From Caporetto to Ukraine, the cursed epic of the trenches

With the soldiers sunk in muddy labyrinths, the future of the conflict seems older than the past: the great storytellers of the war of position have told it, from Svevo to Kafka, from Tolkien to Gadda

The trouble isn’t just that you don’t know how it ends. It’s just that you don’t see it coming. Among the many, very many who hadn’t even noticed it, for example, is Franz Kafka. And there is Aron Hector Schmitz, better known as Italo Svevo. “Germany has declared war on Russia – Swimming lessons in the afternoon”, notes Kafka in his diary on August 2, 1914. More than a year later, Zeno, the protagonist of Svevo’s masterpiece, also notices: has reached. I who was listening to war stories as if it were a war from another time, which was fun to talk about, but it would have been silly to worry about, here I was in the midst of it amazed and at the same time amazed at not having noticed before that I had to be involved sooner or later. I had lived in complete calm in a building whose ground floor was on fire and I had not foreseen that sooner or later the whole building with me would have collapsed in flames”.