Writer and journalist, born in Prato, Tuscany, NC Italy. His service as a volunteer in World War 1 is recounted in the essay La rivolta dei santi maledetti (1921). He first joined the Strapaese movement, but then defected to its antagonist Stracittà. Severing all links with Fascism he wrote Tecnica del colpo di stato (1931), for which he was internally exiled. He fought in the Italian Alpine troops during World War 2, an experience featured in the novels Kaputt (1944), which denounces Nazi cruelty, and Il sole è cieco (1947) and La pelle (1949), where he paints in crudely realistic colours contemporary Italian society.
Curzio Malaparte (June 9, 1898 - July 19, 1957), born as Kurt Erich Suckert, was an Italian journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, novelist and diplomat.
Biography
Born in Prato, from the Tuscany area of Italy, to a Lombard mother and a German father, he was educated at Collegio Cicognini and at the La Sapienza University of Rome.
Malaparte fought in World War I, earning a captaincy in the Fifth Alpine Regiment and several decorations for valor, and in 1922 took part in Benito Mussolini's March on Rome.
In 1926 he founded with Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960) the literary quarterly 900. In Tecnica del colpo di Stato (1931) Malaparte attacked both Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. This led to Malaparte being stripped of his National Fascist Party membership and sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari.
He was freed on the personal intervention of Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini's regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943 and imprisoned him in Rome's infamous jail - Regina Coeli.
His remarkable knowledge of Europe and its leaders is based upon his experience as a correspondent and in the Italian diplomatic service.
As per an editorial note, in Kaputt, his novelistic account of the war, surreptitiously written, presents the conflict from the point of view of those doomed to lose it. Malaparte's account is marked by lyrical observations, as when he encounters a detachment of soldiers fleeing a Ukrainian battlefield:
In The Skin, Malaparte extends the major fresco of European society he began in Kaputt.
From November 1943 to March 1946 he was attached to the American High Command in Italy as an Italian Liaison Officer. Articles by Curzio Malaparte have appeared in many literary periodicals of note in France, the United Kingdom, Italy and the United States.
After the war, Malaparte's political sympathies veered to the left, and he became member of the Italian Communist Party. In 1947 Malaparte settled in Paris and wrote dramas without much success. Cristo Proibito ("Forbidden Christ") was Malaparte's moderately successful film - which he wrote, directed, and scored in 1950.
He also produced the variety show Sexophone and planned to cross the United States on bicycle. Just before his death, Malaparte completed the treatment of another film, Il Compagno P. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Malaparte became interested in the Maoist version of Communism, but his journey to China was cut short by illness, and he was flown back to Rome. Malaparte's final book, Maledetti toscani, his attack on bourgeois culture, appeared in 1956.
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