«Turin, friends, Trieste, this is how my Hapsburg myth was born»- Corriere.it

Sixty years are not few, for a book, and you will understand my difficulty, my joy and my gratitude for this gift, which I would never have expected and which I owe – not for the first time – to Gian Luigi Beccaria. I would like to thank, together with him, for the affectionate attention given to my first book near and far, The Habsburg mythElisabetta and Eugenio and all the staff of the Milanesiana, and Paolo Di Paolo, who spoke about it in Vienna, the obvious and fatal place of this book and this myth, with Renate Lunzer, author of a book that already says all in the title, Unredeemed redeemed. And I would also like to thank Laura Morante, whom I met many years ago on the island of Cherso, in Miholašcica, where I think she shot her first film with Franco Giraldi, who would have liked to make a film Danube and he shot one with Giorgio Pressburger and Paolo Magris taken from So you will understand

Twenty years have already passed since Luigi Reitani – whom we all remember as an incredible, creative, generous presence – wanted to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Myth. I am happy that Gian Luigi Beccaria is talking about it, with me and for me, one of the few friends with whom I feel I have shared the essentials of life for many years. I met him a few hours after arriving in Turin for the first time, in November 1957, at the university college in via Galliari, almost on the banks of the Po and the Valentino Park, where I was to spend five university years at the suggestion of Giovanni Getto, internal commissioner for my high school exam in Trieste and later our common Master, who taught everyone us a profession and, more importantly, to recognize poetry, to understand and feel what poetry is.

Without that Turin, which doubled its population in those years and where everything happened, I wouldn’t be me, I would be someone else. I should mention other friends: Gianfranco Torcellan, destined to become a master of historical studies on the Enlightenment and the Republic of Venice at a very young age. Stefano Jacomuzzi, at least his extraordinary novel A thin wind (happier the title of the French version, Swing). Massimo Salvadori, then recently returned from the Einaudi Prize, to whom I made him read – indeed I read it to him, in a whole and uninterrupted day, when Valentino was already almost summer in its season — my manuscript. The very first, unfortunate sentence — “Once upon a time there was old Austria” — he rejected immediately, on that bench in the Valentino, and was immediately canceled after his “am pias nen”; then it went better and I had the essential of him nihil obstat. And then the girls, the friends, Giovanna Ioli, Carla Poma and many others.

In Turin, in those many years in which I lived there, first as a student then as a professor, first at the Collegio and then at the Albergo Bologna in Porta Nuova, anything really happened, and I fed on that with passion.

We friends were almost all Piedmontese, except me and a few others who came from the south. Another older brother of mine baptized me «the Turinese from Trieste», Guido Davico Bonino, who according to legend snatched the manuscript of the Habsburg mythwhich I seem to have hesitated to publish in the prestigious series of Einaudi Essays.

I would never finish talking about these friends and colleagues, more friends than colleagues even if at one point it came to the same thing. Once again it was Gian Luigi who made people understand, with incredible generosity, what I tried to do — not alone, even with friends like him and others. I will never forget, for example, how I learned from him, a linguistics scholar as well as a great interpreter of literature and a pupil of Terracini, that the signifier is not the garment of the text, of the signified, but it is his music, its covering and recreate the text of the meaning, make her sing.

Around these university groups – I mentioned above all that of the Italianists, but then there were several others, just think, and this is just one example, of the historians – so to speak natural literary schools were formed, even if nourished by hard-earned papers. Schools that taught to write, to distinguish or to connect; which stimulated creativity and encouraged to go beyond academic boundaries, even if thanks to them magazines such as «Sigma» were founded, which wanted to venture into the thickest and least penetrable territories of twentieth-century literature.

I remember – unforgettable – when I went to ask for my thesis from my Maestro Leonello Vincenti, one of the greatest German scholars that Italy has ever had. It wasn’t easy for him to understand what I wanted to do, because I didn’t know it well myself, something that always happens to me, even now, whether it’s a book or an article. But the Master also understood – perhaps above all – what I was unable to say, despite the clarity I had in the texts but not in the speech, and he gave me the green light. When, after graduation, Einaudi’s proposal arrived, Vincenti wrote me a few lines in which there was all his civilization, very Piedmontese. ‘It is very fortunate for a young man and I think I know you well enough to be sure that you will not jump to any hasty conclusions.’

When I had just published my book in Einaudi’s Saggi, the great Austrian historian Adam Wandruszka came to see me, who he thought he would find an old gentleman, a former subject of Franz Joseph, and instead found a recent graduate who had just started his career. He told me why his name was Adam: when the First World War broke out – for Austria, in 1914 – his mother was pregnant and his father, leaving for the front, said that if a boy was born, he would have to be called Adam , the first man, the man of a new humanity, because what was beginning would have been the last of the wars, of history, after which a world of peace and fraternity would have been born. The astonishment of meeting me instead of meeting an old ex-combatant gentleman is little compared to the denial of that noble and naive prophecy that had accompanied his coming into the world.

I have said little about Trieste, even if Trieste is an essential chapter of the Habsburg mythfor many reasons, even contradictory and also because it is the only reality in which Italian culture has come to deal fully with what was once Cacania, Kakanien, the imperial royal or imperial and royal world, a not insignificant difference because it contained all the culs-de-sac of Central Europe. Divided brothers – if they can be called that – because the ruthless struggles and ruthless war actions that indelibly bloodied, belying the prophecy and wishes of Wandruzska’s father, concerned Trieste in a particular way. But it is singular as its own Trieste, pearl of the empire that wanted to tear itself away from that necklace which was the empire itself, it was one of the cradles in which the myth of the empire was born and spread, and even those who had fought to overthrow it have kept an indelible memory of it, a mark that was imprinted on them for life. When I published my book, Biagio Marin, the poet of whom I was a fraternal and filial friend and in a certain sense a disciple, scolded me because in his opinion (and let us not forget that he had taken the field to fight against him as a volunteer Italian) I had been unjust towards the greatness of the empire and everything it had taught and could have taught if it hadn’t been overwhelmed by the outcome of the war.

Perhaps the most authentic nostalgia is that among former enemies who have understood how tragically inhuman but also inevitable and paradoxically noble was their enmity, with its bloody results. The tragic paradox consists in the fact that, with all its nostalgia and all its criticisms, Biagio Marin, like many other writers, especially from Trieste, had understood thoroughly the inescapable reality of that tragic hecatomb. Those who, like Wandruszka’s father, expected a world of peace from war would soon realize that Pope Benedict XV was right when he spoke of the “useless massacre and suicide of Europe” about the First World War.

And it is difficult, even for enemies or descendants of enemies of the past, not to share a wise, though certainly not afraid of appearing simplistic, slumbering and at the same time alert tranquillity, like that of Francis Joseph, when according to the apostolic tradition he washed his feet on Holy Thursday to twelve poor old men recruited in the most distant and poorest provinces of the empire and at the same time, when, in that masterpiece which is Radetzky’s march
, the lord von Trotta, who comes from a modest family of military traditions, protests against his elevation to the rank of nobility and the motivation that explains it by recounting that in the battle of Solferino he would have heroically saved the emperor from death, something of which he he had noticed, and he tries to appease him and invites him not to take it too much. “But it’s a lie, Your Majesty!” replies the corporal who has become a baron. “So many lies are told,
es wird viel gelogenmy dear Trotta», replies the emperor calmly.

The meeting at the Milanesiana

Published in 1963 by Einaudi, «The Habsburg myth in modern Austrian literature» was born as an elaboration of the degree thesis of Claudio Magris (Trieste, 1939). On Saturday 3 June in Milan (9 pm, Teatro Studio Melato, via Rivoli 6) Magris will be at the Milanesiana where, for the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of the essay, he will converse with the linguist Gian Luigi Beccaria. Reading by Laura Morante; in closing, Danilo Rossi & The new gipsy project. La Milanesiana 2023, conceived and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi, is dedicated to «Returns» and is scheduled until 27 July (opposite, the rose logo of the event).