462
PARTISAN REVIEW
Force, in the Prussian officers who set fire to the Archives of Naples and
shot people at random; and not only that, but the total collapse of the
State organization on which those bold conceptions were based. Since
nothing can be the matter with ideas, and even less with a political and
social se -up which did not have Mussolini at its head, something must
be the matter with the Germans. But Croce is too well educated to be–
come a hater of
nation~
or races. He is himself a nationalist, at least in
the sense that he attributes to the "Nation" the character of an ultimate
reality. And precisely for this reason, he is unable to look for an explana–
tion elsewhere than in national myths. So he points out that Germany
"does not have the civilization of Greece and Rome and that of Chris–
tianity at the origins of its, national history, but the ferocity and devas–
tatory impulse of the barbarian invasions." Which, of course, is a com–
monplace that explains nothing, and can only serve the purposes of that
base propaganda strongly condemned (and for the wrong reasons) by
the same Croce during the anti-German frenzy ofl the First World War.
Christianity, one could retort, was taken more seriously in Germany
than, let's say, in Italy; and Greece and Rome were not taken lightly
either, in the land of Melancthon, Hoelderlin and Mommsen.
But the ugly core of Croce's embarassment is to be found in his
dis–
covery of "a deep and intimate difference betweeq Nazism and Fascism,
because the first was a terrible crisis which has been brooding in the
history of Germany through centuries, and the second was a superfeta–
tion foreign to the history of Italy through the centuries and repugnant
to the recent and glorious Italian history of the nineteenth century."
It
would seem that while nazism has some kind of rational explanation,
fascism has no explanation at all. In plain words, Italian nationalism
and the Italian State were all right, except for the fascist meteorite, but
German nationalism and the German State were bad by nature. The
one has to be absolved and restored, the othet1 has to be punished.
This platitude reflects very faithfully the position of those relics
of the Italian ruling classes who are now begging for mercy and compre–
hension from Messrs. Churchill and Roosevelt. Confronted with the im–
possible riddle of saving all their national paraphernalia
in the name
of
national defeat, they are unable to find a more dignified solution than
hurriedly trying to drown the
Germa~
goat, in the hope that the Allied
wolf will not care for their cabbage. Their great ambition is "to sit at the
peace table with the Allies"-and with the king of Rumania. By all
means, they want to be on the winning side. Like Mussolini. And, incredi–
bly enough, they think that they are in this way defending the dignity
and the interests of the Italian people. As things now stand, these relics
will be represented at the peace
tab!~
by a Monsignore working behind
the scenes, and the Italian people will have to pay with economic, polit–
ical and moral slavery for the frivolity of1 their ruling class. The upkeep
of phantoms is very expensive.
NrcoLA CHIAROMONTE
