Ignazio Silone in Exile

Writing and Antifascism in Switzerland 1929–1944

Deborah Holmes

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351928991
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literatura
• Thema: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

Italian writer and political activist Ignazio Silone spent fifteen years from 1929 to 1944 as a political exile in Switzerland. Focusing on this period, this book throws new light on Silone's complex biography and shows how his literary production influenced and was influenced by fellow antifascist German émigrés and the Swiss socialist intelligentsia. Using previously unknown archival materials, letters, and diaries, and following a flexible chronological structure, the book examines the developing role Silone played in the intellectual life of Zurich. Its analysis of Silone's links with 'Bauhaus' circles, disciples of C.J. Jung, and Zurich's socialist city council offers an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective on Silone's exile that both questions and celebrates his status as an 'un-Italian' Italian author. Holmes also considers wider topics such as the functions of the engagé writer in times of crisis, the dynamics of cultural transfer through translation, and the phenomenon of exile literature. Italian antifascist exile writing is an area of Italian literature that has never been explored as an entity. With its painstaking archival research and critical approach to the pioneering methods and results of German 'Exilforschung, ' Ignazio Silone in Exile opens the way for further studies on this little known aspect of Italian emigration culture.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Silone in the Context of Comparative Exile Research

Ignazio Silone spent Christmas 1942 in a cell in Zurich’s barracks. As an official refugee from Italian Fascism, the conditions of his asylum in Switzerland did not allow political activity; he had been arrested having launched a call for civil disobedience in Italy. From his solitary confinement, he paid tribute to the land that had imprisoned him in Memorandum from a Swiss Prison (Memoriale dal carcere svizzero): ‘In Switzerland I have become a writer; but, more importantly, I have become a man’ (‘In Svizzera io sono diventato uno scrittore; ma, quello che più vale, sono diventato un uomo’). The significance of Silone’s time in Switzerland for his literary career is undisputed: seldom can the ‘birth’ of a writer be pinned down to a particular place and period with such accuracy as Silone’s conversion from militant Communism to literary engagement in exile between 1930 and 1944. According to Silone himself, the beginning of his writing career and the end of his Communist Party membership were not coincidental, but two sides of the same existential coin, as he confirmed in his memorandum from the Zurich barracks: ‘On first glance, my disaffection with politics may have seemed the result of external circumstances, however […] my activity as a writer has born witness to my inner struggle and maturation.’¹

Over the intervening years, accounts of this struggle between institutionalised ideology and individual conscience have cast Silone in a series of representative roles as a one-man embodiment of almost all key moments of the twentieth century: young Communist, anti-Stalinist, antifascist exile, lone socialist crusader, disillusioned Catholic, and, most recently, Fascist informer. On one hand, these emblematic interpretations reflect fundamental critical energies of the Western cultural canon, and have placed Silone at the centre of many seminal political and literary debates. On the other, they have often resulted in the oversimplification and manipulation of his life and writing. As a countermeasure, this book attempts to recreate some of the complexities and relationships of the period from which the controversies spring: his exile or ‘rebirth’. Silone researchers agree unanimously with the author’s own opinion on the importance of his Swiss activities and contacts. Nevertheless, the latest studies focusing on this period of his life show how many of the actual details have remained unclear until recently or are still unknown. Paolo Cucchiarelli refers to Switzerland as ‘an obscure aspect’ of Silone’s biography² and even one of the most detailed enquiries, Elisa Signori’s article ‘Ignazio Silone e l’editoria dell’esilio’, betrays a basic uncertainty in its mixed metaphors. First Signori refers to Silone’s relationship to Zurich as a ‘graft’ (‘innesto’), suggesting a close and organic link, only then to describe the city as a mere ‘ideal frame’ for his work. The question of how and to what extent Switzerland actually influenced his intellectual and artistic development is essentially left open.³

No exact dates can be given for Silone’s entry into Switzerland, nor for the beginning of his cultural and political activities there. A native of the Abruzzo, he was one of the founding members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921, and continued to work for its underground and international organisations after it was made illegal in Italy at the end of 1925. He moved between Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain and Russia, coordinating clandestine PCI activities. As illness and doubt weakened his attachment to the Party, he spent more and more time in Switzerland: the PCI gave him sick leave in autumn 1929 and he began writing his first novel Fontamara in a Davos sanatorium.⁴ Before the influx of refugees from Nazi Germany in 1933, patients at Swiss sanatoria did not have to register with the police until three months after their arrival, which is probably why both the Swiss authorities and Silone himself date his actual exile from 1930.⁵ Having been admitted with acute pneumonia and suspected tuberculosis, Silone spent the following year undergoing treatment in Davos and Zurich. He was finally expelled from the party in July 1931 for conspiracy and his opposition to the Stalinist svolta, making him one of the first in an international line of ‘exes’.⁶ The Swiss authorities confirmed his official status as a political refugee in February 1932,⁷ and in the early spring of 1933 he became a houseguest of the philanthropist grain merchant Marcel Fleischmann in Zurich, at Germaniastraße 53, where he remained for eleven years.⁸

After nearly fifteen years in Swiss exile, Silone returned to Italy in October 1944 to lead a solitary existence as an independent left-winger, attacked by former party comrades as a renegade and by the Italian literary establishment as an ‘un-Italian’ writer.⁹ The PCI did not discuss an official re-evaluation of his stand against Stalinism until the collapse of Soviet Communism in Europe 1989–90, when he was gradually rehabilitated as an important figure in the party’s history.¹⁰ There followed a decade of general sympathy towards him in Italy; objective literary research and a dispassionate view of his political activities predominated and much of his lesser-known writing was made accessible to the Italian public.¹¹ For example, key exile works previously only available in German were translated in the early 1990s: Fascism. Origins and Development (Der Fascismus. Seine Entstehung und seine Entwicklung, Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1934) appeared as Il Fascismo. Origini e sviluppo (Carnago/Varese: Sugarco, 1992), the short story collection The Journey to Paris (Die Reise nach Paris, Zurich: Oprecht & Helbling, 1934) came out as Viaggio a Parigi (novelle inedite) (Pescina: Centro Studi Siloniani, 1993) and some of Silone’s contributions to the Swiss journal information were published as Gli articoli di Information 1932–1934, edited by Maria Antonietta Morettini Bura and translated by Lelio Cremonte (Perugia: Guerra Edizioni, 1994).

However, Silone has continued to polarise public and academic opinion; the most recent upsurge of interest was partly due to the twentieth anniversary of his death on 22 August 1998 and the hundredth anniversary of his birth on 1 May 2000, but above all to renewed controversy over elements of his political career. His image as an incorruptible social and moral critic was tarnished by allegations that he spied on his Communist party comrades for the Fascists throughout the 1920s and up to April 1930. The historians Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali produced a series of articles 1996–1999 culminating in their joint book L ‘informatore. Silone, i comunisti e la polizia (Milan: Luni Editrice, 2000) based on archive material, mostly letters written in various hands under various pseudonyms which they believe Silone sent to the Fascist political police. These aroused massive media interest,¹² and in the wake of this affair, biographical studies and speculation as to his true allegiance to the PCI prevail. As in the years immediately following the Second World War, research on Silone is now once again tending to treat his writing as undiluted autobiography, a repository of clues to his private life and political loyalties, and its focus is once again primarily his relations with Italy and Italian institutions.¹³

Regardless of how thoroughly Silone is examined as an Italian figure, however, accounts of his exile which neglect its Swiss-German context and the German-speaking writers who surrounded him cannot but lack vital evidence of both his political and literary development. Silone’s relationship to his German counterparts and to Swiss left-wing figures lends itself to comparative research for the simple reason that the systematic German-language publication of all of his exile works in Switzerland made him the most accessible of Italian authors to German-speaking readers outside the Third Reich. The opening of the ‘Archivio Silone’ at the ‘Fondazione Filippo Turati’ in Florence in 1997 provided quantities of previously unknown material on all periods of his life and played its part in awakening new interest in him among the intellectual community in Italy, as did the opening of a second ‘Archivio Silone’ at the ‘Centro Studi Siloniani’ in his native village of Pescina in May 2000. Some of this material had however already been catalogued and available for years in Swiss libraries and archives. These Swiss sources, which include letters to and from Silone, have the advantage of appearing in their original context and often reveal more about the circumstances and effects of his exile than those to be found in Italy.¹⁴ Contemporary reception of his works can be followed in the Swiss press and German exile periodicals, and Silone himself wrote numerous articles for both. Secondary studies mostly do little more than register this, and influence in either direction tends to remain a routine presumption rather than a documented process.¹⁵ For these reasons, although there are still many Italian sources to be investigated for the first time, this book concentrates on the archive and other material to be found in Switzerland itself, and in particular on German-language sources. This wealth of unpublished letters and documents helps give a more differentiated view of his changing activities and allegiances than has previously been possible. For example, one of the most obvious lacunae in Silone research caused by the neglect of Swiss sources is that noone has yet looked in detail at his contribution to Swiss and German culture rather than vice versa.

The Potential and Pitfalls of Comparative Exile Research

The patchiness resulting from this imbalance is typical of a more general deficiency in research on the period. Writing on German-Italian antifascist exile relations in 1982, Karl Voigt commented baldly that ‘to date we know practically nothing’;¹⁶ this state of mutual ignorance seems to have remained substantially unaltered over the past twenty years. Even in studies of exile literature where Italian and German antifascists are considered side-by-side, they tend to remain in their own watertight chapters.¹⁷ It is interesting to note the exiles’ own perceptions of the relationship between the German and Italian antifascist emigrations. Silone’s correspondence suggests that, even whilst the exiles were living cheek by jowl in the same cities during the 1930s, contact was in fact sporadic. His works played an important role here: for example, the German Communist Ernst Ottwalt wrote to Silone on 5 August 1933 to thank him for having written Fontamara: ‘We have all perhaps taken too little notice of Italy’s fate, and Fontamara has stopped a painfully obvious gap in revolutionary literature.’¹⁸ In 1937, the editors of the German exile review Europäische Monatshefte wrote to Silone to ask him to contribute articles on Italian literature under Fascism, as the German emigration was pitifully uninformed on the matter. And finally, in 1938, Hans Siemsen appealed to Silone to join the ‘Bund Neues Deutschland’ an international group of friends who met to discuss Germany’s future in Europe. He wrote that Silone was the first Italian exile they had contacted, but that he was such an obvious choice for German-speakers that there was no need to give any reasons. He continued:

We have always regarded it as an extremely regrettable mistake that there are virtually no ...