Emilio Lussu – författare

Emilio Lussu was an Italian MP and Professor of Political Economy, who was imprisoned because of his opposition to Mussolini. In 1929 he escaped with two fellow prisoners from the island of Lipari. Enter Mussolini combines an account of Mussolini’s rise to power and a critique of the Italian fascist movement that was influential at a time when many observers were still sympathetic to fascism, at least in its Italian guise. It was first published in English in 1936.

Emilio Lussu was an Italian MP and Professor of Political Economy, who was imprisoned because of his opposition to Mussolini. In 1929 he escaped with two fellow prisoners from the island of Lipari. Enter Mussolini combines an account of Mussolini’s rise to power and a critique of the Italian fascist movement that was influential at a time when many observers were still sympathetic to fascism, at least in its Italian guise. It was first published in English in 1936.

A rediscovered Italian masterpiece chronicling the author''s experience as an infantryman, newly translated and reissued to commemorate the centennial of World War I. Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu''s memoir is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and detached prose, the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy, the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms.For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu''s memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.

Das literarische Hauptwerk über den Dolomitenkrieg aus italienischer Sicht – mitfühlend, ungehorsam, demokratisch.Emilio Lussu befehligt als junger Offzier 1916/17 die "Brigata Sassari" auf der Hochebene von Asiago, auf der italienischen Seite der Dolomitenfront. Er notiert frei von Pathos und Sentimentalität Ereignisse eines Kriegsjahres – mit den "namenlosen" Soldaten als den eigentlichen Protagonisten. Der Roman erzählt den Militarismus in seinen tragischen und komischen ebenso wie in seinen irren Episoden, etwa in der Gestalt des Generals Leone, der den Krieg um des Krieges willen liebt und seine Soldaten in den sicheren Tod schickt, oder in Gestalt des sardischen Bauernburschen, der daserste Mal seine Insel verlassen hat. Eines der wichtigsten Bücher über den Ersten Weltkrieg – auch 100 Jahre danach.