the maimed, the legless”. An entire underground economy is literally and figuratively running here. Like the high society set, the Neapolitans are resigned to their fate, but their fate is markedly different from those in Rome. At the same time, though, the people in Naples demonstrate more strength and resiliency.

Flies have been a staple in Kaputt, especially in the second section “The Mice” which focused on Jews. Associated with death throughout the book, the flies represent the inescapable atmosphere of war. Flies invade the Roman golf course every day, providing one of the few physical inconveniences the socialites endure. In Naples, however, the “stench of corpses rose from under the mountains of stones and plaster. Entire families of lazy fat flies with gold wings buzzed over the debris.” Instead of an occasional nuisance, the flies are constant companions for anyone directly involved in the war. In Naples, looking for fresh water, Malaparte finds a few drops in a bar located amid rubble and flies.

”Why don’t you fight the flies in Naples? At home, in northern Italy—in Milan, Turin, Florence, even in Rome—the city governments have organized campaigns against the flies. You never see a fly in our towns.

“There isn’t a single fly left in Milan?”

“No, not a one. We have killed them all. It is a preventive measure to avoid epidemics and diseases.”

“In Naples we also have struggled against the flies. We have actually waged war against flies. We have been fighting the flies for the past three years.”

“Then why are there still so many flies in Naples?”

“Well, you know how it is! The flies have won!”

Kaputt: The Reindeer

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, translation by Cesare Foligno
(For a note on this book as a literary work instead of a memoir, see the earlier posts on Kaputt)

Frederick turned his face to me, his skin was yellow and wrinkled, his eyes were shining, humble and despairing. Suddenly I recognized his look.

I recognized his look and began to tremble. He had the look of a beast; I thought with horror that he had the mysterious look of a beast. He had the eyes of a reindeer—the humble, despairing eyes of a reindeer. I wanted to say to him, “No, Friki, not you,” but he looked at me in silence, like a reindeer, with humble and despairing eyes.

The other officers, Frederick’s companions, were young too, perhaps twenty, twenty-five or thirty, and they all bore the same marks of age, decomposition and death on their yellow, wrinkled faces. All of them had the humble and despairing eyes of reindeer. In every face, in every eye was the beautiful, wonderful tameness, the sadness of wild beasts; each had that absorbed and melancholy madness of beasts, their mysterious innocence, their terrible sorrow—that fearful Christian pity that beasts have. It occurred to me that beasts were Christ, and my lips trembled and my hands shook. I looked at Frederick. I looked at his companions, and every one of them had the same withered, wrinkled face, the same bare brow, the same toothless smile, the same look of a reindeer. Even cruelty, even German cruelty had gone out of those faces. They had the look of Christ, the look of a beast. Suddenly I was reminded of what I had been told when I had first reached Lapland, of what everyone talked about in low voices, as if it were a mysterious thing, in fact it was mysterious, a forbidden subject; I was reminded of what I had been told since I had arrived in Lapland about those young German soldiers, those Alpenjägers of General Dietl’s, who had hung themselves from trees in the depths of the forests, or who sat for days on the shores of a lake gazing at the skyline and then shot themselves through their heads, or else were driven by a wonderful madness, almost an amorous fantasy—roaming through the woods like wild beasts and threw themselves into the still waters of the lakes, or who stretched themselves on beds of lichen under the firs that roared in the wind and waited for death—letting themselves die slowly in the abstract, frozen loneliness of the forest.

Malaparte gets carried away in his symbolism at times—the reindeer as Christ refer to a separate description of the reindeer which meekly head to their autumnal “Calvary,” or slaughter by the Lapps. This section, though, reads more like Hunter S. Thompson, with a drunken revelry at the Lapland Governor’s palace, Malaparte running into a naked Himmler in the sauna, and a German general fighting with a salmon. Even far from the front, the surreal insanity of the war punctuates life for the Lapps, the ambassadors, and German soldiers.

This section leaves me baffled—despite having several memorable scenes it feels like the weakest section so far. Malaparte’s hypnotic writing, complete with overwrought imagery and constant repetition, provides the intended laughter but at times it feels as strained as the world he describes. I feel like the German general in the alpine stream, carried a mile downstream as he fights to land what is believed to be the last salmon in the river, only to have a subordinate plug the fish with two bullets. Wait…maybe I feel like the fish. The absurdity, however, memorably lingers.

In a section (and book) full of absurdity, the drunken party at the Lapland Governor’s palace is both over-the-top and convincing, with national identity easily insulted and irony completely misunderstood. In the meantime, knives flash and German soldiers enter the room on all fours, howling like beasts. All that was missing was Malaparte starting this story with “We were somewhere around Rovaniemi on the edge of the Arctic Circle when the alcohol began to take hold.” Even with overdramatic language at times and surreal scenarios (or maybe because of them), Malaparte manages to portray not just reindeers or soldiers but a large part of the world intent on suicide.

Kaputt: The Birds

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, translation by Cesare Foligno
(For a note on this book as a literary work instead of a memoir, see the earlier posts on Kaputt)

When night began to rise from the sea with its large bunches of violets already damp with nocturnal dew—at night the sea puts on its windowsills large bunches of violets that scent the air, filling the rooms with the pleasing breath of the sea—my friend said, “The night will be clear. They will certainly come. I must put the presents for the British flyers in the orchard.” I did not understand, and I was puzzled as I watched my friend enter the house and come out carrying a doll, a little wooden horse, a trumpet and two little bags of sweets which he, without saying a word and perhaps mischievously enjoying my bewilderment, went about carefully placing here and there among the rose bushes and lettuce clumps, on the pebbles of the narrow path and on the edge of a bowl in which a family of goldfish softly flashed.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He gazed at me with a serious expression and smiled. He told me that his two children, who were already in bed, had been overcome with a terrific fear during the first bombings, that the health of the youngest one had been seriously affected—and that he had evolved a means of changing the fearful bombings of Naples into an entertainment for his children. As soon as the alarm hooted through the night, my friend and his wife jumped out of bed and, gathering the two little ones in their arms, began shouting merrily: “What fun! What fun! The British planes are coming to throw their presents to you!” They went down into their cellar that offered scant and ineffectual shelter and, huddling there, they passed the hours of terror and death laughing and shouting, “What fun!” until the boys fell happily asleep dreaming about the presents from the British flyers. From time to time, as the crash of the bombs and the crumbling of buildings came nearer, the little ones awoke, and the father said: “Now, now, they are throwing down your presents!” The two boys clapped their hands with joy, shouting: “I want a doll! I want a sword! Daddy, do you think that the British will bring me a little boat?” Toward dawn, when the hum of the motors moved off fading slowly into a sky that was already clear, the father and mother led the children by their hands into the garden, saying, “Look for them, look! They must have dropped them on the grass.” The two boys searched among the rose bushes, wet with dew, among the lettuce plants and the tomato stalks, and they found a doll here, a little wooden horse there and, farther off, a bag of candy. The two children were no longer afraid of bombings, instead they waited anxiously for them and welcomed them joyfully. Some mornings, searching through the grass, they found little sping-propelled airplanes—undoubtedly poor British airplanes that those nasty Germans had brought down with their guns while they bombarded Naples to make Neapolitan children happy.

Not a bad metaphor for Malaparte’s book, except he doesn't try to hide the underlying truth about the war. His intentions, aesthetically clear and morally open, tend to overwhelm his story at times. The anecdote of Ante Pavelic, the Croatian wartime Chief-of-State, and the basket with forty pounds of human eyes is told in this section. Over-the-top gothic fantasy? Of course, and totally unnecessary. Malaparte uses the story as a short-hand account of the changes he saw in Pavelic and the divergence between his rhetoric about goodness and justice and what was really happening.

Kaputt can seem like Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession on steroids at times but Malaparte deliberately adds ambiguities and falsehoods, such as lying about the etymology of the word kaputt. Clearly he’s trying to get at a deeper truth by adding fiction to fact, but does it work? I’m not so sure it does…but then I’m not so sure it doesn’t. (How’s that for ambiguity?) It is a question I’ll need to think about as I read the last two sections.

Eyes play a central role in this section, focusing on the ability to see what is real. His anecdote on seeing German soldiers with no eyelids (they had been frozen off during the winter they spent on the eastern front) symbolically depicts what happens when you can't block out seeing the war: the future is lunacy. Malaparte recounts many stories in this section but the theme gradually focuses on the impact the war has on women, whether it’s the daughter of Mussolini, the wife of a German ambassador, or Jewish girls conscripted into military brothels. As long as hope survives for the ambassador’s wife or the prostitutes they endure, even though they descend “little by little into the dark and lonely feminine world of Germany at war”.

Tacky, I know, but I just strained these pitted cherries from the brandy and sugar they have been soaking in for the past six months and they reminded me of this section...

Kaputt: The Dogs

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, translation by Cesare Foligno
(For a note on this book as a literary work instead of a memoir, see the earlier posts on Kaputt)

Suddenly a few black dots darted out of a forest in the distance, then more and still more; they moved quickly, disappeared in the bushes, turned up nearer and rushed rapidly toward the German Panzers. “Die Hunde! Die Hunde!--The dogs! The dogs!” cried the soldiers around us in terrified voices. A gay and ferocious barking came to us on the wind, the baying of houds on the track of a fox.

Under the sudden onslaught of the dogs the Panzers began to rush about zigzagging and firing wildly. The attacking units back of the armored cars stopped, hesitated and scattered; they fled here and there across the plain as if in the throes of panic. The rattle of the machine guns was clear and light, like the tinkling of glass. The baying of the pack bit into the roar of the motors. Now and again came a faint voice smothered by the wind and in the widespread rustle of grass. ”Die Hunde! Die Hunde!” Suddenly we heard the dull thud of an explosion; then another, and another. We saw two, three, five Panzers blow up, the steel plates flashing within a tall fountain of earth.

“Ah, the dogs!” said General von Schobert passing a hand over his face. They were “anti-armored-car dogs” that had been trained by the Russians to look for food under the armored cars. Kept without food for a day or two, they were brought to the front line whenever an attack was impending. As soon as the German Panzers appeared out of the woods and spread out fanlike on the plain, the Russian soldiers shouted ”Pashol! Pashol!--Off! Off!” and unleashed the famished pack. The dogs carrying cradles on their backs loaded with high explosives and with steel contact rods like the aerials of a radar set-up, ran quickly and hungrily to meet the armored cars, in search of food under the German Panzers. ”Die Hunde! Die Hunde!” shouted the soldiers around us. General von Schobert, deathly pale, a sad smile on his bloodless lips, passed a hand over his face, then looked at me and said in a voice that was already dead, “Why? Why? Even the dogs!”

The German soldiers became daily more ferocious. The hunt for the dogs continued with a merciless rage, while the old Cossacks laughed and slapped their knees. “Ah, bednii sobachki!--Ah, poor dogs!” they said.

The irony, as usual with most of Malaparte’s book, lies in uncertainty. Are the Cossacks addressing and laughing at the German soldiers or the “red dogs” of the Dnieper? The same question applies to a reading test administered to captured Russians—those that could read well were promised clerical jobs while those who failed could look forward to heavy manual labor. Those that passed the test stood off to one side, content with their fate and joking with those who failed, calling them dogs for the amount of work they will have to do. Then the readers are led against a wall and shot. “Russia must be cleared of all this learned rabble. The peasants and workers who can read and write too well are dangerous” said the technical advisor attached to the German unit with which Malaparte traveled. Who exactly are the dogs?

Can such a question be answered during war as everything turns surreal? An injured elk crawling up on the lawn of the Finnish President’s palace no longer seems like an event out of the ordinary. People dressing up for an evening that never darkens appear dead, lifeless. "The strangest thing about these luminous nights of the North ... is that nocturnal gestures, thoughts, sentiments, objects that are born only in the secrecy of darkness, and that the night jealously guards and protects in its dark bosom, can be seen in full daylight." The omnipresent fear his dinner guests discuss affects people differently, but throughout Kaputt Malaparte details a modern consciousness laying itself bare just like the never-ending summer days above the Arctic Circle.

Kaputt: The Mice

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, translation by Cesare Foligno

(For a note on this book as a literary work instead of a memoir, see Kaputt: The Horses)

Sartori stood facing the car, his face raised and wiped his sweat with a handkerchief. Suddenly the door yielded and the [train] car was opened. A throng of prisoners hurled itself at Sartori, knocking him down and falling on top of him. The dead were fleeing from the train. They dropped in masses—with dull thuds, like concrete statues. Buried under the corpses, crushed by their huge, cold weight, Sartori struggled and wriggled trying to free himself from under that dead burden, from under that frozen mountain; finally he disappeared beneath the pile of corpses, as if it were an avalanche of stones. The dead are wrathful, stubborn, ferocious.

“The Mice,” the second part of the novel, focuses on Jews in Poland and Romania during the early part of World War II. Those tunneling out from the Warsaw ghetto were called rats but the mice imagery could just as well describe the people swarming over the dead, stripping them of their clothes and jewelry.

Malaparte’s account brims with discordant moments, such as a luxurious dinner held by the Governor-General of Poland in honor of boxer Max Schmeling followed by a stop at the ghetto walls where soldiers take shots at “rats” emerging from tunnels. Malaparte’s descriptions of the pogrom carried out in Jassy, Romania and its aftermath weave a surreal atmosphere that mesh with the author’s dreams. But it is Malaparte’s focus on fear in this section I want to look at for a moment. The Jews in Jassy were fearful, aware that the stormclouds of violence were about to open on them. But it is the “the true German cruelty—of fear and loneliness”, that runs through this section:

In no part of Europe had Germans appeared to me so naked, so exposed as in Poland. In the course of my long war experience, the conviction had grown within me that the German has no fear of the strong man, of the armed man who faces him with courage and stands up to him. The German fears the defenseless, the weak and the sick. The leitmotiv of fear, of German cruelty as a result of that fear, had become the principal keynote of my entire war experience. In an attentive observer with a modern and Christian mind, this “fear” arouses horror and pity, and nowhere was I moved to such horror and such pity as in Poland, where the morbid, feminine quality of its nature was revealed to me in its full complexity. That which drives the German to cruelty, to deeds most coldly, methodically and scientifically cruel, is fear. Fear of the oppressed, the defenseless, the weak, the sick; fear of women and of children, fear of the Jews.

Malaparte displays some of that fear himself, raising the obvious question of what drove him to write Kaputt, in which scenes are invented and historical events and people appear throughout the novel. For example, his tour of the Warsaw ghetto in his Italian captain’s uniform probably never happened—what kind of person makes up something like that? Yet the blending of fact and fiction makes for a powerful tale. While recognizing his uniform sets him apart, Malaparte’s feelings of pity and impotence overwhelm him. Describing Italians as prisoners under Mussolini, Malaparte uses fictive circumstances to overcome his fear and gain freedom. And along the way, he wishes to assign freedom to others:

”The dead don’t worry me,” said Fischer [German governor of Warsaw]. “It’s the children who worry me. Unfortunately there is little that can be done to reduce the children’s death rate in the ghettoes. I should like, however, to do something to relieve the suffering of those unfortunate children. I should like to train them to love life, I would like to teach them to walk smiling through the ghetto streets.”

“Smiling?” I asked. “Do you wish to teach them to smile? To walk smiling? The Jewish children will never learn to smile, not if you teach them with the whip. Neither will they ever learn to walk. Don’t you know that the Jewish children do not walk. Jewish children have wings.”

Kaputt: The Horses

Casa Malaparte on the Isle of Capri
Picture source

For more on the villa, see A House Like Me

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (born Kurt Erich Suckert), translation by Cesare Foligno

Kaputt reads as a World War II memoir by Curzio Malaparte, correspondent for the Italian publication Corriere della Sera. Connected to statesmen in many countries and assigned to cover the Eastern front during World War II, Malaparte moves through Nazi-occupied Europe and meets with personages across the political and social spectrum. Except…it isn’t a memoir. It’s a novel masquerading as a memoir, based in part on Malaparte’s experiences. How much of what he relates is true? How does what he is *not* telling us factor in? This tension, between what he does and does not tell, anchors the disconcerting nature of the novel.

And then there are “The Horses.” Kaputt’s six parts are titled “The Horses,” “The Mice,” “The Dogs,” “The Birds,” “The Reindeer,” and “The Flies.” While the animals make multiple appearances in their part, they also serve as symbols for the stories he tells within each part’s sections. Malamarte sometimes helps a little too much in explaining the symbolism:

“All that is noble, gentle and pure in Europe is dying. The horse is our homeland. You understand what I mean by this. One homeland, our ancient homeland is dying. And all those obsessing pictures, that persistent obsession of neighing, of the horrible and sad odor of the dead horses lying on their backs along the roads of the war, don’t they seem to correspond to the vision of war, to our voice, our odor, to the odor of dead Europe!”

Unfortunately the homeland was being replaced—at least symbolically. In addition to the dead bodies of people and horse lining the Russian roads, as described in War and Peace, were machines. “For miles and miles around there was only dead iron. Dead bodies of machines, hundreds upon hundreds of miserable steel carcasses. The stench of putrifying iron rose from the fields and the lagoons.” Malaparte’s flowing memories adds to the feeling that Europe was being replaced, too, as the miserable carcasses of everything he previously enjoyed lay strewn and rotting.

The events in Kaputt do not unfold in chronological order but rather across various moments of the war, linked by something cohesive (whether themes, atmosphere, people). Flashbacks occur within ruminations, but how factual are the reminiscent moments? Prince Eugene of Sweden and Malamarte discuss what Paris was like before the war, but the descriptions turn upon Proustian moments and events, becoming memories within someone else’s memory. The war has turned the present and the past into surreal incidents.

In the section titled “The Horses”, filled with casually bizarre moments, sad equine eyes stare back at the reader, none so doleful or terror-stricken as the horses of Lake Ladoga. Fleeing forest fires, many horses of the Soviet artillery reach the shore of the lake and plunge in the water.

The lake is not deep there, not more than six feet; but a hundred yards from the shore the bottom suddenly drops. Pressed within the narrow space (the lakeshore curves inward there forming a small bay) between the deeper water and the barrier of fire, the horses clustered, shuddering with cold and fear, their heads stretched out above the surface of the water. Those nearer to land were scorched by the flames and reared and struggled to hoist themselves onto the backs of the others, tried to push a way open by biting and kicking. And while still madly struggling, the ice gripped them.

The north wind swooped down during the night. (The north wind blows from the Murmansk Sea, like an angel of doom, crying aloud, and the land suddenly dies.) The cold became frightful. Suddenly, with the peculiar vibrating noise of breaking glass, the water froze. The heat balance was suddenly broken, and the sea, the lakes, the rivers froze. In such instances, even sea waves are gripped in mid-air and become rounded ice waves suspended in the void.

On the following day, when the first ranger patrols, their hair singed, their faces blackened by smoke, cautiously stepped over the warm ashes in the charred forest and reached the lakeshore, a horrible and amazing sight met their eyes. The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses’ heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an ax. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flames of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice.

Such macabre moments happen frequently during the war and they become almost normal. Men come down to the lake during the winter and sit on the frozen heads, turning the horses’ plight into a ghoulish merry-go-round. German soldiers laugh at using their Russian counterparts, frozen with outstretched arms, as human signposts. These memorable scenes may be invented or embellished, but Malaparte’s blending of fact and fantasy sum up the perversity breaking over the world during the war.

Update (24 Mar 2014): See my post on some artwork related to the chapter on The Horses and some science behind the possibility of it happening.