Rossana Rossanda

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Rossana Rossanda (born April 23, 1924 in Pola , Istria , Kingdom of Italy , † September 20, 2020 in Rome ) was an Italian intellectual and writer who was a leader in the Communist Party of Italy (KPI) in the 1950s and 1960s and co-founded the independent left-wing daily Il Manifesto in 1971 .

Life

Rossana Rossanda grew up in a middle-class family with a liberal attitude towards upbringing. Her father worked as a notary in Pola, but the family became impoverished in the wake of the global economic crisis and later moved to Milan . Rossana Rossanda began her studies at the university there. As a young student of art history and philosophy, she came into contact with the anti-fascist Resistancea through her teacher Antonio Banfi in 1943 , took part in partisan campaigns and became involved in the KPI after the war. After a short time, thanks to her profound education, she was appointed by then party leader Palmiro Togliatti to be responsible for the cultural policy of the KPI. In 1959 she was accepted into the party's central committee and elected as a member of parliament in 1963.

In the following years, however, she came more and more into conflict with her party, whose indecisive attitude towards Moscow and overly reformist policies in Italy she criticized. In 1968 she published a small volume entitled "The Year of the Students", in which she expressed her political sympathy with the 68 movement . She also condemned the invasion of the Warsaw Pact states into the Czechoslovakia and the ambivalent attitude of the CPI leadership to the crackdown on the Prague Spring , although Enrico Berlinguer wrote the final document at the 1969 meeting of the Communist parties in Moscow, which was supposed to justify the invasion of the Czechoslovakia , had not signed. In the "hot autumn" of 1969, at the height of the Italian protest and strike movement, which had long since spread to sections of the working class, Rossanda founded the magazine together with like-minded members of the KPI ( Luigi Pintor , Valentino Parlato, Lucio Magri, Luciana Castellina and others) “Il manifesto” , which sharply criticized the soothing attitude of the KPI from their point of view. The critics were then excluded from the KPI for deviating to the left.

So Rossanda was all the more committed to “il manifesto”. In 1971 she turned the intellectual monthly magazine into an independent left-communist daily newspaper, whose line she shaped for years. With her numerous articles on political and cultural issues of all kinds, in which she did not shy away from criticizing her own people and self-criticism, Rossana Rossanda even gained a great reputation among her opponents.

In 1976, after attempts by the Il Manifesto group to form a new political party with other factions on the left ended in a devastating electoral defeat, Rossanda withdrew from active politics and the management of the daily newspaper in order to concentrate solely on journalism and to dedicate to literary writing. In an autobiographical essay in 1979 she wrote: “These are the dates of my life: at fifteen the world war, at twenty-five the cold war, at thirty-five admission to the central committee of the largest communist party in the west, at forty-five expulsion from this party. And at fifty-five I am now here, in the middle of the backflow of a tidal wave, the ups and downs of which I have known for a long time and which always carries me away.

During this crisis, Rossanda also dealt intensively and critically with the feminism of the 70s and 80s, which is especially true in her books Le altre. Conversazioni… (Eng. Interference. Conversations with women… ) and Anche per me. Donna ... expresses itself. In her autobiography La ragazza del secolo scorso (English: The daughter of the 20th century , literally: The girl of the last century ), published in 2005, she always looks back at her youth and her time in the KPI until she was expelled from the party in 1969 with the question of how and why someone like her could be a staunch communist in the 20th century. The publicist Hans-Martin Lohmann wrote about it (see links below): “Rossanda's book not only provides an insight into the inner life of a large communist party, but also tells the story of Italian post-war society and how it dealt with the legacy of fascism. [...] One would like Rossana Rossanda's memoirs to be understanding readers, those that the prevailing cynicism has not yet dulled. "

Works (selection)

  • L'anno degli Studenti , 1968
  • Party and class. A discussion between Jean-Paul Sartre and Il Manifesto , il manifesto, Rossana Rossanda (introductory) and Jean Paul Sartre, trans. by Ute Lipka and Merve Lowien, Merve, Berlin 1970.
  • Mao Tse-tung's Marxism, trans. by Dieter Meyer, Merve, Berlin 1971.
  • Il manifesto. Theses on school and university policy , together with Luigi Berlinguer, Marcello Cini, Lucio Magri and Ernesto Scelza, trans. by Burkhart Kroeber and Sigrid Vagt, Merve, Berlin 1972.
  • Where do people's right ideas come from? A controversy between Manifesto and Lotta Continua , together with Lotta Continua, Franco Fortini, Valentino Parlato, Edgardo Pellegrini and Enzo Rutigliano, trans. by Burkhart Kroeber, Merve, Berlin 1972.
  • On Chinese foreign policy , together with Enrica Collotti Pischel, Lisa Foa, Massimo L. Salvadori, Gianni Sofri and Tiziano Terzani, trans. by Claudia Eichenlaub and Barbara Lagler, Merve, Berlin 1972.
  • Il marxismo di Mao Tse-tung e la dialettica (with Charles Bettelheim ), 1974.
  • About the dialectic of continuity and break. On the criticism of revolutionary experiences - Italy, France, Soviet Union, Poland, China, Chile (essays from il manifesto and others, selected by RR), trans. from Burkhart Kroeber , Suhrkamp, ​​es 687, 1974
  • The long march through the crisis (with Lucio Magri and others), selected, included. and over. v. Burkhart Kroeber , Suhrkamp, ​​es 823, 1975
  • Le altre. Conversazioni a Radiotre sui rapporti tra donne e politica, libertà, fraternità, uguaglianza, democrazia, fascismo, resistenza, stato, partito, rivoluzione, femminismo , 1979 (dt. Meddling. Talks with women about their relationship with politics, freedom, equality, fraternity , Democracy, Fascism, Resistance, State, Party, Revolution, Feminism , translated by Maja Pflug , Andrea Spingler and Burkhart Kroeber, European Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 1980)
  • Un viaggio inutile o della politica come educazione sentimentale , 1981 (German: in vain travel or politics as education sentimentale , translated by Barbara Kleiner , Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt / M. 1982)
  • So per me. Donna, persona, memoria dal 1973 al 1986 , 1987 (German for me too. Articles on politics and culture , translated by Leoni Schröder, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg 1994)
  • Appuntamenti di fine secolo (with Pietro Ingrao ), 1995 (German appointments at the end of the century. A debate on the development of capitalism and the tasks of the left , edited by Hartwig Heine, translated by Marcella Heine et al., VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 1996)
  • La vita breve. Morte, resurrezione, immortalità (with Filippo Gentiloni), 1996
  • Note a margine , 1996
  • Brigate rosse. Una storia italiana (interview with Red Brigadist Mario Moretti, by Carla Mosca and RR), 1994, rev. 2002 (Ger. Brigate Rosse. An Italian story , translated by Dario Azzellini , Verlag Libertäre Assoziation, Hamburg 1996, new edition Association A, Berlin / Hamburg 2006)
  • La Ragazza del secolo scorso , 2005 (German The Daughter of the 20th Century , translated by Friederike Hausmann and Maja Pflug, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 2007)

Other
In the 90s Rossana Rossanda also translated two German classics for the bilingual book series Letteratura universale Marsilio :

literature

  • Christina Ujma: Review of the autobiography “The Daughter of the 20th Century”. In: Friday . August 10, 2009 ( freitag.de ).
  • Obituary: Rossana Rossanda is dead. In: Socialism . September 21, 2020 ( Sozialismus.de ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Antonio Carioti: Morta Rossana Rossanda, comunista eretica e fondatrice del "manifesto". In: Corriere.it . September 20, 2020, accessed on September 22, 2020 (Italian).
personal data
SURNAME Rossanda, Rossana
SHORT DESCRIPTION Italian intellectual and writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Pola , Istria , Kingdom of Italy
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 2020
Place of death Rome