Ignazio Silone

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Ignazio Silone (born May 1, 1900 in Pescina , Italy ; † August 22, 1978 in Geneva ; maiden name Secondino Tranquilli ) was a politically active Italian writer .

Life

Birthplace

Silone was born in 1900 in a small town in Abruzzo in the province of L'Aquila as Secondino Tranquilli. During his underground activities against fascism , however, he replaced this birth name with the pseudonym Ignazio Silone . Silone's father was a small landowner, his mother a weaver. In an earthquake in Marsica in 1915, Silone lost his mother and five siblings; his father seems to have died a year earlier. During this time, Silone began to be politically active. As a youth he took part in the struggles of the farm workers, who were still facing remnants of the old feudal estates in his home region. Here he came into contact with socialist ideas, which would play an important role in his further life.

Without having finished school, Silone devoted himself to his political interests from 1917. He wrote articles for the party organ of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) Avanti! (Forward), in which he criticized, among other things, the grievances that had occurred in Marsica as a result of the earthquake. In the same year he joined the regional farmers 'union and became secretary of the agricultural workers' union. In 1917, after moving to Rome , he was elected secretary of the socialist youth and director of their weekly newspaper L'Avanguardia (The Avant-garde ). A little later, after joining the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), he also worked for the newspaper Il Lavoratore (The Worker). In 1919 he met the Roman police inspector Guido Bellone, whom he provided information about the socialist movement. Contact with Bellone continued after the fascists came to power and was only broken in 1930 in a letter to the police inspector. Because of these spy services, Silone was apparently not hindered by the police in his travel activities or his work. The extent to which he harmed party friends with his reports is controversial and remains the subject of research.

At the PSI congress in Livorno in 1921 Silone joined the founding PCI with a large part of the socialist youth organization, in which he took over the leadership of the youth organization. The victory of the fascists in Italy forced Silone to continue working underground. He was also in contact with Antonio Gramsci , with whom he wrote for the secret L'Unità . Because of his function, he also took part in meetings of the Comintern in Moscow alongside Palmiro Togliatti and Gramsci , and traveled to various European countries on behalf of the party. Around 1930 Silone went into exile in Switzerland . His brother Romolo, the only one of his immediate family who survived the earthquake, had recently been jailed on false allegations in connection with an assassination attempt in Milan, where he was later killed by the fascists.

In exile, Silone's political stance changed. Through his position as a representative of the Italian Communists at the Comintern, he was able to experience the rise of Stalin and the associated exclusion of internal party opponents of Stalin up close. Between 1927 and 1929 he was present at the meetings at which the positions of Leon Trotsky , Nikolai Bukharin and other alleged opponents of Stalin were condemned. Silone did not join these convictions. Disappointed about the lack of tolerance and openness, he broke with the communist movement and communism, which then led to his resignation in the summer of 1931.

It was only in exile in Switzerland that Silone began to work as a writer. Here he wrote Fontamara and the books about Pietro Spina : Pane e vino (bread and wine) and Il seme sotto la neve (The seed under the snow), in which he dealt with his own life and his view of socialism, among other things . Hanns Eisler related the texts of the two aforementioned in his 9 chamber cantatas in 1937. Fascism - its origin and development - came into being at this time . In contrast to this non-fiction book, which was initially not allowed to be published in post-war Italy either, his first two novels found their readers as underground literature in fascist Italy.

In exile, Silone continued to be politically active. From 1939 he headed the socialist foreign office. In 1941 and 1943 he was interned for violating the prohibition on political activity.

After his return to Italy in 1944, Silone was still active in the PSI and took part in the constituent national assembly as one of its delegates. In 1945 he was appointed director of the socialist newspaper Avanti! appointed and from 1947 also directed the newspaper Europa Socialista (Socialist Europe) , which he co-founded . After the split in the PSI, in which Silone's sympathies were apparently with the social democratic wing, he decided to largely withdraw from politics and devoted himself primarily to writing.

In this context, he took over the management of the newspaper Tempo presente (Our Time) in 1952 and was also chairman of the pro-American L'Associazione Italiana per la Libertà della Cultura (Italian Association for the Freedom of Culture). This organization was the Italian counterpart to the Congress for Cultural Freedom and was funded by the American secret service CIA to isolate anti-American and pro-communist cultural workers. The newspaper Tempo presente was the Italian counterpart to Preuves in France , Encounter in Great Britain and The Month in West Germany. In 1967 it became known that the newspaper was co-financed by secret funds of the CIA, whereupon Silone retired from his work for the newspaper, although he remained chairman of the L'Associazione Italiana per la Libertà della Cultura until 1969.

Burial place in Pescina dei Marsi

In 1969 Silone received the Jerusalem Prize for the freedom of the individual in society . Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1950 and of the German Academy for Language and Poetry since 1954 , he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. He was also the recipient of other awards.

In addition to saying goodbye to daily political events, he also began to redefine himself in other ways. He now described himself as a "Christian without a church and a socialist without a party". However, development in this direction began as early as the 1930s; in his second book, Pane e vino , the figure Pietro Spina is described in a similar way. Ignazio Silone died on August 22, 1978 after a serious illness in a Geneva clinic.

plant

Epic

Like other novels, autobiographical references dominate Silone's wine and bread and proclaim his message of resistance in the words of Don Benedetto.

1. The action takes place in the author's homeland, in the province of L'Aquila, and describes how in Fontamara and Il seme sotto la neve , the poor and arduous life of the people who are afraid of the fascist militia and their only hope to see improvement of the situation not in a socialist revolution, but rather in emigration to America.

2. The main character Pietro Spina has a biography similar to the author: most of the family members died in the 1915 earthquake. With the support of the priest Don Benedetto (Don Luigi Orione) he was accepted into a church boarding school. In Rome he joined a socialist youth organization and had to flee abroad.

3. Unlike the author, Spina returned from exile in 1935 and tried, disguised as the priest Don Paolo Spada, to set up an underground organization in his homeland. To this end, he made contact with his former companions from school and the Roman underground, but without success. His comrade Luigi Murica is killed and he has to flee the province again.

4. The author uses his characters for political and ideological discussions in which the protagonist and his teacher Don Benedetto are his mouthpieces. Spina fights with four opponents: the fascist dictatorship, the fearful or more or less adapted people, the avoidance strategy of the official church and the doctrine of its socialist organization. The second group includes his schoolmate, the doctor Nuncio Sacca, who is concerned about his family and his professional success. In response to his argument: “You are unable to understand that people generally have no choice. He finds living conditions to which he has to adapt. If the circumstances don't suit him, there is nothing he can do but wait until they change ", answers Pietro Spina:" What if they don't change by themselves? Who should change it? Oh, how bleak is an intelligence that only serves to provide arguments that are supposed to calm the conscience ”. They would have to make their "choice: oppression or resistance" in relation to the prevailing social order. The violinist Uliva, with whom Pietro worked for many years in the communist student group, has disappointedly given up the fight against the fascist dictatorship and asks Spina: “What are you? A bureaucracy in the making. In the name of other ideas, which simply means in other words and for other interests, are you striving for totalitarian power too? If you win [...] it means for us subjects the transition from one tyranny to the next ”. Pietro contradicts him: “The worst thing is surrender. One can accept the challenge, resist, fight ”, but secretly share his fears:“ Is it possible to participate in political life, to put oneself in the service of a party and still remain honest? Hasn't the truth become party truth for me and justice party justice? For me, doesn't the interest of the organization as the highest above all moral values ​​that we despise as petty-bourgeois prejudices? So have I escaped a decadent church in order to succumb to a power-hungry sect? ”Most helpful to him is the revolutionary Christian attitude of Don Benedetto, who, in response to his confession:“ I have lost my faith for many years ”, with the reference Pietro's call, written with charcoal on the steps of the church portal, replies: “In the depths of my dejection I asked myself: Where is God? Why did he leave us? [...] But when a single defenseless person in a hostile place goes up one night and writes Down With War on the walls with a piece of chalk , you can feel the presence of God behind this defenseless person, and in the disregard for him Danger and love for the so-called enemies are reflected in a divine light ”. “The scriptures often speak of life in secret. […] Wasn't Jesus forced to hide more than once later as an adult in order to escape his persecutors? "

Political Writings

The fascism

In his book The Fascism. Its origins and development (1934), at the same time a history of the Italian labor movement, provided Silone with an orthodox Marxist interpretation of fascism. His definition encompassed three dimensions: Chronologically, he described fascism as a movement that arises in capitalist societies in times of persistent crises, when neither capitalist parties nor the labor movement are able to fill the vacuum. Morphologically, for Silone, fascism represented a broad political mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie with nationalist ideology. Dialectically , fascism was a developing and changing movement that had to be distinguished from fascism as a regime.

“The petty bourgeoisie can probably provide the political leaders for any form of government: as a class, however, it cannot influence any form of government in a directional manner, since even fascism, the strongest movement that has ever emerged from the petty bourgeoisie, in the open dictatorship of high finance and in one more unprecedented oppression of the petty bourgeoisie as a class is running out. "

- Ignazio Silone : The Fascism

That definition, according to Dave Renton , is crucial because, by taking into account the inherent contradictions of fascism , it goes beyond the simple Fontamara statement . Silone understood fascism as an anti-reform movement rather than an anti-revolution movement. Fascism profited from the political immaturity of the labor movement at the end of the First World War .

Written between 1931 and 1934, the book was not published in Italy during Silone's lifetime. A German translation was distributed. The original manuscript was lost in exile in Switzerland .

Letter to Moscow

In August 1936, Silone turned the communists' anti-fascist claims against the Stalinist show trials . The editorial staff of the German exile magazine Das Wort , which appears in Moscow, had hoped to win Silone over to a discussion about the political implications of his novel Bread and Wine . A review of the novel by Ernst Ottwalt was rejected because Bertolt Brecht in particular rejected any polemics against Silone. Ottwalt wrote a private letter, and Silone agreed to reply with an open letter. The first show trial of Zinoviev , Kamenev and others took place at this time . Silone responded by drafting a completely different statement, sending it to Das Wort and publishing it in the Arbeiter-Zeitung in Basel . In it he was probably the first to use the word “red fascism”.

“What is the value of all your protests against the fascist police and fascist courts? What sincerity do you express your words about the elementary human rights, about human dignity and about the defense of culture? What is the moral value of so-called humanism that you represent? […] If I were to remain silent now, I would no longer have the courage to write a single line against the fascist dictatorships. [...] What we need above all is a different way of looking at life and people. Without this 'other kind ...' we would become fascists ourselves, my dear friends, namely red fascists! Well, what I had to expressly explain to you is that I refuse to become a fascist, even if it were a red fascist. "

- Ignazio Silone : letter to Moscow of August 30, 1936.

The school of dictators

After the publication of Bread and Wine , Silone wrote the satire The School of Dictators in 1937/38 . In it, an Italian author living in exile in Zurich recalls an encounter with two Americans, the politician Mr. Döbbel Juh and his advisor Professor Pickup, who want to collect ideas in Europe on how to successfully establish a dictatorship. According to Darina Silone , the model of Mr. Döbbel Juh was the American politician Huey Long . The author refers the Americans to Thomas the cynic, an alter ego of Silone, and the satire takes the form of a dialogue. As Thomas the cynic, Silone defines fascism as a kind of metapolitics.

“Although a political movement, fascism understood from the start how to evade the fighting terrain on which its opponents prepared the battle for it and on which it would undoubtedly have been defeated. Without opposing the programs with a program, without committing himself to this or that organization of the state from the outset, he rather aims precisely at discrediting politics as such, including their parties and programs [sic], and with success; and he has also succeeded in bringing on the despised political stage a lot of remnants of a primitive, prelogical and alogical mentality which slumbered in the modern masses and which the progress of civilization had coated with an external varnish, but without attacking its deeper roots. "

- Ignazio Silone : The school of dictators.

Silone deals with language and communication and explains that politicians who wanted to conquer the masses should not explain programs, but should repeat slogans and appropriate symbols with which a sacred bond can be tied with the homeland. For Silone, the emergence of fascism is not tied to a form of government, but rather “a kind of nihilistic anesthesia” for the “vanquished of life”, a result of the war, the economic crisis and the bankruptcy of the socialist parties. Stanislao G. Pugliese sees in Silone's analysis a synthesis of the sociology of the Frankfurt School and the psychoanalysis of Freud and C. G. Jungs , which is based on Silone's personal experiences and sifted through peasant wisdom.

Silone's book was positively received by critics and compared with Machiavelli's The Prince by some . After the Second World War , Silone occasionally dealt with the subject of fascism in his essays. The way in which fascism went under, half tragedy, half farce, warned Silone, gave rise to the unfortunate illusion that the moral infection of nihilism that inspired fascism had come to an end with it.

Right-wing populists quote Silone, according to which fascism will pretend to be anti-fascism when it returns. This quote has only come down to us from the Swiss journalist François Bondy , but is not found in Silone's writings. A similar statement has already been attributed to Huey Long ("When the United States gets fascism it will call it anti-fascism"). Not only did Long never say this, according to the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger , it also did not correspond to his thinking.

Works

  • 1933: Fontamara
  • 1934: Fascism: its origin and development
  • 1937: Bread and Wine ( Pane e vino , first published in German translation; later title Vino e pane or wine and bread )
  • 1938: School of Dictators
  • 1940: The seed under the snow (Il seme sotto la neve) . First German edition in 1942 at Oprecht in Zurich, translated by Werner Johannes Guggenheim . Current edition (1990) at Kiepenheuer & Witsch in Cologne, translated by Linde Birk
  • 1950: in: A God Who Wasn't , Europa Verlag AG Zurich, 1950, DNB http://d-nb.info/451566890 [autobiographical]
  • 1952: A handful of blackberries
  • 1957: Luca's secret
  • 1965: emergency exit. Autobiography - awarded the Premio Marzotto in 1965
  • 1968: The Adventure of a Poor Christian
  • 1969: The fox and the camellias

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: Ignazio Silone  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dario Biocca: Silone - La doppia vita di un italiano. Milan 2005.
  2. ↑ hanns-eisler.de
  3. ↑ Title reference in the catalog of the German National Library
  4. ↑ Since 1991, several translations into Italian have been published.
  5. ↑ As is quoted below from the edition Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1984, 1974,? P. 41.
  6. ↑ p. 41.
  7. ↑ p. 40.
  8. ↑ p. 201 f.
  9. ↑ p. 200.
  10. ↑ p. 107.
  11. ↑ p. 262.
  12. ↑ p. 264.
  13. ↑ p. 262.
  14. ^ A b David Renton: Fascism. Theory and Practice. Pluto Press, London 1999, ISBN 9780745314709 , p. 67.
  15. ↑ cit. after The Fascism. Its creation and development. Europa-Verl., Zurich 1934, p. 284.
  16. ^ A b Stanislao G. Pugliese: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 1429957778 , p. 124.
  17. ^ Stanislao G. Pugliese: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 1429957778 , p. 125.
  18. ^ David Pike: German writers in Soviet exile. 1933-1945. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3518038559 , p. 286.
  19. ^ Michael Rohrwasser: Theory of totalitarianism and renegade literature. In: Totalitarianism. A history of ideas from the 20th century. Edited by Alfons Söllner, Ralf Walkenhaus and Karin Wieland. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 9783050031224 , pp. 105–116, here p. 107.
  20. ^ Michael Rohrwasser: Theory of totalitarianism and renegade literature. In: Totalitarianism. A history of ideas from the 20th century. Edited by Alfons Söllner, Ralf Walkenaus and Karin Wieland. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, p. 108.
  21. ^ A b Stanislao G. Pugliese: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, p. 127.
  22. ^ Maria Paynter: Ignazio Silone. Beyond the Tragic Vision. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2000, ISBN 9780802007056 , p. 69.
  23. ↑ Ignazio Silone: The school of the dictators. Europa-Verl., Zurich / New York 1938, p. 129.
  24. ^ Stanislao G. Pugliese: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, p. 128.
  25. ^ Maria Paynter: Ignazio Silone. Beyond the Tragic Vision. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2000, ISBN 9780802007056 , p. 71.
  26. ^ Stanislao G. Pugliese: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, p. 129. Quotes from Ignazio Silone: The school of dictators. Europa-Verl., Zurich / New York 1938, pp. 205, 140.
  27. ^ Stanislao G. Pugliese: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, p. 129 f.
  28. ^ Stanislao G. Pugliese: Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, p. 126.
  29. ^ Christian R. Schmidt: Silone's warning. How the left-wing intellectual Ignazio Silone was made a key witness of the anti-antifa . In: Jungle World 2020/05, January 30, 2020.
  30. ^ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr .: The Age of Roosevelt . Vol. III. The Politics of Upheaval. 1935-1936 . (EA 1960) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 2003, p. 67. In 2018 the Texan Governor Greg Abbott quoted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill with a similar saying (“The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists.”), which cannot be proven with Churchill either. Churchillian Drift. Texas Governor Inadvertently Highlights Hazard . In: Churchill Bulletin No. 122 (August 2018).
personal data
SURNAME Silone, Ignazio
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tranquilli, Secondo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Pescina dei Marsi Abruzzo
DATE OF DEATH August 22, 1978
Place of death Geneva