Sergio Romano

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Sergio Romano (2008)

Sergio Romano (born July 7, 1929 in Vicenza ) is an Italian writer , diplomat , historian and journalist .

Life

Romano was born in Vicenza ( Veneto ) in 1929 . He spent most of his youth in Genoa and Milan , where he completed his education at the Liceo Beccaria .

After completing his law degree, he began to write for the feature pages of various magazines. His numerous stays in European capitals, e.g. B. Paris , London and Vienna , aroused his interest in a diplomatic career, but at the same time he remained true to his main areas of interest - literature and history.

Romano wrote as a columnist for La Stampa , Corriere della Sera and Panorama, among others , and was responsible for a collection of historical books at the Corbaccio publishing house. In his diplomatic career he was first permanent representative of Italy to NATO and then was ambassador to Moscow , in what was then the Soviet Union .

Romano received an honorary doctorate from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris and is next to u. a. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie are members of the Comité de Patronage of Commentaire magazine , founded in 1978 by Raymond Aron .

In his career taught Romano at a number of renowned universities - the University of California , the Harvard University of Pavia University of Sassari University and the Bocconi University in Milan.

In 2004 he received the Giuseppe Dessì Literature Prize .

Letter to a Jewish friend

The book Letter to a Jewish Friend , published in Italy in 1997 , was published in German in 2007, presented in a public reading and discussion at the Jewish Museum in Berlin on October 15, 2007 , and its second edition was published in 2008. “It is not a letter, however, but a collection of casual work, of lectures, comments and replicas: including a short, clear history of political Zionism , legible sketches on the history of modern anti-Semitism and sensitive vignettes on the inner turmoil of Italian Jewish people Intellectual in the time of fascism from Arnaldo Momigliano to Primo Levi , finally also opinions on the historical significance of the Holocaust . ”The historian Jens Petersen reviewed this book in 1998 in the journal of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research Mittelweg 36 under the title Die Reflexionen von Sergio Romano . The place of the Holocaust in history . This text is printed in the appendix of the book edition from 2007 by Landt-Verlag. For Petersen, the important statements of Romano from the book are as follows, whereby it is noticeable that he was the clear and broadly carried out affect Romano anchored in the Catholic Church against the "Spirit of 1789" and the left , which he partly in alliance with the Jews sees, not mentioned:

“According to Sergio Romano, the genocide culminating in Auschwitz seems not only to be the lastingly formative event of the Second World War, but also to an increasing extent the central event in the history of the 20th century, indeed the crime of humanity par excellence. The author asks about the place that the Holocaust should occupy in future human history. For a part of Judaism, the Holocaust is not only the central event of the last century, but rather it manifests itself through it the evil in history, namely the evil itself - a kind of 'counter-god', which it recognizes through memorial events, memorials, museums and testimonies the concern and requests for forgiveness must be constantly banished (p. 157 of the 2007 edition). - Romano is of the opinion that the genocide committed against the Jews is a unique process that differs from all other mass murders of the 20th century . But even under the premise of this qualitative difference, the Holocaust still remains a historical event that needs to be examined and understood in connection with the particular situation in which it took place (p. 39 f.). - According to Romano, there is a strategy of memory in international Judaism: After a long history of harassment and persecution, the memory of the genocide is a kind of insurance policy, the best protection against a 'relapse'. For Israel it has so far been an important diplomatic weapon, a valuable source of international legitimation (p. 41). According to the author strives irreconcilable part of Judaism after that, to prove the story with fitting and cementing the hierarchy of certain events and their significance . The result is a metahistorical, canonized interpretation of the Holocaust. But historiography always has a secular tendency, culture always a revisionist one, the questions never cease, and no generation is satisfied with the answers that they find in their parents' books (p. 160). Sergio Romano sees the danger of a new anti-Semitism in the new addition of the collective guilt thesis. It is hard to imagine that the genocide of European Jews committed during World War II could ever be forgotten or, with the exception of a few incorrigible ones, played down. And yet the Holocaust is also a 'normal' historical event insofar as, like any other, it represents the sum of (in this case a particularly large number) individual responsibilities and a historical context ”(p. 162).

Remarks

  1. ↑ See Jürgen Kaube on October 17, 2007 in the FAZ: Denial of a historians' dispute.
  2. ↑ Micha Brumlik in his review of December 20, 2007 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
  3. ↑ Mittelweg 36, issue 3, 7th year, June / July 1998, pp. 49–60.
  4. ↑ Jens Petersen, Sergio Romano's reflections. In: Sergio Romano, Letter to a Jewish Friend, Berlin 2007, pp. 213–230.
  5. ↑ Sergio Romano, Letter to a Jewish Friend, Berlin 2007, pp. 115 ff., 134 f., 176 ff.
  6. ↑ Petersen in Romano, pp. 220–222.

Works

translation

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Romano, Sergio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian diplomat and writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 7, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Vicenza