MALAPARTE, Curzio. Kaputt. Naples: Casella. 1944.
8vo. Original stiff cream wrappers, typographical front cover design by Sandro Giordano, titles to spine in light blue; pp. 689, [1]; a few tiny nicks to extremities, tips of upper outer corners chipped, spine creased; uniformly lightly toned, overall a very good, clean copy.
First edition of Malaparte’s brutal account of Europe under Nazi occupation, written between the front lines and diplomatic salons, and one of the most searing literary testimonies of the Second World War.
Sometime fascist writer and filmmaker Curzio Malaparte composed Kaputt between 1941 and 1943: the first chapters in Ukraine, then in Poland and Smolensk in 1942, while serving both as an officer in the Italian army and as a war correspondent for Corriere della Sera. Expelled by the Gestapo, he continued writing in Finland, completing the final chapter in Italy after Mussolini’s arrest on 25 July 1943. “Kaputt is a cruel book”, Malaparte admitted. “Among the protagonists of this book, the war itself is only a secondary character … The true protagonist is Kaputt, this cheerful and cruel monster. No word, better than the harsh and almost mysterious German word Kaputt – literally ‘broken, finished, ruined’ – could convey what we are, what Europe has now become: a heap of wreckage”.
The narrative unfolds along the breadth of the Eastern Front: Ukraine, Bessarabia, Romania, Poland, Karelia, Finland, Belgrade, Budapest, before concluding in Rome and Naples. Malaparte encounters aristocrats, Nazi leaders, soldiers, diplomats, and civilians, recounting them in a voice that blends memoir, fiction, reportage, and modernist experiment. Fragmentary and atmospheric, Kaputt is less a history than a vast literary fresco: a hybrid of sketches, cameos, tales within tales, in which Malaparte’s imagination ultimately transcends the boundaries of fact.
This first edition was published in Naples on 20 October 1944 by Giuseppe Casella, as Malaparte’s Milanese press was still under Nazi occupation. Printed in a typography requisitioned by Allied troops, under bombardment and amid shortages of paper and ink, the edition was an unlikely success: a second printing was already exhausted by August 1945. Though “ready for many months”, the book was withheld until the liberation of Tuscany, “so as not to expose the author’s family, who had remained in occupied territory, to enemy reprisals”.
See Mattei, “The Tragedy of War in Curzio Malaparte”.
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