SOME PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THESE BOOKS
Already much more difference between death and death than between life and death. Already space measurable on the whole only in terms of death.
INGER CHRISTENSEN, IT
(Translated by Susanna Nied)
Azari, Fedele (Pallanza, February 8, 1895–Milan, January 25, 1930). In 1919 he wrote the manifesto “Futurist Aerial Theater,” and presented it at the Great National Futurist Exhibition in Milan, showering down the pamphlets from his plane. In addition to his talents as a painter and writer, A. was gifted in advertising and business—starting in 1923 he exported Italian-made planes and Futurist works. F. T. Marinetti named him the first national secretary of the movement in 1924 and put him in charge of organizing the conference that year. He is also author of the manifestos “Simultaneous Futurist Life” and “Toward a Society for the Protection of Machines.”
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Bilenchi, Romano (Colle di Val d’Elsa, November 9, 1909–Florence, November 18, 1989). At a very young age he joined the left-wing sectors of fascism and was a regular contributor to its main publications in the Florence area between 1930 and 1934 as a writer and journalist; the Spanish Civil War distanced him from fascism, however, and by 1940 he was already a dissident. Years earlier he had published his novel Pisto’s Life in the journal Il Selvaggio (1931), followed by The Conservatory of Saint Teresa (1940), Anna and Bruno and Other Stories (1938), My Cousin Andrea (1943), and the trilogy The Impossible Years, made up of Drought (1941), Misery (1941), and Ice (1983). B. took part in the Italian Resistance movement and its offshoots, including the creation of the newspapers Nazione del Popolo and Nuovo Corriere, organs of the Tuscan National Liberation Committee and the Communist Party respectively; in both cases, and as happened to him with fascism, his intellectual independence and rigor caused him difficulties, and it is no surprise that his subject, more than childhood—about which he wrote extensively—was actually disappointment. B. never stopped correcting his books, in a process of constant reduction. Among the most important are Chronicle of Meager Italy or the History of the Socialists of Colle (1933), The Factory Owner (1935), The Stalingrad Button (1972, winner of the Premio Viareggio), and Friends (1976); in that last one, B. writes about his friendship with Elio Vittorini, Ottone Rosai, Mino Maccari, Leone Traverso, Ezra Pound, Eugenio Montale, and others.
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Blunck, Hans Friedrich (Hamburg, September 3, 1888–Hamburg, April 24, 1961). He studied law at the Universities of Kiel and Heidelberg, where he was part of the Burschenschaften, the student organizations that would form the basis of the National Socialist institutions. He was an officer during World War I and later settled in Belgium, before fleeing to Holland to escape the authorities, who pursued him for his pan-Germanic activities. In 1920 he began publishing novels and stories characterized by their rejection of modernity, which placed him in the orbit of Nazi cultural politics. His texts inspired by Nordic and Germanic mythologies, his fables and his sagas, as well as his texts on the history of the Hanseatic League and his poems in Plattdeutsch, seem to have been written specifically to justify the existence of what we call “National Socialist literature,” and he became one of its most important civil servants, though he didn’t join the National Socialist Party of German Workers (NSDAP) until 1937. B. was vice president of the poetry section of the Prussian Academy of Arts, while H. Johst was president, and, later, he became president of the Reich Literature Chamber and of the office responsible for promoting German cultural policies abroad, the Stiftung Deutsches Auslandswerk. While holding such important posts, and fulfilling them with frenetic activity, B. published ninety-seven books and a hundred-odd articles between 1933 and 1945 (primarily for the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi regime’s most important press organ). In 1944, Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler included B. on a list of authors who should not be deployed because they, and their work, were part of Germany’s cultural patrimony and, as such, essential. Despite that, the authorities of the Soviet occupation considered him simply a beneficiary of Nazism, which allowed him to continue writing. In 1952 he published his memoirs Pathless Times, followed the next year by another volume entitled Light in Restraint: in them he downplayed his role in the Nazi years, of course.
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Borrello, Luca (Sansepolcro, December 9, 1905–Rorà, April 21 or 22, 1945). He did not finish medical school at the University of Perugia. He published his first texts in L’Impero, a magazine founded by Mario Carli and Emilio Settimelli that had a more openly fascist bent than the other Futurist magazines he wrote for, such as La Città Nuova and Stile Futurista. In mid-1936, B. left Perugia and, it seems, held numerous jobs, none of them literary, in the Umbria and Piedmont regions. After it seemed he’d abandoned literature, B. attended the 1945 Fascist Writers’ Conference in Pinerolo, where he met his end. To this day no one has been able to determine whether his death was an accident, suicide, or murder. It seems that he continued writing between 1936 and 1945, but his literary production from that period, if it ever existed, has been lost.
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Boulenger, Jacques (Paris, September 27, 1879–Paris, November 22, 1944). Philologist, poet, and novelist—as well as the author of numerous anti-Semitic pamphlets that were much more popular in France than any of his books—of whom Hellmuth Langenbucher said, “He allows his wit and imagination to drag him along in order to capture on paper an entire world of plots for the enjoyment of his readers”; this praise—while profoundly stupid—is not the worst manifestation of the pompous, meaningless literary criticism that would become, decades later, the rule more than the exception. B.’s body of work includes Monsieur or the Professor of Snobbery (1923), The Literary Tourist and The Mirror with Two Faces (both from 1928), Crime in Charonne (1937), Anywhere, On the Front: Images of the Present War (1940), and French Blood (1943).
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Boyano, Espartaco (Ravenna, February 14, 1916–Ravenna, January 12, 1994). Despite being from Ravenna, he studied in Perugia, where he was a contributor to Abelardo Castellani’s Lo Scarabeo d’Oro and came into contact with a local Futurist group in 1931. In 1938 he met Tommaso Marinetti and asked him to write a prologue for his first book; Marinetti agreed. An attempt to account for his work in an era concerned only with numbers would look like this: books, 6; publication dates, 1938, 1941, 1952, 1960, 1970, and 1971; genres, 1 (poetry); average copies sold of each, 60; reviews of said works, 8; positive ones, 3; negative ones, 4; those indifferent to value judgments or aware that value judgment is, in essence, the least important aspect of a critical text, 1; academic essays on B.’s work, 2; appearances in dictionaries and critical studies of twentieth-century Italian poetry, 0; number of unpublished works that B. left at the time of his death, 1 (unfinished); total weight of B.’s personal papers (which his widow got rid of, with the help of one of their sons, immediately following his death), 11 kilograms; total weight of his poetic work, 960 grams; number of poems written, 234; estimated average time dedicated to each poem, 271.41 hours; approximate reading time of B.’s entire poetic works, 7 hours; people who attended the poet’s funeral, 8 (widow, three children and two of their spouses, as well as a granddaughter and a neighbor); average number of annual visits to his grave since his death, 0.80.
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Bruning, Henri (Amsterdam, July 10, 1900–Nijmegen, December 17, 1983). Poet, essayist, polemicist, and Nazi censor. Some of his opinions diverged from those of the Nazi authorities he worked for—B. came from Dutch Catholic Nationalism and was conservative and elitist—but only some. In 1943 he published Prelude and The Holy Union, and in 1944 Ezekiel and Other Criminals and New Horizons; prior to that he had published an essay entitled New Political Consciousness (1942), which requires no explanation as to why it was new in 1942 and what it was conscious o
f. At the end of World War II he was sentenced to two years and three months imprisonment and banned from publishing for ten years, after which he tried to establish himself again as a poet, unsuccessfully, due to a boycott by editors, writers, and booksellers. Now he is celebrated, almost exclusively, in Catholic circles.
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Burte, Hermann (pseudonym of H. Strübe; Maulburg, February 15, 1879–Lörrach, March 21, 1960). B. was a painter and poet in Alemannic dialect, two activities that could have easily allowed him to escape the scrutiny of his contemporaries without having to renounce an ideology close to the German popular and national essences that later made him a beneficiary of Nazism. But B. published the novel Wiltfeber, the Eternal German (1912) and the tragedy Katte (1914). Had he not written them, the river of history would have passed him by without dampening his shoes, but he did write them, and they were successful, earning him the Kleist Prize (1912), the Schiller Prize (1927), the Johann Peter Hebel Prize (1936), the Goethe Medal for Art and Sciences (1939), a personal gift of some fifteen thousand Marks from Adolf Hitler on his sixty-fifth birthday, inclusion on the list of writers “chosen” to escape forced conscription by dint of being considered German “national patrimony,” nine months in jail starting in 1945, and censorship. In addition to the problems with his ideology, the book’s reception, both before and after the Nazi regime, was marked by the fact that the swastika appeared for the first time in Wiltfeber, whose subtitle was “The Story of a Man in Search of a Fatherland,” as a healing symbol and herald of a new era. Moreover, in 1924, B. announced the arrival of the Third Reich; another of his poems, published in 1931, foretold the arrival in Germany of a political leader who was later associated with Adolf Hitler, so his “Der Führer” was republished and widely anthologized. After his jail time, and after having lost his property as well as his right to perform political or literary activities, B. earned a living translating French poetry and was chosen as an honorary member of the far-right organization Deutschen Kulturwerk Europäischen Geistes (German Cultural Project of the European Spirit), which strove to reconstruct the ties between fascist writers who’d survived the war. The publication of his final poems with the title The Face Beneath the Stars (1957) generated some controversy due to their revisionist nature, which allowed one to think that B. did not have any regrets, was not offering any apologies, and had no bad conscience whatsoever.
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Buzzi, Paolo (Milan, February 15, 1874–Milan, February 18, 1956). He worked his entire life in Milan’s Provincial Administration, while writing comedies, opera librettos, poetry in dialect, imitations of Giacomo Leopardi, a prose poem, an essay on blank verse, a volume of Futurist poetry, a science fiction novel (entitled The Ellipse and the Spiral: Film + Words in Freedom) published in 1915 that was the first to use Marinetti’s “words in freedom” technique), some works of “synthetic theater,” various poetry books in a deliberately more conservative tone, translations (of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, for example), and another two volumes of poetry that can only be described as disconcerting: Radio Wave Poems (1940) and Atomic (1950). However, his most important work is Conflagration (Epic “Parolibera”, 1915–1918), a World War I diary written entirely with “words in freedom,” and many collages, published posthumously in 1963.
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Calosso, Oreste (Rome, May 15, 1915–Rome, February 17, 2004). Despite his Roman origins, C. spent much of his life outside of Rome, in cities such as Milan, Florence, and Perugia; it was in that last city where he studied literature and became a Futurist and contributor to the primary Futurist publications. His texts appeared in La Città Nuova from Turin, Artecrazia (Rome, 1934–1939), and Legiones y Falanges, the magazine edited in Rome by Agustín de Foxá and Giuseppe Lombrosa, where C. was in charge of the film review section. His closeness to the cultural authorities of the Italian Social Republic and particularly to the minister of popular culture, Fernando Mezzasoma, led to his appointment to organize the Fascist Writers’ Conference in Pinerolo in 1945; however, he cannot be held responsible for its abrupt ending. Although his production between 1931 and 1945 was vast, C. distanced himself from it after the war. Following a period of living discreetly in Florence, possibly waiting for his collaboration with the fascist government to be forgotten, he timidly returned to publishing literature in 1949 with a slim volume of poetry entitled Prose, whose title was as damning as the silence of the critics. It was followed by The Unfinished (1951), Places, Moments, Journeys Through Time (1953), and The Foreigner Speaks (1963), as well as a selection of short prose entitled Sloth (1973), which elicited that very mood in its potential readers and, like the rest of his works, went unnoticed. Among C.’s missing talents was the ability to come up with attractive titles for his books, but in his defense it must be said that he is one of the few twentieth-century Italian writers whose work isn’t completely predictable, an honor he shares with Giorgio Manganelli, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Maurizio Cucchi. Although he asked his family to destroy all his work, both published and manuscript, after his death, his papers are now held at the University of Padua, where his family members bequeathed them due to their library’s interest in fascist literature and despite the fact that, apparently, C. swore off fascism and deliberately strove to write against it, which could have benefited him in aesthetic terms but damaged his image for posterity. On the other hand, he never seemed terribly interested in posterity.
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