Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets
Page 28
* * *
—
Herescu, Niculae I. (Turnu Severin, December 6, 1903 [1906, according to other sources]–Zurich, August 19 [16, according to other sources], 1961). In 1944, after the coup d’etat against Ion Antonescu that shifted Romania to the Allied side, H. went into exile in Portugal and then France, where he worked as a Latinist and bolstered the expatriate Romanian literary scene. Among his books are Latin Poetry (1960) and a posthumous novel, Agony Without Death (1998).
* * *
—
Hollenbach, Hans Jürgen (Untermünstertal, May 28, 1911–?). Author of the books Notes on a Philosophy of History (1941), The Theory of Discontinuity (1943, revised editions in 1976, 1979, 1988, and 2000), On Dissatisfaction (1954), and Some Observations on Uncertainty (1974), among others, H. was a student and later collaborator of Martin Heidegger, as well as a professor at the universities of Freiburg, Augsburg, Alexander von Humboldt of Berlin, and Heidelberg between 1935 and 2008, approximately. H. wrote: “What we call history is the effort assumed as a supraindividual task by those who came before us, to impose order on seeming chaos, on a series of discontinuous events that cannot be explained. It is also the task of elucidating what remains hidden, eclipsed by horrible acts that are omitted (when at all possible) and the suppression of the visible and obvious. History is what justifies us, what legitimizes our institutions and our practices, thus only a positive vision of it can offer us the salve of knowing that our atrocities are not gratuitous, but instead necessary links in a chain that illuminates a path. This invention of a fictitious time line of a horrific map of atrocities is a paradoxical task, because it means inventing something already surpassed in order to pave the way for the inevitable atrocities in the future.” For more information on H., see Martin Lachkeller’s book History of the Philosophy and Philosophers of National Socialism (1927–1945): An Approximation, published in 2011.
* * *
—
Johst, Hanns (Seerhausen, July 8, 1890–Ruhpolding, November 23, 1978). Primarily a playwright, J. was president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Literature Chamber) and, as such, the most powerful man in German literature during the Nazi period. When it ended, he faced detention centers and denazification, but by 1955 J. was considered rehabilitated, despite which he was unable to resume his literary career. He ended his days writing poems for the magazine The Intelligent Housewife under the pseudonym “Odemar Oderich.” His moment of glory took place on April 20, 1933, with the premiere of his play Schlageter, dedicated to Adolf Hitler “with devoted veneration and unwavering loyalty.”
* * *
—
Junco, Alfonso (Monterrey, February 26, 1896–Mexico City, October 13, 1974). Member of the Mexican Academy of Language and an extraordinarily prolific writer, J. was one of the most eminent defenders of Francoism outside of Spain, as well as a detractor of ideologies such as liberalism, communism, and fascism, which found no place in his deeply Catholic view of existence. Among his works are Señora Belén de Zárraga Defanatizing (1923), Eucharistic Anthology (1926), A Radical Problem of Guadalupe (1932), Cassocks of Mexico (1955), and Gongoristic Questiunculi [sic] (1955), all books that deserve to be back in print, if not for their quality, at least for their extraordinary titles.
* * *
—
Kolbenheyer, Erwin (Budapest, December 30, 1878–Munich, April 12, 1962). He is mainly remembered for his trilogy of novels Paracelsus; or, better put, would be mainly remembered for his trilogy Paracelsus if anyone remembered it, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Although he joined the National Socialist Party of German Workers (NSDAP) in 1940, he had been a sympathizer since 1928 and a very active writer in that decade and the following one, even though his efforts to prove the biological origin of the supposed superiority of German literature over the literature of other countries were discredited, and with them his work. In 1945, the occupation authorities banned him from publishing for five years; except for that, one could say that K. emerged from National Socialism and the war relatively unscathed.
* * *
—
Maddow, Arthur (Philadelphia, September 27, 1903–Casablanca, December 24, 1947). Born into a wealthy family who turned their backs on him when he came of age, M. lived in Sicily and Tunisia. He published his only book of poetry in Algiers in 1938. The scant testimony from his contemporaries describes him as sickly and with few friends.
* * *
—
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (Alexandria, December 22, 1876–Bellagio, December 2, 1944). He elevated hysteria to the category of aesthetics, he invented Futurism, he was one of the first writers who thought of himself as a businessman, he fought in two world wars and in other lesser conflicts, he was a magnificent publicist. Once an orange was thrown at him, and, after catching it in midair, he peeled it calmly and ate it to the exasperation and admiration of his audience. “We destroy, but only to later rebuild,” he wrote.
* * *
—
Masoliver, Juan Ramón (Zaragoza, March 13, 1910–Montcada i Reixac, April 7, 1997). Essayist, journalist, literary and art critic, and translator. As happens with certain celestial bodies, his light was not his own but rather came from those around him: James Joyce, Ezra Pound (whose secretary he was for a while), Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, etc. Among his publications are Guide to Rome and Italian Itineraries (1950), Presenting James Joyce (1981), Anthology of the Poetry of Ausiàs March (1981), and Profile in Shadow (1994).
* * *
—
Massis, Henri (Paris, March 21, 1886–Paris, April 17, 1970). The magazines Roseau d’Or and Revue Universelle are among his lesser contributions to French literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century; more important is his “Manifesto of French Intellectuals in Defense of the West and Peace in Europe” (1935), in which he proposed an alliance of all the right-wing European powers, particularly the French and Italian, and a suspicious attitude toward Germany. During the war he formed part of the Vichy elite, and, as a result, his name appeared on the list of “undesirables” drawn up by the National Writers’ Committee in 1944, despite which M. was never subject to any purge and in 1960 became a member of the French Academy. M. was a Catholic writer, right-wing and perhaps somewhat sentimental, but, primarily, an enemy of all literary modernization. Among his works are How Émile Zola Wrote His Novels (1905), Romain Rolland Against France (1915), Judgments I: Renan, France, Barrès (1923), Judgments II: André Gide, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel, Julien Benda, the Literary Cliques (1924), The Cadets of the Alcázar (1936), From André Gide to Marcel Proust (1948), Maurras and Our Time (1951), and Over the Course of a Life (1967).
* * *
—
Mencaroni, Diego (Perugia, February 14, 1906–Milan, April 23, 1945). Respiratory problems forced his family to move to Rome from Perugia when M. was four years old, in search of less polluted air. The decision turned out to both terrible and excellent at the same time: terrible because M.’s respiratory problems multiplied in Rome and excellent because the Italian capital was the perfect place for him to make an early impression with his many talents, which included writing film and theater scripts, and composing the sound tracks and creating many of the sets for his films. At fifteen, after having made a name for himself as a set designer and pianist in the Roman theater scene, M. directed his first film, a silent sword-and-sandal movie about the life of Messalina entitled Thirty Thousand Men (1921); it was followed by another eighteen films, many of which were lost during the bombing of Milan and Rome during World War II. Of his film The Start of Spring (1938), for example, only two scenes remain: in the first, two characters talk about a third, someone named Hans Jürgen Hollenbach, about whom the audience knows nothing and, seemingly, will never know anything; in the second, some Aryan-looking young women dance partially naked in a forest. Not even reviews of the film could illuminate the relationshi
p between the two scenes, and it’s possibly there never was any. M. was a pioneer of films whose scenes aren’t as important as their sequencing, in an early acknowledgment of the fact that meaning in cinematographic narration, as well as other types of narration, comes through only in montage. This characteristic, which links his film work to avant-garde proposals that would take place decades later, during what some critics named “postmodernism” and others “the late avant-garde,” didn’t impede the relative popularity of his work in its day. Despite his early adherence to anarchism and some aesthetic ideas whose proliferation and lack of any system were diametrically opposed to conservativism—or precisely because of it, considering the fact that most vanguards are produced on the left of the political spectrum while adhering, to greater or lesser extents, to political positions on the right—M. was celebrated by the fascist regime as one of its most kindred artists. However, this was not an obstacle to their stripping him of all support as, at the start of the war when their need for propaganda films increased exponentially, M. proved himself incapable of producing a film for those ends. It seems his only incursion into the genre was a film entitled A Crow in the Snow (1941). In it, a soldier—played by M. himself—whose legs are cut off by a grenade at the start of the film, lies dying for an hour and a half; during that entire time, the camera remains on the ground on its side so that all the viewer sees is a part of a snowy trench on which a crow finally lands: except for some explosions and howls of pain from M., which fade into a murmur and finally disappear with the arrival of the crow, nothing happens in the film. It was destroyed by order of the Italian High Command after a private viewing attended by B. Mussolini, F. Mezzasoma, A. Cucco, and G. Almirante, among others. He took part in the Fascist Writers’ Conference held in Pinerolo in 1945, but shortly after was executed by the fascists. M. had confided to a couple of the attendees that he was working as a double agent for the Americans; he seemed to have counted on being imprisoned by the fascists and then freed soon after by the Americans, but the American advance was halted for some hours on April 21; meanwhile, M. was accused of high treason when he reached Milan and immediately executed by firing squad. There is no evidence that M. was in contact with the Americans, though there is evidence that those who ordered his execution were: perhaps M. knew of that link and invented his story in order to be protected by the fascists who had already surrendered to the imminent victors of the war—but they decided his execution would keep up appearances until the Americans guaranteed their safety. His plan was a good one; it merely failed due to being carried out at the wrong place and time and due to the actions of others.
* * *
—
México, Pobre (?–?). It is not known whether he lived between 1899 and 1956 or between 1889 and 1946, nor whether his was a pseudonym or a real name. None of his works have survived.
* * *
—
Möller, Eberhard Wolfgang (Berlin, January 6, 1906–Bietigheim, January 1, 1972). Although he was one of the most important playwrights of the National Socialist period, and the Nazi authorities, particularly Joseph Goebbels, named him to the Theater Division of the Reich’s Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, M. is remembered only for his participation in the film Jew Süss (directed by Veit Harlan, 1940), the finest example of German anti-Semitic cinematography. Apart from that, M.’s dramatic works (for example, Douaumont or The Return of the Soldier Odysseus: Seven Scenes, of 1929, Rothschild Prevails at Waterloo, of 1934, and The Fall of Carthage of 1938) are of some interest due to his use of techniques from the avant-garde and the theater of Bertolt Brecht to write plays characterized by anti-Semitism, misogyny, and enthusiasm for war; in other words, for values generally opposed to avant-garde ideas. For these works, M. received the 1938 National Prize and other honors, though his star faded somewhat when, in his book for teens The Führer, he compared Adolf Hitler to Martin Luther and attributed characteristics of a pagan god to him: despite selling half a million copies, the work was taken off the market for being too “kitsch.” Between 1940 and 1943 he formed part of a tank division, and, later, when already an SS officer, he continued his literary work, though without his earlier success. M. was in prison between 1945 and 1948, after which he tried to resume his literary activity: because his plays were no longer staged, he began to write historical novels; their content wasn’t very different from his previous texts; in fact, they contained such marked anti-Semitism and antidemocratic tendencies that it becomes impossible to believe in the efficacy of the purification procedures that took place in German cultural life after 1945, and of which German society is so proud. M. is a perfect example of the type of fascist writer who continued his literary activity after the fall of the regime that had sheltered him, without having to repent or show any doubt as to the correctness of his activities prior to 1945. In 1963, for example, he attributed the lack of success of his anti-Semitic novel Chicago to a conspiracy rather than blame its content. The news of his death was reported only in the neo-Nazi press of the period.
* * *
—
Montes, Eugenio (Vigo, November 24, 1900 [Bande, 1897, according to other sources]–Madrid, October 27, 1982). He was an author in Galician and in Spanish, as well as a journalist and civil servant. His works include The Old Fisherman Suns Himself, and Other Stories (1922), The Traveler and His Shadow (1940), Italian Melody (1943), and European Elegies (1949).
* * *
—
Morlacchi, Flavia (Piove di Sacco, February 27, 1905–Padua, February 26, 2005). Pseudonym of the Italian poet and playwright Gaetana Morlacchi. Her works include the books of poetry The Chinese Nightingale (1927), The Partridge of Isfahan (1930), and An Approach to the Parrot of Cordoba (1931), which make up the ornithological trilogy whose verses Pier Paolo Pasolini quoted—possibly mockingly—in speeches delivered by the actresses Rossana Di Rocco and Rosina Moroni in his film The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966). Her Scorpion Tail Poems (1935), Spiderweb (1938), and The Monkey Ate My Hand (1949), attempts at incursions into the realms of entomology and the study of animal behavior respectively, were coolly received and M. soon returned to the birds she’d based her poetic reputation on: she wrote about them in the books Pigeons of the Piazza San Marco (1967), The Swedish Blackbird and Other Poems (1971), and The Cuban Trojon (1974). Very few people remember her now, but her poem about the Palatine, comparing its ruins to “blind eyes / shaded eyes / of the fierce and glorious Roman specter,” etc., is still recited from memory by all Italian elementary school students.
* * *
—
Munari, Bruno (Milan, October 24, 1907–Milan, September 30, 1998). Author of the first “mobile” in the history of art, his Aerial Machine of 1930; creator starting in 1933 of Useless Machines and, from 1951, of the hilarious Arrhythmic Machines; maker of “projected” and “polarized” paintings, and ones resulting from the decomposition of light; writer of children’s books and responsible for the first laboratory for children in a museum; pioneer of kinetic art with his work Hour X (1945); inventor in 1958 of a sign language using what he called “talking forks”; creator of a series of found objects including The Sea as Artisan, from 1953, and the Fossils of 2000, from 1959; author of abstract series such as Illegible Books, the Imaginary Museum of the Aeolian Islands, the Theoretical Reconstructions of Imaginary Objects, the Travel Sculptures, the Illegible Writings of Unknown Peoples, etc. M. is one of the most important Italian artists of the twentieth century.
* * *
—
Nazariantz, Hrand (Istanbul, January 8, 1886–Bari, January 25, 1962). Studied in Paris and London, was an important journalist in Istanbul, moved to Bari (1913) and became an Italian citizen; but he never stopped writing in Armenian and was possibly the only Futurist writer employing that language.
* * *
—
Olgiati, Carlo (Novara, November 15, 1908–Novara, July 2, 1945). Despite the author’
s precociousness (publishing at twenty-three), and his lack of a formal education, the three volumes of his Historic Metabolism (1931) are surprisingly mature and ambitious, but the work does have some ambiguities and contradictions. We can no longer question the author about them, as he took his own life after the destruction of his family business, which he had planned to have support his essay writing.
* * *
—
Ors, Eugenio d’ (Barcelona, September 28, 1882 [1881, according to other sources]–Villanueva y Geltrú, September 25, 1954). “The carnivalesque aspects, of both the man and his philosophy, are defect and virtue at the same time, and the collection of his glosses in Glossaries—new, highly original, and definitive—is a monumental and invaluable legacy, even above his other masterpiece, which sinks into the angelic stratosphere with the heaviness of a weighted diver” (Andrés Trapiello, Las armas y las letras: Literatura y Guerra Civil (1936–1939), corrected and expanded third edition [Barcelona: Destino, 2010], p. 574).