The complete version of Nenni’s book burned by the Nazis for the first time

2023-05-06 17:48:26

Time.news – The flames were high in Berlin on May 10, 1933. The Nazis had organized huge burnings of banned books in the main German cities. Among them was “Six Years of Civil War in Italy” by Pietro Nennia ruthless and raw examination of the violence with which fascism had come to power.

The volume had been released in Germany a few years earlier, under the title “Todeskampf der Freiheit” (Agony of Freedom), and had been enormously successful. Also printed in other countries, it only saw the light in Italy with the fall of fascism, in 1946. It appears, however, with some cuts on critical judgments towards socialists and communists. But “a piece in which Nenni says that Mussolini had proposed to him in 1922 to create a government together with socialists-popular-fascists” was also removed, underlines the scientific director of the Nenni Foundation, Antonio Tedesco to Time.news.

On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Nazi fires, the reprint of “Six years of civil war in Italy” (Arcadia editions) was presented in Rome on 11 May. allows the Italian public to read the complete version of the text for the first time. The preface is by the journalist and writer Fabio Martini and the volume is published in the series of historical and political studies of the Nenni Foundation.

Nenni’s book, at the time of its first publications, in French and German, was a real bestseller. The work began as a long serial that appeared in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, in 1929. In those pages the socialist leader had recalled his turbulent youth and the common enterprises and struggles with Mussolini, then an influential maximalist. It reconstructs, with a style close to that of the popular novel, the violent birth of the fascist dictatorship and the mistakes of the first anti-fascism that failed to counter Mussolini’s affirmation: the first post-war period, the occupation of factories, the crisis of socialism, the march on Rome, the story of the murders, ambushes and fascist violence up to the road of exile. The socialist leader retraces the years that plunge Italy into the arms of fascism, also outlining a particular portrait of the Duce.