A Triestiner: Claudio Magris

Magris spent most of his life living near the Iron Curtain

Italian author Claudio Magris has been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on Sunday. DW spoke with the literary giant about war, peace, the Cold War and the troubles between China and the West.

On Sunday, Claudio Magris receive the Peace Prize, awarded annually for the efforts of artists and scholars to overcome hatred. A native of Trieste, he is a retired professor of German literature who writes essays and novels. He had a brief political career as a Left Alliance senator in Rome for Trieste from 1994 to 1996.

His selection in June for the prize brought renewed interest in his philosophical ideas and incisive writing, and revived speculation that he was in line for the Nobel Prize for Literature. However some German arts commentators criticized the choice, saying his enthusiastic vision of European unity was out of date at a time when many EU citizens are bored with European Union politics and nationalism is rampant again.

Deutsche Welle: Claudio Magris, this weekend you’ll be awarded the 2009 Peace Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair, let’s talk about peace and war. War plays a big role in your works. Do we have to accept war as a part of our lives?

Claudio Magris: No. Of course there are different kinds of war, not just war where bombs are dropped. There are wars in everyday life – latent wars. There are two dangers. Firstly, that people think that war is unavoidable, that it’s part of life. On the other hand, the false optimism that people think that in our world progress has eliminated wars like immunization has eliminated smallpox. This is a danger, because to fight a disease – and war is a disease – you have to know the disease. You also have to unfortunately be aware of how serious it is and how probable it is that another war will break out.

You’ve mentioned different types of wars, the Cold War, for instance. In Europe we’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. You come from Trieste, one of the places where east met west. You were on the border during the Cold War. How did you experience the end of communism and how Europe grew together?

First of all it was a big surprise for all of us. Nobody could believe in September 1989 that the Berlin Wall would fall so quickly. I couldn’t have imagined it. Even people who were active in bringing down the wall, I talked with some of them, and right up until the day before they never believed that the wall would fall. And they were fighting for this to happen. This is a danger that we blindly believe. We believe that the reality and the situation we are currently in today can never change. This border that was impregnable up until the end – the Iron Curtain – was close to my house. I lived in the center of Trieste, but it’s a small city, so I always felt that someone in spirit I was on the other side of the border. Not on a political level, but because these regions were divided for absurd reasons. Today we have other barriers; invisible, social barriers. Ethnic barriers within our towns that we can’t or don’t want to see. So the borders are still there.

The monopoly of memory

An interesting video by Deutsche Welle about the wall, the GDR, our relationship with history and the perception we have of it…and the fact that nobody is entitled to have the monopoly of memory.

firewall

Months ago MeinMann and I bought our flight tickets in ordet to “sei dabei”, to be there, in Berlin, on November 9th.

There are many reasons to it. The main one is to be physically there, since in 1989 I lived the events (fall of the Berlin wall, but also velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia) through the letters of my DDR and Czech pen pals but I wish I could have been there, side by side with my friends.

And of course we want to join the party, and live the Stimmung, the atmosphere of such a special day.

But there is also another reason. We want to escape to the viruses which are already incubating in Italy. I have already spotted extreme-right posters with the small icon in the corner: “against all walls”.

There are people here, in the Banana Republic, ready to hijack the celebrations. We don’t want to be in Italy on those days, even if we are very well equipped with firewalls against these viruses. We don’t want a beautiful day to be stained with Banana Republic rhetoric.

As Tabucchi says in an interview today “The end of totalitarian governments is a good thing to celebrate, but you have to be careful. Someone could use it to scrutinize other conquests and other freedoms”.

The laboratory of post-democracy, Italy, is not the place where I want to be on that day.

words matter! le parole sono importanti!

A scene from Nanni Moretti’s film “Palombella rossa”, where Nanni shouts “Le parole sono importanti! I don’t talk like that! Who speaks badly, thinks badly. Lives badly. Words are important! Words matter!”.

Words matter. In february in Italy we assisted once more to the bad usage of the word Memoria. Giornata della Memoria. Memory of what? I was in Germany that day, and what was celebrated there was the “Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus”. Just to be clear for the future generations, you know.

Words matter. Indeed I was expecting another mashed-potatoization for April 25th, the day of the Liberation from the nazifascism. And it arrived on time. The prime minister suggested that this day should be called from now on “Freedom Day” – Festa della Liberta’ instead of Festa della Liberazione. And let’s face it, a shortcut had been already done so far, with the media stopping at the liberation from the nazism and curiously leaving out the liberation from fascism.

So after having mashed everything in the Giornata della Memoria (memory of WHAT?), now an equally mashed, pre-cooked and pre-digested Freedom Day. It is not by chance that his own private party has the same name.

As per the peculiar definition of Freedom used by the people leading this country, Corrado Guzzanti and Neri Marcore’ provide in my opinion the best applicable definition of  this particular brand of Liberta’ to date. Liberta’ as in Casa delle liberta‘, Partito delle liberta’, Popolo delle Liberta’ or Giornata della liberta’ – something which has nothing to share with the Freedom as in Liberte’, Egalite’, Fraternite’ but a petit-bougeois but not liberal, spieβig and vulgar, ultimately mean and free-riding attitude culminating in “Let’s do what the …. we like”.

the paranoia of power

Sophie Scholl – The last days. This is one of those movies that I could see over and over, as if I were at the theatre, and discover every time a sentence, an expression that I didn’t notice before.

I had missed this film on Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement at the cinema when it was released in 2005 and it was on my movie ‘to do list’ since a while. I found the DVD on my desk in the office yesterday, after a friend had told me that the film was impressive.

The first thing you notice in the film is the detail. The brown flowers on the wall paper. The clothes. Not “oh so 40s!” but normal. The locations, enormous buildings, resonating with echo. Offices and buildings, not “standard nazi” but still imperial, with a smattering of nazi decoration (portraits, geographical maps of Third Reich Germany) scattered about the rests of three layers of systems of power.

When you exit from your reality, your living room, and start to dive into the plot, the theater comes out. The actors have long takes and they act in front of you as if they were on stage. Julia Jentsch is grossartig and really magnetic.

The beauty of the DVD is the special content, and in the interviews you can understand the great deal of preparation that both the director and the actors put in the film. Preparation is the most recurring word. The story is well-known in Germany, and they wanted to convey all the new material emerged from the archives in order to bring new angles to this important episode of German history.

Conscience versus an illegal legal system. The paranoia of power. These are the elements which stand out from the police interrogations.

Yesterday I finished reading an incredible book, where the paranoia of power, the conscience of a woman against the aberrations of an illegal legal system stand out. But I will talk about that in another post.

Tomorrow is April 25th, the Liberation anniversary in Italy. And the scrap of paper left by Sophie Scholl on her bed before going to trial had one word scribbled on it: “Freiheit”.

Tomorrow I will be disgusted, once more, by those who will tarnish once more the meaning of liberty and the memory of those who died for it, be them partisans, military or civilians, just like Sophie Scholl. Because in Italy the paranoia of power is back. In a cushioned, muted, sometimes obscenely farcical way, it is here. And also in a brutal way, let’s not forget about it.

more about Berlin

A few updates…on the italian Radio 3 the “Jumping over the Wall” (Saltare il Muro) series of interviews has been on air for a week now. You can find the MP3 files below the Berlin Wall section.

I kept on reading books on Berlin, the Weimar Republic, 1945, 1989…a few updates in the bookshelf in Berlin and Rome sections, depending on where I actually read the book. In Berlin we do not have TV, Mac, PC. It’s fabulous for reading books, no distraction…no blogs, no news apart from a tiny alarm clock radio permanently set on JazzRadio.

Other books are being read now, so more to come. I have a few thousands pages to travel across, so I’ll refrain from buying other books, but in the meantime in the Berlin Wall section I jotted down the titles of a few ones which may be worth browsing (but not buying yet!) when in a bookstore…

stolpersteine and sanpietrini

Stolpersteine in Schoeneberg.

saltare il muro, jumping across the wall

20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Radio3 is collecting individual memories and your own story. If you were there in November ‘89, tell your story to Radio3…this is the page. From April 6th live on Radio3.

In the meantime, a new section has been opened on this blog, “Berlin Wall”…have a look and leave your comments!

the pataccari of history

Have you ever been tempted by that fake handbag while strolling in Florence? Did you glance at that remarkably well reproduced Rolex in a Capri pizzeria at dessert time?

There’s much more on offer in Italy, but only for locals. Especially for young locals, or not so attentive baby-boomers. Why should they go through the long decision process and high cost of getting something genuinely authentic, when they can have a fake?

A fake history, for home consumption.

The people who lived WWI and WWII are completing their bow in the sky of life. They can tell the difference between the real stuff and the counterfeited. Some want to shed light, others don’t. But many do not recognize the events they have lived anymore in what is reflected by the media.

There are just too many occasions in which politicians  and journalists behave asymmetrically, with selective memory and amnesia. And other cases they draw symmetry where there is no symmetry at all. They want to confuse our ideas on history. They are faking it. They are PATACCARI.

There are too many journalists who are interviewed on TV by other journalists. A mirror game, you quote me, I quote you back. In the TV interviews some journalists have under their name the “member of parliament” label. Others carry the solemn caption of “historian”.

I thought historians were scholars studying documents in universities, doing research, year after year…not people who did word-crunching for a living. But it is sure that now anybody, politicians and journalists on top, can claim to have a chair at a university in our poor country. Wiki-them, they depict themselves as “historian and journalist…”. So the circle is closed. Tout se tient. These people will write the history books. They are doing it already. After so much boots-licking and microphone-holding, they deserve a comfy office.

If you want to see footage on historical events in Italy, you can try Istituto Luce or RAI Teche. Do send an email to Luce in order to access historical filmed material. They will never answer to you. Try to ask to access the same at RAI. It is locked away by the “managers”, for their private cut-and-paste of history.

There are still journalists who wear out their shoes doing their metier. There are citizens who were witnesses or victims, who speak out (about Genova). BBC in 1989 produced two films on the fascism and we never got to see them. God save YouTube!

Paolo Rumiz is a journalist doing his job of investigating infinite shades of grey, and not selling ready-made all-black or all-white easy solutions from a chair in a university. Here are two articles – in italian I am sorry. They both cover the theme of the day, the foibe. And the asymmetries, forced symmetries, distorted memories, in a word, the fake history.

On the first article, he describes the fascist lagers in Italy. In the second, dated as of today, he reminds us that the Risiera di SanSabba was a nazi lager – because Triest was part of the reich – and so the parallel between foibe and Risiera is a nonsense.

But some politicians (and many journalists) don’t even know where Triest is on the map. Like with the poor woman dead today after 17 years of forced feeding, they just USE people, USE history instrumentally…and forget about them when they have reached their objectives. Their objectives? look where the fakes take you. Follow the tread…tout se tient. Triest is the key. They are looking for friction, and Triest has always been the perfect ignition point.

Both articles are on bora.la

Rumiz sulla rimozione della memoria storica in Italia

I volonterosi carnefici del duce

1969’s normalization

Yesterday MeinMann and I went to the Prague Spring exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Photos, novels, videos, poems and printed media about the 1968 events and the subsequent “normalization”. 20 years later the Velvet Revolution would sweep normalization away…

I was reading the book about the exhibition during the holidays in early January of this year. I found this poem by Zbynek Havlicek – which I could not find in english version so far – in the days in which Gaza was being bombed.

That overly zealous wiper blade closing the poem conveys the feeling of blind obsession of war and its mechanic, grinding advance.

Nelle mandibole politiche dei giorni

Otturate dai cingoli dei carri

Dorme

La coscienza del mondo

Con la sua unica morale

Dei condannati a morte

Pone sotto di se’ ragioni come mine

Mentre la grande schizofrenia della storia

Come una lancetta che si agita febbrile sui vetri delle auto

Si asciuga dalla fronte il  sudore invece della pioggia.

Photo and poem from the book “Praga da una primavera all’altra 1968-1969″ Forum Editrice