The Italian writer Curzio Malaparte was one of the twentieth century’s great intellectual shape-shifters: a Fascist turned critic of Mussolini turned Maoist sympathizer; a prescient and provocative author of novels, reportage, political analysis, poetry, dramas, and a screenplay; and a gifted frontline reporter. He is best known for his unsettling, grotesque novels Kaputt (1944), about the Eastern Front during World War II—the title captures his diagnosis of pre-war Europe as decidedly broken—and The Skin (1949), which depicts Naples under US occupation between 1943 and 1945, after Italy shifted sides from the Axis to the Allies and he became a liaison officer to the US Fifth Army.

In the spring of 1931 Malaparte was ensconced in a hotel in Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera with a woman from an aristocratic Piedmontese family—one in an impressive chain of married lovers. He was thirty-two and that January had been fired after two years as the youngest editor-in-chief in the history of La Stampa, the Turin daily controlled by the Agnelli family of the FIAT industrial dynasty, who only last December announced its sale. The cause of Malaparte’s dismissal remains unclear; he seems to have irked both the Mussolini regime, of which he was an ardent early supporter, and the newspaper’s owners.

It had been a plum job, with access to everyone in Italy, time to write books, and an expense account that let him roam Europe for long stretches writing lively reportage. This included his notable 1929 series on Soviet Russia, with its clear-eyed assessment that although the country was ruled by a repressive regime and had living conditions worse than the West’s, it nevertheless remained a great power—and if it failed to remain one, he argued, it risked collapse.

He took his ouster from La Stampa badly and went to nurse his wounds in France, a country he admired and on whose side he had fought as a teenage enlistee in the French Foreign Legion during World War I. That had been the subject of his first book, La Rivolta dei Santi Maledetti (The Revolt of the Damned Saints, 1921), a stinging critique of Italian military leaders who were stuck in outdated nineteenth-century ideas of strategy and had led thousands of soldiers into bloody defeat by the Austrians at the Battle of Caporetto, which is also central to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). Malaparte had not seen much action at Caporetto but spun it out for the sake of larger truths and self-aggrandizement. His book both captured and fed a fury at out-of-touch elites and the failures of the young democratic Italian nation, a fury that in no small part helped fuel the Fascists’ rise to power in 1922.

In Juan-les-Pins Malaparte was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript that became his first big best seller when it appeared in 1931 in France: Technique du coup d’état, an ice-cold analysis of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky, Stalin, Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler, among other revolutionaries, many of whom he had observed firsthand as a journalist. Its main argument is that in the seizure of power, ideology only goes so far, and if a handful of skilled operatives manage to commandeer the mechanisms of the state—infrastructure, communications—a leader can take control without mass support or even favorable circumstances. This, Malaparte argues, was how Trotsky succeeded in 1917 and Mussolini in 1922, although Mussolini, like Hitler, at first participated in electoral politics. Writing two years before Hitler came to power, Malaparte depicts him as weak and “feminine,” afraid of his own troops, resorting to violence out of fear, “a Julius Caesar who can’t swim, stuck on the banks of a Rubicon too high for him to wade across.”

In Technique, Malaparte consciously placed himself in the tradition of Machiavelli’s The Prince, mapping out what it took to seize a modern state and presumably what it took to defend one. He saw clearly that the great political battles of the twentieth century would be between the defenders of parliamentary democracy and the insurgents of the far right and the far left who opposed it: Fascists and Communists, both of whom he referred to as “Catilines,” after the Catiline conspiracy, which sought to overthrow the Roman government in the first century BCE. “The ‘Catilines’ of the right fear disorder. They accuse the government of weakness, of incompetence, of irresponsibility,” Malaparte wrote.

They view a centralized, authoritarian, anti-liberal, anti-democratic state as the only guarantee of order and liberty, the only dam against the communist danger. “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” as Mussolini said. The “Catilines” of the left see the conquest of the state as a means to install a dictatorship of workers and peasants. “Where there is freedom, there is no state,” Lenin said.¹

Technique reveals Malaparte as what the Italians call un bel facistone but above all as an astute student of power—pitiless, clinical, cynical, unsentimental, indifferent to ideology, and like Machiavelli not caught up in the complications of morality or idealism. He deeply admired strong leaders and was as taken with Trotsky as he was with Mussolini for their revolutionary innovations and skill in knowing how and when to seize power. Mussolini forbade the book’s publication in Italy—presumably because it cast the Bolsheviks in a flattering light—but he allowed it to be reviewed widely. In Germany, some opponents of the Nazis circulated short excerpts from it.

After the war, when Malaparte sought to downplay his Fascist past, his criticism of Hitler helped him shore up his anti-Nazi bona fides. Technique was also banned in the Soviet Union, but Trotsky read it and called Malaparte’s theories about him “absurd.” It was later read with interest by both Che Guevara and the Greek colonels preparing for their coup in 1967—Catilines of the left and the right. When it was finally published in Italian in 1948, Malaparte added a preface in which he claimed the book was what had led the Mussolini regime to send him into internal exile on the island of Lipari, where he spent several months in 1933–1934, a punishment that later helped him burnish his antifascist credentials. In fact, what led to his arrest and internal exile—as well as his formal ouster from the Fascist Party—was that he had insulted his old friend Italo Balbo, the aviator and a leader of the squadrists, the Fascists’ action squads, or irregular militia, in a letter to one of their mutual friends. It was neither the first nor the last time that Malaparte provoked, offended, or fabricated stories about his life.

And what a life it was, as Maurizio Serra, a former Italian diplomat, makes clear in Malaparte, his fascinating, deeply researched biography. Published first in French in 2011 as Malaparte: Vies et légends² and then in Italian in 2021, it is now available in a crackling English translation by Stephen Twilley.

Malaparte was born Kurt Erich Suckert in 1898 in the Tuscan textile capital of Prato to a German Protestant textile manufacturer father and an Italian Catholic mother, who didn’t like him much. Known as Curzio in his youth, he shed his surname in his late twenties—a rejection of his German lineage and German father—and replaced it with Malaparte, the dark inversion of Bonaparte.

In Serra’s telling, Malaparte was a suave, elegant narcissist who slicked his hair, wore silk pocket squares, and shaved his legs and chest. He was also a ruthless social climber and a deft manipulator of those who could be useful to him. Malaparte enlisted in the Fascist Party in Tuscany in September 1922, but he did not participate in its March on Rome the following month, Serra confirms, debunking one of his central myths about himself. For years, when it was politically convenient, he claimed he had marched along with the Blackshirts. Throughout the 1920s he sought the respect and admiration of Mussolini, who had begun as a populist tabloid journalist and was known to read the Italian press voraciously. Malaparte, in Serra’s view, hoped to have the kind of rapport with Il Duce that André Malraux later had with Charles de Gaulle as a cultured adviser, but it was not to be. Mussolini saw him as more of a journalist than a thinker, Serra writes, “not a true Fascist but an inveterate individualist, who used the revolution to get ahead.”

In his postwar collection Diary of a Foreigner in Paris (1966), Malaparte recounts a possibly apocryphal story about his first meeting with Mussolini, in 1923. Il Duce had called him into his cavernous office in Palazzo Chigi, and he believed he might be given a reward. Instead Mussolini ignored him for some time, then reprimanded him for mocking his ugly ties in public. Malaparte swore he would not do it again. Just before leaving he asked to say one more thing. “Go ahead,” Mussolini said, to which he replied, “You’re wearing an ugly tie today as well.”

Even when he published Technique, Malaparte had no intention of breaking with the Fascists, and he harbored ambitions of becoming ambassador to Warsaw or Moscow. What sank this dream, Serra writes, was that Mussolini wanted his ambassadors to be married family men, and Malaparte was not keen to change his bachelor ways. In 1931 no fewer than thirty-four informers from the political police worked in shifts to keep him under surveillance. Whenever he bad-mouthed the regime, word got back to Rome.

The most sordid chapter of Malaparte’s long career was probably in 1924, when he defended Amerigo Dumini, one of the Fascist thugs responsible for the brutal murder that June of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti. A humanitarian pacifist, “hence doubly hated by the squadrists,” Serra writes, Matteotti had gathered solid evidence “of electoral fraud and embezzlement by the Fascists and the police force, which went all the way up to the interior minister himself.” The squadrists snatched him in front of his house in Rome and stabbed him to death.

Malaparte and Dumini had started out in Tuscan fascism together, and Malaparte had been Dumini’s second in a duel. He was drawn to Dumini’s brute force and also believed that he needed Dumini’s support to rise through the ranks and get closer to power. When Dumini and others were put on trial for Matteotti’s murder, Malaparte testified on his behalf, saying (falsely) that Dumini had told him they had meant to give Matteotti a lesson, not to kill him—if the death was ruled accidental, not premeditated, that would result in a lesser sentence.

The Matteotti murder was the most brazen example of how the Fascists used violence to secure their grip on power within a democratic system. This dynamic comes through very well in Joe Wright’s television series Mussolini: Son of the Century (2025), based on Antonio Scurati’s international best seller. The series ends in January 1925 when Mussolini addresses Parliament, taking responsibility for Matteotti’s death and daring his fellow MPs to vote him out. The response from the chamber is silence. It is one of many moments when the forces of liberal democracy (or the Italian army or the Catholic Church) might have blocked the Fascists but did not, either out of lack of nerve or imagination or out of fear of broader violence or physical harm. As Christopher Duggan writes in his excellent history of Italy, The Force of Destiny (2007), “The cause of fascism was greatly assisted by the ineptitude of its enemies.”

In the series, Mussolini often speaks directly to the viewer. Stefano Bises, one of Mussolini’s screenwriters, has said he wanted to make viewers sympathize with Mussolini and then eventually become ashamed of that sympathy. It’s a complex maneuver, and it works. Produced in Italy in Italian, the big-budget series was designed for global distribution by a major streaming platform, but in spite of glowing reviews, none bought it. Wright told The New York Times that one “very, very high-profile streaming executive” told him the show was great but “too controversial” for his platform. “My question back was, ‘Since when did antifascism become controversial?’” (Mussolini is now streaming on Mubi in the US.)

While the squadrists used physical violence, Malaparte fought the war of ideas. In June 1924, the same month Matteotti disappeared and two months before his body was discovered outside Rome, Malaparte founded a radical magazine, La Conquista dello Stato (The Conquest of the State), a step he saw as crucial for fascism to evolve from an upstart insurgency to a full-blown regime. In its pages, Serra writes, Malaparte “called for the greatest severity against adversaries and the undecided, in the name of ‘necessary extremism.’”

The magazine was possibly funded directly by Mussolini, but it was more than a propaganda sheet. It published Giuseppe Bottai, one of the most intellectual of the top Fascist officials, as well as the young writer Elio Vittorini before he became an antifascist. Malaparte later championed other leading Italian writers. In 1937 he founded and edited Prospettive, a magazine of arts and culture, which ran until 1943 and in which he published two of the century’s major Italian poets, Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale, as well as the young Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. He also published García Lorca, Rilke, Éluard, Yeats, and T.S. Eliot, and issues dedicated to Surrealism and Existentialism.

In 1938 Mussolini’s racial laws went into effect, barring Italy’s Jews from positions in the public sector, including universities. Malaparte was a man of the right, but he was not a xenophobe. In 1939 Prospettive published an obituary of Sigmund Freud by the critic Mario Praz, even though it was forbidden to talk about the inventor of “Jewish” psychoanalysis, and a short story by Moravia, whose father, Carlo Pincherle, was Jewish. (Moravia, like Malaparte, is a pseudonym.) In 1941 Moravia filled in for Malaparte as editor when he was traveling on the Eastern Front and writing dispatches, including on the siege of Leningrad, which were eventually collected in The Volga Rises in Europe (1943).

Malaparte and Moravia are a fascinating duo, in many ways yin and yang figures of the Italian midcentury. Malaparte was a journalist at heart who needed to witness the outside world, larger political developments, and front lines. Moravia, who spent his early adolescence bedridden with an illness, probed the depths of postwar anomie and psychic and sexual politics in novels such as The Conformist (1951), which is ultimately about the corrosive effect of fascism on the inner life. Jean-Luc Godard filmed Contempt (1963), based on Moravia’s novel of the same name—a critique of American postwar cultural hegemony—at Malaparte’s austere modernist house on the rocky shore of Capri.

Moravia, like Vittorini, later distanced himself from Malaparte for reasons both political and personal. Serra cites a letter in which Malaparte recounts running into Moravia on Capri after the war: “At the end of lunch he asked me, snickering, if I was sorry Italy had lost the war. I responded naturally that I was deeply saddened Italy had not won.” Serra argues that the rapport Moravia eventually established with the Italian Communist Party, a major force in postwar Italian intellectual life, was not unlike Malaparte’s relation to the Fascists—affinity without total allegiance.

Malaparte was disappointed and disillusioned by the fall of Mussolini and the subsequent armistice of September 8, 1943, which Serra rightly compares to the fall of France in June 1940 in the impact it had on the national imagination. Italy was suddenly divided between Mussolini’s rump Republic of Salò, under German control in the north, and Allied control in the south, which continued for sixteen months of civil war. Malaparte pivoted quickly and cleverly. By October 1943 he had positioned himself as an antifascist, writing to the Allies that “I publicly and resoundingly distanced myself” from the Fascist Party. As part of this effort he referred to his having written Technique in 1931, but he did not call attention to the fact that he had been expelled from the party in 1933.

For a time in 1944 Malaparte wrote dispatches under a pseudonym from German-occupied Florence for L’Unità, the Italian Communist Party newspaper, with the help of Palmiro Togliatti, the deft and brilliant party secretary. Serra writes:

Togliatti was, like Malaparte, cold-natured to the point of minerality, more similar to a headmaster than to a political agitator, indifferent to human relationships, shaped by twenty years of survival in the ranks of the Comintern, a dissembler by vocation and not only by Bolshevik discipline.

But this association was short-lived. When the editors realized who was behind the pseudonym, Serra explains, “neither the Fascists nor the Communists wanted him on their side. And they had good reason.” In March 1945 Malaparte was arrested again, charged with having organized action squads. After the war Italy’s High Commission for Sanctions Against Fascism investigated him but eventually shelved its inquiry, probably after Togliatti sent a deposition in his support. “What a disappointment these anti-Fascists are! They’re Fascists without the black shirt!” Malaparte wrote ironically to a friend.

Postwar conditions provided him with no shortage of material. Kaputt and The Skin reflect the carnage and ironies of war and are completely sui generis in style, a mixture of reportage and autofiction deploying Surrealism in the service of realism. Much has been written about Kaputt and its influence on writers from Joseph Heller to Milan Kundera, who wrote that Malaparte had created a new form. In one invented scene in Kaputt, for instance, Ante Pavelíc, the Croatian Fascist strongman, tells the Malaparte character that the people of Croatia “wish to be ruled with goodness and justice,” and then offers him some “oyster stew”: “It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes.” The Skin probes the dynamics of conqueror and conquered in Allied-occupied Naples, an impoverished city where families starve, mothers prostitute their children to Allied soldiers, and local bosses fleece their occupiers.

“The Americans are not cynics, they are optimists; and optimism is in itself a sign of innocence,” Malaparte, then a liaison officer to the US Army, wrote archly ofhis naive new comrades. He dedicated The Skin to“all the brave, good and honorable American soldiers who were my comrades-in-arms from 1943 to 1945, and who died in vain in the cause of European freedom.” That “in vain” is classic Malaparte: his political allegiances shifted, but his dark, unsparing vision remained consistent.

After the success of Kaputt and The Skin, Malaparte returned to Paris. There he hoped to be celebrated and embraced but instead found himself snubbed by Jean-Paul Sartre and the other Existentialists, who didn’t like the taint of fascism still detectible on his well-tailored suits. The result of that sojourn is Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, which mixes salon gossip with sweeping, often cutting observations. It did not escape Malaparte’s notice that after the liberation of France, many Vichy apologists quickly recast themselves as resistance heroes. “I am more and more convinced that I prefer real collaborators to fake resistants,” he wrote. He is particularly incisive on France’s ideas about itself:

Cartesianism is France’s weakness. It has robbed the French of all naturalness, all spontaneity, all imagination; made them a people of reasoners, dry, arid, without imagination, without instincts, a prey to reason…. This is an age in which the subconscious and the irrational play such a large part in man’s activity, in his intellectual speculation, in his practical life, in his actions, even in his politics. That Cartesianism constitutes nothing more than a method of studying things, of studying life (and not of understanding it)—this is something a Frenchman will never accept.

Malaparte made his last trip to the Soviet Union in 1956, when the country was in the throes of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization process. He was en route to Mao’s China, an invitation Serra believes Togliatti helped him secure. There he wrote dispatches praising the Chinese people and was received by Mao. Once again he showed his affinity for potentates and knack for finding ways to travel on someone else’s dime to witness history.

In China he fell deathly ill and was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes, possibly a result of inhaling poison gas during World War I. Back in Italy in 1957, Malaparte eventually converted to Catholicism. (He had been raised a Protestant.) Serra recounts how Amintore Fanfani, the leader of the governing Christian Democrats, rushed to his deathbed to claim him as one of their own; a savvy nun who had been nursing Malaparte allowed him into the room just minutes before Togliatti—a commedia dell’arte grace note. After his death, the Italian Communists fought to claim his legacy.

Malaparte’s fundamental focus was on the great ideological battles of the twentieth century, but he was also a witness to the ends of eras, and in his lifetime he experienced many. He was a restless, knowing journalist who aspired to be Proust, writing in Du Côté de chez Proust (1948):

I’m haunted by the question of why and how societies decay, if they rot on their own, or under pressure from an external force, the work of a social push against which they have no other defense but to decay…. Because here lies the key to the enigma. Here lies the entire meaning of my activity as a writer.

This central question animates Kaputt and The Skin but also Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, which like another lesser-known work, The Kremlin Ball (1971), contains wry, textured, juicy diaries from lost worlds. The final, unforgettable vignette in Diary of a Foreigner in Paris may well be invented; it is drawn from an unpublished novel. Laetitia Pecci-Blunt, whose uncle was Pope Leo XIII, had married a wealthy American named Blunt, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism. The Pecci-Blunts’ summer party at their Tuscan villa near Lucca was always the event of the season, with singers from La Scala and elaborate fireworks. Laetitia was close to Mussolini’s daughter Edda, whose husband, Galeazzo Ciano, was Italy’s foreign minister; Mussolini later had him shot. (Malaparte had also been close to the couple in the 1930s.)

In the summer of 1938, just after the racial laws took effect, tutta Rome suddenly falls ill and cancels on the party. “The epidemic had rapidly spread across Italy, suddenly striking the nobility of Milan, Florence, Turin, Venice, and Bologna,” Malaparte writes. Princess Jane di San Faustino Bourbon del Monte, American-born and of a certain age, is incensed. (Her daughter Virginia married into the Agnelli family and after being widowed was romantically involved with Malaparte.) “‘Cowards!’ said Princess Jane.” She and Malaparte decide to attend as if nothing had happened. They arrive at the villa, in a landscape out of Piero della Francesca, and hang back behind the bushes, watching from a distance as the Pecci-Blunts, accompanied by a full orchestra, slowly begin to dance to a Chopin waltz:

Princess Jane gripped my arm tight, trembling. I saw tears roll down her pallid cheeks.
“Let’s go greet them,” I said. “They’ll be happy to see us.”
“No,” said Princess Jane. “If they see us, they’ll realize they’re alone.”
And Princess Jane pulled me gently through the trees toward the park gate.

In The Kremlin Ball, a marvelous collection of dispatches from Moscow in the 1920s published after his death, Malaparte also attempted Proustian testimony. Stalin’s purges have not yet begun, but it’s clear where things are heading, and Malaparte captures the changing times and fashions at the dinners, ballrooms, tennis courts, and theater dressing rooms of the capital: “In Moscow, one spoke far more frequently of Madame Schiaparelli than of Stalin—and it was no less dangerous to speak of Madame Schiaparelli than to speak of Stalin.”

In one passage set in 1929, the Malaparte character and the writer Mikhail Bulgakov are walking down Arbat Street on their way to the flea market when they encounter an old man carrying an armchair on his head. He identifies the man as Prince Lvov, the last president of the Duma before the Revolution, although this is not factually correct. Lvov is selling his armchairs to survive. He looks Malaparte over.

“Do they all dress as you do in Europe? It’s a strange way to dress. The tailors over there must have lost their minds. In my day…” And he started to count the buttons on my jacket, amazed that there were only three. “Four! That’s the cardinal rule, jeune homme! Not even the Communist Revolution was able to rip the fourth button off my jacket.”

Serra suspects that this encounter was invented, since in 1929 Bulgakov was already preparing to write the letter to Stalin in which he pleaded in vain to leave the Soviet Union.

Here as in other books the Malaparte character finds interlocutors who act as foils. Among them is Marika, his teenage interpreter in Moscow. One day they find the grave of Nikolai von Meck, the former director general of the Soviet Railways, who had told the public the railways were malfunctioning because they were antiquated and overtaxed by the war. Von Meck, Malaparte writes, was run down by “the locomotive that was the Soviet Revolution.”

“Von Meck was an enemy of the Revolution,” Marika said. “A bad guy, un sale type.”
“He was an innocent man,” I said. “Do you know what an innocent man is?”
“He blew up the locomotive boilers,” Marika said.
“It’s no longer à la mode to be innocent,” I said.
“It was his fault the trains didn’t work,” Marika said.
“The trains still don’t work,” I said. “It’s very dangerous to be the Director General of the Railways when the trains don’t work. One must never be the chef de gare when there is une révolution.”
“Tu dis toujours des bêtises, you always speak such nonsense,” Marika said.
“Naturellement,” I said. “Je dis toujours des bêtises.”

Malaparte had a light touch in a dark time. Today the long twentieth century is decidedly over, its implications still unresolved. On the day I began writing this essay, I received a string of calls and messages, a running ticker of history in the autumn of 2025.

A development economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris was distraught that he would have to fire people since he was facing double-digit budget cuts after the Trump administration slashed USAID. A millennial in the US angry at the system (broadly defined) had put the bulk of his net worth in gold, betting against the collapse of institutions, and urged me to do the same. An anxious American novelist told me that she was so distressed at the state of the country that she was exploring getting residency in France or Mexico. The chair of a department at a large public research university in the US told me that the Trump administration’s new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H-1B visa for skilled foreign workers risked decimating her university, as would a proposed four-year limit on student visas, as it is nearly impossible to complete a Ph.D. in four years.

For those of us who suddenly find ourselves, like characters in an Ibsen play, struggling to understand the new codes, the new geopolitical and social order, the new means of production and information, every day seems to bring another end of an era. There are plenty of political shape-shifters, authoritarians, Catilines keen to tear down the institutions of liberal democracy, and craven elites repositioning themselves to protect their wealth and privileges. But who will be the Malaparte of the meme wars, today’s chronicler of ends of eras? On what shared facts will our future history be based? Where will we even begin?