Ludwig, in the name of a murderous 'superiority'

A sinister fire that you feel on you and wonder how you could have not thought about it and forgotten. "Alessandra Coppola's 'Il fuoco nero' (Passaggi Einaudi, €16.00; 160 pp.) is a powerful book, both for the author's writing and for the detailed, indisputable and authoritative documentation. It is 1984, terrorism of various red and black matrixes dominates the front pages of Italian newspapers; in March 1984, Marco Furlan and Wolfgang Abel are arrested while attempting to set fire to the Melamara discotheque in Castiglione delle Stiviere. They are 24 and 25 years old respectively, they come from the upper middle class of Verona and, as Coppola writes, 'Verona is in the province of Salò'; in their home town, the two young men frequented extreme right-wing groups. Like so many of their friends/acquaintances, they feed on René Guénon and Julius Evola, philosophers seduced by neo-Nazi esotericism, black magic, and distorted cults imported from the East that lead to only one certainty: the superiority of the Aryan race.

The two young men are so convinced they are so superior that they take action: to cleanse the world of 'subhumans'. To Furlan and Abel will be attributed 10 of the 15 crimes committed between 1977 1984 from the North-East to Munich; atrocious episodes claimed with leaflets with neo-Nazi content and signed with the initials Ludwig. Alessandra Coppola began her investigation by re-reading documents preserved in the archives that reconstruct the fire that occurred inside the Eros Sexy Center, Viale Monza, Milan. On 15 May 1983, during an afternoon show in an adult cinema, then known as a red-light cinema, a fire broke out; six people died, including Livio Cerasoli, a passer-by who had come in to help the victims, and 32 were seriously injured. Everything falls into oblivion out of shame, because in our country, even today, there are A and C series victims, and this classification also includes the families of the victims, no one consoles them. After Piazza Fontana, this is the most serious massacre carried out in Milan by an extreme right-wing formation.

The sub-humans to be eradicated from our society are drug addicts, deviant priests, prostitutes, Roma, the disabled; ethnic purity becomes an obsession for Furlan and Abel and many others. The author reads documents, meets witnesses, some incognito because they have changed their lives, goes back to the environment in which the killers were formed, two students attending the same high school, rich, sons of professionals, entrepreneurs, living the Veronese elite in the Borgo Trento district with elegant bars where neo-Nazis educate their disciples and navigate them towards Ordine Nuovo. Abel and Furlan's criminality may have had accomplices, some witnesses recall a third boy/man who always accompanied them despite never being mentioned in the various trials. In the lucid investigation by journalist Coppola, everything is documented, it does not conclude but leaves questions to the reader, it reopens a light on the right wing of those years, on investigations, on trials that should perhaps be reviewed, perhaps reopened. The book invites civil society, the one that continues to believe in a possible change, to talk about it again. This is what good journalism is for: not to stop, to remember.

Alessandra Coppola, The Black Fire, Passaggi Einaudi, € 16.00; 160 pages