Original subtitles

Since when?

1924.

Which functions have you occupied in the illegal Communist party?

I don't know the illegal party.

Until January, 1933, my functions in the German party

were of a technical order.

You have been to Russia.

As a technician: I was attached to the Elektrozavod.

We will see.

What was your function in the German republic of the Volga?

Never seen that republic.

Nor the Volga.

What cell did you belong to in Berlin?

EX-1015.

We will see. Under the direction of?

Hans.

I was going to say that.

I'm asking you for his family name!

Are you fucking with me?

We only know our comrades by their first names.

Without exception.

His address?

I've never seen him outside the cell.

Good.

I'm going to put you in one of ours: you'll see

how it will refresh your memory.

How long were you in Moabit?

Six months.

One hundred and eighty days since your arrest.

One hundred and eighty... Well, well...

Say, all this time,

who's sleeping with your wife? Who's sleeping with your wife?

I am not married.

That doesn't prevent having a woman.

Kassner.

I am known in my legation.

The most idiotic conspirator does not ask for a light from the gendarmes

to enter under their eyes in a mouse trap.

It is no more difficult

to go to the legation with false papers than into the street.

If they were to torture me to make me give information I don't have,

I could not do anything about it.

Let us suppose then that I don't have it.

It was necessary to flee into total passivity,

into the irresponsibility of sleep and madness;

and yet keep watch with a mind lucid enough to defend oneself,

to not allow oneself to be destroyed

there irremediably.

To tear one from oneself so as to surrender only what was not the essential.

And maybe he would be knocked out; but in Hagen,

in a factory with 750 workers, it had been impossible despite the terror

to make them denounce a single one of those who had distributed tracts.

"What, you're spitting out your flag?"

a big, red line sprung up on his face, crackling and flashing:

a blow to the neck. He finally fainted.

"I'm already going mad", he thought.

"Here, it's difficult to kill yourself before...

"It's absolutely necessary to invent something.

"If one tortures me, I may be lucky to be strong enough to not speak,

"but if I go mad...

"To have saved the list to confess things ten times more important!

"And maybe one does not realize it..."

A dizzying hunt

sent his mind towards the images that maintained his life.

It was necessary to organize this hunt,

to transform it into will power.

Bakunin, as a prisoner,

wrote every day in his imagination an entire paper:

editorial, information, tales, feuilleton, gossip...

The images provoked by the music,

rapid, had only been spectacles;

it was necessary to make them enter into duration.

The whole problem of captivity

was in ceasing to be passive. Perhaps Kassner

would conquer the stupor, and the madness,

and the obsession of evasion that continued his underground life,

like eternal salvation beneath the sinful life of a Christian.

There was still as much strength in him as menace around him.

How was it?

Terrible.

I was so afraid...

Did they accept the false identity?

No.

That is, not at first. Then someone declared he was Kassner.

I don't know who.

Killed?

I don't know...

How is he?

I'm not always a very happy woman:

I live a life difficult to live... And yet

nothing in the world is stronger, nothing,

than knowing this child is here. And that he is mine.

I think there are in this city, I don't know,

five thousand, ten thousand children.

And thousands of women that labour pains will seize in a moment

(that begins almost always around 1 or 2 in the morning)

and who are waiting.

With anguish, yes, but also with something else.

Next to which the word joy has almost no sense. Nor any word.

And since the world began, every night has been like that.

Men do not have children.

And yet, in the cell,

they have a great need that there exist something,

that would live at the same depth as pain...

Joy has no language.

For me, joy was music...

Now, I am horrified of music...

I would like to write again.

In the cell I tried to use music...

to defend myself.

For hours.

That gave a sentence, only one,

the call of the caravanners:

"And if this night should be a night of destiny..."

"...blessed may it be until sunrise..."

Even your next departure I want to accept less badly than you think.

I want to walk, to go out with you, anywhere -

I must go look for someone to watch the little one.

Changed?

Certainly since two years before I was,

and certainly anyone who had known me two years before

would have been able to say that I was...

At times I would have wanted to succeed in telling them how I had been

so that they could tell me how I was now...

At least succeed in telling it to her...

But certainly I was changed already when they met me,

and certainly in the very days in which they knew me

I changed again in some way,

and certainly a month later

I was changed a little once again, and I went on changing every day a little,

even though,

at times, for one thing or another that happened to me,

I had the impression of not being changed in anything

not even since a year before or since two years before...

Those days were our best,

in February,

with sun which made the snow like white velvet on the backs of the hills,

and with the danger of our dispersing being over,

with those who were coming back instead of continuing to leave,

but with the difficulties there still were, and with the winter there still was.

I, in those days,

therefore, couldn't not be changed and had to be,

even to her eyes

unless it had been her

who changed and thought differently from her way of thinking,

and appreciated things differently...

Only a few days before I had had my outburst with Toma,

but this didn't seem to keep from her eyes the fact that I was changing,

and it was also an outburst of hers to tell me that word of hers,

therefore there was no break between us, and our thing

immediately resumed its movement

which from then on was to grow

since the time when in the village the motorbike had been heard.

Finally he freed himself from his black granite,

and it was curious that, while he pleased me for that,

for the character he had,

I noticed that I loved him only now.

That's to say, it was his nature that seduced me,

but it was seeing it melt that made me tender.

Now I saw in him how a man must be,

firm in front of things, and yet also gentle and understanding.

I say, not only with me.

Would it have been the same if he had been so with me alone?

Finally I could think of him as kind and good.

But his being good to me wouldn't have helped

to think him good.

And this is what made me tender:

to be able to think him good while also thinking him able,

and to see him,

at the same time, able and good.

It was December, it was January,

it was more difficult every day to stand fast,

and he always came before me as though he were asking me

if he had been able. It was in that way that trust grew between us.

He could ask me: "Have I been able?"

And I could answer him: "Oh yes, you have been."

He never failed to be, and perhaps never had failed

to be from the beginning,

thus there was no sense

in my telling him that he had been, and I didn't tell him so,

or I told him that he had been,

thinking of telling him that he had been everything else,

that's to say kind, good,

as there would have been more sense in my telling him

if only there had already been between us

all the trust required to say such words.

But he,

as though he understood, stopped asking me if he was able.

He also changed the tone in his question. He became a bit arrogant,

even a bit mocking, and asked me: "Do I still seem a Fascist to you?"

I didn't answer him, the trust had stalled a bit between us,

and besides, Giralda Adorno

heard what he said once. Then she asked him

if I didn't prefer

him to look like a Fazzoletto Rosso or a Toma,

and it was also for this that, at the first opportunity,

he gave Toma that slap!

I have never denied

that I like to run after girls. I had run after Antonia too.

And lately after Elvira too.

But if a girl won't hear of it,

I never insist. Nor afterwards do I fail to respect her,

or fail to esteem the one she has preferred to me

if he is the type to be esteemed.

Siracusa I had at once got out of my mind,

in July, as soon as I saw

that she had chosen to go with Ventura.

And everyone can testify

that it was as though I had never looked at her.

Only it would have been a good thing if I had been able to know

what type she was. Now I was left with the torment

that perhaps she was not in everything like another woman;

and thus I no longer knew what and how much I had

of another woman; and thus it could happen

that I had her in my mind again, after months and months.

All of the sudden

it seemed to me that it was about to end between Ventura and her.

Instead it was the cursed desire for her that I hadn't got out of myself

that made it seem so to me. And I had the shame

of showing myself as if I were there waiting.

And I had the shame of having to draw back from her

for a second time. And I had the effort to start again

to get her out of my mind.

And to keep myself from bearing him ill will.

And not being content

while all of them were, in those February days.

But she

why did she let me think it didn't annoy her?

The story that followed between us was quick to pass.

It wasn't because of Toma that it mattered to me; it was for him;

and I could understand that a slap

given in those circumstances, with the exasperation there was,

didn't signify anything very serious.

Yet I was not so easy.

I wanted him to come nearer again but I also wanted him

to sting himself a little on me, after what had happened,

and I told him, for example,

that he wouldn't have a reason for any fuss if I had wanted to go with Toma.

"Would you want to?" he asked me.

"I don't want anything" I told him. "But you mustn't think

"that you could prevent me if I wanted to."

I told him in short

that if I didn't go to bed with another while I was going with him,

it wasn't because I was afraid of him, or because I didn't want to wrong him,

but simply because I didn't have the slightest desire to go.

Then he told me

I could have told him the same in talking much less.

"That is to say?" I told him.

It was my last point on which he could sting himself,

and we were outside,

walking, I in front, he behind, after the evening meal,

with the snow beneath us right up to the same distances

which were seen by day between the highest snows,

and I instead of thinking how come we saw them

wondered if we could make love there outside

without having to lie on the ground.

It seemed that we did not have a house to run to,

or that there was no longer time.

Yet I could notice that the snow around was blue,

and I thought of it as ice more than snow,

profoundly hard, and as if, in hitting them, they would

produce the sparks that flint produces.

But I was no longer to see them like that, from the next day on.

We could make out lights above us. The sky was clear

and the lights were stars that flickered in a distant wind.

It would be blue sky the next day, we already saw how it would be,

and in our impatience for day to come,

we couldn't get to sleep.

We now had our own room

behind the stables. It is separated from the village by a few hundred metres.

It is our house.

He continually looked out from the door

to see if there was still the same sky we had seen.

I too wanted to look out.

And he, after many times, when it was the middle of the night,

couldn't keep himself any longer from running and telling the others

about that sky which was going to give us a good winter sun.

Above all it was because of him,

my shame.

That is, faced with the manner in which he was with me,

continuing to consider me in everything as before.

For example the night in which

the good part of our winter began... He came to call us

out of our dormitories, and I woke up

from the shouts of my name. "Toma. Toma".

He knocked and called, and said my name

instead of another's.

I wondered: "What does he want?" But I heard

the rest of what he was saying, and I was truly ashamed.

"Come out and see what we have" he said.

And he told me to wake up Spataro,

to wake up everyone, and to come out to see with them all

what we had. "What?"

we asked.

We heard him going off and knocking at another door,

and calling for Cataldo there, but at our place he had called me

and it was a wink he had addressed to me

as though to someone with whom he knew he had an understanding

because of all the things we did together.

He said we had sun.

I think then that I hoped

he had gone mad. It was dark through the window

and I could see by my wristwatch that it was 3 in the morning. But outside

it was a blue darkness,

high up on the brightness of the masses of snow.

It was the sky

scattered with flickering green stars, and there was no madness in him,

it was the sun that we had,

and it was my shame not to know how to be content that we had it.

It was that in him which made me tender:

to see him content not really for himself, not exactly with himself,

but with the contentment that was there

and could be there, in our village.

One would have said he was thinking of having to work to create it

in the village

to be able then to have his share.

Certainly he was thinking that I myself

had no way of being content with him unless I was content

with how things were going with all of us

or at least with our efforts to make them go...

And really it was for this that he had begun

to make me tender: for all the times in which, like that night,

he showed a similar need for a joy of his

to be in participating in a general joy.

Thus all of February was splendid,

in the winter which by now was like we imagine by thinking of winter sun,

with the pleasure that even Spine had come back,

with the great satisfaction

of the electric power we succeeded in having,

with that, one evening, of the village illuminated all of the sudden

with every day a satisfaction,

and then March with the sowing of the potatoes,

and then the earth sparkling with green where the wheat had been put,

and then Easter with the lambs we slaughtered,

and then all of April with the green of the wheat which was growing

and was already higher than the snow had been...

He made me tender, I have said... I noticed

that perhaps there was in him an impossibility of being happy otherwise,

that's to say good otherwise, human otherwise.

It was as if he had to gather from outside himself

the feeling of himself. As if he didn't have

a conscience of his own, or had in his conscience

some projectile of war which paralysed it.

And it was as if even his love for me

had to be careful not to want me

from inside himself. It would have been an unpleasant love

he would have wanted for me.

It was as if it was this... But I became all the more tender

thinking it was this, and thinking of his effort to free himself

at least in a similar way, and to be a man in a similar way,

if it was impossible for him

to be one in the simple and spontaneous way

in which all men can be...

February, then March;

and in February the electric power

which we succeeded in having for our equipment,

with the bulbs

which had also already been installed, and the light which all of the sudden

was in each of our houses as if it had blossomed there;

and at the end of February

the red openings in the earth, between the breasts of the snow

which was splitting up without having withered;

and suddenly this earth to fertilize, then to dig;

and the pleasure

that this was still winter

even if no longer being the hard enemy which it had been....

Also all of April was the best weather for us

with our thing which continued to have its movement of rising, of rising,

because of the way in which our village was, our earth,

and all of them.

I myself, thus, could think I was

really changed, I was content, and knew

I would not have been content if I had remained as I had been.

For a while I had been asking myself... But am I?

And if for a while

I had not had anything to answer myself, then it had begun

that at times I could tell myself that I was,

and at times I could not. I was also afraid

of finding that I wasn't.

I tried to find that I was

even if I wasn't. But I could begin to tell her

that I was content, and I could begin to show her

that I was, and begin to be so.

I don't know if one can understand what that meant... One needs to think

how we had come together. That reunion of people

could become a good thing or also the worst

thing.

Each of them was someone who could, in combination with the others,

make it become good or make it become bad.

Each

was ready for both combinations. I was instead

as though I was ready for only one combination alone.

I could want

us to make a good thing, and I could work to make it,

I could be the most implacable

in working to make it, but what by now I had ready in me

did not help me make it.

So that's why I asked myself

if I was content while that reunion became a good thing.

Did it matter to me or did it not matter to me

that it was such a good thing?

At times it mattered to me. At times

it didn't matter to me. But in those days from February until May

I was really content with it. It really pleased me

to be part of it. And what did it mean

that it pleased me to be part of it? Did it not mean

that I was changed?

The thing between me and her

actually continued to rise as if I were changed. And I helped

to put the potatoes in the earth

which was still soaked with the cold of the snow,

having pleasure in doing it

as if I were changed. And the green

altering in the folds of our earth, with the growing of the wheat,

was under my gaze

as if I were changed. And also

the smell of the smoke of milk and underbrush,

when they began making the ricotta,

was as if I were changed...

In 1919

it is the revolution

- against the British occupier.

The rural masses

- disinherited and poor -

are its principal force,

multiplying the sabotage of lines of communication

and organizing a great many clashes with the army of occupation.

The revolutionary democratic objectives are tied

to the patriotic objectives:

embryonic forms of popular power

come to light,

armed revolts

break out against big landowners.

The workers,

the unemployed,

the students,

the shopkeepers,

the officials,

find themselves side by side

throughout the year

in the streets of Cairo and of most of the other big cities

in violent demonstrations of an amplitude

unknown until then.

The workers

will pass on to specific forms of struggle:

occupation of factories

and self-defence against the forces of repression.

The communal councils of the Apuan Alps

where 23 years ago Reder and his men

murdered hundreds of people

pronounce themselves against the request for mercy

after the commune of Marzabotto.

Vinca, may the flame which burned destructively

through German barbarism

remind you, enclosed in the marble of your mountains,

of the martyrdom of your people.

There was a very real way of forgetting those killed:

the way followed by the Italian ruling classes

in the first ten years of the post-war period.

Today they prefer to speak of the Nazi slaughters

in order not to look at the truth of Indonesia, Vietnam,

Latin America, the Congo.

In the end, there is only one harsh, ferocious piece of news:

"You are not where that which is deciding your destiny is occurring.

"You do not have a destiny. You do not have and are not.

"In exchange for reality you have been given

"a perfect appearance, a well-imitated life.

"Well distracted from your death

"to enjoy a sort of immortality.

"The recitation of life will never have an end, you blessed ones."

To evoke the Nazi butcheries equals

to ask for a key for them, an interpretation.

This sense was: to have summarized in the position of victims

and in an incredible concentration of time and ferocity,

all the forms of domination and violence of man on man

proper to the modern age;

to have reproduced for the use of a single human generation

that which diluted in time, in space,

in habit and in insensibility,

the European subaltern classes

and the colonized populations had undergone

as a denial of existence and history,

as an alienation reification annihilation.

But to extract this sense and a lesson

of struggle against the extreme conditions

which render possible the destruction of man,

of which the Jewish massacre is only an example,

has been done by few.

Many spokesmen of the so-called Western "culture" sought

interpretations extra-historical and metapolitical

and arrived at situating the Nazi massacres

in the order of the "sacred",

at considering them a work of Evil itself,

in substance at accepting, by reversing the contents,

one of the central myths of the Nazi mystique:

purity and purification through the holocaust.

This was, in the international order, an operation analogous

to that accomplished in interpreting fascism.

In either case, the Soviet position - and the Communist one -

inasmuch as it tended towards coexistence, or towards UN democratism,

tended also to perpetuate

- in accord with the Western ideological spokesmen -

the pathetic-propagandist version of Horror and Bestiality.

Naturally, the class interpretation has been put forward,

and in forms by now canonical.

Still, the moralistic limit, with its fundamental optimism,

has continued until yesterday to favour a "fixation" of Nazism

in mythological forms,

of which, in substance, its atypical forms have benefited,

that is those, just as ferocious, of Modern Imperialism.

To dissolve this fixation

and make the Nazi massacre recover its character of bloody "normality",

it was necessary that there should enter the struggle

the countries in which European colonialism had installed

far vaster Lagers than the Nazi ones

and destroyed far more numerous millions of lives

than the SS had dissolved.

And finally it must be said that in the action of those

who with major coherence and heroism fought against Nazism

and of whom we read the thoughts and the last letters;

and also, indeed more, perhaps in those who were

in no way exceptional

and have left no trace,

those who were only victims,

I've always felt there was

something that went beyond the struggle against Nazism,

something - be it only for one moment, the last one -

that contributed, whether they knew it or not,

to the "dream of a thing"

which men have had "for so long",

to the enormous dream of men.

You have thirsted very long for the unusual,

and as from a sick body the spirit

of Agrigent longs to leave the old track.

So venture it! what you have inherited, what you have acquired,

what your father's mouth has told you, taught you,

law and custom, the names of the ancient gods,

forget it boldly and raise, as newborns,

your eyes to godly Nature,

as then the spirit is kindled on the light

of the heavens, a sweet breath of life

will drench your bosom as if for the first time,

and full of golden fruits the woods will rustle

and springs out of the rock, when the life

of the world seizes you, its spirit of peace, and

like a holy cradle song stills your soul,

then out of the bliss of a beautiful dawn

the green of the earth will glisten anew for you

and mountain and sea and clouds and stars,

the noble powers, like heroic brothers,

will come before your eyes so that your breast,

as of weapon bearers, beats toward deeds,

and a beautiful world of your own, then reach one another your hands

again, give the word and share the goods,

o then you dear ones - share deed and glory,

like true Dioscuri; let each one be

as all, - as upon slender pillars, let

upon righteous ordinances the new life rest

and let the law affirm your bond.

Then o you geniuses of wandering

Nature! then you serene ones

who take joy out of the depths and the heights

and as grief and happiness and sunshine and rain,

bring it to the hearts of narrowly bounded mortals

from a far strange world,

the free people will invite you to its feasts,

friend to guests! pious! for lovingly

the mortal gives of the best, if his bosom is not

closed and narrowed by servitude.

O father!

From the heart one names you, Earth, then once more

and as the flower sprouts out of your darkness

the red cheek of the grateful will bloom for you

from a breast rich in life and a blessed smile.

Bestowed with garlands of love then

the spring will rush down, will grow under blessings to a stream,

and with the echo of a quaking shore

will intone worthy of you, o father ocean,

the song of praise out of free bliss.

He feels new in heavenly kinship with you,

o sun god! the genius of man,

and yours as his, is what he forms.

From pleasure and courage and fullness of life

his deeds come easily to him, as your beams,

and beauty will die in a sad and mute breast no more.

Often the heart of mortals sleeps like noble seed corn

in a dead shell,

until its time is come; the ether breathes

lovingly always around them,

the sleepers; and with the eagles their eye

drinks morning light, but it does not give

its blessing to the dreamers and it is nourished sparsely

from the nectar that the gods of Nature

daily reach, their slumbering being.

Until they are weary of this narrow drifting,

and life, mindful of its origins,

seeks lively beauty and gladly

unfolds in the presence of the pure,

then will another day rise and glisten, it is they!

the long lacking, the living,

the good gods!

New world -

Translation: Barton Byg, Misha Donat, Ted Fendt, D.H., J-M.S., Gregory Woods

Subtitling: L.V.T. - Paris