The Skin

This black comedy, published in 1949, is set in Naples following the Allied liberation of the city. The central character, bearing the author’s name, is embedded with the American forces as a liaison officer. He is torn between the American viewpoint of being liberators and the perspective of the Neapolitans that they have been conquered rather than liberated. He observes the immediate aftermath of the American takeover of the city in the context of abject poverty and years of persecution, describing the situation in terms of an outbreak of an epidemic:
“I preferred the war to the plague. Within the space of a day, within a few hours, all — men, women and children — had been infected by the horrible, mysterious disease. What amazed and terrified the people was the sudden, violent, fatal character of that fearful epidemic. The plague had been able to achieve more in a few days than tyranny had done in 20 years of universal humiliation or war in three years of hunger, grief and atrocious suffering. These people who bartered themselves, their honor, their bodies and the flesh of their own children in the streets — could they possibly be the people who a few days before... had given such conspicuous and horrible proof of their courage... in the face of German opposition?”
Rather than being set free by the Allied forces, the people of the city were immediately enslaved to a system of corruption, exploitation and abuse. The macrocosm is that the vicious oppression of Fascism was being replaced by the ruthless free-for-all of American capitalism.

The author, Curzio Malaparte (né Kurt Erich Suckert, born 9 June 1898), grew up in Prato, Tuscany, the son of a German father and an Italian mother. On the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for service in the Legion Garibaldi of the French Foreign Legion. When Italy entered the war in 1915, he enlisted in the Italian army and served in the Dolomites as a captain in the 5th Alpine Regiment. In the aftermath of the war he wrote Viva Caporetto! — a fictional account of the 1917 battle in the Austrian Littoral in which the Italian army was routed. It was scathingly critical of the Italian military leadership that oversaw the slaughter. During the 1920s he was active as both a journalist and a Fascist. In 1931, however, his book, Coup d'état, was published. In it, he was critical of both Hitler and Mussolini and this led him to being stripped of his Fascist party membership, then to him being exiled on the island of Lipari from 1933 to 1938 and was subsequently jailed repeatedly between 1938 and 1943. In 1941 he worked on the Eastern Front as a war correspondent for Corriere della Serra. This assignment informed the first of his two seminal novels: Kaputt, published in 1944. From November 1943 to March 1946 he worked as a liaison officer with the American High Command and his experience in that role was the basis for his greatest novel (this one).

In reference to the title of the novel, the narrator observes the situation for the people of Italy:
“Today they suffer and make others suffer, they kill and are killed, they do wonderful things and dreadful things, not to save their souls, but to save their skins. They think they are fighting and suffering to save their souls but in reality they are fighting and suffering to save their skins and their skins alone. Nothing else counts. Men are heroes for the sake of a very paltry thing today! An ugly thing! The human skin is ugly. Look! It’s loathsome. And to think that the world is full of heroes who are ready to sacrifice their lives for such a thing as this!”