Curzio Malaparte, a Tragic Modernity

The chapter examines the controversial author Curzio Malaparte, who vividly described the Italian defeat as an integral component of the general collapse of European civilization. Usually dismissed for his Fascist past, Malaparte was a complex and nonconformist intellectual whose outstanding historical sensibility was rivaled only by his narcissism. As Milan Kundera contends, Malaparte invented with his best-known novels Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949) “a totally new form,” able to express the tragic contrast between the destructive power of modern technology and the fragility of creaturely life. With his representational prowess, Malaparte tackled one by one all the main questions of the debate surrounding recent Italian history: the rejection of Fascist cultural models, the unrestrained technological violence of the Nazi as well as of the Allied bombings, a critique of the centrality of the State and totalitarianism, the racial agenda of modern power, as well as the memory of the destruction of European Jewry.