La Storia e il Male tra politica e letteratura. Appunti su Gustaw Herling e Nicola Chiaromonte

L'articolo intende discutere i rapporti tra antifascismo, antitotalitarismo e anticomunismo nel quadro della Guerra fredda, ricostruendone la genealogia al di fuori della divisione tra Est e Ovest e investigando i vari intrecci tra liberalismo e antiliberalismo. L'amicizia e il rapporto intellettuale tra l'intellettuale italiano Nicola Chiaromonte e lo scrittore polacco Gustaw Herling-Grudziński offrono materiali per ricostruire una importante riflessione intorno a nodi cruciali del Novecento: potere, propaganda e violenza; la ricerca della "verità"; la natura del totalitarismo e le diverse strategie per combatterlo. Throughout the Cold War Fascism and totalitarianism, antifascism and anti-totalitarianism were often perceived and interpreted as reciprocally inconsistent categories, either basically avoiding to cope with Communist totalitarianism or exclusively focussing on it. In the post-1989 period anti-totalitarianism became the legitimizing key of the new democratic orders, but it boosted searches for genealogies still marked by binary perspectives. This essay reconstructs the complex links between pre- and post-1945 intellectual history within a ‘beyond Cold War’ perspective, analyzing the ways in which a selective and creative appropriation of the anti-liberal culture contributed to the elaboration of a liberal critique of totalitarianism. The friendship between the Italian intellectual Nicola Chiaromonte and the Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, developed between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s especially through the journal Tempo presente, provides a case in point. The relationship between violence and propaganda, the crisis of the idea of progress (or ‘nihilism’) and the ascent of the political religions, the faith in History and the problem of Evil represented some of the main topics of their dialogues and collaborations, and all of them amounted to a reflection upon totalitarianism as the deepest sense of modernity. Albeit their different understanding of the political action as a consequence of different intellectual and biographical itineraries, Chiaromonte and Herling shared a common emphasis on ‘truth’ as the main way of coping with the epistemological, ethical, and political implications of totalitarianism and of conceiving an oppositional strategy against it.