hydrarchist writes
Horst Fantazzini, anarchist, robber, prison rebel, spent most of the last thirty years in prison. Last year he was eventually released into semi-liberty. On wednesday December 19th he was arrested, in the company of another anarchist, Carlo Tesseri, near a bank in Bologna and and charged with intent to commit robbery . Horst died of a heart attack in jail on December 24th. Carlo Tesseri remains incarcerated. Fantazzini was famous in Italy as a 'gentle robber' who eschewed violence against individuals. His time in prison intersected with the mass political unrest of the 1970s, during which he won reknown both for his refusal of the authoriatrian practices of the Red Brigades and his unrelenting resistance against the prison system. Enjoy.

"Interview with Horst Fanatazzini, a life in prison:
sentence completion date 2022

What is currently your legal situation and when do
you foressee yourself being able to get out of jail,
at least into semiliberty?

At the moment, my release should occur, more or less,
in 2022. In terms of typologocalical classification, I
think I've been filed in the category "dinosaurs and
tortoises". I think that beyond the freedom committees
of the anarchist milieu, the World Wildlife Fund
section on 'endangered species' should also take an
interest in me.....

This absurd situation came about
by means of the application, in a restrictive manner,
of the so-called 'consecutive judgment', which
functions as follows: all the convictions are
calculated and added together and if the result
exceeds 30 years, which is considered to be the
maximal punishment, the overall sentence is set at 30
years. In my case, already starting from preceding
consecuitives, the thirty years came to have effect
from the date of the last crime committed. This was
the case also for my last consecutive, occurring after
my last arrest in 1991. The thirty years started to
elapse from 1990 and my release set for 2020. The
repeated application of "continuation of crimes',
asked for by my lawyer, will marginally improve the
sitaution. Then, some other trials have become final
(for robbery, possession of weapons, false documents
etc.) and the siutation, today, should be exactly that
of a hypothesized release around 2022-2024. As soon as
the trial in Rome against the 'bad anarchists' has
concluded, in which I appear as a defendant (soon
there will be the last hearings), the lawyer plans to
ask for the application of an overall redefinition of
the continuation of all my sentences. The result will
depend on the humour of the judge, on his good or bad
digestion, on the behaviour of his mother, on the
astral conjunction and other uncontrollable factors.
Rationality and good sense are peremptorily excluded
from the places where the guard-weasels (trans. in the
italian the word is ermellini da guardia, which also
refers to the fabric of the judicial office)
congregate to decide upon the life and future of mine.
As regards semiliberty or other 'benefits',
theoretically I could take advantage of them from
April 3rd this year, that is when my final period of
'treatment observation' will conclude.

Many comrades have asked us if you thought of yourself
as an anarchist prior to your arrest?

That's a fine querstion. You were a friend of Libero,
my father, and you met me about eleven years ago.
There is no doubt that I have always defined myself as
anarchist and claim and have claimed myself as such in
judicial process. But this is not enough. The
anarchist being entails the capacity of reconciling
one's ideal with one's own life, and this has not
always been so in my case, especially when I was very
young. I define myself an individualist anarchist, a
conscious rebel that has often acted unconsciously. At
the age of fourteen years of age I was already signed
up to the USI (trans. an anarchist organisation),
which I don't know still exists (trans. yes, it
does!). In 1965, I was present at the preparatory
meeting of the Congress which unrolled in Bologna and
amongst the participants was Armando Borghi who was
expelled from the board of 'Umanita Nova' after tiring
polemics. In thyis period, with other youngsters, I
was bringing to life an Anarchist Youth Federation,
but then my life became almost entirely caught up in
prison. In approximately thirty years of jail, I
believe to have always conducted myself coherently
with a way of being and to feel myself existentially
anarchist. My firendships and my loves have anarchist
DNA. My correspondents are almsot entirely anarchists
and range from a near mythic 80 year old Mantuan to an
eighteen year old anarchist6 skinhead girl from
bergamo (that I treat with fratenal affection). I am
irremediably and proudly anarchist.

Could you talk about your struggles during this
long imprisonment. In the film this aspect is
eluded.

To speak of struggles in prison today is like digging
up sweet memories from a sarcophagus, so much is the
change confirmed, in the last fifteen years in the
place and its desperate inhapitants. From the
sarcophagus emerge portraits of men who were alive and
proud but who have been bent, broken and dispersed.
Men who claimed with passion their dignity and sought
without mediation their freedom. Men who died on the
roof-tops during revolts and who nobody remembers any
more. Men that in meeting with the first jailed
comrades had discovered that life and struggle can
have meanings higher than their little desires and
selfishness. The end of the '60s and the whole of the
'70s were seasons of struggle that will never repeat
themselves again. Prisons destroyed tunnels to
freedom. Personally I participated in scores of
struggles, big and small. I saw the destruction of the
special section of Asinara, that of Nuoro and that of
Trani and these struggles cost me a 'bonus' of more
than twenty further years. Today the prison is
'pacified' and the air which one breatehes is that of
heavy resignation. The 'population' has changed
radically and almsot the entirety made up of drug
addicts and samll and medium level drug dealers. Their
primordial promblem is that of continuing to obtain or
continuing to deal their daily dose. There are hardly
any comrades at all. In Alessandria I left three. Here
there is no-one. The mafiosi are under the rubric of
41/bis, a rewriting of that which for us, years ago,
was article 90, that is an restrictive interanl
regulation inside a system of rules which are in
themselves already strict. Today they are almost all
young or really young and the prison is nothing other
than an enormous container of a social unrest that
no-one knows or wants to resolve. I have never felt
myself such a 'stranger' in jail. I resist by seeking
to extract myself from all that surrounds me, taking
refuge in my books and speaking with my computer. My
relations with the outside and the love I draw from
them give me strength....... said dear Eduardo. There
it is, dear comrades, I cannot do anything other than
try to resist, waiting fro Godot to decide to arrive.

During these struggles you have had to clash not
only with the prison administration but also with the
'counterpower'. Do tyou want tot tell us how that
happened?

Between the end of the '70s and the middle of the
'80s, the jails were full of comrades. There were ten
special prisons: Cuneo, Novara, Fossombrone, Trani,
Termini Imerese, Favignana, Pianosa, 'l'Asinara and
Nuoro. Then there were specials ections in almost all
of the other jails. For a decade, we 'differentiated'
deatinees did not have contact with the other inmates.
It was normal procedure to hold us in prisons as far
away from our homes as possible, so as to make visits
extremely difficult, which took place in any case
behind glass partitions and through intercoms.
Correspondence was subjected to censorship. We weren't
allowed to receive packets of food supplies from
outside, only books and clothing were allowed. not all
the prisons were 'specialized' in the same manner:
some, like Fossombrone and Cuneo, were softer than
Asinara or Novara. I believe that at that time we were
treated like guinea pigs, upon which was studied
behaviour and reaction with respect to the gradualness
of the 'tratment', which ranged from the hours of
sociality (space and activities to share during
several hours of the day) to the pure hard isolation
of Asinara (two or three to a cell, always the same
ones, with periodic rotation at the discretion of the
monarch of the period, director Cardullo). Obviously,
fictitous 'comrades' and rebel 'sell-outs' were living
amongst us, for more effective control, a fact about
which we became certain later. belushi said that when
the game gets tough, the tough start to play. And it's
true. It's incredible the creativity that man manages
to unleash in difficult moments. The hard treatment
cemented the group and expanded solidarity. We were
all united against 'them' end we invented incredible
channels of communication to break the physical
isolation. In Asinara, for moths, the occupants of one
cell did not managae to see the the occupants of
adjacent cells, but every cell communicated with
the others. you could write a book on all tricks
invented by us to overcome the isolation to which we
were subjected, but the argument, now, is another. To
prepare struggles and eventual escapes it was
necessary to have a rigid compartmentalization, and
thus were born the CUC (Unified Camp Committees). in
Asinara, the brigatisti (trans. from the Red Brigades)
were in a majority, and thus the committees, initially
an expression of necessity and the situation of us
all, would become a political organism stamped with
'democratic centralism' , that lexical pun so dear to
uncle lenin. I said the brigatisti that I had nothing
against compartmentalized and restricted
organizational forms provided that they were purely
provisional and functional to the obtaining of a
rersult, but if these CUCs became permanent political
organisms , I didn't want to have any part of them. I
had participated in every struggle but not to their
political management. The first fight (destruction of
the intercoms at visits and refusal of all the
prisoners to return to their cells) finished with the
massacre of seventy of us. I ended up in a coma and
was brought by helicopter to the hospital in Sassari.
My recovery was kept secret and after two days I was
brought back to Asinara. My partner at that time
managed to find out and revealed the news and the
third day bounced through the whole media. A
delegation of parliamentarians came who could verify
the massacre. An inquiry was opened and the management
of Asinara found itself in great difficulty. A week
later we destroyed the two special wings without the
guards even daring to interfene. The wings rendered
unusable, we were provisionally posted in varios
'normal' sections of the island, awaiting transfer
elsewhere. A few days after this struggle, I managed
to pass to my partner an account that was opportunely
published in a pamphlet by "Anarchismo" editions. This
sent the brigatitis into a raging fury end the most
pissed off amused themselves by reminding us
anarchists of Kronstadt and Barcelona. My "Open Letter
to Comrades on the Outside" was published in all the
movement's journals, which then, in 1978, were still
alive and thriving. The polemic ricocheted theroughout
all the special prisons where, overall, the brigatisti
were in a minority and the majority of the prisoners
took my side. This polemic, amounted to an otherwise
obvious political weakness of the brigatisti (do you
remember the slogan of the movement "With Neither
the Red Brigades Nor the State!"?) and ratified
the end of the CUC in whose place was born the CUB
(United Committees of the Base) an 'open' organization
which for a bit represented all prisoners. Also " A
Anarchist review" published my letter together with an
naswer from Curcio under the title "Anarchists and
Stalinists". I was contacted by various political
parties and also by state organs because, derived from
the polemic in which I had been involved, some
intended to use me to create further divisions between
the prisoners. I did not lend myself to this game.
Asinara had hardly been rebuilt, and I alone amongst
those who had participated in the revolt, was sent
back there from Palmi. Then, after some bust ups with
the guards there, I finished up at Nuoro,
participating in the revolt that destroyed the special
wings there as well. But this was an epilogue. The
external weakness of the comrades was reflected inside
the prisons. The time of the 'penitents' (trans.
informers) and mass 'disassociation' began. The
intellectuals who had played at war, new prodigal
sons, woul;d return to their elite Habitat. Always
distrust professional intellectuals! They weave webs
heavy as chains on the dreams of free men. And since
the times of the ancient egyptian scribe, from
deflowering to deflowering, they always succeed in
rebuilding their virginity. Fifteen years ago, I wrote
this epitaph for them:

The existential misery of the intellectual is his being torn apart by the contradiction between the universality of his knowledge and the particularism of the dominant class of which he is the
product. And thus he wrestles, embodying the Hegelian 'unhappy consciousness', between referents to abandon and to conquer (win over)... And with this bad conscience, source of his disquiet, he aligns himself first with the proletariat, then with the marginalized, then with the third world, searching for strongholds on which to rebuild his own ruins (to pull himself together again), proposing himself again as the active subject, as an intelligence that, with respect to the phenomena analysed and dissected with the microscope of knowledge, self declare himself as the external avant garde from the heights of that knowledge robbed from his ancient forefathers. Among the ups and downs of life he wrestles in the desperation of being an eternal orphan. Orphan of the bosses abandoned without refusing its privileges. Orphan of the proletariat whom he had always instinctively rejected as a foreign body. Orphan of the third world that doesn't have the time to tune in his intelligent analysis having to resolve, day after day, his urgent problems of survival. From exclusion to exclusion, from elision to elision, from erosion to erosion, he found himself with others in the one ghetto. Then, frightened and implicated by the various craziness produced by their theorizing, they began to negotiate the surrender on the backs of all: to recover their initial position of intelligentsia. Misery in misery, plagiarist plagiarised, but privileged that always found the warm nest of the prodigal son who returns to his origins....
.....

These peoople, by repenting or through disassociation
or therough 'benefits' fromj the state that they meant
to fight 'without respite!', now are almost all out. A
handful remain in jail. Less than ten of these, in
jail for decades, have closed themselves off in a
dignified silence. They ask for nothing, they reject
'benefits' from the state that if asked, would bring
about their immediate release. Others, refugees
abroad, await an 'amnesty' or a 'political solution'
to come back. And the jails, now governed with the
carrot and the baton are more thriving than ever and
are bursting with the desperate. Well, I think that's
enough.

While not wanting to be invasive; it has been
noticed several times the transparency and serenity in
recounting what was your relationship before and after
your arrest. Would you like to talk about it?

With the last question you throw me into crisis. A few
days ago a journalist interviewed me on behalf of the
progam 'Frontier' on Rai 2 (trans. Italian state
broadcaster). Amongst other questions, at a certain
point he asked me if I felt regret. Focussing on the
word 'regret', I answered him that I didn't feel
contrite for the banks robbed nor the rest, but that
if I had the chance to relive my life I wouldn't do
the same things. Not because I consider them immoral
in this society to rob a bank, but because I think it
stupide to throw away one's life like that. Then I
told him that my current situation for better of
worse, is the fruit of an initial choice, this
finished by involving other people as well that didn't
share this choice, but who have gotten suffering from
it for sole reason of their goodwill towards me.My
parents, my wife, my children and comrades who wished
and still wish me well. This is a weight that I carry
and it is the heaviest of all. Anna is the person that
I have loved most in my life. Even today, when I think
of her, I feel myself invaded by an infinite
tenderness and sadness. And the person who has given
me the most, received in exchange only pain and
humiliation. She was close to me in the most difficult
moments, then in the special prisons the situiation
became heaviest, and we decided by common agreement to
leave one another. Rationally, without resentment nor
rancour, remaining friends.Today, after a life given
to others, she is a serene woman. I hope one day to be
able to see her again, to together caress Jacopo, the
newest Fantazzini who has recently made us both
grandparents.

interview by tiziana

Originally published in Umanita Nova No.3, 2000"