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 the
evolution of the character of Edith (Susan Strasberg) in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1959 movie Kapò. Here, in fact, Pontecorvo
and 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 the
Holocaust. In particular, we refer to the story of Edith, a Jewish girl deported to Auschwitz who, by the time she
arrived, decided to take the opportunity of change her identity in a political prisoner, thus escaping to death. Just entered
the camp, she becomes a Kapò, a victim that the inhumane conditions of the Lager forced to become a collaborator of
the persecutors, and then a perpetrator. The Lager in Pontecorvo’s intentions is nothing more than a transposition of
society in the Marxist sense, in which the Nazi executioners metaphorically represent the bourgeois classes, while the
victims are the proletarian classes oppressed by history and reduced to a subordinate condition. Starting from this, the
character of Edith puts on a real awareness of her social condition (class), and at the same time of her identity. And it is
precisely from the intersection between class consciousness and religious identity that the paper will begin, with the aim
of giving an account both of the Marxist interpretation of the society made by Pontecorvo through the representation of
the Lager, and of the "gray" historical condition of its ambiguous protagonist - also through a conclusive analysis of the
Italian political reception of the film.