European history offers numerous instances of remarkable intellectual friendship among men who shared similar political as well as philosophical and aesthetic preferences and interests. Circles composed of like-minded individuals produced collective works such as manifestos, journals, and book series; friends inside the circle turned into characters within literary works or were mentioned in dedications; topics discussed in private correspondence reappeared in published works. In some historical epochs, intellectual friendship often kept a “strange balance between a ‘logic’ will of political effectiveness and an ‘ethical’ desire of acknowledgment among friends.”Footnote 1 In twentieth-century Italy, the group of people associated with the publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore formed a circle of this kind, constituting the primary context for the intellectual friendship between Felice Balbo (1913–64) and Giaime Pintor (1919–43).
This essay presents unpublished documents to introduce the international readership to Balbo and Pintor's original analysis of the political situation in Europe in the early 1940s. The emergence of the Resistance movement in Italy is explored by examining letters, diaries, and essays written by both Balbo and Pintor, as well as by other members of the Einaudi circle. Retracing a dialogue among friends, the current study relates the efforts of these intellectuals to find ways out of Fascism and Nazism to some aspects of US American culture and to the European Federalist Movement.
Balbo and Pintor served in the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France, hence their knowledge about the military and historical situation was based on first-hand experience, including official trips to Germany, access to classified materials, and underground contacts. Intellectuals with wide literary and philosophical interests and open to popular culture, such as American movies, these enthusiastic young men slowly but steadily moved toward militant antifascism.
In the following analysis, I sketch out the history of the Einaudi publishing house from its foundation in 1933 until 1945, introducing Balbo and Pintor as members of the Einaudi entourage as well as of the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France, both located in Turin. Discussion of a letter by Balbo to Pintor of 10 July 1943 and of Balbo's notebook of 1941 is at the core of this essay. These two documents offer the opportunity to sound out Balbo's political views about Italy and Europe in crucial moments of recent history, taking him as representative of a generation of young intellectuals grown up in Fascist Italy who had the chance—and grasped it—of developing their own ideas and activities despite censorship, propaganda, and repression. For Balbo's historical–philosophical background I refer to works published in the 1930s by Benedetto Croce, Johan Huizinga, and Oswald Spengler. In a further section of this essay, Balbo's interest in German oppositional circles to National Socialism is connected to Pintor's and Elio Vittorini's participation in the European Writers’ Congress called by Joseph Goebbels in 1942, while the last section places Balbo's desire of “making Europe” into the context of the underground Europeanist movement.
THE EINAUDI CIRCLE
Giulio Einaudi (1912–99), the youngest son of the liberal professor of economics at Turin University, Luigi Einaudi (1874–1961),Footnote 2 started his editorial activities by taking over the political-economic review La Riforma sociale from his father. Expanding his activities in 1933, the middle of the Fascist era, he launched the publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore in Turin with the help of Leone Ginzburg (1909–44). Cesare Pavese (1908–50) soon joined them. All three were alumni of the Massimo D’Azeglio school, an intellectual breeding ground with openly antifascist leanings.Footnote 3 Pavese was a novelist and a translator of English works, Ginzburg a scholar, translator, and lecturer on Russian literature. Their office happened to be in the same building in which Antonio Gramsci had edited the socialist weekly L’Ordine nuovo in the period from 1919 to 1920.Footnote 4
Einaudi and his publishing house soon ran into trouble with state censorship. In May 1935, the publisher and his closest partners were arrested and accused of being members of the antifascist movement Giustizia e Libertà, organized by the Rosselli brothers, Carlo and Nello, Italian refugees in Paris. The Rossellis were killed in French exile in 1937 by order of the Italian Fascist intelligence. “Imprisonment was a painful experience for all of us,” Einaudi wrote in his memoirs years later.Footnote 5 Pavese was interned for one year; Einaudi was set free but put under surveillance until 1942; Ginzburg, who was considered the head of Giustizia e Libertà in Turin, had already been in prison since March 1934.Footnote 6 Einaudi kept the publishing house afloat until 1936, when Ginzburg and Pavese returned to Turin, by publishing books welcomed by Mussolini—for example, volumes on military history.Footnote 7
From 1936 to 1938, a number of new series came into being: Foreign Writers in Translation, New Collection of Italian Classic Works, and Essays, all conceived and developed by Ginzburg and Pavese. The Library of Scientific Culture series started in 1938, edited by Ludovico Geymonat (1908–91).Footnote 8 When Italy declared war on France and Great Britain in 1940, Ginzburg was interned in a small village in southern Italy as a sorvegliato speciale (person under special surveillance); moreover, as a Jewish Russian émigré, he had lost his Italian citizenship in 1938 by dictate of the race laws. Ginzburg kept in contact with Einaudi and continued his work despite many obstacles, but his influence on editorial decisions diminished. The publisher moved toward a policy of moderate appeasement with the Fascist power in order to bring books through censorship and, in wartime, to receive rationed paper on which to print them. Einaudi even hired a young literary critic, Mario Alicata (1918–66), and assigned him the task of maintaining a direct connection to the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Popular Culture who decided on such matters.Footnote 9 The opposition of his publishing house to the Fascist regime could only be read between the lines, in prefaces to historical works and in the very choice of volumes on the history of Europe, of England, and of the Russian Revolution.
In 1941, Einaudi opened a branch office in Rome and began planning the Universal Library, based on a list of four hundred works by foreign and Italian authors. In 1945, a new branch office in Milan was put under the responsibility of Elio Vittorini (1908–66), who had previously been a consultant for Einaudi while working for the publisher Bompiani. The publishing house played a pivotal role in the reconstruction of the country after the Second World War by providing a range of cultural tools for both elites and the general public.Footnote 10
PLOTTING FRIENDS
Felice Balbo and Giaime Pintor met in Turin in the summer of 1941 at the publishing house. Balbo was born in Turin, scion of a noble, impoverished, liberal-leaning Piedmont family. One of his ancestors, Cesare Balbo (1789–1853), had played an important role in Italy's national unification movement. Like the founders of the publishing house, Balbo had been a student at the Massimo D’Azeglio grammar school in Turin. In portraits by such contemporaries as Natalia Ginzburg (1916–91) and partisan fellows, Balbo was judged to be a “clever and pensive young man,”Footnote 11 of “keen and lively intuition,”Footnote 12 with “great thoughtfulness of others and lively curiosity.”Footnote 13 As a sergeant of the Italian Alpine troops, Balbo took part in the invasion of France in June 1940 and was then sent to Albania to prepare for the campaign against Greece (Albania had been part of the colonial Italian Empire since 1939). Balbo there contracted amoebiasis and almost died. During his long convalescence he re-embraced Catholicism and engaged in theological readings and writings. Back in Turin in the summer of 1941, still on sick leave, he joined the publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore, becoming one of its most valued advisers.
Giaime Pintor was a young expert in German literature, a translator of Rilke but also of Goethe, Kleist, Hofmannsthal, Trakl, and Jünger.Footnote 14 Descended from a Sardinian family of high state officials, Pintor graduated with a law degree from Rome in June 1940, but put much more effort into studying philosophy and philology, attending classes in history of science by the mathematician Federigo Enriques, and writing essays and book reviews. In 1939, Pintor became an army officer after a few months of military training. Waiting for a posting during the summer and autumn of 1940, he served in Perugia. There he became acquainted with a German student, Ilse Bessell (1920–70), whose close friendship came to represent a further tie with Germany. Pintor was not sent to the front but, probably in connection with the death of his uncle, General Pietro Pintor, was appointed instead to the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France (Commissione Italiana di Armistizio con la Francia), “the masterpiece of bureaucratic–military organization” located in Turin.Footnote 15 There “soldiers in white gloves” occupied “sumptuous offices”; this organization “covered, like Hamlet's world, many more things than philosophers could see.”Footnote 16 The German Committee for the Armistice with France (Waffenstillstandskommission) had its headquarters in Wiesbaden, and the two sites each housed a delegation of the other country. In Turin, Pintor very soon joined the Einaudi circle. Years later Einaudi portrayed Pintor in the following words:
A Royal Army officer, with a general as uncle, lover of life, of literature, of women, always in a good mood, even in the most difficult periods, which were, however, those that he was most passionate about. As an officer involved in the committee for the armistice with France, touring the world (the world at that time) between Turin and Vichy and Rome with frequent brief stays in Germany, which he loved. He liked plotting, and held high-level contacts with generals, representatives of illegal parties, and young intellectuals who were interested in slightly insurgent magazines.Footnote 17
Pintor would die on 1 December 1943, killed by a land mine in a partisan mission on the front line near Naples and becoming a celebrated symbol of the Italian Resistance, in Italy and abroad.Footnote 18 In 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre printed, for instance, in his monthly review Les temps modernes, a French translation of Pintor's last letter of 28 November 1943 as “revealing the state of mind in which young Italian intellectuals moved from a cultural and moral ‘antifascist resistance’ to a physical ‘resistance’, weapons in hand.”Footnote 19
Beside their relationship with Einaudi's publishing house, Pintor and Balbo ended up also working together at the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France when Balbo was called to service there in 1942. They became close friends. In his autobiographical sketches Pintor would testify that Balbo had a crucial influence on his way of thinking, while Balbo saw in Pintor the exemplary “man without myths” and in 1945 dedicated his book of that title to Pintor's memory.Footnote 20
Their friendship also embraced a German employee working at the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France, the art historian and literary critic Werner Haftmann (1912–99), who had been working for the German Institute of Art History (Deutsches Kunsthistorisches Institut) in Florence, maintaining contact with antifascist artistic circles.Footnote 21 Through Pintor's mediation, Haftmann met Einaudi and his staff. He was the first to translate into German Elio Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversations in Sicily), which appeared in neutral Switzerland in 1943 under the title Tränen im Wein; Haftmann also helped Vittorini to hide from German persecutors during the German occupation.Footnote 22
BALBO’S LETTER OF 10 JULY 1943
A letter that Balbo wrote to Pintor in July 1943 gives interesting insight into Balbo's concrete search within Hitler's Germany for allies for political change, dreaming of a Europe other than a nazified continent. It is worth reproducing long passages of this letter, including the hints about its material circumstances, for a better understanding of its message and of Balbo's social background and personality:
10 July
Dearest Giaime,
Preamble:
As you see I don't know how to use this writing paper, it is difficult for me . . . small abstract furies snake through my writing hand. It is my destiny; since I was born I have never had the right writing paper for me . . .
Body:
This part entitled “body” should have, in order to worthily continue the metaphor, the further specification of “snake,” i.e. of the animal that has the longest body.
In fact, as you have imagined, I attempted to condense into four days the whole possible Germany. The non-man, reduced to a single night out of four of actual sleep, took revenge and made me experience the technical expertise of a Wiesbaden dentist. It doesn't matter. I achieved a great deal in those four days and perhaps it will also be important. I better understand your “Comment on a German Soldier”;[ Footnote 23 ] we must discuss this again because it seems to me a very important path (I am writing everything a little crookedly because I am in bed with a touch of angina but I am already feeling better). It would take too long to identify everyone I met and with whom I managed to speak despite my shaky German vocabulary. But I must tell you, at least, that my impression is essentially a positive one: among those people I have found Pablo and Hemingway, the lack of books did not make them turn stupid at all but has only made them humble and ready to receive and recognize the truth; they may be at great risk only if we stop. And only if we do not stop can we give them more than Chianti and sunshine. I have realized that they are ready to welcome the Man with the same impetus with which, if we become traitors, they would become wild beasts—tanned by our sun and drunk on our Chianti. And then there are the women. The women that I had already spoken to you about and that were also for me a wonderful surprise . . .
I have seen various other girls in the cafés and I am convinced, in conclusion, that we have an america [sic] in Europe and I visited it during those four days and wish I had been there longer. Sooner or later we must find a way to stay there at least for a few years. We will make Europe there.
Coda
I still don't know anything about Gap because I am in bed.
Soon I will be on leave. Write to me.
Yours,
CicinoFootnote 24
Summarizing with enthusiasm a sort of reconnaissance expedition through Germany, the letter conveys the sense of urgency of political action combined with a moral renewal. The phrase “they may be at great risk only if we stop” suggests the interpretation of “they” as German conspiratorial groups plotting against Hitler. Was Balbo on an underground political mission on behalf of antifascist groups? Or did some military officers, in preparation for the coup d’état against Mussolini, send Balbo to Germany to survey the lay of the land in anticipation of such a case? Or both at once? Balbo had started to cooperate with the underground Italian Communist Party after coming back from Albania, presumably through contacts with communist cells at Fiat, the large automobile company in Turin where he had been employed as a manager in 1939.Footnote 25 In December 1945, he declared, “As soon as I converted [to Catholicism] and still before I got in touch with the Catholic Communist Movement, I joined the PC [Communist Party] and worked with them.”Footnote 26 In late 1942, Balbo met in Rome an underground group of Catholic communists, and joined the movement. The Cattolici Comunisti relied on both Christian social traditions and on Marxism as tools for fighting injustice.Footnote 27 In spring 1943, Balbo avoided arrest at a meeting of the Catholic communists’ group only because he happened to be out of town on that occasion.Footnote 28 In March 1943, workers went on mass strike at several plants in and near Turin, Fiat included.Footnote 29 After the defeats in all military theatres of operations, the homeland strikes were a clear sign that the Fascist regime had definitively lost the support of the population. The underground Italian Communist Party numbered only about five thousand to seven thousand members in 1943.Footnote 30
Before Mussolini was overthrown on 25 July of that year, the communist leadership decided to build small action groups called GAP—gruppi d’azione patriottica (groups for patriotic action)—and set their organizational structure and name. The communist leader Giorgio Amendola later posted a circular of May 1943, formulated by Antonio Roasio, with the instruction of building “patriots’ action groups” (gruppi di azione dei patrioti).Footnote 31 On 10 June 1943, the underground newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, l’Unità, appealed to the citizens: “Let's build the squads of patriotic action!” (“Formiamo le squadre d’azione patriottica!”), with the declared aim of defending the population against the Fascist squads by force of arms.Footnote 32 When they were actually formed, each GAP was usually a group of three to five persons pursuing urban terrorism.Footnote 33 In his novel Uomini e no (Men and Not Men), Vittorini gave impressive insights into the psychology and activities of GAPs in Milan during the German occupation, also describing atrocities by the German SS and Gestapo.Footnote 34 The first GAPs were put together in Friuli, the north-eastern region on the border of Yugoslavia. At the same time, Italian and Yugoslavian partisans there constituted the nucleus of the first Garibaldi partisan brigade.
Balbo's enigmatic words at the end of his letter of 10 July 1943 to Pintor—“I still don't know anything about Gap because I am in bed”—can plausibly be interpreted as referring to such new developments in the antifascist opposition. Less plausible—but not to be excluded unless new documents come to light—is the hypothesis that Balbo simply referred to a nickname, or to the small French town of Gap in the region of Hautes-Alpes, the buffer zone between the French territories occupied by the Italians and those occupied by the Germans.Footnote 35 In my conjecture, the precise fact that Italian troops were billeted in the town of Gap could offer Balbo a safe protection in writing down the acronym in case his correspondence was checked.
As for Pintor, at that time he was involved in plans for a coup d’état against Mussolini by members of the aristocracy—or he was at least well informed about them.Footnote 36 In the essay he wrote in October 1943 one reads,
In the autumn of 1942 . . . members of the royal family contacted directly, or through mediators, representatives of the opposition. A whole network of inquiries was established in order to identify the forces in favour of an initiative by the King to eliminate Mussolini and reach the end of the war, and to evaluate the chances of success of such a plan . . . In the spring of 1943 the idea of a coup d’état passed from the stage of a hypothesis to that of a project.Footnote 37
WHICH EUROPE?
For Balbo and Pintor's idea of Europe, the reference point was the United States of America, as portrayed in Pavese's and Vittorini's essays and translations, as well as in American movies, which were highly popular in Italy, to the Fascists’ annoyance. “America” was the symbol of freedom and vitality. Commenting, for example, on the works of the Armenian American writer William Saroyan, Vittorini had highlighted Saroyan's faith in each human being and in humanity in general against the background of multiethnic America; in 1947, Balbo referred to Saroyan's “racial and universal men” as examples of spontaneous, natural men without myths.Footnote 38 Surprising nonetheless is Balbo's quite daring comparison between National Socialist Germany and America. Presumably he considered Germany such a tabula rasa after ten years of Hitler's dictatorship that people there, deprived of freedom and intellectual tools but not turned “stupid” (“the lack of books did not make them turn stupid at all”), would be ready for a new beginning after the demise of National Socialist hegemony. To better understand this comparison it is useful to take a look at Pintor's essay on Vittorini's anthology of American writers, Americana.Footnote 39 Pintor wrote his essay in the early months of 1943, dedicating it to Balbo.Footnote 40 In their continuous, multilayered conversation, Balbo's letter of 10 July 1943 was a kind of response to thoughts on America by Pintor, who had highlighted the overall positive attitude to life (positività) of the American people, despite problems and mistakes. For Pintor, Ernest Hemingway had given, in his A Farewell to Arms, the “first, sure example of man being capable of getting rid of customs no longer valid, and of freeing himself from the ambushes of history by means of his own strength.”Footnote 41 Hemingway, who had been an American war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, overtly sympathizing with the Republicans, had become a symbol of the struggle for liberation. Alluding to antifascists he had just met in Germany, Balbo used this symbol while writing his letter of 10 July 1943: “my impression is essentially a positive one: among those people I have found Pablo and Hemingway.” Pablo—Joe in the original—was a character in an American movie by Howard Hawks, Only Angels Have Wings, shown in Italy under the title Avventurieri dell’aria.Footnote 42 Balbo wrote about the emblematic character in his book Il laboratorio dell’uomo of 1946.Footnote 43
Balbo's comparison between Germany and America (“we have an america in Europe and I visited it during those four days”)Footnote 44 was already present in Pintor's essay. Paradoxically, Germany seemed to Pintor both the “natural antithesis” of America and, at the same time, as a young country, “its mirror image” in Europe.Footnote 45 Corruption and purity were frighteningly contiguous, “an enduring madness leading the Germans astray, forcing them into adventures inhumane and difficult.”Footnote 46 America represented for Pintor an ideal, possibly disconnected from the “historical phenomenon USA and its current forms,” but internalized and imagined as in the dreams of the first emigrants and of “whoever has decided to defend at the price of pains and error the dignity of the human condition.”Footnote 47
RISKY THOUGHTS
Balbo's views on the political situation in Europe can be extensively traced in a notebook he used in May 1941 at the military hospital in Bari, southern Italy, where he was recovering from the serious bout of amoebiasis contracted in Albania. The invasion of Greece by the Italian army in October 1940 had failed; the Italians were pushed back by the Greek army so that the German ally intervened, occupying Greece (without Crete) and Yugoslavia by the end of April 1941. At this time, the Third Reich demonstrated overwhelming military power. On the Continent, it controlled France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway in the west; and Austria, Czechoslovakia, and west Poland in the east. German economists were already developing the idea of a European economic community based on a “greater economic zone” (Großraumwirtschaft) under the leadership of the “Axis” powers.Footnote 48
In a small notebook of graph paper with a brown cloth cover, Balbo, still convalescent, wrote down his philosophical thoughts in paragraphs numbered from 1 to 70.Footnote 49 This preliminary work was to constitute the backbone of his book L’uomo senza miti (Man without Myths), published in 1945 by Einaudi. If one turns the notebook, now stored in an archive in Bologna, upside down and rotates it 180 degrees, a page with addresses is followed by further paragraphs in the same handwriting dealing with politics—presumably less accessible to the eyes of curious potential informers. The text on this hidden side of the notebook starts with the sentence “Let's fight against the Pharisee and the beast,” a biblical reference to the Pharisees, attacked by Jesus as hypocritical observers of the Law (Matthew 23), and to the Beast of the Apocalypse, a powerful, corrupting idol (Revelations 13–20).Footnote 50 After denouncing the “present, deep moral crisis” that entails the urgent need for “rebuilding man . . . the entire man . . . the man in freedom. Who will have in himself his authority,” Balbo got down to details:
If forms of Nazism and Fascism exist, it is because humanity embraces them and in fact has created them. They are not imposed from an outward perspective, but it is man himself that imposes them. It is, however, true that within man there appears to be a resistant force as well: England fights against forms of Nazism and Fascism. One has to wonder if it is really fighting Nazism and Fascism or rather the countries that pose a threat to its existence. I don't consider that the English intellectual tone continues to be as moral or liberal as it once was in Old England. The targets and ideals of the war had to be changed in order to convince the people. In Britain, the liberal system no longer inspires much trust as the Beast has also infiltrated it, albeit with greater, hypocritical, human spoils. Man is wolf to his fellow man: this is the point that we have reached today where the beasts are attacking each other. And so this, unfortunately, is the reality of the war where, as long as the forms of Fascism did not prove to be frightening because of weapons, they were allowed to carry on, the Europeans too concerned about that “comfort” that has epidemically invaded all countries.
Who knows if the English, placed in Sweden, would have behaved like the detested Swedes, or placed in France, as the French? In other words England wasn't that interested in adoring God until it found out that Hell existed. Similarly, this was how it was for the entire militant antifascist movement.Footnote 51
When Balbo was writing of Fascism and Nazism in the plural form in 1941, he took into account not only their specific national characteristics in different countries,Footnote 52 but also observed them more generally from a historical and philosophical distance. They became phenomena that could be generalized and analysed. Implicit in Balbo's thoughts is an intellectual and political opposition that looks to Great Britain—but with disillusion, as, in Balbo's view, liberalism has lost part of the population's support there.Footnote 53 He believes that hypocritical idealistic motives conceal the true motivation: nationalistic self-defence, which made, in his eyes, the British not better than French collaborationists or laxly neutral Swedes. Implicitly following Oswald Spengler's diagnosis of Western decay—a commonplace at this time—Balbo blamed the “Europeans” for seeking only “comfort,” thereby losing moral strength. In 1931, Spengler (1880–1936) had criticized Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism:
Its ideal was utility, and utility only. Whatever was useful to “humanity” was a legitimate element of Culture, was in fact Culture. The rest was luxury, superstition, or barbarism.
Now, this utility was utility conducive to the “happiness of the greatest number,” and this happiness consisted in not-doing—for such, in the last analysis, is the doctrine of Bentham, Spencer, and Mill. The aim of mankind was held to consist in relieving the individual of as much of the work as possible and putting the burden on the machine.Footnote 54
Balbo went on in his notes, “Men sensing an absence of true living forces turned to a remedy of the state, the state's intervention in the economy, etc. But neither democratic nor corporate system will ever restore what these men have lost: humanity.”Footnote 55 Similarly, another contemporary philosopher referenced on the issue of the modern crisis is Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), a Dutch antifascist. His book In de schaduwen van morgen of 1935 had been courageously published by Einaudi in Italian translation under the title La crisi della civiltà in 1937.Footnote 56 Huizinga critically quoted Spengler's The Hour of Decision and Man and Technics and pleaded for “the new ethics in which the opposition between collectivism and individualism will have been dissolved.”Footnote 57 Ethics was crucial for Balbo and Huizinga—not so for Spengler.
The Italian philosopher to whom Balbo, especially in his youth, owed most, was Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), who had, indeed, an enormous influence on generations of Italians.Footnote 58 In his History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1932), dedicated to Thomas Mann,Footnote 59 Croce gave a dialectical interpretation of history as a continuous struggle for liberty, implying liberty as expression of the spirit and “moral ideal.”Footnote 60 Even after the bloody First World War, he saw everywhere in Europe signs of a European “new consciousness, of a new nationality” in a “process of European union” conceived as the dialectical synthesis of all particular European nationalisms.Footnote 61
Balbo, writing in the hidden side of his notebook in May 1941, after a few pessimistic thoughts on the masses, counterbalanced by the emphasis on the pedagogical role of the intellectuals, came to his final remark on Europe:
If, as seems likely, the continent of Europe will be Germany, Italy will have the chance to play a crucial role. “Graecia capta etc.” A moral action has therefore all the greater value and importance. In order to save Italy, to save Germany, to offer the only vital contribution we can give for now.Footnote 62
Balbo's quoting the famous sentence from Horace's letter to Augustus—“Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium”Footnote 63 (“Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes / intulit agresti Latio”)—indicates that Balbo believed in the civilizing influence of cultivated Italy (in the role of Graecia) upon savage Germany (in the role of ancient Latium), following Croce, who saw Romanità as the historical foundation of Europe and rejected the Germanic racist theories.Footnote 64
The dispute about the primacy of Germanesimo or Romanità had immediate political and cultural consequences, and Mussolini's government was aware of this. In January 1941, the Italian minister Bottai published in the journal he directed—which had the programmatic name Primato—an article exhorting both Italians and Germans “to look at each other with new eyes,” after admitting a widespread lack of mutual understanding despite the traditional germanofilia of Italian scholars, technicians, army members, and politicians.Footnote 65 He went on in his attempt to equilibrate the two ideologies, noticeably making use of Croce's concept of consciousness: “We need to rediscover Germanesimo and Romanità, to feel them again as facts of our consciousness . . . as factors of the entire ancient and modern civilization of our continent, and therefore of the world itself.”Footnote 66 Fascism's imperialistic and Eurocentric view could not be clearer. But the fears that hid behind such a vision become evident in the closing words of the essay, which tried to exorcize the danger of being swallowed up by the stronger ally:
These two worlds that we want to bind in an alliance of spirits are two distinct worlds. And this distinction of values, of characters, of functions should always be considered if, from mutual integration, we seek to enter not into a dangerous and provisional confusion but into a sustainable organic fusion of intent and action.Footnote 67
In his private notes of May 1941, Balbo seems to share the anxiety of the establishment about the future of Europe under National Socialist Germany. In this context, it is useful to remember how shocked Italian public opinion had been by the Wehrmacht's invasion of France in 1940: barbarians winning over the exquisite, albeit decadent, French culture. Through the alliance with Germany, and with some admittedly not very successful battles, Italy had come to be the winning side, and a massive Fascist propaganda underlined this fact.Footnote 68 But the German ally was proving very mighty: this boded no good. Germany's rapid conquests showed that hers was the true continental power, and that, seemingly, “the continent of Europe will be Germany,” in Balbo's words. The opinion that “after all Hitler has united the Continent and that Germany is Europe” was shared by US isolationists, as reported by the alarmed German exile writer Erika Mann (1905–69) at the Congress of the International PEN Club in London in September 1941.Footnote 69
Meanwhile, the alliance between Germany and Italy lost support among the Italian population as the war spread and dragged on.Footnote 70 The Germans were aware of this; for example, a weekly report of the German delegation to the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France, sent on 23 January 1941 to the headquarters in Wiesbaden, reads, “in case of further setbacks the [Italian] inner political system is in danger.”Footnote 71 Nevertheless, they saw the main responsibility for the crisis lying in the Italian Fascist leadership and in the regime's misleading propaganda based on Roman heritage:
Instead of holding up to the [Italian] people a mirror of their failings, sweeping away misgovernment in Party, Army, and State with an iron broom, newspapers and posters on walls have been daily proclaiming for eighteen years that nothing comparable to today's fascist Italy has been seen since ancient Rome.Footnote 72
In this judgement was implicit the self-confident assumption that the German way, “with an iron broom,” was proving to be the right one. Balbo's aversion to ideologies and rhetoric—what he calls “myths”—had its origin in this omnipresent Fascist propaganda.Footnote 73
Writing in his notebook the words “Italy will have the chance to play a crucial role,” Balbo seemed to share the general attitude of Italian intellectuals in cultivating political “illusions,” as historian Luisa Mangoni puts it: “firstly, in believing the war would be avoided; then, that it would be short; and finally, that Italy would have the chance to play in it a prominent cultural and political role.”Footnote 74 But for Balbo, what was needed was a moral action originating from Italy to save Europe. It is remarkable that Balbo's salvation plans through ethical renewal involved Germany as well, relying on those Germans who—like the anonymous ones he contacted on his travels in July 1943—would welcome a political change and plot for it. These could be members of military or diplomatic oppositional circles, since Balbo's contacts could have result from his service at the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France, which offered him at least the opportunity of his reconnaissance mission. In fact he mentioned Wiesbaden—where the headquarters of the German Committee for the Armistice with France was located—in his letter of July 1943. His sadly visionary words about the reaction of the German army in the case of the termination of the Axis Alliance by Italy seem to confirm this hypothesis. In expressionist apocalyptical style, Balbo described to Pintor the consequences of such a step: “I have realized that they are ready to welcome the Man with the same impetus with which, if we become traitors, they would become wild beasts—tanned by our sun and drunk on our Chianti,” and urged action. In October 1943, Pintor wrote down the chronicle of the coup d’état against Mussolini, maintaining that during its far too long preparation “the absurd theory that the Germans would spontaneously withdraw was still credited.”Footnote 75 Balbo told him that such a theory was definitely absurd.
MULTIPURPOSE JOURNEYS
Because of his position on the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France, Pintor, too, made frequent trips to Wiesbaden. He travelled by train and usually had the simple but sensitive task of delivering documents. Waiting for hours or days for German responses to bring back to Italy, he was allowed to leave Wiesbaden only in civilian clothes, if he had them with him.Footnote 76 On behalf of Einaudi's publishing house, he negotiated with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, unpopular with the National Socialists, during one such trip.Footnote 77
In the autumn of 1942, Pintor was invited to participate as an official member of the Italian delegation to the European Writers’ Congress organized by the National Socialist regime. That congress, the third meeting of this kind, took place in Weimar from 7 to 11 October 1942, bringing together writers representative of Axis-friendly and neutral states with the aim of creating a European cultural and literary common ground.Footnote 78 Countries participating were Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Portugal (probably), Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.Footnote 79 The European Writers’ Union had just been founded in March 1942 in Weimar, as a National Socialist alternative to the International PEN Club, which had held in London its seventeenth congress in September 1941, “a gathering of the free spirits in the world's capital, all fighting for democracy,” in the characterization of Erika Mann.Footnote 80 For the National Socialist European Writers’ Congress all the funding came from the German Propaganda Ministry, which tried to keep its sponsorship secret.Footnote 81 The German Embassy in Rome proposed inviting Pintor and Vittorini, along with nine other Italian writers.
Vittorini was the only one the Department of Education, led by Minister Bottai, tried to take off the list.Footnote 82 The publication of Vittorini's novels Il garofano rosso and Conversazione in Sicilia, as well as his anthology of American writers, Americana, had run into problems with the censors. In 1947, Vittorini explained the reasons for the censorship of Il garofano rosso as follows:
the book was not authorized because the censorship of ’35–’36 (like that of ’33–’34 before) did not want the slightest hint of motives for being fascist other than the official ones, nor of the youthful enthusiasm for the criminal aspects that fascism had actually exhibited (and now was about to exhibit in Ethiopia and Spain). It was about fascism with its bloodthirsty, violent aspects, or its noisily defiant appearance, which, in the eyes of us boys, unfortunately meant a vibrant appearance.Footnote 83
Vittorini, a brilliant and innovative writer, editor, and typographer, as well as self-taught translator from English, had supported fascism in his youth as a revolutionary social movement, though he later criticized Mussolini's backing of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. From 1936 on, he moved from a so-called fascismo di sinistra (left-wing fascism) to communism, taking part in underground opposition groups as early as 1942.Footnote 84 Nevertheless, his membership in the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista) has given rise to many, even recent, disputes since the Second World War, as Vittorini became a leading personality of the Italian Communist Party during the Resistance and after. Upon receiving the invitation to the Weimar congress, Vittorini asked his underground group leader whether or not he should participate, receiving an affirmative answer.Footnote 85 The Italian government, on the other hand, did not want to create a diplomatic controversy over just one writer, so Vittorini was allowed to attend.
In October 1942, the National Socialists began to realize that victory over the Soviet Union would not come as easily as had been thought; Stalingrad had not been conquered, and the winter would soon begin. The German hosts at the congress in Weimar were visibly nervous, the official talks long, the meals simple, and uncertainty about the future palpable—a very different situation compared with the first European Writers’ Congress, which had started in October 1941 with a two-and-half-week-long tour through Germany for the guests.Footnote 86 Both the Italian and the German governments smuggled in informers. It was reported that the Italian delegation had not greeted the German national anthem with the Roman salute and that some high officials of the German Propaganda Department judged that the war would go on for another two or three years.Footnote 87
Pintor wrote a report for the journal Primato, which was not published. Although the article did not include sentences like “the congress [was] without results” or “the European writers, who were meeting in Weimar, were the largest numbers of cretins I have ever seen”—assessments he expressed privately—it still contained some clear criticism.Footnote 88 On Goebbels's speech and on the aftermath of the event one reads,
The most important part of the speech was the controversial aspect: in Germany writers who write for aesthetic purposes are despised, the writer who remains outside or behind the times has no right to exist. The minister therefore welcomed the large number of books and other published writings on the war . . . The day was again taken up with meetings and concerts, but the morning after I stayed alone in Weimar with Vittorini, and in the city empty of guests and devoid of flags, the symbols of the crisis appeared more evident and obvious. Goethe and Schiller were hidden beneath a hovel of bricks, fake books were displayed in the windows and the women walked alone in the old park in Weimar. With Vittorini, who knows “the offended world”, it was easy to talk about those topics that a European literature congress is unable to address; about literature as an honest vocation, and especially about Europe: something that seemed to us too large and uncertain and afflicted, impossible for three hundred gentlemen gathered in Weimar in October 1942 to speak in its name.Footnote 89
Such a “defeatist” view could not be tolerated, even by the editors of Primato, and the article was handed back to Pintor.
In it Pintor had also featured Vittorini, who was considered by many contemporaries to be a literary and political alternative to the writers “on command” put forward by the regimes. His Conversazione in Sicilia had become legendary in antifascist groups; single phrases like “abstract furies” and “the offended world,” and characters like “Gran Lombardo,” were popular and immediately recognizable.Footnote 90 At the end of the war, it would be no random choice for Einaudi to make Vittorini editor of the innovative weekly newspaper Il Politecnico, the most challenging of the publishing house's projects at the time.
Vittorini took the opportunity to prolong his German journey in October 1942. He travelled from Weimar to the Rhineland, investigating reactions to the Allies’ bombing. In a letter of 3 November 1942, Pintor asked him about the outcome of this journey, about “Germany as Sicily” (conspiratorial) after experiencing “Germany as Germany” (official). Vittorini answered that he would tell him in person about his “recent impressions of Germany.”Footnote 91
EUROPEANISTS AT WORK
Pintor had concluded his report by mentioning the uncertain future of Europe and denying that the Writers’ Congress would play any role in it. Some months later, Balbo, too, wrote about the future of Europe. “We will make Europe there”—Italians would establish a different Europe in Germany, an idea not further specified in the letter, which echoed the federalist project expressed in Altiero Spinelli's and Ernesto Rossi's Manifesto di Ventotene of 1941, “Per un’Europa libera e unita” (“For a free and united Europe”), as well as the ideas of Christian Europeanist groups.Footnote 92 The Einaudi circle was involved in the Europeanist movement in so far as Ginzburg took part in meetings of the European Federalist Movement as soon as he got out of internment.Footnote 93 In addition, the Einaudi family was well acquainted with Rossi; Luigi Einaudi, father of Giulio, the publisher, became a member of the movement, contributing to shaping the European federalist program during his exile in Geneva, Switzerland, from September 1943 to December 1944.Footnote 94 In August 1943, Pintor had suggested that Einaudi publish “a text, so far clandestine, by Spinelli about European unity,”Footnote 95 but the proposal did not meet with success, presumably because of the ongoing negotiations over the European federalist program. The so-called Manifesto di Ventotene was printed on a secret press in Rome in January 1944, edited by Eugenio Colorni and Leone Ginzburg.Footnote 96
Working on the prescient assumption of Germany's defeat even back in 1941, Spinelli and Rossi envisioned there a post-war Europe facing great difficulties in each country and incessant power struggles unless national sovereign states gave way to a United States of Europe on the basis of republican constitutions, aiming at social justice in the sense of a moderate, non-dogmatic socialism. Moreover, the Polish and the first French resistance groups acting since the German invasions conceived of a future European federal union of free nations or regions. French communist partisan groups, on the other hand, aimed at cooperation with the Soviet Union, envisioning a federal European union just like the USSR; they did not become active in the Resistance until Hitler's military attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.Footnote 97
In his 1942 essay “Gli Stati Uniti d’Europa e le varie tendenze politiche” (The United States of Europe and Different Political Trends), Spinelli pleaded once more for a federalist Europe and against the restoration of independent national democratic states, stipulating Germany as “the central problem of European life” (“caso tedesco, che costituisce il problema centrale della vita europea”).Footnote 98 As a result of its geographical position, historical and social factors, Germany would soon initiate new wars, regardless of the kind of political rule. Spinelli was against plans, already circulating in 1942, to split Germany into small states after the defeat of the National Socialist regime.Footnote 99 He preferred instead the construction of a democratic European federalist union that would include Germany.Footnote 100 Until 1944, antifascist leaders like Luigi Sturzo, Benedetto Croce, and Ernesto Rossi also objected to the perspective of radical punitive measures against the German population. For years, they had been distinguishing between National Socialists and the German population, considering the latter not responsible for politics and crimes of the dictator and his helpers. This view was tightly linked with a hope of a German insurgence against Hitler and collapsed when such a hope failed to materialize and the dimensions of the Holocaust and further mass murder became apparent in 1944–5.Footnote 101 Balbo's and Vittorini's reconnaissance trips through Germany in 1942 and 1943 must be seen in this perspective.
CONCLUSION
Balbo's documents of 1941 and 1943, published in this essay for the first time, complement Pintor's well-known cultural and political analysis and allow us to reconstruct a more coherent picture of young intellectuals’ views on European politics from inside Fascist Italy, followed by their turn to active opposition. Balbo's later definition of the intellectual as someone “who expresses in words universal values in the historical moment or discloses them through example” is appropriate for his and Pintor's activities in the early 1940s, which had evolved from political statements into militant action.Footnote 102 In the last letter to his brother, Pintor urged the political role of artists and writers, who should “renounce their privileges in order to contribute to the liberation of all.”Footnote 103 Balbo wrote down his thoughts against Fascism and Nazism in 1941 and joined underground oppositional groups beginning that same year; Pintor was involved in secret diplomacy for a coup d’état against Mussolini from the end of 1942 on and died on his first partisan mission one year later.
In particular, Balbo's letter of 10 July 1943 is, in my opinion, an important historical source, likely documenting the early stage of armed resistance in Italy (GAPs) and of Balbo's own role in a reconnaissance expedition through Germany. In his encoded message to Pintor, Balbo pointed up the dilemma of Italian politics in the uneasy partnership with National Socialist Germany, addressing the impending problem of “treason.” His apparent connections to German oppositional circles are noteworthy in view of the few groups of German Widerstand (resistance) and of their secrecy. Further research could identify some of Balbo's contacts.
The dialogue between Balbo and Pintor about Fascism, Nazism, and resistance that originated within the circle of intellectuals at the Einaudi publishing house demonstrably converged on the crucial value of humanity, a concept that loses its vagueness and takes on a clear shape in the face of experienced inhumanity. Benedetto Croce, the leading Italian philosopher of the twentieth century and master of this generation, had emphasized the concept of “shared humanity” back in 1935, while writing against the Nazi persecution of the Jews.Footnote 104 Balbo and Pintor found humanity best exemplified in an ideal America, represented by its “universal men” (Balbo) and defenders of the “dignity of the human condition” (Pintor).Footnote 105 The Europe they wished to build was meant to resemble this America. In summer 1943, as Balbo met people in Germany who shared his values and efforts, he espied promising “American” traits in Germany, of all countries. It was on this basis that he dreamt of “making Europe” there.
