Roberto Saviano

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Roberto Saviano, 2007

Roberto Saviano (born September 22, 1979 in Naples ) is an Italian writer and journalist . In his literary work and in his reports, he deals with the phenomenon of organized economic crime . Saviano is a member of the Osservatorio sulla Camorra e l'Illegalità ; he works for the magazine L'Espresso and the daily newspapers Il Manifesto and Corriere della Sera .

Life

Roberto Saviano is the son of a Catholic doctor and a Jewish teacher. When his father was providing medical care to a Camorra victim against their will in the 1980s, he was beaten up as a warning. Saviano studied philosophy at the University of Naples Federico II . He completed his studies with a diploma.

In 2006, Saviano published the documentary study Gomorrah (title of the original Italian edition: Gomorra - Viaggio nell'impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra ). The title alludes to the sinful city of Gomorrah of the Bible and to the economic criminal clans of the Camorra in Naples . Gomorrah is a hybrid between novel and journalistic reportage and describes in detail the practices of organized crime and its interlinking with legal economic structures and politics. Saviano is particularly concerned with the Camorra stronghold of Casal di Principe , a small town about 20 km north of Naples, which is economically controlled by the Casalesi clan . For years he had worked undercover for his research, including as a dock worker.

The book made its author famous and earned him several awards, including the Premio Viareggio , Italy's most prestigious literary prize. It has been translated in more than 50 countries and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. In German-speaking countries the book was published under the title Gomorrha. Journey to the realm of the Camorra . Based on the book, the feature film Gomorrah by director Matteo Garrone was made in 2008 and the television series Gomorrah in 2014 .

In his book The Opposite of Death , published in 2009, he describes the hopelessness of young men in southern Italy in reports. In order to avoid crime, service in the police or the military is often the only option for them. Many “volunteers” did not return alive from the fighting areas in Kosovo , Afghanistan or Somalia .

The Neapolitan football player Marco Borriello accused Saviano in 2010 of downgrading the reputation of their hometown. Saviano had previously uncovered the involvement of Borriello's murdered father in dirty business. After an intervention by Silvio Berlusconi , Borriello withdrew his accusation.

Consequences of Gomorrah

Following the publication of Gomorrah and his work against organized white-collar crime , Saviano received death threats. A few months after the book was published, he publicly mentioned names of Camorra leaders who had gone into hiding. At an anti-Mafia event in Casal di Principe, he shouted into the audience: " Michele Zagaria , Antonio Iovine , Francesco Schiavone - your power is based only on fear!" After that, the threats against him intensified. At the beginning of October 2006, the writer Umberto Eco appealed for his protection on the main news of Italian television and caused a considerable stir in Italy. As of October 13, 2006, Saviano received personal protection from the Ministry of the Interior and since then has lived in hiding in different places that he has to leave about every two days. He only keeps in touch with his family.

In October 2008 a key witness informed the Italian police that the Casalesi Camorra clan was planning to use a remote detonator to blow up Saviano in his car on the motorway between Rome and Naples by Christmas 2008. Saviano now doubts whether he would write his novel again: "Every morning I ask myself why I did it and I can't find an answer, I don't know whether it was worth it." Also in October 2008, he said in an interview the assumption that the Camorra will now wait with a stop until its popularity diminishes. A normal life in public is no longer possible for him. Airlines refuse to carry him, and hotels and restaurants have their rooms searched for bombs before he visits. Saviano's expressions of frustration evoked many different expressions of solidarity among the Italian public. In the daily newspaper La Repubblica he announced that he would evade the current threat of leaving abroad.

On October 20, 2008, six Nobel Prize winners ( Günter Grass , Dario Fo , Michail Gorbatschow , Orhan Pamuk , Rita Levi-Montalcini and Desmond Tutu ) made a public appeal in La Repubblica to the state to better protect Saviano. Other writers of international standing joined the appeal. It was only this appeal that brought movement to the previously politically neutral attitude of the Nobel Prize Committee . Following the previously rejected initiative by jury member Kerstin Ekman , the Nobel Prize Committee agreed, after a long internal debate, to invite Salman Rushdie and Saviano to Stockholm on November 25, 2008 for a discussion on the subject of “The Free Word and Lawless Violence”. This invitation means that the Swedish Academy has turned its back on its formal political neutrality. Despite the increasing number of declarations of solidarity, Saviano stuck to his intention to leave Italy.

The South African singer and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba dedicated her concert to Roberto Saviano on November 9, 2008 in the mafia stronghold of Castel Volturno . At this anti-mafia concert, too, the Camorra asked for a " protection money ". Makeba died of a heart attack immediately after the concert.

Roberto Saviano, who has lived under police protection since the factual novel was published and, like his family, is in hiding, said in May 2013 in the Welt am Sonntag : “I looked into the abyss ... I met so many bizarre people and heard incredible stories. At some point I started to think like a mafioso myself, to distrust everything and everyone. This book destroyed my life. It is important to report, not to show fear, not to be silenced. But it is just as important to fortunately defend your road. "

In 2018, the then Interior Minister of Italy, Matteo Salvini , threatened to withdraw police protection from him after Saviano criticized Salvini. Saviano accused Salvini of being close to the Mafia 'Ndrangheta .

Research on the Camorra

Despite his isolated situation, Saviano can still do research, and new informants also provide him with their findings. The most important claims include:

  • In 2008 the German port city of Rostock played a key role in the international cocaine trade . The Camorra is building specially constructed ships with double walls for cocaine smuggling. The cocaine is only accessible via a complete dismantling of the ship, but the enormous profit margin in the cocaine trade allows the loss of an entire merchant ship.
  • In many German cities (Stuttgart, Leipzig, Munich, Frankfurt) all the Camorra clans have their representatives. In the former GDR in particular, certain economic sectors such as tourism, construction, transport and the textile industry have been infiltrated.
  • The German secret service (presumably: BfV ) is also said to have been infiltrated by Camorra informants.
  • Saviano sees the companies on the Costa del Sol now largely under the control of the Camorristi. In addition to drug trafficking (cocaine), money laundering is primarily carried out there via the construction industry. Saviano said in 2006 that the Casalesi clan had invested heavily on the Costa del Sol and in Andalusia , "where various hotels and resorts were built with the money and cement of the Camorra". The Camorristi already call the Costa del Sol Costa nostra ("our coast", alluding to the Cosa Nostra , the Sicilian Mafia 's own name). Saviano attributes the ignorance of Spanish politicians towards the Camorra to "a tacit agreement according to which the criminals from Naples can do their business as long as they do not provoke military action".

Television and cinema

Broadcast Vieni via con me by Saviano on Rai 3

In November 2010 Roberto Saviano and Fabio Fazio presented the four-part program Vieni via con me (German: “Come away with me”) on Rai 3 . The program, in which numerous personalities read a list on various, sometimes controversial, topics, proved to be a great success with the public. Roberto Saviano, for his part, addressed organized crime as well as social imbalances and various current topics such as the re-emerged garbage crisis in the Campania region. The third broadcast, on November 23, 2010, reached an average viewer number of 9.7 million, with a peak of 11.4 million viewers and one, not least because of the entanglements presented by Roberto Saviano between organized crime from the south and north Italian economy Audience rating of over 43 percent. Vieni via con me thus achieved the highest audience rating ever achieved on Rai 3 since it was surveyed.

On August 22, 2019, the dubbed Italian feature film Paranza - The Children's Clan by director Claudio Giovannesi started in German cinemas . The crime drama is based on the novel La paranza dei bambini from 2016.

Publications

Books

Articles and speeches

Awards

Others

After Saviano had expressed in 2007 that he would like to be a rapper in order to set his strange life under police protection to music, the Neapolitan rapper Lucariello published the song Cappotto di Legno with the help of the author . The title - in English: "Coat made of wood" - is a fine talkative word of the Camorra for "coffin". Accompanied by string music by the composer Ezio Bosso , the song describes the (fictional) murder of Saviano from the perspective of a Camorrista who sings in the Neapolitan dialect. Saviano provided background information and the song title.

The closing words of his documentary novel Gomorra “You damn bastards, I'm still alive!” Alludes to the closing words of Henri Charrière's film adaptation of Papillon , an innocent convicted prisoner who finally manages to escape.

Web links

Wikiquote: Roberto Saviano  - Quotes
Commons : Roberto Saviano  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Interviews
Article dossiers
items
TV reports on YouTube

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birgit Schönau: Roberto is not silent Die Zeit , November 2, 2006.
  2. ↑ Information from the Mondadori publishing house on the book Gomorrah librimondadori.it, accessed on January 13, 2018.
  3. ↑ Tanja Weber: “Perché sono tutti cattivi”: Strategies of attraction and repulsion in 'Gomorra - la serie' , in: Romanische Studien , Nr. 2 (2015), pp. 197–232, abstract with links to the text
  4. ↑ Birgit Schönau: Stand-up man from Gomorrah. Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 23, 2010.
  5. ^ Uta Keseling: Romancier in Lebensgefahr welt.de, October 30, 2006.
  6. ↑ Stefan Tröndle: "Mafia threatens revelatory author Saviano" ( Memento from July 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), Tagesschau , October 18, 2006.
  7. ↑ Interview: The Mafia is a German Problem Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 20, 2007.
  8. ^ A life in hiding stern.de, July 14, 2010.
  9. ↑ Stefan Ulrich : The wages are fear Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 14, 2008.
  10. ↑ Stefan Ulrich: "He can do me, the success" Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 16, 2008.
  11. ↑ Threatened Saviano: Appeal of Nobel Prize winners in Italy The press , October 20 of 2008.
  12. ↑ Worldwide solidarity with Saviano. 150,000 signatures for the writer Frankfurter Rundschau , October 23, 2008.
  13. ↑ Hannes Gamillscheg: Satanic Camorra Frankfurter Rundschau, November 27, 2008.
  14. ^ Rushdie and Saviano to Stockholm, Abendblatt.de (dpa), November 12, 2008.
  15. ^ Despite wave of solidarity: author Saviano wants to emigrate Die Presse, November 3, 2008.
  16. ↑ Miriam Makeba is dead. "One of the greatest singers of our time" dpa , November 10, 2008.
  17. ↑ Saviano regrets the mafia book "Gomorrha" ORF.at, May 26, 2013.
  18. ↑ How Salvini plays the Mafia game. June 25, 2018, accessed April 25, 2020 .
  19. ↑ a b Stephan Maus: "For the Camorra, I'm just scum" stern , September 18, 2008, interview with Saviano
  20. ↑ Martin Hirte: Handout for the film Gomorrah (PDF), September 16, 2008
  21. ↑ "España está invadida por el dinero de la Camorra" Interview with Saviano in El País , November 12th, 2006. Quote: "El clan de los Casalesi, en concreto, invirtió mucho en la Costa del Sol y en Andalucía, donde varios hoteles y complejos turísticos se construyeron con dinero y cemento de la Camorra. "
  22. ↑ The face of the mafia in Sicily. In: derStandard.at . Retrieved May 21, 2020 .
  23. ↑ El Mundo | Roberto Saviano: "Para la Mafia, la Costa del Sol es la 'Costa Nostra'" ( Memento from February 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  24. ↑ Roberto Saviano: 'For the Camorra, Spain is already cosa nostra' ( Memento of December 9, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) cafebabel.com, October 16, 2007.
  25. ↑ Let's get out of Italy Neue Zürcher Zeitung , November 27, 2010.
  26. ↑ For once without glitter and screaming, Tages-Anzeiger , November 24, 2010.
  27. ^ Record d'ascolti per Fazio-Saviano Corriere della Sera , November 23, 2010.
  28. ↑ Paranza - The Children's Clan , filmstarts.de, accessed September 2, 2019
  29. ↑ «There is no investment that is more worthwhile than cocaine» Tages-Anzeiger , April 2, 2013.
  30. ↑ Hans von Trotha: "Young killer on motor scooters" , review on deutschlandfunkkultur.de from August 29, 2019, accessed September 2, 2019
  31. ^ Film award for Roberto Saviano: Great honor for a man on the run tagesspiegel.de, October 17, 2008
  32. ↑ Palme Prize to authors Saviano and Cacho Salzburger Nachrichten , January 23, 2012.
  33. ↑ Ursula Scheer: Prize for Roberto Saviano: From Men Who Want to Die faz.net, September 16, 2016.
  34. ↑ Carolin Gasteiger: With rap against the Mafia Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 25, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Saviano, Roberto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH 22nd September 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH Naples