October 1944: Colonel Martin von Bora , of the Abwehr, the German military secret service, has been living on the razor's edge for years now. He continues to carry out his duty as an army officer , but is increasingly intolerant of the behavior of the Nazi ringleaders . The SS and Gestapo have long marked him in their black book for having denounced the German massacres on the Eastern Front and because he is suspected of having helped some Jews escape the concentration camp. In recent times, the situation for Bora has become even more dramatic: Operation Valkyrie , the conspiracy that came closest to eliminating Hitler, failed in July, and the failure was followed by a terrifying decimation of suspected opposing officers, some from very close relations with Bora himself. And precisely this last circumstance is about to burn the noble colonel, against whom the Gestapo has built a menacing dossier. When, without warning, he is picked up by agents of the political police and transported to Salò, in the Italian Social Republic, Bora is convinced that the end has come for him. Conversely, he finds himself in a sort of limbo, far from the department he had been fighting with for months in Italy and with the job of liaison officer between the German military command and the equivalent of the Social Republic. A commitment that to the brave soldier, after seven years of war, seems stagnant but which in reality turns into a new investigation and a very risky adventure. Investigation and adventure that are at the heart of the novel " La Venere di Salò " (Sellerio editore, 2022, pp. 464, also e-book), the twelfth that the writer Ben Pastor dedicates to the figure of Martin Bora and his tormented story of man and officer perpetually engaged on the battlefields of Europe, from the war in Spain to Italy, via Stalingrad and Greece.
In the Venus of Salò we find him in the role of detective suited to him, entangled in the search for the canvas by Titian which gives the title to the volume, stolen from the home of the millionaire Pozzi, a rather crude businessman who enriched himself among other things with war trafficking . To find the painting, Bora must enter a forest of opposing interests , of struggles within the regime and between fascists and Nazis, of mysteries, to which the strange suicides of three women act as a macabre corollary, all linked by very thin threads that the our protagonist finds himself following, while the Gestapo noose tightens around his neck.
Ben Pastor describes with his usual skill Bora's race against time to complete his assignment and do his duty to the end before being overwhelmed by a destiny that now seems ineluctable to him. Indeed liberating in the desperation that grips him while his country is on the verge of a disastrous defeat.
The aversion to Hitler and his acolytes has by now taken the upper hand over any other sentiment in the German officer, but his loyalty to the uniform and to his own nation has not failed . Bora continues to experience the profound conflict that tormented more than one German of his generation, the one between duty towards one's homeland and rebellion against what that homeland had become under Nazism. Faced with this disagreement, the character created by Ben Pastor escapes simplistic solutions and shuns miraculous conversions. He accepts his own destiny and torment, relying more and more on his conscience as a man and as a soldier.
As Bora states in the book , you can lose a war , but there is always a difference in how you lose it and face defeat . Just as for Bora there has always been an unbridgeable difference between his ways of fighting and those of Hitler's faithful executors.