TEN
O my country O my country etc. what shall
I do I cannot shed my blood for you who do
not exist any more etc. etc. etc. what great
deed shall I do?
LEOPARDI (1798–1837)
During the war and for decades afterwards, Italian historians claimed that Habsburg Italians flocked across the border in their thousands to join the fight against Austria in 1915. Recent research by Fabio Todero has exposed this claim as a myth that endured by downplaying the number of regnicoli, who were Italian citizens living in Austria- Hungary for economic reasons. Some 49,000 regnicoli lived in Trieste: a fifth of the population. They had to return home in 1915 or face prosecution, so should not be counted as volunteers. From March 1915, they were queuing to get their passports stamped at the Italian consulate in Trieste. Some 35,000 made the one-way journey. Only 881 Triestines really volunteered for the Italian army: less than 1 per cent of the city’s Italian community, drawn from the middle classes. The proportion of Tyrolese Italian volunteers was even smaller: 650 from a population of 400,000.
The ‘foreign’ volunteers were disliked by ordinary Italian soldiers, for they might be Austrian spies and they actually wanted this foul war. Patrizio Borsetti, a volunteer from the south Tyrol, wrote home in August 1915: ‘the soldiers look at us as if we were the reason why they have to fight. How many curses on account of “Trento and Trieste”…’ So widespread were the ‘mockery and rebukes’ directed at volunteers that in October 1915, the commander of the 65th Division (Second Army) formally ordered his officers to monitor and punish ‘such ignoble attitudes’.
The volunteers were geeky and bookish, afire with conviction. Giani Stuparich’s brother Carlo marched to war at the age of 21 with Dante, Homer, the Bible and Mazzini in his knapsack. The brothers were anguished by their comrades’ suspicion. ‘What more do we have to do to convince them that we are Italians too?’ Giani asked his diary. ‘Just like them, just like them!’ They were not just like them. Highly educated, mostly unmarried and childless, these zealots were ready, even enthusiastic, to lay down their lives. Modelling themselves on Garibaldi’s famous redshirts, they were even less prepared for the horror of modern warfare than their working-class comrades, who took revenge in trench songs:
Cursed be those young students
full of learning, wanting war
They put Italy in widow’s weeds
she’ll be grieving a century more.
The volunteers’ letters and journals are impossibly exalted. Marco Prister, a Triestine Jewish Italian, kept a diary which ends with these lines: ‘22 November [1915], 13:00: Going into action, maybe I’ll soon be dead! Farewell everyone! Long live Italy! I’ve got the order to advance. I’m ready! My destiny unfolds! Long live Italy! Long live Trieste!’
Antonio Bergamas wrote to his mother from Udine in June 1915:
Tomorrow I am going away, who knows where, almost certainly to death. When this reaches you, I will no longer exist … Perhaps you won’t understand, cannot understand how, without being forced, I went to die on the battle¬ field … it is a thousand times sweeter to die facing my native land, our sea, for my natural Fatherland, than over there on the frozen fields of Galicia or the stony fields of Serbia, for a Fatherland that was not my own and that I hated. Farewell beloved mother, farewell dear sister, farewell father, and if I die, I do so with your adored names on my lips facing our savage Carso.
He survived for another year, until he was cut down by machine-gun fire trying to cross a third line of barbed wire.
More than 300 Triestine volunteers died in the war: a knucklebone in the hecatomb of the Great War. Yet Mussolini turned them into a full-blown cult, naming streets, squares and schools after them. One of the survivors lived to spell out the tragic irony of their sacrifice:
Everything we hated about Austria, the oppression of different peoples, the suppression of liberty in general and the press in particular, the Church’s interference in public life as the established religion of state, the huge power of militarism – all this came back to life in Fascist Italy, in an even worse form.
The cult survives, ghoulishly, in the Risorgimento Museum in Trieste, off the Piazza Oberdan, not far from D’Annunzio Avenue. The custodian did not look up from her newspaper when I walked in. My footsteps echoed among glass cases of faded uniforms, medals, illegible documents, fuzzy photos of the beardless dead. The volunteers’ complex ardour could hardly be worse served; the museum is like a second death. Depression only lifted when I read a heartfelt entry in the visitors’ book: ‘Nationalism – what a deadly infection! Let us hope we’re less infected with it today.’
Of all the Italians who volunteered in 1915 and died on the Isonzo front, Scipio Slataper was perhaps the most gifted, the sort of figure who defines a place and a time. To his admirers he was a meteor in the skies above Trieste, alerting all Italy to the new ideas coursing through Europe. Yet he turned into a passionate champion of the values that led to Europe’s nemesis in two world wars.
Slataper was born in Trieste in 1888 to middle-class parents. His mother was Italian while his father’s roots were Slovene or Croatian. Perhaps as a result, he was keenly alive to his city’s uniqueness, with its triple identities – Italian, Germanic and Slavic – woven together by Habsburg power. He loved its anomalies, as he loved its odd location between the limestone uplands of the Carso and the Adriatic Sea. What he did not love was its provincialism; he longed to shake its citizens out of their money-making routines, and help Trieste discover its vocation as Italian culture’s gateway to the Germanic and Slavic worlds, stretching to the Baltic and the Black Seas. For he longed to be a heroic educator, even a prophet. ‘I was born to give form to clay’, he wrote to a friend, with the solemnity of 19 years. ‘When they tell the story of my life, they will say: he was a vivifier in everything he did.’ He was an alpha-male; ‘domination is in my character’, he airily confessed. Handsome and charismatic, he gathered a following of talented men and women who shared his idealism and were under his spell. His closest acolyte, Giani Stuparich, became his biographer. The three women in the group all fell in love with him. One killed herself on his account; another married him; after his death, the third married his future biographer in a union-by-proxy that could not last.
In 1908, the end of a sentimental affair made Trieste suddenly unbearable. He won a scholarship to study in Florence, which then possessed the sort of cultural glamour in Italy that Paris exerted over Europe as a whole. Florence was part of his inheritance as an Italian, yet he felt like a savage amid its splendours. (From a letter to one of his three muses: ‘I am a barbarian who dreams. I have nothing but my pain and the joy of having it.’) For other strands completed his inheritance – strands remote from Tuscany’s placid landscapes, immemorial cities and the secure achievements of the Renaissance. By these standards, Trieste had no culture. Yet its newness held a promise: Trieste was raw and vital, with the potential to become something. Was not Italy decrepit by comparison?1 His mind teemed, and being Slataper, he shouted his insights to the nation. A series of ‘Triestine Letters’ was pub lished in an avant-garde journal called La Voce (‘The Voice’), published in Florence. Predictably, the bourgeois Italians of Trieste were scandalised, taking as condescension what was meant as a bracing challenge.
The Voice became Slataper’s intellectual home soon after he reached Tuscany. He noticed the first issue in a bookshop, read it from cover to cover and soon called on the editors. It was the most exciting cultural and political review in Italy. Irreverent and caustic as well as learned, it had a broad concept of culture and a mighty ambition: nothing less, according to Slataper’s biographer, than ‘a systematic critical revision of Italian life’, renewing national culture by quarrelling with its makers, canons and clichés. While their concerns were national, the editors were moved by a ‘yearning for universal culture’. Slataper was the quiet one among the vociani, soaking up their ease of allusion and acerbic self- assurance. He never quite became one of them; his background set him apart, and he had no thought of disowning it. He corresponded intensely with his Triestine circle, especially the women. To one of them in particular, Anna Pulitzer, he described his efforts to get over the botched affair that had brought him to Tuscany in the first place.
In the course of these confidences, he grew infatuated with Anna herself. Calling her Gioietta, ‘little joy’, he said she was ‘the most divine woman I could have dreamed of’, an ominous tribute. The infatuation was mutual. Slataper poured out passion and opinions in equal measure. ‘I don’t want to command’, he declared not quite convincingly. ‘I want to bring people to their liberty so that they can find their own way. What stops them is slavery, the terrible slavery of the internal lie.’ He sounds like D. H. Lawrence’s Adriatic cousin, wrestling with sexual convention. ‘All the world should be remade by my desire,’ he exulted; but what about the object of that desire? His letters were serial monologues, and they swamped Anna. His worship became oppressive and eventually unbearable. What did it have to do with her as she actually was? How could she live up to his ideal? Anna shot herself in May 1910, standing in front of a mirror. She left a note dedicating her suicide to Scipio’s future work.
His reaction confirmed the grounds of her despair. He intensified the torrent of letters to her. ‘Letters of pride, of anger, of prayer, of grief, of humiliation,’ Stuparich calls them. ‘The beloved lived on in his imagination, as she had lived before dying.’ The fact of her self- destruction eventually sank in. ‘Gioietta’s love had made him feel like a god. Her suicide destroyed that.’ His self-belief was too strong to be cowed for long. The following year, under the shadow of her loss, he wrote his masterpiece. Il mio Carso (‘My Carso’) has a triple subject: Slataper’s growth and character, his birthplace of Trieste, and the Carso. The first pages evoke a happy childhood, rich in sensuous detail. Young Scipio serves his appetites, recording trials of inner strength with adults and physical endurance with other boys, yearning for mastery. He prays for ‘our fatherland’ across the sea, traces Garibaldi’s campaigns on a map and dreams that Italy ‘will liberate us’. He and his pals sing irredentist songs in the street, then scatter when the police give chase. First love is giddy (‘I brought her the finest pear on the tree between my teeth’), and ends abruptly, without pain. As he grows, his vision is touched with nationalist paranoia. ‘Every step in the city is monitored by spies who pretend not to see anything.’ Contact with irredentists leaves him underwhelmed; where is their passion? The story of Oberdan makes his heart pound. ‘I wished I could die like him.’ At a loose end after school, he becomes a journalist – a modern version of the prophet’s calling.
Slataper’s Trieste is a thriving port, crammed with goods passing from the Orient, America and Italy towards central Europe. Wagons clatter through the streets, laden with crates of oranges, casks of oil, grey sacks of coffee beans and rice, trailing lines of snow where customs officers have punctured the sacks with their ink-stamps. Colliers hauling fuel on board the steamships pause to hawk and spit on the quayside. ‘I move through the streets and am happy that Trieste is so wealthy.’ For it is also a bourgeois city; motor cars roll along the Corso, past strollers in fur coats. And it is a city of political tensions. The Bosnian sentries in front of the governor’s palace remind Slataper how far away the fatherland really is. He joins the demonstrators marching for an Italian- language university, is arrested and led away but twists free from the Habsburg policeman. It is good sport, but serious too.
Then there is the Carso, rising behind the city, a tramride away. It is a dreamscape, a psychogeography of contradictions. In his half-feral boyhood, he ran with the wind, bounding over the stone walls and juniper bushes, plunging into a stream ‘to slake my skin’, then flinging himself naked on the heather. Scent of bitter almonds. Gentians (distilling the blue of spring skies) and primroses (‘the first sunrays!’) amid the weathered rocks. His loneliness is writ large in the Carso’s desolation. ‘My cape sticks to its rocks like flesh to embers.’
As Slataper strides across the rocky meadows, a Slovene peasant eyes him warily. ‘You are barbarous in your soul,’ thinks the Italian, but adds that ‘selling milk in the city for a few coppers would be enough to soften you’. The peasant could be urbanised, and who is to stop this from happening? Slataper’s dislike yields to frank admiration.
You are a Slav, a son of the new race. You came to this land where nobody could live and you made it fruitful. You, a son of the soil, took the Venetian fisherman’s nets away from him and made a sailor of yourself. You are steadfast and frugal. Strong and patient. For long years your servitude was flung in your face; but your hour, too, has struck. It is time you were master. For you are a Slav, son of the great future race.
By contrast, the Italians seem anaemic and exhausted, bragging about their ‘twenty centuries of culture’, unable to channel the Carso’s nourishing energy into their city. Their ‘vital force’ has been sapped. The Slovenes have a place in Trieste’s future – perhaps the foremost place.
In My Carso, Gioietta remains off-stage, impalpable as mist. ‘Filled with grief and death’, the author yearns for her. The Carso’s petrified expanses fit him like a glove. ‘Boulders grey with rain and lichen, contorted, split, whetted.’ The cold north-easterly wind called the bora. Fierce sunlight and bristling grass. Grief turns into leave-taking: burn her pale corpse on a pyre of pine branches, cover her grave with junipers. When this mood, too, works itself out, he discovers a work ethic. Her suicide wiped away the petty truths he once lived by. Realising that ‘work is a vain quest for something that has been lost’, he resolves to be strong and to toil without hope. He blesses the day of Gioietta’s birth and the day she chose to die. A timely southern wind brings health and joy from the green Adriatic. Purged of grief, he can celebrate the Carso again, a landscape that offers no quarter, ‘an inferno’ – Slataper exults in the Dantesque metaphor that soldiers would use again and again to describe the battlefield a few years later. He returns to Trieste with a new sense of purpose. ‘We love and bless you, for we would even be happy to die in your blaze.’ It was another ominous tribute.
This sense of purpose led him to support Angelo Vivante against the militants who denounced his peaceful vision for the Habsburg Italians. ‘The historic task of Trieste’, Slataper said, ‘is to be the crucible and propagator of civilisation, three civilisations.’ He and his friends decided to try to change the climate of ideas in Italy and Austria by establishing an intellectual centre of ‘centripetal energy’. They would tackle the leading problems of the day, starting with the national question. Each of them would study a different language. (‘With ten of us, we can cover Europe, if not beyond,’ he enthused.) Using Trieste as an ‘observatory’, they would publish a review called Europa to debate ‘the general problems of modern civilisation: races, Semitism, feminism, democracy, religion, political activism’.
He fell in love again, with another of his Triestine circle: Luisa Carniel. They married in 1913 and moved to Hamburg, where Scipio worked at the university. The third muse, Elody Oblath, still deeply smitten, trailed after them and shared their quarters for several months, surely an excruciating arrangement. Scipio’s mind was fixed on Trieste, as always when he lived abroad. The couple returned home in August 1914. From the outbreak of the Great War until his death in December 1915, he was prolific even by his own standards, as he strove to increase public support in Italy for war.
Until the start of the war, he had refused to take sides on the irredentist question. He thought Italian nationalists underestimated Trieste’s economic links with Austria, while socialists like Vivante tended to intellectualise the national question. Yet he believed that conflict between nations was proper, because civilisations do not hold equal rights before history. It is ‘morbid and harmful’ to concede something to one nation simply because ‘another has reached the stage of deserving it’. The Italians stood above ‘the Slavs’ because they ‘have a richer civilisation’ and were ‘right to affirm it and fight for it’. Even so, he would not call for war unless it was in Italy’s own interest to fight. August 1914 presented exactly the scenario that would swing his position. He decided that Italy should enter the war with a view to sharing the territorial spoils with Serbia. Italy would take Friuli, Trieste, the Alpine frontier, all of Istria, a Dalmatian island or two, and eventually Albania.
As summer became autumn and Serbia defended itself against immense odds, while Russia attacked the Austrian Empire in the east, the case for Italian intervention became – in Slataper’s view – rock solid. Italy should fight for the rights of the non-German peoples of the empire, but also for the territorial claims that stemmed from the Italians’ superior civilisation. Avid for a national readership, he wrote for a pro-war newspaper in Bologna (the same one that channelled funds to launch Mussolini’s newspaper in November 1914). His despatches were gossipy and vivid. When war broke out, there was confusion in Trieste. ‘No one could make head nor tail of it.’ The military band played marches in the streets and there was much flag- waving. News of Britain’s entry into the war was met with stunned silence in the city stock exchange, broken by a trader who cried ‘It’s all over!’ The city was practically undefended; the garrison had been sent to the Eastern Front. Apart from a few reserve companies on the Carso, only a few hundred Slovenian military police were left. The Austrians evacuated their archives and transferred the regional capital to Gorizia. They were so jittery about a British naval raid that the governor slept outside the city every night. The bank vaults were emptied: strongboxes were loaded onto wagons and pulled by oxen through the deserted city at night. The mass exit of regnicoli caused dozens of shops to close; barbers and waiters were particularly hard to find. The cafés were quiet, after losing their clientele as well as their staff. People wandered down to the quays at night, which were empty for the first time, dark and silent. Gas lamps were unlit, to save fuel. Access to border areas was restricted, so rumours of troop movements across the Isonzo could not be verified.
Privately, Slataper was exasperated by the local Italians’ ‘lack of historical responsibility’. Instead of seizing the chance to throw off the Austrian yoke, they got on with their lives as best they could. Under this pressure, he became a propagandist. An article in December 1914 ended with a steely call to arms: ‘For 32 years of forced peace we could not say the name of Oberdan. Oberdan is a duty: he is war. Simply that. We shall sing his name when our soldiers enter the barracks in Trieste where he was hanged.’ He assured his readers that Austria’s border on the lowlands of Friuli was ‘absolutely indefensible’. He came to share the nationalist contempt for Habsburg fighting abilities, claiming that ‘the Austrian soldier cannot win because he has no will to win’. One of his last publications was a silly pamphlet predicting that Trieste would be liberated within a few days and Laibach after a few weeks. His old insights into Italian–Yugoslav relations, and Slavic toughness in particular, were forgotten. Yet even now he could be surprising. His last article, datelined 22 April 1915, admitted that the pursuit of nationalist claims would never produce a stable order in Europe, because every success triggers counter-claims by another minority. Only ‘healthy liberalism’ could provide a ‘true guarantee’ for Europe’s minorities.
By May 1915, he was living in Rome. He volunteered at once and found himself in the Sardinian Grenadiers. The troop train pulled out of Portonaccio station under heavy rain. Slataper wore a red rose in his cap. Wounded in June by friendly fire, he returned to the line as quickly as possible. In November he was sent to Podgora, the hill above Gorizia that the troops called ‘Calvary’. Five years earlier, he had foreseen his death:
One day, when I’m still young, when I’m walking on the Carso and the stones and flowers are telling me things I already know, some Slav will hurl an eroded, heavy rock full of sharp edges at me. And that’s where I’ll fall, up on the Carso. Not in bed, amid tears and stinks and whispers and people walking softly in the room. I want to die at the height of my life, not down there.
His wish was granted on 3 December, when a Croatian or Bosnian bullet killed him during an action that he had volunteered for. He was 27 years old.
Slataper’s biographer tried to explain his hero’s attitude to the carnage.
He did not approve of so many lives being lost due to lack of planning or resources, but if blood had to be so grievously shed to cement the future history of the fatherland, he could not spare his own with the excuse that the Italian generals were so many contemptible executioners … For all those who did not know why, it was necessary for someone to go in full knowledge, but with their same humility.
Slataper was a sublime educator, showing by example how the Italian soldiers must go like cattle to the abattoir. His search after Anna’s suicide for what he called ‘a harder, more heroic and disinterested life’ led to what his biographer praised as devotion to ‘violent liberty and complete sincerity’ – dangerous goals at any time, and fatal for many in 1915. The Slovene peasant who was guardedly admired in My Carso became his mortal enemy. Slataper the vivifier finished as an apostle of the twentieth century’s worst malady – aggressive ethnic nationalism. A decade after the war, Elody Oblath, his truest soulmate, looked back on the inbred intensity of their group:
We thought we knew all about the horrors of war, but we knew nothing except our own exaltation. Yet we did know with conscious certainty that whatever these horrors would be, none of us would hold back. Our plotting for war really was like [the revolutionaries in] 1848. Thinking today of our inviolable closeness, and everything we tried to do and did do with such effort, I feel admiration and also pity for that limitless and truly heroic enthusiasm. Ours was an ideal co-operation for a collective truth. For the sake of this truth, each of us, I am sure, would have gone to the gallows, just as we consciously instigated and helped all our friends (the best part of ourselves) to go forth and die. Days of mad illusions, faith in a better humanity, which made us exult and demand the deaths of millions of men.
The news of Scipio’s death ‘shattered our fanaticism for ever’.
Source Notes
TEN The Dreaming Barbarian
1 Fabio Todero has exposed this claim as a myth: Todero [2005].
2 a fifth of the population: Cecotti, 67.
3 ‘the soldiers look at us as if we were the reason’: Alliney, 50.
4 ‘Everything we hated about Austria’: Arrigo Arneri, quoted by Fabio Todero [2005].
5 ‘a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse’: Ellmann, 233.
6 a silly pamphlet predicting that Trieste: Slataper [1915].
7 ‘We thought we knew all about the horrors of war’: Oblath Stuparich, 32–3.
1 James Joyce, that adoptive Triestine, had a similar reaction to Rome in 1906: the Eternal City reminded him of ‘a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse’.