il manifesto 21.4.2010
E il luglio del 1922, Novara. I fascisti sono alle porte, ci sono stati già scontri armati, morti, scorrerie, aggressioni. Novara è la chiave del triangolo industriale, sfondare qui significa per i fascisti avere le porte aperte per la conquista delle roccaforti operaie del triangolo industriale. “Vi fu in quel periodo una riunione alla Camera del Lavoro del Biellese”, racconta Alfonso Leonetti, che all’epoca era redattore dell’Ordine Nuovo: ma quando il rappresentante del partito comunista bordighiano si rese conto che era presente Giacinto Serrati, sospetto di riformismo, nonostante le insistenze degli altri partecipanti, se ne andò, “ciò che rese impossibile anche solo l’iniziare la discussione”. E intanto i fascisti avanzavano.
Cesare Bermani riporta questo documento nel suo La battaglia di Novara. 9-24 luglio 1922. L’ultima occasione di una riscossa antifascista, ripubblicato e ampliato ora da Derive Approdi (347 pagg., 22 euro). E’ il racconto minuziosamente documentato della (poco conosciuta) popular resistance in the province of Novara red fascist aggression, and as a result, divisions, blindness, compromises, failures of the left political forces contributed to this defeat, even decisive at the national level. The episode recounted by Leonetti is an example. But in the conclusions, Berman insists above all on the responsibilities of the reformist parties who are convinced as ever that "the opposition is in parliament and not in the country, divided the Alliance of Labour and they suspend the general strike declared in Lombardy and Piedmont bank to make the aggression of the fascist squads. Fallen strike, divided workers, opened the way for the fascists Novara, the victory over the North, and the March on Rome.
The responsibility for this outcome, writes Bermani, then falls on those political forces that divided the people's resistance and did not realize that the only way to stop the fascists was to fight from below. Now, as Bermani writes in the introduction, there is no history with the "if", and it is said that the fight from the bottom could really prevent the Fascist victory in Italy - but the fact is that it was not proven, or at least not to the end. In a sense, the battle of Novara evokes what has been called "ucronia": a narrative that the story would have been different, and if this did not happen was due from us. The ucronia, in short, is a way to tell us and other makers of history, to assert our leadership and our responsibility and our mistakes. And perhaps alluding to the risk of repeating this. As always in practice
historiographical Berman, a strong interpretive thesis does not, in fact reinforces, a documentary and narrative practice scrupulous exactitude the limits of a welcome. The original documents - archive, news source, and oral sources (including a clever use of sources fascist) - are reported with unusual breadth, supported by abundant notes, and twisted almost into a montage of film. If I were to say that the book more like him, I would say the short summer of anarchy by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a montage of sources that the author connects them "as when a child was passed by opening water channels from one puddle to another." Less than literary and documentary, The Battle of Novara may seem hard to read, until one refuses to be lost in the game of languages: the fascist rhetoric of hyperbole and inflated superlatives, its echoes even in the anti-fascist press time, the concreteness daily oral sources and the passion of the dialect reported engaging with philological precision.
One of the top of the book is the long narrative of Fenis Baldini, who was going dancing with friends when he was in the midst of battle. It is worth paying tribute to this woman, militant proletariat, which (through the records Bermani Cesare in the 60s) we have a lot of political songs then entered into the movement of folk song and in our common memory is made by people like her bone of the worker and the culture of resistance in our country (we can hear his voice now a more valuable work in recent Bermani Caesar, come May. Canto social, tales of magic and memories of struggle in the first half of the twentieth century in Lower Novarese, Novara, Spacing, 2009, with two CDs of original recordings).
As always, linguaggio veicola il senso profondo degli avvenimenti narrati, lo sato d’animo di chi li vive e li racconta. Il resoconto fascista di una scorreria contro il paese di Recetto: “Senza colpo ferire rimaniamo padroni assoluti della posizione…” E’ il linguaggio militare, che domina queste narrazioni di gesta. A fine giornata, le squadre fasciste “dopo tredici ora di lavoro, di assalti, senza posa e senza cibo, vittoriose, con i cimeli di guerra, esauste per la fatica, ma non per lo spirito, ritornano cantando i loro inni all’accampamento di Borgo Vercelli…” Sembra di sentire gli echi del famoso comunicato della vittoria di Armando Diaz. E infatti: stiamo raccontando uno scontro politico, o stiamo raccontando una guerra? Non è tanto il dato materiale dei morti (otto antifascisti, tre fascisti), quanto lo spirito implicito nel linguaggio dei vivi a suggerire che davvero a Novara in quei giorni, e forse non solo lì, ci si sentiva come nel pieno di una vera e propria guerra civile, in cui l’obiettivo era l’annientamento dell’altro da un lato, e la sopravvivenza per lottare ancora dall’altro.
Tempo fa, raccontandomi un sanguinoso sciopero, la violenza padronale e la resistenza sindacale, un operaio di Detroit mi diceva: “non fu una passeggiata di pistoleri” – anche i lavoratori risposero a tono a chi gli sparava addosso. Scrivendo di Novara, ancora nella sua fase antifascista, Giampaolo Pansa spoke of "a walk, even violent" as saying that the only players on the scene were the Fascists, and the opposition or not there was or not hampered them too much. Raccntando detail a myriad of events of those days, Berman shows us that no, it was by no means a walk of gunslingers: to take Novara and its province, the fascists had to face a combative working class, often armed, far from being submissive and resigned. The "walk" was after, and it was called March on Rome, but to open the way it was (too?) The abandonment of the struggle from below that experienced in Novara one of his finest moments, and not told.
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