Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Relations between the Tyrol and Bavaria have always been marked by ambivalence. It was the Bavarians, in the struggles against the Slavs between the sixth and seventh centuries, who definitively guaranteed the Germanness of the Tyrol – even though to the west it is the Alemannic element that prevails – of which their Duke Tassilo III is the first suzerain. Nevertheless, Meinhard, the count of the Tyrol to whom the country owes in large part its particular character, resisted the Bavarians with all his strength and turned to the Hapsburgs. This clash recurred in the time of Margareta Maultasch and concluded with a victory for the Austrians, which indeed signalled the end of Tyrolean independence.

  Generally it has anyway been the Bavarians who have been considered the foreigner to be fought off: in 1704 the Tyrolean peasants rose up successfully against the invading Bavarian army, which had been welcomed by the nobility; if the cosmopolitan aristocracy was therefore untrustworthy and pro-Bavarian, which at that moment meant pro-French, the common people defended the soul and the soil of the Tyrol. Andreas Hofer himself fought against the French and the Bavarians – once again it was the peasant element that took up arms for the Tyrol, the Vendée of the Germanic world.

  The Bavarian constitution introduced into the Tyrol in 1808 set up the dominion of the State-machine created in Munich by the minister Montgelas, an enlightened and modernizing absolutism which aimed to level the diversities and privileges of the mediaeval heritage. Hofer and Leitgeb defended “their ancient right” against the universality of Reason, which legislated under a unified code, and against Bavaria, which represented French-style Reason. Things change slowly over the following decades, which witnessed the progressive symbiosis of modernizing authoritarianism and popular Bavarian tradition; from this compromise the political cohesion of Bavaria was born, and Bavaria gradually presented itself to the Tyroleans no longer as the invading enemy, but as a sympathetic supporter of the Tyrol – even the terrorists and the extremists, like Dr Burger, for example, given life imprisonment in Italy for his activities yet acquitted in 1970 by a Munich court. In any case, today Bavaria’s charm centres above all on the Deutschemark and for some years now Giuliano, in the Stube, has no longer been able to say to the Tyrolean nationalists that if they want to be annexed by Germany, then they should simply have themselves incorporated into East Germany.

  There is a jus loci that has been in force for more than twenty years which guarantees that even on days when the entire establishment is reserved for a wake, there is a table for cotecio. “I’m going on to the end,” says Sergio, worried that Traudl might block his twist. On winning four consecutive hands one has the right to attempt a twist, but with the risk of losing, or to decline the right to a twist and so render that game void. Going on to the end is not necessarily a mark of cowardice, of a lack of love for risk-taking; it is a guerrilla war with time, deferring so as to prolong the game and to put off the final outcome, which anyway is still an ending. Hapsburg civilization always went on to the end, procrastinating and putting off in order to survive. Gradually the wake comes to its end, people begin to leave, they wait behind a while to talk, to say goodbye, to empty a glass. There is no fuss, neither is there any disorder, everyone is composed and calm. It’s not right, it’s really not right, says Lisa. There was a time when the meals after a funeral were great – everyone cheerful, laughing and making a racket, singing, telling jokes. It really was fun … a party, even more so than New Year, not at all like this, I really don’t know, I don’t understand why….

  Heinz S., too, having drunk one last glass to the eternal health of the deceased, leaves the premises. He is one of the twenty-five young men who left on 25 November, 1939 for Germany, having opted to leave – together with the vast majority of the valley’s inhabitants – cutting the umbilical cord between blood and land. He came back in 1941, others in ’48 and in ’56. In fact relatively few left and most of them returned, but the figure of the Dableiber, of those who at that time had opted to stay – renouncing German nationality – is a disconcerting shadow, the ghost of a foreigner. Literature has not ignored the option, but it has not been up to dealing with that laceration which is at once age-old and ultramodern, one of the many artificial and violent movements of frontiers in our century. It has featured in two plays, by Pircher and Riedmann and even, many years ago, in 1941–42, by Joseph Raffeiner, a writer destined to a sad fate: after witnessing the drama, with its element of power and protest, he became a Volkspartei and then a Heimatpartei politician, in other words a spokesman for officialdom.

  It would be interesting to talk with Heinz about all this, but he is silent on the topic and his silence is fitting for the wound. A veritable eingeklemmt, a man stuck and blocked in – to quote Norbert G. Kaser, the writer who studiedly embodied this blockage in his own life. The most vibrant Tyrolean literature has assimilated this self-accusation, dressing up in it as evidence of authenticity and transforming it into a mocking and aggressive celebration. Tyrolean writers enjoy an enviable advantage – a petty political–cultural establishment which, in proclaiming the pure, untarnished virtues of the Heimat and its tradition, involuntarily confers importance and authenticity on every deviation from this model, even banal albeit liberating deviations. Thanks to the often retrograde conservatism of official Südtirolese culture, it is easy to be the persecuted writer and to earn high regard thanks to the overbearing hostility of the conformists. In a different cultural context such literary posing would be considered adolescent or pathetic, but in Alto Adige it still has a value as protest.

  An obvious symptom of this backwardness is the posthumous canonization of Kaser: the sensitive, rebellious young man, unemployed alcoholic, Capuchin friar and militant Communist, suffering and sneering, a man who died very young after declining to complete any of his books, expressing himself rather in glosses and fragments, is not a bad writer, but the legend that has taken hold of him, a true hagiography of dissent, is the reverse side of the Heimatliteratur and its liturgies, which are certainly lacking in the land’s real drama.

  Tyrolean writers are obsessed by the frontier – by the need to cross it and the difficulties involved in crossing it – and by identity, and they search for this in a denial of the very compact identity that is so dear to the cultural establishment of their country. With the painful but facile, overdone rhetoric frequently found among frontier writers (for example writers from Trieste), they are too willing to take up a position on the other side as well – distressed and yet also delighted to feel themselves Italian among the Germans and German among the Italians, eagerly awaiting the brutal onslaught of the custodians of the homeland’s memory so as to be able to say, with ringing sincerity, that the pain is in not knowing to which world they belong.

  All this is literature, often good. As long as the angry, pugnacious ideology of the Heimat exists in all its potency, there are bound to be poets like Kaser who want to serve up the Tyrolean eagle roasted. These writers are certainly the true heirs of that eagle, because Tyrolean literature, even without going back to the mediaeval giants such as Oswald von Wolkenstein, has by no means been lacking in voices harshly critical of the gut instinct, the social exclusiveness of its own world, as in the plays of Schönherr or Kranewitter and their desolate pictures of peasant brutality. But now it is time for the Tyrolean eagle to be roasted, eaten and digested once and for all, with no further need to spit on its bones as well; indeed it is time to shake off the polemical obsession with the border, to stop considering it a peculiarly Tyrolean or Triestine problem and to realize that it can concern a Milanese no less than an inhabitant of Antholz or the Karst. In their scornful protest, many Tyrolean writers display sentiments that are too benign, they espouse ideals of liberty, protest, deterritorialization, Niemandsland. Praiseworthy sentiments and ideals, unlike those of their detractors, but not really the stuff of poetry. It is no coincidence that an author of the first rank like Franz Tumler went through a truly horrendous ordeal, his youthful support of the Nazis, which he l
ater overcame, and which – obviously only because he had got over it – allowed him fully to grasp the nature of the Südtirol and the demonic link that might exist between a sense of the frontier and a sympathy for the Anschluss.

  Südtirolese writers should be a bit – just a bit – less Südtirolese or rather less anti-Südtirolese and forget their umbilical cords. The new magazines – Arunda, Der fahrende Skolast, Distel, Sturzflüge – have tried to bring in some fresh air, but the photomontage of Andreas Hofer naked on the cover of Sturzflüge still smacks of Tyrolean infantilism. Solutions, however, certainly can neither be prescribed nor proscribed. Perhaps in taking his own life Klaus Menapace died of Tyrolean pain. His poetry, extraordinary vignettes of the charm and the pain of living, transforms the actual landscape of shimmering snow and woods, into landscapes of the soul, into a winter scene that evokes the places in which those images were born and immediately erases the memory. Stärker / als alle Sprache / der Tod, this “death stronger than any language” transcends any Oedipal complication.

  Antholz Mittertal, as its name states, is the centre of the valley, but it is also the last true village. Obertal, Anterselva di Sopra, is not a village, but rather a scattered handful of houses, lacking centre and unity; indeed it has neither church nor inn. Like a river as it flows towards its estuary, like all existences, individual and collective, a valley loses identity as it gradually approaches its end. A few cottages, haystacks, a woodshed, a chapel hidden away near the bridge, with a Madonna whose heart is pierced and who has many ex votos, the stream that shines brown.

  Climb up to the lake and come down the pass, while the rifle shots of the skiers training for the world biathlon championships reverberate; the echo of one shot lingers in the woods, memory superimposes it on other echoes and when it fades it is already another year – this time Irene hasn’t come, the baby has chickenpox, for two years Francesco has been promising to make it at least for New Year’s Eve. Isabella flies past coming down from Wildgall, the halo of her blonde hair in the wind is an aurora of the snows, the ice yields under her skis and regurgitates black mud onto the white, the years tumble down the hill.

  The lake used to belong to Enrico Mattei, it was his favourite refuge. Whenever he could he took the plane, landed at Dobbiaco and came to the silent lake; he would stay for a long time, fishing, walking, gazing at the water. His fishing stretch was the object of some contention between Passler and the Bishop of Bressanone. The people here loved him and still remember him happily and with respect. Heaven knows what it was that would make Isidor Thaler, stumbling and drunk already at ten in the morning but punctual and careful in his job at the Wildgall ski-lift, go for a drink with the mighty captain of industry. Mattei was privately incorruptible, but for his far-reaching ends he was ready to stoop to corrupt methods; he faced off the world’s leaders and knew how to advance the goals of unassuming post-war Italy, giving her a place on the political and economic world stage, but he had his part in her moral decline and thus diminished her as well. Perhaps a common aversion towards capitalism instinctively united the followers of Andreas Hofer and the unscrupulous modernizer, who was soon to be victim of a criminal sacrifice.

  Near the place where his house was, now replaced by a hotel, and where there is a bridge that rises with Japanese grace over the stream and the reeds frozen in fantastic lacework, a holy painting recalls an ancient tragedy on the lake – a boat sinks and people drown while from the heavens the Madonna and the saints look on in impotent distress like the people crowding on the shores. Above the image an inscription asks the passer-by, Mein Freund, wo gehst Du hin?, “My friend, where are you going?” It is difficult to reply the way another inscription does, on a house: I live and know not for how long, I will die and know not where and when, I go and know not where, and it’s amazing how happy I feel.

  The lake is a spectrum of colours. The snow is white, at certain moments it is gold, when the wind lifts it and drags it across the frozen surface it is a silver dust, where the shadow begins it is blue. On the sides of the mountain it is ivory, pink, pearl-grey; in the evening the blue becomes wine-red. Goethe hated Newton because of the colours. If white, as Newton explains, is the presence and mixture of all colours, then that means that all hues die there, the differences expire and this white, these years mixed and melded in the snow are only a muffled ending. If white were original light, as Goethe believed, then colours would still be latent, to begin and begin again – the azure of remoteness, the red of a flower and a mouth, the honey of a look, these things would all come back.

  The lake changes colours, the green of the trees is black, white becomes gold, a bronzed gold that gets darker and is suddenly blue. The edges, quick to dissolve, are sharp; one looks at the lake and the snow is white, the strip along the bank is blue, the pines are a dark green, the world is there, it exists, irrefutable and solid like the snowball that Lucina throws at Hans. Goethe, Newton, Schopenhauer, Steiner, Wittgenstein have written about colours; poetry and philosophy are also branches of general chromatics, science of the glare that flashes for an instant in the sun, of cheeks burning red, rubbed with snow, of hair that is black and then is white.

  Beppino is obsessed with chromotherapy – sanatoria with verandas where for hours patients contemplate the hues and their changing, following rigorous medical prescriptions. There are those who need blue, those who need grey, those who need bright colours and those who need more gentle hues; one person benefits from an hour’s staring at an intense reflection, another has to be more careful, even the sea shimmering and twinkling at noon can result in a sadness at heart, or perhaps a happiness so intense that it is akin to melancholy and therefore should be dispensed in measured doses. Chromotherapy has been fashionable for years, books and newspapers have dealt with it, but everyone can testify that Beppino first expounded its virtues even well before the first ceremony of the diploma of loyalty to the valley, which one receives solemnly at the Herberhof, at the end of each decade, from the burghermeister of Rasun.

  Up to the Stalle pass. Here, so the maps say, runs the border between the Mediterranean and the central European climates. Mitteleuropa as meteorology, it has been suggested. It is cold, the Oberland wind, which comes from the east, is freezing, everything is still whiter; the world empties, a bell jar in which there is only sky and snow, a bottomless bluish white, which sucks things into the void. The wind is strong, one resists it a bit walking head down against the gusts, but the wind is stronger, it drags and carries away, everything is suddenly left behind and moves away. It is to late to “redo”, at the most one goes on to the end and next year back up to the pass again, to look down into the valley – the lake is a burning torch, but before we go down it will have turned grey. The sky is high, the dome of a glass ball shaken to start the snow falling; there is a flurry of snowflakes and we descend quickly, among the flakes and the hours that fall in the dark. The sun sets rapidly but it is still early and perhaps we can reach Antholz in time to get the car and go to Brunico, to Schönhuber’s. We’ll buy another four coffee cups and a milk jug, says Marisa, so the sixteen-piece set is complete, including all the extras; then Francesco and Paolo can split it and have an eight-piece set each, which is something.

  Public Garden

  No dogs, no bicycles, keep off the flowerbeds. A beginning is often accompanied by a prohibition, even the beginning of a walk in a park, in this case in the Public Garden in Trieste. The main entrance is guarded by a barrier of wrought-iron lances, black as the shadows that spread on high among the big trees – horse chestnuts, planes and firs, dark waters on which branches and leaves float and into which the birds disappear and sink like stones.

  The dense shadow of the park is a foretaste of the evening; it falls a little earlier and is never completely absent, but lingers here and there, thickened in the foliage. Coming out of the Caffè San Marco and turning left up Via Battisti and Via Marconi, or crossing through the Garden, which runs parallel to the latter, to reach the church of the
Sacred Heart, one finds oneself by the main entrance and the monument to Domenico Rossetti, wrapped in his cloak, hand on chest. The marks left by the pigeons have dribbled down his face, leaving him with noble rivulets of tears. Three massive, solemn women, draped in gowns, are arranged around the pedestal in a spiral ascension, proffering torches, codexes of ancient statutes, branches of oak.

  Patriot, philologist, historiographer and antiquarian, Rossetti was a patrician nostalgic for the old small-town Trieste and he did not appreciate the new, tumultuous, cross-bred city born of the prosperity of the port. “In Rossetti’s land nowt but Italian be spoken,” sang the irredentists in homage to the learned custodian of the homeland’s memory, apotheosis of all that is Italian cultivated under the centuries-old Hapsburg rule. While Rossetti, for his part, had also written dutiful verses celebrating Austria and its mighty leader too (who was saved by Trieste in the end), hoping that perchance that day will serve to remind generations to come, that Austria alone can warm our hearts.

  Like some female silhouettes of a certain age, Rossetti’s monument improves when looked at from behind, when one has gone past it and entered within the Garden; the rear parts have resisted the ravages of time a little longer. The only attractive thing in the entire statue is a foot belonging to one of the three women, which protrudes behind the base. It is perhaps a touch too robust, but is nevertheless a fine, semi-naked foot, kicking out imperiously, heralding incontestable orders, as lapidary as the inscription written in chalk just beyond the threshold of the Garden, between the ban on dogs and the keep out of the flowerbeds: “Elisa I love you.”