| Popis: |
On the morning of 25 January 1942, Curzio Malaparte, engaged in a long reportage on the Eastern Front for the Corriere della Sera, crossed the threshold of Warsaw’s “forbidden city”. Malaparte was the first Italian writer to personally visit the largest Jewish ghetto in eastern Europe: the literary account of that experience was included in a long narrative sequence in Kaputt, published in 1944. However, Malaparte was not alone during his visit: he was in fact accompanied by another Italian journalist, Alceo Valcini, whose presence was entirely obliterated in Kaputt. Warsaw correspondent for the Corriere, Valcini witnessed the German invasion in 1939, the subsequent occupation of the city, and the ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943. The memories of those events were collected in a volume, Il calvario di Varsavia (“The Calvary of Warsaw”), published by Garzanti in 1945 and never reprinted. This essay intends to propose a selective reading of these two atypical narratives of the Warsaw ghetto, construed by writers whose intellectual trajectory revealed to be, moreover, deeply compromised with the world of fascist ideology. |
