Dubious Chronicle

KAPUTT (407 pp.)--Curzio Malaparte, translated by Cesare Foligno--Dutton ($3.75).

What the publisher's jacket fails to tell about Author Malaparte is exactly what a reader should know to get a straight line on Kaputt. Curzio Malaparte, born near Florence in 1898, was a Fascist even before the 1922 march on Rome. Says Malaparte: I too, was of course, a Fascist as was everybody at that time for the same reasons for which everybody is now antiFascist. He became editor of Turin's influential La Stampa and stood very well with the Duce. Later he got into trouble with Fascist big shots (even sat in jail a bit), but it was all personal, not ideological.

By 1936, after five years in exile, he had again made his peace with the Party. He says that "Mussolini, I am sorry to say, liked me very much" for a time, but in later years Malaparte appealed successfully to Count Ciano for protection against the Duce's wrath. When the war came he had no trouble getting accredited to German armies in the Ukraine, Poland and Finland. The publisher's jacket, which tells none of this, describes Malaparte only as a man who dodged the Gestapo and ducked the Fascists.

Kaputt (German for "broken, finished, gone to pieces") is the readable and often brilliant distillation of Malaparte's war experience. Italian diplomats and newsmen say: take it with salt, especially his cloying, new-found love of suffering humanity, his suspiciously detailed and too melodramatic recital of fast-moving events. But whatever their worth as history, these tenuously connected yarns have the quality of horrible legends recited against the feverish background of Europe's moral decay.

The book is filled with the stench of dead horses and dead men rotting on the vast Ukrainian plain. Malaparte was in Jassy on the night of the pogrom when 7,000 Jews were killed in the streets. He was allowed to visit the Warsaw brothels whose girls the Germans killed after a short period to replace them with fresh victims. There are chilling pictures of the Warsaw ghetto.

Beware the Weak. Malaparte says he dined with German Governor General Hans Frank at his Warsaw palace, heard him extol German Kultur, play Chopin with delicacy, later that same night saw him use a live child for target practice while the women of the party giggled. Says Malaparte: "In no part of Europe had the Germans appeared to me so naked, so exposed as in Poland. In the course of my long war experience, the conviction had grown within me that the

German has no fear of the strong man, of the armed man who face him with courage. . . . The German fears the defenseless, the weak and the sick."

After the Italian surrender, Malaparte did liaison work with the Italian liberation forces and the Allies. About this time the British arrested him on the strength of his past record, but turned him loose when OWI-man Percy Winner, once with I.N.S. in Rome, guaranteed his good conduct. He then toured Germany on a special mission for the Allied Psychological Warfare Branch. Now ex-Fascist Malaparte lives well in his flashy Capri villa. Kaputt, whatever the doubts as to its reliability, is a great hit in Italy, has become must reading in fashionable clubs and salons.

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