Gestures that make history. The new book by Giorgio Van Straten – Corriere.it

One of the most beautiful films about fascism is the telling of a story in which fascism is an absence. A glaring absence. It is a gigantic apartment building in Rome that is emptied of every human being because Hitler has arrived in the capital and everyone, willy-nilly, adults and children, goes to pay homage to the Nazi dictator. Black shirts of all sizes swarm towards the gate and in that enormous space, which will from that moment on become the whole world for the viewer, only two people remain.

A woman of the people, Sofia Loren, who lives the suggestion of fascism in a simple way to the point of having fainted one day, seeing Mussolini on a white horse at Villa Borghese.
In the opposite window lives an EIAR announcer, Marcello Mastroianni, fired from the radio because he is homosexual and anti-fascist.
Fascism — invasive, heavy, massifying regime — becomes here a puffy void in which the solitude of two different souls who meet resounds as subversive.

A particular day is it history?
Is it less or more so than that organized in manuals and essays, produced by the tiring, irreplaceable work on maps, dates, facts that scholars produce to make known, understood, discussed?
It is the theme of Field invasionthe beautiful essay, published by Laterza, which Giorgio Van Straten dedicated to the relationship between literature and history.
Right from the start of the volume, the author maintains a clear thesis, in my opinion rightly so: that they have a common origin and therefore «refer to the desire for a comparison with reality and its memory, with the existences of women and men as they actually were or can be imagined to have been; that both history and literature deal with individuals, and with the desire to recreate them, to represent them and, one could say, to exhume them».

History can not only be written in its pure “factual” dimension. It can be told by assuming the human condition, individual or collective, as the narrative centre.
That is, history does not only have a “structural” aspect to which the Marxist approach has entrusted in the past the exclusive task of explaining the facts, but it can filter through the experience of humans. Even just a human being.
Hadn’t Homer basically done this when he told of Hector, Achilles, Ulysses?

Van Straten analyses, in particular speaking of Primo Levi and Beppe Fenoglio, the cases in which literature has made history for the ability of writers – in this case direct witnesses – to take the reading of the facts a little further.
Primo Levi was the first to understand and recount the complex nature of the “grey area” with which he came to terms in the concentration camp and which cannot be simplified into indifference or pure equidistance.

Fenoglio, in particular with A private matterhe told the Resistance away from the reductive stereotypes of celebratory literature and ventured into the identification of the existence of that “civil war” of which Claudio Pavone years later had the courage, cultural and civil, to speak as an excellent historian.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote, forcing the terms of the question: «The history of the historian is singular devoid of humanity. The story is exhibited without its subject: the people. “The unemployed”, they say, “the entrepreneurs”». Not by chance, to tell the tragedy of the Titanic, pure history, he himself adopted the form of the epic poem.
The competition of literature and history can offer the possibility of reading the succession of events in a complete form, their influence on individual and collective life, even their ultimate meaning.

Van Straten quotes the American writer Daniel Mendelsohn who investigated the relationship between history and person: «On the one hand there is the infinite range of possibilities due to chance, time, state of mind, the unknowable and endless mass of events that make up the life of an individual or a people; on the other hand, in this incredible and unlimited universe of factors and possibilities, personality and individual will intersect, decisions, the ability to make distinctions, therefore to create.».

After all, hasn’t the same history of events been conditioned, often, by the influence of human decisions and not only by the great economic, social, political processes?
If Rosa Parks in 1955 hadn’t refused Montgomery to give up her seat to a white man, if that unknown Chinese citizen hadn’t stood with two shopping bags in front of the tanks of the Beijing regimeif Libero Grassi hadn’t refused to pay the mafia, if Mahsa Amini hadn’t chosen her dignity as an Iranian girl…

People, whose gesture, perhaps matured in an instant, has marked our history.
Van Straten writes, in a book he develops an open debate right on the pages of «la Lettura»about the need to overcome an exclusively «scientific» approach to the historical narrative: «The women and men of flesh and blood asked to be part of the scene again, as individuals and not just as part of a class, of an ethnic group or of a generation, and together with this element the choice of a new generation of historians had also re-emerged to start from single events capable of shedding light on an entire period, on larger phenomena.».

On different fronts Antonio Scurati and Patrick Modiano, one dealing with a careful literary reconstruction of the Mussolini phenomenon and the other choosing to reconstruct the story of Dora Brudera fifteen-year-old girl who disappeared during the years of the deportation of Jews from occupied Paris, we were offered, but I mention only two among many, the possibility of reading history through individual lives and vice versa.

Cipolla, Ginzburg, Diamond and many others have also demonstrated how fascinating the inverse path is, when history, that of specialists, intertwines the two dimensions.
As Giovanni De Luna explained, about her work on women persecuted during fascism: «The obligatory choice was to combine “history” with “stories” by placing the individual-collective nexus at the center of the story: the contradictory nature of individual events was consciously assumed as an extraordinary cognitive opportunity».

With one caveat, though. We live in a time in which risk is opposite to that of the past.
We are indeed constantly bombarded with minute stories, widespread due to their particularity and elevated to the exclusive symbol of general problems and trends.
An infinite and ubiquitous «Strano ma vero» diffused to induce easy emotion and to disaccustom us to the complexity, to doubt, to the link between particular and universal.
But history and literature can help us, in their wonderful interweaving, to avoid the risk of becoming all hysterical, insecure and naive drinkers of frivolous and hairy superficiality.

The volume

The essay by Giorgio Van Straten Field invasion is published by Laterza (167 pages, 18 euros). It is a reflection on the relationship between history and literature with particular attention to the works of Primo Levi and Beppe Fenoglio. Born in Florence in 1955, the writer Giorgio Van Straten is the author of numerous books. He has held various positions, including that of director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York (2015-2019). He currently chairs the Alinari Foundation for Photography. Among Van Straten’s more recent books: A desperate vitality (HarperCollins, 2022); Stories of lost books (Laterza, 2016); Wartime love story (Mondadori, 2014); The truth is useless (Mondadori, 2008)