Coscienza di classe, identità ebraica e “zona grigia”. Per una rilettura politica di Kapò

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to link the Marxist concept of "class consciousness" to the analysis of theevolution of the character of Edith (Susan Strasberg) in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1959 movie Kapò. Here, in fact, Pontecorvoand Solinas (the screenwriters) choose to put at the center of the film a direct reference of what Primo Levi called the"gray zone", that vast ambiguous and paradoxical area that extends between the persecutors and the victims of theHolocaust. In particular, we refer to the story of Edith, a Jewish girl deported to Auschwitz who, by the time shearrived, decided to take the opportunity of change her identity in a political prisoner, thus escaping to death. Just enteredthe camp, she becomes a Kapò, a victim that the inhumane conditions of the Lager forced to become a collaborator ofthe persecutors, and then a perpetrator. The Lager in Pontecorvo’s intentions is nothing more than a transposition ofsociety in the Marxist sense, in which the Nazi executioners metaphorically represent the bourgeois classes, while thevictims are the proletarian classes oppressed by history and reduced to a subordinate condition. Starting from this, thecharacter of Edith puts on a real awareness of her social condition (class), and at the same time of her identity. And it isprecisely from the intersection between class consciousness and religious identity that the paper will begin, with the aimof giving an account both of the Marxist interpretation of the society made by Pontecorvo through the representation ofthe Lager, and of the "gray" historical condition of its ambiguous protagonist - also through a conclusive analysis of theItalian political reception of the film.