Giuseppe Genna
Hitler

"And here, it emerges

The animal screech, like a mare, of Klara.

Blood stains the bed’s ventricle between the thighs.

It is born.

It is a non-person. It waits to become one.

They call him Adolf."

Since the dawn of Society, History has represented a diabolical monster in the eyes of Man, with which to share existence on this Earth. At least until the day of its extinction. At least until that much-vaunted Judgment Day that will expel the Homo Sapiens species from this Planet to cast it into a mysterious immaterial, hyperuranic dimension, which takes different names and denominations according to various Faiths and mysticisms: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory... just to mention the dogmatic derivatives of the Christian matrix.

Man looks at History, scrutinizes it, analyzes it, perceives its looming presence, feels fear, tries to nullify it, to tamper with it, to manipulate it. From this arises an indispensable dogma: it is the material and concrete product of Man who, through his actions, his interventions on Earth, interventions subjected to the rational character inherent in human DNA, modifies, inserts itself into the eternal invisible and imperceptible passage of Time. History and Time: two conceptual categories linked to each other by the perpetual human intervention, abstract, artificial, artful concepts. Yet fundamental, indispensable. Whether History is connected to philosophical-positivist ideas of Progress, or to nihilistic-Nietzschean doctrines of Eternal Return... the source of any thought is established as a certain and indispensable fact: History is a temporal bond, a construct of moments, an edifice of moments.

My interest in History as a human artifice of events is more than remarkable: it provides me with convincing and considerable considerations on the current human structure, its developments, its evils. It is the Mother, the Bride of the Past, the Present, the Future. To History and from History converge and branch out theme-producing bifurcations on Economy, Society, Politics, moral and religious Superstructures, Ideals. It is the magnetic pole of an immense mass of human contexts. History is produced in the same way a child molds clay and plasticine: through the Concrete, the manipulable, the modifiable, the erasable, the annullable, the recreable, the destructible, the annihilable.

Adolf Hitler is a figure who has managed to apply, even with disastrous and catastrophic consequences, 100% of the categories of modification and annulment to the historical process, implementing in certain respects that historical materialism of Marxist origin, a category and concept so rejected and hated by him.

Genna produces a work that intends to break away from the classic essayistic and historical-social written production. It is a narration that rejects the austerity, rigidity, the lack of flexibility that manuals and volumes possess, in order to test a biography that adds to the typical prerogatives of the historical text the corresponding ones of the novel. But it's not over. In fact, it performs a "stylistic mini-revolution", blending the best of the best belonging to a vast range of literary genres and shaping a raw, realistic, and truthful narration, yet enriching it with pathos, darkness, liveliness, and drama, a sinusoidal tour de force of frank chronological narration and psychoanalytic introspection of the key character.

The most striking example is the effective insertion of a sci-fi-horror vein represented by the Nordic mythical saga, in particular of the Wolf Fenrir, the Wolf of the End, witness to the birth of the Dictator, passive observer of the tragic evolution of events and Judge post-mortem. Hitler’s historical saga, while paradoxically maintaining the truth and pure empirical reality of historical events, plunges into a fantastic context. The attempt to unite historical narrative (and therefore pure objective reality) with fantastic stylistic enrichment has been perfectly succeeded.

The structure of the work contains further elements of innovation within it: eliminating long chapters aggregating well-distinguished historical periods, Genna, alongside customary chronological narration, divides his work into mini chapters specifying a particular temporal and locational context, transforming a biography/monograph into a true and genuine external and indirect diary of life, through the revelation of almost unknown scoops, the recreation of dialogues, the implementation of flashbacks, intimate and scandalous reflections, all having as common denominator the life and "work" of the terrible Fuhrer.

From childhood to death by suicide in a devastated, inflamed, and subdued Berlin, through an adolescence without acquaintances, burning disappointments, failures, shattered dreams, moral decay, spiritual and conscious rebirth, an existence marked by the influx into the mind and controversial nature of Hitler of a multitude of ideals, Nietzschean, Wagnerian, idealistic, Apollonian, anti-positivist, racist, reactionary, warlike, narcissistic, totalitarian, nationalist. A continuous forging of a twisted mind, marked by a difficult family situation (father Alois, illegitimate son, legitimized through deceit and mystification, a technique fully absorbed by young Adolf, mother Klara, weak, at the total mercy of the husband-uncle), by the suffering following the failed admission to the Vienna Academy and the death of the mother from cancer, to the degradation consequent to the life of a pseudo-dandy in Vienna, idle and dreamer.

Twenty-year-old Adolf is a pariah, without a job, just grand ideals, particularly a growing anti-Semitic and racist faith, against the "Jewish Marxist germ" blamed for the decay of the German and Nordic Spirit extolled and celebrated by Wagner, "messiah" of Germanic ideals. He finds misery, knows hunger, loneliness, the desolation of the "Mannerheim", the homeless shelter of Vienna, vast head, capital of an Empire close to collapse. And war will come, defeat, the humiliation of Versailles, Adolf's discovery of the DAP (Deutsche Arbeiter Partei - then NSDAP), a political formation which will be for the rest of his existence the only raison d'être. And again: the failed Munich Putsch of 1923, detention at Landsberg, the concretization of the program in Mein Kampf, the rebuilding of the party, the race to the polls, victory, the demolition of the Weimar Republic and the founding of the Third Reich, the implementation of a Totalitarian State, repression, anti-Semitic persecution, war, the camp universe, defeat, death.

Hitler has a personal designation within Genna’s work, presumably derived from Joachim Fest's official biography of the Fuhrer: the Non-Person, a man who radiates death, annulment, erasure, extinction: the lives, not just of those 6 million Jews slaughtered in various Auschwitzs but also of niece Geli Raubal (towards whom a morbid and incestuous niece-uncle relationship is attested, based on sexual perversions, moral blackmail, impediments, schizoid paranoias) and wife Eva Braun, and other women (Unity Mitford the so-called Valkyrie...) who faced passage to the hereafter because of him or even in his name: a powerful magnet that draws in fragile, weak, paranoid mentalities).

Hitler: love is deviation, in the name of a raw pseudo-social Darwinism, man is an insignificant cog in a mighty and active machine, the individual is annulled in the name of a Totality that replaces God and the Almighty. The State loses any liberal-democratic connotation for a universal and total omnipresence within a Society planned and decided at the table: a citizen is only he who has a well-defined type of "blood" within a specific and delimited territory that will necessarily be called to recover a "Lebensraum" through a gradual and fierce expansion towards the West and, especially, towards the East, the Russias, the expanses now dominated by Stalin and an inferior "race" that must necessarily be exterminated and anulled.

Particular is the heart of the work, a dramatic retrospective on the camp universe of various Auschwitz & co. (1941-45), rich in direct testimonies, of blunt, raw, brief and direct reflections, teeming with theatricality. Here Genna, as if in front of a mirror, questions, without response, those events, creating a rarefied and dark atmosphere, yet rich, intense and deep. An unsettling, irregular alternation of historical facts, questions, sparse phrases, all elements aimed at underscoring the catastrophic drama of the theme under analysis.

"Germ everywhere and the sprout of Anne Frank

There were many who collapsed from sheer hunger without writing it down, and Anne Frank's is not, should not be a privileged memory.

Souls radiating calm and clear over thousands of other faces"

I end this review with one last quote. A more than positive work.

"The World sustains by virtue of the children's chant between the walls of the houses of study, intent on repeating ancient words that from generation to generation propagate beyond the window, but also within the fibers of the heart and mind.

It takes only one just person for the world to deserve to have been created.

Be the cursed, not the one who curses."