Luigi Pintor

Luigi Pintor (born September 18, 1925 in Rome , † May 17, 2003 ibid) was an Italian journalist , writer and politician , best known as a co-founder of the independent left-wing daily Il Manifesto .

Life

Luigi Pintor was born in Rome , but his parents Giuseppe and Adelaide Dore came from Sardinia, where Luigi grew up. In his autobiography Servabo , Pintor describes his childhood in Cagliari , the capital of Sardinia, as a carefree time, which he spent more playing soccer or (during the holidays) bathing on the beach than doing school. When Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940 , however, this changed abruptly: Luigi's father was of the opinion that his wife and children would be safer with relatives in Rome than on the island of Sardinia, and so Luigi, who was according to his, embarked Autobiography "miraculously" passed the secondary school leaving certificate with his mother and older brother Giaime (also: Jaime, * 1919) to the mainland.

No sooner had they found accommodation with relatives in Rome than Luigi's father died; The 15-year-old suffered greatly and began "with a dedication, as if a debt was to be settled", to copy his high school degree in preparation for university and to practice the piano with iron discipline, although he had never considered himself a talent.

During the occupation of Rome by the German army (September 8, 1943 to July 4, 1944) Luigi Pintor had to evade the forced recruitment temporarily by fleeing to the hinterland, but then returned to Rome and participated in a few smaller resistance actions. His brother Gaimie saw it as his duty to join the Resistancea despite his predominantly literary talent .

On December 1, 1943, Giaime fell during one of his first military operations near the village of Castelnuovo al Volturno ( Molise province ). Luigi and an uncle managed to recover the body; the transfer to the cemetery of Castelnuovo became a funeral procession with the participation of the villagers and Gaimie was soon considered one of the most famous heroes of the Resistancea, also because his farewell letter to Luigi with many programmatic passages was soon published as a flyer.

Luigi Pintor, under the deep impression of his brother's death, continued to participate in smaller resistance actions in Rome, the climax of which was an attack on two German soldiers (later inexplicable to him). Shortly before the end of the war in May 1945, Pintor was captured by an Italian group of rioters working with the German occupiers and only survived because American troops shelled the city and Rome was liberated shortly before his previously announced execution.

The twenty-year-old Pintor found himself, as he later wrote, almost disoriented in peacetime: the war had lasted all his youth and he had lost father and brother. He married a friend from the resistance movement, but the soon-to-be-born children presented the young couple with serious problems, and both of them struggled to do odd jobs.

Pintor became a journalist for the communist daily L'Unità , which was also the central organ of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). The freezing of thought, which soon spread to the PCI as well as a hierarchization in favor of the experienced and respected party members, aroused Pintor's distrust. In addition, during journalistic trips to the Eastern Bloc states (several Soviet republics, Hungary , Poland and Czechoslovakia ), which were praised as role models , he discovered the misery that also prevailed in the countries of real socialism and communism.

At the 10th PCI party congress in 1962, Pintor became a member of the central committee, but left the central body because of a dispute with Mario Alicata , the editor-in-chief of Unità , and joined the party office. At the 11th Congress of the Communist Party in 1966, Pintor expressed his critical assessment of the political and social situation in Italy and the world, which differed greatly from the official party line. Thereupon he was expelled from all central party organs and deported to an insignificant position in the regional committee of his native Sardinia, where he faithfully fulfilled his duties as a functionary, but remained independent and critical. In 1968 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies by Sardinia, to which he was a member until 1972.

In November 1969 he was finally excluded from the PCI with the entire group "Manifesto", which included Massimo Caprara, Luciana Castellina , Lucio Magri, Aldo Natoli and Rossana Rossanda . Together with the other excluded, especially Rossanda and Natoli, Pintor founded a monthly magazine called Il Manifesto in the same year , from which the left-wing daily newspaper of the same name emerged in 1971, for which Pintor worked for many years as co-editor and author. From the beginning, Il Manifesto saw itself as left, but independent and also critical of the Communist Party and had many employees from the circle of the student movement.

The early death of his wife, which was associated with many years of suffering, hit Pintor hard. In 1987, Pintor became a member of the Independent Left in the Italian Chamber of Deputies for one term . In the last years of his life he turned to literary activities and published several books. Luigi Pintor died in Rome in 2003.

Literary works

In the last years of his life, Pintor published several literary works. An overview:

• 1990 Parole al vento. Brevi cronache degli anni '80 ("Words in the Wind. Brief Chronicle of the 1980s"), short stories
• 1991 Servabo , autobiography
• 1998 La Signora Kirchgessner ("Frau Kirchgessner"), novel
• 2001 Il Nespolo ("The Medlar Tree"), novel
• 2001 Politcamente scoretto. Cronache di un quinquennio, 1996-2001 ("Politically incorrect, Chronicle of a year five, 1996-2001")
• 2003 (posthumous) I luoghi del delitto (“The places of crime”), non-fiction book

Servabo

The title of Pintor's short autobiography , published in 1991, is taken from the motto of one of his ancestors: Servabo means “I will serve” in Latin . In a language that is unusually poetic for a political biography, Pintor reflects on the essential stages of his life. By almost completely doing without names and dates, he succeeds in impressively depicting the images, experiences and feelings that led him to act. Critics praised the booklet for its masterly epigrammatic brevity and precision as well as its critical sobriety towards parties and ideologies. Instead of portraying himself as a hero, Pintor describes himself as a basically passive person, shaped by the course of time and social currents, who in his being and in his actions v. a. was influenced by World War II . The very successful book reached a circulation of over 50,000 copies in Italy in the year of publication.

literature

Autobiographical:

• Luigi Pintor: Servabo. Italian original: Boringhierei editore, Turin 1991. German edition: Servabo. Memory at the end of the century , translated by Petra Kaiser and Michael Becker. Wagenbach, Berlin 1992; 1998.

Literary works (German editions):

• Luigi Pintor: The medlar tree . Roman, translated by Friederike Hausmann. Wagenbach, Berlin 2002.

Web links

• Literature by and about Luigi Pintor in the catalog of the German National Library