The war without honor of Mussolini's last soldier

After the armistice of 8 September 1943, the life of Ulisse Savino, a veteran of the fascist militia, no longer has any reference points. The sudden fall of Fascism disoriented him, the choice of the king and Badoglio to side with the Allies left him full of shame for what he considers a betrayal of Nazi Germany. Every ancient certainty seems to collapse and even the partner rejects it, while the daughter simply ignores it. Only the creation of the Republic of Salò gives new hopes to him and pushes him to join the ranks of the Tagliamento Assault Legion, in order to support the Nazis in the fight against the Allies. In this way, Ulysses is convinced that he is giving new meaning to his own existence and helping to redeem the honor of the whole of Italy. A very different reality awaits him, made up of clashes with the partisans and the population that supports them and dotted with roundups, shootings, violence and abuse of all sorts. Faced with what presents itself as a ruthless fratricidal war, his convictions will then begin to waver and his eyes will begin to look differently at those who are fighting to free Italy from the yoke of Nazi-fascism.

Novel focused on a painful, but convincing awareness of one's adhesion to a wrong cause "Mussolini's Last Soldier" (Newton Compton Editori, 2021, pp. 416, also e-book) shows once more the ability to Andrea Frediani in building an engaging narrative without compromising the correctness of the historical reconstruction. A fundamental correctness, in our opinion, when dealing with a novel "mixed history and invention" to put it in Manzoni's style, even more so when we are confronted with the Italian events of the tragic two-year period 1943-45.

Precisely because of the delicacy of the topics dealt with, we ask Andrea Frediani what prompted him to enter that real mess represented by the events following the armistice of 8 September 1943, abandoning the history of ancient Rome to which he dedicated many of the his novels:

“I like the whole story and already at the maturity I graduated with a thesis on Nazism; if I have written more about ancient Rome, it is because it is what the publisher asks me most often ... In reality I have wanted to take care of things that people are debating for some time. Last year I wrote The Librarian of Auschwitz to have my say on the Holocaust and to counteract the increasingly prevalent denial, while in this case I would like to participate in the debate on fascism and its responsibilities, which is back strongly topical ".

How did you research for this book?

"When it comes to the civil war that followed the armistice of 8 September, one must always start from a fundamental text, a reference text: 'A civil war' by Claudio Pavone, an essay that has brought everyone to an agreement by identifying three forms of war in Italy of 1943-45: a war of liberation, in fact, between a part of the Italians and the Germans, a civil war, between partisans and fascists, and a class war, between workers exploited by the occupation regime and bosses essentially tied to profit. I have also read a lot of memoirs, acts of the trials against the members of the Tagliamento Legion, to which I make my protagonist belong, and I have documented both resistance and CSR in the most recent volumes by Mimmo Franzinelli. But I also needed to delve into the mentality and reasons of those who joined Salò. So I consulted for a long time Giorgio Pisanò's 'History of the civil war', a work as mammoth as it is biased, which in any case has the advantage of presenting a very rich photographic and documentary documentation ".

Did this book change your way of looking at the events of 1943-45?

“Yes, I would say that something has changed. I have always thought that we could not speak of a civil war, but only of a war of liberation against an occupation regime and its collaborators. But I realized, deepening the subject, that reality is much more multifaceted; often those who chose the wrong side were moved by emotion, not by reasoning. Those who had their homes bombed or relatives killed by the Anglo-Americans, those who felt abandoned by the king and generals, those who were terrified of the communist revolution, those who had been plagiarized by the propaganda of the Twenties ... had more reasons to continue fighting the Anglo-Americans than to fight alongside them, and he would also ally himself with the devil, just to take revenge. In those days of chaos following September 8, it was not easy to find your way around and understand which was the right part ".

Who is Ulisse Savino?

“I called Ulysses my protagonist because his story is a real journey, not only from one region to another in the places to which his unity is assigned, but also and above all interior, through the horrors of the civil war. A journey that leads him to a progressive awareness by making him change his vision and position. I attributed many of my characteristics to him, in reality, so much so that, were it not for the fact that he is a convinced fascist, he could be considered my alter-ego ”.

Why did you decide to tell this piece of Italian history from the point of view of someone who was on the "wrong side"?

“Just to understand why so many people have chosen to join the wrong side. If I had chosen a partisan, I would not have been able to plumb the soul of a fascist with a critical spirit and analyze from the inside the dynamics that have guided the thought and actions of the republicans, their motivations and their objectives. If you want to describe something in depth, you have to do it 'as an infiltrator'… ”.

Weren't you afraid of being considered a revisionist or worse?

“Only those who stop at the title could call me a revisionist; and in fact, in order not to take even this risk, I wanted to call the book War without honor, an expression which then ended up in the subtitle. Those who read it soon understand that it is a book of denunciation, the purpose of which is to arouse indignation, not complacency. If a convinced fascist buys it because he thinks it glorifies fascism at first he is pleased with what he finds there, but then he gets annoyed and maybe gives up on finishing it. There are already those who wrote to me provocatively inviting me to write a book that talks about the massacres of the partisans ... "