Italian · 1898–1957
Kurt Erich Suckert, son of a German father and a Lombard mother, volunteered for the French army at sixteen, was gassed on the Chemin des Dames, joined the fascists, wrote a manual on how to seize a state, and was exiled to Lipari by Mussolini for insulting Italo Balbo. He changed his name to mean the bad side, as a joke against Bonaparte. In the 1940s he covered the Eastern Front for Corriere della Sera, saw the Iasi pogrom and the Warsaw ghetto, and turned what he witnessed into two books that no one can classify as reportage or fiction. He built a red house on a cliff at Capri that Godard filmed in Contempt. He ended a fascist, a partisan liaison to the Americans, a Maoist sympathiser and a Catholic convert, in that order, and left the house to the People's Republic of China.