The Italian Tempo project

In 1938 Alberto Mondadori (son of the publisher Arnoldo Mondadori), Indro Montanelli and Carlo Bernard met in Rome and talked about the possibility of ‘creating a weekly of photographic information, combining the formula of Life with that of a literary-artistic weekly’ (Lascialfari Reference Lascialfari2002, 442). One year later, on 1 June 1939, the first issue of Tempo: Settimanale di politica, informazione, letteratura e arte appeared. At that time it was very common for emerging as well as for established writers to work as journalists in order to have a regular income. Therefore, Alberto Mondadori, on behalf of his father, easily succeeded in hiring Indro Montanelli as the editor in chief, Carlo Bernard, Arturo Tofanelli and Lamberti Sorrentino as the editors, and Augusto Guerriero, Raffaele Carrieri, Irene Brin and Cesare Zavattini as the permanent entourage (Lascialfari Reference Lascialfari2002, 442–443). Only a few weeks after the magazine’s launch, Carlo Bernard (who had been signing himself as Bernari since December 1940)Footnote ² replaced Montanelli as editor in chief. Footnote ³

Among these permanent employees, Carlo Bernari occupies a particularly important place. Firstly, he had already made a name for himself as a writer before the Second World War with the neorealist novel Tre operai (Rizzoli, 1934), and then he had been patronised by Alberto Mondadori in spite of his critical stance against the fascist power. According to Alberto Mondadori, after an unresolved political scandal took place in 1940–1941 in the editorial board, the collaboration with Bernari, who was probably already involved in the clandestine Communist Party, became weaker. He was officially forced to leave both his job and Milan, but as a freelancer he still frequently wrote for Tempo, while being very much involved in the magazine in an advisory capacity (Lascialfari Reference Lascialfari2001, 39–40). Paradoxically however, after the war the Communist Party did not accept him as a member when he refused to follow the wishes of party leader Palmiro Togliatti, who asked for a partial rewriting of Gramsci’s Notebooks ahead of their publication (Bernari Reference Bernari1977, 3).

Given the success of Tempo in Italy and the enthusiastic reception – in Europe as well as abroad – of the German bimonthly propaganda magazine Signal (1940–1945), which at its peak in 1943 had a circulation of 2.5 million copies every fourteen days (Boltanski Reference Boltanski2014, 53), the publisher Arnoldo Mondadori decided to exploit new markets as well.Footnote ⁴ The German edition of Tempo was soon followed by a Spanish, a Portuguese, a Romanian, a Hungarian, a French, an Albanian, a Croatian, a Greek and a Swiss one (for Italian Switzerland), with a fortnightly release. Alberto Mondadori was the one who took care of the realisation of the foreign editions from October 1940 onwards, deciding on the content together with his father Arnoldo, but officially each edition had its own editor-in-chief.Footnote ⁵ Agreements on the financing, distribution and especially on the content of what was supposed to become the most powerful instrument of Italian propaganda abroad, were made between the publishing house and the Ministry of Popular Culture, directed by Alessandro Pavolini (Lascialfari Reference Lascialfari2002, 447–448). However, all the editions of Tempo had to cease publication on 9 September 1943 due to war-related events.

Among the archival materials, an undated promemoria lists the main aims of the bimonthly German edition directed by Rocco Cartoscelli (Lascialfari Reference Lascialfari2002, 448).Footnote ⁶ The content was to be made up of the best articles, which had already been published ‘two issues before in Italian, with a preference for articles that publicise and focus on the action of Italy in every field. In this issue there will be new contributions and specially prepared extensive photo shoots that have not appeared in the Italian edition before’. According to the editor, the main priority was to ‘TALK ABOUT US, ESPECIALLY ABOUT US’. As for the choice of the language, it was decided that ‘the text will be printed pre-eminently in Italian, but with extensive caption texts and summaries in German. Through this medium our language should become widely known even beyond the borders’. The magazine’s distribution was to reach ‘all the countries where German is one of the spoken languages [...]’. Besides Germany and Austria, it was therefore sold in Bohemia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland and in North Africa (to the German army). In a letter to Osvaldo Sebastiani, the Duce’s private secretary, Alberto Mondadori stressed the importance of ‘an edition in German that will be distributed in the Third Reich and will significantly strenghten the image of Italy as a warrior, the fascist politics, its industrial, cultural and artistic activities’.Footnote ⁷

‘A magazine of that kind’

At first sight, the content of the German edition released on 3 October 1940 seems broadly in line with the requirements of the moment, although the collaboration of Carlo Bernari certainly did not please the Fascist authorities. The prevalence of military reports and of Italy-centred news of every kind was evident and they clash with Alberto Mondadori’s post-war declarations about the magazine being a ‘largely apolitical’ one that ‘carried out the bulk of its activities more in the artistic, literary and entertainment spheres than in the political one’ (Lascialfari Reference Lascialfari2001, 11). The first cover picture was dedicated to the ‘warrior youth’. Lamberti Sorrentino’s report on the miners of Carbonia (a newly founded city in Sardinia), which appeared in the first Italian issue on 1 June 1939, was republished. In addition to articles on the victories of the German and Italian army (i.e. in ‚The Italians in Egypt‘ and ‚Storm over England‘), reviews of Italian films and interviews with movie-stars like Lina Cavalieri offered some distraction. The section ‚Romane und Novellen‘ (Novels and short stories) was inaugurated by the first episode of the short novel Der Goldsucher (The Goldseeker) by Carlo Bernari. Other literary contributions in the section entitled ‚Literatur‘ were Corrado Pavolini’s reviews of the books Quasi un secolo by the collaborator Carlo Bernari (Mondadori) and Oratorio di Santa Teresa by the emerging author Romano Bilenchi (Vallecchi). Suggested readings for politically friendly countries like Germany, Chile, Spain and Finland were signed resepectively by the editor-in-chief Rocco Cartoscelli, by Carlo Bo and by Carlo Piazza. Surely remarkable, finally, were the Farbige Seiten (coloured pages, i.e. photographs), because Tempo was the first periodical in Italy to inaugurate the technique of reproduction in four-colour printing (Lascialfari Reference Lascialfari2001, 16).Footnote ⁸

Mondadori’s periodical at that time was clearly identified as a ‘real’ propaganda magazine and not every writer wanted to appear in it. In 1941 the contemporary author Térésah (pseudonym of Teresa Ubertis), the wife of the influential Fascist politician Ezio Maria Gray, wrote a letter to Arnoldo Mondadori because she did not want her name to be associated with any edition of Tempo:

However, a closer look reveals that the popular propaganda magazine with all its foreign editions was actually something more than a simple bulletin of the Rome-Berlin Axis. Nevertheless, it would not be correct to define Tempo as an ‘oppositional’ periodical. The publisher Arnoldo Mondadori pursued commercial success that actually depended upon the Fascists’ ability to stay in power; and even if Alberto Mondadori and his close collaborators did publish ‘a series of foreign and Italian short stories of definitely non-fascist authors (Alba de Céspedes – Carlo Bernard – Arturo Tofanelli – Erskine Caldwell – William Saroyan – Elio Vittorini, etc)’ and therefore, according to the editor-in-chief, often received ‘reproaches and reprimands by the director general for the Italian press’,Footnote ¹⁰ they never took an unambiguous position against the regime.

The result of the more traditional and cautious attitude of the father and the greater boldness of the son was a literary section that contained reviews on those supporters of the regime who still dominated the Italian literary scene (Ada Negri, Alfredo Panzini, Riccardo Bacchelli, Emilio Cecchi) as well as the original contributions of emerging writers and critics like Elio Vittorini, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1943), Alfonso Gatto, Carlo Bo and Eugenio Montale (1943), whose work had not yet reached Germany. Tempo also managed to offer German readers a deep insight into different issues by deciding on the publication of many ‘panoramic articles’, like, for example, the essay by Corrado Pavolini on ‘Arts and literature in the new Italy’ (with brief portraits of Ungaretti, Montale, Vittorini, Zavattini, de Céspedes, Gianna Manzini, De Chirico and Giorgio Morandi) or that by Sergio Solmi on ‘Contemporary Italian poets’ (Pavolini Reference Pavolini1940; Solmi Reference Solmi1941). In this way, its readers gained a good overview of the Italian literary scene and of its most important representatives. Statements like the following made by Carlo Bernari, which appeared in the Italian as well as the German edition, clearly show what the real attitude of the young editorial board towards the main contemporary bestselling authors was and give as an idea of the battle going on inside the Italian literary scene:

What emerges most particularly through this review is the negative judgement of a uniform Italian literary scene dominated by authors who were faithful to the regime, while at the same time there is mention of a less well-known but more alluring scene that is about to prevail.

If, on the one hand, many contributors of the Italian and the German edition were the same (i.e. Bruno Barilli who was responsible for the music sectionFootnote ¹¹ and the poet Alfonso Gatto who traced accurate portraits of contemporary authors),Footnote ¹² on the other hand, a few important names were missing in the German issues.Footnote ¹³ No contributions by Alberto Moravia are to be found, perhaps because of his Jewish origin, nor by Cesare Zavattini, whose Nuovi raccontini had been considered not suitable for the Italian readers and therefore even less so for the German ones.Footnote ¹⁴ As Gualtiero de Santi (Reference De Santi2015, 147) summarises, Zavattini composed ‘a gallery of insights and perspectives on a bourgeois world alienated in madness, but also, suggestively and extensively, on the existential condition of men’. Furthermore, any negative comment on Italian artists was severely forbidden since the main aim was to give a positive image of Italy itself. On this account, Alberto Mondadori wrote to Zavattini in September 1940: ‘[...] Something else: from the next issue onwards, Tempo will go abroad and we need to ban every kind of negative criticism regarding the life of Italian artists. Please consider this as an order from above.’ Footnote ¹⁵ Notwithstanding these precautions, the editorial board decided to publish some provoking contributions by Elio Vittorini, thereby clearly showing once more the coexistence of two opposite trends in the magazine: a wisely philo-fascist one and a prudently progressive critical one to which the Sicilian author lent his voice.

Elio Vittorini, ‘Nome e lagrime’

In 1940 and 1941 in particular, Vittorini acted as a prolific contributor to the Italian edition of Tempo, translating novels and writing essays on American and English literature with a particular focus on the US writers Steinbeck, Saroyan and Faulkner. But while no reference at all to the English and the American (not only literary) enemies ever appeared in the German edition, some of Vittorini’s own highly provocative short stories were accepted and published (Vittorini Reference Vittorini1941, 50–51; 1943, 27, 32). These represent his first publications in Germany, anticipating his successful postwar reception (Kapp Reference Kapp1996). The first story, ʻAls der Winter begannʼ (‘Quando cominciò l’inverno’), appeared in the issue of 23 January 1941 and it focuses on a rich teenage girl who falls in love with one of her father’s workers and runs away with him. When the police finally find and arrest the young man, the story takes an unexpected turn. Instead of escorting her home, the police chief himself ‘sells’ the girl to a woman who rents rooms by the hour. For an Italian, as well as for a German reader of that time, this story about a relationship trascending social boundaries, a corrupt police chief and prostitution must have come as a surprise. Since these and many other subjects (for example suicide) were censored, the happy-ending short stories in propaganda magazines were usually set in the past or in a timeless present in which war events only represented the right setting to show a young soldier’s love for his motherland and for his wife (Alvaro Reference Alvaro1942, 16–18).

Vittorini and the editor, Alberto Mondadori, surely knew they were running a risk, but at that time the author’s trouble with the Italian censors was still to come. When the story was published, the Sicilian writer’s controversial novel Conversazione in Sicilia Footnote ¹⁶ had not yet appeared; neither had he finished working on the anthology of American literature, Americana, which was published in April 1941 by Bompiani and immediately seized by the Fascist censors because of his too-positive observations on US writers.

One year later, however, Vittorini’s contributions in the German issue of 15 January 1942 (no. 35) came as even more of a surprise. Along with articles by Carlo Bernari, Alfonso Gatto and Massimo Bontempelli – who had been engaged by Alberto Mondadori in 1939 even though he had been suspended from every professional activity for two years and sent on a kind of ‘golden exile’ to Venice by the Fascist regime – one finds two short stories by the Sicilian author: ʻDas Kleid hinter der Türʼ (ʻIl vestito dietro la portaʼ) and ʻNamen und Tränenʼ (ʻNome e lagrimeʼ). The first had appeared only once in Il Tesoretto (a literary yearbook edited by Alberto Mondadori and Arturo Tofanelli) in June 1940, whereas the second was then well-known among Vittorini’s Italian readership, as it is the short story that the writer used as an introduction to Conversazione in Sicilia or, to be more precise, to Nome e lagrime, the previous title of the novel (Rodondi Reference Rodondi1972, 202). The intense short story introduces the reader to a surreal atmosphere, by describing the passionate main character’s search for a nameless woman, who leaves him with nothing except a handkerchief full of tears. Since Conversazione in Sicilia with its tacit call for opposition had already attracted the attention of the censors, the publisher Parenti in Florence decided to entitle the first edition Nome e lagrime, just like the aforementioned story.Footnote ¹⁷ Published for the first time in Corrente (no. 19, 3 October 1939), Bompiani eliminated the story from the second edition of Conversazione in Sicilia in 1941 onwards. Interestingly, neither of these two texts ever appeared in the Italian Tempo. Arnoldo Mondadori had actually refused to publish Vittorini’s novel; and on this topic he wrote to Teresa Ubertis on 11 March 1942:

Notwithstanding his decision, Mondadori had kept for himself a copy of the rejected novel, and the short story ʻNome e lagrimeʼ found its way into the German edition of Tempo. Alberto Mondadori’s decision to publish a story included in one of the most discussed and criticised novels of those years after his father Arnoldo Mondadori had declined it, seems more provocative than accidental. After two more editions published by Bompiani in 1942, the book was indeed seized (Rodondi Reference Rodondi1974, 1201) and so it could hardly be considered as a useful propaganda tool.

However, while Vittorini’s short stories confirm the magazine’s editors’ search for a new and independent literary model without any ideological constraints, we should not forget that until the end of the 1930s Vittorini considered himself a fascista di sinistra (a left-wing Fascist) and that in 1942 he participated (together with Giaime Pintor and Emilio Cecchi) in the Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung in Weimar, a sort of literary festival for representatives of the Nazi’s allies (Hausmann Reference Hausmann2004, 214). This can be interpreted as a clear sign of his indecision between alignment and opposition, but – as we tend to believe – it could also represent an unavoidable compromise in order for Vittorini to continue to exercise his opposition.

The German ‘Italien’ project

Elio Vittorini’s works, especially Conversazione in Sicilia, also attracted the attention of the second magazine I would like to focus on: Italien. As a ‘Monatsschrift für Kultur, Kunst und Literatur’ (monthly for culture, art and literature), Italien had already been published between 1927 and 1930 by Kampmann Verlag in Heidelberg following the example set by the German-French Association and its periodical, the Deutsch-französische Rundschau. Its founder and director was the playwright and novelist Werner von der Schulenburg, a strong supporter of Fascism and of the Duce himself, who rewrote the play Cavour by Benito Mussolini and Giovacchino Forzano, originally entitled Villafranca. When Egon Vietta (pseudonym of Egon Fritz, in which he used the surname of his Italian mother), writer and editor for Italian literature at Broschek Verlag in Hamburg, decided, together with the director of the publishing house Carl Gustav Schiefler, to launch a new monthly dedicated to Italy, he asked von der Schulenburg to bring Italien back to life. In 1942 the latter became the official periodical of the Deutsch-Italienische Gesellschaft, an association that aimed for the improvement of Italo-German cultural relations through the organisation of conferences, lectures and exhibitions. Thanks to its support by the Nazi Foreign Office, it was economically well-off and in 1942 it could count on 16 branches throughout the country (Schmidt-Bergmann Reference Schmidt-Bergmann1992, 142). One of its board members was the former German ambassador in Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, who was sentenced to death in September 1944 because of his suspected involvement in the resistance movement (Schmidt-Bergmann Reference Schmidt-Bergmann1992, 149). From the very first issue, Vietta was responsible for the concept of the magazine, although von der Schulenburg remained the editor-in-chief until 1943 when he was replaced by Prof. Dr. Albert Prinzing, the German Foreign Office’s expert on Italian folklore as well as head of the German cultural institutes in Italy. In spite of his important official role, Prinzing apparently took no serious interest in the magazine’s content, but several personal letters reveal that Vietta’s literary selection and more generally his way of running the magazine did not meet with von der Schulenburg’s approval.Footnote ¹⁹ The replacement may, therefore, have taken place partly for this reason and partly because of political disagreements.

While von der Schulenburg deeply admired Fascism and its representatives, Vietta was and had always been sceptical towards Fascism and Nazism. Immediately after graduating from law school in Freiburg in 1926, Italien’s future editor became a member of the SPD (Socialist Party of Germany). In 1938 he was fired from his job as a governmental assessor in Schopfheim (Baden-Württemberg) because of his anti-Nazi attitude and his supposedly ‘kulturbolschewistische Publikationen’, that is, publications that, according to the forces in power, endorsed ‘the spirit of cultural Bolshevism’. The majority of his books were banned, including the novel Der Engel im Diesseits, published in 1929, and the non-fiction book Der Tanz from 1938. During the Second Word War Vietta took part in an intellectual resistance group in Hamburg, which was strongly connected to the Weiße Rose (White Rose) group founded by Hans and Sophie Scholl in Munich (S. Vietta Reference Vietta2012, 338–372).

The direction of the magazine Italien can also be seen as an act of opposition against a prescribed art and literary model that Vietta did not accept. Through it, he wanted first of all to be the official voice of modern Italian art in Nazi Germany. His initial contacts with Italy were primarily in the field of painting. In 1937, at the gallery ‘Il Milione’ in Milan, he organised a group exhibition of artists of the Bauhaus, considered as ‘degenerate’ art by the Nazis and therefore banned. At that point the gallery was already an important meeting point for the most prestigious Italian and foreign contemporary artists. Furthermore, it was the headquarters of the magazine Il Quadrante. Mensile di arte, letteratura e vita, run by Pier Maria Bardi, former owner of the gallery, and Massimo Bontempelli, one of Italien’s contributors. It is likely that Vietta used to meet his friends there, including the painters Carrà, De Chirico, Achille Funi, Massimo Campigli and Virgilio Ghiringhelli, as well as the writer Bontempelli, all of them regulars of the gallery. In return, in Italien Vietta more than once reviewed the Edizioni del Milione, small booklets on the gallery’s main artists such as the one on Mario Sironi with an introduction by Massimo Bontempelli published in 1943. Together with Ghiringhelli and Campigli, he even planned a corresponding magazine from Italy, but it was never realised (R. Vietta Reference Vietta2011, 26–27). In Germany, in turn, Vietta held several lectures on contemporary Italian painting between 1939 and 1940. In the same period his journeys to Italy became more frequent and in 1944, when he was searched by the Gestapo because of his affilitation to the already mentioned resistance group in Hamburg, he decided to move to near Verona.Footnote ²⁰ He lived there for some time with the painter Bartolo Battiato and then, on 4 July, he flew to the other front in Florence together with Carlo Carrà, the painter, who introduced him to Elio Vittorini and Alfredo Casella (R. Vietta Reference Vietta2011, 28–29). At that point, in Italien he had already published Carrà’s theoretical reflections on painting and some personal memories about their earlier encounters in Milan (Carrà Reference Carrà1943, 159–161).

Italien’s cultural and literary programme

To keep up the appearance of an official propaganda periodical, the welcoming prologue in the first editorial of Italien (no. 1, October 1940) was signed by von Tschammer und Osten, Reichssportführer (Reich Sports Leader) as well as president of the Deutsch-Italienische Gesellschaft, and by the minister of Popular Culture Alessandro Pavolini. Both of them agreed on the importance of an intense cultural and literary exchange in order to achieve a real unification of both nations. The reference to the ‘noblest Italians’, Cavour and Marinetti (and not to Mussolini), in the editorial is no coincidence (‘Editorial’ 1942, 21–22). Vietta deeply admired Italian Futurism and, notwithstanding the Nazi regime’s declared antipathy towards every kind of contemporary painting, the second issue of Italien contained an article on Italian theatre by Marinetti himself (Marinetti Reference Marinetti1942, 39–40), whose Manifesti and whose novel Mafarka, le Futuriste partly appeared on the Nazi blacklists (Schmidt-Bergmann Reference Schmidt-Bergmann1992, 140).

The editorial board consisted of the Schriftleiter (editor in the Nazi period) Egon Vietta himself and the editor-in-chief Werner von der Schulenburg. The poet and translator Hanns Studniczka seems to have had a permanent working commitment to Italien only from 1943 onwards.Footnote ²¹ Together with Ursula Carl-Ratzlaff, who joined the journal in 1943 as well, Vietta provided the majority of the articles, but each issue also contained essays by occasional contributors such as Karl Voßler, the well known German scholar of Romance studies, and Vincenzo Errante, an Italian expert on German literature. Literature meant, more than anything, essays on contemporary authors (but also musicians and painters), reviews of their main works and many original contributions, short stories as well as poetry. According to Schmidt-Bergmann (Reference Schmidt-Bergmann1992, 144) the monthly’s editorial policy represented a combination of ‘a deep consciousness of classical humanism and the presentation of Italian contemporary literature’. The subtle balance between literature and politics already shines through the choice of the Italian correspondents of the first issue: the Ministers Bottai and Pavolini, the writers Corrado Alvaro and Curzio Malaparte (originally Kurt Suckert), and the composer Alfredo Casella. Malaparte’s summary of his interview from 1929 with Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Culture in Moscow, had actually already appeared in Prospettive (Malaparte Reference Malaparte1939, 3). This periodical, founded and directed by Malaparte himself (1939–1952), caught Vietta’s attention more than once, probably because among its contributors – according to the editor-in-chief – there were ‘the best Italian and French authors of every “nonconformist” trend, i.e. Moravia, Petroni, De Benedetti, Saba, Guttuso (painter) Paul Eluard, Jean Pierre Jouve etc.’Footnote ²² In 1941 Prospettive also published an excerpt of the book Il signor Dudron by Giorgio De Chirico and only a few weeks later, Vietta asked him for permission to let it appear in Italien as well (De Chirico Reference De Chirico1941, 7; De Chirico 1942, 204–205).Footnote ²³

Unlike Tempo, Italien advocated a strong return to the classical equilibrium exemplified by Roman antiquity, publishing regular feature articles on archaeological findings and on Italian authors of the Ottocento like Pascoli, Leopardi and Verga, in order to create a new balance between tradition and contemporary art and literature. As a matter of fact, the first literary section (no. 1, October 1940) looked backwards and forwards, combining the Bismarck Ode by Pascoli and a story from the Novellino duecentesco with the short story ʻDie Frau des Giovanninoʼ (ʻLa moglie di Giovanninoʼ) by Corrado Alvaro. In the Literarische Chronik (literary chronicle), the scholar Kurt Eugen Gass reported positively on the Italian literature of the year 1941, especially on Vicenzo Bacchelli, Alessandro Pavolini, Eugenio Montale and Emilio Cecchi. Apart from the literary section, from time to time there was the ʻMusikalische Chronikʼ (reports on music events signed by Alfredo Casella), the aforementioned ʻArchäologische Chronikʼ (short news on archeological findings and exhibitions), a ʻTheaterchronikʼ, a ʻFilmchronikʼ and a ʻChronik der Bildenden Kunstʼ. In the latter, dedicated to arts, Vietta often wrote short contributions. His review on the volume of the series ʻArte Moderna ItalianaʼFootnote ²⁴ dedicated to Achille Funi, represents the first of many brief insights into an art scene that was hardly approachable from Germany (Vietta Reference Vietta1942b, 55). Finally, the chronicle of the German Italian society always announced the society’s upcoming events.

In the course of its lifetime, the magazine’s content underwent some important changes, particularly concerning the literary section. In particular in 1943 and 1944, Italien started to display some surprising news. While on the one hand the literary programme seemed to head in a rather traditional direction, promoting such authors as Corrado Alvaro and Grazia Deledda, on the other hand it welcomed new and emerging writers such as Tommaso Landolfi, Paola Masino and Alba de Céspedes. Vietta’s positive review of Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia (E. Vietta Reference Vietta1943, 343), as well as of Buzzati’s masterpiece Dei Tartarenwüste (Il deserto dei Tartari) (E. Vietta Reference Vietta1942a, 151–152), and the publication of the short stories ʻLidaʼ and ʻBiancaʼ by Vasco Pratolini (Pratolini Reference Pratolini1943, 214–215; Reference Pratolini1944, 47–48), with their young, poor and very eccentric main characters, are only a few of many possible examples of works that show the desire to finally turn the page.Footnote ²⁵

Like Tempo, the publication had to be discontinued in June 1944 due to overwhelming war events;Footnote ²⁶ but at that time Italien had already managed to publish a few notes about the 600,0000 Italian military internees in Germany; that is, the soldiers that were caught and jailed after Italy changed sides (Schmidt-Bergmann Reference Schmidt-Bergmann1992, 148). Between the lines, the editorial board distanced itself from the Nazi assaults and expressed its sympathy for the Italian population. For many collaborators literary opposition suddenly turned into a real war.

Vittorini in Italien

When Vietta met the Sicilian writer in 1944 (R. Vietta 2011, 29), the German police were looking for him and the censors has already forbidden Conversazione in Sicilia; at the same time, Vittorini was strongly involved in the Italian partisan resistance movement. By reviewing his controversial novel and by publishing one of his contributions during this period, Italien – together with Tempo – helped to build up Vittorini’s new image as an anti-fascist writer. When Vietta’s review of Conversazione in Sicilia appeared in January 1943 (Vietta Reference Vietta1943, 343), the Swiss editors had already published two editions of the novel (in 1941 and in 1943), but the first official version in Germany appeared only in 1948.Footnote ²⁷ According to Heydenreich (Reference Heydenreich1998, 59), the art historian Werner Haftmann, who worked at the Deutsches Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence from 1936 to 1942, became friends with Vittorini before the latter moved to Milan in autumn 1938. Haftmann translated Conversazione in Sicilia during the war and in 1943 it was published by Steinberg-Verlag in Zürich, without mentioning the translator. The same text was reused by Riemerschmidt-Verlag in 1948, this time with Haftmann’s name on it. Once again, transnational and interdisciplinary connections revealing the strong affinity between the Italo-German fields of the arts and of literature proved to be the most effective cultural strategy.

As Eitel (Reference Eitel1979, 47–58) noticed, even if Vietta’s review, probably in order to please the censors, omitted to comment on the implicitly critical tone of the whole novel and focused on questionable similarities with Nazi authors like Hanns Johst, the final section extensively praised the writer’s capacity to describe human nature in the most sober and touching way. A few months later, in March 1943, Carl-Ratzlaff’s article compared four different works that, according to her, well represented the then current battle between imagination and realism in contemporary Italian literature: La pietra lunare. Scene dellla vita di provincia by Tommaso Landolfi (1939); Il segreto del bosco vecchio by Dino Buzzati (1935); Nome e lagrime by Elio Vittorini (Reference Vittorini1941); Parliamo tanto di me by Cesare Zavattini (1931). In the section concerning Vittorini, the critic pointed out that a ‘morbid lethargy’ was ‘the main object of the book’. The reader himself risked being influenced by the ‘strange feeling of an inner emptiness’ that radiated from the book, but this ‘contamination’ also showed the writer’s great talent (Carl-Ratzlaff Reference Carl-Ratzlaff1943, 49–51). While she did identify the main aspect of the book – the intolerance that Silvestro feels towards the political and social Italian reality – apparently the critic only interpreted it as a personal dilemma of the protagonist. However, between the lines, it seems to us that the review stressed Vittorini’s provocative intention to force his readers to think of improved future scenarios by depicting a dreary, melancholic and extremely static society.

Last but not least and still in 1943, Italien published an excerpt of Vittorini’s book Nei Morlacchi – Viaggio in Sardegna (Parenti, 1936).Footnote ²⁸ In the same issue, he was officially presented as ‘one of the main Italian storytellers’, ‘editor for Bompiani, Milan, where he is responsible for the big complete editions of Spanish and American authors, Italian poetry and suchlike’.