Episode list

Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894 - 1961) better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel "Journey to the End of the Night" (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working class speech. From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. After the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944 he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile.

About Curzio Malaparte (1898 - 1957) born Kurt Erich Suckert, an Italian writer, filmmaker, war correspondent and diplomat. He is best known for his books "Kaputt" (1944) and "La Pelle" (1949) and "Technique du coup d'etat" (1931). During the 1920s, Malaparte was one of the intellectuals who supported the rise of Italian fascism and Benito Mussolini, through the magazine 900. After the Second World War, he became a filmmaker and moved closer to both Togliatti's Italian Communist Party and the Catholic Church.