New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century 9781845459765

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MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editors: Jörn Rüsen, Alon Confino, and Allan Megill Volume 1 Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate Edited by Jörn Rüsen Volume 2 Identities: Time, Difference, and Boundaries Edited by Heidrun Friese Volume 3 Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness Edited by Jürgen Straub Volume 4 Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds Edited by Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger Volume 5 History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation Jörn Rüsen Volume 6 The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany’s Path toward the New Economy and the American Challenge Werner Abelshauser Volume 7 Meaning and Representation in History Edited by Jörn Rüsen Volume 8 Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age Mihai Spariosu Volume 9 Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation Edited by Helga Nowotny Volume 10 Time and History: The Variety of Cultures Edited by Jörn Rüsen Volume 11 Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts Edited by Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock Volume 12 Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in an Intercultural Context Edited by Mamadou Diawara, Bernard Lategan, and Jörn Rüsen Volume 13 New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century Edited by Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert

NEW DANGEROUS LIAISONS Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century

Edited by

Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2010 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2010 Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data New dangerous liaisons : discourses on Europe and love in the twentieth century / edited by Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Making sense of history ; v. 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-736-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Love—Europe—History—20th century. 2. Europe—Civilization—20th century. 3. National characteristics, European. I. Passerini, Luisa. II. Ellena, Liliana. III. Geppert, Alexander C. T., 1970GT2630.N49 2010 306.7094’0904—dc22 2010013225

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 1-978-84545-736-5 hardback

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Luisa Passerini

1

Part I. Historicising Love: Points de Repère/Points of Reference Chapter 1. Love and Religion: Comparative Comments Jack Goody

21

Chapter 2. The Rule of Love: The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective William M. Reddy

33

Chapter 3. Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation in Twentieth Century European Contexts Alf Lüdtke

58

Chapter 4. Overseas Europeans: Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy Liliana Ellena

75

Chapter 5. ‘Window to Europe’: The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject Almira Ousmanova

95

Part II. Public and Private Loves Chapter 6. Love in the Time of Revolution: The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska Marci Shore

117

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Contents

Chapter 7. Love, Marriage and Divorce: American and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII Alexis Schwarzenbach Chapter 8. ‘Dear Adolf !’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany Alexander C.T. Geppert

137

158

Chapter 9. Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation in the Revista de Occidente, 1926–1936 Alison Sinclair

178

Chapter 10. Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s Jo Labanyi

197

Part III. European Borders and Cultural Differences in Love Relations Chapter 11. Between Europe and the Atlantic: The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

215

Chapter 12. The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic Sandra Mass

233

Chapter 13. Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War Svetlana Slapšak

251

Chapter 14. Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam Ruth Mas

269

Contributors

289

Select Bibliography

294

Index

301

Figures

Figure 7.1 King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Sibenik, August 1936

139

Figure 8.1 Love Letters to Adolf Hitler, 1938–1945

163

Acknowledgments

The present collection of essays is the final product of the international research project ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’ that was undertaken at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) in Essen, Germany, thanks to the Research Prize of the Land of Nordrhein-Westfalen awarded to Luisa Passerini. Within the general framework of the project, directed by Luisa Passerini, core members of the research group Liliana Ellena, Alexander C.T. Geppert, Jo Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova and Alison Seaton Sinclair developed their own individual projects. Guests of the project were invited for periods of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences were organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various countries. Papers presented by Jack Goody, William Reddy, Alf Lüdtke, Marci Shore, Alexis Schwarzenbach, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Svetlana Slapšak and Sandra Mass form the basis of essays collected in this volume. We would like first and foremost to thank all of the members of the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, particularly Jörn Rüsen for his unstinting [!!] support and Norbert Jegelka for his continual help. We would like to express our gratitude to the whole staff of the KWI for their assistance and, in particular, the staff of the Library, represented by Gesine Worm and Brigitte Blockhaus, whose efficiency and kindness we had many occasions to appreciate. We are also very grateful to the consultants of the project, Lutz Niethammer and Hartmut Kaelble, for their encouraging and useful remarks on various occasions, as well as to those colleagues who participated in our workshops and conferences and commented on our work: among them, Luisa Accati, Sally Alexander, Giulia Barrera, Sabine Broeck, Caroline Brunner, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Josep Lluìs Mateo Dieste, Etienne François, Dana Heller, Danièle Hervieu-Leger, Christian Klesse, Nicola Mai, Christoph Miething, Laura Mulvey, Elke Reinhardt-Becker, Jutta Scherrer, Claudia Schmölders, Maurizio Vaudagna and Sarah Wright.

x

Acknowledgments

An invaluable opportunity this research provided was the privilege of hosting junior and senior colleagues from across Europe for both short and long stays. Work by serveral of these scholars is represented in this collection, while some writings by others have already been, or will be, published together with ours in the future. We would like to list here the names of those whose work does not appear in this collection, thanking them warmly for sharing our research and letting us share theirs: Caroline Arni, Marcella Filippa, Wladimir Fischer, Costantin Iordachi, Yvonne Rieker, Susanne Terwey and Ilona Tomova. The Editors

Introduction LUISA PASSERINI

New ‘Dangerous’ Links The project ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’, held at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, was intended to study the complex connection that has existed during the last two and a half centuries between the sense of belonging to Europe, on the one hand, and the concepts of courtly and romantic love, on the other. Since the Enlightenment, the claim was put forward that the sense of belonging to Europe was characterised by a type of love considered unique to the relationships between the genders in this continent and to the type of civilisation developed in Europe in the modern era. The sentiment, originating from the courtly love sung by the Provençal troubadours, was treated as if it evolved – seamlessly – into the feeling exalted by romanticism. Among its characteristics were the insurmountable distances between the lovers and most often a destiny of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, even in the case of reciprocated love. The claim that this type of love was exclusively European informed the dominant discourses on Europeanness and on love starting in the last decades of the eighteenth century and then fully developing in the second half of the nineteenth. Some of its assumptions, found in political and literary essays but also in fictional and artistic works, were that heterosexual relationships involving a high degree of sentiment and an appreciation of the woman were not possible in relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans, since those could include only sexuality. Love in inter-racial relationships was considered particularly impossible, and therefore doomed to a disastrous end. However, this claim has been disputed in the second half of the twentieth century by those philosophers and anthropologists who argue that these types of love can be found in all cultures and in all epochs. Nevertheless, questions about the very Notes for this section begin on page 18.

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prominent place that love has been given in the European self-representations from the Enlightenment onward remain. This love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used as a distinctive characteristic of one civilisation (European) over others (originally African and Asian, and later on in the US). The intent of our research has been to criticise all forms of exclusive Eurocentrism in this field, but while doing so also to produce hypotheses about the historical role of these emotions in the European sense of belonging and to consider these ‘other’ histories as a basis for a nonEurocentric understanding of new possible forms of European belonging. The novel by Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos, from which comes the metaphor used for the title of this book, was written between 1779 and 1781 and published in 1782, at the beginning of the age during which the connection between the discourses on Europe and love was constructed, and then gradually became one of the pillars of European superiority in the symbolic domain. In this epistolary novel, two libertines who are also lovers, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Viscount of Valmont, engage in an intrigue aimed at obtaining revenge for the infidelity (toward the Marquise) of a count who should now marry a relative of hers, Cécile de Volanges, a young woman just out of the convent, who however is in love with the young Danceny.1 At the end, the complicity between the two libertines-lovers breaks and they betray each other. One dangerous liaison, writes Cécile’s mother, is enough to generate a chain of many tragic misfortunes. But, as the Marquise had already written to Danceny, there are dangers for the libertines as well, if their liaisons become known. Les liaisons dangereuses is useful to illustrate the main figurations of the amorous subject (in the Barthian sense of figures) within the tradition of the European love discourse: the courtly couple (Tristan and Isolde); Don Juan; and the woman renouncing a reciprocated passion, such as the protagonists of La princesse de Clèves by Mme de La Fayette (1678) and Julie in the Nouvelle Héloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761). Originally, all of the three figures are dangerous for orderly society and challenge power relationships in it: a fusion love leading to death; a lover (usually, but not necessarily, male) that deceives his many beloved; a lover (usually, but not necessarily, a woman) that decides to give up a love that is fully reciprocated, for reasons that vary between the ‘repos’ chosen by Mme de Clèves and Julie’s idea of loyalty. It is historically significant that the ways of subtracting oneself from the tyranny of love by Don Juan and by Clèves-Julie are opposite in gender attribution, as the erotic excess is attributed to the man and the withdrawal from passion is attributed to the woman. The novel may also be used to study the parallels between the conquest of lovers and the conquest of colonies. No doubt, all three figures were formulated in Eurocentric terms and can have other formulations. For instance, a variety of similar figures exists in Asian literature: the first is represented, for instance, by the Persian tale of Leyla and Majnun by Nezami, the second by the Japanese novel on Prince Genji by Lady

Introduction

3

Murasaki and the third by the many gods and goddesses in Hindou mythology that at a certain stage of their lives withdraw in order to save a love (a theme brought up to date, for instance, by the character Gopal in the novel A Matter of Time by Shashi Deshpande). Future research should indeed compare such similar figurations in different cultural traditions. In the European tradition, the three figurations are connected between themselves. The first two are parallel and symmetrical (Don Juan is often reduced to the opposite of, or interpreted as a rebellion to, Tristan, while ClèvesJulie is a reaction to both). Therefore, there is no chance that Liaisons is, precisely like Don Quixote, the parody of a chivalry novel, as Michel Butor has noticed; in this novel, libertinage imitates and mocks chivalrous love and its warlike language, and the language of courtly love is largely used. The Liaisons can be seen as a summary of the three figurations, alternating Don Juan (Valmont and the minor character Prevan, and above all its feminine version, the Marquise de Merteuil) and Tristan (Danceny), with Mme Tourvel, who in the first part of the story looks somewhat like a ‘sister’ of Rousseau’s Julie. There are other and more in-depth reasons, besides this general one, for borrowing the title by Laclos. A first one is that it indicates relationships that are dangerous for the oppressive aspects of the existing social and cultural order. Less ambitiously, we have been working with the aim of creating new links in the field of cultural history and cultural studies, links trying to innovate and discard the Eurocentric order in the symbolic field and to produce a critique of a cultural Fortress Europe that in various forms reappears today in the debate about the ‘Christian European roots’ and the cultural role of migrants on the continent. Some of our already published collective work offers examples of new dangerous liaisons or of old liaisons understood in a new sense. Such are the analyses of ‘simultaneous’ or double love in the debates on love, modernity and feminism in the German speaking areas of Europe during the first part of the twentieth century;2 of the ‘cultural love affair’ consisting in the literary fascination with Russia that was experienced in Spain during the three first decades of the same century;3 and of the symbiotic relationship with Africa as incarnated by homoerotic and homosexual links between Spanish and Moroccan men.4 While these examples mostly concern intra-European relationships, dangerous liaisons have been explored in our research also for what concerns external relationships, equally constitutive of Europeanness. Such are the question of miscegenation between Africans and Europeans,5 and the relationship between Europe and Islam in the field of love.6 However, the Liaisons represents a source of inspiration in a further and deeper sense. Its narration establishes an order that transgresses the existing social order. But the subjects of transgression, the libertines, transgress the new order that they establish as well, starting with the libertine who falls in love with the devout lady. Thus the conflict between the two orders results, with a pessimistic ending, in the victory of conventional and hypocritical morality. The

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final order can only be that of the narration, including the virtuoso conclusion by which the novel destroys its own construction and puts an end to itself. In such a textual perspective, it is the reader that is put in danger by reading about dangerous ways of loving and that is left with no clear option: rationalist and materialistic theories about love such as those held by the protagonist Merteuil lead her to self-destruction, because they do not respect the reasons of the heart; but on the other hand, the reasons of love lead Tourvel also to renunciation and sacrifice and finally to death. This is a second level of suggestion for our research: to put in danger/in question both the subject of the socio-historical disciplines and some rules of these disciplines. In this sense, the first and pivotal dangerous liaison is the connection between Europe and love, which leads to establish new connections between the disciplinary traditions of political philosophy, on the one hand, and those of literature, psychology and cultural studies, on the other. Some of our previous work as well as the present collection can be seen as examples of such inter- or intra-disciplinary contaminations. We have indeed benefited from contributions from intellectual and cultural history, anthropology, film studies, philosophy and area studies.

Historicising Love: Points de repère/Points of Reference The structure of this collection has been thought of as a way of breaking traditional classifications, such as those that separate colonial history from the history of European identity, which divide too harshly the internal from the external of the continent. The present construction tries to show the links between these two dimensions of the construction of Europeanness. Moreover, its articulation privileges two theoretical knots, public/private and cultural borders, because these are considered as cultural and political priorities in the present post-colonial situation. The first two essays of this collection, respectively by Jack Goody and William Reddy, establish a tension – a risky liaison – between two different positions that I want to put in a dialectical relationship. The whole collection will find its context in the space created by such tension. The essays that follow the first two are meant to construct an itinerary representing the crucial conceptual elements in the link between Europe and love. One does not need to share all of the views expressed by the authors – and in fact I do not – in order to recognise that their writings converge to create/support a construction in which they act as pieces of a mosaic. Each step will therefore present a different type of ‘danger’ and novelty. We will indeed find more specific dangerous liaisons as we go on, as examples or enlargements of the one between Europe and love. The position taken by Jack Goody has the merit of criticising the Eurocentrism implicit in many studies on love. Therefore, his attitude is a starting

Introduction

5

point for our research, in as far as it warns us against any temptation to repeat the ‘theft of history’ that Europeans have done by appropriating romantic love as exclusive to their own culture. Important points of Goody’s warning are the recognition of the specificity of European Christianity and its debts toward Judaism and Islam. Within his critical framework, Goody insists that love, equality and freedom are fundamental features of the ethical teaching of Islam (with a particular attention to Turkey), as is a concern for the individual. This obliges anybody who takes these points seriously to give up the claim to a general European exclusivity of such values and, more relevantly, to look for the historical particularities in which love has been lived and configured in the European context. This is in its turn contextualised by Goody in a global setting, where differences between European culture and the cultures of other continents cannot be taken for granted, as historiography has often done. The attention to African societies, such as the LoDagaa of northern Ghana, allows Goody to perform a double operation: implicitly criticising the universalism claimed by Europe and yet appealing to a shared repertory of humanity, which gives way to innumerable variations on the same themes. By considering a wide range of cultures in all times, Goody shows the weakness of the thesis according to which the free choice of partner has become idealised globally over the past century, being often identified with love and with modernisation. In his view, there is nothing to suggest that such a type of love is absent from the so-called simpler cultures or from ancient Egypt or from Hindu society. His firmly empirical approach proceeding by accumulation of details allows us to see the common and the different in transcultural relations. Thus, he relativises the claim by Europeans to have ‘invented’ the courtly and romantic forms of love (Goody takes the stand, in the century-old debate on the origins of Provençal poetry, that the notion of courtly love was derived from the Islamic culture of Spain), and is ready to give up such claim, thus displaying the novelty that there can be a European specificity without being exclusive and hierarchical, capable of experiencing certain types of love in its own way without denying a similar experience to others. In the 1960s, a partially similar position taken by some scholars such as Francis Newman denied any specificity of the European courtly love, including the very term. In this way, the critique of Eurocentrism went so far as to take away precious elements that can allow those who want to consider themselves as Europeans not only to feel that they share a certain cultural repertoire, but also to recognise the relevance of the historical interchange with others. Indeed, recognising the specificity of European forms of love cannot be done without recognising their derivations from other continents. Throwing away anything labelled as European would be equivalent to avoiding the patient work necessary to understand the long process of osmosis and syncretism that constructed ‘Europe’ out of exchanges with Asia, Africa and other parts of the world. Goody’s essay stops short of the danger of losing those forms of love,

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because it does not dissolve them into a presumed universalism, but it insists on their historicity, and precisely on the ‘reflexivity of the written word’, that produces romantic love. Appropriately, William Reddy intervenes at this point with an attentive consideration of the specificity of the Western tradition of romantic love in comparative perspective. For him, the thesis of the universality and naturality of love is based on a terminological confusion; he acknowledges ‘(some) common features’ of romantic love, but he insists on the centrality of reciprocity and exclusivity in Western ideas about love partnerships. He observes that ‘romantic love’, which in this tradition started as courtly love, involves reciprocal feeling and exclusivity, but that the prevalence given to this type of feeling is a relatively recent phenomenon. However, he provides an impressive excursus for it, a useful platform for our collection, on the ways of understanding love, from the troubadours, Dante and Petrarch, through the iconography of the unicorn, and the philosophies of Kant and Cousin, to present lesbian’s and gay’s movements for full marriage rights, bringing examples from poetry, iconography and literature. Reddy notices that since the Middle Ages, love had become more and more an emotion connected with marriage, although the fact that it was the foundation of marriage to the exclusion of other considerations came to be widely accepted only with the Enlightenment, in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The cultural process thus envisaged developed in the nineteenth century and was interrupted by the First World War, after which the new media of film and radio marketed stories about romantic love which often led to marriage, to a widely extended audience. On the basis of this historical overview, Reddy argues that love’s peculiar accommodation with regulation turns to a unique Western distinction between love and lust, a distinction that no other cultural tradition applies to the understanding of emotional connections between sexual partners. Thus, Reddy takes a very different stand from Goody’s, as he claims that the romantic love complex is historically unusual, in breaking with sexuality at the same time as embracing it. However, I would say that only by taking into account the general claim by Goody, of the possibility that a basic emotion of love can appear in many cultures, can we safely – i.e., without falling into Eurocentrism – not only accept Reddy’s approach and vindicate romantic love to the modernised West, but also introduce the limitation of regulatory thinking, which dates back to the Middle Ages. Reddy sets this story in comparison with elements from Japan and India, showing the different meanings of ‘passion’ in Murasaki Shibiku’s Tale of Genji (eleventh century), and in the Gitagovinda (twelfth century). His conclusion is that the rule of love in many Western countries today is a peculiar and rather recent configuration of some traditional Western ingredients. Romantic love, he argues, continues to stand in contrast to lust, and to include spiritual expectations that can be realised only through a sexual partnership. In some areas of the world, such as South Asia and northeast Brazil, romantic love is regarded as

Introduction

7

an innovation of modernity, but in the West it is considered as an old and natural thing. Reddy concludes with a plea to historicise our own time: if love is our inheritance, modernity is not such a secular age as it claims to be. Thus, he converges with Goody’s criticism of a narrow and Eurocentric concept of modernity, and interprets love as a secularised form of religion or spirituality. Another piece of the historical and theoretical puzzle that is emerging is added by Alf Lüdtke, with the articulation of the links between public and private loves in the European tradition. His analysis allows us to see that the specificity of the forms of love experienced in Europe is not at all based on an anthropological or even cultural difference generating a particular way of loving, but it largely depends on the European contexts of power (statehood) and work. His argument is confined to the twentieth century, while the two first essays are set in a longue durée perspective. Thus, it operates as a transition to the rest of the volume, dedicated to this century. Lüdtke pays attention to some central features of this period, such as the relationships between the masses’ affections – in the very processes of massification – and the power of the state, a theme crucial for understanding the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that characterised the century. He too insists on the historicity of cultural codes of love, or ‘modulations’ as he calls the interconnected ones that reinforced each other in the twentieth century: sentimental love between spouses; love for ‘father-state’; and attachment for one’s task in work. The originality of Lüdtke’s approach is to consider this interconnectedness, and thus to overcome the dichotomy between public and private. He refers to Reddy in pointing out that the singling out of specific feelings misses their specificities and thus the meanings of feelings, because they never appear in isolation, and at any one time there will be a variety of feelings for individual actors and groups. Lüdtke applies his hypotheses to a specific geohistorical area, Germany, and to specific sources, such as letters by soldiers, which are very relevant for exploring the means of the acceptance of power, even extremely oppressive power, a point that will reappear later on in the collection. This approach dispels illusions on the natural good feelings of the masses and discovers usually invisible liaisons between individual and collective emotions. The construction of the dyad Europe-love that is slowly emerging refers not just to the internal history of Europe. Liliana Ellena provides a case study vividly illustrating the fact that the discourse on love at the heart of European modernity cannot be charted just within Europe, because it was the product of continuous exchanges with the rest of the world and particularly with the colonies. The chosen case is that of an Italian journalist and writer, Arnaldo Cipolla, who wrote between 1907 and 1938. In many of his novels and short stories, the encounter between a ‘European’ man and an African woman is depicted as an allegorical representation of the colonial opposition between European violence and Africa equated with nature, which is often presented as female and threatening for the ‘male’ and decadent Western civilisation. The

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novels are set in Belgian and French Congo, an overcharged colonial space that stands for ‘Central Africa’, considered as the anti-Europe par excellence, and at the same time is represented as one of the elements in contrast with which Europe defines itself. They show the peculiarity of Italian Fascist colonialism, but also the shared heritage of whiteness and Europeanness in the colonial situation. Both Europe and love emerge, on the one hand, as abstract forms, and, on the other, as normative meanings, not only for Africans, but also for Italians, sometimes portrayed as too close to each other for attitudes and skin colour. The lability of the self-definition as European and capable of romantic love therefore appears fully in the colonial situation, where the white subject is at the same time shown in its weakness – in competition between nationalities and constantly in danger of losing himself – and affirmed as powerful and virile. Its inconsistency can be overcome by no inner strength, but only by contrast, opposition and superiority stated on the basis of weapons. This essay establishes another dangerous liaison: between the self-definition of Europe and its violent impositions on others; between the creation of an empty self and the creation of a projected other. Again, this theme will be picked up in the subsequent sections of the collection. And finally, to conclude this first section, we find the deep division within Europe itself, i.e., East and West. Almira Ousmanova deals with a cinematic representation of the experience of post-Soviet subjects marked by the collapse of the socialist economic and political system. This essay can be seen not only as a study of a dangerous liaison between Russia and a Western Europe as represented by Paris, but also as a contamination between visual studies and the history of the reciprocal political representations of various parts of Europe. In her approach, love in a metaphorical sense (for Paris, for Europe, for culture) is interrelated and interwoven with the more literal meanings of love, linking the narrative conventions of the love story with the symbolic meanings of the filmic text. Here too we have a case study, the analysis of the film Window to Europe (a Russian expression to indicate relationships with the West), directed by Yurij Mamin in 1993, which narrates a story of instant transfer from St. Petersburg to Paris through a magic window; the transfer results into a dangerous liaison, the love story between a French woman and a Russian man. This time it is Europe that appears in the shape of a charming woman, an embodiment of ideal femininity, ‘the personification of a dream shared by both Soviet men and women’, while Europe is a place where utopia and romantic love continue to live. Difficulties in communication between the lovers metaphorise difficulties of cultural relationships between countries: is Russia still in some ways a part of Europe, as so much of its cultural heritage witnesses? Or does it foster a separate identification, in which pride and rancour testify a more complex relationship, a plea on the part of Russia for fuller recognition from ‘Europe’? In both cases, are not the two subjects definable only on the basis of their reciprocal and conflictual relationship through the ages? And why cannot a double

Introduction

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sense of belonging, to Russia and to Europe as a whole, be established as it happens in other countries? What emerges clearly is that the memory of the communist past no less than that of older relationships shapes present cultural attitudes much more that it has appeared in the media during the last decade, and this should be taken into account when posing the question of Europeanness regarding Russia. The choice of this case study – using a filmic text7 – for studying such questions proves advantageous in many ways, such as showing that deep emotional aspects are involved in the contested link, although no final answer is provided. We are left wondering about what can a Europe without its Eastern part be, a cultural and political space that seems to have been accepted by many on the basis of the assumption that the Eastern part cannot enter the European Union. Whatever the outcome of the debate on the Eastern boundary of Europe, I see it as a reason for keeping the gap between the European Union and Europe wide open.8 At the end of the first section, we can summarise that the points of reference of the collection are the following: 1) the dyad Europe/love must be considered in the double perspective of deconstructing Eurocentrism and, at the same time, recognising the historical specificity of European forms of love; 2) a central aspect of these forms is the varying distinction between public and private; 3) the construction of Europeanness cannot be separated from the consideration of the colonial past; and, 4) cultural borders affect deeply the cultural sense of European belonging within love relationships.

Public and Private Loves The issue of public/private could not be absent from this collection: the question ‘Europe and love’ can be seen as a specification of the more general question of the intertwining between the two. This has already emerged in the first section, and it becomes the focus of the second one. The second section explores what could be defined as a historical typology of the relationships between Europe understood as public and love considered as private. It does so by taking into consideration the interwar period, a particularly significant time for the study of our topic. It is in the period between the wars and particularly in its second decade when huge changes appear in the relationships between the public and private love, which will have a repercussion on the second half of the century. The three first essays of section two allow us to compare such changes in very different situations: in the revolutionary situation in Poland, in the democratic framework of Great Britain and under the dictatorial regime of Nazism in Germany. Against the background of a climate of revolutionary hopes, Marci Shore analyses in rich detail the life of the generation of Polish futurist poets born at the fin-de-siècle, the first to come of age in independent Poland. They were

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cosmopolitan (many were ‘non-Jewish Jews’), and polyglot, being versed in Russian, German and French, and nourished in European literature from many epochs and countries, from St Augustin to Machiavelli to Proust. They united public and private in an inextricable knot, as their loves were love itself, poetry, Poland and the Revolution. For the poets of Café Ziemian;ska in Warsaw, the Revolution was only secondarily dialectical materialism; more importantly, it was the fulfilment of their European cosmopolitanism, and, above all, it was romantic love. Shore portrays their life and fantasies in the cafés and cabarets of Warsaw starting from the early 1920s through the 1930s to the 1960s, their multiple relationships with other European countries through the work of artists such as Marinetti, Mayakovsky, and their romances. Some extraordinary figures of women and men emerge against this background, living their experiences to the extreme, with great passion brought to the scene of sexual love as well as of to the scene of the political party. While their hopes to collapse public and private loves in a single engagement failed under the pressures of a public sphere dominated by Stalinism, their experiences leave a vivid testimony of such utopia. They succeeded in keeping alive, even under Stalinist totalitarianism, a space for private language and intimacy. ‘Europe’ was a point of reference in such efforts, not as a model, but quite to the contrary as an heritage beyond which they wanted to go, as an avant-garde capable of overcoming the destiny of degeneration and the death of European civilisation. Their tragic ending was to be ‘destroyed by Marxism’, by the choices they made to embrace Marxism: some were killed and some committed suicide, while some survived in exile with bitter feelings. For them, living the revolution in their daily life was self-actualisation through self-annihilation, the consummation of subjectivity through its abandonment and the transcendence and the fulfilment of both their Polishness and their Europeanness. Alexis Schwarzenbach chooses an ideal case to study attitudes toward love in Europe and the United States, focussing on the reactions to the abdication of Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson, a US divorcee, in December 1936. The case became famous, stirring a world-wide press campaign and mobilising public opinion. In this picture, a prevailing silence in Britain is compared with the ‘sympathetic understanding’ in the United States and with an attitude of ‘restraint’ in the rest of Europe, from Switzerland to the Scandinavian countries. The story was generally presented as a romantic love in which the feelings of the protagonists should have prevailed despite all obstacles. However, what most interests us is the opposition established in the great majority of the free press in Europe’s democracies, between romantic love considered as a progressive or a disruptive social force, on the one hand, and social and political stability, on the other. This explains why left-wing and liberal newspapers had a more favourable view of the story than the conservative media. While the local press in Britain showed anti-US prejudices and some rancour to the king for not having ‘found some sweet British girl’, the very numerous letters to the

Introduction

11

king made such prejudices much more explicit. Thousands of such letters were indeed written during the abdication crisis, which show a remarkable crosssection of public opinion from all classes. The letters are interesting also because they display two concepts of masculinity, one stipulating that good masculine behaviour should have put duty above love, and the other on the contrary considering that such a behaviour was fulfilling the pursuit of personal happiness. The two concepts belonged to different generations, the former being held by the late-Victorian generation (Edward’s father) and the latter by the generation coeval with Edward himself. Schwarzenbach concludes that two love stories were at stake in the public debate: that between Edward and Wallis Simpson on the one hand, and on the other, that between the people and the king, which finds its context in the general history of European monarchies. The link between the monarchies and their subjects included a deep sense of mutual love and a legendary aura, so that Edward represented a ‘fairy prince’ in the true sense of the word. Schwarzenbach rightly observes that three years after the event, in 1939, Denis de Rougemont published his book L’amour et l’Occident, in which he saw the European attitude toward love as beginning to risk the imitation of the one that he believed was prevalent in the United States, where the high-rate of divorce was coupled with a Hollywood-styled romance as the only basis for getting married. We should add that Rougemont also coupled the type of romantic love leading to a fusion between the lovers with the attitude of adoration by followers toward Hitler, while he saw similarities between the type of love presiding to conjugal marriage and the type of union present in federal democracies. In this light, it is significant for our purposes that both Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson were known to have good relationships with the Nazis, from the German ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop, to Hitler himself. Although Schwarzenbach has not found evidence for these political sides of the abdication, they certainly fall into place in the interpretative frame proposed by Rougemont. Rougemont’s hypothesis about the link between Europe and love is also pertinent to the other essay in the present collection using private letters to the powerful – Alexander Geppert’s analysis of love letters to Hitler. Geppert takes into consideration such 64 letters, out of a huge number ranging in the many thousands. We already knew that in the dictatorial regimes between the wars, the private sphere was forcibly drawn into and under the public, so that all moments of the lifecycle of the masses were ‘nationalised’, from birth to death. However, while we know of the Nazi and Fascist use of women’s capacity to give birth as well as to be part of the labour force in peace and war tasks, we cannot help being struck by the phenomenon of collapsing together of intimate and public that these letters display. They are written in the jargon of love, and as with all love letters, they use affectionate little words, transforming the name of the beloved into childish forms thanks to diminutives and sweet

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adjectives, but they also insist on the patriotism of the writers and assume as a starting point the position of power of the object of love, Hitler. What we are called to witness is the inextricability of public and private emotions, to the point of considering the distinction impossible, in a sort of total regression to a single elementary language and to a desire of fusion not only between two human beings, but also between the individual and the collective, be it called fatherland or supreme head. Rougemont had precisely noticed, in his acute analysis of a mass gathering to listen to Hitler’s speech, that the kind of total participation of the people in the crowd was that of a new cult, in an attitude of adoration and ecstatic fusion. Two lines of interpretation are proposed. One is that the communication revealed by the letters is only apparently one-way, while actually it is already a reply to the overwhelming penetration of Hitler’s words through propaganda and mass media; this established a contamination of languages, reflecting the colonisation of everyday (and every night, if we think of the influence of the Third Reich on dreams) life. The other line of research is a comparative reflection on the links between the dictators and their peoples. The example offered by Geppert is that of Italy and Mussolini, who used to receive thousands of private letters. While both the Fascist and the Nazi dictators established a special office for dealing with the letters, thus entertaining direct relationships with the writers, the attitude of the Italian regime was much more paternalistic than the German one. Moreover, Geppert notices a difference already in the type of letters sent: in the case of Mussolini, the letters seem to display a much lesser degree of eroticisation, since his figure is portrayed more as a fatherly (and sometimes even motherly) one than like that of a lover. We know now that a gossipy legend was constructed on Mussolini’s virility and extra-marital affairs, but it was probably not accessible to the large masses from faraway parts of the country. In any case, his image was presented as always accompanied by concrete female figures, his mother, wife and daughter (who, by the way, was at a certain point in time responsible for the secretariat that took care of the letters), besides the image of the imagined matron representing Italy. On the contrary, Hitler was always a single figure, whose constant female companion was allegorical, i.e., Germany. He was portrayed as a lonely man, the unique one, who could nourish the wildest fantasies and promise to fulfil them at both the public and the private levels. The next case in the section on public and private concerns Spain and it is composed of two studies, one centered on the inter-European (Sinclair) and the other on the extra-European perspective (Labanyi), that complement each other and converge to construct a double case study. Spain is a particularly interesting and significant example – very relevant for our research – because of its complex nature as a European country: a Southern and Mediterranean country like Italy and Greece, but also the initiator of an early and wide colonial empire; a country claiming its full and paradigmatic Europeanness and yet at the same time

Introduction

13

often uncertain of being recognised as European, on the contrary considering itself as a periphery, or a banlieusarde in the terms used by Salvador de Madariaga. Its case study allows us to see other variations on the theme of Europe and love, with particular reference to the category of gender, which here, while we have already seen it appearing in other essays, becomes central. Alison Sinclair, under a title borrowed from Doris Lessing, studies one aspect of the Revista de Occidente, which was founded in 1923 and was directed by José Ortega y Gasset, who was central in promoting Spain’s cultural relations with Europe. The major contribution of the journal in the period 1923–1936 was to bring Spain into a relationship with ideas of civilisation, specifically those of European civilisation. Those years cover two different periods in Spanish politics: the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the Second Republic, which, however, do not differ sharply for what concerns the topic under discussion, gender relations. The articles hosted by the Revista de Occidente in this period include authors such as the German sociologist Georg Simmel, the scientists Gregorio Marañón and Gustavo Pittaluga, both champions of eugenics, and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Through the analysis of the themes touched by these authors, which range from Don Juan to the emancipation of women, Sinclair traces a line of argument that unites the Europeanness of Spain and an essentialist view of gender differences. She interprets this view as an ‘imaginary of consolation’ for the anxiety and social unrest predominant in Spain at the time. The articles of the Revista de Occidente are seen as a sign of the desire to participate in European modernity, and are understood as a masculine model accompanied by a nostalgia for its opposite. A defensive discourse about modernity was thus developed precisely in connection with the increased contacts with Europe, which embodied it. In a pendant essay, Jo Labanyi examines the myth of Don Juan between the 1920s and the 1930s as treated by three Spanish intellectuals of different political attitudes: Ramiro de Maeztu, whose positions were equivalent to those of Action Française, the liberal humanist Salvador de Madariaga and the Fascist Ernesto Giménez Caballero. Don Juan, defined as one of the European myths par excellence because its theme connects, in its numerous variants, many different parts of Europe, is aptly chosen as an indicator of positions toward the Europeanness of Spain. Maeztu saw Don Juan as the embodiment of hedonistic individualism, understanding him as the outcome of modern humanism and rejecting him in favour of Don Quixote’s chivalric notion of altruistic service, a metaphor for an alliance with the European Catholic right that would allow Europe to confront the hegemony of the United States, while the Spanish legacy should allow Spanish America to do the same. Giménez Caballero set Don Juan in dialogue with Petrarch’s Laura, thus proposing him as the charismatic leader of a Spanish-Italian fascist alliance, and considering him as an embodiment of both the cultural miscegenation of West and East and the mixing of races in Spanish America. Madariaga also treated Don Juan as the incarnation

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of European individualism and imperial conquest, and rejected him as a sexual predator, as the unacceptable face of European imperialism, while romantic love represented the fusion of races in Spain and Spanish America. All three writers used the trope of love, which they considered as specifically European, to position Spain in relation to Europe as well as to the Americas. For all three, Spanish culture and history offered models for rethinking Europe. The case of Spain shows that a crucial aspect in the processes concerning public and private loves in the interwar period was the change in gender relations. The redefinition of gender roles and imagery invested in not only concrete men and women, but also in the symbolic level for what concerned cultural understanding of masculine and feminine, in the course of being deeply modified by the emancipation of women and the crisis of masculinity. In this section, the nexus of Europe and love has proved useful in exploring the relationship between public and private love and its transformations in the interwar period. It has shown that it was particularly in this field that the processes of publicisation of the private and of the penetration of the public into the private were happening. The use of our central dangerous liaison has made visible various elements: not only the private sphere, but also the most intimate one – situated in the bedroom and in the boudoir, invoked by the Marquis de Sade as the site of the final step of the revolution – was at stake in the moving of boundaries affecting the public and the private in reciprocal interpenetration, and suggests directions of research for comparative studies. This interpenetration constituted an overall similarity, in spite of the important variations introduced by national and political features. Although these processes took up extreme characteristics in situations either of violent social and cultural unrest, such as a revolution, or of totalitarian oppression, they were at work even in democratic countries. In fact, the political situation accentuated the impact of economic forces that were already going in that direction. Similar processes took on a psycho-pathological nature in totalitarian regimes, while in democratic situations the collapse between public and private was more restrained, so that the two were never flattened together, and the emotional implications of the collapse were less restrictive of individual spaces and were more manageable by common people in their daily lives.

European Borders and Cultural Differences in Love Relations The topic of the third section of this book translates the general theme of the book into the conflicts articulated in terms of territory and political borders. Essays in this section refer either to borders, which are considered traditionally as peripheries of Europe (Portugal and the Balkans), or to the issue centre/ periphery within two crucial European nation states, such as Germany and France. In this perspective, these essays share a positionality that, starting from

Introduction

15

an allegedly marginal situation, transforms itself into a novel point of view reconsidering the historical dynamics between supposed centres and peripheries. Such historical dynamics evidences different tropes of love and sexuality and includes the emergence of various forms of longing for a different Europe, thus showing the topic of the second section in a new light. Methodologically, the essays share the effort to combine various categories of cultural difference, be they gender, race, ethnicity and/or location. The section is opened by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro’s longue durée view of Portugal’s colonialism: its alleged role of mediator between worlds finds an adequate exemplification in romantic love that is understood as capable of creating mediations at a universal level. The excursus starts with The Lusiads by Camões, for whom love is the ultimate purpose of the human quest. Then the author goes on to use as a case study Jornada de África by Manuel Alegre, a novel on the colonial wars, which evokes a new version of Barbara, the beloved black slave celebrated by Camões, in love with a rebellious officer of the Portuguese colonial army; the woman, ‘free, but colonised by love’, is significantly an Angolan member of the MPLA, the movement for the liberation of Angola from the colonial rule. Calafate Ribeiro points out that the mediation operated by Portugal is based on the combination of a peripheral geographic position, since it is the head of the first European empire. During the period of the 1950s to the 1970s, this same peripheral position allowed Portugal to be the last European empire. The colonial wars, to which this peripheral condition led Portugal and its empire, sought to defend the fiction that Portugal was a centre, but these wars also initiated the journey back to the metropolis and to Europe. In this frame, the image of Barbara – a metaphor of a conquered Africa and of Portuguese love for the continent – still represents the ambivalences of Portugal between the memory of the empire, with its roots in the South Atlantic, and a European future. Calafate Ribeiro’s essay implies the need of a re-elaboration that this suspended and drifting double sense of belonging will require, in a process in which the destiny of love and gender relations appears particularly undecided. This state of indecision finds an echo in the present situation, in which Europe is suspended between accepting the new multiple forms of subjectivity that inhabit it, thanks to the processes of post-coloniality, and its dressing itself once more as a fortress in the cultural field. Sandra Mass focuses on three case studies concerning the border territories of the Weimar Republic: the Rhineland of the campaign against ‘Black Horror’, i.e., the stationing of African colonial soldiers in the territory under French occupation; the Eastern border, which German Freikorps defended against the Red Army and the Baltic nationalists; and the African colonies. Mass shows how sexuality was used not only as a metaphor of the wounds inflicted on the nation, but also more directly to illustrate the analogy between the nation seen as a body and the individual body. The first case, love relationships between German women and French African soldiers, became the target of a campaign

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that pointed out the unity of Europe and the white race endangered by France; the relationship being German and being white included the belief of belonging to the community of the ‘white race’, sharing a common European heritage and presumably sharing a superior civilisation. In the second case, German soldiers were seen as threatened by Communist women, on which they would exercise bloody and sadistic revenge. In the third, the violence of colonisation was transformed into the ‘ardent love’ for the second Heimat, Africa. Here again, as we already saw in the essay by Ellena, Africa is presented as nature, the maternal earth characterised as both virginal and violent. And again, the individual and the collective are collapsed in defining the European subject as the male colonial hero. In the picture drawn by Mass, gender and race appear closely interwoven, and love shows its connections with sexuality, but also with pain and death. The dark sides of both Europe and love emerge once more in a sinister way, connecting the internal history of Germany with the history of its borders. Gender is central also in Svetlana Slapšak’s essay, which theorises on love as one of the civic activities pertaining to collective identity and citizenship. The author considers love as one of the fields of public discourse and activity that can oppose war and be interpreted as reducing the immeasurable dimension of war compared to any other human activity. Slapšak takes her inspiration from antiquity, mentioning Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in the context of the opposition to the Iraq war in 2003, and analyses the philosophy of love in three women’s works: Anica Savic; Rebac (born in 1894 in Novi Sad), Olga Freidenberg (born in 1890 from a Russian Jewish family) and Edith Stein (born in 1891 into a Breslau Jewish family); all three women were active during the Second World War. Slapšak maintains that in the case of the first two, they have been treated as outsiders in academia on the basis of gender instigated censorship, while in fact there is much European about them and their work. For instance, in Anica Savic; Rebac’s approach to what she calls ‘pre-platonic erotology’, it is a distancing herself from the Platonic tradition that evidences her Europeanness ex negativo, as a desire to go beyond it and explore and enlarge the sources of the philosophical discourse on love. Slapšak also sees a shared context for all three women in the historical model of intellectual closure (monasteries, universities, salons) and in multilingualism; far from saying that these are unique European features, she refers to the European historical versions of such worldwide phenomena. For all three women studied by Slapšak, love is neither a symbol of hope nor a form of escapism; rather, it is a proposal for a public civic attitude, affecting upon and originating from public life, against any romanticising of love in its Western bourgeois sense. What allows Slapšak to take this approach is a position that she defines as ‘feminist practice’ and that connects the author of the essay and the women she studies, although in very different historical situations. This essay is a good indicator of how the central and Eastern areas of Europe – considered peripheral for a long time – can become crucial in order to create new connec-

Introduction

17

tions. The three women never met and possibly never even heard of each other. Thus, it is a gaze from the present, which is rooted in the same geopolitical areas those women belonged to that puts them together, constructing a point of convergence equivalent to a hazardous and illuminating liaison. The essay by Ruth Mas concludes this section and the whole book by focussing on a burning issue for today’s Europe: the place of Islam in Europeanness. Mas addresses the issue through the analysis of a case study of the mixed marriage of a Franco-Maghrebian woman, as done by the psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama. The case study considers gender and generational differences, countering fixed and naturalised borders between communities and cultures. It reverses the usual relationship, which sees love as a private emotion displaced within the political domain, by showing how colonial legacies embodied by notions of inter-cultural love and sexuality work on individual subjectivity by doubling experiences of trauma and exile. Mas criticises both the colonialist notion of métissage and that of mixed marriage as a solution of racism and of women’s subordination, and sees Benslama’s discussion of métissage as problematising the ‘liberating’ potential of mixed unions and showing the feminine subject as situated in a complex web of power relations to which she is subjected. Mas concludes that Benslama has allowed for an understanding of Islamic subjectivity that disrupts the hegemony of the French nation state and deconstructs the oppositions of Islam/West and of all monolithic conceptions of Islam, producing a plural vision of the relationships between Islam and liberalism. What appears at the same time, however, are the limits to the possibilities for the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim feminine subjects to find resources for imagining an ethic that respects dissent; deconstructing the traditional way of conceiving métissage opens new ways, but it leaves deliberately suspended the crucial question of repositioning the feminine Muslim subject. We can only hope that painstaking analytical efforts, such as the one exemplified in this essay, can contribute to opening the way to configurations of subjectivity and emotionality, both collective and individual, that will allow new ways of being European and Muslim women at the same time to occur. The section highlights how the tension between love and sexuality underpinning romantic love has informed forms of political imagined community. The case studies discussed by Calafate Ribeiro and Mas highlight the embracing movement of love between self and other and the violent reduction of difference to abstract oneness, while the German case studied by Mass implies that women’s bodies and sexuality are the material ground on which the borders of the nation are naturalised and controlled. This perspective adds further elements to the intertwining between the private and public spheres by questioning the gender hierarchy grounded in the European (male) love subject. The dangerous links between love and the political domain gives particular relevance to the feminist critique of romantic love suggested by Slapšak, which entails both a de-naturalisation of love and a refusal of its ‘imaginary of consolation’, already

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pointed out by Alison Sinclair, by rooting love and the labour of love within practices of public responsibility. The final section of the collection presents – because of its closeness to some crucial problems of the present, such as those linked with racial and cultural differences in Europe today – some pessimistic undertones. Love, sharing the dark sides of European history, appears as a battlefield involving power inequalities that cannot be solved. Not only Europe, but also Europeanness appear divided between the senses of belonging to various areas such as East/ West and North/South and between the identifications with different communities. Europeanness seems still to be configured – culturally speaking – as a defensive fortress in many instances. The historical study of the nexus between Europe and love can help us in recovering the utopian hope of a united and not exclusive Europe and of a love conjugating passion and respect. By being aware of the dangers that the liaison between Europe and love can imply in an essentialist and Eurocentric perspective, we can discern the value of the actions and thoughts of individuals and groups that had the emotional capacity to contrast their own communities and to envisage new hazardous liaisons between personal and collective emotions.

Notes 1. The plan of the libertines is that Valmont, already involved in the seduction of the virtuous and devout Mme Tourvel, should seduce Cécile before her marriage. Valmont succeeds in the double seduction, falls himself in love with the devout lady, but interrupts this relationship because of the influence of Madame de Merteuil. The ending is tragic: Mme Tourvel dies in despair in a convent and Cécile, after an abortion, enters a convent as well. The Marquise, disfigured by smallpox, is abandoned by everybody and the Viscount dies in a duel with Danceny, who had been in his turn seduced by the Marquise. 2. Caroline Arni, ‘Simultaneous Love. An Argument on Love, Modernity and the Feminist Subject at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, European Review of History 11, no. 2 (Summer 2004), Special Issue: Europe and Love – L’Europe et l’amour, 185–205. 3. Alison Sinclair, ‘Spain’s Love Affair with Russia. The Attraction of Exotic (Br)Others’, ibid., 207–224. 4. Susan Martin-Marquez, ‘Performing Masculinity in the Moroccan Theatre. Virility, Sexuality and Spanish Military Culture from the African War to the Civil War’, ibid., 225–240. 5. Liliana Ellena, ‘Political Imagination, Sexuality and Love in the Eurafrican Debate’, ibid., 241–272. 6. Ruth Mas, ‘Love as Difference. The Politics of Love in the Thought of Malek Chebel’, ibid., 273–301. 7. Although this is the only example of filmic studies appearing in the present collection, the research project devoted much attention to the role of films as sources, which will be the subject of Europe and Love in Cinema, eds Luisa Passerini, Jo Labanyi, Karen Diehl (Bristol: Intellect, forthcoming). 8. This question, as well as the problem of the historical division of Europe into East and West, will not be thematised in this collection. It is at the centre of other projects that I have directed in the past few years (such as the one presented in the book Women Migrants from East to West. Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe, eds Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Ioanna Laliotou and Enrica Capussotti [Oxford: Berghahn, 2007]).

Part I

HISTORICISING LOVE POINTS DE REPÈRE/POINTS

OF

REFERENCE

CHAPTER

1

Love and Religion Comparative Comments JACK GOODY

The topic of love is not the domain of one discipline alone, but of a more general debate, by sociologists, historians and psychologists as well as by anthropologists. The anthropological perspective is essential, even for the past, because it deals with other cultures, especially so called pre-industrial ones. Nobody can judge the singularity of the institutions of one culture or one ‘stage’ without looking at others. That is most important in dealing with love, as, in my view, Europeans, scholars and citizens alike have been guilty of a ‘theft of history’ in appropriating love, particularly romantic love, for their own and denying the same experience to others. I refer here to the claim by scholars who see the possibility of such experience as being uniquely associated with the process of modernisation1 or with the history of Europe.2 I want to address the notion of secular love and religion in a comparative way, concentrating upon the question of the rapprochement between earthly and divine love, and the problem of the use of the same or different terms. First, I will briefly look at the articulation of these questions in European Christianity, and then I will turn to one culture roughly equivalent to that of Europe at least before the Renaissance, namely, Islam, and especially Turkey, as well as to one much simpler society, the LoDagaa of northern Ghana, where I carried out fieldwork. The reason for giving so much attention to the situation in earlier Turkey is that, as I have earlier suggested,3 part at least of the idea of courtly love, the notion of the troubadours, was derived from the Islamic culture of Spain – the frontier of which was much more permeable than many cultural historians of Europe, devoted to the singularity of their own culture, would allow. At the best, they held and expressed parallel views. This suggestion Notes for this section begin on page 31.

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derives not only from some of the better-informed historians of Andalusia,4 but also from a fascinating account of Islamic influences on the work of Dante, by Asin Palacios.5 There, he notes that Islam influenced the court in Sicily and the songs of the troubadours in the north. It is for this reason that I have turned to Turkey, which is often seen by Europeans as an example of the static despotism of Asia. It was, in fact, very far from that.6 The notion of secular love is tied up in European thought not only with that of fraternity and love of one’s fellow man, but also more closely, especially regarding sexual love, with that of freedom (freedom of choice of partner, romantic love) and of individualisation (individual choice as preferred to family choice). These ideas are dear to Western ideologies, which see them as marking off Western Christianity from other creeds. In Christianity, love is often seen as an intrinsic part of a complex of religious ideas and practices. The love of God (given and received), the love of man, the love of women – all are drawn together by the use of this one word, which implies a common element, but a variety of forms. The Hebrew bible uses the same word for the love of God, of fellow men or of fellow women. Hence, the rabbis could interpret the apparently erotic Song of Songs as the love of God for Israel, an interpretation that Christians later transfer into the love of Christ for his people. The first three chapters of Hosea show a similar identification, which later Protestants would say show confusion. However, there does seem to be a difference in Hebrew between love (‘ohebh) and desire (shawq). When God curses Eve, he says that her ‘desire’ (shawq) shall be for Adam, not that she shall ‘love’ (‘ohebh) him. The Song of Songs, a series of secular love poems, was only included in the canon because Rabbi Aqivah (first century CE) decided to read it allegorically, but there is nothing in the text itself to suggest an allegorical reading.7 It seems doubtful if many other societies include those two forms in one overall category in quite the same way as European Christianity. Or should we say in some branches of European Christianity? Because in many contexts, the two activities, even if given the same name, are diametrically opposed. In the Roman Catholic church, the priests are forbidden married love (as well as, of course, unmarried intercourse), though we know that many find that difficult, whereas they are enjoined to enter into the mutual love of God as well as into eternal amity (fraternity) to all mankind and indeed to all of God’s creation. But the opposition becomes particularly acute in the dualistic versions of the Christian faith (as of others) where a sharp line is drawn between this world and the next, between evil and earthly on the one hand, and good and spiritual, on the other. To be ‘perfect’ among the Cathars of the twelfth century – and all have to aim for this – carnal love has to be renounced as one of the things of this world that is completely antithetical to the spiritual, to God, to the religious life. As a result, they renounce the world, the flesh and the devil. That path leads to renunciation, even for the laity. Nor was it an ideal confined to them.

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Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy’s new religion of love led to the abandoning of his family and renouncing earthly ties, including the earthly love of his wife and thirteen children. Here the shift was not so much between earthly and divine love, as between carnal and fraternal love (though inspired by Christian teaching). The two main forms of spiritual and earthly love are distinguished by the Greeks as eros (that is, erotic, sexual) and agape (fraternal or social). As we know from Caroline Bynum’s studies of medieval women mystics, sometimes, but not always, the two aspects of love, the spiritual and the sensual, become very much intertwined.8 In the words of the thirteenth-century mystic, Hadewijch, who wrote of her union with Christ, ‘after that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full felicity.’9 This concern with the flesh is linked to the idea that Christ had a human as well as a divine nature, the invisible God made visible. Renunciation of the flesh, of earthly love, is associated with other priesthoods, especially in monastic religions such as Buddhism, for reasons that sit comfortably with the differentiation of the universe, however mildly, into the material and the spiritual. That differentiation may take on an extreme Manichean dimension or may simply offer an extension of the quasi-universal dichotomy into body and mind, spirit and soul. However, not all religions demand renunciation in the same way, although most place some restrictions on sex in relation to religious activities, such as abstention before prayer. In Hindu India, the rapprochement between love and religion is much closer than in the religions of the Near East. Whereas the representation of human love would be forbidden in any Christian church, not to speak of Jewish and Islamic contexts where all figurative representation would be taboo, that is far from the case in India, as we see in the temples of Khajuraho and in many others.10 Let me now turn to the question of freedom of choice and its relation to love and religion. It seems clear to me that the union of man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman, involves attraction and indeed something that one could reasonably call love, congruent or conjugal love, even if not ‘romantic love’. A division is often drawn by family historians between arranged marriages and love marriages. Arranged marriages are those organised by the senior generations of the family or specified in the kinship calculus, for example, that a man should marry his mother’s brother’s daughter. Love marriages involve free choice for the prospective partners and the notion is deeply embedded in Western culture – though not altogether absent from others. The idea of consensus was especially favoured by the Church, in opposition to the practice of some families. There is a difference between ‘love’ as a means of choosing a partner, in courtship and dalliance (which is the narrower sense in which Europeans often use the term11), and love as an attribute of a sexual relationship following marriage. Love of a kind is almost always emergent in the latter cases simply

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because the continued intimacy of the sexual relationship gives rise to cathexis, or to positive emotions of attraction and attachment. Emotions develop in the course of the union. There is also asexual love, called by a different name in many societies, for one’s children, or one’s parents or one’s siblings, although the sexual implications, albeit forbidden, may always arise. One variety is known as Platonic love. When the Renaissance writer, Rycaut, discusses the Turks, he sees the Platonic love that developed in the course of education in male institutions as having been transformed from physical desire, as being thoroughly commendable and a step toward that perfect love of God.12 If we think of the wider meanings of the word ‘love’, it seems curious that we use it when the choice of partner is made by the couple, but not when we refer to one made by the parents, who are assumed to be active in their own interests rather than in those of their children (which could amount to their ‘love’ of their children). Parents do, of course, take into account family concerns, which seem altogether necessary if all will be living in the same house or even in the vicinity. But the parents will usually be thinking of their child and his or her preferences. If they do not, then in those many parts of the world in which divorce is permitted, a break-up may soon follow. Or they may not see the grandchildren they desire; the marriage may prove to be less fertile, as Wolf and Huang have shown in the case of ‘incoming daughter-in-law marriages’ in China, where a girl is brought up from a young age with her future spouse.13 Or they may alienate their son or daughter. In any case, it is generally recognised that a union that is at first arranged, can, and usually does, develop into one of mutual attraction and devotion that deserves to be called love, at least ‘congruent’14 or ‘companionate’ love.15 However, the free choice of a partner in modern society has become idealised globally over the past century and is often identified with love and with modernisation. If so, it is a more fleeting emotion than many have thought, since freedom means not only to engage, but also to change, to divorce, meaning the end of intimacy. However, it seems confusing to identify love with the freedom of choice and to deny the presence of love in other regimes, even though the western model has already become dominant ideologically, largely through the dominance of the global media and their appeal to youth.16 The notion of love has a long history, especially in relation to religion. The identification of love for a woman and love for one’s country or for one’s God was common in the Old Testament, especially in that sensuous biblical book, Hosea, as well as in the Song of Songs, which was given such a uniquely spiritual interpretation in later Judaism and Christianity. And yet the Jewish identification continued. In the poetry of Ibn Gabiral (1021–1057), much influenced by Islamic models, the love poetry also has the dimension of cosmic love, of the privileged relation between Israel and her God.17 Zafrani writes that ‘the compositions remain ambiguous, whether they are liturgical or profane, so that one cannot say if it relates to mystical love or to the relation with someone

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closer, a disciple or a friend’.18 It should be noted that while Jewish poetry in the Maghreb was always basically religious, Arab poetry was often profane, even erotic.19 Indeed, the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, denounces the use of poetry and especially of song, often sung by slave-girls and accompanied by wine.20 It was this Arab tradition that was so important in ‘modernising’ medieval Europe. The other notion I want to discuss in relation to love is individualism, the individualism involved in the freedom of choice. This is often equated with the absence of family ties. But that is not what actors’ experience. Children may depart relatively early from their natal household in a spatial sense, but soon after they do so, they establish strong bonds with others, a lover, a spouse, and subsequently with their own children; at the same time, they maintain ties over distance (interrupted by visits and frequent communication by letters, telephone and email) with their parents and with their siblings. Indeed, it has been suggested that a fission of this kind may strengthen closer attachments. That view does not appear to be consistent with the widespread idea of the isolated individual in Europe making his way against the world, in the manner of Robinson Crusoe or other mythical heroes of Europe. This inconsistency is totally apparent, for example, in the notion that our economy is about individual entrepreneurs, which is contradicted by the very important role played by family firms.21 One of the most disturbing myths of the West is that the values of our ‘Judaeo-Christian’ civilisation are to be distinguished from the East in general and from Islam in particular. However, Islam has the same roots as Judaism and Christianity and has many of the same values. If we are thinking of the level of religious ideology, then it has recently been pointed out by Yalman22 that love, equality and freedom are fundamental features of the ethical teaching of Islam, as is a concern for the individual. Therefore, I give particular attention to Yalman’s work, because it contradicts widespread stereotypes on Islam. The recognition of the role of love in Islamic cultures is important first of all because many Europeans see love and charity as inextricably linked to Western, Christian culture, or, in the case of love, as evolving from the twelfthcentury troubadours or as characteristic of their conjugal family, even as a feature of our modernisation.23 It is nothing of the sort; indeed, not only were developments in Languedoc in the twelfth century possibly influenced by Islamic writers such as Ibn Hazm working in Spain, but also the subject was of wide interest in the Muslim world, both in secular and religious contexts. In Sufism, emphasis on love was particularly marked. One Sufi master wrote, ‘I am neither Christian, Jew nor Muslim… love is my religion’.24 Yalman writes of these sects: The interest in love as a social doctrine can be said to arise with the mystic tarikats very early in Islam. There is much talk of the heart: love in this sense is a dangerous, even subversive, doctrine. Thus are the tarikats regarded to this day in many

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places. The love of men for God, and for each other, has a Dionysian quality difficult for authorities to control. Such irrepressible and all-consuming love is expressed in highly emotive rituals – the passion plays of the Shi’a, or the ritual chanting (dhikr) of the various dervish orders, or the sema (whirling ritual) of the Mevlevis, and, in all cases, it is reported that the effect of the communal ritual is the submerging of the individual in an “ocean of love” in his group. The degree to which the Middle East, at least, was susceptible to such ideas can be understood from the fact that Divine love (tasawuj) is the largest and most persistent subject in the poetry and music of the Ottoman, Persian, and indeed Mughal Empires.25

The metaphor of love, the love of men for God and for each other, also has political implications. It denies, of course, the machine-like quality that wellrun societies sometimes come to exhibit. Love as a consuming passion would set aside formalities and undermine social barriers. It would erode the privileges of those small, closed groups that often run the important institutions of society, and insist that hierarchical structures, built up with such care and dependent upon people keeping their places and doing their duties, be brought down. It would insist that men be equal to each other, that they dissolve the barriers separating them and unite with one another in a sense of community and identity and become one with each other and with God. The close intertwining of secular and divine love runs very deep in the life of the mystic poet Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, in whose name one of the most famous of the brotherhoods (tarikat), the Mevlevi, was founded after his death in 1273. A revolution took place in his life in Konya, when he met a man called Shems-i Tabrizi (Shemüddin, the ‘sun’ of Tabriz). The circumstances of their meeting are obscure but according to one account, Shems apparently grabbed the bridle and stopped Mevlana’s horse in the middle of the street. Mevlana was stunned by Shems and his alien way of life; he went through a period of total ecstasy and fell instantly in love with him. The two stayed in conversation for ‘forty days’, but Mevlana’s absence troubled the outside world. Shems then departed, an act that gave rise to a most extraordinary outpouring of lyric poetry on the subjects of love and separation. They were briefly reunited but the mob again rioted and again Shems departed. But for Mevlana, the world had changed: ‘now his life has meaning, predicated upon Divine love. He composes vast quantities of deeply moving poetry on the allegory of love’.26 Shems, Yalman notes, ‘is turned into the master symbol of Divine love between man and God and between man and Man’. Once again, there is ambiguity between the two, and homoerotic love is celebrated by a great poet in the Arabic language. Islam seems to be one religion that does not put a strong regulatory hand on human sexuality, since one of the hadiths declares that every time a man has sexual intercourse, he undertakes a work of charity. Among Arabs, the ritually appropriate remark in initiating sex relations with one’s wife was: ‘I seek refuge in God from the accursed Satan; in the name of God, the beneficent, the merciful’.27 The ambivalence attaches to male sexuality, but Adam requires an Eve, so that there is something here of sex (and love) that we have seen

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elsewhere, although unions approved by God seem to be opposed to Satan’s version. The duality between good and evil remains, but approved sex falls on the opposite side compared with the Cathars. Intercourse could be carrying out the service of God. However, the total situation is more complicated, since Islam also harks back to the story of Adam and Eve, and there is an obvious aspect of ambivalence about unauthorised sex. That ambivalence exists very widely in human societies, in some of which sex is forbidden between close kin (as in Christianity), in others encouraged (as in Islam). I have extended this discussion to the realm of sex. While love and sex cannot be identified, neither in most cases can they be separated. Although some forms of love as ‘platonic love’, love of fellow man, love of God, even self-love, exclude sexuality, in the majority of cases, ‘making love’ with the other sex is an aspect of love. Doubts or qualifications about love, even married love, are part of Christian beliefs, embodied in the words of Christ and of his disciple Paul, as well as from the merit that Catholicism awards to the cloister, a renunciation that invokes also the celibacy of both males and females. The insistence on renunciation for all clergy is to be found in others of the great world religions; that is reinforced in the wider belief, almost approaching the Manichean, that the opposition between the spiritual and the material brought the physical aspects of love close to evil, to ‘the world, flesh and the Devil’, for earthly love was usually considered to belong with the latter. Qualms about earthly love do not begin with written religions, though some have argued from the story of Adam and Eve, so widely proclaimed on Romanesque churches, that it is the Judaeo-Christian tradition (as it is often called, omitting Islam from the company) that confers feelings of guilt on the sexual act, a feeling that God forced upon the first humans whose breach of the taboo meant they were excluded from Paradise. However, Indian religion as well, though much more explicit about the sexual act in temple sculpture, not only in certain ways encourages its renunciation, but also sees that act as ‘polluting’, as bringing dirt and impurity, at least immaterial, upon the participants. Such ambivalence is not confined to the written or so-called ethical religions. That is made clear from the various taboos that surround sex in many oral cultures. One example comes from the recitations embodied in the rites of the Bagre society among the LoDagaa of northern Ghana. A passage in a version that I published as The Third Bagre: A Myth Revisited can only be interpreted I believe, by attributing similar beliefs, at least in embryo, to this oral culture on whose religion the Near East can have had no real influence. In the Black Bagre (the second of the two parts), recited at the settlement of Gomble, the original man and woman begin by building their house with the help of God.28 He provides them with the material to make mats and they lie down to sleep. At that point, God traces a circle of ashes around them, presumably to see if they move. They do so and have intercourse with one another. But the aftermath is somewhat unexpected:

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And God, it was he with all his wonders, came down suddenly, went and asked the woman. The woman replied, don’t ask me. Go and ask the man. He asked the man, who became ashamed and he bent his head. You know that, that’s how it is, the woman spoiled the man. And they also said the man spoiled the woman. And then God became angry and went up and they blamed each other. Two days later the woman became pregnant.

Even in this simple, hoe agriculture society, with a purely local religion, an element of shame is attributed to the sexual act, for which God is seen as ultimately responsible. Looking at love in a more general context, there is in my view little or nothing to suggest that such an emotion is absent from simpler cultures. It is true, as I have argued elsewhere, that emotions may receive a greater elaboration in written cultures, in particular in love letters, in which by definition the correspondents are distant from one another. This very distance may be a significant component of what we call ‘romantic love’. I have suggested, as have others, that we find such expression in Ancient Egypt, even in letters between brothers and sisters, who were of course possible sexual partners. The same is to be found in early Chinese love poems, again often between distant partners. But coming closer to home, you find it also in Islamic cultures, in which personal relationships have often been seen by the West as providing a complete contrast. That parallelism is also apparent in the relationship between love and equality. The anthropologist Yalman sees equality as a ‘fundamental aspect’ of the ‘culture of Islam’. Certainly, it is ‘translated’ into practice in the notion of open access to opportunities for people and the absence of a group (a priesthood) with privileged access to divine truths. But that does not mean there is no inequality among Islamic peoples: ‘In practice, inferiority and superiority are as much a part of daily Islamic experience as any other’.29 Yalman draws a general contrast between a highly idealised formula between equality and love in Islam, on the one hand, and hierarchy and renunciation in India, on the other. The contrast is between his description of Islam and that of Dumont’s on hierarchy and renunciation in Hinduism,30 ‘an almost mirror-image comparison of two

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religious world-views that have intermingled with bitter intimacy for more than a thousand years on the Indian sub-continent’.31 According to Dumont, renunciation, ascetic self-denial, was the religious dimension of hierarchy, allowing for some liberation and permitting ‘the specially gifted individuals to escape from the strict crucible of caste’.32 But then Yalman on the one hand recognises that equality has not always been achieved by Islamic states and, on the other hand, he quotes a comment on the presence of bakhti in India, in which those who have fallen from twice-born status might be brought to better condition.33 In other words, hierarchy could be breached. Equally he refers to the great Hindu tradition of love, of the gopis for Krishna, and he might well have referred to the fine body of Sanskrit love poetry. He sees this as a ‘point of profound contact in Hindu and Muslim devotionalism’, going on to claim that in the Hindu case it is only a minor theme of a great civilisation.34 I suggest that we need to modify the stark contrast that Yalman draws between these aspects of love in the religious ideologies by taking into account the similar ties, especially regarding love, that accompany them. From the African standpoint, both the Islamic society of Turkey and the Hindu society of India are representative of the late Bronze Age cultures of Eurasia, which are heavily stratified. However, those forms of stratification may be qualified by the religious ideologies. Islam does something to loosen and even oppose the secular stratification, which for the most part is based on unequal access to land, always ploughed, sometimes irrigated; there is charity from the better-off, sometimes the revolt of the poor, but no effective redistribution. In India, the secular hierarchy is to some extent supported by the religious ideology, but not entirely since it is the written priesthood who conduct the religious rites, as in Islam, and who are considered to stand on top of the hierarchy. The secular rulers follow. Nevertheless, the class divide is modified by charity, as in Islam, by acts of giving, as when in a Congress-dominated village in Gujarat, I saw the harijan, formerly the untouchables, queuing up to obtain the whey leftover from the yoghurt-making activities of the ‘peasant’ Patels. More significant, however, are aspects of religion, Bakhti and Krishna-worship displaying egalitarian characteristics. And there has always been the outright opposition of others, the long tradition of Indian atheistic thought, which included Dalit (‘untouchable’) opposition to the caste system in which they found themselves at the bottom of the pile. That opposition was typified in Pune by the nineteenthcentury activities of Mahatma Phule, who founded a primary girl’s school, and by the work of Dr. Ambedkhar, leader of the harijan under Mahatma Gandhi, who drafted the Indian constitution to include positive discrimination, but eventually led his group away from Hinduism and into Buddhism. Buddhism and Jainism had both grown out of Hinduism and involved rejecting the caste system. That is why Ambedkhar successfully led the former untouchables to Buddhism, an Indian religion that had little following in that country and therefore fewer political implications.

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Yalman also elaborates the concept of freedom in Turkish Islam. The Englishman, Sir Adolphus Slade, who served as an officer under the Ottoman Navy in the 1820s, wrote: ‘Hitherto the Osmanley has enjoyed by custom some of the dearest privileges of free men, for which Christian nations have so long struggled.’ He paid a very limited land tax, no tithes, needed no passport, encountered no customs nor police; ‘from the lowest origins he might aspire without presumption to the rank of pasha’. He compares the freedom, ‘the capacity of realising his wildest wishes’, to the achievements of the French revolution.35 There are many other practical significances of this concept. You could make a slave a Muslim but you could not make a Muslim a slave. Equally, a new convert, as with the Albanian dervishes, could rise to the highest offices in the land, bar that of Sultan. As Yalman explains, the notion of freedom is connected to that of equality. The ‘high ideals of Islam’, he notes ‘do turn around the principle that there are no privileged persons in Islam, or rather that a person’s worth depends upon the morality of his/her intentions, behaviour and piety. This may lead to the gates of heaven, but even in the worldly kingdoms, all people, once converted to the belief of Islam – i.e., having “surrendered” (teslim) to the will of God – must be given an equal chance to rise in society. Hence the promise of Islam, for instance, to Black Muslims in America and oppressed peoples elsewhere’.36 Like love and equality, the notion of freedom was present in Hindu society, even if not always prominent in Brahmin religion, just as the practice and to some extent the ideology of hierarchy existed in Islam. These contrary tendencies are mirrors of each other within each society; the religious ideologies do display contrasts, but if they are considered in a wider ideological frame, we find both trends present in the two societies. How and why? Because both societies, being dependent upon advanced agriculture and its commercial and artisanal concomitants, were heavily stratified from a socio-economic point of view as well as having both political stratification and religious-educational stratification in relation to the written word and to the holy scriptures more generally. But stratification is often seen as contrary to what are virtually pan-human notions of equality among humans (e.g., among siblings, among brothers and sisters), which run as a counter-current in stratified societies, and are based on the idea of distributive justice. From the standpoint of the family, it is based on relations between siblings (‘all men are brothers’) or between partners rather than between parents (prototypically fathers) and children.37 One set involves inequality, the other equality, and both are built into social relationships from the family outward. Both involve love, one fraternal or sororal love as well as ‘sexual’ love, which is between equals, a lateral relationship. The other involves parental love, and its complement, which is hierarchical, between unequals. The imposition of hierarchy by the father or parent is countered by claims to equality on behalf of the brothers or siblings. These claims may dominate the lifestyles of a person or of a com-

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munity, or they may constitute a point of reference that does not prevent one continuing to act in a rapacious or consumerist manner. We are well acquainted with these ideological-behavioural-centred conflicts in our own daily lives, as when we decry the pollution that cars contribute to the environment and jump into our Nissan to go down to the supermarket (which we decry as having taken over the small, personalised shops). There are conflicts as well within these close relationships of ‘love’, which are often forgotten in the glow of romance. There is the strife between brothers; or, the hatred that may follow the end of conjugal intimacy. Love has to be considered in the context of hate, attraction in that of repulsion. The examples discussed here suggest that while love and the associated ‘virtues’ of equality and freedom are often seen by Westerners as basically European – part of that continent’s cultural heritage enabling it to move forward to modernisation in front of the rest of the world – this idea is built on unsteady foundations. These attributes are found in different forms in other societies, and not just in advanced literate ones, although there the ideologies are more developed, especially in poetry. It is the greater reflexivity of the written word, wherever it is found, that produces not only love, but also romantic love.

Notes 1. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 2. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York: Princeton University Press, 1956; Georges Duby, Féodalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 3. Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4. See, for example, the volume edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 5. Miguel Asin Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy (London: Murray, 1926). 6. Halil I Ænalcik with Donald Quartaert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 7. I am grateful to Jessica Bloom for this comment, and to Andrew Macintosh and to the writings of Nur Yalman. 8. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 9. Mother Columba Hart edition quoted in Janet Martin Soskice, ‘Sight and Vision in Medieval Christian Thought’, in Vision in Context. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, eds Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1996), 29–43, here 38. 10. Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 210f. 11. E.g., William Josiah Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free Press, 1963). 12. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 122. 13. Arthur P. Wolf and Chien-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980). 14. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.

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15. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost. England Before the Industrial Age (London: Methuen, 1971). 16. This attitude has sometimes been described as an ‘earthly religion’. The phrase may serve as a metaphor, but it is analytically confusing, since religious concepts refer to the other world. 17. Haïm Zafrani, Juifs d’Andalousie et du Maghreb (Paris: Maisonneuve Larose, 1996), 109. 18. Ibid., ‘Compositions restent ambiguës, qu’elles soient liturgiques ou profanes, donc on ne peut dire s’il s’agit d’amour mystique, ou de la relation avec un être plus proche, le disciple ou l’ami.’ 19. Ibid., 134. 20. Ibid., 136. 21. Goody, The East in the West, 192f. 22. Nur O. Yalman, ‘Further Observations on Love (or Equality)’, in Cultural Horizons, ed. Jayne L. Warner (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001). 23. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. 24. Zafrani, Juifs d’Andalousie et du Maghreb, 159. 25. Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 272. 26. Ibid., 275. 27. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns, 141. 28. Jack Goody and S.W.D.K. (Kum) Gandah, The Third Bagre. A Myth Revisited (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2003). 29. Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 271. 30. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus.The Caste System and its Implications (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980). 31. Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 270. 32. Ibid. 33. Thomas J. Hopkins, ‘The social teaching of the Bhagavata Purana’, in Krishna. Myths, Rites and Attitudes, ed. Milton B. Singer (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1966), quoted in Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 277. 34. Ibid., 278. 35. Quoted in ibid., 271. 36. Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 271. 37. See Juliet Mitchell, Siblings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).

CHAPTER

2

The Rule of Love The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective WILLIAM M. REDDY

Sociologists have paid close attention to the remarkable post-war ‘triumph’ of love in the Western industrialised countries.1 But love has received relatively little explicit attention in other fields – and this at a time when scholarly work on ‘genders’, ‘sexualities’ and ‘desire’ has gained unquestioned academic legitimacy. In critical theory, in literary and historical research, in theoretical formulations concerning culture, discourse, agency and performance, love has come up, but usually only tangentially. Even when love is a central issue of their work, authors in these fields prefer to highlight their concern with sexuality or desire.2 This selective focus on genders, sexualities and desire is not just the product of recent fashion in the academy. The ultimate origins of this preference must be sought much further back, in a peculiar historical accommodation first worked out in the Middle Ages, between romantic love, on the one hand, and the sexual regulation imposed by family and religion, on the other. This essay argues that love’s peculiar accommodation with regulation turns on a unique Western distinction between love and ‘lust’. No other cultural tradition applies such a distinction to the understanding of emotional connections between sexual partners. Two alternative ways of conceptualising and practising love – from the Hindu and Japanese traditions – will be discussed below, as points of contrast. But many other traditions could have been brought forward, for example, the Muslim, Polynesian or Indonesian traditions. The evidence is overwhelming. As Anthony Giddens has put it, ‘[i]n (Western) romantic love attachments, the element of sublime love tends to predominate over that of sexual ardour. Notes for this section begin on page 52.

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The importance of this point can hardly be overstressed. The romantic love complex is in this respect as historically unusual as traits Max Weber found combined in the protestant ethic. Love breaks with sexuality while embracing it.’3 Sociologists and psychologists frequently note that Western romantic love, as currently practised, may be overburdened with significance, and inadequate to the role it has been assigned in modern societies. But this highly significant role cannot be separated from love’s structural position as, at once, lust’s opposite, and the force that sanctifies lust and integrates it into the social order. Better understanding of the emergence and history of this structure is therefore urgently required.

The Triumph of Love Since the Second World War, the role of romantic love in a number of industrialised Western countries has been steadily expanding; love has ‘triumphed’ as never before, according sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, becoming a kind of ‘earthly religion’, as the German sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim have put it.4 ‘Family success’, through romantic love, ‘is the highest aspiration of the French’, remarks Hervieu-Léger: ‘Incontestably, it counts more today, in terms of the role in the construction of the self which it is supposed to play, than it has ever counted in history.’5 As pornography becomes more widely available, and the line between obscene and acceptable fades, as the divorce rate climbs inexorably above 50 per cent in many countries, interest in lasting love partnerships nonetheless remains curiously robust. Marriage rates have recovered from a low in the mid 1990s and in many countries the rates are stable or on the rise. The number of unmarried co-resident couples is also increasing; and many of these unmarried couples are ‘starting families’ together.6 Lesbians and gays justify the current international movement for full marriage rights on the grounds that same-sex couples love in the same manner as heterosexual ones. ‘Samesex couples face all of the same challenges and joys that heterosexual couples do – but we’re left navigating through them without the protections marriage provides’, said Michael Adams, Director of Education and Public Affairs at Lambda Legal Defense Fund, in an 15 October 2003 news release announcing a new counselling forum, ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Couple’.7 Celebrations of marriage – often after years of cohabitation – take the form of elaborate, personalised rituals, recycling many traditional features and featuring extremely up-to-date vows.8 The constant exploration of marriage in popular culture and public concern over the agony of divorce – these and other aspects of the present landscape attest to the continuing centrality of love partnerships. The rule of love has such an unchallenged sway over many minds that we can hardly grasp its omnipresence. Many of us see the problems it creates as the problems of freedom, of the human condition. We rejoice when ho-

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mosexual, bisexual and transsexual couples, or when couples of differing ethnic and racial backgrounds are freed to come together and struggle as we do – in private, without public insult or discrimination – over the hopes of love. This prevalent concept (or, should I say ‘practise’, or ‘emotion’ – it is all of these9 ) of romantic love serves in many industrialised Western countries as the sole legitimate grounds for founding families and the principal form of a bond giving structure to the private sphere. A former Archbishop of Canterbury recently recommended that the Prince of Wales marry his long-term partner, Camilla Parker Bowles. ‘He is the heir to the throne and he loves her; the natural thing is that they should get married’, said Lord Carey.10 Yet, until very recently, this ‘natural thing’ was in fact forbidden by the Church of England’s rules regarding remarriage of divorced persons. Love’s ‘natural’ reign is actually a highly peculiar, local, and – in its current configuration – relatively recent phenomenon. The idea that romantic love is natural and universal – a widely held belief, defended by some psychologists and anthropologists – seems to be based in part on a confusion about terms. Love in English is a very vague term. The term romantic is added to allow one to refer to that emotion that accompanies attempts to initiate an enduring sexual partnership and/or the emotion that accompanies and motivates such an enduring partnership. However, romantic love is also the only available English term to refer to the specific emotion Westerners feel when they pursue or sustain sexual partnerships. Almost always, one or more features of Western romantic love will turn up in non-western cultural arenas. But identification of (some) common features does not warrant the conclusion that romantic love is universal. Such a leap obscures the highly specific role that romantic love is playing in some presentday societies. One ethnographer of Nigeria, for example, who was arguing for the universality of romantic love, reported that a man became fascinated, even obsessed, with his third wife the moment he saw her. Although he already had two wives, he said, ‘I told her I wanted to marry her. She said she had nothing to say about that, and directed me to her parents.’ He immediately went to negotiate with the parents, and soon married her.11 Whatever this man’s emotion was, to equate it with ‘romantic love’ as practised in certain Western industrialised countries is to ignore the centrality of reciprocal feeling and of exclusivity in Western ideas about love partnerships. The two meanings of ‘romantic love’ must not be blurred together in a way that allows this kind of mistake to go unnoticed.

The Medieval Accommodation of Love and Sexual Regulation The failure of the scholarly community to understand romantic love’s odd Western structure seems to reflect a peculiar Western accommodation between love

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practices and regulatory thinking. Long ago, in effect, lovers and regulators agreed to ignore each other. This accommodation was beginning to take shape by about the year 1200 CE, and was fully developed by the fourteenth century. It developed, that is, along with the new form of romantic love that has come to be called ‘courtly love’. Courtly love was startlingly different from earlier sexual practices in a number of ways. For the ancient Romans, love was a pastime of idle moments and any man who became preoccupied with it obviously lacked virtue; a man’s undue concern with sexual partners – male or female – detracted from his capacity to engage in those political and military duties that distinguished him as a citizen.12 Proper sexual partners were of lower rank. They did what they were told, and swooning over them was unnecessary and unseemly.13 But, from early in the twelfth century, the European warrior elite adopted the new courtly love ideal with amazing rapidity and thoroughness.14 Courtly love was perfectly compatible with political duty and military prowess – it was even likely to enhance one’s military effectiveness. Courageous, quick-tempered knights provided the clinching proof of their virtue by loving gracious women of higher, not lower, rank than themselves. This new kind of love entailed not just adoration for, but also obedience to, the higher ranked woman, and extreme concern for her reputation, especially in cases where the love was reciprocated through an adulterous relationship.15 Eminent medievalists such as Maurice Keen and Peter Dinzelbacher are of the opinion that such relationships were quite common.16 When women chose to return the sentiment of devotion, they insisted on their lover’s homage, submission and discretion. For both men and women, courtly love was a transcendent experience. This adulterous love transformed one’s sense of self and offered fulfilment; God was widely assumed to approve and to aid lovers. Prayers invoking God’s aid were a frequent feature of troubadour, trouvère and Minnesänger lyrics all across Europe. This spiritualised sensuality can be seen in mature form in a song by Giraut de Borneil, ‘Reis glorïos, verais lums e clartatz’. Giraut de Borneil, active between 1190 and 1240, was known as the master troubadour for his technical virtuosity in an art whose forms were becoming increasingly fixed. ‘Reis glorïos’ is an ‘aube’ or ‘dawn’ song. In this popular genre, the singer calls out to his companion, to warn him that dawn has come. The singer has been set as guard to watch over the place – a bedroom, a garden – where two lovers have met in secret. He must protect them from discovery by a jealous husband. In Giraut de Borneil’s version, the singer’s cries are like an austere hymn. 1. Reis glorïos, verais lums e clartatz Deus poderos, senher, si a vos platz, Al meu companh siatz fizels aiuda Qu’eu non lo vi, pois la noitz fon venguda; Et ades sera l’alba. …

Glorious king, truth and light most true Powerful God, my Lord, I beg of you To be a faithful aid to my companion Whom I have not seen since night has fallen; And soon it will be dawn. …

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3. Bel companho, en chantan vos apel: Non dormetz plus, qu’en aug chantar l’auzel Que vai queren lo iorn per lo boscatge; Et ai paor quel gilos vos assatge; Et ades sera l’alba

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Fair companion, singing I call to you: Sleep no more, I hear the lark sing, who Searching for light beneath the branches flies; And I fear lest the jealous one take you by surprise; And soon it will be dawn.17

In this song, illicit love is a holy quest; God’s help is requested with no sense of incongruity. The assistance of a loyal friend (the singer) is offered with a deep sense of duty and admiration. The mournful repetition of ‘And soon it will be dawn’ at the end of each stanza gives rise to a growing sense of anxiety as the song continues, the sun rises and the danger of discovery increases. The aube genre celebrates risk, bravery, vigilance: qualities belonging to the warrior, and underscoring love’s new status as an integral part of the warrior’s noble calling. How was this extraordinary set of practices so widely adopted without falling afoul of the regulatory apparatus of the medieval church? Courtly love was first expressed in songs and soon elaborated, as part of the code of chivalry, in long narrative poems. By the end of the thirteenth century, it was being celebrated in illustrations and tapestries, on household furnishings such as jewellery boxes, mirrors and combs, on coats of arms and in heraldic mottos and tournament rituals. It became a dominant theme of vernacular literature from Sicily to Denmark, Iberia to England. However, only one effort was made to write up a kind of explicit manual of love: Andreas Capellanus’s famous De Amore, written around 1180. This work, written probably by a protégé of Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, consists of a series of dialogues examining love’s nature and the best way to win a lover. These are followed by an additional discussion of the sinfulness of love. The work also contains the only known description of a ‘court of love’, where noble ladies meet to pass judgment on questions of love. In such a court of love, Andreas reports, Marie de Champagne gave the following succinct verdict: ‘We declare and confirm that love cannot exist between two married people.’18 Because of its peculiar structure, scholars have hotly debated the true meaning of the work. But it seems safe to say that it contained ideas about love that were widely accepted at the time, whatever Andreas Capellanus’ own position may have been.19 This treatise, due to its persistent popularity in the thirteenth century, eventually attracted the condemnation of the church in 1277. As this condemnation made perfectly clear, when formulated as an explicit doctrine, courtly love was heresy.20 Love’s continued centrality in the medieval period therefore depended on the avoidance of explicit normative recommendations. Love was praised only in the realms of (what we would now call) literature and art; its acolytes performed certain of their rites in strict secrecy, and others only after dinner or at tournaments (which were also condemned but tacitly tolerated), far from

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churches and universities. In their writings and rituals, courtly lovers pretended to see no contradiction between Christian virtue and adulterous devotion to a beloved. This strategy of ‘open concealment’ was typical of the whole uneasy accommodation between Christian teaching and the ever-more elaborate ethos of the warrior elite. Courtly love resembled Christian love in a number of respects. Both courtly love and Christian asceticism required self-denial, and often heroic self-denial. Just as Christian theology pitted the love of God against the body and its passions,21 so courtly lovers often depicted their own devotion to the beloved as the fruit of (and as inspiration for) strict self-discipline. By various forms of disguise, courtly love was able to survive, then, even flourish. Dante, in the Purgatorio (1314), for example, transformed his beloved Beatrice into a messenger of divine forgiveness. In Canto XXXI, her stunning beauty shows through semi-transparent veils, as she lectures him about his tendency to forget her for less virtuous women. When she sees his remorse, Beatrice cries out, ‘Hold me! Hold me!’22 She crosses the river Lethe and draws him into the waters of forgetfulness up to his neck. ‘The fair lady opened her arms, clasped my head, and dipped me where I must needs swallow of the water; then drew me forth.’23 Dante is then required to gaze into her eyes, whence once Love’s arrows came to pierce him. Burning with desire for her, he is taught that what he desires is only a distant reflection of spiritual intimacy.24 Thus, concupiscence, condemned by theologians as the worst pitfall of the soul, is quietly rehabilitated by Dante as the best kind of sin, because it can lead on to appreciation of divine companionship. Likewise Petrarch claimed he fell in love with his Laura on Good Friday; and, years later, on Good Friday she died. This connection between sexual love and divine passion was regarded by some as blasphemous.25 Petrarch, it is true, constantly warned his readers that he regarded his love of Laura to be a weakness, not an alternate form of devotion, as it often appeared – a weakness because he could not see beyond Laura to the God whose beauty she only echoed. He thus kept love, just barely, within the bounds of the sinful, despite the transcendent tone of all of his descriptions of this emotion. Benjamin Boysen states, ‘The identification of Laura with Christ serves (aside from the purely amorous and hyperbolic rhetoric) to nominate her status as an omnipotent Other, who reigns over life and death.’ Petrarch did not hesitate to compare Laura with the divine: Per divina bellezza indarno mira Who seeks for divine beauty seeks in vain chi gli occhi de costei giamai non if he has not yet looked upon those eyes vide, and seen come soavemente ella gli gira; how tenderly she makes them move; non sa come Amor sana et come he does not know how love can heal and ancide kill (Petrarch, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 159.9–12)26

Sinful, perhaps, but Petrarch’s love was no bodily appetite, no mere concupiscence. Perhaps hyperbolic rhetoric, so consistently deployed as it was in the

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Middle Ages, adds up to something more than mere hyperbole. There is nothing that compares with it, either in Ovid’s praises of cupid or in Augustine’s denunciations of concupiscence. Another striking instance of open concealment can be found in the collection of thirteenth-century motets that has come down to us in the so-called Montpellier Codex. Love themes curiously juxtaposed with sacred ones dominate in these early examples of polyphony. Each voice, in these pieces, sings a different lyric; up to three different lyrics may be sung simultaneously. Understanding the words is, for the most part, difficult at best. Most of these motets take a familiar sacred hymn as their point of departure; its melody is hummed in the background. Secular love lyrics, sometimes openly anti-Christian, are sung in harmony at higher pitches. In motet 311 of the Montpellier Codex, for example, the lower voice sings a man’s praises for his beloved’s grace, goodness and beauty. He forgets all sorrow when his love for her envelopes him; he prays to God that he may be able to continue the sweet labour of his love. In intricate harmonies, the upper voice of motet 311 expresses a woman’s conviction that she ought to love her beloved, for he has surely deserved it; he has willingly obeyed her, setting aside his pride; he is joyful, handsome and proper; ‘God, I use my love well in giving it to him!’ Here we have morality, duty, beauty, joy, obedience, God’s assistance – all of these religious notions expressed as part of a dyadic sexual tie and set to music in harmony with a well known sacred melody, ‘Et Sperabit’. On one page of the Montpellier Codex, reproduced in the catalogue of a recent exhibition of medieval art, the illustrators graphically displayed the juxtaposition of sacred and amorous themes by presenting two saints at the top of the page, and a flirtatious game of ‘frog’ at the bottom.27 A number of jewellery boxes have also survived from the late thirteenth century through to the fourteenth century, which display images of courting couples on the outside of the cover, and images of the Blessed Virgin on the inside. This juxtaposition suggests, without openly stating it, a parallel between love and the sacred in much the same way as the curious construction of the motet, the illustrations of the Montpellier Codex or the quasi-sacred beauty of Beatrice or Laura.28 The iconography of the unicorn reflects a similar unspoken accommodation of spiritualised emotional attachment and Christian transcendence. This animal, legend had it, could only be captured by a virgin. Enthralled by her beauty, he places his front hooves in her lap. Hunters can then successfully strike or kill him.29 Thus, the unicorn could be read as a symbol of Christ, submitting to the Virgin birth and to the crucifixion, or to the loving chivalrous knight, whose devotion to a beloved can trump his intrepid prowess.30 The unicorn symbol gained in popularity in the thirteenth century, and continued to be popular up until the end of the Middle Ages.31 By the early fourteenth century, the unicorn is found frequently in marginal illustrations of illuminated manuscripts and as a decorative motif for small boxes and clasps.32

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In the fifteenth century, the unicorn became even more prominent in chivalric symbolism. One of the famous tourneying brotherhoods of Germany of that period was called the Brotherhood of the Unicorn (others were named for the falcon and for the fish).33 When the knight Jacques de Lalaing issued his famous ‘Fountain of Tears’ challenge in 1450, he invited opponents to come to Chalon-sur-Saône, where they found a pavilion with an image of Our Lady above it. In front of the pavilion was a maiden with a dress stained with tears and a unicorn with three shields suspended from its neck, also stained with tears. The shields were white, violet and black. The challenger touched the white shield with his lance if he wished to fight with the axe, violet if with the sword, black if with the lance. Challengers brought to the ground by the axe agreed to wear, as a penalty, a golden chain until they found a lady with the key to unlock it. The story behind this elaborate representation was not made clear. However, as Maurice Keen notes, the unicorn suggested purity or chastity, and ‘[i]t is clear … that (the maiden) was to be understood to be comforted and upheld by the prowess of her champion.’34 That such an elaborate ritual of combat could have been staged at all, without arousing clerical suspicions of heresy or devil worship, is in itself remarkable. The unicorn images most famous in the present day are undoubtedly those of two late fifteenth-century tapestry series, one held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (at the Cloisters exhibit), usually called ‘The Unicorn Tapestries’, the other called ‘The Lady of the Unicorn’, on display at the Musée national du Moyen Age in Paris. The first of these seems intended as an allegory of Christ’s passion, as Adolfo Cavallo has suggested.35 But it includes two tapestries that apparently derive from another series, in which the unicorn was treated as a symbol of courtly love. One of these, the ‘Unicorn in Captivity’, showing a unicorn with multiple wounds trapped within a circular fence, has become one of the most widely reproduced images of medieval art. The mere fact that this courtly love image was for so long confounded with a series presenting an allegory of the Passion shows how deep the ambiguities of the unicorn symbol went. ‘The Lady of the Unicorn’ has, in a similar fashion, plagued scholars with its allusiveness and its ambiguity. There is general agreement that the first five tapestries in the series represent the five senses. In each, a richly dressed woman holds or touches something emblematic of a sense: a flower for smell, a small pipe organ for hearing. In each tapestry, a lion and a unicorn are present, usually standing on either side of the woman, bearing shields and banners. In the piece that represents vision, the unicorn gazes in rapt admiration at the lady, his face reflected in a mirror she holds before him. The sixth tapestry in the series is quite different. The damsel holds a heavy necklace in her hands; she is either putting it on or taking it off. Her assistant holds a jewellery box in which the necklace is stored. Behind the woman an elaborately embroidered field tent has been pitched, and she stands as if ready

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to enter it. The tent is decorated with fleurs de lis, with golden teardrops (or candle flames) and with an embroidered device over the entrance: A mon seul desir (To my only desire). J.-P. Boudet has noted that this motto echoes a line of a courtly love song by Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465): De leal cueur, content de joye, Ma maitresse, mon seul desir, Plus qu’oncqes vous vueil server, En quelque place que je soye.

Of loyal heart, content with joy My mistress, my only desire, More than any other, I wish to serve you No matter where I am.36

Thus the theme of the tapestries seems to be a renunciation of the senses in favour of love; but the tent the lady prepares to enter is empty – is it love of God or of a man? By the adroit use of allegory, Boudet concludes, this worldly aesthetic ‘covers its tracks, completely transforming … the edifying schema of … senses that inspired it’.37 Another intriguing example of the surreptitious celebration of spiritualised love is the spread of the cult of Saint Valentine in England from the late fourteenth century onward. Henry Ansgar Kelly argues that the cult found its origins in the poetry of Chaucer, who, in the Parliament of Fowls, spoke of Saint Valentine’s day as the feast day of love among birds. Kelly speculates that the Saint Valentine in question was the one whose feast was celebrated on May 1 in Genoa, and that the identity of the saint was later confused with another Saint Valentine, better known in England, whose feast day was 14 February.38 Whatever the exact origin, by the fifteenth century, the exchange of notes between lovers had become a well-known practice in England, and at least some in France were imitating the practice.39 Like the unicorn, the jewellery boxes that juxtaposed madonnas and lovers, and the thirteenth-century motet, so the valentine greeting carried on a typical medieval strategy of silently associating courtly love with religious devotion.

Concupiscentia: Love’s Dark Partner Just as courtly love was kept out of the limelight of doctrinal attention, so church and state, educational institutions, law courts and patriarchal authorities, from the twelfth century onward, conspired to pretend that courtly love did not exist. In the same years that the new love doctrine was being developed in literature, music and art, theologians such as Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas spoke only of concupiscentia, that is, of what came to be known in English as lust.40 Concupiscence was a mere physical appetite like hunger; yielding to concupiscence was a vice like avarice. To the theologians, giving in to concupiscence was a sin, no matter what the motive or pretext. Church leaders warned that, even within marriage, enjoyment of sexual pleasure was sinful.41 Clothing concupiscence in the language of courtly love was a transparent self-deception that required no special comment from theology. Writers,

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singers and lovers might extol love’s power to transform life and to sanctify it; as long as they did not make doctrinal statements along these lines, theologians could dismiss their delusions without comment. A widely used collection of sermons drawn up in the late thirteenth century, for example, offers numerous reflections on the proper comportment of husband and wife.42 But the sermons made no mention whatsoever of love; love is neither praised nor condemned. Husband and wife owed each other fidelitas (fidelity), temporantia et honestas (temperance and honesty), adiutorium (mutual help) and educatio filiorum (education of children). They also owed each other dilectio – a Latin term better translated as ‘familial affection’ than as ‘love’. Expressions of courtly love and theological condemnations of concupiscence were soon joined by another genre of reflection on love, a popular genre (like the courtly love literature), but one that reinforced the theological view of things. As early as 1200, a kind of popular narrative became widespread, the socalled fabliaux, which presented a new formulation of the ribald, of the bawdy, that was in perfect tune with the theology of concupiscence. Fabliaux authors offered, for example, a humorous critique of courtly love that purported to expose its hypocritical character (in a manner of which theologians would have thoroughly approved). In an anonymous early thirteenth-century fabliau called The Knight of the Vermilion Robe (Le chevalier à la robe vermeille), for example, we learn the story of a knight ‘above reproach’ who won the favour of a lady, the wife of a rich vavaseur (a lower-ranking noble) who lived a few miles away.43 When the vavaseur goes to town on legal business, his wife seizes the occasion to send for her lover. The knight prepares to visit her in his full feudal splendour. He puts on his fine vermilion robe and his golden spurs, mounts his best horse, sets on his shoulder the hawk he has raised himself and brings his two well-trained hunting dogs. Arriving at her dwelling, he ties up his mount and leaves the hawk and the dogs outside. Hearing him, the lady disrobes and gets naked into bed. When he prepares to join her there, she insists he also must undress ‘so that the pleasure will be greater’ (por avoir plus plesant delit). He leaves his spurs, robe and other clothes at the foot of the bed. ‘There he is, slipping under the sheets: she takes him in her arms. I do not want to make allusion to other joy, other pleasure; I think that those who understand me know what I mean. Both of them gleefully made that pleasure that lovers make when they play together.’44 However, the husband comes home unexpectedly, and the lover must hide under the bed. Seeing the horse, the dogs, the vermillion robe, the husband becomes suspicious and enraged. But his wife assures him, ‘these are gifts from my brother; did you not see him leaving as you came up?’ The husband relents; he is delighted with these rich gifts. His wife then invites him to join her in bed, and induces him to make love, giving him twice as many kisses and caresses as usual. Finally he falls asleep, and the lover takes this chance to get out from under the bed and away, taking all of his things with him. When the husband

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awakens and demands to know what has happened to his rich gifts, his wife teases him for having an odd dream. ‘Who would want a used robe, anyway?’ she asks. ‘A man of your stature and wealth must order new, whatever kind of robe or horse he thinks he needs.’ Such stories were humorous, typically, in two ways. The audience is invited to laugh at the self-deception of the protagonists and also to laugh at their resourcefulness in eluding detection. In Le chevalier à la robe vermeille, the lady is so anxious for pleasure that she is in bed with her clothes off before the knight has even reached her door; her first remark is to urge him to join her quickly. There they ‘gleefully made that pleasure that lovers make when they play together’. This way of describing love-making can be compared with Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier de la Charette, where Lancelot literally worships at Guinevere’s bed before joining her there.45 The author of the fabliaux underscores his point by the redundant use of synonyms for sensual satisfaction: ‘plus plesant delit’ (more pleasant delight), ‘firent liemant tel deduit’ (gleefully make such pleasure). Fabliaux writers were lenient in their approach to lust, but fundamentally agreed with theologians that lust was the real motivator of lovers, however much they dressed up their relation in the signs of chivalrous devotion. This kind of story had a rich future before it. It is best known to modern readers in the sophisticated rewritings provided by Boccaccio and Chaucer. But debunking love in this way – in the fashion typical of the fabliaux, that is, by revealing it as lust in hypocritical clothing – only served to establish explicitly a distinction between love and lust that was implicit in the mutual silence that courtly lovers and theologians maintained with respect to each other.46 Courtly love had a dark partner, lust, born simultaneously with it.47 To theologians, they were the same; to popular satire, love served only as a cover for lust. To courtly lovers, the distinction was painfully clear; their devotion to the beloved and their self-abnegation recalled the ascetic’s selfless devotion to God.48 Their love was heroic, not self-serving or libidinous.

The Stages of Love’s Conquest Since the middle ages, love has undergone a profound transformation; it has become the emotion of marriage. But love’s conquest of marriage did not occur overnight. The transformation was slow, sometimes imperceptible, involving a number of distinct stages. Even in the Middle Ages, love within marriage was not excluded in principle, despite Marie de Champagne’s famous dictum, as reported by Andreas Capellanus, that love was necessarily adulterous. As John Baldwin has pointed out, some romances ended with happily married couples.49 The hope that real married couples would find love (at least after the ceremony) was often expressed through wedding gifts.50 It was simply that, because most marriages were arranged by parents, love was usually absent. By

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the medieval love ideal, a loving couple, if circumstance allowed it, would of course elect to marry each other. But for the acolytes of courtly love, devotion to the beloved legitimated adultery when necessary. The Reformation brought a dramatic shift in norms (as well as in practice for some). Luther’s rejection of ‘works’ entailed a severe downgrading of self-denial in all of its forms, especially in the form of chastity. The dissolution of monasteries and a rehabilitation of the marital estate went hand in hand. According to Steven Ozment, the reformers taught that mutual affection and companionship between spouses, coupled with mutual respect and trust, provided a framework within which ‘physical attraction and emotional love’ could play a limited beneficial role.51 Ozment lumps love and lust together in this phrase because that is how his sources construed the matter. Isabel Hull summarises Reformation changes as follows: (T)he reformers revalued marriage as the moral crucible tempering human (sexual) nature into godliness and civic responsibility. The upward valuation of marriage and marital sex shortened the list of sexual misdeeds to those more suitable to external regulation, and the reformers’ moral fervour impelled them to press for real enforcement. Out of this atmosphere and on Reformation institutions the absolutist states built the foundations of secular regulation.52

Luther taught that men and women were not capable of resisting sexual temptation; therefore, as Paul had urged, they had better find sexual release in marriage. Calvin taught that the capacity for sexual joy was ‘a sign of God’s goodness and infinite sweetness’.53 The reformers dramatically reversed the Church’s prior teaching on sexual pleasure, but they continued to amalgamate love and lust as manifestations of a human appetite that, if not disciplined, easily became sinful. Heroic devotion to a beloved was no different from paying prostitutes, if it occurred outside of marriage. In Catholic regions in the seventeenth century, although marriage was given new stature as a vocation, the warnings against the debilitating effects of original sin were reiterated with new zeal.54 Thus, in both Protestant and Catholic lands, secular authorities were encouraged to discipline sexual behaviour as never before. Such discipline in the state’s hands usually entailed an increase in the power of the parents over marital choice as well. As a result, for many, if not most, love continued to play little or no role in the choice of marriage partners and, simultaneously, extramarital relationships were now fitfully, unevenly, but often savagely repressed. Adultery might result in the death penalty; premarital sex could lead to steep fines, public humiliation, jail or forced labour. Elopement was often treated as the equivalent of rape.55 Ironically, these severe penalties were so rarely inflicted in practice that large pockets of de facto tolerance remained, and increased with time. Simultaneously, among the ruling elite, there is evidence of a loss of faith in courtly love’s salvific powers, as well as of a concomitant increase in the number of extramarital liaisons among those influenced by the standards of Italian Renaissance court life.56 In short, courtly love was replaced in many

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court circles by what came to be called ‘gallantry’ – a less intense, less enduring bond. The idea of gallantry included a presumption that flowery protestations of love were hypocritical or self-serving. The idea that love, as opposed to lust, ought to provide the foundation of marriage – to the exclusion of parental estimations of suitability, respectability or upright character – came to be widely accepted only with the Enlightenment. By the end of the eighteenth century, few moralists were prepared to defend the old practice of arranged marriages, even though many parents continued to select mates for their children through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The dramatic transformation of norms (with practices lagging significantly behind) began in the late seventeenth century with the success of novels, plays and magazines that trumpeted the advantages of true love in marriage over parental choice and over extramarital adventures.57 Fiction, medical teaching and the new scientific conception of natural law all conspired in this re-conception of love. If natural law governed the heavens and the earth, as Newton had shown, then it must also govern human behaviour. Just as gravity held the planets in orbit as if by design, so sexual desire moved individuals to come together, form families and perpetuate the species. If carried to an extreme, desire became disruptive. Some eighteenth-century writers recycled the old term passion (in German Leidenschaft) as a label for this natural drive when it became disruptively strong.58 In any case, the ‘rake’, or ‘Don Juan’ was a danger to himself and to others.59 If moderated, either by nature or by self-discipline, sexual desire became ‘love’, a ‘sentiment’ (as opposed to ‘passion’ in some writers’ terminology, or a benevolent ‘passion’ in the view of others60) that was a fundamental spur to altruism and virtuous behaviour.61 Samuel Richardson’s bestselling novel Pamela (1740) became a kind of paradigm of love’s power to moralise the wicked. In this lengthy, lachrymose story, a young serving girl resists her rakish master’s advances with such persistence and virtue that she finally converts him. A happy marriage follows. We find many of the ingredients of courtly love in this story, but strangely repositioned. It is the lowly (read: natural, unspoiled) serving girl, not a higher ranked lady, who inspires her lover (after his conversion) to become a better man. The love they share, in the end, bridges the enormous social gap, just as in medieval romance; but in this case it leads to legitimate marriage, not adultery. Thus, modern ‘romantic love’ was born of an attempt to rethink traditional ideas (derived from medieval courtly love) in the light of a new secular vision of human nature. Like entrepreneurship or political participation, romantic love required individual rights and individual autonomy to flourish. Up until the outbreak of the French Revolution, the right to love was an integral part of rights talk.62 But revulsion at the Revolution’s excesses led to a much-reduced idea of the proper scope of rights. The early nineteenth century saw religious revivals and a resurgence of pessimism about human nature and the power of reason. Norms

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were widely reformulated without reliance on a ‘natural’ and moralising sentiment of love. Kant was a leader in this movement, as was Victor Cousin in France. In the vast area where it was applied, the Napoleonic Code reinstated parental authority over children up to the age of twenty-five. But the ideals of the eighteenth century were not forgotten; they lived on in novels, plays and operas. We find the ideal of love in marriage widely embraced in memoirs, autobiographies and private correspondence in the nineteenth century.63 A gradual movement toward acceptance of this ideal seemed to be underway, but was interrupted by the First World War, which at first greatly accelerated both the trend toward greater equality for women, and another, much debated trend toward acceptance of premarital sexual activity.64 Fascist movements spawned in the War’s aftermath preached a return to traditional restraint, however. The new media of film and radio marketed stories about romantic love (often leading to marriage) to a vastly expanded audience. Amidst the instability and new possibilities, love retained a vitality that is hard to explain in purely ideological terms.65 By the beginning of the post-war period, salaried employment had taken on a new centrality in determining social status. This change – the rise of the new ‘white collar’ middle class – did more than any legal reform to loosen the strings of parental authority over marital choice. Education and individual character determined income more than ever before, and a good salary enabled men (for the most part, but later women as well) to choose a life partner without reliance on the advice or consent of others, as well as to dissolve such a partnership without fearing loss of status. Thus marriage became a central ‘consumer’ choice; and a wedding industry developed to endow this choice with all of the magic of which capitalist ingenuity was capable.66 The period of political dissent in the 1960s and 1970s brought brave experiments in ‘free love’, ‘open marriages’ and communal living. But these did not endure. No one would have predicted in 1970 – about the time of the rise of new-wave feminism and the gay and lesbian rights movement – that, thirty-five years later, so many men and women would continue to regard marriage as central to success in life, or that gays and lesbians would be clamouring for the right to marry. Love remains heroic. But the heroism that lovers exhibit today is often depicted in relation to their own psychological limitations. Lancelot jousted with Meleagant to liberate Guinevere. Modern lovers usually struggle with themselves. Richardson’s Mr. B. (in his 1740 bestseller, Pamela) is both Pamela’s captor and her eventual devoted liberator. In the movie As Good as It Gets (1997), Melvin Udall (played by Jack Nicholson) offers the following statement as his most compelling complement to Carol Connelly, the waitress he has fallen in love with (played by Helen Hunt): ‘You make me want to be a better man.’ Nicholson’s character proves his devotion by struggling to overcome his obsessive-compulsive disorder, and by displaying generosity toward those in need.

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Such fictions offer a powerful counterpoint to a certain pessimism about human nature that has prevailed since the early nineteenth century. This pessimism has its own fictional embodiments in the works of, for example, Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Milan Kundera, Phillip Roth, Eric Romer or Frédéric Beigbeder. In combination, this range of love stories (the optimistic ones and the pessimistic ones) offers a map on which individuals can locate themselves, formulate hopes and determine how well they are doing. Freud casts a long shadow across this present-day terrain of love outcomes. His doctrine of infantile sexuality shocked contemporaries. He persuaded many that repressed drives could be sublimated into socially useful and altruistic channels. This thesis undercut love, however, rendering it a mere cover for lust, much as the fabliaux writers had done. Not love, but healthy sexual activity and psychological compatibility with partners were the keys to a satisfactory life. Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) was a landmark in the development of such views. Popular magazines such as Esquire, Playboy and Cosmopolitan have disseminated them. Peter Stearns has traced their continuing influence.67 As in the nineteenth century, so in the twentieth, although in a very different way, much expert opinion has remained sceptical, if not hostile, to love. Its post-war triumph is all the more remarkable. Doubtless the structural reasons for this triumph, much discussed among sociologists, have been important. But they may not be the whole story. No one attempting to evaluate this phenomenon should allow themselves to be inadvertently influenced by the long, culturally deep, current of pessimism about sexuality stretching from medieval theologians and fabliaux writers down to Freud, Fitzgerald and Roth. As the next section discusses, the extraordinary impact of Foucault on present-day scholarship about gender and sexuality has been more of a hindrance than a help in this respect.

The Theorisation of Love and Lust as ‘Desire’ When, in 1976, Michel Foucault began to examine the history of sexuality, he took as his starting point a reversal of Freud’s ‘repressive hypothesis’, insisting that sexuality and sexual desire were not natural, but constructions of regulation itself.68 However useful as a critical tool for examining the history of sexual regulation, this starting point helped ensure that the spiritualised eroticism of Western romantic love – and its silent, defining polarity with lust – would remain in the shadow among those who followed Foucault’s lead. During the subsequent decades of all-important new theoretical reflection on genders and sexualities, ‘desire’ became the watchword, the umbrella term for both love and lust, concepts that, in Western history, have been, in actuality, highly differentiated, and even polar opposites of each other.69 The opposition itself was

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occluded from view, and has hardly been noticed, in the outpouring of theory and research that has followed. As Eve Sedgwick has recently remarked, The post-Romantic “power/knowledge” regime that Foucault analyzes, the one that structures and propagates the repressive hypothesis, follows the Freudian understanding that one physiological drive – sexuality, libido, desire – is the ultimate source, and hence in Foucault’s word is seen to embody the “truth,” of human motivation, identity, and emotion. In my own first book on sexuality, for example, I drew on this modern consensus in explaining the term “male homosocial desire” … “in a way analogous to the psychoanalytic use of ‘libido’” … Reducing affect to drive in this way permits a diagrammatic sharpness of thought that may, however, be too impoverishing in qualitative terms.70

One side-effect of this blindness to the distinctive character of romantic love is the current odd scene, in which explicit sexual behaviour enjoys an unprecedented tolerance, while the old love-lust dualism, first expressed in twelfth-century romances and fabliaux, lives on. Cable television channels and mass-market magazines fill up with nudity and near nudity; but the gyrating or carefully posed bodies seldom express affection for each other. We have rejected the age-old regulatory strictures against sexual expression, but we have not yet even raised the question of the love-lust distinction to the level of critical reflection. We know little of its origins, its meanings, its validity, its power. In the film Pretty Woman (1990), for example, Vivian Ward, played by Julia Roberts, forswears her life as a prostitute after experiencing love for a client, Edward Lewis, played by Richard Gere. Gere’s character, likewise, changes his mind about the prostitute that he originally hired to be his escort in a sardonic gesture of protest against the hypocritical world of business in which he worked. In the end, he decides to quit his career as a corporate raider, to join a shipbuilding business with real products and to pursue a love relationship with Ward. At the close of the film, he comes to her apartment building like a knight in shining armour. He arrives to rescue her, standing, with his head through the sunroof of a white limousine, holding up his umbrella like a lance. He escorts her from her window down the fire escape, as if saving a damsel from a castle tower. The film questions the shame associated with prostitution; the point is made explicitly in a conversation between the two lovers. ‘You and I are such similar creatures’, remarks Edward, ‘we both screw people for money’. But this critique of shame is not paired with any commentary on the peculiar Western configuration of spiritualised love – that configuration is taken as a given, and provides the ‘fairy tale’, as they themselves call it, by which the characters save themselves, and each other, from the self-defeating domain of lust.

Points of Comparison To explore the peculiar spiritualised eroticism that is Western romantic love, let us briefly compare it with two other examples of spiritualised eroticism: first,

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that of Heian Japan, taking as a point of departure Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji of about 1020 CE; and, second, that of the Hindu tradition, taking as a point of departure Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, a Sanskrit text written in Bengal around the year 1180. In neither of these settings does one find a dualism that parallels the West’s peculiar love-lust distinction. The Tale of Genji is the tale of a young man’s long series of amorous adventures, set in the exquisitely refined context of the imperial court.71 Genji is the son of the emperor by a low-ranking concubine; he is handsome, wealthy and habituated to privilege. But his political standing is hampered by his mother’s lack of influence. What he does is therefore of relatively little political weight. In his numerous amorous adventures, Genji does not pursue lustful satisfaction at the expense of personal feeling. He is, in a word, no Don Juan. He longs for a kind of highly refined compassionate indulgence from the women who attract him, and he longs to provide the same to them. He searches for the same thing in every relationship. It is true that there is tension between his partners’ desire for exclusivity and his own wandering eye. But this tension is not conceptualised as pitting appetite against mutual fidelity, lust against love. This tension arises as a side effect of Genji’s youthful lack of wisdom. Inexperienced and, yes, arrogant, the author suggests, Genji may be forgiven for his insistent belief that a new adventure might bring him closer to a release from ‘desire’. But the desire Genji seeks release from is conceived in the Buddhist sense, not as concupiscence or drive, but as intention itself, the wellspring of all of this-worldly action.72 Genji does not yet realise in practice what he has been taught all of his life, that all desire in this world is doomed to frustration. (No exception is made for inspired love versus appetitive sex, or faithful love versus casual love.) His connections with women are uplifting – they do provide some relief from frustration – but only just insofar as the pair offer each other a kind of consolation, an echo of heavenly release, by their own refined exchanges of affection. The prevailing notion of refinement in imperial circles was, in fact, highly spiritual in nature. The Buddhist heaven of the Heian period was nothing if not refined; its gods and goddesses were conceived as improved versions of Heian emperors and courtiers, and their temples were constructed on the same principles, and according to the same Sanskrit texts, as the palaces of Kyoto.73 The authorial voice, likewise, sounds the note of indulgence and compassion toward Genji, the same sentiments that inspire so many of his companions, servants and lovers.74 This approach to sexuality continues to inflect Japanese practices long after Genji was composed. Sheldon Garon, for example, reports that Japanese prostitutes in the early twentieth century saw an average of 1.2 clients per day, when French prostitutes of the same period saw four to eight. ‘Compared to ordinary prostitutes in many other societies’, Garon remarks, ‘licensed prostitutes in Japan apparently spent more time eating, drinking, and flirting with clients’.75 In the 1930s, the Japanese Parliament protected the ‘beautiful tradi-

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tion’ of legalised prostitution, even as Tokyo police cracked down on the new nightclubs of the Ginza district where, it was feared, romantic love might flourish. In Japanese hostess clubs today, as Anne Allison has shown, businessmen are offered a release from stress through refined sexual joking, praise and flirting.76 Sexual intercourse is not necessary to the type of release, or consolation, that is pursued in these luxurious clubs. The relationship between marriage and sexually explicit socialising in the lives of present-day corporate employees is complex, sometimes riddled with tension; but it resists reduction to any simple love-lust dichotomy. The twelfth-century Sanskrit Gitagovinda draws on a number of traditions to depict an intense and exclusive dyadic love between Krishna and the cowherd girl Radha. The myth of the god Krishna’s erotic play with gopi or cowherds – who dropped their normal duties and abandoned husbands and families to pursue him across the fields – had long been a popular feature of north Indian devotionalism. But, before Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, no authoritative text had singled out one gopi as Krishna’s favourite or explored the emotions of their relationship in depth. In the Gitagovinda, Krishna and Radha’s love is extramarital, in line with the tradition, but it is also secret. Radha suffers longing and resentment when Krishna is unfaithful to her. In the end, Krishna longs just as deeply for her, however – and the idea of Krishna’s love suffering is a strikingly new element in the story. Finally, they are united in a secret tryst by the secluded bank of a river. There are striking parallels, therefore, between Jayadeva’s text and the troubadour love songs of Europe of the same era, as Lee Siegel has pointed out.77 However, the differences are as important as the similarities. Radha, a simple cowherd, is nonetheless of divine stature herself; the Gitagovinda depicts a mythical or transcendent world, not the world where courtly love affairs were understood to occur – which was in the first instance the everyday world of the court. Both Sanskrit aesthetic theory and bhakti theology insist on the difference between everyday particular emotions, called bhava, and the refined, generalised moods created by poetry, drama or ritual, called rasa, literally nectar or extract.78 This distinction parallels the Greek distinction between passion and reason. Rasa generalises in the same way that reason does. Rasa is not about particular persons but divine suprapersonal verities, just as reason is the tool by which Westerners suppose that they abstract generalised types and conditions from specific circumstances. The passion that unites Krishna and Radha is a form of rasa. It is therefore a mistake to call it ‘passion’, insofar as the Western concept of passion has to do with the appetites, affects or obsessions of specific persons locked into this-worldly action settings, that is, to what in Sanskrit are called bhava. Rasa is no delusion; it is a heightened form of cognition, a means of apprehending a higher reality.79 When Krishna and Radha are united in love, therefore, they are doing something no worldly couple can do. The love celebrated by troubadours and romance writers in Europe, by contrast, was a love between two specific persons – however exem-

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plary, high-ranking or legendary they might be. Imitation by other real persons was not ruled out, it was implicitly encouraged. But the Hindu spiritualised love known as srngara rasa is an important ingredient of the whole tradition; it is the theological doctrine behind many of the classical dance rituals, such as those studied by Frédérique Marglin at the temple of Jagannatha, and it stands in opposition to all extra-religious sexual partnerships, from prostitution to marriage.80 The ritual dancers of earlier periods, as Marglin has noted, were not allowed to marry or have children; to do so would have involved them too much in the particulars of this world. But they were not required to be chaste. They were allowed temporary liaisons with priests and aristocrats of their own temple complexes. Because these liaisons remained temporary, they did not become personal, and therefore could partake of that universalised erotic mood or rasa that was the dancers’ business to understand and promote.81 British invaders of the early nineteenth century were quick to categorise such ritual dancers as ‘temple prostitutes’.82 But ‘prostitute’ and ‘lover’ are both the wrong words for them. Hindu sexual feeling was neither love nor lust.

Conclusion Careful examination of these and other non-western contexts shows that the rule of love in many present-day Western countries is a peculiar and rather recent reconfiguration of some traditional Western ingredients. Western romantic love is particularly unusual insofar as love continues to stand in contrast to lust. It continues to include spiritual expectations that can be realised only in and through a sexual partnership. It is no longer entirely invisible to regulatory institutions, insofar as consent is now a defining feature of legal sexual relations and insofar as psychological and religious norms now designate love as the core emotion of a proper marriage and of the fulfilling life of a couple.83 A great deal has been said by psychologists and sociologists, in self-help literature and popular fiction, about the extraordinary difficulty of conforming to the rule of love in its modern form.84 One must pursue one’s own career in life and care for one’s own needs and manage one’s own growth, but in a way that allows a stable place for the partner at one’s side. One must idealise the partner, but in a special limited way that is safe from disillusionment. This is no place to examine the knotty question whether, or how, the rule of love ought to be opposed or modified. Yet certain ironies of the present scene are worthy of remark. In many venues today, such as South Asia or Northeast Brazil, romantic love is regarded as an innovation of modernity, or an import from the industrialised West, a new, and often a naughty, self-indulgent and self-centred kind of emotion.85 But in those places where its rule is currently unchallenged, love is regarded as an old thing, a natural thing, and the pursuit of love is seen as a kind of quixotic venture, that goes against the grain of

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modern instrumental rationality. This sense of agelessness finds expression in the elaborate ceremonies in which marriages and other sexual partnerships are publicly acknowledged. Agelessness is linked to naturalness, to some degree, but also to the prestige of venerability.86 Love is our inheritance. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s phrase ‘earthly religion’ is more, I think, than just an ironic tag; they have gotten it right. This recognition should, at the very least, stimulate a reconsideration of modernity’s claim to be a secular age. There are numerous parallels, for example, between the experiences reported by early modern Christian mystics and devotional experts, on the one hand, and those reported by participants in present-day love partnerships, on the other.87 In both, disciplined rehearsal of normative emotions, often with the help of guidebooks, or aids in establishing a relationship (with lover or with God). In both, the relationship itself has ups and downs, moments of elation and of despair, of contentment, of boredom. In both, the relationship is expected to grow with time, allowing the devotee to follow a career of love, leading upwards toward closer, ultimately selfless, union with the beloved. In both, the love relationship exists for its own sake, and is supposed to be inherently fulfilling. Some day in the future, historians may regard the present with the same wonder that we regard the age of Teresa of Avila or John Donne – as a period in which human possibilities were unnecessarily constricted by a peculiar set of expectations.

Notes 1. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy. Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde (Paris: Bayard, 2003), 191; Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Das ganz normale Chaos der Liebe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); Bernadette Bawin-Legros, Le nouvel ordre sentimental (Paris: Payot, 2003); Serge Chaumier, La déliaison amoureuse. De la fusion romantique au désir d’indépendance (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999). 2. See, for example, G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jane Fishburne Collier, From Duty to Desire. Remaking Families in a Spanish Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); David Konstan, Sexual Symmetry. Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 3. Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy, 40. 4. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, 191; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Chaos der Liebe. 5. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, 191. 6. Michelle Conlin, ‘Unmarried America’, Business Week, 20 October 2003, and HervieuLéger, Catholicisme. 7. ‘We’ve brought together some fantastic lesbian and gay couples’, Adams continued, ‘who are kind enough to lend their relationship experience to their heterosexual peers. These couples have made it through all of the same problems married couples face, but without the same support systems.’ See ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Couple’, a counselling forum supported for a time in the USA by Lambda Legal Defense Fund, at http://www.lambdalegal.org/cgi-bin/iowa/qa.html.

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8. Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Cinderella Dreams. The Allure of the Lavish Wedding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Céline Lison, ‘Mariages en France. Voyage au coeur d’un renouveau’, National Geographic France, June 2002: 2–19; Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme. 9. On the social shaping of emotions, see William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 10. Quote from a report by the BBC World Service, 2 June 2004 (emphasis added). 11. Leonard Plotnicov, ‘Love, Lust and Found in Nigeria’, in Romantic Passion. A Universal Experience?, ed. William Jankowiak (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 128–140, here 134. 12. Pierre Grimal, L’amour à Rome (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1988); Paul Veyne, La société romaine (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men,Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Konstan, Sexual Symmetry. See also the useful anthology Roman Sexualities, eds Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 13. David M. Halperin, ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?’ History and Theory 28 (1989): 257–274. This disapproval of emotional intensity toward sexual partners continued despite the challenge that was raised against it by the elegiac poets of the end of the Republic and the first years of the Empire. These poets were as opposed to traditional military virtues as they were to the traditional disinterest in emotional attachments to sexual partners; in this respect, they differed sharply from the troubadours of the twelfth century. See, especially, the essays collected in Hallett and Skinner, Roman Sexualities. 14. Some useful titles include: Reto R. Bezzola, Les origins et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident, part II, vol. 2: La société féodale et la transformation de la literature de cour (Paris: Champion, 1960); Henri-Irénée Marrou, Les troubadours (Paris: Seuil, 1971); Rita Lejeune, Littérature et société occitane au Moyen Âge (Liège: Marche Romane, 1979); Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Frances L. Decker, ‘Gottfried’s Tristan and the Minnesang. The Relationship between the Illicit Couple and Courtly Society’, The German Quarterly 55 (1982): 64–79; Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Liebe in Mittelalter’, in Minne ist ein swaerez Spil. Neue Untersuchungen zum Minnesang und zur Geschichte der Liebe im Mittelalter, ed. Ulrich Müller (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1986), 75–110; John Baldwin, The Language of Sex. Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 15. Decker, ‘Gottfried’s Tristan and the Minnesang’; Don A. Monson, ‘The Troubadour’s Lady Reconsidered Again’, Speculum 70 (1995): 255–274. 16. Each provides examples that have come to light; see Keen, Chivalry, 19–21; Dinzelbacher, ‘Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Liebe’, 82. 17. Translation by Kenneth Koch, from the liner notes of Troubadour and Trouvère Songs. Music of the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Lyrichord Early Music Series CD LEMS 8001, 1994). 18. Baldwin, Language of Sex, 65; June Hall Martin McCash argues that such a court of love may well have been held; see her ‘Marie de Champagne and Eleanor of Aquitaine. A Relationship Reexamined’, Speculum 54 (1979): 698–711. 19. This manual displays as much familiarity with Ovid as with the troubadours; its exact teaching has been subject to much controversy, precisely because the author attempted to cover himself by anticipating theological objections. Baldwin, Language of Sex; John C. Moore, ‘“Courtly Love”. A Problem of Terminology’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 621–632; Michael Calabrese, ‘Ovid and the Female Voice in the “De Amore” and the “Letters” of Abelard and Heloise’, Modern Philology 95 (1997): 1–26; Don A. Monson, ‘Andreas Capellanus and the Problem of Irony’, Speculum 63 (1988): 539–572. 20. Alain Libera lists the doctrines extracted from the work that were regarded as heretical; see his Penser le Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 189f. 21. Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au Moyen Age (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); see also Brown, Body and Society.

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22. Purgatorio, Canto XXXI, line 93. English translation from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), 380. 23. La bella donna ne le braccia aprissi; abbracciommi la testa e mi sommerse ove convenne ch’io l’acqua inghiottissi. Indi mi tolse… (Purgatorio, Canto XXI, lines 100–103. Ibid., 381). 24. Kevin Brownlee emphasises the striking contrast between Dido in the Aeneid and Dante’s beloved Beatrice, in ‘Dante, Beatrice, and the Two Departures from Dido’, Modern Language Notes 108 (1993): 1–14; see also Richard Abrams, ‘Illicit Pleasures. Dante among the Sensualists (Purgatorio XXVI)’, Modern Language Notes 100 (1985): 1–41. 25. Benjamin Boysen, ‘Crucified in the Mirror of Love. On Petrarch’s Ambivalent Conception of Love in Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta’, Orbis Literarum 58 (2003): 163–188; Boysen indicates that Ugo Foscolo, for one, condemned this parallelism, see 170. 26. Ibid. 27. In this game involving a group of men and women, one is chosen to be the frog; she must cover her eyes and then guess the identity of the person who touches her, while the other players make confusing noises and gestures. See France, Réunion des musées nationaux, L’art au temps des rois maudits. Philippe le Bel et ses fils, 1285–1328 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1998), fig. 171, 262–264. 28. Several examples are discussed in John Cherry, ‘The Talbot Casket and Related Late Medieval Leather Caskets’, Archaeologia 107 (1982): 131–140. There are also a number of examples at the Musée national du Moyen Age, Paris; for a reproduction of one, see Alain ErlandeBrandenburg, Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, and Dany Sandron, Guide des collections. Musée national du Moyen Age,Thermes de Cluny (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 53: Coffret, Pays Bas, fin du XIVe siècle. See also Madelein H. Caviness, ‘Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed’, Speculum 68 (1993): 333–362, reproduction on 339, for another example. 29. See the most widely used source of this unicorn lore, the Physiologus, a second century CE translation into Latin of a Greek original. An English version of this source is available: Physiologus (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); on the unicorn, see 51. 30. For further discussion of unicorn iconography, see Adolfo Salvatore Cavallo, The Unicorn Tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998). 31. The Reformation put an end to its popularity, by foreclosing ambiguity. Protestant sects became suspicious of elaborate iconography; and the Council of Trent explicitly condemned the use of the unicorn to symbolise Christ. Cavallo, Unicorn Tapestries, 27. 32. For discussion of several examples, see Caviness, ‘Patron or Matron’; and Cherry, ‘Talbot Casket’. See also the front panel of a casket (French, early fourteenth century) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, containing scenes of the fountain of youth, the capture of the unicorn, lovers and the god of love (cupid) – as seen on the Amico Library database, at http://eureka.rlg.org/cgi-bin/ zgate2.orig. Good examples may also be viewed on line at the British Library Images Online, site: http://ibs001.colo.firstnet.net.uk/britishlibrary/index.jsp, search term ‘unicorn’. British Library examples include (1) a marginal illustration in the Percy Psalter (ca 1280), at beginning of Psalm 38, unicorn dying from wounds with horn in the lap of a virgin; (2) armed knights wounding a unicorn whose hooves are in the lap of a virgin, from Dicta Chrysostomi (northern France, ca 1280); (3) an image of Humility (virgin standing on a unicorn) in Frère Laurent, La Somme le Roy, Paris, end of thirteenth century. 33. Keen, Chivalry, 186–187. 34. Ibid., 203; on this whole episode, 201–204. 35. Cavallo, Unicorn Tapestries. 36. Cited in Jean-Patrice Boudet, La Dame à la licorne (Toulouse: Le Pérégrinateur, no date) – a brochure prepared for the Musée National du Moyen Âge. 37. Jean-Patrice Boudet, ‘Jean Gerson et la Dame à la licorne’, in Religion et société urbaine

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au Moyen Âge, eds Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2000), 551–563, quote at 561. 38. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucer and the Cult of Saint Valentine (Leiden: Brill, 1986); see also Jack B. Oruch, ‘St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February’, Speculum 56 (1983): 534– 565. 39. Harry F. Williams, ‘The French Valentine’, Modern Language Notes 67 (1952): 292–295 – who notes that Valentine greetings were simply one form of a more prevalent courtly genre, the salut d’amour. 40. Georges Minois, Les origines du mal. Une histoire du péché originel (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 89f. 41. Baldwin, Language of Sex, 116–127. 42. This compilation, by the Dominican friar Peregrinus, is examined in Rüdiger Schnell, ‘The Discourse on Marriage in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 73 (1998): 771–786. 43. Anatole de Montaiglon, ed., Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, 6 vols. (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1872–1890), III: 35–45. 44. Maintenant est el lit entrez; Ele le prist entre ses braz, D’autre joie, d’autre solaz Ne vous quier fere menssion, Quar cil qui ont entencion, Doivent bien savoir que ce monte; Por ce ne vueil fere lonc conte, Mès andui firent liemant Tel deduit com font li amant En ce qu’il se jouent ensamble. (Ibid., 37). 45. Et puis vint au lit la reïne, Si l’aoire et se li ancline, Car an nul cors saint ne croit tant, Et la reïne li estant Ses braz ancontre, si l’anbrace, Estroit pres de son piz le lace … (Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier de la charrette, ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992), 322, lines 4652–4656; emphasis added). 46. In this sense, Baldwin’s remark that romance and fabliau are ‘in symbiosis’ is both right and crucial, in Language of Sex, 40. 47. Interestingly, David Konstan argues that the ancients had no concept equivalent to lust; see his Sexual Symmetry. 48. In Marie de France’s late twelfth-century lai, ‘Eliduc’, for example, the two lovers, after many years together, enter the cloister, without any suggestion of incongruity; quite the contrary, it is a logical end to lives of devotion. 49. Baldwin, Language of Sex, 63–78. 50. Cherry, ‘Talbot Casket’; Caviness, ‘Patron or Matron’. 51. Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled. Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 59–61. 52. Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 17. 53. Quoted ibid., 20. 54. Minois, Origines, 137–161. 55. Hull, Sexuality State, and Civil Society, 53–106; Danielle Haas-Dubosc, Ravie et enlevée. De l’enlèvement des femmes comme stratégie matrimoniale au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999). 56. See Lucien Febvre’s discussion of Marguerite de Navarre in Amour sacré, amour profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1944); also Benedetta Craveri, L’âge de la conversation (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).

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57. See Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies. Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and Ancients Against Moderns. Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); David M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery. Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Dorothée Sturkenboom, Spectators van hartstocht. Sekse en emotionele cultuur in de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998). 58. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 140, 239–240; Frank Baasner, Der Begriff ‘sensibilité’ im 18. Jahrhundert. Aufstieg und Niedergang eines Ideals (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1988), 50, 54, 73, 80f, 154. 59. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 38–44, 237. 60. Simone Balayé, Madame de Staël. Lumières et liberté (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), 68. 61. According to Hull, ‘The sexual drive was celebrated as the motor of society and the mark of the independent, adult, productive citizen. Self-preservation and the sexual drive (Trieb) were the two most basic urges motivating human activity.’ The sexual drive, Hull continues, was credited as source of: ‘original sociability (the result of sexual attraction), energy resulting in productivity and creativity (partly an analogy to reproduction, partly an extension of the drive for pleasure, for which sexual pleasure stood as the first and most basic example), and independence and freedom (an at once biological and social analogy: sexual capacity occurred only with biological maturity and legitimate sexual relations, that is, marriage, emancipated one from the tutelage of childhood).’ Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 238, 239. 62. James F. Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 232f. 63. On the early nineteenth century, see, for greater detail, Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 211–256. 64. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes. Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 65. Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics Between the Wars (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Francesca M. Cancian, Love in America. Gender and Self-Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 66. Otnes and Pleck, Cinderella Dreams. 67. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool. Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 68. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 69. Judith Butler, ‘Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures’, Theory, Culture and Society 16 (1999): 11–20. 70. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 17–18; quoting from Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 2. 71. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1976). 72. John R. Wallace, ‘Tarrying with the Negative. Aesthetic Vision in Murasaki and Mishima’, Monumenta Nipponica 52 (1997): 181–199; Margaret H. Childs, ‘The Value of Vulnerability. Sexual Coercion and the Nature of Love in the Japanese Court Literature’, Journal of Asian Studies 58 (1999): 1059–1079. 73. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, ‘The Phoenix Hall at Uji and the Symmetries of Replication’, Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 647–672. 74. Childs, ‘Value of Vulnerability’. 75. Sheldon Garon, ‘The World’s Oldest Debate? Prostitution and the State in Imperial Japan, 1900–1945’, American Historical Review 98 (1993): 710–732, quote at 716. 76. Anne Allison, Nightwork. Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 77. Lee Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love in Indian Traditions as Exemplified in the Gîtagovinda of Jayadeva (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).

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78. Siegel provides a detailed discussion of this distinction in Sacred and Profane Dimensions, 42–59; see also Edward C. Dimock et al., The Literatures of India. An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Arjun Appadurai, ‘Topographies of the Self. Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’, in Language and the Politics of Emotion, eds Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 92–112; Frédérique Apffel Marglin, ‘Refining the Body. Transformative Emotion in Ritual Dance’, in Divine Passions. The Social Construction of Emotions in India, ed. Owen Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 212–236. 79. According to Siegel, ‘Rasa as both an aesthetic and a devotional term (as well as a physiological term) provides the link between the profane and sacred dimensions and between the literary and religious traditions.’ Sacred and Profane Dimensions, 42. Here, we see the stark contrast with the European tradition – in the idea of a physiological, that is, a sexual response that can link sacred and profane. If there is any equivalent in the medieval Christian context, it is the tears of the repentant ascetic; see Nagy, Le don des larmes. 80. Contrasting rati (everyday sexual love) and srngara rasa (spiritual eroticism), Siegel remarks, Rati is the basic emotion which in literature crystallizes into the aesthetic experience of love the srngara-rasa. It is the feeling of love that Radha experiences in relation to Krishna; the rasika’s potential for that feeling enables him to empathize with Radha (or Krishna) and through that empathy to experience rasa as a literary connoisseur or as a Vaisnava devotee or as both. The rasika’s own experience of love, or rati, enables him to perceive the rasa in the literary or devotional work and thereby to move from the immanent delight of his own experience, Radha’s or Krishna’s experience, to the transcendent joy of the universal experience. The aesthetic theory of universalization and the bhakti-rasa theology sanctify, give meaning and significance to the rati which as an individual, emotional, sexual experience perpetuates entanglement in the empirical world, the world of pain and pleasure, but which through art and/or devotion is a means of transcendence – the profane is transformed into he sacred by the poetic and/or devotional act. (Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions, 58). 81. ‘The devadasis (ritual dancers) embodying the female aspect of divine sovereignty are considered in most contexts to be living embodiments of the goddess Lakshmi, the consort of Lord Jagannatha. As such, the devadasis can have sexual relations with all the men who share in the sovereignty of their divine husband, the ultimate sovereign. In these relations, the devadasis transfer to men the auspiciousness of Lakshmi.’ Marglin, ‘Refining the Body’, 216. 82. George D. Bearce, British Attitudes Towards India, 1784–1858 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 85; Kunal M. Parker, ‘“A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes”. Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls, 1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998): 559–633. 83. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, 185–212. 84. This point is emphasised by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Chaos der Liebe; they also provide many citations of US and European literature. See also Bawin-Legros, Le nouvel ordre sentimental. 85. Laura M. Ahearn, Invitations to Love. Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Jyoti Puri, ‘Reading Romance Novels in Postcolonial India’, Gender and Society 11 (1997): 434–452; Linda-Anne Rebhun, The Heart is Unknown Country. Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 86. Otnes and Pleck, Cinderella Dreams. 87. Kate Narveson, ‘Sudden Passion, Godly Affection. The Problem of Emotional Authenticity in Early Stuart Devotional Writing’, and Elena Carrera, ‘The Role of the Emotions in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Spirituality. Affective Hermeneutics’, papers delivered to a conference entitled, ‘Emotions in Early Modern Europe and Colonial North America’, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, 7–10 November 2002.

CHAPTER

3

Love of State – Affection for Authority Politics of Mass Participation in Twentieth Century European Contexts ALF LÜDTKE

What feelings drive people to long for or, at least, to welcome domination and those who dominate?1 How might we re-configure notions of mass politics so as to make them more sensitive for the expression of the political practices of the many? In other words, what would a notion of the political look like that conceives of mass groups who act as agents – to produce, not just rule, acts of domination including such awesome manifestations as Nazism and the Second World War?

Domination: Practice without Feelings? Analyses of modernity take a strong focus on those designs and efforts that ‘order’ things and people alike. Among others, and not withstanding fundamental differences between them, both Karl Marx and Max Weber have emphasised the overpowering dynamics of such ordering processes. Both conceived of processes as being driven or, at least, justified by claims of ‘rationalisation’. Disenchantment with anything but the ‘cool’ pursuit of one’s interest would be its inevitable result.2 According to this view, the ‘many’ had no option but to comply.3 Accordingly, the institutionalisation of the state turned on the exercise of power and its disciplinary practices. This held whether it was the ruling classes or the seemingly anonymous necessities of rationalisation or even ‘the market’ that exerted power: both were understood to be responding to the ultimate threat Notes for this section begin on page 71.

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or application of brute force against violators. Thus, the experience (and hence expectation) of being forcibly subdued led the ‘dominated’ to accept their lot. Max Weber, however, did not view the dominated as being totally passive. Although he did not emphasise it, he did hint at the importance of the active contributions made by the ‘dominated’ themselves. This was because only their ‘compliance’ (Fügsamkeit) would allow for and, hence, guarantee domination. The very wording indicates a possible alternative: that one might not bow and ‘make oneself suitable’ to the demands of the dominant. At any rate, the term fügsam or ‘suitable’ is set against its alternative: that ‘the many’ do not bow and make themselves ‘suitable’ to the demands of the dominant. Weber’s point is based on the assumption that in the first instance, people tend to follow reasons and their feelings of unwillingness to comply. It was only in the context of the 1930s that Ernst Cassirer highlighted the way in which the feelings of people were fundamental for politics in general and for the emergence of the modern state in particular.4 It was the positive feelings of the many that ‘made’ the state. In this way, claims made by states or their agents for material and moral contributions from their citizens relied on their positive feelings toward the state in the first place. According to Cassirer, these feelings that were so urgently demanded by the state were stimulated or sustained in rituals. We should take into account the fact that by the time he put this view forward, Cassirer had fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to the USA. He thus operated inevitably in a field of forces as much shaped by New Deal democracy as by Fascism and Stalinism. Cassirer, however, did not focus his analysis of either of these. On the contrary, he was interested in understanding the dynamics of mass support for a modern state that provided individuals with the means of connecting with the common weal. In so doing, he cut across distinctions between democracy and dictatorship that were both well established and morally charged. It was from here that he turned to ‘myth’ and a logic that undercut the dichotomy of rationality versus emotionality. At virtually the same time, another refugee from Nazism turned to the field of the emotions and their role in the recent disasters of politics. At the end of his essay on the work of art in the Middle Ages, Walter Benjamin addressed the principal characteristics of German Fascism. While the Fascists ‘denied people their rights’, they nonetheless ‘granted them their expression’.5 Thus, Benjamin set the ‘expression’ of feelings against the assertion of rights or interests. For him, this was striking evidence of the lack of substance of any claim made by German Fascism that it would allow participation in the state. But how could it be otherwise? The writings of Cassirer, Benjamin’s contemporary, allude to a possible alternative and floats the idea that notions of political participation may have been fundamentally curtailed by a prevailing notion of modernity, according to which participation would have been driven by disenchantment and rationalisation, so that the ‘emotional’ was cancelled out.

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Contrary to the account offered by Benjamin, it is possible that ‘the many’ may have found that Nazism provided an opening up of the specific context in which they lived, not the least in terms of the expression and articulation of emotions they found within themselves and others. Among these feelings I consider the love of state and the love of authority to be prominent. Specific contexts and more general situations that allowed for the open if not the public display of these feelings might as a result be experienced as simultaneously revolutionary and liberating. In the following chapter, I will trace the longue durée of symbolic forms and relate them to short-term situational practices. My aim is to track as closely as possible how actual feelings and their ‘energising’ dimensions are produced.

Cultural Codes of ‘Love’ ‘Love’ refers to cultural codes that have been produced and reproduced within concrete historical settings and times. In the first half of the twentieth century, the code of love equated this feeling with an intense personal attachment to another person and concern for his or her well being, not withstanding possible risk or loss. This notion or rather this projection or imagination of ‘love’ operated across the generations so that long-term and short-term formulations of love came into contact with one another. I shall consider three variant concepts of love that emerged independently, but which in the context of the twentieth century can be seen to be mutually reinforcing. 1. Sentimental love between spouses as it originated in the eighteenth century in France in the households of aristocratic families, and even more so, in bourgeois households. ‘Sentimental love’ meant having feelings and it alluded to relations between equals. It was this particular aspect that fuelled political statements and activities in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6 This social and political aspect has to be kept in mind when the attractions and dynamics of feelings and emotions are discussed. In the context of this essay, however, I will focus on feelings and relations that exist between those who are not equal (or those who are rendered unequal by others). 2. The ‘Father state’ in its dual form of violent intervention and pedagogical regulation. This process gained momentum, albeit unevenly, during the eighteenth century under the title of ‘police’. It reached an intense form in France and subsequently in other European states and territories.7 3. Attachment to one’s task – and the pursuit of this task in and through work.

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The ‘Father State’ The notion and practices of state developed in German territories in two directions – and both were intricately interconnected in eighteenth-century settings. The first one emphasised provisions of ‘security’ while the other focussed on the improvement and well being of the very same subject. Images and guidelines for practice portrayed the prince metaphorically as a ‘father’, thus drawing on the ideas of creator and guarantor for survival and – more than this, for a ‘good life’. In other words, justified by this general claim and purpose, the main task of the state and its agents was to police people.8 Moreover, this dual focus determined the emotional demands and longings of most subjects. Of course, the intensity of these demands or hopes varied tremendously over time, between social groups and, not least, distinctions according to life cycle, age (or generation) and gender. The image of ‘father’, whether as projection or metaphor, resonated in several arenas. Its usage in the arena of religion was well established. In the context of the religious wars and of confessional strife in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, God as ‘father’ had been invoked time and again. This ‘Almighty’ provided grace as ‘He’ handed down punishment and demanded contrition for worldly sins and impropriety against ‘His Unity’ of love and might. Princely authority claimed participation in this divine right. The claim resonated with the notion of the King’s two bodies, which was widely held in late medieval and early modern contexts.9 Accordingly, the king simultaneously did exist in two entities, one representing divine grace while the other embodied worldly might – both united by and in the flesh of the lord of the land. Thus, while the physical body would perish, the divine body remained untouched and intact. Protestant reformation did not abandon this way of thinking. At least in Central Europe, the office of lord of the church (now protestant) was combined with the office of the lord of the realm (as count, duke or king) in the person of the prince. By way of reciprocation subjects demanded provisions for their well being or, at least, survival in times of war or epidemics. In the wake of grave turmoil, as intensified during the Thirty Years War, people obviously became more ready to accept measures for containing deviants, including the threat to terminate the latter’s worldly existence by execution.10 This threat was bolstered by an ongoing practice to rely primarily on corporeal, but also on capital punishment.11 The prince and his agents (police agents or school teachers or – as was the case in many continental states in Europe – pastors) presented a ‘fatherly’ profile in yet another and even more everyday way: the Hausvater (Father of the house) referred to his household as the ganzes Haus (the entire house) and was eager to ‘correct’ those who had been given into his care and custody. Correction meant enforced improvement, and its execution not only impinged on people’s everyday lives, but also connected with them in an intricate manner.

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This was expressed through violence and a wide range of symbolic and material sanctions or gratifications. It was a system of stick and carrot.12 Of course, the ‘children’ obeyed the ‘father state’ not only metaphorically, but also in their everyday practices while retaining a certain stubbornness or self-will (or Eigensinn). In many instances, this combined with various forms of acceptance of, if not devotion to, the state. Both acceptance and devotion were put to the test, however, in times of war. It is important therefore to trace the sentiments that were in play and that arguably impelled young men and their female partners to join war efforts and to put their lives on the line. It is worth scrutinizing the emergence of this particular figuration of statehood more closely in order not revert to those unilinear notions of statemaking that informed the rather unreflecting modernisation theories of the 1960s and 1970s.13 For the purposes of this essay, I will confine my attention to the twentieth century. My focus is on the impact of states of emergency on people and on their forms of (self-)mobilisation. The First and Second World Wars are thus central to the discussion. But under dictatorial regimes such as Bolshevism or the different Fascisms of Italy and Germany, it was the case that people did more than merely accept or loyally fulfil their obligations. On the contrary, irrespective of factors of social class, gender and age difference, the vast majority of the population in such states did not ‘shy away’ from their obligations and even ‘pitched in’ with energy and commitment.14 It is the intensity of their action that is noteworthy here. Individuals as well as civil associations or institutions of state and community (including, of course, the rank and file members of these institutions) demonstrated their support for and good feelings toward the authorities by reporting on what they estimated to be possibly or actually harmful action to the ‘good cause’. In other words, they informed on neighbours, colleagues or friends and passed on their ‘knowledge’ either to their superiors on the spot or to the agents of a special institution, whether in the neighbourhood or further away.15 In the 1930s, reports or ‘denunciations’ became abundant, particularly to the Gestapo. Local branch representatives complained over and over again about receiving reports that were too many and too trivial. As a result, they even sought ways of making the public less eager, asking them to be more careful or to abstain from making such reports altogether. For the agents of the police it was too often the case that purely ‘private’ motives blurred what they were looking for in terms of ‘political’ contestation or an alert to possible danger. In the reports submitted to them, they found that to a large extent (accounts vary between 30 and 60 per cent) that quarrels between neighbours or within households of families dominated.16 Nonetheless, the practice of composing and submitting these reports indicates that those who did so experienced feelings or longings for the state. One of their longings was bound up with the keeping or restoration of ‘order’. What people called for was a greater equality in sharing the burden of war. This was

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obtained whether it was the case of someone who seemed to be evading military service ‘at the front’ (which we can see in cases from Vienna and archives of letters to the police during the First World War, authored primarily by wives of draftees or by female neighbours), or similar cases during the Second World War. The claim was that those who withheld resources or cheated in activities where their neighbours or others claimed that they themselves were ‘pitching in’ should be punished. What we can see here is the surfacing of a specific ‘moral economy of the masses’. It is more difficult to get a sense of how far these practices were inspired not only by the longing to participate in the common cause, but also to show one’s affection to either the Kaiser or (in many ways a rather different proposition) to the Führer, who had risen to that position from humble beginnings. We need then to consider other practices as well. Denunciations are a prime arena of activities indicating forms of trust in or attachment to authority and its agents. In the case of the Nazi rule, we have the example of lowlevel participation in the activities of the several hundred thousand Blockwarte (neighbourhood watch), who kept their eyes open and reported on what they saw and considered meaningful for those ‘higher up’, occasionally also ‘peeping in’ or intruding into their neighbour’s privacy.17 In addition to this, the range and popularity of periodic conspicuous demonstrations of Volksgemeinschaft deserve more serious attention than scholars have paid them so far. For instance, it is interesting to see how the Eintopfsonntag18 is recalled in oral histories with signs of embarrassment but also with fondness. My reading of this is that the mixture of embarrassment and disbelief in these recollections speaks of something that was stronger than an enforced or grudging acceptance of these ceremonial events. One could view in a similar way the sacrifice of wedding rings as gifts to the nation that was organised on a large scale in Fascist Italy in 1935/36.19 The Work and Emotions of being German The claims to feel love for authority resonated – on yet another plane – with an imaginary of German work that consisted in visions of its unmatched excellence. Prior to 1914, this took the form, for example, of images of Germanbuilt steamships as they won the Blue Ribbon crossing the Atlantic; there was also the case of battleships built to demonstrate the superiority of ‘German craftsmanship’, thus contesting the British claim for superiority on the high seas. In like manner, the arrival of electric lighting for German cities stimulated emotions of pride as did the Zeppelin craze. During the First World War, military gear dominated this field of the imaginary completely: submarines torpedoing war- and merchant-ships alike, artillery bombarding Paris from an immense distance, or the Dicke Bertha, which was a high calibre howitzer capable of breaking through almost any armour (the nickname was a reference to the Krupp family, who controlled a world-famous industrial and armament

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complex in Germany). These guns and ships demonstrated to friends and foes alike that ‘German quality work’ was perfectly suited for both tools of peacetime and the most destructive of weapons. Photographs and stories praising these accomplishments circulated in newspapers or illustrated reviews, while film clips that were shown throughout the country may have similarly fuelled feelings of pride. At the same time, however, such food for sentiments did not actually feed the townsmen (and women), who increasingly suffered hunger due to the shortage (since early 1915) of basic foodstuffs (when, for instance, hogs had to be slaughtered on a large scale), not to mention the ‘cabbage winter’ of 1916/17. Letters from the home front amply show bitterness and occasionally rage among ‘the many’ who had to cope with privation.20 Yet such emotions of bitterness or rage did not totally dominate. Letters to and from wives, parents or fiancées still attested to feelings of stolidly keeping one’s ground, and some even expressed pride. People might grumble or curse the Kaiser or ‘those above’, but at the same time, they expressed confidence in the belief that it was possible to cope with hard times on one’s own. Whatever these feelings, they were expressed in a contained manner. In public settings they remained subdued, while figuring prominently in semi-public settings, such as chatting in the hallway, or in exchanges between relatives or among loved ones. The focus was not on spectacular events, and what mattered were gestures and symbolic signs and actions. In other words, what counted was the fact that letters were written and sent, usually accompanied (and thus augmented) by a package of homemade cookies, hand-knitted stockings or a cake, in order to provide a taste, feeling or smell that was particularly cherished by the addressee. This practice bore a resemblance to the way that people engaged in other arenas in their everyday lives. The point of resemblance was in the intense direction of skill toward taking care of a task – in this case the task of caring for one’s relationships – that resembled work elsewhere, or the care and effort taken to operate (machine) tools in a factory or, for that matter, to harvest potatoes. These activities also had some level of resemblance to the handling of a machine gun in the trenches or participation in a storm troop assault. Regardless of the different settings involved, what mattered was engagement with and devotion to one’s task that provided the impetus for practices of work in any of these arenas.21 It was clear that, from the late nineteenth century, people from different milieus, classes and even generations had increasingly referred to ‘German quality work’.22 Its advocates aimed at promulgating the idea that there was a competitive edge to German industrial products, and at this time such claims went against the better knowledge of most experts. Nonetheless, working people were ready to accept such claims because they were able to interpret the propaganda as containing the recognition of the sweat, toil and labour they invested every day in work. Why should they then protest if a wider public finally began to view the skill of workers and their attachment to their job or

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‘honour’ in a new light? And why should they not press for this idea and the foundational images associated with it to be extended to encompass the whole range of work practices and work experiences, reaching beyond the factory floor or the coal-mine to refer also to ‘female’ tasks such as nursing the sick or washing and repairing clothes? ‘German Quality Work’:The Engagement With Work After the end of the First World War, a major arena in which feelings of uncertainty about individual futures and the future of the German nation was no longer available: the realm of the military and of warfare. But already in 1919, journalists pointed to a possible alternative: work would now be the only field where it would be possible to fight the enemy and re-establish the ‘honour’ of the individual and the nation. The emphasis on work appealed to many Germans, right across the divides of class and politics. If after the war it seemed as if there was nothing left, the option seemed to be to direct all energy and devotion toward ‘doing a good job’ and thus to develop and manufacture products that would outclass those of the country’s competitors, especially from the ‘enemy nations’. Although Germany had lost the war, by shifting its energies to this new battleground, the field of work, the German nation would be able to secure a second chance.23 The feeling involved in this gained momentum because the national cause would now supersede party affiliation and political groupings. Aspirations to regain lost territory (in both literal and figurative terms) came into evidence, for example, during the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. At this point, masses of German workers (including socialist and communist revolutionaries of 1918) and their families rallied to defend the ‘fatherland’ against what they saw as encroaching barbarians, who in this case were Welsche (French), or ‘frog-eaters’, and especially their African troops.24 In the years that followed, wide-ranging shifts in the labour policies adopted by management directly affected certain segments of the labour force. Mass production in the electrical manufacturing industry, for example, lowered demand for skilled work and workers. The result was that union officials and observers as well as those directly concerned protested against this downgrading of skills. At the same time, however, semi-qualified jobs were increasingly offered, with the result that the unskilled worker had new opportunities.25 These changes, however, at least in some segments of industry (rather less so in agriculture, and following a different rhythm in each industry) came to feed notions of work that revolved around the ‘honour’ of the worker and the quality of what he produced, as well as of the processes by which the product was brought into being. Notions of the ‘honour of work’ and of the specific ‘quality’ that producers claimed for their products and their work called up feelings within the worker. Accordingly, the written word, but more especially pictures, represented an imaginary that emphasised muscular males who displayed bodily strength and dexterous determination at the point of production.26

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In the 1920s, however, politicians across the board took the view that emotions could only be regarded as aberrant and fatal. Political action had to be ‘reasonable’ and, thus, needed to be cleansed of that messy irrationality provided by feelings. Representatives of the political left in particular considered that the politics they strove for was solely informed by people’s ‘interests’ and their rational calculations about action. According to this view, it was the economics of cash that would powerfully predetermine notions of the political among the members of workers’ organisations (both socialist and Christian). Thus, a fundamental criterion for grasping properly the interest of the individual and, even more so, of the collective interest was the issue of income or wage. But one of the unspoken assumptions of this model of rational man was the power of the cultural claims and emotional bonds that were symbolised in and by ‘German quality work’. The range of such notions – and the direct connection that people made between their practice at work and their sense of ‘Germanness’ – surfaced even more strongly when the context did not provide that respect to which ‘quality workers’ felt accustomed. An account from the margins shows how the self-definitions of people as German quality workers took precedence even over their affiliation to groups of fellow communists. This is particularly the case of several thousand skilled workers who migrated from Germany to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and many of whom saw job opportunities open up while the economy at home slumped. Yet an appreciable number of these migrants were, of course, primarily driven by their commitment to socialism and communism. Nonetheless, the letters that a number of them sent to the Moscow German language daily newspaper Deutsche ZentralZeitung revealed how they felt rejected by their hosts and perceived their hosts’ disgust at the migrants.27 The accounts penned by the latter testify not only to their individual dislike of the new environment in general, but, even more, also to the feelings of increased bitterness triggered by the denial of respect that was demonstrated by their Russian mates and superiors alike for the way that they carried out their job. One of these German workers in the USSR, Fritz Loew, wrote on 30 March 1933 to the editors of the Zentral-Zeitung. He told an appalling story of continuous harassment or, at least, of improper treatment by superiors and fellow workers alike. Suffering from hunger, he had nonetheless, as he reported it, proposed improvements. Those in charge of a factory that was building locomotives, for example, had turned down his proposal to construct a cart for transporting heavy objects. The cart that he proposed placed the object’s weight on the axle and the wheels of this cart; by contrast, existing carts put all of the weight on the arms of the man who manoeuvred it. As Loew put it, Russian co-workers and especially those who called themselves technicians or engineers had ignored if not actually belittled his proposal.

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How could a ‘simple worker’ claim to have better ideas than themselves? Loew added: Our proposals are not inventions that come out of thin air; on the contrary, they are firmly grounded in practical experience gained in Germany. The others (the Russians, A.L.) do not come to us to ask for explanations or advice. They would consider that to do so would be dishonourable (‘man hält dies unter seiner Würde’).

Bitterness mixed with anger spread among many of these Germans. In the end, a considerable number of them returned to Germany, most of them doing so after the Nazis had seized power.

Fascism: ‘The Masses can Express Themselves’ Timothy Mason has shown how workers stubbornly persisted in their pursuit of securing higher wages during the armament boom of the late 1930s.28 They employed the methods for fighting piece-rates, including techniques of industrial sabotage, that they had been developing and using for decades. And yet statements of contemporary observers from the illegal Social Democratic parties present a different account of workers’ practices outside of the shop floor: ‘The masses (i.e., the proletarian masses, A.L.) remain quiet and accept everything.’29 It was not, however, just the attraction of enjoying new powers that lulled into acquiescence those who were liable to cry out and revolt, that is, the proletariat. The range of symbolic and material gratifications the Nazi authorities offered allowed for hidden or even public expression of feelings of satisfaction (if not happiness) among ‘common people’ in Germany.30 The longing to be now ‘respected as a working man and, thus, as a human being’ could be satisfied, at least occasionally. Such practices could resonate with other encounters, such as the one a French intellectual reported from 1935/36 in his diary. Denis de Rougemont, thirty years of age (and making his living as a language teacher), attended a Nazi rally on 11 March 1936 in a local assembly hall: A floodlight focuses on a small man in brown clothes who appears at the entrance (of the meeting hall) ecstatically smiling. 40,000 people, 40,000 arms rose in one single movement. Slowly the man advances saluting the masses in slow movements like a bishop while the shouts of the people roar like thunder.31

The observer observes the people around him: ‘They are standing upright and shout rhythmically and in a chorus, their eyes being fixated on this lighted dot in the distance, on this face smiling while many are in tears watching him.’ Recounting his own feelings, de Rougemont emphasises his ‘awe’, and he seems still to tremble from ‘being overwhelmed’ and ‘physically overpowered’. The event he is witnessing appears to him as a ‘sacred ceremony’ exercising force

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that he (so he notes) feels stronger than the collective body of tight bodies surrounding him. And as for these bodies, looking around he finds himself among ordinary people: ‘workers, labour service men, young girls and women from working class background’. Other recollections and reports on the 1930s allude to similar feelings – at least indirectly. In accounts produced after the event, such feelings and their articulations tended to be silenced, or figured as being politically embarrassing and morally disgraceful. The women interviewed by Margarete Doerr still mention feelings of ‘shame’ about behaviour ‘then’ while recalling such past situations, although some of them do recall experiencing irritation at the time.32 In the 1930s, however, their response was different and they went on to cooperate with or to support those in power: as they recollected it, they felt they could not stand the anxiety of being disconnected from what they felt was an ‘embracing whole’.

Engaging in the Work of Destruction: Satisfaction and Pleasure? Melita Maschmann, born in Berlin in 1918 and brought up in a middlebourgeois family, worked from 1938 as an employee with the ‘association of girls’ (BDM, the obligatory organisation for young women). In the late 1950s, she recalled how she had fallen enthusiastically for the Nazi cause. She had thought, she said, of ‘the Germans’ as being involved in a military struggle, and herself as an active participant driven by a mix of self-sacrifice and self-indulgence. Speaking of this in the late 1950s, she diagnosed ‘devotion’ (Hingabe) as being a highly charged ‘sweet feeling’ that drove her to ever higher levels of commitment and work until the very end of Nazi rule. It was this feeling that made her cleanse her mind immediately of perceptions of the brutality perpetrated against the Jews that she observed on 10 November 1938 in the streets of Berlin.33 She recalled similar feelings from her activities as leader of a work camp in occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943. She explicitly notes the mixture of ‘cold distance’ and unwavering contempt that she felt for the members of the occupied territory whenever she had to deal with them directly, for instance, when handing out punishments for overstepping the rules of the camp and the occupation. Letters from soldiers have become an important source of exploring how Nazism, and its waging of war, was accepted by most Germans. Of particular interest are those letters written by draftees or volunteer soldiers who had worked in manufacturing industries before joining the military. Many of these former employees wrote to their previous companies thanking them for occasional parcels, especially at holidays like Christmas. Moreover, some of these soldiers even wrote regularly to the company or to some former colleague at

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the company, obviously treating the person of the company as a kind of a parent or foster relative.34 To explore this I draw on letters of workers and soldiers from Leipzig and Chemnitz, respectively. The soldiers stated explicitly that there were striking similarities between industrial workers and military service or military work. In other words, they felt in a specific way more ‘at home’ with many of their comrades who had been recruited from other backgrounds. In a letter from June 1943, a sergeant speaks of the flight he had made some days before, when they passed over Warsaw en route. He wrote: ‘We flew several rounds over Warsaw, and recognised with enormous satisfaction the total destruction of the Jewish living quarters. Here our troops have done a truly great job.’35 Clearly the role of the military entails being prepared to kill, and when it comes to battle, the danger of being killed is as imminent as is the possibility that one might kill or wound others. The emotions involved in these situations were rarely addressed directly in the letters that soldiers sent home.36 Indeed, some of them displayed a specific sort of humour when it came to the ever-present dangers of soldiering. In September 1944, for instance, a soldier stationed at the homefront not far from his hometown, the city of Chemnitz, was shot at by an allied airplane. The bullet missed him by just a few meters. In a letter some days later, he dryly commented that it was not necessary to be very far away in order to be killed in war (his reference being to the distance between home and those comrades who were serving a long way away, such as soldiers in Russia or even Italy). In the same letter, the author gave details about a hunt for ‘Russians’ who were obviously escaped Ostarbeiter, and then expressed joy at seeing how these escapees trembled upon being caught.37 Other previous employees of the same company sent letters. A young woman, who had been conscripted (dienstverpflichtet), worked as a secretary since the spring of 1943 to an officer of the ordinance corps in the Generalgouvernement, the part of Poland that had not been incorporated into the Reich but designated as a colony and which was, in fact, the site of the Holocaust. Her superior, who in his civilian job had been in the same Chemnitz-based company that she had worked in, was killed by a bandit or a partisan in February of 1944. She writes of her horror and sorrow and concludes: ‘His death causes a lot of extra work although we got a new person to take over his job but this one has to get used to things … Nevertheless I enjoy my task (Einsatz) a great deal, and I am almost ready to say that I do not want to come home now. Indeed, all is fine.’38

Concluding Remarks The emergence of modernity may have transformed emotionality but it did not erase it. What is required therefore are explorations of the specific ways

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in which feelings were experienced and symbolised, but also how they might have been silenced or suppressed. ‘Emotionology’, the term coined by the Stearnses, denotes an approach that has pioneered such investigation in history.39 The two authors focus on ‘emotional standards’ as favoured by social groups in their respective settings or conjunctures. Resulting studies reconstructed classifications of feelings from a wide variety of textual documents. However, this emphasis on the social construction of emotions left out the very dynamics of feelings operating ‘beyond’ any text. William Reddy has pointed out that articulations of emotions may be different from other genres of voicing one’s state of mind or calling for action. Accordingly, such articulations work as ‘emotives’. That is to say: terms denoting specific feelings not only register but actively and instantaneously evoke or shape these very feelings.40 In addition, it becomes obvious that singling out a certain feeling (like ‘jealousy’, as Peter Stearns did in one of his studies) misses the specifics of feelings: They never appear in isolation. Contextualization needs to include the fact that at any one time individuals experience a variety of feelings whether people do operate as singles or participate in group action. Yet, the issue is not merely the presence and impact of feelings; at the same time their transformation needs scrutiny. At least certain terms have undergone dramatic changes as to both their meaning and their emotional charge. The German term Weib (woman) is a case in point: from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries Weib did refer to a woman in good standing; the term also transmitted a strong emotional charge. Nowadays, however, pejorative connotations have wiped out that previous meaning; they also have lost much of their emotional charge. Similarly, we might ask which feelings and emotions were not only indicated but, perhaps, triggered by terms such as Abreibung (thrashing) or Bombenstimmung (joyful mood) that were held to be indicative for pro-Nazi views among friends and foes alike.41 Or what about German soldiers at the Eastern front during World War II who mentioned der Russe or, more colloquially, der Russki (the Russian) over and over again in their letters to families or friends at home? What were the feelings that grounded and contextualized such a term? And how did the emotional charge alter as the war unfolded for both those who used the term and those on its receiving end? Furthermore, is it possible to track two distinct but related threads of resonances connected to Russe or Russki? One would run along a spectrum that went from contempt to fear of the enemy (yet even include respect or admiration); the second would show peaks and troughs of the emotional charge as feelings became more intense, less intense, and, then, more intense again. Neither the presence of feelings nor the shifting intensity of their emotional charge are ‘given’ properties of the words (or signs) the people of the past employed in their (inter-)actions. Thus historians’ efforts to reconstruct

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past feelings are not only hampered by both distance and difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Even more, the limits of present day awareness may blind and deafen researchers to the very feelings people experienced in the past.

Notes 1. I prefer the term ‘feelings’ because it emphasises the sensual dimension, while ‘emotions’ seem to stress the cultural codes that transform feelings into meaning. At any rate, I do not consider the two terms mutually exclusive, but rather that they allude to different facets of the same issue, ‘thing’, and practice. Still, the term emotion seems to focus specifically on registers of perceiving but also theorising; thus, emotions address feelings in theoretical refraction. 2. Karl Marx referred to practices of work in different ways. This included terms that alluded to ‘living labour’ and concomitantly to the ‘fire of labour’. See Karl Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1965 (1867/1890)), 198, 445. In the case of Max Weber, it was particular religious motives and ‘ethics’ that drove or might have equally hindered people from working. In this case, however, ‘ethics’ entailed a sense of calculation, so that it was the cognitive rather than the emotional dimension that was in play. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992 (1904/1905)), 13–38, 102–125. 3. The ‘many’ refers to those who operate or perceive themselves as being not on the ‘heights of command’, but below, beyond or outside of them. My intention in using this term is to avoid the often-misleading connotations of ‘the masses’ or of those terms intended to denote ‘ordinary’ people according to classifications of social rank or function. Moreover, the term ‘the many’ also alludes to the fact that even groups that are strongly cohesive are made up of individuals who come together, and operate, and ‘stand’ together. 4. Ernst Cassirer, Der Mythus des Staates. Philosophische Grundlagen politischen Verhaltens (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1985 (1949)), 234, 346–360. See esp. 377 on the ‘power of the imagination’ that ‘moves big masses nowadays’. 5. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1/2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974 (1935)), 431–469, here 467. 6. William M. Reddy, ‘Sentimentalism and its Erasure. The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution’, Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 109–152. 7. Achim Landwehr, Policey im Alltag. Die Implementation frühneuzeitlicher Policeyordnungen in Leonberg (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000); Georg Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung in Paris. Zur Entstehung und Duchsetzung von Normen im städtischen Alltag des Ancien Régime (1697– 1715) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2004); Alf Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 1815–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 8. Herfried Münkler, Im Namen des Staates. Die Begründung der Staatsraison in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987). 9. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1981); and for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 10. See Pieter Spierenburg, ed., The Emergence of Carceral Institutions. Prisons, Galleys and Lunatic Asylums 1550–1900 (Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit, 1984). The perspective pursued here resonates with but also is different from Michel Foucault’s emphasis on the change of power from direct physical enforcement to means which ‘produce’ compliance by a combination of the ‘arrangement of bodies, surfaces, lights and gazes’ and the practices of minutely (self-)disciplining everyone’s body, thus constituting a disciplinary mode and, more generally, a ‘microphysics of power’. Cf. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 203, 140.

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11. Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 12. Alf Lüdtke, ‘“Sicherheit” und “Wohlfahrt”’, in “Sicherheit” und “Wohlfahrt”. Polizei, Gesellschaft und Herrschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Lüdtke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 7–33, esp. 12–22; Lüdtke, ‘Gewalt des Staates – Liebe zum Staat. Annäherungen an ein politisches Gefühl der Neuzeit’, in Rationalitäten der Gewalt. Staatliche Neuordnungen vom 19. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, eds Susanne Krasmann and Jürgen Martschukat, (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007), 197–213.. 13. Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Peter B. Evans, ed., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). In contrast, Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974) overcomes such matrix by pursuing two different and longstanding historical trajectories for Continental Europe. 14. See also the comparison of these to a rather different setting, i.e., the US New Deal by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Entfernte Verwandtschaft. Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus, New Deal, 1933– 1939 (Munich: Hanser, 2005). 15. Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society. Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); see also the more sceptical stance of Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror.The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 16. Bernward Dörner, ‘Alltagsterror und Denunziation’, in Alltagskultur, Subjektivität und Geschichte. Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte, ed. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1994), 254–271, 263. 17. Hans Mommsen and Dieter Obst, ‘Die Reaktion der deutschen Bevölkerung auf die Verfolgung der Juden 1933–1943’, in Herrschaftsalltag im Dritten Reich. Studien und Texte, ed. Hans Mommsen (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1988), 374–426; Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann, ‘Der “Blockwart”. Die unteren Parteifunktionäre im nationalsozialistischen Terror- und Überwachungsapparat’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 48 (2000): 575–602. 18. Eintopfsonntag meant the nationwide sharing of a simple meal not during weekdays, but on a Sunday. This conspicuous action (or rather this campaign) was widely advertised in the media of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and is – albeit shyly – recalled in oral history interviews I undertook during the summer of 1985 with retired machine construction workers of Henschel Company at Kassel. These men had been teenagers or were in their early twenties around 1938. Most of them, with a chuckle, but in some detail mused about the mixture of indignation and relief, if not mild pleasure they related to the respective stew – or to their efforts to avoid it. The tapes are kept in my research archive at the former Max-Planck-Institute for History, Göttingen. 19. Petra Terhoeven, Liebespfand fürs Vaterland. Krieg, Geschlecht und faschistische Nation in der italienischen Gold- und Eheringsammlung 1935/36 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2003). 20. Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning. Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I in Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); “Zieh’ Dich warm an!” Soldatenpost und Heimatbriefe aus zwei Weltkriegen. Chronik einer Familie, ed. Frank Schumann (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1989). 21. Even reports of those who, like Dominik Richert, finally deserted in the midst of the disintegration of the German army from the spring of 1918 onward, refer to feelings of satisfaction if not joy in relation to both soldiering and warfaring – feelings they had experienced before deserting. See Dominik Richert, Beste Gelegenheit zum Sterben. Meine Erlebnisse im Kriege 1914–1918 (Munich: Knesebeck & Schuler, 1989); on the army’s disintegration after the spring of 1918 see Wilhelm Deist, ‘Verdeckter Militärstreik im Kriegsjahr 1918’, in Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes. Eine Militärgeschichte von unten, ed. Wolfram Wette (Munich: Piper, 1992), 146–167. On resonances between warfare and industrial work see Alf Lüdtke, ‘War as Work’, in No Man’s Land of Violence. Extreme Wars in the 20th Century, eds Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 127–151. 22. The emphasis here was on both products and the process of production. Contrasting with the way that the trademark ‘Made in Germany’ was forced upon German manufacturers

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by British competitors, who were trying to stigmatise (what were presumed to be) inferior German products, the emphasis on ‘German quality work’ aimed at appropriating the trademark and turning it into a symbol of pride of superiority; see Sydney Pollard, ‘“Made in Germany”. Die Angst vor der deutschen Konkurrenz im spätviktorianischen England’, Technikgeschichte 53 (1987): 183–195. 23. Hermann Pankow, Vom Felde der Arbeit. Eine Auswahl von Erzählungen, Schilderungen, Gedichten und Urteilen aus Heimat und Fremde (Leipzig: Dürr, 1920). 24. See on the emotional furore of the anti-Bolshevik Freicorps but also of military activists of the ‘Red Army of the Ruhr’ 1919/1920 Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 2 vols. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980) (English: Male Phantasies). For the continuation, or, more precisely, revitalisation of such emotions during the occupation of the Ruhr area by Allied troops and, in turn, German resistance in most of 1923, see Michael Ruck, Die Freien Gewerkschaften im Ruhrkampf 1923 (Cologne: Bund, Verlag, 1986); and Gerd Krüger, ‘Straffreie Selbstjustiz. Öffentliche Denunzierung im Ruhrgebiet, 1923–1926’, Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen SOWI 27 (1998): 119–125. 25. See for this Alf Lüdtke, ‘“Deutsche Qualitätsarbeit”, “Spielereien” am Arbeitsplatz und “fliehen” aus der Fabrik. Industrielle Arbeitsprozesse und Arbeiterverhalten in den 1920er Jahren. Aspekte eines offenen Forschungsfeldes’, in Arbeiterkulturen zwischen Alltag und Politik. Beiträge zum europäischen Vergleich in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Friedhelm Boll (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1986), 155–199, here esp. 159–167. 26. As for photography, not only publishers and journalists, but also authors increasingly used visual media, which in itself was turning into an icon of modernity. It is clear that depictions of fuming smoke stacks and shining machinery or their polished products closely resonated with the imagery of industry at the same time that was being publicised and employed in the US, in France or, for that matter, in the Soviet Union. 27. See GARF, Moscow, Fonds 5451, Holdings of Trade Unions, Inventory 39, file 100 (Deutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung, Moscow), 42–42a. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Viktorija Tjashelnikova and Dr. Sergey Zhuravlev (both in Moscow) for directing me to this material. 28. Timothy W. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, ed. Jane Caplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), on the containment of the working class in Nazi Germany, 231–273; Timothy W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich. Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1977). 29. Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Sopade, 1934–1940, vol. 4: 1937 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1980), 1239. 30. On the range of these efforts of Nazi agencies addressing industrial workers, see Alf Lüdtke, ‘What remained from the “Fiery Red Glow”?’, in The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Lüdtke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 198–251; as to a village context see Werner Freitag, Spenge 1900–1950. Lebenswelten in einer ländlich-industriellen Dorfgesellschaft (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1988). 31. Denis de Rougemont, Journal aus Deutschland 1935–1936 (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1998), 62–66. 32. Margarete Doerr, “Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat…”. Frauenerfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg und den Jahren danach, vol. 3: Das Verhältnis zum Nationalsozialismus und zum Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1998), 193–381. 33. Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered. A Dossier on My Former Self (New York: AbelardSchuman, 1965), 56. 34. See my Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1993), 406–410. 35. Sergeant Herbert H., 16 June 1943, Sächsiches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Sack, No. 353, 46. 36. This is discussed in Klaus Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten – nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegserlebnis – Kriegserfahrung, 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998); Martin Humburg, Das Gesicht des Krieges. Feldpostbriefe von Wehrmachtssoldaten aus der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998).

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37. SaechsStA Chemnitz, Guenter und Haussner, 260/261, 27 September 1944. 38. Ibid., 12 February 1944. 39. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, ‘Emotionology. Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985), 813–836; Peter N. Stearns, Jealousy. The Evolution of an Emotion in American History, New York: New York University Press, 1989. 40. Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; cf. fn. 6. 41. See the scrupulous collection and nuanced reading of such terms by the eye- and earwitness, the philologist Victor Klemperer who had been expelled from university in 1935 and persecuted but managed to survive. See his account: Lingua Tertii Imperii. Notizbuch eines Philologen, 19th edn (Leipzig: Reclam, 2001 (1946)).

CHAPTER

4

Overseas Europeans Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy LILIANA ELLENA

Introduction The set of discourses connecting love with modernity has intersected the positioning of Europe over other cultures in various ways. Scholars in the field of cultural history and anthropology have underscored the connection between the canonisation of courtly love and the Eurocentric presuppositions that fulfilled the age of imperialism, criticising the assumption that romantic love was unique to European civilisation.1 Other connections may be found in the nineteenth century shift from discourses on ars amatoria to scientia sexualis in the field of social sciences. Caroline Arni has remarked, for example, how, at the end of the century, part of the relevance of the traditional axis of inter-European comparison that shaped the long tradition of treatises on love in Europe had been lost, while attention was increasingly turned toward pre-modern societies understood both in time and in space as ‘primitive societies’.2 The work of Paolo Mantegazza, one of the founders of Italian anthropology, is quite significant in that respect. In contrast with the first two volumes of his Trilogia dell’amore, the last volume was devoted to sketching a huge history of the love relations of the human race, and was largely based on cross-cultural and ethnographical comparison. Later on, the entire work (1872–1885) became to be internationally considered as an early model of modern sexology and was translated as the Trilogy of sex.3 These remarks suggest that the casting of the discourse on love at the heart of the making of Europe’s modernity is an historical process that cannot be Notes for this section begin on page 91.

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charted in Europe alone. Many of its assumptions were based, at least partially, on discursive and practical forms of knowledge shaped by colonial experience and concerns. By looking at the debate on Europe and love from this perspective, I will discuss in the following pages two constitutive dimensions of it. The first lies in the prominent public function given to the sphere of intimate relationships. The vocabulary of ‘love’ pervading political representations of imperial rule and intercultural encounter declined within multiple discursive formations, which range from passion and desire to affection and family ties.4 The second dimension concerns the unstable relationship between definitions of sexuality and emotions and how the boundaries between them have been historically and culturally defined. As William Reddy argues in his contribution to this book, the polarity between love and lust, albeit deeply informing European conceptions of love as a peculiar form of spiritualised eroticism, has been given little scrutiny. However, there may be no other field in which such dualism has been overtly dislocated and reaffirmed as much as the colonial encounter. The inscription of sexuality within the language of race, whether culturally or biologically defined, offered the basis for a racialisation of this paradigm, while exotic and colonial literature has largely contributed to the dissemination and popularisation of these stereotypes to a wider audience. Alain Ruscio’s survey on French production brilliantly unveils how the ubiquity of the trope of love in colonial literature has little to do with notions of passion and emotions usually associated with romance. It is a literature de l’échec which denies any romantic fulfilment.5 To look at the intersection between these two dimensions is pivotal in order to avoid the trap inscribed within colonial discourse itself. As Ann Laura Stoler has argued, the recurrent concerns with sexuality and intimacy were not merely metaphoric of sets of power and domination, but they point out the management of sexuality as a defining feature of the making of racial boundaries across the colonial divide.6 In order to trace the crossroads of these two dimensions, I will focus on a case study based on the multiple and shifting narratives of love in Arnaldo Cipolla’s travel and fiction writings. Cipolla’s texts, written between 1907 and 1938, cut across different genres in the field of highbrow and popular culture, covering a phase in which the connection between Europeanness and colonialism acquired a peculiar political relevance in Italy. In the early 1920s, Cipolla, a journalist, became the champion of a hybrid genre that could be called the geopolitical romance, in which geography and sexuality are narrated in terms of racial recovery vis-à-vis the post-war crisis of Europe. By recalling and popularising the nineteenth century heroic representation of European discovery and exploration, Cipolla made the encounter of pleasurable sexualities the very site in which the superiority of modern societies and of ‘European love’ is asserted and made evident through cultural and ethnographic comparisons. More specifically, I shall refer to his writings on the Belgian Congo, which underwent significant changes under pressure from

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the Italian Fascist Regime’s official vision of colonial Africa. In the first part of this essay, I will sketch out the genealogy of the specific connection between virility, intimacy and colonialism through the comparison between fiction and travel writings. The endless reworking of Cipolla’s texts highlights around the term ‘European’ a field of tensions addressing not only anxieties and dangers arising from inter-racial sexual contacts, but also even more so the anxieties and dangers arising with regard to different experiences of colonial rule. In this context, stereotyped representations of colonial love became the ground on which tensions surrounding conflicting definitions of European civilisation were shaped, not so much by the need to govern colonial subjects, but to carve out ‘the domestic subject of Euroimperialism’.7

Overseas Europeans: A Euro-African Romance in Congo In 1907, Arnaldo Cipolla started a dazzling career as a special correspondent that brought him to be the first journalist to travel twice to Ethiopia before the First World War. Already in 1915, the futurist leader Marinetti, addressed him as ‘the most audacious Africanist writer and tireless revealer of exotic landscapes and people’ and as such more suited to glorify the futurist mobilisation against traditionalism than ‘all the pedantic and bad professors of Italy’.8 The midcareer novel, L’Airone, published in 1920,9 marks Arnaldo Cipolla’s first attempt at fiction writing and constitutes the first volume of the African trilogy published between 1920 and 1923.10 The novel is set in Banzi, a colonial outpost in Congo, and develops around the encounter/clash between European civilisation and African indigenous populations, dramatised through the love/sexual relationship between the protagonist, Evans, a European settler, and Mosila, his lover from a remote forest village. The narration opens in a typical Conradian fashion. During a shooting party on a pirogue, the protagonist recalls his own expedition toward the interior regions of Congo, inspired by the ‘romantic’ dream of conquest, through a sexual metaphor: ‘Your fantasy kindled by the fever throbbing at your temples, tells you vaguely that despite the terrible things happening around you … you will arrive at the presence of a virginity, of a frailty that will be sweet to violate with boundless gentleness’ (42). The dream turns into a violent sexual relationship when Mosila offers herself to the ‘white man’ as a token of peace in order to save her people from extermination. From the beginning, Evans is presented as a man who has lost control over his own reactions and feelings. The protagonist embodies the ‘hyperbolical exoticism of the European’, vis-à-vis the ‘boundless uniformity of the equatorial land’ (20). The distance from civilisation and the European community allows the protagonist to absorb indigenous’ culture and instincts, which are eventually turned against his civilised nature, predisposing him to a mental breakdown and moral degeneration, ‘causing him to slowly

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forget the tastes and morality of his civilised nature, being overwhelmed by the rule of instincts that the violent land and primitive man were imposing upon him’ (14). Mosila, the virgin worshipped by the Bantu, on the contrary, is the symbol of the deepest traditions of authentic Africa, ‘the personification of the free peoples, hidden in the forest, who are unaware of the whites’ cruel face’ (30). Beautiful and semi-divine, she decides to use her seductiveness in order to control and satisfy the white’s endless desire for conquest. Her intent is to transform the colonisers into tame beings, like ‘wild beasts exhausted besides their females’ (70). The narration intermingles literary and widespread Eurocentric stereotypes, such as the connection between travel and delirium, or the image of savage anthropophagy. The violent and aggressive language, when not explicitly pornographic, that the novel uses to express sexuality starkly recalls the futurist language of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first novel Mafarka le futuriste and its quest for action and intensity of stimulation.11 In the case of Cipolla’s novel, however, the European protagonist’s sadism is not the outcome of his male and racial superiority, but is the very symptom of his weakness. The obsessive concern for Evan’s sexual habits, who constantly tries to avoid the overwhelming physical closeness with Mosila, including ‘in the hour of love, so short-lived for him’, is contrasted with the sexual power of the native warrior with whom she is in love and his ars amatoria. The mixture of sexual envy and admiration for the Labia quickly turns into hate for Mosila: ‘I hate you because you have offered me all pleasures and because the ones that I can give you, instead of appeasing you, only stir up new ones that I cannot satisfy’ (80–81). By closely linking European violence and madness to the sexuality of natives, the text offers the readers the spectacle of difference and at the same time signals a lack of colonial authority. The attention is indeed focussed on the attitude of the European and the excess of his rule. While the first part of the novel is characterised by the subjective point of view of the European and his delirious self-reflection, the second is marked by the reversal of the power relationship between Evans and Mosila, when the colonial camp is hit by the sleeping sickness. Mosila, who foresees the destruction of the camp, tries to convince Evans, on behalf of all indigenous people, to leave the village and follow them into the forest’s interior. Evans’ violence, unleashed by what he perceives as Mosila’s betrayal, marks the beginning of his repentance, which only intensifies when he finds pearls, tissues and guns returned to him: ‘the contempt the semi-civilised threw at the white men’s feet, the violent return of goods received as the price for their submission to the work, for the end of their savage condition’ (213). He recognises his error in having silenced his original and instinctive conviction that ‘the primitive human creature is gentle and good’, following ‘the bloody path of the great deceivers of unknown equatorial populations’ and becoming a partisan to a ‘mistake which would cost humanity the frenzied disappearance of inferior

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populations’ (218). Once Mosila has left him to join her people, the sexual attraction and repulsion felt by Evans turns into love and into the impossibility of living without her. Finally, when some Europeans arrive to help Evans but can no longer find him, Cipolla suggests in the novel’s closing lines that the European followed Mosila’s invitation to leave the ‘whites’ forever, joining her and her people in the remote region’s ‘place of delight and forgiveness, surrounded by the forest which is the limit of the world’ (247). The symbolism of ‘sleeping sickness’ not only stands for the utter failure of colonialism, to which it is explicitly connected, but evokes the discourse on the extinction of primitive races: ‘Believe me’, declares the doctor going to rescue Evans ‘in order to save the Equatorial races there is nothing but the total evacuation by Europe from Central Africa, and its inhabitants’ throwback to the original conditions’ (232). This idea, spread within the social Darwinist circles in the second half of the nineteenth century, was revived by the debate on colonial atrocities in Congo. The Baron Giuseppe Nisco, a judge of the Court of Appeal at Boma who took part in the Committee of Inquiry appointed by King Leopold, considered in 1904 the black race ‘decrepit’, never able since its appearance on the earth to get up from the lowest form of barbarism and doomed to disappear, leaving room for being replaced in Central Africa by a new race, which he explicitly identified with the Italian one.12 Whether in the version of sentimental racism or in that more aggressive version advanced by Nisco, the extinction discourse evoked the opposition between modernity and primitivism through the racially constructed idea of fitted and unfitted populations toward material progress and economic development.13 The novel’s conclusion, the European being destroyed by Africa or gone native, suggested the apparently opposite but actually functional idea that a certain type of European colonialism had exhausted its role in Africa. It signalled not only the defeat of the mission to universalise the European civilisation to other cultures, but also signalled the defeat of the endangered moral ground on which its superiority was rooted. If the book’s incipit and subject echoes Heart of Darkness – that would be translated into Italian some years later – Cipolla’s life does it even more. He spent the years between 1904 and 1907 in the Congo Free State, first as an army officer and later as a colonial administrator. In 1907, after returning to Italy, he published his collected letters, which opened for him a successful career as an international reporter for the leading Italian newspapers.14 The book met the echoes of the international debate on the colonial atrocities made by the Congo Free State, owned personally by King Leopold, which led in 1908 to the Belgian State taking over the colony. In Italy, the debate found a sensitive ground in connection with the role played by Italian officers and settlers in Congo, representing, in the years recorded as the ‘Italians epoch’ (1903–1909), the second nationality (after the Belgians) among the non-indigenous population in Congo.15 Public and political emphasis was given to the endangered

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status of Italian officers, mostly enrolled there immediately after the Adowa defeat in 1896, after some reports claimed they were subjected to foreign officers with lower rank, or even set between Belgian petty officers and black sergeants.16 The ambivalent positioning of Italians in Congo met the anxieties both over the marginalisation of Italy among European powers and over the army and national prestige already undermined by the recent defeat by African troops. Furthermore, the resounding of the Anglo-Belgian debate can be traced in the negative outcomes of a number of reports ordered by the Italian government to verify the possibility of economic and commercial penetration and of Italian migration to Congo.17 In 1906, under pressure from European public opinion over Leopold and the simultaneous concern for the treatment of Italian officers in the Belgian army, the Italian government withdrew from previous agreements, which allowed Italian soldiers to carry out their service in Congo. The daily Il Corriere della Sera was one of the most active in denouncing the genocidal exploitation of the indigenous population by Leopold in Congo and supported Congo’s annexation to Belgium. This is most likely the reason that the newspaper hired Arnaldo Cipolla. Cipolla explicitly refers to his experience in Congo in the novel’s note to the reader, where, by arguing against the artificiality of exotic literature written without leaving Europe, he claims the protagonist’s ‘tragic adventure’ to be for most part true, Evans being his ‘unknown predecessor in a remote colonial station along the equatorial rivers’ (5). Yet, the identification of the novel’s protagonist is left very vague, often denoted simply as ‘the European’, however, his name and the reference to the white man with ‘red hair’ seem rather to suggest a Northern European nationality. This remark raises the question of the connection between fiction and autobiographical writing, and in particular how the novel’s fiction re-figures in the early 1920s Cipolla’s previous experience in Central Africa. The question of what it meant to be a ‘European’ in Congo represented, indeed, one of the main focuses of the published letters, as a field riddled with contradictions vis-à-vis both indigenous people and Europeans from different nationalities. The widespread trope in colonial literature, which posits Europeanness as something to be discovered and acknowledged mainly outside European borders,18 was combined with a subjacent concern of tensions among the Europeans themselves, as connected to different ways of implementing Congo Free State’s system of economic exploitation. Led to believe he would have been ‘the leader of a civilised expedition’, Cipolla found himself at the head of ‘a column of men reduced to slaves’.19 In this context, the attempt to enforce the European civil code on an indigenous population is considered a further violence brought by a mistaken evaluation of the relationship between Europeans and natives. Ethnographic remarks and personal observations were advanced to support the argument that the contact with the indigenous populations required a ‘revolution in the moral field’ calling for the eradication of the belief that ‘the savages’ soul could feel, “I would not say the

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same compassions as ours, but at least the seeds of them’.20 It is precisely within this argument, in which the question of transcendence and moral concerns played a crucial role, that the position of women comes into play as the signifier of the boundary between civilisation and barbarism. Cipolla invoked the widespread belief that in indigenous languages, ‘to will’ and ‘to love’ were expressed through the same word – a point made also by others Italian observers of Congo indigenous populations. ‘Love does not exist if not as mere sexual coupling: kissing is not used, nor appreciated’, wrote Primo Cantale, while Libero Acerbi considered ‘love and, its natural outcome, jealousy’ as ‘little felt by the Congolese’ for whose women it is indifferent to belong to one or another man.21 Cipolla assumed the absence of the conception of love as what caused colonised populations to be unable to understand the institution of modern European marriage. But even more crucially, he stated that only in Congo had he realised that the modern conception of marriage was a very recent acquisition in the history of humanity. Hundreds of years had been required ‘before the awareness of women’s rights could manifest itself in man’s soul, and, as a result marriage’.22 The superiority of European men to their ‘savage’ counterparts rests with their acknowledgement of women as their equal companions, sanctioned by the institution of monogamous marriage. To force indigenous soldiers recruited into the Force Publique to marry, as the Leopoldian government was doing, is criticised as a vain effort given their inability to understand ‘that the married woman is very different from those the indigenous buy and sell, in that she has the same rights as the man, that she is his own only as a consequence of her own will, solemnly affirmed before him’.23 It is in this context, where Cipolla is celebrating a wedding, that Sonisia, one among the few natives named in his letters, briefly appears for the first time. ‘Stark naked’, she asks him, ‘nothing less than to become, we would say, my Congolese half, one of my wives, since she imagined that I, being a white mokungi (chief), would have at least a dozen’.24 In 1917, then years later, the material presented in Dal Congo was rewritten. The content, no longer in epistolary form, was narrated in a more descriptive and captivating style. Even if many episodes and valuations remained relatively unchanged, it is significant that the main changes related to the section dealing with indigenous women. The few pages from 1907 were rewritten into a new chapter aimed at allowing the reader to penetrate ‘the tastes of the feminine refinement of the cannibals’.25 Sonisia reappears here not as the savage of the 1907 text, since an ‘abyss’ has been drawn ‘between her and her bestial sisters from Aruvimi’.26 Referring to her as ‘my companion’, Cipolla claims to have been initiated into the deepest and most concealed aspects of native customs: ‘Nothing like intimacy with these mild and docile creatures could prove to be of more help for the European in Congo.’27 The new version hints at the displacement of Cipolla’s personal experience within the code of literary invention and narrative that the novel would bring about. This move was dictated by his personal literary ambition28 and was

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fostered by post-war feelings of nationalistic resentment. If Mosila’s character in 1920 owes much to the different versions of Sonisia throughout his travelogues, then the narrative structure of the novel subverts the representation offered in the travelogues by inventing a dichotomised and fantasised opposition between an unrestrained African sexuality and a decadent European civilisation, characterised by corruption and death drives. The travelogues and the fiction play out the polarisation between love and sexuality in a quite significant way. In the first case, the conjugal conception of love explains the attraction felt by African women toward European men (but not the other way around), as an emancipator promise of respect, freedom and fidelity. In the second case, on the contrary, African sexuality as identified with women stands out in opposition to an emasculated Europe. In this specific narrative, ‘the European’ becomes a highly unstable signifier. The love allegory points out to the degeneration of European civilisation, which brings about material and technological progress at the expenses of moral standards and envisages the fall of Europe or at least its decline. While Heart of Darkness became the founding text of an ambivalent European rhetoric on colonial violence based on the ‘unspeakable horror’, Cipolla’s novel can be connected to a corpus of popular literature production that spread all over Europe and the United States and was less sophisticated from a literary point of view but was much interesting. Susanne Gehrmann has remarked how the high mediatisation of the ingredients of the colonial violence in the public sphere were often exploited by these texts in order to stir up the imagination of the popular public through aesthetics of horror highly eroticised.29 Without undermining the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise, this discourse reproduced the racist identification of Central Africa as the Anti-Europe and simultaneously cast the question of standards of European morality at the centre of the international scene. The need to reaffirm the European moral superiority and the legitimacy of white rule became a transnational concern where the universalising claims of European ideology were contrasted with specific attitudes both nationally and culturally rooted.30 Cipolla remarked that the novel, rather than a celebration of his European precursor, was meant to ‘pay a modest homage to the primitive men who had been my companions and my consolation during exile’ by letting them tell their ‘ineffable tragedy’ (5). Here, ‘exile’ meant not simply his personal isolation in colonial Congo, but more broadly the exclusion and self-exclusion of liberal Italy from overseas expansion. In 1921, Cipolla resentfully recalled in an autobiographical article how his early military career during the ‘sad years after Adowa’ was marked by ‘the obsession to try to take part in the few overseas ventures where the humiliated Italy was forced to send its soldiers’,31 and in his later memoirs, he would recurrently evoke his self-image of a ‘restless young’32 at unease in the restricted domestic horizons of Liberal Italy, who knew by heart the journeys of Henry Morton Stanley and Vittorio Bottego.33

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In the context of the early 1920s, the themes of the anti-Leopoldian campaign resounded in the nationalist feelings raised by the Versailles Treaty and fed by the myth of Italian ‘mutilated victory’. After the carnage of the European war, forms of cultural pessimism, which imbued positivistic scientific and political thought, were revived around the theme of the sunset of civilisation, denouncing the alienation of the grey, standardised and bourgeois post-war Europe. By connecting the Italian ‘exile’ with colonial expansion and the indigenous tragedy, the novel embodies a specific version of the ‘anti-conquest discourse’, as defined by Mary Louise Pratt in terms of a strategy of representation, ‘whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony’.34 The love allegory, without undermining the boundaries between civilisation and primitivism, played out the ‘repulsive appeal’35 of Africa against the Imperial European powers by mobilising the love for the lost Africa. The nostalgic mourning of the colonial dream was conveyed through forms of nationalist celebration that, despite the condemnation for the atrocities committed in Congo, would support other colonial projects and politics no less overtly racist and violent.

Toward a White Colonial Romance After fascism’s rise to power, Congo lost any strategic interest in the colonial public debate. The question of the connection between colonialism and competing definitions of European civilisation became, however, a key political issue. The imperial fate of Italy and its predestination to Africa were not only crucial to the Fascist vision of modernity, as part of the plan to unify and regenerate the nation, but as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has remarked, were also coupled with larger geopolitical plans to remake Europe.36 The rhetoric of the opposition between the old plutocratic colonialism and the new ‘spiritual’ one provided the ground on which the Fascist civilising mission, rooted in the Roman imperial past, was doomed not so much to save the Old Europe, but to remould it. The reshaping of Cipolla’s travel writings did not end with the 1920 novel. The subject, on the contrary, was bound to reappear over and over in his later writings until his death in 1938. The success of the African trilogy earned him the label of the Italian Kipling and probably encouraged him to further exploit the genre.37 Exotic landscapes as backgrounds for love romances became his specialty, and resulted in a 1926 collection of short stories, previously published in newspapers, entitled Il cuore dei continenti (The Heart of the Continents).38 In particular, the dangerous ‘European’ pattern of colonialism, previously identified with Leopoldian rule, became now increasingly associated with France and explicitly connected with the question of love and inter-racial relationships. In the first novel, which shared the same setting as L’Airone, the character of Lucia, a young French woman who asks for help in returning to Europe, is

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contrasted with the figure of her father, an ‘indigenised’, who ‘cannot conceive of a life different from those of the Sango’. In the second novel, a similar contempt for the hypocrisy of French ‘liberal’ colonialism is cast around an interracial marriage, by representing the colonial administrator ready to welcome the ‘WWI coloured combatant’, who is forced to face instead a black ‘who took over a rosy daughter of France’.39 The following year, a new collection of short stories and travelogues, Pagine africane di un esploratore, would include the reworked plot of L’Airone and the chapter on ‘Congolese women’ already published in his travelogue from 1917.40 Some of the crucial passages of the original novel were left out, while others were considerably reworked. In particular, the opposition between black and white male sexuality disappeared with Mosila no longer sacrificially offering herself for the safety of her people, but instead offers herself out of a free and unrestrained lust, thus becoming even more similar to Sonisia. The denunciation of the excesses and violence of the Leopoldian colonial rule was confirmed, while the admiration for the indigenous world that characterised the original novel was considerably softened. The period between 1926 and 1927 coincides with the launch of the first competition for a colonial romance organised by Fascist government as part of the campaign aimed at promoting a peculiar Italian colonial consciousness. The quest for an original Italian colonial corpus of literature implied the refusal of the tropes of the everlasting allure of the oriental femme fatale, in order to concentrate, on the contrary, on the colonial prestige of the virile Italian people. Cipolla found in this new context a long awaited opportunity to point to his own work as the model of ‘a healthy and effective colonial literature’, that should no more be simply aimed at popularising exotic lands inaccessible to the Italian people.41 His previous colonial experience could be successfully recalled to fit the political need to forge a colonial style devoid of any foreigner influence. In 1927, the changes in the novel’s plot were significantly justified by a footnote in which Cipolla – without mentioning the previous novel – declared Evans to be himself. This shift is crucial, insofar as the identification between Evans and himself marks the transformation of the plot from the opposition between European colonialism and African primitivism toward the contrast between different styles of European colonialism. Within fascism’s spiritual interpretation of modern colonialism, the discourse of empire became the site of debate over countries’ rights for conquest, competing cultural traditions and styles. In this new climate, Cipolla’s concerns about colonisers’ attitudes could be easily mobilised and resonated with the normative conceptions of politics as a style in which fascism combined the avant-garde gestures with the masscult of personality.42 The Italian ‘superior’ genius and the spiritual attributes of its action made its expansionist claims morally outstanding. Cipolla had already noted in his early travel writing that Italians, even if not being present in Africa in great numbers, had ‘the strength

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of the race’. Congolese admiration and trust for the Italians were firmly rooted in a number of reasons: the character, their simplicity of manners. The exceptional sobriety, certain innate surges of enthusiasm or anger, the way of speaking the indigenous language, whose pronunciation came very naturally to us, while for the others it is laboured and false (the French pronunciation is the negation of Central Africa’s languages), and above all such a wonderful adaptability to the environment that the Italian possesses in an outstanding amount, and that allows him to lower himself to these primitive minds and understanding them to dominate.43

A similar stance will be recalled in 1931, emphasising that Italian sincerity contained ‘a deep liking for the so-called inferior people’ and that the Italians’ ability to completely understand them would one day translate into the ability to ‘correct the colonial injustices of the present’.44 The last step of the process of revision of L’Airone plot took place in 1936, which coincided with the Ethiopian war and the Fascist declaration of Empire. Cipolla would again rework this material in a series of articles that appeared in the newspaper ‘Il Messaggero’, where the three female characters – the French Lucie, Sonisia and Mosila – will be fused together.45 The original subject of his first novel was, significantly, retreated around the contrast between the French colonial camp and the Belgian one run by Cipolla himself, which faced each other along the banks of the Congo River. The protagonist is the object of desire of the métisses daughters of the French administrator. One of them, Berthe, is in love with the ‘European’ and romantically dreams of being abducted by Cipolla in order to be married. He was, however, already in love with ‘Mademoiselle Lucie, thoroughbred Parisian, daughter of the Ibenga’s Governor’. Lucie, an extraordinary being ‘originally stable, but deeply disturbed by the tropical stay’, uses the excuse of wanting to go back to Europe in order to join Cipolla at the Belgian station and to escape her indigenised father. The whitening of the colonial romance posits the Italian as the only proper embodiment of sexual and racial morality. He is the bearer of the meanings of ‘Europe’, which Lucie can rejoin through being connected to him without leaving from Africa, and through which the boundaries of the colonial divide are reasserted. The white couple, writes Cipolla, offered natives the ‘celebration of a lover’s ritual unknown to them, that of two young white gods’. From this moment onward, Lucia speaks almost literally the same words spoken by Mosila. When the sleeping sickness hits the camp, she tries to convince the protagonist to leave the village: ‘And after all, why should you care about the Belgians? You have learned what the true Africa is; when you return to Italy from the glades you could teach it to your countrymen and urge them to vindicate Adowa … I am French, but I love Italy … because I love you.’46 This time the fulfilment of the colonial romance is assured by the whiteness of the couple. After defeating the sleeping sickness, Lucie and Cipolla return to Europe together.

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The resumption of Italian settlers’ experiences under ‘foreign’ empires was functional to the restoring of Italian authority and relevance brought about by the conquest of Ethiopia and was combined with a renewed interest toward Central Africa, as marked by publications aimed to popularise anthropological theories.47 In this context, Cipolla reworked, for the umpteenth time, his personal experience in Belgian Congo, by adapting it to the political agenda and presenting himself as the perfect example of the colonial male prestige. The journalist’s transformation into the protagonist of the colonial venture produced a substantial re-arrangement of the previous narration of adventure and exploration by evoking a space in which experiences of annihilation and death co-exist with fantasies of liberation and transformation. In this version, Evans’ romance mirrored the opposition between the old, decadent and weak Europe and the new virile Europe infused and reinvigorated by its Mediterranean-African roots. The impossible romance between a European man and an African woman required a complete reversal of the triangle cast in the original novel. The centre is no longer concerned with how the European man loves, articulated in the opposition between Evans and the native warrior, but is shifted to the question of who the White should love. In the 1930s, this question was no longer a private matter, but represented a charged public domain on which depended not simply individual morality, but also national/European racial prestige. In contrast to the old forms, the new ‘virile’ colonialism was based on clear racial boundaries between coloniser and colonised, which reasserted whiteness and Europeanness along gender and racial lines. The main changes of Cipolla’s original plot signalled that even before the 1938 racial law, the triumph of white romance was not predicated mainly in opposition to inter-racial sexuality, but against the ghost of the métis, identified here with French colonial rule, whose penetration into ‘most savage Africa’ was based on methods ‘seemingly praiseworthy considered from Europe, but full of snags once applied on the spot, and above all harmful for the whites’ prestige’.48 By inscribing the redefinition of the boundaries across the colonial divide into questions of European rivalry and competition, this representation suggests that imperial desire was increasingly addressed not only to Africa, but also to Europe itself. The love allegory does not concern the relationship between Europe and Africa anymore, but the focus is shifted to the field of inter-european relationships. It is France, represented as a woman, to be saved and redeemed by the virile and racially safe Italy. In the same year, Mussolini declared miscegenation ‘an attack to European civilisation’, as part of the enormous propaganda effort, the real target of which was not to demonstrate the inferiority of the African populations, already taken for granted, but to address the monstrosity and dangerousness of the hybrids. One of the most striking examples of this virulent campaign is the resumption of the nineteenth century Saartjie Baartman’s case, known as the Hottentot Venus. She was presented as a métisse of Euro-African descent, and whose

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‘monstrous’ features were the result of the mixing between Dutch settlers and Hottentots.49 Lidio Cipriani, considered the engineer of the segregationist system in East Africa, in 1936 attacked the French assimilationist system, alleging that it would have entailed ‘catastrophic demographic consequences for the preservation and rise of our civilisation’ extending the ‘nucleus of the infection’ to Europe, as it had already happened with Portugal, a nation considered completely ‘negrotised’.50 In the period after 1939 and the outbreak of war, on the pages of the journal La Difesa della razza, which hosted the biggest names of Fascist ideologists of racism, the concern with miscegenation was addressed not only to the colonies and to the practices of other European colonial powers, but increasingly also toward Europe itself.51 While in 1939 the ‘plague of métissage’ implied that ‘the white France has virtually ceased to exist’, in 1940 not only was France not considered a ‘race’, but the reason for the French defeat was ascribed to its ‘racial anarchy which mixes blood as it does with white coffee’.52 Interestingly enough, in the same year the journal published the article ‘Interpretazione razzista dell’Otello’ (Otello’s racist interpretation) where the Shakespearian character was recruited in the anti-miscegenation campaign granting to the Italian dramatist Gianbattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573), considered one of sources of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the primacy of having pointed out the dangers of inter-racial marriage.53

Europeanness and Whiteness in Fascist Italy The texts written by Arnaldo Cipolla belong to different genres and were disseminated across different media from travel writings to newspaper articles, from reportages to novels. In interwar Italian travel and colonial production, this emphasised hybridity is in no way an exception. By analysing the body of travel writing, Loredana Polezzi has stressed the specific intertextuality governing an intergeneric network composed by political pamphlets, scientific treatises, colonial novels and guide books, whose ‘cross-roads indicates genres which seems to function as formal as well as conceptual links between other, more distant texts types’.54 The public image of Cipolla embodies this specific mark. One of his reviewers opposed him as a writer on exotic subject to nineteenthcentury old cosmopolitanism ‘the globe-trotter and the pure race Italian have merged in him without overlapping … no artifice, no affectation, no snobbery or babelism’.55 He combined the heroic allure of nineteenth-century explorers with the modern appeal of special correspondents, ready to turn from soldier into traveller, from tourist into colonial writer. While his travel writings translated his military experience in Congo into the code of discovering and exploration adventures, his journalist accounts made him into an embodiment of the colonial hero of the Fascist revolutionary modernity. The topics handled by Cipolla intertwined both his personal interest and the political climate. His

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long experience as a colonial writer and Africanist offered the basis for the political exploitation of his production and simultaneously his self-promotion. In 1934, he joined the Fascist writers’ trade union, which allowed him to follow the military operations during the Ethiopian war and for which he was granted the medal for military valour. He published his reports in the Il Messaggero newspaper and eventually put himself forward as a candidate for ‘Italian Academician’ and even as a candidate for Senator.56 While Cipolla’s rewriting of the colonial romance was produced and solicited by a specific political contingency, it cannot be merely considered a direct projection of political changes in Italian colonial policies – from tolerant attitudes toward inter-racial relationships to a racist stand in the 1930s or even from an anti-colonialist position to colonialism.57 On the contrary, it highlights the set of tensions that were at the stake in the triangulation between Italy, Europe and Africa during the interwar period through which cultural forms of internal and external Orientalism were turned into the modernist dream of Italian authenticity and displaced in the colonial imaginary. The work of Arnaldo Cipolla and more broadly Italian colonial discourse bring to light the double level on which meanings attached to Europeanness were called into play in connection with colonialism. On the one side, Europe stands as an abstract form, ‘a figure of the imagination whose geographical referents remain somewhat indeterminate’58 on behalf of which any colonial project is predicated and justified. It exists as a homogenous idea of civilisation, whose superiority is based, among others, on the idea of love as a free and equal relationship. On the other hand, Europe is translated into specific attitudes, interests and normative meanings constituted through the conflict between different and competing national cultures and political projects. In this respect, Europeanness emerges mainly ex negativo as a lack and a failure, as a ‘white race’s solidarity’ broken or contradicted. In the imperialist game, Étienne Balibar has suggested, each colonialist nation has put itself forward as the most European: ‘the other white is also the bad white. Each white nation is spiritually “the whitest”.’59 The interplay between these two levels, and their frictions, emerged overtly in connection with the Ethiopian war. In the international dispute over the Italian invasion, the European civilising mission was put forward, both in order to legitimise Italian intervention and to oppose it.60 In the internal debate over colonial policies, the discourse on whiteness was linked to the concept of the Italian race as the one destined to embody the moral strength of the European stock. In this specific context, métissage emerged as a powerful trope for European internal contamination and for challenges to rule. The protagonist of Arnaldo Cipolla’s novel underwent a metamorphosis, hinting at the shift from an ambivalent positing of the European coloniser as a negative model toward an assertion of the Italian colonial style as truly embodying the values of European civilisation. This ‘man of character’ asserted by colonial literature and Fascist propaganda, who was able to control his sexual desires and instincts and who

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embodied a modernised and renovated image of rule, was not simply part of the effort to import cultured sensibilities to the colonies, but it was rather part of the effort to make Italians into European colonial subjects, suggesting that race was not merely about biology, but required specific regulation of sentiments and affective dispositions. Cipolla’s endless investigation into who should be intimate with whom reminds us that the Italian colonial ‘gaze’ in the interwar years was not fixed merely on the ‘colonised’, but obsessively on the Europeans themselves. The Italian colonial discourse, with its prevailing highly fantasised colonial ‘other’, rather turns the focus on the contradictions between the mobilisation of the European normative values attached to ‘race prestige’ and the actual attitudes of Italian settlers in East Africa. The Latin-Mediterranean roots of Italian culture, its ‘difference’ that was supposed to mark the distinctness of the colonial rule, entered into conflict with the need to draw a clear boundary between Italian Europeans and East Africans. The redefinition of acceptable sexual behaviour and morality emerged during a specific conjuncture that coincided with a crisis in colonial control, calling into question the tenuous artifice of the rule within the European white community in East Africa and what marked its borders. The high percentage of hybrids in Eritrea, the oldest colony, resulted in English fears about the injection of African blood in Europe by Italians during the Ethiopian war.61 The difficulty of making clear distinctions between Italians and the natives was not only based on skin colour, in which very often métis can be easily confused with the Italian European brown type ‘with some Saracen traits’ or with ‘whites burned by the sun’, but moreover with cultural attitudes and behaviours. In 1936, the journalist Ciro Poggiali wrote down in his personal journal: It is painful to say, but we have sent too many Southerns to Ethiopia. They are too backwards to have the authority to impose what is called European civilisation. Some of them are perfectly at their ease in the tukul’s filth, because in their villages in Puglia or Calabria they had nothing better. This makes one laugh when the race’s prestige is spoken of. If one ignores the face’s colour, what is the difference between some of our most shabby fellow countrymen … and Ethiopian peasants, who on the contrary are beautiful in their shapes and looks?62

The racial association of ‘white’ with European appeared, to say the least, problematic to Italian readers as even the texts of colonial policymakers reveal. By reminding the readers that in the discourse about ‘indigenous or national manpower’, the ‘human question’ was often understated to considering the man in the colony simply as an ‘animal-machine’, Antonio Petrucci criticised the common belief that assumed the colonial enterprise as simply a matter of investments and engineers. The article listed a number of mistakes made in the colonies, rooted both in a feeble consciousness of the ‘race prestige’ and in an unsatisfactory knowledge of indigenous attitudes and customs. He concluded ‘even the individual who do not have the burden of command in the Empire should look after his behavior towards indigenous very carefully. Because the

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prestige he acquires or loses is acquired or lost for the Italians as a whole.’63 Traces of the clash between internal forms of Orientalism and colonial racism can be found almost everywhere, as confirmation that Italians where Europeans, but not quite. This contradiction feeds during the same years the Mussolinian rhetoric of the ‘popolo bue’ (ox people), who were never able to be up to the Imperial task. In 1938, Galeazzo Ciano reported in his diary that once informed about the unfair conduct of a farmers’ group from Bari visiting Munich, Mussolini got upset with the ‘slaves’ sons’ and remarked that the need to infuse a ‘higher racial conception’ was crucial to proceed in the colonisation of the Empire. Ciano noted down: ‘he added that if they would have had a distinguishing somatic mark he would exterminate them all, sure to do Italy and humanity a great favour’.64 The obsession with the colour line emerged from widespread anxiety about the instabilities and vulnerabilities of Italian manliness and racial membership. As Giulia Barrera has convincingly argued,65 the reasons which moved Mussolini to dictate from Rome the rules of everyday interaction between Italians and their colonial subjects, as part of a totalitarian project to engineer colonial life, largely emerged from an internal contradiction. The southern Italians, farm workers and urban unemployed – who were supposed to migrate and populate AOI (East Africa Empire) – were unsuitable to fit the settlers’ ethos imagined by Mussolini and to build a cohesive white and European community, which demanded an apartheid system to be imposed from above. The instability of the identification between Italianness and Europeanness required to be repeatedly reasserted and ‘scientifically’ proven. Already in 1938, the infamous Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti devoted an entire article to attest the Europeanness of Italian stock: ‘A clear distinction should be made between the Mediterranean of Europe (westerners) on one side, and the Orientals and Africans on the other side. The theories that uphold the African origins of some European populations and include in a shared Mediterranean race also Semitic and Hamitic populations, should therefore be considered dangerous.’66 Recently focussing on the genealogy of the ‘colonial intimate regime’, Ann Laura Stoler has pushed even further the concern of Frantz Fanon’s work in the 1950s with regards to the subjectivities produced through colonial sexualities. By mapping what she calls the European ‘colonial bourgeois order’, she suggests that the Dutch, the British and the French ‘each defined their unique civilities through a language of difference that draw on images of racial purity and sexual virtue’.67 This approach maintains that the assertion of European supremacy in terms of patriotic manhood and racial virility was not only an expression of imperial domination, but also was a defining feature of it. The lapidary slogan by Mussolini, ‘Empires have to be conquered by weapons and maintained through prestige’, hit directly upon the very core of the Italian internal contradictions. The desire for Africa, articulated through colonial dis-

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course, hinted very much at the impossibility of erasing the internal Otherness, which returned over and over to destabilise the othering of Africa. By turning the focus to the construction of Europeanness, rather than to the genealogy of otherness’ stereotypes, the colonial discourse brings to light how racialised representations not only affected real and imaginary management of non-European subjects, but simultaneously also impacted on contested definitions of European identifications within the continent itself. As I have tried to show through the work of Arnaldo Cipolla, and more broadly through the debate on colonial prestige in Fascist Italy, the question of what constituted European identities at home was steeped in racial metaphors and civilising tropes, which highlight the difficult task of disentangling the link between colonialism and Europeanness. Moreover, the racialised vision of the ‘New European Order’ predicated by totalitarian regimes suggests that maybe no other period than the interwar shows that racism was not simply a colonial reflect, fashioned to deal with the distant Other, but a part of the very making of Europeans themselves.

Notes 1. See Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars (London: Tauris, 1999), in particular ch. 5. On the anthropological approach of this critique see William Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion. A Universal Experience? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 2. Caroline Arni, ‘Simultaneous Love. An Argument on Love, Modernity and the Feminist Subject at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, European Review of History 11, no. 2 (2004): 185–205, here 202f. 3. See Victor Robinson, ‘Introduction’ in Paolo Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1935). The original publication was Gli amori degli uomini, 1885, while the previous two volumes were respectively Fisiologia dell’amore, 1872, and Igiene dell’amore, 1877. 4. Matt K. Matsuda, Empires of Love. Histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries. Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 5. See Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), and Alain Ruscio, Amours Coloniales. Aventures et fantasmes exotiques de Claire de Duras à Georges Simenon (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1996), 15–17. 6. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 7. I borrow this definition from Marie Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes.Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4. 8. F.T. Marinetti to Arnaldo Cipolla, 2 January 1915, see Corrispondenze/Fondo Cipolla/ Public Library of Como. All translations from Italian sources in this text are mine unless otherwise noted. 9. Arnaldo Cipolla, L’Airone (Milan: Vitagliano, 1920). Henceforth, quotations of this work will be given in the text. 10. Beside L’Airone, the trilogy includes La cometa sulla mummia (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), and Oceana. Romanzo del mare indiano (Turin: Agenzia Giornalistico-Libraria, 1923).

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11. F.T. Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste (Paris: Sansot, 1909). The novel cost Marinetti a trial for outrage of public decency. See Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–33, 49–76; and Cinzia Sartini-Blum, ‘Incorporating the Exotic. From Futurist Excess to Postmodern Impasse’, in A Place in the Sun. Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 138–162. 12. Barone Giuseppe Nisco, ‘Il Congo e gli italiani’, La Tribuna, 5 July 1904. 13. See Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings. Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800– 1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. Savage Intellect, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 14. Arnaldo Cipolla, Dal Congo (Milan: Bracciforti, 1907). This first edition was co-signed with Vittorio Liprandi, an unknown army officer whose name will disappear from the second edition two years later. 15. According to the statistics reported by Edoardo Baccari in 1905, there were 238 in a total of 2,511 whites. See Edoardo Baccari, Il Congo (Rome: Rivista marittima, 1908), here 688. 16. Reported by Luigi Armani, Diciotto mesi al Congo (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1907), 100f. 17. See Baccari, Congo, and Cesira Filesi, ‘Progetti italiani di penetrazione economica nel Congo Belga (1908–1922)’, Storia Contemporanea 13, no. 2 (1982): 251–282. 18. Some years later, the French Eugene Pujarniscle, for example, will aptly synthesise this point ‘one might be surprised that my pen always returns to the words Blanc (white) or “European” and never to “Français” … in fact colonial solidarity and the obligations that it entails allies all the people of the white race’, Philoxene ou de la litterature coloniale (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1931), 31. 19. Cipolla, Dal Congo, 247. 20. Ibid., 148. 21. Gianbattista Primo Cantale, Ragione e Stato Indipendente del Congo (Cremona: Foroni, 1906), 26. Libero Acerbi, Dal Congo al Nilo azzurro 1902–1915 (Viadano: Portanuova, 1975), 89. 22. Cipolla, Dal Congo, 164. 23. Cipolla, Dal Congo, 169. The regular army of the Congo Free State was officially established by a decree in 1888. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were approximately 17,000 native soldiers subjected to European officers, most of whom were recruited mainly from Belgium, Italy, and England. 24. Ibid., 229. 25. Arnaldo Cipolla, Al Congo. Memorie di un esploratore (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1917), 113. 26. Ibid., 125. 27. Ibid., 133–134. 28. The subject of the Italian settlers in Congo can be found in a number of literary works. Among them Luigi Pirandello, Zafferanetta, in Terzetti (Milan: Treves, 1912), a short story focussed on a man who discovers to have a métisse daughter in Africa, leaves for Congo and never comes back; Gino Rocca, ‘Le liane. Dramma in tre atti’, Comoedia 2, no. 9 (10 May 1920): 5–46, a play set in a rubber plantation in Congo. Cipolla contended that both stories were inspired by his own writings, in Arnaldo Cipolla, Pagine africane di un esploratore (Milan: Alpes, 1927), 123. 29. Susanne Gehrmann, ‘Les littératures en marge du débat sur les “atrocités congolaise”. De l’engagement moral à l’horreur pittoresque’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, no. 314 (2005): 137–160. 30. See Kevin C. Dunn, Imagining the Congo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21–59. It should be noted that Edmund Dene Morel, one of the main advocates of Congo indigenous rights in the ‘Red Rubber’ scandal, would not hesitate to portray Africans as less than human and as sexually uncontrollable rapists of European white women, while fighting against the presence of black French troops on the Rhineland between 1919 and 1924. See Sandra Mass’ contribution to this book.

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31. Arnaldo Cipolla, ‘Autobiografia’, Raccontanovelle, no. 33 (15 February 1921): 7–10, here 8, a passage that would be included in his autobiography, La mia vita meravigliosa (Rome: La Navicella, 1949). 32. Cipolla, La mia vita meravigliosa, 9. 33. Vittorio Bottego (1860–1897), a military officer, was one of the most celebrated Italian explorers of East Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century and author of L’esplorazione del Giuba.Viaggio di scoperta nel cuore dell’Africa (Rome: Società Editrice Nazionale, 1900). 34. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. 35. This is an expression by Jean Loup Amselle. The anthropologist uses it in order to underline the interplay between attraction and disgust that characterises European representation of Africa. See Jean-Loup Amselle, ‘L’Afrique. Un parc à thèmes’, Les Temps Modernes, no. 620–621 (2002), (Special Issue ‘Afriques du Monde’): 46–60. 36. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Modernity is Just Over There’, Interventions 8, no. 3 (2006): 380–393. 37. Teodoro Rovito, Letterati e giornalisti italiani contemporanei. Dizionario bio-blibliografico italiano (Naples: Rovito, 1922), 104. 38. Arnaldo Cipolla, Il cuore dei continenti (Milan: Mondadori, 1926). 39. Ibid., 7 and 24. The two short stories were entitled respectively ‘Notturno equatoriale’ and ‘Lo sposo del Barghimi’. 40. Cipolla, Pagine africane di un esploratore. 41. Cipolla’s answer to the survey about the state of colonial literature, L’Azione coloniale, 15 March 1931, 43. 42. See Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle.The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 43. Cipolla, Dal Congo, 70. 44. See Arnaldo Cipolla’s contribution to the survey on Italian colonial literature, L’Azione coloniale, 15 March 1931. 45. The three articles were published between October and November of 1936 on the cultural page of the Italian newspaper, entitled respectively ‘Amore e morte nello sfondo dell’Ubangi’, ‘Il popolo negro fugge la malattia del sonno’ and ‘Solo contro un villaggio’. These short stories were republished in Continente nero (Roma Vettorini, 1937), the text from which I quote. 46. Ibid., 45f. 47. One of the best known was Lidio Cipriani, Il Congo. Da un viaggio dell’autore (Florence: Bemporad, 1932). As the personal archive gives evidence, Lidio Cipriani and Arnaldo Cipolla exchanged a number of letters on Congo. 48. Cipolla, Continente nero, 48. 49. See Barbara Sorgoni, ‘“Defending the Race”. The Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 3 (2003): 411–424. 50. Lidio Cipriani, ‘Su alcuni criteri antropologici per la colonizzazione in Africa’, Gerarchia, no. 12 (December 1936): 231. 51. See for example Guido Landra, ‘Il problema dei meticci in Europa’, La Difesa della razza, no. 25 (5 November 1940): 11. 52. Elio Gasteiner, ‘Grandezza e decadenza della razza francese’, La Difesa della razza, no. 6 (20 January 1939): 11–14, here 14; Olivier Mordrel, ‘Le minoranze in Francia’, ibid., no. 9 (5 March 1940): 6; and Mordrel, ‘Razzismo francese’, ibid., no. 17 (5 July 1940): 23. 53. L.D., ‘Un’interpretazione razzista dell’Otello’, La Difesa della razza, no. 24 (20 October 1940): 30–33. See Shaul Bassi, Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (Bari: Graphis, 2000). 54. Loredana Polezzi, ‘Imperial Reproductions. The Circulation of Colonial Images across Popular Genres and Media in the 1920s and 1930s’, Modern Italy 1 (2003): 31–47, here 32. The main survey on Italian colonial literature is offered by Giovanna Tomasello, L’Africa tra mito e realtà. Storia della letteratura coloniale italiana (Palermo: Sellerio, 2004 (1984)), dealing, however, mainly with high literature.

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55. ‘Il giramondo e l’italiano di razza pura si sono in lui amalgamati pienamente, senza sovrapposizioni … non artifici, non preziosismi, non snobismi o babelismi’, M.R.C., ‘Bibliografie. Letteratura esotistica’, Il Marzocco, 5 May 1929, 32. 56. The support of his candidacy to the ‘Accademia d’Italia’ is witnessed by a letter from Dino Alfieri, Minister of Popular Culture, 5 April 1937, in Corrispondenza/Fondo Cipolla/ Como Public Library. His wish to be nominated Senator is mentioned in a letter to Ermanno Amicucci, 4 July 1937, to Ermanno Amicucci, Director of ‘La Gazzetta del Popolo’, in 1846/Cipolla Arnaldo/Archivio storico della Gazzetta del Popolo/Archivio del Museo del Risorgimento di Torino. 57. The latter is the interpretation suggested by Marco Lenci, ‘Amore nero o amore bianco? Autocensura e pregiudizio razziale nel Congo coloniale di Arnaldo Cipolla’, Studi Piacentini 29 (2001): 123–152. 58. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27. 59. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 43. 60. The clearest example is given in the French debate by the Manifeste pour la défense de l’Occident, launched by Henry Massis in October 1935 on ‘Le Temps’ and the Réponse aux intellectuels fascistes, published in Europe, no. 153 (15 November 1935): 452f. 61. Quoted by Gianluca Gabrielli, ‘Un aspetto della politica razziale nell’impero. Il “problema dei meticci”’, Passato e Presente 41 (1997): 77–105, here 78. 62. Ciro Poggiali, Diario AOI (15 giugno 1936–4 ottobre 1937). Gli appunti segreti dell’inviato del ‘Corriere della Sera’ (Milan: Longanesi, 1971), 127. Poggiali was a war correspondent in Ethiopia for Italy’s leading newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. 63. Antonio Petrucci, ‘Difendere il prestigio’, La Difesa della razza, no. 2 (20 November 1938): 41. 64. ‘I figli degli schiavi … ed ha aggiunto che se avessero un segno somatico distintivo li sterminerebbe tutti; sicuro di rendere un gran servizio all’Italia e all’Umanità’, Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1937–1943 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 243. Galeazzo Ciano was the Italian Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1943. 65. Giulia Barrera, ‘Mussolini’s colonial race laws and state-settler relations in Africa Orientale Italiana (1935–41)’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 3 (2003): 425–443. 66. ‘E’ necessario fare una netta distinzione tra i Mediterranei d’Europa (Occidentali) da una parte, gli Orientali e gli Africani dall’altra. Sono perciò da considerarsi pericolose le teorie che sostengono l’origine africana di alcuni popoli europei e comprendono in una comune razza mediterranea anche le popolazioni semitiche e camitiche.’ ‘Il Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti’ was originally published in Giornale d’Italia, 14 July 1938, and a few weeks later in La Difesa della razza, no. 1 (5 August 1938): 5–27, here 14. 67. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’ and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 10; see also Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.

CHAPTER

5

‘Window to Europe’ The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject ALMIRA OUSMANOVA

The following article analyses cinematic representations of post-Soviet subjects marked by the collapse of the Socialist economic and political system, the loss of former ideological reference points and the introduction of a market economy and consumer values. It focuses on the film Window to Paris (Yurij Mamin, 1993), which explores projections and anxieties related to the problem of access to Europe. The film narrates a phantasmagorical story of a direct transfer to Paris through a window, leading to a love relationship between a Russian man and a French woman. The cinematic narrative encodes various strategic modes of relationship with Europe, which fall into the two sometimes overlapping categories of ‘disinterested love’ and ‘profitable exchange’.

After the Wall: Encounters with Europe in Post-Soviet Cinema The process of European unification was central to the political and economic debate in the 1990s. In this debate, cultural production, including the mass media, played the role of mediator and interpreter, seeking to mobilise public opinion, sway people’s emotions and provoke discussion on key issues relating to Europe’s present and future. The reintegration of the two Europes became a central theme in European cinema of the last decade. In this process, film functions as an experimental site for exploring and testing new transnational and multicultural models of European identity.1 National cinemas reacted to the new political reality by articulating their societies’ expectations and anxieties in Notes for this section begin on page 111.

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relation to the attempt to forge a shared European identity. For the countries of Eastern Europe, this has involved a sense of returning to Europe as a cultural home. This essay will explore how post-Soviet cinema commented on this opening up of borders with the reunification of Europe, and will investigate what ‘Europeanness’ might mean for those excluded or left ‘outside’ Europe politically while belonging to it geographically and culturally.2 It should be said at the outset that this cultural ‘belonging’ is complicated by the almost complete lack of knowledge of post-Soviet cinema in the West. This has less to do with artistic quality or cultural untranslatability than with the political and economic factors governing the distribution system. An additional factor is the existence of an established discursive frame that posits ‘Easterners’ as ‘subalterns’ who cannot speak for themselves. The term ‘transition’, widely used during this period, is significant in this respect because it supposes a defective subject whose goal is ‘normalisation’ in terms of a Western capitalist model. In the 1990s, the Western media represented the ‘East’ almost exclusively in terms of poverty, prostitution, illegal migrants and the Russian mafia. As Michael Kennedy has argued: ‘the West wanted to see in Eastern Europe proof of its own universality’, while ‘East Europeans wanted to confirm that they were really part of the West’.3 Thus, in the post-Soviet media – East European cinema is a key example – Europe tends to be referred to with admiration and respect. Svetlana Boym notes that this relationship to Europe has taken the form of a romance, mixed with resentment and disenchantment: ‘unlike the Western legal or transactional relationship to the idea of Europe, the “Eastern” attitude used to be affectionate. The relationship with Europe was conceived in a form of love affair in all its possible variations – from unrequited love to autoeroticism.’4 The fall of the Berlin Wall made a greater impact on post-Soviet citizens than on their Western counterparts, since it was perceived as offering the promise of a better life, the beginning of new era. Even today, the opening of borders – no matter how partial – can be seen as the most positive achievement of the last decades. Despite the complexity of the process, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany seem likely to remain in the memory of millions of people as a staged media event, as if ‘television was the main actor of the historical mutation’5 and Communism had fallen instantaneously under the camera’s gaze. Vestiges of such a view can be found in the film that will be analysed here, Window to Paris (Yurij Mamin, 1993), whose plot does not seem so improbable after what happened in Berlin. The ease and rapidity of the ‘transfer’ to Paris, as portrayed in the film, normalises the freedom of moving back and forth, crossing borders (rendered ‘invisible’) whenever one wishes and in an instant. And yet there is a paranoid fear that the magic ‘hole’ will be closed up again for the next two decades or centuries: the film’s protagonists feel as if they are seeing Paris for the first and the last time. This perception remains a recurrent

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motif in the media; each time, when new restrictions on the visa application at the French consulate are announced, Russian newspapers are likely to run the following headline: ‘The Window to Paris Has Once Again been Barred’. Communism may have collapsed as a political system, but states of mind and ways of life do not change overnight. People were still returning home to small over-crowded apartments, doing boring, badly paid jobs (if they were not unemployed) and waiting for a better life. Indeed, new walls and new borders appeared. This bitter sense of yet another disillusionment permeates 1990s post-Soviet cinema, particularly in the case of those films recounting mishaps befalling those who set foot on European soil. In this respect, the opening sequence of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s White – a film to which we will return – is symptomatic: the desperate attempt to conceal the shabby shoes, the uncertain gait and the feeling of intolerable shame, as though everyone looks down on you – even the birds. This film articulates eloquently the massive inferiority complex that Europe’s poor Eastern relatives have toward their newly recuperated ‘family’. Something similar is found in almost every post-Soviet film that depicts the encounter with Europe. The majority of films dealing with this issue were produced between 1989 and 2000. There were, however, a few films of the 1970s and 1980s that touched on the topic. Some of these were rather successful, for they served as a window into a world that remained largely unknown to Soviet people: for them, the ‘West’ existed as an imaginary land that could be accessed only through literature and cinema. Two important films made in the 1980s set the tone for contemporary interpretations of the theme, namely, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983) and Petr Todorovsky’s Intergirl (1989). Both films served to construct a dramatic vision of Europe as a place of exile, implying that it is by definition impossible for a Russian to live in the West, regardless of the motives for attempting to do so. The two films differ in their specific class and gender perspectives: Tarkovsky’s film tells the story of a cultivated man, a musician, whose personal story evokes two centuries of cultural dialogue between Russia and Europe. As Anna Lawton comments, Gorchakov – like his eighteenth-century predecessor, the Russian composer Pavel Sosnovskii – ‘finds himself at a crossroad of two civilizations, unable to reconcile their opposite values’.6 His nostalgia is a result of profound alienation from the world and from himself. The heroine of Todorovsky’s Intergirl, Tanya Zaitseva, could not be more removed from the high cultural and moral concerns of Tarkovsky’s protagonist. She is a hard-currency prostitute who entertains foreign businessmen at an Intourist hotel in Leningrad, until the appearance of her fairytale prince: a Swedish businessman who falls in love with her and marries her. Tanya leaves for Stockholm with him and settles in a capitalist paradise.7 She too becomes consumed by nostalgia for her homeland and decides to return, but on the way to the airport she is killed in a car accident. As Lawton observes, the film sug-

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gests that the ‘harsh, dehumanizing, everyday Soviet reality that drove her to prostitution seems preferable to the comfortable but dull life of the Swedish upper classes’.8 If, in the first case, exile is interpreted as a metaphor for the human condition (the ‘universal’ point of view of an intelligent man), in the second it is portrayed as the result of a pragmatic choice conditioned by concrete social and economic factors. In both cases, the return home is impossible, implying that one can cross the border only once and only in one direction. Izabela Kalinowska has noted that 1990s cinema, and not just in Russia, stages ‘all kinds of returns “home”’.9 This produces a dramatic change in the cultural landscape: going to the ‘promised land’ is fraught with various anxieties that are symptomatic of the post-Soviet experience, but it ceases to be an exceptional occurrence.10 The popular Soviet expression ‘See Paris and die’ gave way in the early 1990s to the similarly popular but more optimistic postSoviet joke: ‘Not that I want to stay here (in Russia) or move to Israel, but what I like about moving is that the connection is via Paris.’ It is useful to relate Window to Paris to another East European film released in the same year (1993), which is also concerned with the notion of Europe as ‘home’: Krzysztof Kieslowski’s French-Polish production White. Although the two films convey different messages, both provide a commentary on the immediately preceding era. Both transmit a bitter sense ‘of rupture, loss, fragmentation and nostalgia’,11 but also a sense of revitalisation and hope for a new life. In Kieslowski’s film, the return home to Poland can be read as the consequence of a failure of communication with the Europe that has been a home for many Polish émigrés over the last two centuries. It is the story of a ‘perpetual foreigner’, who remains an alien in the West and in the East. As Kalinowska comments, it draws our attention ‘to the problems of an individual removed from the cultural context of the community which formed him’.12 Window to Paris also pays tribute to the eternal nostalgia of an East European (Russian) intellectual longing for his European cultural home, but nevertheless choosing to return to his country of origin. Other characters in the film – representing different generations, social groups and professions – also consider emigrating, but in every case they are bound by a seemingly irrational patriotism to a country that is falling apart. The two films depict a love affair between an Eastern European man (Polish and Russian, respectively) and a French woman, linking the narrative of lost identity to the concept of romantic love. Love provides an opportunity, creating the conditions for a recovery of identity and providing a form of relationship between East and West Europe. However, what at first appears to be mutual love turns out to be based on a tragic misunderstanding based on different cultural and political experience. A similar situation is found in the film Casanova’s Cloak (Alexander Galin, 1993), in which a middle-aged spinster who goes to Venice as interpreter for a Soviet delegation falls in love with an Italian who works in the hotel. At the end of her stay, the lover politely asks

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her to pay for his services – he is a gigolo. But he too has gotten things wrong, having mistaken her for a wealthy, high-society lady. Aspirations and disillusionment, failures of communication and mutual misrecognition in the context of the recently opened up possibilities of an encounter with Europe are the subject of this essay. I will discuss two principal strategic modes of the relationship with Europe as articulated in post-Soviet cinema, taking Window to Paris as a case study. The first, which I term ‘disinterested love’, designates a nostalgic love for Europe and its culture, reinforced at the level of cinematic narrative by a romantic attraction (often unrequited) toward a European man or woman. The second mode consists in what I will term ‘profitable exchange’: in this case, Europe is again the ‘promised land’, but it is so in the sense of a consumer paradise rather than a cultural home. For many post-Soviet economic migrants or tourists, going to the West is a purely pragmatic matter of achieving a better lifestyle, which is understood in terms of material benefits.

Window to Paris as Cultural Palimpsest The story begins in a gloomy Russian city, later identified as St Petersburg. The central character, Nikolai Nikolayevich Chizhov, is a music and dance teacher at a Business School for teenagers. Having lost his job, he cannot afford to rent an apartment, so he sleeps in a school sports hall. He thus feels fortunate when he acquires his own attic room in a communal apartment, inhabited by the boisterous, vulgar Gorokhof family, who work at a music factory. One night the communal apartment is visited by a ghost: that of an old woman, presumed dead, who previously inhabited the room. The amazed residents, who have been drinking all night, follow her, climbing out of the window and staggering down the fire escape to the street below, in search of entertainment. In their drunken state, it takes some time before the magical truth dawns on them: the city through the window is not St Petersburg, but Paris. The enterprising Gorokhov and his family quickly become daily commuters devoted to the pursuit of whatever consumer items they can get a hold of in Paris: money, clothes, a satellite dish, an old Citroën. On their way in and out of their own apartment, the Russians have to pass through another apartment on the Parisian side belonging to a young French woman Nicole, an artist who earns a living by making luxury items (stuffed animals) for wealthy clients. She starts to get annoyed with the intrusive visitors who keep trudging through her apartment. One day, she chases the Gorokhov family back to St Petersburg, where she becomes trapped, finding herself in a nightmarish world of filth and mind-numbing greyness. She ends up arrested and spends the night at the police station, surrounded by prostitutes and delinquents. When Nikolai finds out, he rescues her from the police by claiming that she is Edith Piaf (and that

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he is Elvis Presley) on tour in St Petersburg. Sick and tired, Nicole just wants to go back to her apartment. Since she has caught a cold, Nikolai takes care of her and a romantic relationship starts to develop between the two. Eventually, Nikolai takes his students to Paris. For them, Paris turns out to be an unending sequence of parks, balloons and carousels. The teenagers refuse to go back to Russia. A debate ensues between Nikolai and Nicole (who sides with Nikolai) on the one hand, and the teenagers on the other, who reason that their parents would be only too happy to learn that they had stayed in Paris; they believe they will be able to survive in Paris by singing and dancing. Nikolai is faced by a serious dilemma, for he has himself been thinking of remaining in Paris. He poses a question that is addressed not so much to the teenagers as to the film’s audience: is it right to flee to a land of wealth, or should one return to one’s homeland and work to improve it? As he says: ‘It’s a miserable, bankrupt country, but it’s your country. Aren’t you willing to try to make it better?’ The teenagers seem to agree. However, there is a problem: while they are saying goodbye to Paris and Nicole, the window closes. In their efforts to return to Russia, Nikolai and the teenagers, led by Nicole, highjack a plane to take them to St Petersburg. The magic dream is over. It is a grotesque narrative, in which the realistic is oddly mixed with the fantastic. As Lawton notes: ‘The events are presented as being normal, and the settings suggest the ordinary world. But characters, events, and places stand in an absurd relation to each other.’13 It may be noted that the Russian tradition of grotesque narrative was born in St Petersburg and was developed by Soviet poets and filmmakers whose creative work is inseparably linked to the city. First, there was Gogol, then Oberiuts, FEKS and many others; probably, it is because ‘Leningraders are more inclined to use comics, épatage, shock therapy of the social consciousness …, raising absurdity to a high degree of the absolute.’14 It is not surprising that many of the literary and cinematic motifs in the film, which make intertextual reference to this cultural tradition – and to everyday life in 1990s Russia, more carnivalesque than any absurdist representation – were overlooked or misunderstood by foreign spectators. One Western reviewer characterised the film as ‘a noisy satire’ whose ‘story is incoherent while its blatant message is more bankrupt than the Russian economy. It has a fantasy plot that is poorly accomplished’.15 The gags were consequently felt to be primitive. I suggest that the narrative of Window to Paris is so dense that it requires meticulous exegesis. Not only is it an encyclopaedia of post-Soviet life, but in many ways it is also a palimpsest of Russian and Soviet culture: a ‘memory text’. It is therefore necessary to be familiar with multiple cultural references, as well as with the social context, in order to be able to appreciate the film’s black humour. it is vital to be aware of Soviet ideological codes in order to interpret some of the visual images and to understand the work of estrangement and irony.

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There is no space here to unravel the film’s entire web of cultural references. I will limit myself to discussion of certain themes that touch on key sore points in the memory of the post-Soviet subject. These sore points indicate a failure to relate to the symbolic order, to a core identity. Both the individual and the traumatised community display a tendency to relive the wounding experience of the past;16 this is what causes the repetitive character of some of the cinematic motifs. Let us start with the first two sequences, which evoke the dissolution of public and private spaces in the post-Soviet world. In the first sequence, we see the communal apartment and its inhabitants, who are speaking to a policeman about a lady who has vanished. The communal apartment is chosen as a site for unrealistic and bizarre events, even though it is endowed with very realistic features associated with this kind of housing. Communal apartments remain one of the most painful topoi of Soviet culture. From the time of the 1920s housing shortage, communal apartments became a powerful social institution that regulated the structure of living space, sanitary norms and modes of interaction between inhabitants. Housing was an instrument of social stratification in Soviet society – to have a ‘personal’ room in a communal apartment was a sign of well-being, compared to life in the dormitories – yet it was also an efficient way of erasing class boundaries: scientists and workers, poets and criminals would live side-by-side. Ilya Utekhin, who conducted meticulous research on communal apartments in St Petersburg, notes that certain aspects of their inhabitants’ behaviour, opinions and habits are markers of what have been called ‘cultures of poverty’, or ‘deprivation societies’.17 People who live in such poor conditions, and are more or less equal in their poverty, believe that everything that is regarded as desirable comprises a closed system; wealth is a resource that can be accessed only through internal redistribution. The essential requirement is to gain access to this closed system of goods. Consequently, the communal outlook is characterised by obsessive attention to each co-habitant’s individual share: when viewed from the outside, this can look like an expression of envy and greed.18 Hence Gorokhov, on getting to Paris, immediately sets up a redistribution system. Such living conditions encouraged mutual hatred and envy. Privacy was a completely unknown concept. This is what most strikes Nicole when faced with the ongoing intrusion of strangers who seem not even to notice that they are disturbing her. It was normal for flatmates to spy on each other, and misfortunes suffered by one’s neighbour would be relished since they might lead to the improvement of one’s own living conditions.19 This is what happens to Nikolai in the film: he gets a room because of the old woman’s disappearance, but on his arrival nobody looks pleased. These communal apartments had a very distinct odour not unlike that of public toilets: their smell is impossible to erase from memory. Window to Paris

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also refers to this. Nikolai meets up with his old friend Guljaev who had emigrated to Paris some ten years before. His friend keeps complaining (hypocritically, in Nikolai’s view) about his new life, manifesting a sort of nostalgia for his communal apartment and the gossip in the kitchen. Nikolai takes him to St Petersburg through the window, blindfolded. As he descends the stairs, Guljaev joyfully recognises the smell. If private space is portrayed in this way, how then is public space represented in the film? In an interesting sequence, a motley crew of musicians and street performers are seen trying to cheer up citizens in what appears to be a bread line – this was the period when food was distributed through a rationing system, and even that involved spending hours in a queue. It turns out to be a vodka line, and there is no vodka left. In order to prevent a fight from breaking out between the lucky few and their unlucky fellow-citizens, the musicians strike up the International – and it works. People who have queued for hours are immediately set in motion and start to follow the band, singing in hoarse voices the familiar words of the Marxist anthem. The singing of the International in this scene is highly symbolic: a nostalgic memory of the time when Communism was a utopia uniting the working classes of all nations, and not only those who are now fighting for cheap vodka. We can see how heterogeneous the crowd is, yet they are all marching, united in song, as if Soviet times had returned. However, it seems that all times have returned simultaneously: in one square, the crowd meets a group of monarchists; further on, we see marching anarchists, followed by people singing religious chants. Later, Nicole, wandering through the streets of St Petersburg, witnesses the frenzied activity of the awakening masses, enjoying their newly regained freedom of expression. It seems that all social groups have come out onto the streets to protest: some (mostly, women) chant ‘Hands off Lenin!’, while at the next corner, others proclaim liberal values. She is struck by the atmosphere of mounting aggression: shortly after, a man walking ahead of her suddenly commits an act of vandalism, destroying a public telephone. Having given vent to his aggression, he continues walking down the street. Public space is transformed into a gigantic carnival site: everyone is here, ready to defend their values or political views, or simply to release negative emotions. But this site is also a gigantic flea market, for the demonstrators have merged with traders selling all kinds of items, old and new. Thus, the concepts of democracy and freedom of choice are linked to the notion of a market place that imposes its own rules, and where everything can be sold and consumed. That this bizarre mixture of times and public parades should be staged in St Petersburg is no accident. The film’s title is a play on the phrase ‘a window onto Europe’, immortalised in Pushkin’s 1833 poem to the city, ‘The Bronze Horseman’, which became a standard metaphor for Russia’s relationship with the West. It was Peter the Great who conceived St Petersburg as the meeting point of two cultures, the gateway ‘through which technology and new ideas

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could flow. St Petersburg was to mark the way for Russia to become modern’.20 The city was meant to change the whole Russian way of life. Depending on the specific historical period and political regime, the ‘window’ would be more or less open or closed, but it never became a genuine gateway. St Petersburg always functioned for the West as a projection: an ideal image of what Russia would become. Whatever the historical period, St Petersburg continued to be the most European Russian city – mostly on account of its architectural style, its noble ‘northern’ beauty. For two centuries, St Petersburg was a Mecca for the best Italian and French architects, sculptors and decorators, who were invited there to undertake their most daring projects. As a result, St Petersburg was often seen as an artificial copy of the West. The nineteenthcentury writer and philosopher, Alexander Herzen, declared that St Petersburg ‘differs from all other European towns by being like them all’.21 The similarity is indeed striking: the inhabitants of the communal apartment in Window to Paris would immediately have been able to distinguish Paris from any other Russian city. The ‘myth of Petersburg’ generated a whole tradition of fantastic narratives in which it was portrayed as ‘an unreal city, a supernatural realm of fantasies and ghosts’.22 It was home to the lonely, haunted figures who inhabited Nikolai Gogol’s Tales of Petersburg (1835) and to murderers like Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). The vision of an all-consuming flood became a constant theme in tales of doom relating to the city, from Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Bronze Horseman’ (1833) to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913). Josef Brodsky believed that there was ‘no other place in Russia where thoughts depart so willingly from reality: it is with the emergence of St Petersburg that Russian literature came into existence’.23 The director of Window to Paris, Yurij Mamin, plays with the metaphor of a ‘window onto Europe’ by interpreting it literally. If there were an actual window giving access to Europe, it would have to be located in St Petersburg. Mamin also appeals to the ways in which the myth of Petersburg was constructed in Russian culture: Nikolai gets his class to perform Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, the role of the Countess being given to the old lady who previously lived in the communal apartment. The old lady personifies the damned city – both can drive one mad. Neither has Mamin forgotten that it was in St Petersburg that the Revolution was born, without which the modern history of the city is unthinkable. The ghost of the Revolution, personified by Lenin, haunts the film characters both in Paris and in Russia. When they first get to a Parisian bar, they mistakenly pay for the beer with Soviet roubles. The barman stares at the coins, but takes the money: for him, it is a tourist souvenir. Lenin’s profile on a coin becomes a symbol of Russia’s bankruptcy – political and economic; inflation, not to mention political crisis, peaked in 1993. The omnipresence of the dollar and European banknotes (massively enlarged) on the walls of the business

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school symbolises the arrival of the new ‘gods’ with whom the Russian rouble cannot compete. The historical irony consists in the fact that coins bearing Lenin’s profile become post-Soviet citizens’ only hard currency, and that the ‘Revolution’ is virtually the only brand that can be exchanged for consumer goods in the West. The references to Lenin include an interesting intertextual nod to early Soviet cinema. When Guljaev, the friend Nikolai brings back from Paris, gets out of the taxi and is finally allowed to open his eyes, he sees the image of Lenin at the Finland Station and is greatly taken aback: all of his nostalgic sentiments vanish. The image of Lenin is like a frightening dream, a hallucination, as if nothing had changed during all of these years. The way the statue of Lenin is shot and Guljaev’s reaction to it are strikingly reminiscent of a sequence from Fragment of Empire (Friedrich Ermler, 1929), where the protagonist, sub-officer Philimonov, who has been suffering from amnesia for ten years, recovers his memory and immediately sets out for his native city, St Petersburg. The city, however, has changed, as has the country. He realises this when he suddenly perceives the monument to Lenin with its outstretched hand (pointing to the future, of course). He gazes at Lenin, desperately trying to recall who it might be. The intellectual montage techniques used in this earlier film represent the protagonist’s damaged psyche. In Window to Paris, this already established cinematic metaphor designates the ‘return of the repressed’: as Guljaev recovers his memory, he comes back to his senses. Guljaev’s point of view is used by Mamin as a defamiliarisation device, by making things look ‘strange’ in both Paris and post-Soviet Russia. If in Fragment of Empire Lenin stood for the coming of a new age and his statue embodied social progress, in Window to Paris estrangement is required to remind the audience that Soviet times are over, but there is a danger of their restoration. For Gorokhov’s and Nikolai’s companions – the ex-Communist, the hippy musician and the ‘alcoholic anonymous’ – the party card, with its portrait of Lenin, becomes a means of payment in Paris, but this magic pass to solidarity and internationalism have lost their relevance in present circumstances (the French Communists, most of whom look Asian or African, seem embarrassed and yet behave very politely, even taking them on a coach tour of Communist memorials in Paris). Apart from St Petersburg as a living architectural reminder of European culture, what other connotations does ‘Europe’ have in the post-Soviet cultural imaginary? As seen in this last instance, there is the memory of a common Communist past. There is also the memory of French culture, whose bizarre mixture of real and imaginary topoi is embodied in the figure of Nicole. Nicole is strikingly different from the three Gorokhov women, who seem to incarnate the merciless caricature of what Soviet women were felt to have become: shapeless, loud and atrociously dressed. They serve to remind the audience of the Communist ideal of the robust woman barely distinguishable

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from a man. This exaggerated caricature is required by the film’s somewhat distorted representation of the Socialist emancipation project, but also by its narrative logic: the appearance and behaviour of these women have to create a sharp contrast with the elegant femininity of a French woman. When the Gorokhov women buy new clothes in an attempt to look smart, they appear all the more ridiculous. Having bought their kitsch clothing in Tati, the combined effect is that of a traffic light: the mother is dressed in red, her pregnant daughter in yellow and the grandmother in green. By contrast, Nicole is an embodiment of ideal femininity, the personification of a dream shared by both Soviet men and women.24 In Soviet times, the image of the ‘typical’ French woman was embodied by Edith Piaf. Thus, the policemen in St Petersburg immediately ‘recognise’ Nicole as Edith Piaf; they hold up the magazine with her image on the cover and, for them, Nicole looks exactly the same. In this respect, both France and Nicole as ‘dream woman’ represent an obscur objet du désir, to cite the title of Luis Buñuel’s film. How then is the memory of Europe transformed by the characters’ encounter with Europe in the form of Paris and a ‘real woman’?

Disinterested Love or Profitable Exchange? The encounter with Europe produces a culture shock, a genuine bouleversement, in all of the film’s characters. The imago projected by Soviet culture breaks down; it does not correspond to the real state of things, producing a profound referential crisis. Having never been abroad, the characters know only what they could have gleaned from the Soviet mass media. They quickly realise that Europe is not quite what they had imagined, but, since they cannot change their ‘ways of seeing’ overnight, they continue to use their mental schemata to interpret what they see. Like bricoleurs, they have to fit new experiences into an existing interpretive framework. What we witness here is a process not just of adjusting to new ‘civilized’ codes of behaviour, but also of reworking of previous mental constructs and stereotypes into a new configuration. Window to Paris reproduces virtually all of the major Soviet propaganda clichés about the West. The Soviet mass media elaborated a more or less apocalyptic mode of representation of the West, which consecrated the binary opposition between good and evil, socialism and capitalism. Whenever Western countries were mentioned in the news, it was exclusively in the context of ecological disasters, economic crises, horrifying crimes, unemployment and other negative factors.25 No wonder that Nikolai’s first ‘vision’, on initially deciding not to return home and stay in Paris, mimics the nightmarish images of Soviet propaganda and indeed is very scary: he imagines himself becoming a Parisian clochard, who lives on a rubbish tip, catches raw frogs to eat and walks alone through a rainy Paris at night, unshaven, dirty and dressed in rags. He is

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glad not only to be awoken from this nightmare, but even more so to discover that the window is still open, allowing him the possibility of escaping such a terrifying fate. Clearly, Nikolai’s nightmare expresses the fear of losing one’s home in the metaphorical sense of ‘homeland’. He could not be so scared by the prospect of not having a home as such: after all, his ‘home’ had previously been a sports hall. The principal fear here is that of finding himself alone in a hostile environment in the capitalist West. In Soviet Russia, the West was imagined and constructed as the embodiment of self-interest, heartlessness, sexual decadence and immorality. This caricaturesque representation was rooted in the traditional Russian discourse on ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’, according to which Europe epitomised ‘civilisation’ – superficial and oriented toward the cult of technology and formalised etiquette – whereas Russia was considered to be a ‘culture’ based on spirituality. Filmmakers such as Tarkovsky played a part in supporting the image of Europe as ‘morally bankrupt’ – a place devoid of spirituality. Such an opposition clearly reflects an inferiority complex at not having been accepted by the West and an unacknowledged awareness of the low level of material culture in Russia.26 The motif of Western sexual depravity is articulated in Nikolai’s and Gorokhov’s second meeting with Nicole. Infuriated by their night time visit and the damage they have caused, she tries to explain to them exactly what they have done. Gorokhov is staring at her, and while she moves from one object to another, he starts to develop his own interpretation, based on popular Soviet jokes about sexually liberated French women. This turns out to be a primitive zoomorphic reading of her gestures. Decoding her message as an expression of sexual desire, he whispers to Nikolai: ‘See how she wants you!’ The theme of the moral disintegration of the ‘decadent’ West is developed in the sequence that depicts Nikolai job hunting in Paris. He successfully takes part in an audition organised by Guljaev and is offered a job in an orchestra that performs for high-society audiences. There is, however, a strange condition: he is asked not only to refrain from smoking and to wear a tailcoat, but also to take off his pants. He resists and walks onto the stage as he is. There, he sees something beyond his wildest imaginings: a half-naked male orchestra playing for a completely nude audience. In fact, he should not have been so shocked, for he has already seen how his friend Guljaev is earning his daily bread – playing music in a restaurant on a violin that he clamps between his buttocks. Thus, the protagonists’ multiple misadventures in Paris correspond to the image of Europe from the official Soviet standpoint. In the course of the film, the image of another Europe gradually takes shape and these clichés lose their validity. Nor is this new image idealistic or idyllic. A picture emerges that is more diverse; the relationships between the film’s characters correspondingly become more complex. Rich and poor, inequality and justice, coexist. Europe is a consumer paradise, but it is also a cultural ‘home’ for many Russians.

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The diversification of attitudes toward Europe, as well as the multiplicity of subject positions, forms the symbolic centre of the film’s narrative. This is articulated, firstly, through the theme of capitalism as a consumer society and market place; and, secondly, through the theme of love. Both strands are closely connected in terms of the strategic modes of relationship with Europe, defined by class and gender positions, which they suppose. From the standpoint of post-Soviet citizens, consumer society is seen as the major goal of social progress. By contrast, the Soviet regime, being a ‘society of labour’, was built on the idea of the attempt to eradicate private forms of consumption. As Søren Damkjaer notes: ‘The principles of planned consumption had led to a rationed level of consumption for the majority of the population, who shared the relatively scarce consumer goods according to the criteria of political patronage and privilege.’27 This was supposed to be an ideological alternative to the capitalist West. However, perennial shortages made people feel deprived. This explains why the Soviet state was so inconsistent in terms of its consumer policy, why its attitude toward consumption was always so ambivalent. In fact, communism failed precisely because of the harsh material conditions of everyday life. The conflict between the communist and capitalist systems took place in the sphere of consumption: as Ina Merkel notes in relation to East Germany, ‘the Cold War was won in the market place’.28 Hence, Europe’s present is perceived by the film’s characters as Russia’s radiant future. Walking through Paris, Nikolai and Gorokhov are amazed to see supermarkets filled with all of the consumer goods they have never seen: they stare at the electronic equipment, cars, clothes and the variety of fresh fruits. All of this makes a striking contrast to Russia, where, on an everyday basis, people have to struggle to survive. A facile explanation of why France is so far ahead is given by Gorokhov: ‘We fended off the Mongol hordes for them, while they were building their prosperity.’ Gorokhov joyfully throws himself into the lively process of exchange and smuggling; he sells everything – matrioshkas, pianos, Tchaikovsky’s music – while other characters display an ambivalent attitude toward consumption. He is learning to embrace the capitalist system. The only thing that he does not put on the market, as he declares to Nikolai, is his motherland. In a nice irony, Mamin here reminds his audience of yet another Soviet topos: the theme of betrayal used to be associated with the idea of ‘selling the motherland’. As a worker, Gorokhov shows no traces of the supposed asceticism of the proletariat. He seems to be unaware of the principles of proletarian internationalism, having no sympathy for his French counterparts who, for him, are merely market competitors. The lure of consumer society generated what came to be known as ‘sausage migration’: the term commonly used to refer to the mass migration of the 1990s, triggered not so much by political necessity or ethnic conflict as by pov-

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erty and economic need. Window to Paris reflects on the question of how and why former Soviet citizens migrated to the West. Various strategies of migration are articulated through different characters. These include the former musician, Guljaev, who had emigrated to Paris at an earlier stage and now works in a restaurant. With bitter irony, Mamin (himself an emigrant) highlights the duplicity of the emigrant’s discourse. Claiming that all French people are greedy and nasty (while he sits in a French restaurant, drinks French wine, wears French clothes and tells of his travels around the globe), Guljaev sheds false tears, nostalgically recalling kitchen conversations and former times of frankness and authenticity. Then we have the old woman, the former aristocratic ‘owner’ of the magic window: her figure recalls the first-wave of emigration triggered by ideological dissent against the Soviet regime. Additionally, we have the teenagers, singing and dancing for tips in Paris, who have no wish to return home – as if for the younger generation, Russia has no future at all. Lastly, there is labour migration, represented here by the new phenomenon of ‘shuttle business’, personified by Gorokhov. Gorokhov’s attitude toward Europe is pragmatic, confined to his class position and with no concern for European cultural values that do not form part of his cultural memory. Europe is on his mind (in his business plans), but not in his heart. However, Mamin’s lead character Nikolai does not fit any of these categories. On the one hand, he is a liminal subject, ready to migrate: he has lost his job, he has no family and even his city becomes alien to him. In addition, he falls in love with Nicole. Yet, he chooses to return home. Thus, there is some room in this consumer paradise for romantic feelings. This second type of attitude toward Europe is embodied in the love story between Nikolai and Nicole. The representation of love in cinema is by definition related to the issue of gender identity. Recent Russian cinema is obsessed with recuperating masculinity, with female characters serving as a site for male fantasies related to power and sexual control. The renaissance of the notion of Russian identity is largely due to the appearance of new images of heroic masculinity. In practically every recent Russian box office hit, the conflation of national identity with masculine authority has been a key factor in the film’s success. Window to Paris evokes the difficult process of acquiring a new male identity. All of the main characters are ex-something and are in the process of becoming something else. For instance, Gorokhov is in the process of becoming a businessman. He is sexually active, energetic and has few qualms about the ethical aspects of his entrepreneurial activities. In his relationship with the three women in his family, he behaves in a very decisive way; as father, husband and son-in-law, he is used to dealing with women. He personifies the new hegemonic masculinity. Mamin cannot conceal his sympathy, tinged with shame, for this new cultural hero of our times. Unlike Nicole, represented in the film as the ideal woman, Nikolai, for all his romanticism, is definitely not an ideal lover: middle-aged, not particularly

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handsome and gauchely dressed. There is something pitiful in his appearance. In Kieslowski’s White, Karol also lacks any sex appeal. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two men: firstly, we know nothing about Nikolai’s sexual fantasies, to the extent that it is doubtful whether he has any; secondly, unlike the enterprising hairdresser Karol, Nikolai persists in his inertia. Nikolai’s weakness and passivity are closely related to the crisis of masculinity in late Socialist society and the beginning of Perestroika.29 His tragic position is defined by two factors: he is a man and he belongs to the intelligentsia – a social group whose status in the Soviet Union was always highly dubious, but which in the 1990s lost the last remnants of its symbolic capital. Intellectuals do not figure among the heroes of recent Russian films, while characters like Gorokhov are frequent. Window to Paris comments on the position of intellectuals (particularly men) unable to adjust to the new economic realities and left feeling helpless.30 Both sides of Nikolai’s personality suffer an identity crisis. His not-quitemale behaviour, apart from his lack of sexual initiative, is marked by the fact that he faints three times, on more or less any occasion that requires a decision or a declaration of intent. He seems to be paralysed by a general state of social anomie and does not know what to do in a world that is falling apart. He is a typical ‘hero of our times’, a contemporary personification of the ‘superfluous person’ glorified by nineteenth-century Russian literature. The only thing that he still seems to possess is his pure love for culture and the arts. This is why he enjoys being in Paris, walking through the streets, recognising familiar places, seeing its beauty day and night, listening to its music, while his flatmates are busy smuggling through the window and selling everything they can find on either side. His love for Nicole seems to be as disinterested and pure as his love for European culture. One might want to ask whether Nikolai is really romantic or merely impotent. In the course of the film, he is transformed from a passive into an active subject: he rescues Nicole from the police and then takes care of her when she gets sick; he brings the teenagers to Paris and then manages to convince them to go home; he learns how to make decisions. His journey to Paris is a classical fairytale test – in this case, of his romantic outlook. He remains strikingly immune to the lure of consumer society. Nikolai seems to be the last man of Soviet culture – a ‘fragment of empire’, for there is no place for people like him in this new world, just as there is no time and place for romantic love. In his imagination, Europe is an embodiment of romantic love – a place where utopia remains alive. The way love is represented in the film is interesting in its own right. The majority of the post-Soviet films of the early 1990s exploited the female body and featured explicit sex scenes. Sex became the major audience attraction. Window to Paris is a rare exception: it speaks about love ‘in the age of permissiveness, when a sexual encounter is often nothing more than a “quickie” in

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some dark corner of an office’31 – an age when, by ‘love’, people actually mean ‘sex’ (as illustrated by the popular post-Soviet proverb of the 1990s: ‘Sex is not yet the reason for getting acquainted’). The film’s erotic sub-texts are very subtle; it is, in fact, a very romantic film. By contrast with Kieslowski’s White, the long-awaited moment of fulfilment is never realised and would hardly be appropriate. This is an ‘impossible’ love, which will never be consummated. But it is not enough to say that the film represents love in an entirely chaste manner. The subtlety derives from the juxtaposition of words and unspoken sentiments. Just as we never see a sex scene, we also never hear words of love. Since the main characters experience constant difficulties in speaking to each other, their story develops primarily through visual narrative: gazes, gestures, colours, light and camerawork are more eloquent than words. As Koen Raes puts it: ‘Love presents itself as covering the domain of the unspoken, as being beyond speech, as an emotion that cannot be uttered or expressed by words.’32 I would not argue that love does not need words, nor that ‘language can only be a poor expression of what love really is’, but I would agree with Raes that love ‘involves the promise of an encounter without codes, a communication without a grammar’.33 Love happens when an emotional affinity between two people comes about: in the film, this is suggested by the peculiar circumstances that make communication and understanding between the two lovers possible. At first they seem too different, yet it is precisely this difference, as in the case of Karol and Dominique in Kieslowski’s White, which excites them. In Paris, Nicole would probably never have even noticed Nikolai; she starts empathising with him and then falls in love with him at the point when her misadventures in St Petersburg seem to be over. She feels grateful to him for rescuing her, and she understands him better now. Love arises as an instantaneous flash and then everything gets transformed in its light. It is only at this moment that ‘true love emerges’: in Slavoj Žižek’s words, ‘we witness the sublime moment when eromenos (the loved one) changes into erastes (the loving one) by stretching his hand back and “returning love”. This moment designates the “miracle” of love, the moment when “the real answers” appear.’34 Nicole now sees people and things differently; she no longer personifies a radical otherness, with which no relationship of empathy is possible. However, for this initial emotional arousal to mutate into something more stable and solid, there has to be a possibility of linguistic exchange. In Window to Paris, as in White, language starts to play a crucial role when the danger of misunderstanding appears and the protagonists cannot find a proper language to express their feelings. A desperate Karol sets out to learn French, after he has already failed once. Nikolai does likewise when he exhausts his limited vocabulary of a bizarre assortment of French and English words plus Italian musical terminology. Nicole is ready also: when she gets tired of foreigners tramping through her flat all of the time, she decides that the only language these people can

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understand is swear words. She buys a French-Russian lexicon and masters the entire contents. She takes the first step, initiating communication in an obscene variant of Nikolai’s native tongue. It is only later that she comes to understand the meaning of these words, as well as the reality that stands behind them. Nikolai, a man who probably does not know the words of love in any language, expresses his feelings mostly through his deeds. However, he seems to need the French language in order to communicate his feelings to Nicole. We may recall that, in nineteenth-century Russian culture, French was the only language of love among cultivated people in high society. And together they carefully pronounce the words: La fenêtre vers Paris. Thus, love turns out to be the most efficient mode of intercultural exchange, while the emergence of love is also the condition for becoming a subject. Nicole’s love gives Nikolai a chance to view himself in a new light, to regain self-respect and, therefore, to be able to return home. Through Nicole’s love, he becomes a subject, capable of making decisions and taking action. As Žižek puts it: ‘the object of love changes into subject the moment it answers the call of love’.35 On a symbolic level, the narrative suggests that the nostalgia for Europe is a longing for romantic love. The film communicates the utopian belief, grounded in the political climate of the early 1990s, that Europe is so close and that access to it is very open. This utopian belief would give way to disappointment – in the film as in reality – when the borders proved to be as material as they had been prior to 1989 and the dream of freely travelling back and forth turned out to be no more than a dream. In this sense, Window to Paris is a film about the historical imaginary of the post-Soviet subject, for whom access to Europe has turned out to be a kind of cultural neurosis.

Notes 1. Apart from the famous Three Colours trilogy by Krzysztof Kieslowski (1993–1994), films by Milcho Manchevski (Before the Rain, 1994), Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, 1987), Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa, 1991), Lars von Trier (Europa, 1991), Emir Kusturica (Underground, 1995), and others have touched on the question of a new European identity. 2. The enlargement of the European Union involves careful and highly formalised procedures for making decisions on the terms of membership in the EU. It is thus predicated on exclusion at least as much as on inclusion, with the necessity of defining its eastern borders being crucial to the process. 3. Michael D. Kennedy, ‘An Introduction to East European Ideology and Identity in Transformation’, in Envisioning Eastern Europe. Postcommunist Cultural Studies, ed. Michael D. Kennedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–45, here 44. 4. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 221. 5. Dominique Wolton, Éloge du grand publique. Une théorie critique de la télévision (Paris: Flammarion Champs, 1990), 253. 6. Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 126.

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7. In 2003, the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson made the film Lilya Forever, which narrates the pitiful story of a Russian teenage prostitute who also finds herself in Sweden. This can be seen as an updated version of a familiar plot: a Russian woman is portrayed as a criminal or prostitute (or both). The early twentieth-century image of the beautiful, enlightened Russian woman seems to have vanished from the cultural memory of Europe. 8. Lawton, Kinoglasnost, 212. 9. Izabela Kalinowska, ‘Exile and Polish Cinema: From Mickiewicz and Slowacki to Kies;lowski’, in Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices, ed. Domnica Radulescu (Lanham: Lexington, 2002), 107–124, here 107. 10. Several post-Soviet films explicitly address the topic of the encounter with Europe. Though I will not discuss them here, it is useful to recall some of them: Hitchhiking (Nikita Mikhalkov, 1990); Restless Arrow (Georgy Shengelaya, 1993), whose plot is based on the idea of a direct transfer back in time to the Soviet 1960s; I Want to Prison (Alla Surikova, 1998); French and Russian Love (Alexander Alexandrov, 1994); Casanova’s Cloak (Alexander Galin, 1993). 11. Domnica Radulescu, ‘Introduction’, in Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices, ed. Domnica Radulescu (Lanham: Lexington, 2002), 1–14, here 3. 12. Kalinowska, ‘Exile and Polish Cinema’, 108. 13. Lawton, Kinoglasnost, 231. 14. Sergei Dobrotvorsky, ‘The most Avant-Garde of All the Parallel Ones’, The New Orleans Review 1 (1990): 84f. 15. See Dennis Schwarz, Online Film Critics Society, http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com. 16. Kalinowska, ‘Exile and Polish Cinema’, 116. 17. See Ilya Utekhin, Ocherki kommunal’nogo byta (Moscow: OGI, 2001). 18. Ibid., 47. 19. Natalia Lebina, Povsednevnaja zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda. Normy i anomalii. 1920–30 gody (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo ‘Dmitry Bulanin’, 1999), 198. 20. Bruce W. Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight. St Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 3. 21. Alexander Gertsen, ‘Moskva i Peterburg’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1954), 2: 30–37, here 36. 22. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London: Penguin, 2002), 6. 23. Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986), 76. 24. It would be useful here to recall a conversation René Étiemble had in 1957 when he visited the Soviet Union for the second time: ‘“Ah!” – me disait une Moscovite, elle-même très distinguée de visage et de manières – vous en avez de la chance, vous autres Francais! Toutes les femmes chez vous sont minces, élégantes et jolies, bien différentes de celles qu’on voit dans les rues de nos villes: trop grasses, affalées, negligees.’ The woman who says this adds, ‘Parce que nous avons vécu trop longtemps coupés les uns des autres, nous vivons les uns et les autres sur des images légendaires, fabuleuses’ (‘Ah!’ - a woman from Moscow was telling me, a very distinguished woman in appearance and manners - you are really lucky, you French! All your women are slim, elegant and pretty, very different from the ones that can be seen in our towns: too fat, slumped, sloppy.’ The woman who said this continued, ‘Because we have lived for too long cut off the ones from the others, and we both have mythical, fairy-tale images of one another’.) (René Étiemble, Le Meurtre du petit père. Naîssance à la politique (Paris: Arlea, 1989), 229). 25. On this issue see Kristian Gerner, ‘Soviet TV News. “Sobornost” Secularized’, in Symbols of Power.The Aesthetics of Political Legitimation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, eds Claes Arvidsson and Lars Erik Blomqvist (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International 1987), 113–140. 26. See Mikhail Jampol’sky, ‘Rossija. Kul’tura I subkul’tury’, in Novaja volna. Russkaja kul’tura i subkul’tury na rubezhe 1980–90-h gg. (Moscow: Moskovskij rabochij, 1994), 40–55, here 45. 27. Søren Damkjaer, ‘The Body and Cultural Transition in Russia’, in Soviet Civilization between Past and Present, eds Bryld Mette and Erik Kulavig (Odense: Odense University Press, 1998), 117–132, here 127.

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28. Ina Merkel, ‘From a Socialist Society of Labor into a Consumer Society? The Transformation of East German Identities and Systems’, in Envisioning Eastern Europe. Postcommunist Cultural Studies, ed. Michael D. Kennedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 55–65, here 60. 29. In the early 1990s, the phenomenon of ‘sofa emigration’ appeared; that is, of unemployed, mainly educated men who, instead of adapting to new circumstances, preferred to stay at home, while their women would take on any kind of work in order to feed their families. Women became the breadwinners and owners of small business enterprises in the economic system of the transition period. They were particularly active in the ‘shuttle business’. This issue has been extensively researched in recent studies of masculinities in Russia (for instance, see O muzhe(n)stvennosti, ed. Sergei Oushakin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002)). 30. See Elena Kabanova, ‘Postsovetskij period. Kino i zritel’ v poiskah drug druga’, in Istorija strany. Istorija kino, ed. Sergei Sekirinski (Moscow: Znak, 2004), 460–491, here 469. 31. Slavoj Žižek, ‘From Courtly Love to The Crying Game’, New Left Review 202 (November– December 1993): 95–108, here 95. 32. Koen Raes, ‘On Love and Other Injustices. Love and Law as Improbable Communications’, in Love and Law in Europe, ed. Hanne Petersen (Dartmouth: Ashgate, 1998), 27–51, here 27. 33. Ibid., 45. 34. Žižek, ‘From Courtly Love to The Crying Game’, 105. 35. Ibid., 106.

Part II

PUBLIC

AND

PRIVATE LOVES

CHAPTER

6

Love in the Time of Revolution The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska MARCI SHORE

For Polish poets born at the fin-de-siècle, life was unbearably heavy. They were a particular generation, the last to be educated under the partitioning empires and the first to come of age in the universities of independent Poland. Now the patriotic burden of poets had been mercifully lifted, and the young poet Jan Lechon; captured a certain temporal ethos when he wrote: ‘And in the spring let me see spring, not Poland.’1 These poets were Poles and Europeans; many were ‘non-Jewish Jews’, in their sometimes-friend Isaac Deutscher’s words, who very much felt themselves to be Poles. They spoke Russian and French as well as Polish; they read philosophy in German; they moved about in rather entangled circles with shifting boundaries, connected to one another by not more than one or two proverbial degrees of separation. They were polyglots who came under the influence of Marinetti and Apollinaire and fell in love with Mayakovsky; East Europeans whose sense of Europe embraced the continent’s entirety; quintessential cosmopolitans who felt at home in Paris, Moscow and Berlin – yet who at once felt inextricably bound to Poland, who believed in their role as the ‘conscience of the nation’ and who very much felt that Warsaw belonged to them. They were afflicted with a certain fatal narcissism – it was a narcissism they indulged in, but more poignantly, suffered from. They sat in their café called Ziemian;ska and believed, with absolute sincerity, that the world moved on what they said there. Often they fell into bouts of despair and self-hatred, and – not despite, but rather precisely because of – their narcissism, they embodied the observation that intellectuals comprise the only class who loves to hate itself.2 They fell in love with poetry and they fell in love with the Revolution – and perhaps with both much, much too completely. Notes for this section begin on page 134.

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The Poets of Café Ziemian;ska During the dark and cold winter of 1922, the young poet Władysław Broniewski fantasised about meeting a diabolical woman. Instead he made the acquaintance of Aleksander Wat, an ‘extreme futurist’. It was a time in the elegant city of Warsaw when this small group of young futurists lived amid cafés and cabarets, dabbling in nihilism and wallowing and exalting in visions of the collapse of European civilisation, of the end of the world. The First World War had already irrevocably destroyed one Europe. At stake was the future – or absence thereof – of the new one that had been born. In the evenings, they gathered on the upper floor of a café named Ziemian;ska, where they would speak of their friend the avant-garde poet Adam Wazæyk, translator of the French futurist Guillaume Apollinaire, with the rhyme Wazæyk brzydki twarzyk – ‘Wazæyk with the ugly little face’. In December 1922, Broniewski noted in his diary that at Café Ziemian;ska, he had been meeting with a small group of writers: Aleksander Wat, Anatol Stern, Mieczysław Braun. ‘All Yids. People of much intelligence and erudition … I have benefited much from that – above all because I’ve become acquainted with the new Russian poetry … Mayakovsky, the most important of them all, has revealed to me completely new worlds.’3 Władysław Broniewski came of age fighting for Polish independence in Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s Legions – he wore the gray Legionnaire uniform, adorned with a sky-blue ribbon. His bedroom in his mother’s apartment was decorated in the style of the Polish szlachta: a Persian rug, crossed swords, ancestral daggers.4 In October 1918, at the age of twenty, he commented in his diary that ‘a woman who is not pretty should be sensible, otherwise she is intolerable’.5 He longed for an entanglement of love and war, and despaired of boredom, which for him was ‘life’s tragedy’.6 At the war’s end, he felt unconnected, as if he had departed so far from all spheres that he no longer had any place. By January 1921, he had clarified what he needed in the language of nineteenth-century Romanticism: ‘to find an idea that would rejuvenate me, that would force me to treat my own life as a backdrop, that would propel me towards sacrifices, towards battle … To find a creative power for myself, that would allow me to become “immortal in the effects of my own action”.’7 Aleksander Wat, the polyglot futurist, had already reached the conclusion that neither rejuvenation nor regeneration were possible, that rather civilisation – Europe – had degenerated beyond repair. At the age of eighteen, ill and feverish, in a manic, ‘trance-like’ state, Wat composed the long prose poem I from One Side and I from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove. There Biblical references mated with narratives from European literature and characters from Greek myths, entangled through a Polish Wat infused with neologisms, archaisms and obscure words borrowed from some dozen different foreign tongues. The esoteric sophistication and density of the language betrayed an astounding breadth of knowledge – and a self-education that devastatingly pointed to nothingness.

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Wat wrote of eternal nights that never pass; of the horror of encountering one’s own sallow image at midnight; of the nightingales that sing him to death; of his faces, which he changes with each zenith of the sun. Sleepy castrates moan in the corners of a grotesque arcade; children emerge from graves to suck his fingers; and ‘God with a swollen hydrous body trembles from cold and loneliness’. ‘At midnight’, the young Wat wrote, ‘it is always necessary to place your head under the dazzling, yes! dazzling knife of the guillotine.’ The piece was saturated with a deep sense of moral degeneration, of the collapse of civilisation, of the ‘cursed principium individuationis’ that paralysed him. There was nothing redemptive, there was no salvation and the blasphemy throughout the poem suggested less heresy than it did nihilism. Sexuality had become licentious and grotesque. ‘– I leave for your meeting’, wrote the eighteen year-old Wat, ‘where trembling in tears and without sensation you will surrender, you will surrender, he (she) will surrender, we will surrender, all of you will surrender, they – the men (they – the women) will surrender’. In the last stanza, Wat returned to himself, tormented by his own self-absorption, and wrote of how it was he himself who was burning in the ‘inquisitorial interior’ of his pug iron stove.8 Before long, the Crakowian Bruno Jasien;ski joined the Warsaw futurists Aleksander Wat and Anatol Stern. Jasien;ski had returned home to Cracow after having spent his teenage years in Russia; now he went to Polish university, where he became a futurist. Of all of them, he was the dandy, all nineteenthcentury elegance dressed in black with a top hat and a wide tie and a monocle on one eye. Schoolgirls went crazy for him – but Jasien;ski, like his new Warsaw friends, was infatuated rather with Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, infatuated most of all with Marinetti’s announcement that words had been liberated – a revolution, Wat later described, just as much as Nietzsche’s had been when he announced that God was dead.9 The futurists were intoxicated with transgression as well. In their 1921 manifesto, Wat and Stern declared that the great rainbow monkey named Dionysus had taken his last breath long ago and that they were throwing away his rotten legacy, relegating civilisation, culture and their morbidity to the trash heap.10 The Polish novelist they revered was not amused. Stefan ZÆeromski was a generation their senior, the luminary of the Young Poland circle who came of age at a moment when it was imperative to see Poland, not spring. Now in his book Snobbism and Progress, ZÆeromski turned the Polish futurists’ cosmopolitanism against them, deriding them for snobbery, for their rather pathetic imitation of foreign fashion. ZÆeromski accepted ‘the most modern artistic currents’ elsewhere in Europe, but he disparaged their Polish counterparts: ‘These trends are in essence new pages of Italian, French and Russian literature. In Poland, however, they are “cigarette butts,” alien, colorless, unreadable, material evidence of snobbism.’11 The Polish futurists were quite hurt; nonetheless, ‘snobbism’ soon joined their list of favourite words, together with ‘passéisme’, ‘bourgeoisism’ and later,

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‘joy’. For the Łódz; poets Witold Wandurski and Mieczysław Braun, Café Ziemian;ska was all about snobbism. ‘Don’t go at all to Ziemian;ska! You’ll suffocate in the fumes of snobbish literati and pretentious false literature’, Mieczysław Braun warned Władysław Broniewski. ‘Stay away!’12 Broniewski agreed. In spring of 1924, he wrote to an old army friend that he was getting sick of those Jewish literati from Ziemian;ska. He had, upon closer acquaintance, become convinced that they had psyches very different from his own – Jewish intellect was all quickness, flashiness and false depth – in contrast to his Slavic intellect: heavier and less ethereal. His futurist poet friends from Ziemian;ska were, he concluded, ‘masters of outcry, of a noisy-gloomy passion entangled in itself ’.13

Mayakovsky and Revolution It was these masters of outcry who introduced Broniewski to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry. The introduction was a fateful one. The Italian futurist Marinetti had liberated words from syntax; the Russian futurists had gone a step further: they had liberated words from their referents, signifiers from their signifieds. Yet having done this, they fled from the implication – the absence of any stable meaning, radical contingency – into the embrace of the Revolution. Now in Poland all of Café Ziemian;ska, the waiters as well, were reciting Mayakovsky’s ‘Left March’ – the Russian refrain levoi! levoi! levoi! resounded throughout the café.14 This was not mere amusement; the poets of Café Ziemian;ska took themselves very seriously. In July 1921, Aleksander Wat, Anatol Stern and Bruno Jasien;ski, ‘in the name of the Polish futurists’ – that is, themselves – wrote a letter to Vladimir Mayakovsky. ‘The Polish futurists, establishing relations with futurists of all countries, send fraternal greetings to the Russian futurists’, they began. They solicited his contribution to ‘the first large international journal-newspaper devoted to futurist poetry from all over the world in all languages’.15 The highly ambitious international journal-newspaper lasted for only two issues. Their love for Mayakovsky lasted much longer. In the end, it was neither Marx nor Lenin, but the breathtakingly handsome Russian futurist who seduced the Polish poets. Radical nihilism and radical contingency proved unbearable; in the end they could not endure it. They fled. They arrived at Marxism in the mid to late 1920s, before socialist realism, before Stalinism. For these poets, Marxism meant Revolution – something radical, ecstatic, consummating. What Marxism in theory would become when applied, what communism would mean in practice – they did not yet know. Their Marxism was a much more multivalent and contestatory one, chosen at moments when there was little space for opportunism. For the Polish avant-garde poets, as for JeanPaul Sartre, revolution was a categorical, existential imperative. Revolution was self-actualisation through self-annihilation; the consummation of subjectivity through its abandonment; and the transcendence and the fulfilment of both

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their Polishness and their Europeanness. Distinctions between East and West would be effaced once and for all, Poland would be liberated from all hithertoexisting inferiorities and the Polish poets would assume their place among the vanguard of the world. In 1923, Broniewski initiated the futurists’ first ‘ark of the covenant’ with the Communist Party. The poets would join the revolution, lending their talents to the theosoph-turned-communist Jan Hempel’s Marxist journal. Witold Wandurski contributed the scathing ‘To the Gentlemen Poets’, a verse accusing the café poets – his friends and the friends of his friends – of manicurism and self-indulgence, of falling behind Europe, which had now become the progressive Other – in contrast to their own, eastern half of Europe, of whose ‘backwardness’ they were at times painfully conscious. The Polish poets had failed to see the future in Europe, Wandurski declared: Oh, independent hypocrisy! Freedom of masturbation! How does it fail to disgust you, poets, this verbal onanism? Look! In Europe the wind already blows… Hurl the fire-brand into the keg of the powder-magazine!16

It was a short-lived experiment. The Party was displeased with the futurists’ contributions and the verdict was passed down to Hempel. A mésalliance on both sides, Braun told Broniewski.17 After that, the futurists set out upon different paths. Braun rebelled against both proletarian poetry and the avant-garde, telling Broniewski in January 1925 that he had now adopted a classical style: ‘Today I’m at a new stage. Nothing connects me to the so-called new art. I’m reaching out to other places for “models”. I’m writing classically. I don’t care at all about the gains of futurism, I’m alien vis-à-vis Russian poetry; Mayakovsky, Esenin, Apollinaire somewhere fell into a void and utterly disappeared for me.’18 When the Second World War came, Braun, as a Jew, went to the Warsaw ghetto. From behind the wall, he sent letters to his friends on the ‘Aryan Side’ in which he wrote of the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad and the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, who lived in Paris. One evening Aleksander Wat met the aspiring actress Ola Lev at a year’s end drama school ball. Afterward, he ran excitedly to his friend Irena Krzywicka, the sexually liberated feminist whose writing seemed to Wat to be ‘passéist’, and told her the wonderful news: such a beautiful girl – and she wanted him! Irena Krzywicka was impressed. After all, Wat himself was rather ugly.19 But he was not ugly to Ola, and theirs was to be greatest love affair of all. He would take her with him to Café Ziemian;ska, where she would mix chocolate into her coffee. When once at a party where the guests drank vodka and ate herring served on newspaper, a certain soon-to-be-Trotskyite named Isaac Deutscher pulled Ola onto his lap, Wat jealously pulled her away, for she belonged to him.20

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In 1927, Aleksander Wat and Ola Lev were married, and Wat presented his bride with a homemade wedding gift: a collection of short stories titled Lucifer Unemployed. The tales were parabolic, anti-utopian, nihilist. In one titled ‘The Eternally Wandering Jew’, Nathan, an orphaned Talmudic student from the shtetl Zebrzydowo, travels through all of Europe to the US in search of his benefactor, the rich Baron Gould. The story, set during a moment when Europe is ‘cannibalistic, impoverished, mystical, sadistic, prostituted’, is framed by the foil of the US and the dialectic of the Old and New Worlds; by the image of the isolated shtetl; and by the refrain, ‘there is always mud in Zebrzydowo’.21 In New York, now as Baron Gould’s secretary, Nathan conceives of the ideal social world as one that reconciles communism and Catholicism. He insists that the Jews convert en masse to Catholicism; and the yeshiva student himself becomes Pope. The story ends hundreds of years later, when the last anti-Semites come upon Nathan’s shtetl Zebrzydowo. There they convert to Judaism and restore the ancient Hebraic traditions. As Wat hovered at the edge of this abyss, vacillating among nihilism, Catholicism and communism, Witold Wandurski made an existential leap into the arms of the Revolution. Broniewski was too timid; he failed to grasp, his friend wrote from Łódz;, that revolution was a fire into which you must throw yourself, burn yourself, descend into savagery and barbarism. Wandurski was ecstatic, he had reached an epiphany: their problems with apparatchiks like Hempel, their whole stance of ‘intellectual autonomy’, it was all masked intellectual opportunism, appeasement. ‘Yes, appeasement! I want content, life, joy’, he wrote to Broniewski, ‘I want to be an authentic futurist.’22 A few days earlier, Wandurski had abandoned poetry to serve as secretary for two of the ‘reddest’ labour unions in Łódz; – and he felt wonderful. He urged his friend to do the same, to break free from Café Ziemian;ska – which was, after all, an empty place, ‘the hole in the bagel’ – and throw himself into the fire of revolution. In the meantime, the young poet Władysław Broniewski, who had dreamt of a fantastical romance with a diabolic woman, now fell in love with a pretty girl named Janina Kunizæanka. He wrote her love letters in a language reminiscent of the knights and castles of pre-modern chivalry. Janina Kunizæanka loved him as well, with an affection and concern that would last her entire life. Her greatest, most undying love, though, was for a tall woman with a strong voice named Wanda Wasilewska. These two women would come to mean more to each other than any of the six husbands they had between them. In 1926, Wanda Wasilewska was not yet in Warsaw. She was still living in Cracow, where she drank black coffee and chain-smoked and wrote poems for a newspaper called Robotnik (The Worker). She was a promising young leader of the Polish Socialist Party and a woman of great passions – for Poland, for social justice and above all for a man named Janek, who was her first love. In the journal she kept as a teenager, she described masochistic fantasies: she lies beneath his boots and kisses off the dust that clings to them, she feels his spurs

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digging into her back until she bleeds. ‘Because I believe in you as in God’, she addresses Janek in her diary, ‘And for me you are the highest essence, you are my master, my ruler. If you were to so order, I would fulfil anything. Even the worst humiliations, the worst injuries, I would bear with a smile if you were to so much as want that.’23 Władysław Broniewski was not the only one for whom the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky opened up new worlds. As a generation, it was, perhaps, their identification with Stefan ZÆeromski’s novel Przedwios;nie (The Spring to Come) – the story of the young, romantic youth who finds his way to the revolution – and their love for Mayakovsky that set them apart. It was a love that consumed them with a particular intensity – and a love that was finally consummated in the spring of 1927, when Mayakovsky, the ‘gangplank’ between the avant-garde and the Revolution, paid a visit to Warsaw.24 He was to be their most passionate love affair – a love affair which was, they thought, the beginning of the future, of the new world. Now at the train station, the poets’ first impression of Mayakovsky was an impression of enormity.25 Mayakovsky himself was hypnotising, his voice was of ‘colossal range’.26 Rooms trembled when he read his poetry. ‘I assume’, Wat wrote of an evening that spring with Mayakovsky, ‘that chills went up the spines of quite a few of the people there, for that truly was imperious power. That wasn’t a man, that wasn’t a poet; that was an empire, the coming world empire.’27 They were all intoxicated by his voice, yet also by his hands, large and tender, and by his gentleness, his paradoxical fragility. Janina Broniewska sensed that beneath his powerful exterior was a ‘self-defense against shyness and lyricism’.28 Ola Watowa, too, felt that in this ‘figure of a giant there was something very gentle, disarming, something that at moments seemed like weakness’.29 For Wat, Mayakovsky was the picture of Russian manhood, and at once a superhuman of ‘cosmic melancholy’.30 As Mayakovsky read his poetry in Wat’s living room, Janina Broniewska went into the kitchen to help Wat’s delicate wife, who struck her as possessing an odalisque-like beauty. From the kitchen, Janina Broniewska saw how the Russian poet could not keep his lyrical, enchanting eyes away from their hostess.31 For her part, Ola Watowa and her husband both fell very much in love with the Russian futurist.32 In that colossal voice was the threshold of the new world. Mayakovsky was happy to meet his Polish counterparts, he grew close to Wat, but maintained a scepticism toward the literary scene in Warsaw more generally and in particular its desire to be Parisian. ‘They chase the youth to the Louvre’, Mayakovsky wrote of Polish intellectuals, ‘they’re happy when Warsaw is called the Little Paris, they get themselves “the unknown soldier,” they speak in French and read bad French novels – this is the position of those who rule over Polish literature’.33 In Mayakovsky’s opinion, if Warsaw was Paris, then it was ‘a very small Paris’. As for the Polish writers who claimed that Warsaw was another Moscow, this was, in Mayakovsky’s opinion, ‘simply a mistake’.34

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Mayakovsky himself was en route from Paris when he visited Poland. It was in Paris that he met Bruno Jasien;ski, who had left Poland for the French capital in 1925. There in Paris Jasien;ski one day saw the French writer Paul Morand’s novel Je brûle Moscou in a bookstore window. He was enraged – and returned home to write I Burn Paris, the wild apocalyptic tale of a deathly plague transmitted via contaminated water that destroys the debauched, bourgeois city – only those in prison are spared.35 Thus, Jasien;ski portrayed, was the old, bourgeois Europe defeated; in its place ascended the new, progressive Europe. For this the French deported him, and Jasien;ski forsook returning home to Poland in favour of sailing on to Leningrad and a hero’s welcome. He was not alone. By this time, Witold Wandurski also had headed east for the great socialist homeland. At the end of the decade, Aleksander Wat became the editor of a new Marxist literary periodical. On the pages of Miesieç cznik Literacki (The Literary Monthly), he recanted his futurist youth. The futurists, he wrote, had aspired to a ‘progressive revolution of forms of expression’, but instead had engendered only anarchisation. There had been no place in bourgeois art for a battle against passéisme; yet the futurists’ own battle against passéisme, which should have led to social revolution as in Russia, had led them instead toward anarchism and decadence. Wat’s memoirs of futurism were a pre-Stalinist self-criticism: the futurists had reached the workers’ movement without historical materialism. Polish futurism, Wat wrote, had been ‘the crooked mirror in which Caliban gazed at himself with a grimace of abomination’.36 Shortly after Wat wrote this, Vladimir Mayakovsky took his own life in his Moscow room. The first detail that reached the Polish poets who so loved him was the phrase from his suicide note ‘liubovnaia lodka/razbilas’ v byt’ (the love boat/crashed against the everyday).37 Now Wat dedicated the May 1930 issue of The Literary Monthly to the Russian friend who had shown him the path to the Revolution.38 The Literary Monthly lived on after Mayakovsky’s death for little more than a year. In September 1931, the police interrupted an editorial board meeting and arrested those present. This was the ritual baptism in prison they had been so excitedly anticipating. Aleksander Wat’s wife Ola sent care packages with notes tucked inside the head of a herring. Władysław Broniewski sat in the cell, translating Gogol and reciting his poetry. Broniewski was that kind of poet, Wat was later to remember, the best kind – poetry in any circumstance. When Wat and Broniewski were released several months later, they began receiving invitations again to receptions at the Soviet embassy. No one spoke about politics, and the Polish poets threw themselves upon the caviar. This was their life – pastries at Café Ziemian;ska and herring in their prison cell and caviar at the Soviet embassy. Bruno Jasien;ski, the dandy who wore a top hat and monocle, was spared Polish prison. Upon arriving in Leningrad, the former futurist was given a grand reception: the Soviet Union, homeland of the proletariat, was more than happy to grant asylum to this Polish revolutionary persecuted in bourgeois

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France. In Russia, the gaunt Jasien;ski immediately abandoned his Polish wife for an obese Russian journalist. They spent their vacations in Tadzhikistan, and from one such visit Jasien;ski returned with two Tadzhik eagles, which joined him and his new wife in their Moscow home. When a Polish writer came to visit, Jasien;ski hosted an extravagant dinner party in his filthy apartment. The table, set with silver and crystal and glasses bearing the numerals of the last emperor, strained from the weight. Beluga and caviar and crystal. Spider webs covering the iron doors of the stove. There was no need to freeze the alcohol; there was frost in the room. While Wanda Wasilewska’s self-effacing romance with Janek was long, their engagement was short. In May of 1923, she wrote in her diary that ‘the royal prince has gone’, and that a chapter in her life had ended.39 Before long, she married another man and gave birth to a daughter; soon afterward, her young husband died. A short time after his death, Wanda Wasilewska met the bricklayer – and Polish Socialist Party activist – Marian Bogatko, with whom her courtship began during a kayaking trip on the Vistula river. When their kayak overturned, Bogatko saved Wasilewska from drowning. Unlike the young athletic bricklayer, Wasilewska was a weak swimmer.40 At the age of fifteen, Wanda Wasilewska had written in her diary that she judged it ‘nobler’ to be a man’s lover than to be his wife.41 To this youthful view she now returned, and soon Bogatko had become her lover. In 1933, she wrote a long letter to her mother, justifying her decision to continue living with Bogatko without a wedding and insisting that so often she rejoiced at the absence of formalities. How good that there had been no marriage. ‘For once, finally’, Wasilewska wrote, ‘I’m a person and not someone else’s appendage … even though Marian and I share the same values (of equality), on my side there would be the minus that I am a woman, and as a result would always be the other one, and not myself.’42 Being herself was something she had long despaired was impossible. In January 1922, on her seventeenth birthday, she had confessed in her diary, ‘I know well that I will always be only a shadow of the person I love.’43 A self was not the only thing whose absence she felt painfully. In 1919, at the age of fourteen, Wanda Wasilewska had written of how desperately she longed to find a girl who could be a true friend, to whom she could confide all of her secrets.44 It was fifteen years later when Wanda Wasilewska met such a girl, who was by now a woman – a mother of a young girl named Anka and the wife of the famous revolutionary poet Władysław Broniewski. Soon Wanda Wasilewska and Janina Broniewska could not endure a single day without one another.45 In 1933, Witold Wandurski was arrested in the Soviet Union, accused of right-wing deviation, Polish nationalism and espionage. He was executed the following year. Before Wandurski was shot, his interrogators extracted from him an elaborate false confession damning to his friends, to Bruno Jasien;ski and Władysław Broniewski. Now, three years later, it was the height of the Terror,

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and Bruno Jasien;ski was to follow Wandurski to the grave. In Moscow, Jasien;ski defended himself: he had never been a Polish spy, he had had nothing to do with Polish spies. He wrote a letter to Stalin counter-attacking those who accused him.46 Three days later, he changed his mind; he sent a second letter to Stalin, this time a self-criticism: ‘You have taught us to have the courage to confess fully to our errors, but I am ashamed to confess to them before you.’ Nonetheless he did. Only now did he realise how he had been an instrument in the maneuvers of the Trotskyite enemies.47 Stalin was unmoved. Jasien;ski was arrested. In prison they tortured him. He confessed to everything. Several days later, he sent a letter to his persecutors, recanting the testimony extracted under duress. In January 1938, in a prison cell awaiting execution, he wrote of his favourite poet Mayakovsky, who had brought him to the October Revolution, and he thanked the Stalinist security apparatus for having opened his eyes, for having helped him to understand his guilt, the depth of filth in which he had been wading about like a blind man.48 Aleksander Wat wrote a poem after the death of his dandyist futurist friend: ‘arrogant Bruno… Let us say/a bedtime prayer for him.’49

Communism-in-Power On 1 September 1939, interwar Warsaw came to an end. Despite his illustrious military record, Władysław Broniewski was not mobilised. He was now in his forties – too old from the point of the view of the Polish Army. Moreover, he was known as a communist. Undeterred, Broniewski set out on his bicycle in search of his regiment – he wanted to fight for Poland. After he had traversed the route from Warsaw through Lublin and Tarnopol, friends found him in a Lwów hotel. He was wearing his military uniform, awaiting his assignment, eager to fight.50 But it was too late. On 12 September, Broniewski found his regiment; five days later, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland.51 After five days more, the Polish defence commander signed an act of capitulation, relinquishing Lwów to the Red Army. Slavoj Žižek has written of how there is, perhaps ‘no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if the revolution demands it’.52 And the revolution demanded just this of Wanda Wasilewska. Refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland were pouring into now-Soviet Lvov; the city quickly became a juxtaposition of anarchy and Soviet totalitarianism. Some seven years earlier, Wasilewska had confided to her mother that she felt much more for Marian Bogatko than she could have ever imagined feeling for anyone. ‘I don’t know – perhaps I’m blind and deaf ’, she wrote to her mother, ‘but I don’t see so much as the slightest flaw in that man – he is so wonderfully young, pure and good. Not a single second goes by when that boy thinks of himself – generosity comes to him somehow

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so easily and so simply, that one doesn’t even notice it.’53 Now in Soviet Galicia, Wanda Wasilewska would call on that generosity again. It was the moment of her extraordinary rise to power, the moment when she was to become a man of state and a confidante of Stalin. Yet Marian Bogatko did not share his wife’s uncritical enthusiasm for Soviet life, he was wary of the propaganda and sceptical. His distrust toward the Soviet state was mutual, and Bogatko’s stay in Lvov would prove to be short. On a certain day in April 1940, two or three unknown men rang the doorbell of the villa Bogatko shared with Wasilewska. He answered the door. One of the men shot him.54 Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Ukrainian section of the Bolshevik Party, had by the time of Bogatko’s murder already become a great admirer of Wasilewska.55 Given his fondness for her, Khrushchev was very disturbed to learn that ‘their Chekists’ had killed her husband. He ordered ‘his Ukrainians’ to go to Wasilewska, apologise and ask for her understanding.56 One of these Ukrainians was the communist playwright Oleksandr Korneichuk, charged by Khrushchev with organising cultural life in Lvov. Aleksander Wat, upon his own arrival in Lvov in autumn of 1939, also went to see Korneichuk, who was living then at the Hotel George. To Wat, Korneichuk seemed to possess a kind of beauty alluring to homosexuals – ‘masculine, but at once servile, sweet-scented’.57 And so the sweet-scented Korneichuk and his Ukrainian friend went to Wasilewska and asked for her understanding. She understood. Before long, Wanda Wasilewska had become Korneichuk’s lover. In Soviet Lvov the poets of Café Ziemian;ska were invited by a scenographer friend to a dinner party at a fashionable gathering spot. On that evening, he drove their wives to the restaurant in a black limousine; he was especially generous, ordering delicacies and vodka for everyone. Then someone provoked a brawl. Wat was hit in the jaw. Blood poured from his face; he collapsed. Adam Wazæyk, who had recently become an editor of a Stalinist newspaper in Lvov, helped Ola Watowa to revive her husband. Their scenographer friend fled the restaurant. Aleksander Wat, Władysław Broniewski and Anatol Stern were arrested; now it was they who rode in the same black limousine to prison. Having been communists in interwar Polish prison, now they were Polish nationalists, Jewish nationalists, Zionists, Trotskyites, spies and provocateurs in Soviet prison. Inside Aleksander Wat’s prison cell, he and his companions held contests to see who could kill the most lice. Later, Wat and Broniewski were transferred to Lubyanka, Moscow’s infamous prison. There, Wat talked to his cellmate about linguistics, and to his interrogator about Polish literature. Lubyanka had a library as well as torture chambers, and there in Stalinist prison Wat read European literature: Tolstoy, Saint Augustine and Machiavelli, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.58 By now, Janina Broniewska and Władysław Broniewski had long been separated, and she was pregnant with her new lover’s child. Yet now that Broniewski found himself in Soviet prison, she refused to pursue a formal di-

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vorce. For her, it would have been ‘worse than unfaithfulness in marriage. It would have been a disavowal of everything that joined us throughout our lives. Solidarity, boundless confidence in the sincerity and earnestness of our shared convictions made it impossible to divorce a communist imprisoned in a Soviet prison.’59 Then came the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union and the amnesty of 1941; Wat and Broniewski were released from prison, and Wat found himself in Kazakhstan. There in Alma-Ata, Mayakovsky’s friend Viktor Shklovskii found Wat on the street and took him in; now Wat joined Shklovskii’s circle of friends: the novelist and playwright Konstantin Paustovsky, the humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko, Zoshchenko’s young wife, the screenwriter Mikhail Shnaider and the film director Sergei Eisenstein. It was Mayakovsky, dead for over a decade, who had inducted Wat into this Russian circle, and now an editor came to Wat to attempt to persuade him to write down his reminiscences about his Russian futurist friend, offering to pay him well. Wat refused. He refused even to speak of Mayakovsky; he could not bear it.60

On Warsaw’s Ashes The war ended. From Kazakhstan and Moscow via Jerusalem, Władysław Broniewski returned to a Warsaw now burnt to ashes. There he wrote a beautiful poem in praise of Stalin. The other poets also returned to Warsaw after their years in the Soviet Union. In communist Poland, Adam Wazæyk became the ‘terroretician’ of socialist realism. He retold the history of the avant-garde for the benefit of those too young to remember, and explained that the thrill of discarding all formerly obtaining literary rules was the thrill of remaking the world. Wazæyk did not go as far in belittling his avant-garde years as he might have; his younger colleague suspected that this was because ‘Wazæyk never could have renounced Apollinaire – he would sooner have slashed his own arteries.’61 And, in fact, Wazæyk continued to see in the French avantgardist’s work ‘the brilliant introduction to almost all of innovative poetry’.62 Yet he qualified himself: words were only a substitute for people, avantgardism in literature a substitute for revolution. ‘In a word’, Wazæyk concluded, ‘unable in the realm of art to carry through battles for upheaval in social life, (the avant-garde) enacted upheavals in the forms of art’.63 Mayakovsky was the exception. His poetry stood as ‘an example of great revolutionary passion’, he had understood the strength of words and the responsibility a writer must bear for them.64 Aleksander Wat was ostracised. He was no longer a Marxist and spoke out against socialist realism at a Writers’ Union meeting. ‘When the bear is grumpy, you give him a bat on the head and then he’ll shut up’, he was answered in Russian. He returned home feverish and ill. Not long afterward, on New Year’s Eve of 1954, The Literary Monthly’s star literary critic, who had once fallen in love with Władysław Broniewski’s young wife, presented the now

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weak and sickly Aleksander Wat with a gift: a complete collection of the shortlived Literary Monthly with the dedication ‘In memory of the shared sins of our youth’. On the first page of the first issue Wat scribbled, ‘the corpus delecti of my degradation … in communism, by communism’.65 Among the literati in Poland, it was Adam Wazæyk who pulled the curtain on his own performance. Apollinaire’s translator-turned-‘terroretician’ of socialist realism initiated the revolt against his own reign. He did so with an impassioned bitterness. His 1955 ‘Poem for Adults’ was a eulogy for a lost Poland. Its motif is the unrecognisability of Warsaw; its tone is one of dislocation; its refrain: ‘give me a piece of old stone/let me find myself again in Warsaw’. He wrote of ‘vultures of abstraction’ who ‘devour our brains’, of ‘language … reduced to thirty incantations’, of a ‘lamp of imagination extinguished’.66 The narrative topos in ‘A Poem for Adults’ was drawn from an old story: the emperor is wearing no clothes. Wazæyk walked around repeating, ‘I’ve been in an insane asylum.’67 As 1956 came to an end, Wazæyk was among those who came together with the idea of beginning a new literary monthly called Europa. When the Party refused to consent to Europa’s existence, Wazæyk returned his Party card.68 Władysław Broniewski had harsh words to say about Wazæyk’s betrayal of the Party – notwithstanding the fact that Broniewski himself had always remained a ‘fellow traveller’ and did not even have a Party card to return.69 An older friend sent a copy of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to Broniewski – and Broniewski withdrew his poem about Stalin from the next edition of his collected poems.70 Now Anatol Stern returned to Moscow, where Mayakovsky’s onetime lover Lila Brik, sister-in-law of the French surrealist Louis Aragon, introduced him to Bruno Jasien;ski’s Russian wife – who just several days earlier had returned to Moscow after a seventeen-year stay in the gulag. She showed Stern the letter from the prosecutor: Bruno Jasien;ski had been rehabilitated, his death sentence post-humorously overturned.71 Stern copied the letter by hand and brought it back to Poland. Soon afterward, he and Adam Wazæyk published an anthology of Mayakovsky’s poetry – in a Polish translation by themselves, by Władysław Broniewski and Bruno Jasien;ski. In his introduction, Stern reminded his readers that Mayakovsky and the Revolution were one. He added of Mayakovsky’s love for the Revolution: ‘And if for her he devoted at times even his own poetry, he did this as a man who was ready to do anything his beloved demanded of him – even at those times when he sees her claiming that to which she has no right and that which she should not demand.’72 Aleksander Wat did not recover from his illness, and abandoned Warsaw for warmer climates, for France and Italy. Living in West European exile, Wat fell into bouts of self-hatred and struggled with his identity. At moments he felt he was – and always had been – a Jew, a Polish-speaking cosmopolitan. At other moments, he felt strongly that as a Polish poet, his homeland was his

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language, and he belonged in Poland, where his father and his father’s fathers were buried. ‘In the end’, Wat wrote in his diary in Paris, ‘I’ve found myself in a fine place: not at home, not with the emigration – in a void.’73

Death Władysław Broniewski would call his friends in the middle of the night and demand that they listen as he recited his poetry. In 1960, he published an anthology of Polish translations of foreign poetry – of Aleksander Pushkin, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin, of Friedrich Wolf and Bertold Brecht – titled My Poetic Friendships.74 By now, Broniewski had deteriorated into alcoholism. He drank and smoked himself to death: in February 1962, he died of throat cancer. In London, Broniewski’s old editor from the interwar years gathered information for Broniewski’s obituary. He wrote to Wat asking about the legendary Literary Monthly, and about the 1931 imprisonment of The Literary Monthly’s editorial board.75 Wat answered in detail. ‘Of the first seven revolutionary writers’, he wrote to Broniewski’s onetime editor, ‘there remains only myself, sick, wrecked, but for a long time now the most radically cured of that degeneration’.76 After Broniewski’s death in Warsaw, the younger Polish émigré poet Czesław Miłosz arranged for the Wats to spend a year in Berkeley. In his letters to Wat from California, Miłosz warned him that America was something entirely different, inexplicable in any terms available to Europeans. ‘Because we’re so peculiar’, Miłosz wrote, ‘sometimes an American Jew can understand us, but even so, only to a small extent … I know cases of people who fled from America because “there are no cafés” – and this is a symbolic formulation of something deeper.’77 Now for the first time, Wat would encounter in person the place that as a young writer he had conjured up as Europe’s Other in ‘The Eternally Wandering Jew’. In December 1963, the Wats arrived in California, where the Berkeley Slavicists received them warmly, and where Wat was charmed by the bright, young graduate students.78 Yet it was a capriciously ephemeral interlude. Wat sensed that others at Berkeley feared that Wat would try to find a way to stay in the United States, and so treated him coldly; their fears humiliated him.79 The same young people who had been so embracing and attentive during those first days now disappeared, their curiosity having been satisfied, their interest now waned, they avoided him when they passed on the street. As Wat watched them turn the other way, he began to understand not only the superficiality of their initial warm reception, but also their fear of being ‘contaminated’ by someone like himself who would surely not manage to make a career there; he felt the division of American society into the ‘losers’ and the successful ones. ‘Now I, too, am a loser’, Wat wrote in his diary.80

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America had not saved Aleksander Wat. On the contrary, it alienated him more; he could not find a place for himself in this land where there were no cafés. In the 1960s, Anatol Stern wrote a warm, even hagiographic book about his old futurist collaborator Bruno Jasien;ski.81 Stern speculated: had Jasien;ski been able to see into the future what awaited him in ten years, would he have come home to Poland instead of boarding that ship bound for Leningrad? Or would Jasien;ski’s fanatical nature not have allowed for a change in itinerary even if he were to have had forebodings of the tragic ending?82 Stern had solicited Wat’s contribution to his work on Jasien;ski, but Wat had refused. Stern was disappointed. Even in his sixties, Stern continued to be moved by the memories of their futurist antics of long ago.83 By now Wat saw in Stern’s nostalgia for their futurist years only pathos. Moreover, it seemed to Wat that the one great contribution Stern had made to Polish poetry in those early years – the unabashed sexuality he refused to censor – Stern himself now discounted. At one time, Stern had paid a high price for his refusal to shy away from erotism; in his youth, he had gone to prison on charges of profanity.84 Of his one-time futurist co-author Wat now wrote to a younger literary historian – invoking an allusion to the intentional misspellings that the futurists had once delighted in: ‘he was already back then “pontifical”, but – then – it added charm to his impudence. But a 67-year-old Kingg of New Art! – it’s a sorry sight. It’s difficult today to imagine the freshness and lustre of the boasting intelligence, the wit he had then.’85 On Friday, 29 July 1967, Ola Watowa went into the room where her husband was sleeping, took him in her arms and tried to wake him. His head was turned to the side, he was cold and calm. She saw the sheets of paper by his feet. On one, Wat had written in large letters: ‘DO NOT SAVE ME.’ On a second, he had written a letter to her – ‘my life, my everything’ – pleading with her to forgive him for this crime.86 Earlier that evening, he had swallowed forty tablets of Nembuttal. He was buried in France, in the cemetery in Montmorency. The erratically written pages left at the foot of the bed told a remarkable love story that lasted nearly half a century. Their love was, for Wat, the one source of purity in his anguish-laden life. He did not believe he had ever deserved Ola.87 Now in his final pages he wrote poetry to her, for her, about her: ‘The faithfulness and devotion of (my) wife/ make sublime our/ male debacles…//The purity and devotion of (my) wife/sanctifies existence.’88 When, many years after his suicide, now in her old age, Ola Watowa wrote her memoirs, she began with the words, ‘Everything that is most important in my life is connected to Aleksander.’ She wrote of how she would get goose bumps whenever she thought of how she might not have been at that drama school ball, she might never have met him, and her life would have been wasted.89 After the war, Wanda Wasilewska had chosen not to return to Poland. She remained in Soviet Ukraine with Oleksandr Korneichuk. He in turn remained

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a playboy, ostentatiously unfaithful. She was unhappy but said nothing. Likewise, about Marian Bogatko’s murder Wasilewska never said to her daughter a single word. If she spoke about this at all, it was to Janina Broniewska, who kept her friend’s secret. At home in Warsaw, Janina Broniewska was not entirely without jealousy that her closest friend had chosen to remain far away, and once told her granddaughter, drawing on a slang pejorative for Poland’s eastern neighbours, ‘Out of love for Korneichuk Wanda stayed with those Russians.’90 When Wasilewska died suddenly of a heart attack in 1964, Broniewska traveled to Kiev for her funeral. Afterward, she wrote, ‘In my home there remain her books, her furniture, and so, so often I have the impression that she still lives. I know the beating of Wanda’s heart, I know her personal affairs. It was proposed to me that I write her biography, but I couldn’t do it. She’s just too close.’91 Later, Janina Broniewska would emphasise that family members, sisters, do not choose one another, whereas theirs was ‘a love by choice’.92

Intimacy, Betrayal and Marxism Janina Broniewska referred often in her memoirs to the private language she and Wasilewska shared, their letters read more than once as if encrypted. And so even under Stalinist totalitarianism, and even among communists, a space for intimacy remained. This speaks as well to the young Broniewski, who in the 1920s was writing proletarian poetry in a new, communist idiom and letters to Janina Kunizæanka in a language reminiscent of chivalry – Broniewski’s multilingualism, like that of these two women, ran deep. In fact, it is so that among all of these figures, an internal Bakhtinian polyphony of voices never disappeared. After Broniewski’s death, when his friends and fellow poets wrote of him, they would marvel at ‘how much love that man bore in his heart’.93 Throughout his life, Broniewski maintained perhaps four great passions: for women, for poetry, for Poland and for the Revolution. Their accompanying discourses – romantic and literary, patriotic and communist – while sometimes disentwined, nonetheless coexisted even in the most improbable – and inauspicious – circumstances. Likewise did Wat’s love for his wife transcend all of his ideological choices – even at the height of his communist engagement, he ignored Isaac Deutscher’s accusation that he was harbouring foolish bourgeois prejudices and whisked Ola Watowa off of Deutscher’s lap. Theirs was a love story. Yet so was the Revolution. Their own narcissism was unbearable – they fled from it, desperate for a love that would consume them. As for Wandurski who longed to burn himself in the fire, and Wasilewska who longed to feel spurs digging into her back, so for all of them, Revolution was a passion not devoid of masochistic fantasy. They were never enthralled by communism, per se, as much as they were by the promise of transcendence via conflagration –

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transcendence of national boundaries, transcendence of all that was backwards and constricting, unjust and inadequate in Poland, transcendence of their own self-absorption. For the poets of Café Ziemian;ska, the Revolution was only secondarily dialectical materialism; more importantly, it was their realisation of their European cosmopolitanism, their self-fulfilment through self-annihilation, their fiercest of romantic loves. Yet the Revolution proved capricious and fickle and did not love the poets back. And so in the end did the poets of Café Ziemian;ska and their friends live their lives ensconced in angst, the creators as well as the victims of tragic fate. And here ‘tragic’ must be in understood in its non-classical meaning, as the preservation of the beauty of a disastrous action.94 The poets suffered this fate intensely personally as well, by the force of their private relationships. For them, the moment of Mayakovsky’s 1927 visit was the ecstatic beginning of the Revolution, the new world – yet in fact it was the climax, the beginning of the end. He was their greatest love affair, the nexus point of liminality through which they fell in love with the aesthetics of the Revolution. For these writers, faith and betrayal referred not only to Marxist ideology, but more poignantly to Mayakovsky, the greatest of all of their loves. In the end, the choices they made to opt for (and out of) Marxism became those that framed their lives. They were a particularly sad generation, pursued in their old age by a demon of communism, who haunted their old city, its ruined cafés that were burnt to ashes. They died consumed by their pasts. Ultimately, these avant-garde poets-turned-revolutionary Marxists were destroyed by Marxism, by the choices they made to embrace Marxism – choices they made in the absence of an understanding of what Marxist ideas translated into communism-in-practice meant. Their story contains no possibility of an aesthetically pleasing ending. They became neither Polish nationalists of the Right nor revisionist Marxists, they did not try to sift through the layers of Stalin, then Lenin, and return to Marx. They were too old, too crushed – this was left for the next generation. For the Polish generation born at the fin-de-siècle, the young avant-garde poets of the 1920s, after Marxism there was no new love, after Marxism there was nothing. Many years after Aleksander Wat had committed suicide, when she had long been living in Paris, his wife Ola Watowa went to Warsaw and paid a visit to Adam Wazæyk, by then an old man and the last of the avant-garde friends among the living. As soon as Ola Watowa sat down in his apartment, Wazæyk hurried to remind her that he was also once a Stalinist. I know, I know, she answered. She had not forgotten. The confession was not Wazæyk’s only source of pain. The Polish PEN Club had recently dedicated an evening to the French futurist Apollinaire; Wazæyk had not been invited. ‘I was the first one in Poland to translate Apollinaire’, he told Ola Watowa, ‘and they didn’t even invite me to say a few words’.95

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Notes 1. Quoted in Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (London: Macmillan, 1969), 385. 2. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect. French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 38. 3. Władysław Broniewski, Pamieçtnik 1918–1922 (Warsaw: PIW, 1984), 323. 4. Aleksander Wat, My Century.The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 6. 5. Broniewski, Pamieçtnik 1918–1922, 38. 6. Feliks Lichodziejewska, ed., ‘Pamieçtnik Władysława Broniewskiego 1918–1922’, Polityka 7 (13 February 1965): 1. 7. Broniewski, Pamieçtnik 1918–1922, 214. 8. Aleksander Wat, ‘JA z jednej strony a JA z drugiej strony mego mopsozæelaznego piecyka’, in Poezje, eds Anna Micin;ska and Jan Zielin;ski (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1997), 307–335. 9. Wat, My Century, 5. 10. Anatol Stern and Aleksander Wat, ‘GGA’, in Antologia polskiego futuryzmu i nowej sztuki, ed. Helena Zaworska (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolin;skich, 1978), 3. 11. Stefan ZÆeromski, Snobizm i posteçp (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo J. Morkowicza, 1926), 1, 4, 73, respectively. 12. Braun to Broniewski, Łódz;, 22 May 1923, teczka Brauna, Muzeum Broniewskiego, Warsaw (MB). 13. Feliksa Lichodziejewska, ‘Korespondencja Władysława Broniewskiego z Bronisławem Sylwinem Kencbokiem’, Pamieçtnik Literacki 62, no. 4 (1971): 149–219, quote at 212–213. 14. Witold Wandurski, ‘Majakowski i Polscy Poeci’, in Włodzimierz Majakowski, ed. Florian Nieuwazæny (Warsaw: Pan;stwowe Zakłady Wydawnictw Szkolnych, 1965), 277–286, here 280. 15. Bruno Iasenskii, Aleksander Vat, and Anatol Stern to Vladimir Maiakovskii, Warsaw, 1 July 1921, 2852/1/599, RGALI, Moscow. 16. Witold Wandurski, ‘Do panów poetów’, Nowa Kultura 15 (22 December 1923): 392. 17. Feliksa Lichodziejewska, ed., Od bliskich i dalekich. Korespondencja do Władysława Broniewskiego 1915–1930, vol. 1 (Warsaw: PIW, 1981), 115–116. 18. Braun to Broniewski, Łódz;, 6 January 1925, in Lichodziejewska, Od bliskich i dalekich, 1: 143–144. 19. Irena Krzywicka, Wyznania gorszycielki (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1998), 274. 20. Ola Watowa, Wszystko co najwazæniejsze (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1990), 13, 20. 21. Aleksander Wat, ‘The Eternally Wandering Jew’, in Lucifer Unemployed, trans. Lillian Vallee (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 8. 22. Wandurski to Broniewski, Łódz;, 22 January 1926, A/2, MB. 23. 15 October 1919 and 29 February 1920, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv-Muzei Literatury i Mystetstva Ukrainy, Kiev (TsDAMLM). Copy provided by Timothy Snyder. 24. Wat, My Century, 24. 25. Wiktor Woroszylski, ZÆycie Majakowskiego (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1984), 534. 26. Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years, ed. Bengt Jangfeldt, trans. Stephen Rady (New York: Marsilio, 1992), 12. 27. Wat, My Century, 44. 28. Janina Broniewska, Dziesieçc ; serc czerwiennych (Warsaw: Iskry, 1964), 157. 29. Watowa, Wszystko co najwazæniesze, 16. 30. Wat, My Century, 44. 31. Broniewska, Dziesieçc ; serc czerwiennych, 157. 32. Wat, My Century, 46. 33. Vladimir Maiakovskii, ‘Poverkh Varshavy’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2 (Kalingrad: FGUIPP Yantarny Skaz, 2002), 91. Alexander Zeyliger helped with this reference.

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34. Maiakovskii, ‘Naruzhnost’ Varshavy’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 88. 35. Bruno Jasien;ski, Paleç Paryzæ (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1957). 36. Aleksander Wat, ‘Wspomnienia o futuryzmie’, Miesieçcznik Literacki 2 (January 1930): 68– 77, quote at 71. 37. Janina Broniewska, Maje i listopady (Warsaw: Iskry, 1967), 47f. 38. Aleksander Wat, ‘Poeta rewolucji Majakowski’, Miesieçcznik Literacki 6 (May 1930): 281– 288. 39. 6 May 1923, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, TsDAMLM. 40. Zofia Aldona Woz;nicka, ‘O mojej siostrze’, in Wanda Wasilewska we wspomnieniach, ed. Eleanora Syzdek (Warsaw: Ksiaçzæka i Wiedza, 1982), 55f, here 55. 41. 19 October 1919, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, TsDAMLM. 42. Syzdek, ed., Wanda Wasilewska we wspomnieniach, 55f. 43. 20 January 1922, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, TsDAMLM. 44. 4 October 1919, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, TsDAMLM. 45. Janina Broniewska, ‘Przedmowa do “Utworów dla młodziezæy” W. Wasilewskiej’, in Wanda Wasilewska, ed. Helena Zatorska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1976), 341–344. 46. Jasien;ski to Stalin, 25 April 1937, M/III/55, Archiwum Wschodnie, Warsaw. Polish translations from the original Russian appear in Krzysztof Jaworski, Bruno Jasien;ski w sowieckim wieçzieniu. Aresztowanie, wyrok, s;mierc; (Kielce: Wyzæsza szkoła pedagogiczna im. Jana Kochanowskiego, 1995). 47. Bruno Jasien;ski to Stalin, 28 April 1937. Jaworski, Bruno Jasien;ski w sowieckim wieçzieniu, 95. 48. Ibid., 141f. 49. Wat, ‘Sny sponad Morza S:ródziemnego’, in Poezje, 103. 50. Quoted in Agnieszka Cies;likowa, Prasa okupowanego Lwowa (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 1997), 77. 51. Feliksa Lichodziejewska, Broniewski bez cenzury 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Społeczne KOS, 1992), 7. 52. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 19–20. 53. Zofia A. Woz;nicka and Eleonora Sydzek, eds, ‘Listy Wandy Wasilewskiej’, Zdanie 6 (1985): 33–39, quote at 38. 54. Jacek Trznadel, ed., Kolaboranci. Tadeusz Boy-ZÆelen;ski i grupa komunistycznych pisarzy w Lwowie 1939–1941 (Komorów: Fundacja Pomocy Antyk, 1998), 416–423; Watowa, Wszystko co najwazæniejsze, 36. 55. Nikita Siergiejewicz Chruszczow, ‘Fragmenty wspomnien; N.S. Chruszczowa’, Zeszyty Historyczne 132 (2000): 109–192, here 118. 56. Ibid., 140. 57. Aleksander Wat, Mój Wiek. Pamieçtnik mówiony (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1998), 1: 275. 58. Wat, My Century, 189, 224–234. 59. Broniewska, Maje i listopady, 235. 60. Wat, My Century, 328. 61. Jan Kott, Still Alive. An Autobiographical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 186. 62. Adam Wazæyk, ‘U z;ródeł nowatorstwa w poezji’, Kuz;nica 1, vol. 12 (18 November 1945): 2f, quote at 3. 63. Ibid., 3. 64. Adam Wazæyk, ‘O włas;ciwe stanowisko’, Kuz;nica 5, no. 10 (12 March 1950): 1. 65. Watowa, Wszystko co najwazæniesjze, 147; Wat, My Century, 13–15. 66. Adam Wazæyk, ‘Poemat dla dorosłych’, in Poeta pamieçta. Antologia poezji s;wiadectwa i sprzeciwu 1944–1984, ed. Stanisław Baranczak (London: Puls Publications, 1984), 66–72. 67. Kott, Still Alive, 181.

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68. ‘Protokół Nr 217 posiedzenia Biura Politycznego z dnia 19 stycznia 1959 r’, in Centrum władzy. Protokoły posiedzen; kierownictwa PZPR wybór z lata 1949–1970, eds Antoni Dudek et al. (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN), 323; also see Kott, Still Alive, 210. 69. Bohdan Drozdowski, ‘Władysław Broniewski’, ZÆycie Literackie 19 (11 May 1958). 70. Stefan ZÆółkiewski to Władysław Broniewski, 26 March 1956, MB. 71. Anatol Stern, Bruno Jasien;ski (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1969), 9–19. 72. Anatol Stern, ‘Słowo wsteçpne’, in Włodzimierz Majakowski, Poezje, eds Mieczysław Jastrun, Seweryn Pollak, Anatol Stern, and Adam Wazæyk (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1957), 8. 73. Aleksander Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, ed. Krysztof Rutkowski (London: Polonia, 1986), 69. 74. Władysław Broniewski, Moje przyjaz;nie poetyckie (Warsaw: PIW, 1960). 75. Mieczysław Grydzewski to Aleksander Wat, 28 February 1962, London, A-58, Aleksander Wat Papers, Uncat MS Vault 526, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven (AWPB). 76. Wat to Mieczysław (Grydzewski), La Messuguiere, 2 March 1962, C-219, AWPB. 77. Miłosz to Wat, Berkeley, B-127, AWPB. 78. Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, 93. 79. Wat to Miłosz, Berkeley, C-222, AWPB; Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, 114f. 80. Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, 130. 81. Stern, Bruno Jasien;ski, 17. 82. Anatol Stern, ‘Bruno Jasien;ski w Paryzæu czyli trzy portrety pisarza’, Kamena 2 (21 January 1968): 4. 83. Anatol Stern to Aleksander Wat, 9 June 1963, A-5, AWPB. 84. Zbigniew Jarosin;ski, ‘Wsteçp’, in Antologia polskiego futuryzmu i nowej sztuki, ed. Zaworska, xxxix; Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Ksiaçzæka Moich Wspomnien; (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1968), 231f. 85. Wat to Jan S:piewak, 24 December 1965, Antony (letter unsent in this version, ‘zmieniony, złagodzony’), C-222, AWPB. 86. Aleksander Wat, ‘Zeszyt ostatni’, 14; Ola Watowa to Seweryna Broniszówna, 20 August 1967, Toulon, C-237, AWPB; Watowa, Wszsytko co najwazæniejsze, 176f. 87. Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, 206–208. 88. Wat, ‘Zeszyt ostatni’, 1967, 14, AWPB. 89. Watowa, Wszystko, co najwazæniejsze, 9. 90. Cited in Ewa Zawistowska, personal correspondence to author, Halkidiki, Greece, 15 January 2001. 91. Janina Broniewska, ‘O mojej przyjaciółce Wandzie Wasilewskiej’, Promełej (March 1975): 6. 92. Ibid., 6. 93. See Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s contribution to Stanisław Witold Balicki, ed., To ja – daçb. Wspomnienia i eseje o Władysławie Broniewskim (Warsaw: PIW, 1978). 94. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 352. 95. Watowa, Wszsytko co najwazæniejsze, 26f.

CHAPTER

7

Love, Marriage and Divorce American and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII ALEXIS SCHWARZENBACH

The abdication of Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson in December 1936 was one of the most publicised love stories of the twentieth century.1 As it involved a European and an American protagonist and made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, it is an ideal case to study attitudes toward love in America and Europe. The first part of this article analyses and compares the representation of this Anglo-American love story by the American, British and European media. This section is not only based on newspaper archives, but also on previously unexplored British Foreign Office reports summarising the media coverage in a wide range of countries.2 In the second part, the media evidence will be compared to another rich but rarely explored set of sources: the great number of unsolicited letters that Edward VIII received during the abdication crisis.3

Brief Summary of the ‘World’s Greatest Romance’4 During a weekend party in Leicestershire in January 1931, Wallis Simpson, the 35-year-old American wife of a London-based British-American businessman, met Prince Edward, the 37-year-old heir to the British throne. According to Wallis, it was three years later, during a summer cruise with the Prince of Wales, that she and Edward ‘crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love’.5 Following the death of his father George V, Edward became King in January 1936. A couple of months later, Wallis SimpNotes for this section begin on page 153.

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son separated from her husband and began divorce proceedings. In August 1936, she accompanied the king on another cruise and in September she was his guest at Balmoral in Scotland. On 27 October, her divorce case was heard at a court in Ipswich in East Anglia. She received a decree nisi, which meant that in April 1937 her divorce would become absolute and she could re-marry. It would be her third marriage, for between 1916 and 1927 she had been married to an American air force officer.6 Three weeks after the divorce, the king informed Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of his intention to marry Wallis Simpson. While the king was free to marry whomever he wanted provided the woman was not a Catholic, the conservative prime minister was convinced that Wallis Simpson would not make an acceptable queen for Britain and its Empire. Apart from Baldwin, a rather heterogeneous and by no means organised group of people also opposed Edward’s marriage plan. It included members of the royal family and the royal household, sections of the social and political elite of London, as well as prominent ecclesiastics such as the archbishop of Canterbury. While some people simply disliked Wallis Simpson because she was an American commoner, others maintained that the Church of England, headed by the king, did not condone divorce and that thus a marriage to a divorcee was unacceptable. In order to overcome the difficulties caused by his marriage plan, the king informed Baldwin on 23 November that he wanted to marry Wallis Simpson morganatically, i.e., without her automatically assuming his rank. Instead of preserving Edward’s throne, the morganatic marriage proposal provided his opponents with a tool to settle the matter in accordance with their own interests. They were now able to argue that their opposition to the king’s marriage plan stemmed neither from the fact that Wallis Simpson was an American commoner nor from the fact the Church of England did not condone divorce. Instead, they argued that the king’s morganatic marriage proposal caused legal problems leading to a ‘constitutional crisis’. On 4 December, Baldwin informed the House of Commons of the king’s morganatic marriage plan and explained that such an unprecedented constitutional act would require special legislation. Without giving any reasons for their decision, Baldwin unmistakeably stated that: ‘His Majesty’s Government are not prepared to introduce such legislation.’ He added that also none of the governments of the Dominions – who shared their royal head of state with Britain – were prepared to accept a morganatic marriage of their sovereign.7 As the king was determined to marry Wallis Simpson against the constitutionally binding advice of his government, he abdicated in favour of his brother on 10 December. Just before leaving Britain on the following day, Edward addressed his former subjects via the radio and explained: ‘You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’8

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Headlines in the Americas The first media reports on Edward and Wallis appeared in American papers in autumn 1934, more than two years before the abdication.9 After the accession of Edward in January 1936, American interest in the story increased and especially long reports were written about the summer cruise to which the king had invited a group of friends including Wallis Simpson, but not her husband. Often, they were illustrated with photographs aimed at proving the strong bond that had allegedly developed between the king and his American friend. The most frequently reproduced image was a snapshot taken at the Yugoslavian port of Sibenik. It shows Wallis Simpson inadvertently touching the king’s arm while trying to leave a small boat (Figure 7.1). The New York Daily Mirror added the following caption to this image: ‘Mutual interests in many fields helped the sincere bond of affection between King Edward and Mrs. Ernest Simpson, pictured on a boat during a recent holiday along the Dalmatian coast.’10 American interest in ‘Wally’s royal romance’11 became frenetic once the media found out that the ‘Baltimore girl who won (the) friendship of Edward VIII’12 was suing for divorce and thus removing the legal obstacle to an AngloAmerican royal wedding. The New York Daily Mirror announced with outmost

Figure 7.1. King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Sibenik, August 1936. Courtesy Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS.

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certainty a day before the divorce came through: ‘King will Wed Wally’.13 Once Edward’s desire to marry Wallis Simpson was confirmed at the beginning of December, there was no room left on the front pages for other news. On 3 December, a day before Baldwin’s announcement of the king’s marriage plans, the British Library of Information in New York reported to the Foreign Office in London: ‘Constitutional crisis is principal news in American press with full page headings. Even presidential tour is relegated to second place.’14 Five days later the Foreign Office was told: ‘American interest in the debate about the King has been enormous. It was catered to the very full by the press and the radio, and there has been so great a flood of news and comment as to bear comparison only with war conditions.’15 Once the crisis was over, the British Library of Information in New York and the British embassy in Washington agreed that ‘responsible newspapers’16 such as the New York Times had covered the events leading up to the abdication ‘with accuracy and fairness’17 and that in quality papers there had been ‘generally a sympathetic understanding of the situation’.18 By this, they meant the ‘constitutional crisis’ arising out of the king’s morganatic marriage plan and the rejection of it by the governments of Britain and its Dominions.19 However, both British observers in the US stressed that the influential tabloids, especially those owned by the media mogul William Hearst, had unconditionally supported the king’s desire to marry Wallis Simpson and had made no effort to explain let alone understand the British government’s point of view. According to the British Library of Information, the Hearst press ‘sprung to the defence of the King as a popular and democratic person, nor have they neglected to emphasize and re-emphasize the fact that Mrs. Simpson is an American’.20 The British ambassador in Washington complained that the Hearst press had inaccurately argued ‘that opposition in British Empire to King’s marriage is due to American birth of Mrs. Simpson’.21 An article of the New York American, one of the main Hearst papers, illustrates the way in which the American tabloids reported and promoted the romance between an ordinary ‘Baltimore woman’ and the King of England. At the same time, the article sheds light on the way in which concepts of love and marriage were linked to ideas about Europe and America. On 26 October, a day before the Simpson divorce, the New York flagship of the Hearst press titled: ‘King Edward of England to Wed Mrs. Ernest Simpson in June, 1937’ and, all in capitals: ‘HE IS SINCERELY IN LOVE’. The article went on to give the following details: ‘King Edward’s most intimate friends state with the utmost positiveness that he is very deeply and sincerely enamoured of Mrs. Simpson, that his love is a righteous affection, and that almost immediately after the coronation he will take her as his consort.’ Love was thus the only necessary precondition for marriage and the fact that Wallis Simpson had been married twice before did not diminish the quality of her present love.

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A further revealing passage, while being heavily influenced by one of the main political objectives pursued by William Hearst in the 1930s, namely an Anglo-American alliance,22 alluded to the special and highly interesting peripheral position Britain occupied in Europe, both in terms of geography and emotions.23 The New York American stated: (Edward) believes that it would be an actual mistake for a King of England to marry into any of the royal houses of the Continent of Europe, and so involve himself and his empire in the complications and disasters of these royal houses. He believes further that in this day and generation it is absurd to try to maintain the tradition of royal intermarriages, with all the physical as well as political disabilities likely to result from that outgrown custom.

Europe was thus represented as an old-fashioned, declining and in fact doomed continent, while the traditional intermarriages between European royal families were used as a powerful metaphor to emphasise the degenerate character of the entire continent. Peripheral Britain, however, was represented as a country not really belonging to Europe. The article stressed the possibility of Britain saving itself from Europe’s inevitable downfall by means of an alliance with the modern United States, with whom it already shared one of the main means of collective identification, namely, language. The ideal metaphor for this move was the union between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. ‘Finally’, the article concluded, ‘(Edward) believes that the most important thing for the peace and welfare of the world is an intimate understanding and relationship between England and America, and that his marriage with this very gifted lady may help to bring about the beneficial co-operation between English-speaking nations.’24 Heavily influenced by the US media, the press in Latin America also treated the story of Wallis Simpson and the British king as a romantic love story. The British ambassador in Mexico reported that the Mexican press made little effort to explain the British government’s point of view and that most articles were written ‘in the style of vulgar sensationalism reserved for Royalty by the United States news services on which the Mexican press depends’.25 His colleague in Uruguay was less indignant, but also reported that ‘the general tendency has been to dwell upon what may be termed the romantic aspect of the question’.26 As in the United States, in Latin America the press had begun to report on Edward’s friendship with Wallis Simpson well before her name was first mentioned in the British press. Already in October 1936, the readers of El Rivadaria, a newspaper published in Argentine Patagonia, were able to glance at the notorious snapshot of Wallis Simpson touching the arm of the king in Sibenik. The story of the Edward VIII and the ‘belleza norteamericana’ (beautiful North American) had thus reached the southernmost part of the American continent at least two months before the first reports on the subject began to appear in Europe.27

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Silence in Britain In striking contrast to the North and South American press, the British media made no reference to the king’s friendship with Wallis Simpson until shortly before the abdication. While her name was included in the list of people who dined with the king or accompanied him on his holidays, no paper hinted in any way at the possibility of a romantic attachment. Even photographs showing Edward and Wallis during their summer holiday were ‘so retouched as to eliminate entirely the picture of his companion and make it appear that the king was alone’.28 On several occasions, the British distributors of American newspapers and magazines even removed or blackened out articles dealing with the king and Mrs. Simpson, an unusual behaviour that the government failed to explain to the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, who inquired about it in Parliament.29 A variety of reasons led to this remarkable and largely self-imposed silence observed by all British media, ranging from the conservative Times to the communist Daily Worker. Initially, the press was ignoring Wallis Simpson in much the same way as it had ignored previous royal mistresses who were married upperclass women. On 16 October 1936, the king held a meeting with the British press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, because Edward feared that Wallis Simpson’s divorce and the attention it received in the United States could prompt British papers to break their silence. Beaverbrook, owner of the Evening Standard and the Daily Express, then the world’s largest newspaper with a circulation of 2.25 million, promised to refrain from sensationalism and also succeeded in convincing the rest of the British media to keep up their silence.30 Finally, there was the fear of libel suits, a potentially costly possibility that British papers had to take into account when writing about the king’s private life, but which the American papers could safely ignore.31 For all these reasons, the British press remained silent about the king’s friendship with Wallis Simpson even after her divorce. This was despite the fact that the editors of all of the major newspapers knew that Edward’s marriage plans had led to serious problems between the king and his government, and that the issue was discussed in ever larger social circles. On 25 November, the conservative MP, London socialite and passionate diarist Chips Channon noted: ‘The possibility of a royal marriage is still the talk of London.’32 The pretext the media used to break their silence was a sermon by the bishop of Bradford on 1 December, who criticised the king in general terms for not taking his religious duties seriously enough. Referring to this speech, on 3 December, the national papers began writing about the difficulties between the king and his government, a day before the prime minister officially announced the king’s morganatic marriage proposal and the government’s opposition to it. Several detailed analyses exist of the way in which the British media covered the events leading up to the abdication only a week after Baldwin’s official

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announcement of the crisis.33 They show that while the tabloids belonging to the press lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere supported the king, of the major national dailies, only the liberal News Chronicle openly supported the king’s morganatic marriage proposal. All of the other national newspapers including the Times, Telegraph, Morning Post and Manchester Guardian, as well as the vast majority of provincial newspapers supported the government. Of the major weeklies, the Spectator supported the government, while the New Statesman supported the king. Although in terms of their print-run, the papers favourable to the king outnumbered those opposing him,34 a press campaign in favour of him never materialised, mainly because Edward decided not to participate in it. Once he had failed to get his government’s approval to address the nation in a radio broadcast on 4 December, in order to gather public support for his marriage plan, the king had in fact quickly made up his mind to abdicate.35 At the end of an intense week of crisis, there was widespread relief in the British media about the solution found, namely, the abdication of Edward VIII and the succession of his brother Albert, who came to the throne as George VI. The importance attached to love played a central role in the British media coverage of the abdication crisis. The editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, supported the king, arguing that Edward’s ‘dislike of humbug prevented him making a formal marriage to a Royal personage whom he did not love, though a farce of this character would have been welcomed by the Cabinet and solemnized by the Church’.36 The News Chronicle believed that there were ‘many people in this country who would not desire to see as Queen of England a woman who had previously been married’. Nevertheless, the liberal newspaper was convinced that the general public would eventually accept a morganatic marriage ‘if the King, who is of an age old enough to know his own mind, is sufficiently in love to persists in his intention’.37 Beaverbrook’s tabloids argued much more simply. They wanted to ‘secure for the King freedom to marry the woman of his choice, a freedom enjoyed by the humblest of his subjects’.38 The quality newspapers supporting the king therefore used the same arguments that in America had been employed by the Hearst press, namely, that divorce should be no obstacle for a marriage based on true love and that royal intermarriages were an outdated European anachronism. The British tabloids, on the other hand, considered love marriages to be a universal human right to which anyone was entitled, applying even to the King of England and a twice-divorced American woman from Baltimore. While the papers supporting the king valued love more highly than any other feeling, the papers supporting the government believed that there were much more important feelings than love. The Daily Telegraph argued that the king had to put the ‘august and permanent interests (of the nation and the Empire) before personal feelings which, however deeply they may concern his own happiness, are in that respect strictly private and not national or impe-

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rial’.39 The Western Mail believed that the king had to ‘make whatever personal sacrifice is necessary to comply with the traditions of his august position’.40 The papers opposed to the king’s marriage plans thus argued that Edward’s love for Wallis Simpson should play a subordinate role compared to his feelings of duty and responsibility toward Britain, the Commonwealth and the Empire. What exactly the duty of the king was depended on the point of view of the newspaper. Some believed it was the king’s duty to follow the advice of his ministers; some argued that as ‘Defender of the Faith’ he had to live a life according to the teachings of the Church of England, which did not condone divorce. The Times was one among many papers that pointed out that its objection to the king’s marriage plan was not influenced by ‘some old-fashioned conventional dislike of the marriage of the King with a “commoner”, or with an American’. The paper explained that the marriages of two of the king’s brothers to British commoners had been very popular and claimed that there were ‘many daughters of America whom (the king) might have married with the same approval and rejoicing’. Instead of objecting to the nationality of the king’s proposed bride, the Times explicitly criticised Wallis Simpson’s matrimonial history. It argued that it was wrong for the king to marry a woman who ‘has already two former husbands living, from whom in succession she has obtained a divorce’. According to the Times, a royal marriage to a divorcee was bound to lead to an ‘overwhelming objection … because it would scandalize a very large proportion of the nation and Empire and therefore do infinite harm to the whole institution of the British Monarchy’.41 By concentrating on the issue of Wallis Simpson’s divorces instead of her American descent the opponents to the king’s marriage plan nevertheless focussed on a theme with very strong American connotations. Various studies have analysed the long history of specifically American attitudes toward divorce.42 They have shown that, while in the course of the last centuries attitudes toward divorce have gradually become less strict on both sides of the Atlantic, in this development America was usually ahead of Europe. At any given time, it was easier and socially more acceptable to obtain a divorce in America than in Europe. Although the ever more relaxed American attitudes toward divorce had a direct influence on the country’s legal, literary and cinematographic traditions,43 to this day divorce remains a highly controversial topic within American society.44 Many Europeans, however, failed to notice the controversial status of divorce in America and instead preferred to cultivate the stereotypical notion that in comparison to themselves, US Americans were far too relaxed and carefree about it. Various factors facilitated the development of divorce-related anti-American prejudices. One of them were American novels, plays or films centred around divorce, which were regularly exported all over the world. In the year of the abdication crisis, for example, Clare Boothe’s play The Women was first

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staged on Broadway. Subsequently shown in 18 countries, this comedy set in a Nevada divorce ranch was also turned into a internationally successful film in 1939.45 Another means of distribution for stereotypes about American attitudes toward divorce were reports about sensational divorce cases. In 1936, millions of American and European cinemagoers knew perfectly very well that one of Hollywood’s greatest stars, Gloria Swanson (1899–1983), had been divorced twice as many times than Wallis Simpson. While Swanson was to acquire two more husbands, the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton (1912–1979), who had just divorced her first husband in 1935, was to entertain the world with six more divorces in the course of the following decades.46 A letter written to the editors of the Daily Express during the Abdication crisis shows how easy it was for members of the British general public to establish a link between Wallis Simpson’s matrimonial history and divorcerelated anti-American prejudices: ‘Isn’t it very dreadful that Edward VIII, son of our Beloved King George, should bring Hollywood ideals to Britain? Surely he could have found some sweet British Girl.’47 Due to the American connotations of divorce, the opponents to the king’s marriage plan could exploit widespread anti-American prejudices while at the same time insisting that there was nothing wrong with Wallis Simpson being American. This implicit use of anti-Americanism was necessary because many British papers such as the Times advocated good political relations between Britain and the US, ‘the two great English-speaking democracies’.48 Furthermore, no serious journalist could have denounced divorce as an exclusively American vice, given that in Britain divorce rates were also rapidly rising.49 Explicit criticism in the Times and other papers opposed to the king was only expressed about his morganatic marriage proposal. This plan was rejected because it involved a legal tradition that only existed in continental Europe. The Times explained: ‘(A) British King is bound by no such rule as has made the morganatic marriage a Continental institution. Abroad it has been necessary because the monarch’s choice has been constitutionally limited to certain princely families. It is precisely because the King of England has been as free as the law of the realm can make him to choose his wife irrespectively of rank or nationality that no such device is or has been necessary or possible in this country.’50 Incompatible with English freedom, a key element of British national identity often invoked in comparisons with continental Europe, a morganatic marriage was thus rejected because it was not in line with Britain’s peripheral European identity.51 Implicitly rejecting a marriage with a divorcee because this was considered to be too American and explicitly rejecting a morganatic marriage because it was too European, the Times and other papers thus argued that an ideal British marriage was a union of two equal partners who had never been married before and intended to remain married for the rest of their lives.

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Restraint in Europe After the abdication, the Foreign Office noted with great satisfaction that in striking contrast to America, ‘the press of practically all European countries has behaved wonderfully well over the crisis’.52 The European media had largely refrained from mentioning the king’s friendship with Wallis Simpson before the British papers started writing about the subject. Once the story had broken, most of them backed the British government’s point of view. The Foreign Office noted that in Austria, most reports were ‘very guarded’, in the Netherlands they were ‘enlightened and sympathetic’, in Switzerland, ‘restrained and sympathetic’, in Czechoslovakia, ‘friendly and sympathetic’ and in Hungary, full of ‘respectful reserve’.53 In Poland, the government had even ‘induced the leading Polish newspapers to refrain from publishing any of the reports and rumours regarding the King’s matrimonial intentions that were given so much prominence in the American press’.54 It is of particular interest in our case to note that not only the statecontrolled media of Europe’s dictatorships sided – for one reason or the other – with the British government, but also the great majority of the free press in Europe’s democracies. One good example comes from the heart of Europe, from Switzerland. The country’s most important liberal newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, told the story of Edward and Wallis as a modern fairytale and printed a widely reported yet incorrect version of it.55 According to the Swiss daily, Wallis and Edward had not met in Britain in 1931, but in America ‘twenty years ago’. Edward was supposed to have seen Wallis for the first time when she was not yet married during a ball in Baltimore. Later, ‘their paths crossed again by chance’, but Wallis was by then already married to her first husband. Finally, they met again after Wallis’s second marriage had brought her to London. There, she was quickly included into Edward’s circle of friends and the two of them were often seen dancing ‘tango and rumba for hours at the Ritz and in more exclusive nightclubs’.56 Despite indulging in detailed accounts of this love story with a ‘fairy tale quality’,57 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung firmly believed that the king’s duty was far more important than his love. After the abdication, it blamed ‘the romantic dream of King Edward VIII’ for seriously threatening the political stability of his country by shattering ‘the foundation of the British monarchy’. It called the events preceding the abdication a ‘most unpleasant performance’, which could have been avoided had the king realised that his morganatic marriage proposal was doomed because the necessary legislation had ‘no chance’ of being introduced: ‘Unfortunately Edward VIII did not immediately draw the obvious conclusions from this fact, a move he should have made in the interest of the British Empire the unity of which largely depends on the moral authority of the crown.’58

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British Foreign Office reports contain many similarly harsh statements from all over Europe. Much of this criticism was caused by the fear that Edward’s marriage plans posed a serious threat to British and European political stability. After the abdication, it became clear that this extraordinary event failed to cause any political damage. Therefore, most European papers interpreted the way in which the crisis was solved as a reassuring proof of the strength of Britain’s political system. In Austria, for instance, ‘the development of the crisis and the attitude of the leading figures and of British public opinion are held up as an example of stability of the British peoples, and the conviction finds expression that that stability will continue to exercise its influence in the consolidation of peace’.59 The Swedish daily Dages Nyheter also expressed its relief and stated: ‘The free nations of Europe have long looked up to England as the guardian of democracy, and will congratulate themselves on the fact that the dangers which have threatened the constitutional monarchy from within during the last few weeks have been averted without irreparable damage.’60 In France, where the Popular Front government of Léon Blum was in the middle of one of its regular crises, there was also widespread ‘admiration for the resilience and strength shown by English institutions and for the coolness and courage with which the British people surmounted the crisis’. According to the British embassy in Paris, ‘journals of every shade of opinion’ argued that ‘France … has been given an object lesson in Parliamentary government and in national behaviour. She should reflect upon the example of a country where tradition lives in the conscience of the people and the supreme law is the safety of the nation.’ Only Le Populaire, the Socialist newspaper controlled by Léon Blum himself, was ‘unable to resist the temptation of pointing out once or twice that monarchy has weaknesses and dangers to which a republic such as France is not exposed’.61 Almost everywhere in Europe the fragile security situation thus led to a negative perception of King Edward’s marriage plan, which stood in sharp contrast to the view propagated in the American tabloids, namely, that an Anglo-American royal wedding would foster world peace. Yet to what extent the specific political situation in late 1936 – the Spanish civil war had broken out, Hitler was forming alliances with Italy and Japan – was responsible for the widespread agreement among European papers that duty was more important than love remains difficult to assess. What can be stated with certainty, however, is that in Scandinavia, there were two interesting exceptions to this rule. In Denmark, there was an intense and antagonistic public debate about whether the king should follow his heart or the advice of his government. The British legation in Copenhagen reported on 5 December that ‘Opinion varies with Party colour, Right emphasising danger to the Empire, Left showing sympathy with the human element in the problem.’62 In a subsequent report, the legation explained that ‘the Socialist Press and, rather less emphatically, their

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allies, the Radicals, (took) the point of view that the opposition to the King’s plans sprang from old-fashioned or reactionary circles’.63 A similar if less intense debate took place in Sweden. The British embassy in Stockholm reported that conservative papers such as the Dagens Nyheter or Svenska Dagbladet emphasised that one of the key duties of a monarch was ‘the suppression of personal feelings’ and criticised the king for having ‘set his private interests above that of the realm’. The left-wing Social Democraten, however, interpreted the abdication as a ‘victory for Mr. Baldwin, the Church and respectability’ and emphasised that Edward showed ‘commendable firmness of character, in that he refused to be compelled to desist from the choice of his heart’. The Social Democraten concluded: ‘In any case the moral victory lies with the monarch, who has voluntarily abdicated rather than bow down to prejudice.’64 This evidence suggests that in Denmark and Sweden, there was an overlapping of political opinions with views about the status and importance of romantic love. In line with most other European papers, the conservative media of in both Scandinavian countries attached more importance to duty than to love because this traditional attitude seemed to guarantee social and political stability. Left-wing and to a lesser extent liberal newspapers, on the other hand, perceived romantic love as a progressive social force that conservative circles in Britain had once more defeated, but that should eventually succeed in deconstructing outdated bourgeois values and power structures. In contrast to the views held in the two Scandinavian monarchies, in Britain the oppositional left, apart from a few Communists, never tried to make political profit from the government’s struggle with the king.65 The Labour Party backed Baldwin in his opposition to the king’s marriage plan, while the country’s first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was one of the most severe critics of Edward’s attachment to Wallis Simpson. Instead of being backed by the left, Edward received political backing from the right. His most important political supporter was Winston Churchill, who seized the opportunity to stand up against his rival Baldwin, while Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists as well the former liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George also threw in their lot for the king.66

Letters to a King in Love The international media reports on the abdication can be compared to another very important set of sources, namely, the thousands of letters written by members of the general public to Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. These letters were preserved because, in 1945, Godfrey Thomas, private secretary to the Duke of Gloucester and former assistant private secretary of Edward VIII, thought that they contained ‘a remarkable cross-section of public opinion from

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all classes which should be of much interest & value to anyone who in years to come is writing about the Abdication’.67 While I do not think that these letters can be used like a contemporary opinion poll showing how ‘ordinary people felt’, a qualitative analysis of these very subjective sources can reveal ways in which Edward’s contemporaries perceived the romantic issues at stake that are invisible or not as clearly apparent in the media accounts analysed above.68 One of the most intensely debated issues in the letters sent to Edward was the relative importance attached to love and duty. While this was also discussed in many of the media reports on the subject, the high level of emotion in the letters is striking and shows how important these matters were to Edward’s contemporaries. Some people vigorously urged the king to do his duty rather than to follow his heart. An anonymous British subject wrote: ‘For Gods sake put the EMPIRE FIRST’,69 another even threatened that ‘MRS. SIMPSON WILL BE SHOT ’ if Edward were to abdicate.70 Margaret Laidlay from Leeon-the-Solent near Portsmouth put it rather more subtly: ‘About nine years ago, I was faced with the choice between a great love and “doing the decent thing”. I chose the latter. Although I renounced perhaps the biggest thing in a woman’s life, and shall remain a rather lonely spinster, I know that my gain outweighs the loss – because I have peace of mind.’71 On the other side of the spectrum of opinions, emotions ran equally high. Some people were even prepared to take up arms in order to defend the king and his rights – ‘I’ll die for you if necessary’ wrote a man from Sussex on the day the news broke.72 Alec Roylance from London formulated his reasons for being in favour of the king’s marriage plans very clearly: ‘Love is the most powerful force throughout the universe. A man in love is a happy man. A happy king cannot fail to be a good king.’ That Edward was really in love was completely clear to Roylance. He told the king: ‘With such a choice as you can command, it is obvious that you love this charming American lady.’73 Both people in favour and against the king’s marriage plans urged Edward to behave in a masculine way. Two examples: an anonymous Scottish woman who was outraged at the thought of Edward marrying Wallis Simpson – ‘the leavings of some other poor man whom she wrecked before’ – urged the king to leave her by telling him: ‘Be a man, shake yourself up.’74 Herbert Coppock from Didsbury near Manchester, on the other hand, told the king: ‘I am unaccustomed to address royalty, but with all due respect, if I may for a moment address you not as a King, but as a Man, I would say, stick to your guns and if no precedent exists for your action or contemplated action, then make one. Our country owes its greatness to the creation of precedents even as Nelson by putting his telescope to his blind eye, won the battle of Trafalgar.’75 This evidence suggests that two quite different concepts of masculinity existed at the same time. One concept clearly stipulated that good masculine behaviour meant putting duty above love. It was often linked to the late Victorian generation and the example of Edward’s father King George V (born in 1865),

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whose marriage had been a dynastic arrangement lacking any sense of romance. His wife, Princess Mary of Teck, had originally been engaged to George’s elder brother Albert Victor. Two years after his premature death in 1891, Mary got married to George, the new heir to the throne. The other masculinity concept was usually associated with the generation of Edward himself, who was born in 1894 and who was a young adult when the First World War broke out. The essentially twentieth-century second concept held that the vigorous pursuit of personal happiness was a more masculine behaviour than fulfilling one’s duty and sacrificing one’s romantic feelings while doing so.76 Anti-American prejudices were much more explicit in the letters sent to Edward than they were in the media coverage of the abdication. One anonymous British subject called Wallis Simpson an ‘American adventuress’,77 another stated: ‘We don’t want an American prostitute as Queen.’78 Very often these prejudices were linked to the allegedly negative attitudes Americans had toward love, marriage and divorce. One ‘Canadian who feels like all Canadians over this matter’ was outraged at the idea of a ‘scheming, clutching, twicedivorced, American hag’ becoming queen,79 while ‘one of the people’ described Edward’s future wife as a ‘second divorced crazy American woman’.80 Others consciously avoided using anti-American prejudices and claimed that the only problem was Wallis Simpson’s divorces. Rene Page from Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, for example: ‘We do not object to your marrying a Commoner, or an American, but to marry a woman who has been divorced twice & whose former husbands are still living we think, the morals of the whole world would be at stake … We women feel that if this woman had any moral standing, she would remain where she is & not cause you & the nation any more anxiety.’81 Yet, like the British press opposed to the king’s marriage plans, such universalistically formulated anti-divorce letters were implicitly using the widespread European prejudices about Americans being too relaxed about divorces. As in the case of the masculinity debate, it seems that generational differences also played an important a part in the debate about the compatibility of love and divorce. A 26-year-old Polish woman in love with a married man who was unable to obtain a divorce, for example, wrote to Edward: ‘The majority of my compatriots and almost all women with the exception of a few old puritan spinsters feel a spontaneous sympathy for your majesty.’82 Even the people who were convinced that Edward had to give up Wallis Simpson because this was the only right – and masculine – thing to do, never questioned that he was in love with her. Instead, they often expressed doubts about the quality of Wallis Simpson’s romantic feelings. ‘You may be genuinely in love with her but do you really suppose that she has true affection and love for you’, wrote J.R. Jones from Walton-on-Thames without adding a question mark.83 Many people even believed that Wallis Simpson must be unable truly to love; for example, an anonymous ‘wife and mother’ from East Yorkshire

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who claimed to ‘know something of the value of real love’. She stated: ‘I cannot imagine any lady who has previously given herself, and her heart, twice, possessing the right kind of love to make Your Majesty really, and truly happy. Such a love must surely wither, and die before many years have passed. No two people making such a union can ever hope for eternal happiness. Possibly no issue would ever come of the marriage.’84 Together with the fact that many letters debased Wallis Simpson using xenophobic and misogynistic terminology, this evidence suggests that even those who opposed Edward’s marriage plans perceived the king and his love to be true and pure, while Wallis Simpson and her feelings were considered to be false and dirty. This phenomenon of putting all of the blame during a royal crisis on one ‘bad woman’, who was supposedly corrupting the pure prince, was, of course, nothing new. Rather, it was one of the oldest narrative themes used for the description of royal couples, such as Caesar and Cleopatra, Justinian and Theodora or Russia’s last imperial couple, Nicholas and Alexandra.85

Two Love Stories A very important theme that the media reports failed to highlight but which is very prominent in the letters sent to Edward is the fact that for many of his contemporaries, the abdication crisis was not about one, but about two, love stories. On the one hand, there was the love story between Edward and Wallis Simpson, on the other hand, there was the love story between the people and the king. In order to explain the latter, we have to take into account the general history of European monarchies. In the course of the nineteenth century, all European monarchies realised that dynastic legitimacy alone was not enough to secure their thrones. Consequently, royal households began to devote a lot of their time and energy to the construction of emotional links between royal families and their subjects. One prime aim of this public relations activity was to create a sense of mutual love between the monarchy and the people.86 In the case of Edward VIII, the construction of a sense of mutual love between him and his subjects had been extremely successful. Ever since his birth, he had regularly participated in important and widely publicised royal pageants and his looks were known to almost all of his subjects through the regular publication of official photographs and newsreel films. Edward’s trips to all parts the world as soon as he reached adolescence made it possible for large numbers of people to come into relatively close and often direct contact with the prince. The construction of a widely loved royal persona for Edward benefited from the accidental facts of his extremely youthful looks, his great charm and spontaneity as well as his splendid photogenic smile. For many women, he was the most glamorous bachelor alive. The American fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1906–1989) remembered:

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‘To be a woman of my generation in London – any woman – was to be in love with the Prince of Wales.’87 But Edward also appealed to men. ‘I shook hands with you at Saut Ste Marie. With me was an American soldier, in uniform. You made him a devoted admirer of you, as you have of millions in all lands’, remembered a Canadian First World War veteran when writing to Edward in 1936.88 Many of Edward’s contemporaries explained that his popularity was due to the fact that he reminded them of a ‘fairy prince’,89 while Jungian psychologists would probably use the archetype ‘puer aeternus’ to explain Edward’s phenomenal global popularity.90 During the abdication crisis, the emotional bonds established over the past four decades between the king and his contemporaries played an important role. When rumours began to spread that the king may abdicate, many people became very anxious and feared that they were going to lose not a sovereign, but a lover. ‘Please oh please your Majesty do not leave us, we should miss you so very, very much’, wrote Eleanor Cooper from Dagenham, Essex. Fred S. Itacker from Osterly in Middlesex implored the sovereign: ‘Edward our Prince, England loves you and wants you. Do not leave us.’91 Many of Edward’s subjects felt that the king had to chose between his love for Wallis Simpson and his love for his people. Mary Canning from Cambridge wrote: ‘If you leave us and marry this lady, you won’t be happy because of the knowledge that you have let down the many millions of your subjects, and surely the love of these many people is greater than that of one woman.’92 Once Edward had abdicated and pronounced his farewell speech, many of the letters he received expressed the great grief and sadness many people felt. They employed terminology otherwise used when love stories end or loved ones die. Margaret Wilermith from Egham, Surrey, wrote: ‘I am heartbroken that we are to lose you as our King … We shall all try to serve your royal brother faithfully in his difficult task; but I do not think that many of us feel that anyone can take your place in our hearts.’93 For others, Edward fully entered the realm of romance because he had sacrificed everything for love. A woman from Prague, Miss Benesova, wrote the day after the abdication: ‘As a very young girl, I had the chance to see Your Royal Highness during your visit in Praha (Prague) more than twenty years ago and since this time you are for me “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche”. Therefore it would have been a great disappointment for me, if you preferred the throne to the love. Fortunately you didn’t. I am very thankful to you that I was not deprived of my ideal and wish you joy.’94

L’Amour, le divorce et l’occident Three years after the abdication, the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont published his landmark study on the history of love, L’Amour et l’Occident. It in-

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cludes a reference to Edward VIII, which all contemporary readers must have understood even if the king’s name was not mentioned. When discussing the effects of the Tristan myth on contemporary marriages, Rougemont deplored the fact that many of his male contemporaries only believed in marriage based on passion, where nothing else counts ‘pas même la couronne s’il est roi’ (not even the crown if one is king).95 Rougemont believed that such a marriage would not last for he was convinced that passion and marriage were incompatible. Unlike many of his fellow Europeans, he was thus not against Edward’s marriage because he believed that the king should have valued his duty higher than love, but because he believed that a marriage based on passion was doomed to fail and end in divorce and personal unhappiness. History proved Rougemont wrong in this particular case for Edward and Wallis never divorced. In another passage of his book, however, Rougemont touched on one of the central themes of this article, namely, the different attitudes toward love and marriage in America and Europe. In the passage ‘Sens de la crise’ (Sense of the crisis), which the author included into the 1956 edition of his study after having lived in the United States for several years, Rougemont explained that for Americans, love, marriage and happiness were synonyms. He also stated that for them, Hollywood-style ‘romance’ was the only basis for getting married. Due to America’s high divorce rates, Rougemont thought that this attitude was fatal, but he had to acknowledge that identical developments were taking place in Europe. He concluded: ‘The entire evolution of the West goes from the tribal wisdom to personal risk; this is irreversible and one has to condone it, in as much as it tends to align the collective or native destiny to personal decisions.’96 This article has demonstrated that different American and European attitudes toward love, marriage and divorce did not just interest intellectuals such as Denis de Rougemont. We have seen that this also deeply influenced the way in which the abdication of Edward VIII was represented and perceived by very many of his contemporaries. But while it has become clear that divorce-related anti-American prejudices were a central element shaping European attitudes toward American ways of loving, the analysis of American notions of European forms of love still needs to be undertaken. This would certainly be a rewarding task and would fill in another gap in the still largely unexplored cultural history of twentieth century emotions.

Notes 1. This article is based on a paper delivered at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) in Essen. Most of the archival research was undertaken while I was a Swiss National Science Fund Fellow at the Oxford University History Faculty. My participation in Luisa Passerini’s KWI research group ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’ was made possible through scholarships of

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the Janggen-Phoen Stiftung in St. Gallen and the Swiss National Science Fund in Bern. I would like to thank the editors of this book, the other members of the KWI research group and the Registrar of the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle, Pamela Clark, for their useful comments, the staff of all of the archives consulted for their efficient and professional help and, last but not least, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for permission to quote from documents held by the Royal Archives. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of non-English sources are mine. In analogy to the historical documents consulted for this article, the term ‘American’ is used in this text both to refer to citizens of the United States and their cultural practices as perceived by Europeans as well as an adjective pertaining to the entire American continent because Latin American reactions to the abdication of Edward VIII are also taken into account. 2. The main newspaper archive used is the one of the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich. The Foreign Office documents are located in the Public Record Office (PRO) in Kew. 3. The letters are held by the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle (RA). For previous use made of these sources see below, note 72. 4. Time, 16 November 1936, RA, DW/ABD/MISC/1. 5. Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, The Heart Has Its Reasons.The Memoirs of the Duchess of Windsor (London: Companion, 1958 (1956)), 197. 6. There is an enormous amount of literature on Edward and Wallis. The most useful biographies are: Philip Ziegler, King Edward VIII.The Official Biography (London: Collins, 1990); Greg King, The Duchess of Windsor.The Uncommon life of Wallis Simpson (London: Aurum, 2003). 7. Text of Baldwin’s statement reproduced in The Times, 5 December 1936. 8. Transcript of radio broadcast of Prince Edward, 11 December 1936, in Edward Duke of Windsor, A King’s Story.The Memoirs of the Duke of Windsor (London: Prion, 1998 (1951)), 413. 9. See Wallis and Edward. Letters 1931–1937. The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (New York: Summit, 1986), 128. 10. Daily Mirror, 26 October 1936, RA, DW/ABD/Misc/1. 11. New York Evening Journal, 30 September 1936, ibid. 12. Liberty, 26 September 1936, ibid. 13. Daily Mirror, 26 October 1936, ibid. 14. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 3 December 1936, PRO, FO 395/ 545. 15. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 8 December 1936, ibid. 16. Ambassador Lindsay, Washington to Foreign Office, 7 December 1936, ibid. 17. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 15 December 1936, ibid. 18. Ambassador Lindsay, Washington to Foreign Office, 11 December 1936, ibid. 19. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 3 December 1936, ibid. 20. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 8 December 1936, ibid. 21. Ambassador Lindsay, Washington to Foreign Office, 7 December 1936, ibid. 22. For a detailed account of Hearst’s life see David Nasaw, The Chief. The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). 23. For Britain’s peripheral position and identity see Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars (London: Tauris, 1999), and Paul Ward, Britishness since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2004), especially 108–112. 24. Clipping of New York American, 26 October 1936, RA, EDW/ABD/MISC/1. 25. Murray (Mexico) to Foreign Office, 12 December 1936, ibid. 26. Milington-Drake (Montevideo) to Foreign Office, 12 December 1936, ibid. 27. El Rivadavia, 14 October 1936, RA, DW4/1/3. This was probably not the first Latin American article that appeared on the story. 28. Marshall M. Knappen, ‘The Abdication of Edward VIII’, The Journal of Modern History 10, no. 2 (June 1938): 242–250, here 249. 29. See Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties. 1930–1940 in Great Britain (London: H. Hamilton, 1940), 278, and A. Susan Williams, The People’s King.The True Story of the Abdication (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 20.

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30. See Max Aitken Beaverbrook, The Abdication of King Edward VIII (New York: Athenaeum, 1966), 30–33. 31. For the influence of British libel laws on newspaper articles and books about the abdication see Knappen, Abdication. 32. Henry Channon, ‘Chips’. The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (London: Phoenix Giant, 1999), 85. 33. Apart from Ziegler, Edward VIII, see also Kingsley Martin, The Magic of Monarchy (London: T. Nelson, 1937), 66–93; Muggeridge, Thirties, 276–289; Frances Donaldson, Edward VIII (London: Futura, 1976), 276–296; Brandi McCary, Press, Politics and the Abdication of Edward VIII (New Orleans: Department of History, Loyola University, 1996); and Williams, People’s King, 134–152. 34. Edward himself later calculated that 8.5 million newspaper copies supported the government, while 12.5 million, or 60 per cent of all of the newspapers produced, supported his own cause. See Duke of Windsor, King’s Story, 373. 35. See Ziegler, Edward VIII, 314–319. 36. Martin, Magic of Monarchy, 72. 37. News Chronicle, 3 December 1936, quoted in The Times, 4 December 1936. 38. Beaverbrook, Abdication, 42. 39. Daily Telegraph, 3 December 1936, quoted in The Times, 4 December 1936. 40. Western Mail, 3 December 1936, quoted in The Times, 4 December 1936. 41. Ibid. 42. See, for instance, Glenda Riley, Divorce. An American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce. From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Joseph Epstein, Divorce. The American Experience (London: Cape, 1975); William L. O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 43. See Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law. American Failures, European Challenges (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Kimberly A. Freeman, Love American Style. Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976 (New York: Routledge, 2003). Ira Lurvey and Selse E. Eiseman, ‘Divorce Goes to the Movies’, University of San Francisco Law Review 30, no. 4 (1996): 1209–1219. 44. For a recent US criticism of the phenomenon see Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The Divorce Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). 45. On Boothe see Sylvia Jukes Morris, Rage for Fame. The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce (New York: Random House, 1997). 46. See Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson (London: Michael Joseph, 1981), and C. David, Heymann, Poor Little Rich Girl.The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton (London: Hutchinson, 1985). 47. Quoted in Martin, Magic of Monarchy, 66. 48. The Times, 3 December 1936. 49. On the history of divorce in Britain see Richard Goodall, The Divorce Dilemma (Folkestone: Renaissance, 2000). 50. The Times, 4 December 1936. The only constitutional limitation of the king’s freedom to choose his bride was that she must not be a Catholic. 51. For a recent overview of British national identity see Ward, Britishness. 52. Handwritten note on report ‘Turkish interest in events preceding King Edward’s abdication’, 28 December 1936, PRO, FO 395/545. 53. All these reports are contained in the dossier PRO, FO 395/545. It also contains reports about the press coverage in Romania (‘respectful admiration at the dignity displayed on all sides’), Belgium (‘with greatest delicacy and restraint’), Portugal (‘marked self-restraint’) and Turkey (‘tone of the press was unexceptionable’). 54. British Embassy, Warsaw to Foreign Office, 14 December 1936, PRO, FO 395/545. 55. Fairytales were among the most important representational themes of twentieth century monarchies. For details see my paper ‘“Some day my Prince will come” – Love and Royal Fairy

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Tales from Grimm to Walt Disney’, presented at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen on 26 March 2004. 56. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 7 December 1936. 57. Ibid. 58. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11 December 1936. 59. British Embassy, Vienna, to Foreign Office, 11 December 1936, PRO, FO 395/545. 60. British Embassy, Stockholm, to Foreign Office, 11 December 1936, ibid. 61. British Embassy, Paris, to Foreign Office, 12 December 1936, ibid. 62. P. Ramsay (Copenhagen) to Foreign Office, 5 December 1936, ibid. 63. British Legation, Copenhagen, to Foreign Office, 17 December 1936, ibid. 64. Greenway (Stockholm) to Foreign Office, 11 December 1936, ibid. 65. For the insignificant Communist support for Edward see Williams, People’s King, 179. 66. See Ziegler, King Edward VIII, 298–335, and Williams, People’s King, 179–180. 67. Thomas to Miss Milsom, 18 June 1945, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication. 68. Williams, People’s King, 208. Even if one were to make a quantitative analysis of the letters, which Williams fails to do, the result could not be used like a modern opinion poll for the views of people who decided, for one reason or the other, to write to the king, and are not necessarily representative of public opinion. 69. ‘A subject from ENGLAND’ to Edward VIII, 7 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ C019/444-5, Letters against marriage. 70. Anon. to Edward VIII, 10 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters after Abdication. 71. Laidlay to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/C019/442-3, Sympathetic letters (unanswered). 72. Illegible from Hove, Sussex to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication. 73. Roylance to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, ibid. 74. ‘The Real Mäckay’ to Edward VIII, 4 December 1936, ibid. 75. Coppock to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, ibid. 76. I have found no evidence that either of these two concepts were in any particular way attached to European or American stereotypes. 77. ‘One of those who gave all’ (woman), 7 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/C019/444-5, Letters against marriage. 78. ‘Your obedient servant at present’ to Edward VIII, 6 December 1936, ibid. 79. ‘A Canadian who feels like all Canadians over this matter’ to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication. 80. ‘One of the People’ to Edward VIII, 3 December 36, RA, PS/GVI/C019/444-5, Letters against marriage. 81. Page to Edward VIII, 6 December 1936, ibid. 82. ‘La majorité de mes compatriotes et presque toutes les femmes à l’exception de quelques vielles filles puritaines éprouvent une sympathie spontanée pour votre majesté.’ Mayzell to Edward VIII, 10 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication. 83. Jones to Edward VIII, 4 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/C019/444-5, Letters against marriage. 84. ‘A Wife and Mother’ to Edward VIII, 6 December 1936, ibid. 85. For the case of Justinian and Theodora see my ‘Die imaginäre Königin als Heilige und Hure. Wahrnehmungen von Grace Kelly und Romy Schneider’, in Der Körper der Königin. Geschlecht und Herrschaft in der höfischen Welt seit 1500, ed. Regina Schulte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002), 302–320. 86. For details see my article ‘Royal Photographs. Emotions for the People’, Contemporary European History 13 (September 2004), 255–280. 87. Diana Vreeland, D.V. (Cambridge: Kluwer, 2003), 70. 88. Illegible Canadian ex-serviceman from Toronto to Edward VIII, 8 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication.

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89. Duff Cooper quoted in Ziegler, King Edward VIII, 167. 90. See Marie-Louise von Franz, Puer aeternus. Ewiger Jüngling und kreativer Genius (Küsnacht: Stiftung für Jung’sche Psychologie, 2002). 91. Fred S. Itacker to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication. 92. Canning to Edward VIII, 6 December 1936, ibid. 93. Wilermith to Edward VIII, 11 December 1936, ibid. 94. Benesova to Edward VIII, 11 December 1936, ibid. 95. Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1939), 285. 96. Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1995), 316–319.

CHAPTER

8

‘Dear Adolf !’ Locating Love in Nazi Germany ALEXANDER C.T. GEPPERT

Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars … He was no politician. He was a media artist himself. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like. He staged a country. – David Bowie, Playboy, September 1976

Adolf Hitler, Rock Star? Starting with Heinrich Mann in 1933, both contemporaneous observers and contemporary historians have struggled with the problem of Adolf Hitler’s physical attractiveness, his ‘dreadful sex appeal’ and the considerable emotional effect he had on so many of his followers.1 Traudl Junge (1920–2002), his longtime private secretary, sketched a number of episodes that illustrate Hitler’s apparently irresistible erotic power and sexual fascination in her bestselling 1947 autobiography Bis zur letzten Stunde. According to Junge, neither women nor men could resist him. ‘Before the war, the gates were opened once a day when Hitler began his daily walk, and then people streamed into the grounds and lined his way’, she depicted a particularly intriguing scene at the Berghof, which was, from 1928 onward, Hitler’s notorious mountain-retreat on the Obersalzberg, close to Berchtesgaden: Hysterical women gathered up the stones which his feet had touched, and even apparently reasonable people behaved in a most irrational manner. On one occasion a lorry bringing tiles to the Berghof was plundered by a few very overexcited Notes for this section begin on page 173.

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women, and the tiles – which the Führer’s hands and feet had certainly never touched – ended up as souvenirs in the display-cabinets of their living rooms. Love letters from such women made up a considerable part of the post which arrived in the Führer’s chancellery.2

Traudl Junge, along with other female colleagues such as the older and more experienced Christa Schroeder, were responsible for the extensive and strictly formalised treatment of these missives. ‘Hundreds of telegrams. Love declarations from the entire Volk’, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary in October 1936. Numerous other sources confirm reports of the constant stream of pilgrims and admirers heading for the Obersalzberg, hoping either to catch a brief ‘live’ glimpse of their beloved object of desire, or to share in his aura by taking away future relics such as pieces of wood from the Berghof ’s garden fence or by digging up some of the earth on which Hitler had trodden.3 In retrospect, these reports do not seem entirely exaggerated. Years later, former female devotees spoke of a collective ‘hypnosis, psychosis’ that had taken hold of them. While some who had managed actually to touch Adolf Hitler were so overcome with emotion afterward that they could not wash their hands for several consecutive days, other women reported that they ‘lifted their eyes to the heavens and – like wet rags – sank slowly to the ground’. ‘There they lay like butchered calves’, a contemporaneous observer reported in retrospect, ‘sighing deeply. Joy and fulfilment’. Those who did not experience emotional reactions of this kind came to wonder why it was only they who remained so ‘cold’ and unmoved, and whether they did not in fact suffer some crucial lack of feeling. Yet, for the affected, the sheer sight of their object of desire sufficed to evoke the most intense psycho-physiological reactions. Thus, a female participant of an oral history project undertaken in the mid1980s remembered how she had, at the age of twelve, experienced her first orgasm while participating in a National Socialist solstice celebration held in the autumn of 1933.4 Professional journalists and foreign commentators confirmed the continual occurrence of similar outbursts of lust and fainting fits throughout Hitler’s years in power. They reported on the considerable emotional effects that the Führer had on his audiences – which, from a present-day perspective, one would be inclined to associate with superstars such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones or Michael Jackson. On the occasion of a Nuremberg party rally held in September 1934, for example, the American CBS correspondent William L. Shirer (1904–1993) was shocked to see the contorted faces of ‘ten thousand’ women who had been waiting in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting ‘We want our Führer’ until he appeared on the balcony for the briefest of moments. ‘They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah’, Shirer noted with a mixture of amazement and disgust in his journal, ‘their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement’.5 Even if such an observa-

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tion may also be the direct consequence of a certain kind of mass phenomenon, the empirical evidence of its overtly erotic nature is overwhelming. The present essay will not repeat the simplistic and rather mechanical argument that women, in short, were simply ‘seduced’ by the sexually impressive Adolf Hitler. Even if they did form the majority of the German electorate and were regarded by Hitler himself as vital to his electoral success, the argument that women effectively brought him to power has long been dismissed as a popular myth. Yet, those present-day German feminists who fight furiously against reports of supposed fits of Hitler-induced swooning do not interpret the problem adequately either. Eager to reject any association between fascism and sex appeal, they run the risk of neglecting a key element of Hitler’s grip on the German nation by dismissing these strong emotional effects – confirmed by a wide array of historical sources – as mere ‘fantasies’ of predominantly male contemporary historians. What is worse, they fail to consider the central argument about National Socialism’s highly modern and at least partially liberalising sexual politics, which a different and far more sophisticated branch of feminist scholarship, including the work of historian Dagmar Herzog and others, has successfully advanced in recent years.6 Complicated as all of this may be, fundamental questions remain: what did these women see in Adolf Hitler? And can their unquestionable devotion be sufficiently explained with the help of Max Weber’s much-quoted and oft-discussed concept of ‘charisma’?7 That there exists an obvious gap between lived, individually experienced emotions on the one hand, and ‘official’ emotional programs on the other, is a truism. Yet, under the new regime, this emotional disparity became a most pressing problem. More consistently than ever before, the boundaries between private and public blurred. The National Socialists’ attempt to draw these two spheres as close together as possible and to merge them, eventually, into each other was intentional and innovative. Linguistically, family and love became noticeably nationalised, birth and motherhood militarised, every aspect of the individual’s existence politicised and vice versa. At least in theory, emotional ties and bonds were supposed to be exclusively oriented toward the State, the Volk and, above all, the Führer, and far less toward a personal ‘significant other’, thus necessarily bypassing and in fact downgrading the traditionally most important social form, the family, by insinuating a new degree of loyalty after 1933 that transcended established emotional hierarchies. Yet, how far did these programs extend and how effective was this kind of ‘emotional re-education’? The present essay concentrates on the problem’s ‘demand side’. Analysing the significance of emotions projected onto the Führer and examining the connection between love and public order, this study poses larger questions about the potentially subversive and/or integrative function of emotionality within European society in the first half of the twentieth century. How did Adolf Hitler’s admirers imagine him? In what form and for what reason did many of them attempt to approach him personally, and what kind

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of private hopes did they place in the self-declared head of state? Finally, what does all of this tell us about the steering and management of emotions during Germany’s twelve years of dictatorship? In a wider context, therefore, the essay analyses the status and significance of politically determined and publicly desired frameworks. Its central tension derives from possible conflicts and contradictions between public, officially implemented concepts on the one hand, and private, mostly unsolicited and potentially deviant practices on the other. Even in twentieth-century mass society, establishing a personal, if not romantic, relationship with one’s political leader seemed a highly desirable goal. As sociologist William Josiah Goode noted half a century ago, there is no emotion that is more projective than love. Since the attracted person is, usually, hardly ever willing to believe that the object of his or her love or passion does not in some way reciprocate the feeling, he or she will be ready to go far before accepting rejection as genuine.8 As this essay demonstrates, among a specific sub-group of German society, emotional transference proved so successful under National Socialism that it caused considerable counter-effects, entirely unforeseen and hardly controllable by the regime. In quite a number of cases, officially prescribed devotion transformed into true, even if obviously unrequited, love. In analysing Adolf Hitler as an object of passionate desire and discussing the problem of loving the dictator as expressed in the bulk of ‘fan mail’ he received, this essay identifies links between two of the most distant units: individual and private on the one hand, and collective and political on the other. Though by no means jeopardising the political system per se, in the case of Nazi Germany, such liaisons proved much more dangerous than is immediately apparent. Thus, neither Adolf Hitler himself nor his personal (if any) love life and private ‘women’s question’ are at the centre of this essay. Rather, it focuses on his image, appeal and persona in the popular and public imagination, as well as those emotions projected onto him. The dictator was adored and loved like a presentday rock star – although he was and remained, in fact, Adolf Hitler.

The Archive Empirically, this analysis is based on a collection of personal love letters addressed directly to Adolf Hitler. While their existence could have been known to scholars since the mid-1990s, these letters have – for various reasons – hitherto remained largely unexamined, awaiting serious research. The unlikely history of their survival is, in itself, intriguing. This cache of letters was discovered by Wilhelm K. Eucker (1912–2000), a member of the German resistance who had fled to France, Spain and North Africa, where, having changed his name to William C. Emker, he became an officer of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor of the CIA. Once the war was over, Emker was sent first

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to Vienna, then back to Berlin to work for the Information Services Control Branch of OMGUS, the Office of Military Government for Germany (US). In the spring of 1946, during an unofficial visit to the bombed-out Reich Chancellery in Wilhelmstraße, located in the Russian sector, he found piles of private letters written to Adolf Hitler strewn across the floor. Originally received and filed by several secretaries, including Hitler’s own Traudl Junge, this unlikely trove had apparently been ignored by the Russian agents. Despite removing government and military documents, file cabinets and other pieces of equipment from the premises, they had left stacks of disordered papers behind. In more than twenty subsequent visits to the Chancellery, Emker claimed to have systematically collected several thousand documents, all of which he carried out in his briefcase, forwarded to his US address, and repossessed after his arrival a year later. Emker waited half a century before a drastically abridged and often inadequately edited selection of the letters – 43, to be precise – was published in a small booklet, rife with careless errors.9 In retrospect, Emker explained to friends, he had endeavoured not to embarrass any potential survivors and had not formerly found anyone who considered the letters significant enough to publish in full. Before his death in 2000, Emker handed the entire bundle over to a German friend and collaborator whom he designated as a custodian. This friend had previously helped him publish both the letters’ digest and his fragmentary autobiography.10 Although deteriorating rapidly due to inadequate storage, to date the entire collection is still held in private hands rather than properly preserved in a publicly accessible archive. While other samples of a similar kind and likely of the same provenance are spread over various files available at the German Bundesarchiv, 200 additional folders ‘packed with domestic correspondence addressed to Hitler’ and ‘thousands of hideous poems’ dedicated to him, both ‘of inestimable sociological value’, appear to have been acquired by the Library of Congress in November 1948. Yet, whatever happened to these so-called ‘Chancellory Papers’ after their accession is not entirely clear. Unfortunately, the material’s current whereabouts are completely unknown, a fact which could not be satisfactorily explained despite an extended in situ search.11

The Letters For the following close reading, approximately one hundred of Emker’s collection of love letters were examined. Others could not be consulted for purely technical reasons: either they were incomplete or consisted of mere fragments, did not contain any indication of their senders or date of origin, or were scribbled in such indistinct handwriting that they remained entirely illegible even to experts of penmanship. Five distinct features can nevertheless be identified, all relating to format and form:

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First of all, both the total number of these letters and their distribution over time are unknown. Neither of these figures can be reconstructed, as the respective file records have not survived. There are, however, credible hints that the number of letters flowing daily into the Führer’s Adjutancy in Berlin ran at least several hundred, if not more. According to a comparatively reliable Italian source, Mussolini is said to have received up to 30,000–40,000 personal letters of a similar kind per month; for instance, 42,000 in October 1936 alone.12 Only a certain portion, however, of the letters received in the Reichskanzlei were actual love letters. The vast majority concerned any number of diverse subject matters, from problems of everyday food supply caused by the war, to Germany’s geopolitical situation, to possible ways of further weakening the enemy. Since neither the official finding aids nor the actual files still exist, it is unclear exactly when the first love letter was received in the Chancellery and whether Hitler had already obtained similar correspondence prior to his seizure of power in January 1933. The last letter consulted for this analysis dates 31 December 1944. Generally speaking, their numbers seem to have remained comparatively constant, with peaks in 1939 (12 letters) and 1943 (15 letters), and a certain, if short-lived, drop in the interval (1941: 3 letters) (Figure 8.1). These figures, however, must be treated with a necessary degree of scholarly caution; since the general number of letters received is effectively unknown, they indicate no more than a vague trend of limited significance, and are not statistically representative. Second, a similar range of evidence can be observed with a view to the occasions around which such letters were composed. Religious holidays such as Christmas or Easter, secular ones such as the New Year, and Hitler’s birthday on 20 April, provided the most welcome opportunities to address the Führer personally, to convey cordial wishes for his future welfare and to communicate one’s own concerns, often complete with a handmade gift or a rhymed poem. The composition of such birthday letters was at least semi-officially endorsed, while the writing of love letters clearly was not. In 1935, for instance, the Braunschweiger Tageszeitung conducted a public competition on the topic ‘What do I owe to Adolf Hitler?’ Answers need not have been written in an elaborate or artistic manner, but should rather have ‘come from the heart’. Of the to-

Figure 8.1. Love Letters to Adolf Hitler, 1938–1945 (this sample N = 59)

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tal contributions received, twenty-two were awarded prizes, before the entire bundle of essays was officially handed over to the Reich Chancellery for future use. In the next year, 151 poems alone were received in the Presidential, and not the Reich Chancellery.13 Unlike the painstakingly assembled inventories of Hitler’s own Christmas presents sent to friends and acquaintances during the early years after the seizure of power or the long list of some 500 personal visitors during his five month-long imprisonment in Landsberg am Lech in the summer of 1924, no comprehensive records of the items received at the Reich Chancellery have survived. ‘Everything that I send to you is written in a spirit of true love’, declared a female devotee, who also enclosed a cake baked ‘out of pure love’. Together with their ‘poetic’ laudations, other women consigned four-leaf clovers, home-stitched pillows (with ‘feathers from my own bedspread!’), private photographs or even entire marriage contracts, which for practical reasons were already completely filled out, with only his signature still missing. ‘My fervently adored Führer!’, one woman wrote, ‘You have a birthday and we know only two ardent wishes: may everything in our Fatherland be now and in future just as you want it to be, and may God provide that you be preserved for us for ever. Your loyal, E.E.’ A third woman declared that her love was simply ‘as true as gold – there is nothing to be done’, while Wilhelmine Houschko rhymed as follows:14 For Hitler’s birthday: A pure thought An ardent prayer Lord, help us to be worthy That Hitler Lives and fights For us.

She mailed this poem from Vienna, her place of residence, to Berlin on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday in April 1938, i.e., shortly after the so-called Anschluss, and she would, like numerous others, continue to write him faithfully over the following years.15 Third, little is known about the social background and personal circumstances of the authors of these letters, though a certain amount of evidence can be indirectly deduced from what and how they wrote. The love letters consulted in this study were authored exclusively by women. Letters from men contained in the same collection were of a very different, and, at least superficially, much less erotic character, being concerned rather with technical matters. Men composed letters to express their opinion as to the future of the war and the inevitable restructuring of Europe, to make wide-ranging politicaltechnical suggestions with regard to strategic planning, to assure Hitler of their unshakable support, or to offer their personal assistance in realising his plans. Quite a few of the male writers sought private audiences with their beloved

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Führer to present diverse ‘projects’ and to secure Hitler’s personal support before setting out to realise their frequently far-reaching and often far-fetched plans. Whatever their personal motivation, and despite the homoeroticism latent in National Socialism, none of the male writers openly declared that he longed romantically and/or sexually for Hitler. Again, the broad variation among the letters indicates considerable social and, hence, educational heterogeneity, although it is virtually impossible to infer from the source material anything as to cultural, regional or confessional backgrounds of the female authors. Some women wrote in clear, elegant but nonetheless strong-minded prose, while others contended, to varying degrees of success, with orthography. A third group had most acute problems expressing their thoughts comprehensibly in written form. There are numerous, sometimes hilarious, stylistic weaknesses and occasional humorous lapses to be found amongst these letters. Addressing Adolf Hitler as her ‘dear good darling’, a certain, surnameless Rosemarie from Dessau, for example, stated on 4 November 1943 that ‘I would so love to be your little bride, but I’m really not at all happy that I haven’t got my false teeth yet’.16 Format, style and quality of the stationery differed widely as well. While many female authors apparently wrote under their real names and indicated current home addresses – some letters even arrived from other European countries such as Austria, France or Switzerland – others used obvious pseudonyms. Yet, all of them included some form of postal address, not only hoping, but explicitly expecting, that they would soon receive a personal reply. Fourth, there is no discernible pattern to the frequency, form or length of the love letters. While the aforementioned Rosemarie wrote in November and December 1943 several times to Berlin, other women tried to establish contact only once. These letters range from a few lines hastily scribbled on prefabricated, commercial birthday cards, to detailed love letters, often of twenty pages and more. When they did not receive the kind of answer for which they had longed, many women simply wrote again, complaining bitterly about the lack of replies and frequently making little effort to conceal their great disappointment. ‘You obviously don’t want to have anything to do with me’, wrote a resigned Erna Jung from Ludwigshafen on 2 August 1944 after a number of attempts to establish personal contact had failed, ‘otherwise you would long ago have allowed me to visit you’. Others tried to explain their discontent and disbelief as a mere consequence of ‘too much work’ in his case and bad timing on both of their parts. As an alternative scenario, they projected a common future in post-war times when Hitler would no doubt be less occupied, so that the loving couple could eventually unite and forever live happily together. ‘It is solely because I have this profound, great feeling in my heart that I now feel so estranged from my husband’, another wife, equally frustrated by one missing reply after the other, explained an increasing estrangement from her real husband as the consequence of a burning desire and insatiable yearning for the Führer.17

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Last but not least, when addressing Adolf Hitler, almost all of these women invested a good deal of creative energy inventing unique pet names, apparently meant to convey the intensity of their emotions. These nicknames were, simultaneously, oriented on the conventions of the love letter genre and to National Socialist language. Thus, the writers invented shortened and minimising forms of salutation, such as a simple, yet intimate ‘Adilie’; made alluring compliments by calling him ‘my dear, sweetest Adolf ’; or strung together several such endearments, designating him ‘the man of my heart, my roly-poly darling, my very dearest Adolf ’. Other women opened their letters by greeting Hitler with ‘hail my very dearest Adolf ’, ‘my dear Adi!’, ‘my adorable sweetheart!’ or ‘you sweet, amiable dear, my precious, my very best, my ardently loved one’. His ‘loyal wife Lucie Hitler’ addressed one of her love letters outright to her ‘Dear husband, Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler’ – precisely in this order.18 The overabundant use of self-invented pet names, often entirely opaque to a third person outside of the romantic relationship, is certainly intrinsic to love letters as such and thus can be found in numerous other contexts as well, yet these attempts to incorporate officially sanctioned propaganda language into personal salutations is unique. In these highly charged salutations, the writers struggled to fuse expressions of their private romantic feelings for the Führer with the rhetorical formulas usually employed when referring to him in public. The intensity, but also the ineptitude, of their repeated attempts to combine the two in a single utterance is obvious. A number of women introduced a further noteworthy element of address into their letters. They insisted on addressing Adolf Hitler as ‘Your Majesty’, even when reporting for pages and pages on their everyday and family life, their children, relatives and friends, pouring out worries about solitude, despair or illnesses, or when simply asking for financial aid in case of personal need. Writing shortly before Christmas 1941 from Prague, Margarethe Marie Louise explained her motives and reasoning for so doing in more detail: I realise, honourable Reich Chancellor and Führer of the Great German Empire, that Your Majesty has not been formally given the crown; yet, in my inmost heart, I can only address Your Excellency, Your most revered, honourable Reich Chancellor and Führer des Großdeutschen Reiches with the word “Majesty” – and I dare to use this expression in a private letter as an intimate, completely secret – yet, at the same time – completely normal term.19

‘It’s not madness that makes me ask the Führer to admit me into his presence, to let me be with him’, expressed yet another woman in a similar letter written in March 1943 to the Reich Chancellery: In earlier times it was possible to speak – just once – to a king. Why not in our time, to our Führer? My only, inmost wish is to be with the Führer – and this wish has simply taken possession of me. I cannot dismiss it … I often even wonder if I am perhaps becoming mad? But then the Führer would also be that. I can only love someone similar to myself.20

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Here, distinct notions of the sovereign are blurred. Hitler was regarded as different forms of head of state in one person: not only Reich Chancellor and Führer, but also King and the ‘secret emperor’ for whom the nation had so long been waiting. At the same time, there is a vague longue-durée perspective, an unconscious undercurrent to some of the arguments. Twentieth-century manifestations of Ernst Kantorowicz’ famous medieval doctrine of the ‘king’s two bodies’ shine through. According to Kantorowicz, beginning in the fifteenth century, though with roots in classical antiquity, the sovereign came to be seen as a persona mixta or, rather, as una persona with duae naturae. His rule was Godgiven, of divine origin. Since he formed part of a larger body that transcended his own physical existence, the ruler was endowed with supernatural powers, allowing him to heal by touch. Though unaware of the similarity, the women writing to Hitler and appealing for relief employed an age-old discursive model of addressing the ‘just sovereign’; precisely the same could be said for the wellknown ‘If Hitler only knew’ formula.21 The submissions and letters contained importunings of every possible kind. Quite a few offered, in more or less subtle ways, sexual intercourse and bodily intimacy. ‘You are searching for a woman – and I for a man’, Martha H. from Halle an der Saale volunteered on 27 January 1939, ‘[n]ow everything remains up to you. I myself am prepared to do absolutely anything. Tell me when, and come.’22 One woman promised to leave her back door unlocked in case of a nocturnal surprise visit on the part of Adolf Hitler. Another announced that she would hide a second set of keys in her gardens to enable Hitler to enter unimpeded at night – and all of this frenzy due not to love of state in a figurative sense, but rather a far-reaching, physical desire for its head. Only under the latter condition could this entreaty, in turn, be taken as a literal act of applied patriotism, in the unconditional offering of one’s own body. A third admirer, by the name of Eva Koch, left no doubt as to the earnestness of her devotion. ‘I kiss you, your behind and bare myself to you, so that you realise how much I love you’, she wrote, ‘[y]ou cannot demand any greater patriotism than that.’23 However, the love, yearning and imagined intimacy so fervently expressed in these letters always remained unrequited. It is more than likely that Hitler never saw any of the love letters; at least, not a single answer has been found. ‘Official receipt or thanks in single cases were not given. The letters received were presented to the Führer in listed form’, thus a high official explained the general bureaucratic procedure. After their arrival at the Chancellery, secretaries such as Junge and Schroeder read and carefully filed these letters under the sender’s name. In exceptional cases, especially to authors of birthday greetings, standardised replies were dispatched. A very few even received official thankyou cards embossed with Hitler’s signature and expressing his ‘sincere gratitude for the friendly greetings and the great loyalty which they reflect’.24 The authors of ardent love letters, however, do not seem to have merited any answer at all. If they wrote persistently, the Chancellery informed the local police,

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who gave them an official warning. Correspondents who did not heed such a warning could eventually be declared ‘mentally unfit’, prosecuted and sent to a psychiatric hospital. In three cases, it can be deduced that such a procedure seems to have been followed: Anna Wempe from Berlin sent eight love letters to Adolf Hitler, Gertrud Wenge from Koblenz three and Margarete Sauer from Stargard in Pommern also three, after which point the local police received instructions from Berlin to respond straightaway and put an end to further written advances. Yet, in spite of a first ‘friendly’ warning, all three continued writing. Wempe, for instance, started using a male pseudonym, while another woman wrote a harsh farewell letter of complaint to Adolf Hitler himself. Telling him, in a most outraged manner, that the police had come to see her, she expressed her sincere disappointment that Hitler had apparently not had the courage to write to her personally and explain his lack of interest. Only under the condition that Hitler broke the news himself, face-to-face, was she ready to accept his romantic rejection at all.25 While we may be tempted to play down this woman’s love for the dictator by declaring it retrospectively as ‘merely’ ascribed, projected and imagined, this emotionally-laden affair seems to have been all too real for her.

Loving the Dictator Present-day lawyers, criminologists and psychologists would not hesitate to classify such forms of deviant – and possibly compulsive – behaviour as comparatively minor forms of ‘stalking’. These letters clearly entailed neither any direct, physical contact or violence, nor did their writers cause fear on the part of the ‘victim’. In fact, Hitler chose not to react in any way at all. Especially in the case of today’s numerous celebrities who are loved and pursued to the point of harassment by their fans, sociologists have adopted the concept of ‘erotomania’, ‘erotomanic delusion’ or ‘paranoia erotica’. The same clinical condition has also been described as the De Clérambault Syndrome, named after the French prison psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), who, between 1913 and 1923, published a number of learned articles on psychoses passionnelles.26 He pointed to a form of paranoid delusion of amorous quality. According to de Clérambault, an erotomanic stalker is usually a woman who has developed a deluded belief that the object of her love, a man with whom she may have had very little or virtually no contact at all, reciprocates her own affection. Neither by experience nor by argument can she be convinced of the opposite. Frequently, the chosen person is of a much higher social status and thus is likely to be unattainable. It remains, however, disputable whether such a retrospective diagnosis could help to explain an obviously widespread practice, and indeed to foster its necessary historicisation.27 Espe-

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cially regarding Adolf Hitler, the psychological speculation or psychoanalytic reasoning so prevalent and fashionable in the late 1970s and early 1980s have in fact proved a mixed blessing when examining the origins of his appeal to the masses. By the very rules of their profession, historians do not consider whether one of their ‘cases’ would today be categorised as potentially pathological, if for one simple reason only: it would neither essentially change anything nor offer a satisfactory explanation. What is it then that makes these letters appear in part so absurd, sometimes even comical, yet also so grotesque and disturbing? Quite clearly, the phenomenon’s occurrence as such is not limited to Adolf Hitler. Contemporary celebrities who receive comparable correspondence include not only pop musicians, movie stars and screen idols, but also democratically elected politicians and federal chancellors equally at the centre of public media attention, in the German case especially Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schröder.28 Yet other European dictators of the early twentieth century such as Hitler’s Fascist counterpart, Benito Mussolini, were also objects of obsession and prominent addressees of the same kind of passionate attention.29 Only a carefully designed, horizontally and vertically comparative large-scale historical study could give detailed and secure information as to the precise historical differences and similarities between all of these cases, and, in particular, the ways in which they contrasted with various forms of political charisma existing prior to the twentieth century. In the present context, it must suffice to point to the social position of the dictator as such, which is by definition elevated and tantamount to specific embodiments of ruling masculinity. For Mussolini, at least, the following can be established on a more concrete basis. Compared to the letters that Hitler received, submissions to the Italian dictator were frequently composed in a semi-official and much less personal style, even if there are also a number of cases of women bluntly offering themselves and outspokenly suggesting that he should father their child. Generally, the Duce appears as a different type of leader – less sexualised and more avuncular – who was to be contacted for direct advice and uncomplicated assistance in cases of social injustice, misfortune or personal emergency beyond one’s own control – precisely the kind of occasions suggested in an article ‘Quando si scrive una lettera a Mussolini?’ (When does one write a letter to Mussolini?), which the noted narrator, sports journalist and writer Orio Vergani (1899–1960) published in the Corriere della Sera in November 1936. Here, the Italian dictator was depicted as a caring and omnipresent, yet slightly distant father figure to be addressed in moments of long-term misery and personal despair, whose task it was to serve as everybody’s last resort. It seems that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, was also ready to fulfil such a role, even if only to a certain extent. A limited number of scribbled comments in the letters actually preserved, either by him or one of his secretaries, prove that at least some of these submissions did, in fact, reach the intended recipient. In rarer cases, Mussolini made benevolent

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comments and even ordered specific actions that, however, seem never to have been characterised by outstanding financial generosity.30 What is, on the other hand, most remarkable in the love letters sent to Adolf Hitler is his direct, immediate and entirely uninterrupted personal presence imagined by the writers in a domestic context. Despite his actual physical absence in their homes, for these women ‘Hitler’ could not have been more real. In some cases, Hitler may well have filled the emotional gap left by absent fathers and sons, lovers and husbands completely absorbed by total warfare; in others, he may merely have been the object of a ‘crush’, a hypothetical possibility, given that many of the women wrote about their male partners as well as Hitler. Yet, in general, there cannot be the slightest doubt as to the earnestness of their heartfelt love, unrequited as it was. Adolf Hitler constituted a very concrete, even integral, part of their daily lives. The writers considered themselves so close to and intimate with Hitler that they did not flinch from addressing him in personal terms. As numerous references to specific speeches and marches, radio transmissions and propaganda events in the letters themselves suggest, this was their way of responding to the regime’s omnipresent penetration into everyday life by a variety of means, all aiming at both mind and body. Many felt so directly involved and personally addressed that they believed themselves to have been perhaps not the only, but most certainly the true recipient of his words, for whom alone Hitler had carefully composed his messages. Some writers even sought (and supposedly found) hidden hints in his speeches that they interpreted as direct references to themselves – and hence as secret replies to what they believed to have already communicated to him. While the source material does not contain sufficient evidence to justify any speculation as to the ‘actual’ motives of the writers, three distinct, though by no means mutually exclusive figures of the Führer can be deduced from the letters: first, Hitler as an adored object of desire, a powerful sex symbol and a pined-for lover; secondly, Hitler as a close friend, a confidant, almost a family member, like an uncle sincerely interested in the wellbeing of his kin; and, thirdly, Hitler as the sacred redeemer, saviour and sovereign, a God-sent creature, a royal figure equipped with healing powers of heavenly origins. Sometimes one of these three Führer figures overshadowed the other two, but more often than not they were combined in an inextricable manner. On the occasion of Hitler’s 43rd birthday in 1932, for instance, Ida Erbe from Barchfeld sent a telling cable in which several distinct images were mixed, the result being one big tangle of passionate emotions that is impossible to unravel: My beloved Führer! My heart is so full, my birthday wishes became a prayer. Now I know that God who, in his unending love, sent you to us will lead and protect you. You shall remain Adolf Hitler and become our second Bismarck. We live, and if necessary, we die for our Führer and his aim! … Heil! Heil Hitler! Let us continue the struggle! Ours is the truth! Ours the final victory! Best birthday wishes, Ida Erbe.31

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Here, in her ‘prayer’, Hitler transcended everything, with one single exception. He became the beloved object of passionate desire, a protective statesman and guarantor of truth as well as an omnipotent creature of supernatural powers, with God, the Almighty, remaining the only supreme authority above him. Yet since God had sent him in his ‘infinite love’, there was no doubt whence Hitler derived his powers and for what reason both ‘truth’ and ‘the final victory’ had to be ‘ours’. On the part of his admirers and followers, the only adequate response and only possible reaction to such earthly divinity was love. Thus, political actors as diametrically opposed as Joseph Goebbels on the one hand, and the exiled Social Democratic Party, on the other, made almost identical statements. ‘The Führer is always present for his people. Yet they also love him with all their heart’, the former noted in his diary in July 1937, while an official report by the latter had already stated two years earlier that ‘[h]e is loved by many’.32 In the end, both the apparent earnestness of these women’s hopes for a union with Adolf Hitler and the regime’s clumsy attempts at reacting to such outbreaks of unsolicited, highly eroticised passion that they could not completely control, raise far-reaching questions about the nexus of love and order, sex and politics. In this specific context, it remains a ghastly paradox that those who took the omnipresent Hitler-myth at face value and believed in the ubiquitous propaganda as unswervingly as they could were eventually prosecuted and imprisoned. Despite the considerable and far-reaching effects this could have on their lives, the female letter writers tried to express something obviously impossible within two existing frameworks usually believed to be quite separate, i.e., the genre of romantic love letters on the one hand, and linguistic conventions of National Socialism, on the other. It is such a blatant clash of two very different and distinct languages that makes reading these letters today such a deeply disturbing experience. It is hard to believe that Hitler was actually loved by a considerable section of his followers, but there is no doubt that they used the conventional language of romantic love with all of its stereotypes in presenting him as their object of desire. Whether such passion was the direct result of Hitler’s historically frequently ascribed charisma or not, to ‘diagnose’ it as love produces an effect of both alarm and disbelief on our part. Familiar with both distinct sets of rhetoric rules and linguistic conventions, we almost inevitably react with a profound sense of irritation vis-à-vis these continuous efforts to speak the unspeakable in such a candid manner – attempts which, in retrospect, could not but fail. In the very end, diagnosing ‘love’ may entail that historians will never be capable of fully explaining Hitler’s fascination, attractiveness and ‘dreadful sex appeal’ as one of the reasons for his leadership and power. For us, laughter may be the only way to conceal our apprehension in view of such an alarming and deeply disquieting possibility.

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Staging a Country During the twelve years of National Socialism, overly emotional displays between husbands and wives and between family members were not politically encouraged. Any emotional exclusivity was considered risky for the Volksgemeinschaft ideal, the state and the Führer. A strong and uncontrollable emotional sub-community could well prove a potential threat to the national whole. If one of the most outstanding features of the Nazi state was its totalitarian tendency to erase all boundaries between public and private life, and to politicise every aspect of the individual’s existence, then close emotional bonds between individuals were not in the direct interest of the authorities. Thus, there was no official conception of ‘love’ in National Socialism, or at least no positively defined conception. ‘Love’ was not a central term, and it did not form part of any ideological concept. Hence, no separate entry of ‘love’ is to be found in the various linguistic dictionaries of National Socialist vocabulary. As a matter of fact, however, the term is applied with a surprising frequency in different kinds of official and semi-official documents. Most of the time it appeared in a strictly figurative, undichotomous and deromanticised sense: love for something – the fatherland, the nation, the state. The only somebody to be loved was the Führer and/or God, with the relation between the two not being always clear in these documents. For instance, ‘A man, risen from the midst of the people, preaches the gospel of love for the fatherland’, an official propaganda book declared, directly proclaiming Hitler to be the new Messiah and confirming the quasi-religious component already diagnosed.33 If there were expressions of private, romantic love in the public realm, it was Adolf Hitler exclusively who took on the part of the ‘significant other’. Thus, the innumerable love letters written by private followers and admirers found their direct equivalent in those public declarations of love for the Führer, which various party officials made over the years, first and foremost Joseph Goebbels. As early as April 1926, he proclaimed, ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at one and the same time. You are indeed what is called a genius.’ A few weeks later, Goebbels elaborated further, calling the object of his desire a ‘truly creative instrument of a divine fate’: ‘I stand before him, utterly overwhelmed. In fact he is like a child: sweet, good, merciful. Also as cunning, clever and agile as a cat, but like a lion too: roaring, great, gigantic. A real, true man.’ In a lengthy leading article written for the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday in April 1935, Goebbels expressed not only his own personal adoration of Hitler. Rather, Goebbels declared that he was speaking in the name of and on behalf of the entire German people who felt attached to Hitler ‘not merely in deep respect but also with profound, heartfelt love’.34 David Bowie’s provocative statement, quoted at the beginning of this essay, is inevitably one-sided, but it draws a valuable parallel: Hitler was indeed

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loved like a rock star by many of his admirers and followers, including some of his immediate subordinates. Yet what may, prima facie, look like the perfect evidence ‘from below’ for the applicability of the much-debated charisma concept, proves to be far more ambiguous on closer inspection. Loving a rock star is seldom problematic, loving a dictator is always so. While these pairs are both mutually dependent, the implications of such imaginary couplings are far from identical. Unlike celebrity fixations, at stake in this obsessive view of Hitler was an entire political regime. While love of Hitler underpinned that system, it also, paradoxically, helped to destabilise it.

Notes 1. Heinrich Mann, ‘Der große Mann’, in Der Haß. Deutsche Zeitgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Querido, 1933), 79–103, here 87f.: ‘Dann keuchten die Massen unter seinem überwältigenden Ansturm und rückhaltlos ergaben sie sich diesem fürchterlichen sex-appeal’. I am most grateful to Rita Hortmann and the late Luise Rox for linguistic and technical assistance, and to Jörn Rüsen and Claudia Schmölders for comments and criticism. Helmut Ulshöfer was so kind as to let me access the private William C. Emker Collection (WCEC) in Wiesbaden, Germany, which he holds as a custodian. 2. Traudl Junge, Bis zur letzten Stunde. Hitlers Sekretärin erzählt ihr Leben (Munich: List, 2003), 96f.: Vor dem Krieg wurden jeden Tag einmal die Tore geöffnet, wenn sich Hitler auf seinen Spaziergang begab, und dann strömten die Menschen herein und säumten seinen Weg. Hysterische Frauen nahmen Steine mit, die sein Fuß berührt hatte, und die vernünftigsten Menschen benahmen sich wie toll. Einmal wurde sogar ein Lastwagen, der Ziegelsteine zum Berghof hinaufbrachte, von ein paar übergeschnappten Frauen geplündert, und die Steine, die weder des Führers Hände noch Füße berührt hatten, wanderten als wertvolle Andenken in die Vitrinen des Wohnzimmers. Von solchen Damen trafen dann die Liebesbriefe ein, die einen großen Teil des Posteingangs in der Kanzlei des Führers ausmachten. See also Christine Schroeder, Er war mein Chef. Aus dem Nachlaß der Sekretärin von Adolf Hitler, 2nd ed. (Munich: Langen Müller, 1985). 3. Ralf Georg Reuth, ed., Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher 1924–1945, 5 vols. (Munich: Piper, 1992), here 3: 1000 (31 October 1936): ‘Berge Telegramme. Liebesbezeugungen aus dem ganzen Volke.’ Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 60f. 4. Walter Kempowski, ed., Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? Deutsche Antworten (Munich: Hanser, 1973), 47–49, 62f.: ‘Wir haben uns drei Tage kaum die Hände zu waschen getraut, vor lauter Rührung, nur weil er sie geschüttelt hat.’ ‘Die Frauen drehten das Weiße aus den Augen raus und sanken wie nasse Lappen hin. Wie geschlachtete Kälber lagen sie da, seufzten schwer. Freude und Erfüllung.’ Doris K., in Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer? Ehemalige Nationalsozialisten und Zeitzeugen berichten über ihr Leben im Dritten Reich, ed. Lothar Steinbach (Bonn: Dietz, 1984), 79. 5. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary. The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 14f. 6. See, for instance, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, ‘Feminisierung des Faschismus’, in Die Nacht hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommt schon der Tag. Antifaschismus – Geschichte und Neubewertung, ed. Claudia Keller (Berlin: Aufbau, 1996), 45–69, or Eva Sternheim-Peters, ‘Brunst, Ekstase, Orgasmus. Männerphantasien zum Thema “Hitler und die Frauen”’, Psychologie heute 8, no. 7 (July 1981): 36–41. I am grateful to Dagmar Herzog for sharing these references and other information with me; see in this context her state-of-the-art anthology Sexuality and German Fascism (Austin: Uni-

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versity of Texas Press, 2002) (= Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1/2), and especially her Sex after Fascism. Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 7. The literature is vast. For surveys see Birthe Kundrus, ‘Frauen und Nationalsozialismus. Überlegungen zum Stand der Forschung’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 36 (1996): 481–499, and Kundrus, ‘Widerstreitende Geschichte. Ein Literaturbericht zur Geschlechtergeschichte des Nationalsozialismus’, Neue Politische Literatur 45, no. 1 (2000): 67–92. Claudia Schmölders, Hitlers Gesicht. Eine physiognomische Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2000). Although relying on an idea en passant already propagated twenty years earlier (Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘30. Januar 1933 – Ein halbes Jahrhundert danach’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 4-5 (29 January 1983): 43–54, here 50), the most profound attempt to make ‘charisma’ the key concept to analyse Hitler’s persona can be found in Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1919–1949 (Munich: Beck, 2003), 551–563, 866–872. However, the very first to describe and analyse Hitler as a charismatic leader in Weber’s sense was the German-American sociologist Hans Gerth in 1940; see his ‘The Nazi Party. Its Leadership and Composition’, American Journal of Sociology 45, no. 4 (January 1940): 517–541. Another locus classicus is M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Das Modell der charismatischen Herrschaft und seine Anwendbarkeit auf den “Führerstaat” Adolf Hitlers’, in Lepsius, Demokratie in Deutschland. Soziologisch-historische Konstellationsanalysen. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 95–118. See also Ludolf Herbst, ‘Der Fall Hitler. Inszenierungskunst und Charismapolitik’, in Virtuosen der Macht. Herrschaft und Charisma von Perikles bis Mao, ed. Winfried Nippel (Munich: Beck, 2000), 171–191; Marcel Atze, ‘Unser Hitler’. Der Hitler-Mythos im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003); and Henning Bühmann, ‘Der Hitlerkult. Ein Forschungsbericht’, in Personality Cults in Stalinism, eds Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 109–157. 8. William J. Goode, ‘The Theoretical Importance of Love’, American Sociological Review 24, no. 1 (February 1959): 38–47, here esp. 38n1. 9. Helmut Ulshöfer, ed., Liebesbriefe an Adolf Hitler – Briefe in den Tod. Unveröffentlichte Dokumente aus der Reichskanzlei, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Akademische Schriften, 1996). Some of these letters were translated into English and provided with a short introduction by Will Hobson. See Ulshöfer, ‘Dear Adolf ’, Granta 51 (January 1995): 73–83. See also Andreas Rosenfelder, ‘Empfänger unbekannt. Chronik der Gefühle. Hitlers Liebesbriefe sind immer noch nicht angekommen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 February 2004, and Hans-Jörg Vehlewald, ‘“Süßer Adolf, ich bin zu allem bereit.” Wissenschaftler untersuchen Liebesbriefe an Nazi-Diktator Hitler’, BILD, 14 February 2004. 10. Eucker’s/Emker’s fragmentary autobiography was published as Zwischen den Welten. Autobiografie des Antifaschisten Willy Eucker, ed. Helmut Ulshöfer (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Akademische Schriften, 1993), here esp. 171f., 182f. 11. See, for instance, ‘Persönliche Zuschriften an Adolf Hitler’, Bundesarchiv, Berlin (BArch), NS 10/157, Fos. 126, 138, NS 10/158, Fo. 172 or NS 10/160, Fos. 150-150v; Douwe Stuurman, ‘The Nazi Collection. A Preliminary Note’, The Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 6, no. 1 (November 1948): 21f.; Thomas R. Henry, ‘Hitler Considered a God Letter Collection Shows. Library of Congress Gathered Data in Ransacked Reichchancellery’, Evening Star, 15 December 1948. 12. Orio Vergani, ‘Lettere a Mussolini. Quando si scrive una lettera a Mussolini?’, Corriere della Sera, 3 November 1936. 13. Hauptschriftleiter Heinz Henckel to Reichskanzlei, Berlin, 11 November 1935, German Captured Document Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (GCDC), Reel 18; ‘Was verdanke ich Adolf Hitler? Das neue Preisausschreiben der BTZ’, Braunschweiger Tageszeitung, September 1935; ‘Was verdanke ich Adolf Hitler? Das Ergebnis unseres Preisausschreibens’, Braunschweiger Tageszeitung, 28/29 September 1935; Staatssekretär und Chef der Präsidialkanzlei to Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, Abtlg. VIII, Berlin, 7 May 1936, GCDC, Reel 18.

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14. Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Liste. Ein Dokument persönlicher Beziehungen (Munich: Herbig, 2003), 12–15; Margarete to Adolf Hitler, Königsberg/Ostpreußen, 10 December 1939, WCEC: ‘Mein Herzensadolf, ich schicke Anfang dieser Woche ein Paket an Dich ab mit einem von mir handgearbeiteten Kissen (Die Federn sind aus meinem Zudeck!)’; Anne-Marie R. to Adolf Hitler, Chesières, Switzerland, 5 August 1940, ibid.; Kershaw, Myth, 73; Miele to Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 10 September 1939, WCEC: ‘Ja, ja, mein lieber, süßer, guter Adolf, die Liebe ist echt wie Gold. Da kann man nichts machen.’ 15. Wilhelmine Huschko to Adolf Hitler, Vienna, April 1938 (?), GCDC, Reel 19: Zu Hitlers Geburtstag: Ein reiner Gedanke Ein heißes Gebet Herr lass uns wert sein Dass Hitler Für uns lebt und kämpft. 16. Rosemarie to Adolf Hitler, Dessau, 4 November 1943, WCEC: ‘Mein liebes, gutes Schatzel! ... Gern möchte ich Ihre kleine Braut werden und sein, es gefällt mir nur nicht, daß ich noch immer meinen Zahnersatz nicht habe.’ 17. Erna Jung to Adolf Hitler, Ludwigshafen, 2 August 1944, ibid.: ‘Sie wollen doch nichts von mir wissen, sonst hätten Sie mir schon längst einen Besuch bei Ihnen gestattet’; Jose und Buben to Adolf Hitler, Bad Kreuznach, 30 September 1941, ibid.: ‘Mein Lieb. Ich danke Dir auch für alle Liebe und Treue, für alles Schöne. Du bist so lieb und gut zu mir. Dies macht mich so reich und glücklich, mein großer, treuer Liebster. Es tut mir oft so leid, daß Du, mein Lieb, so viel Arbeit hast, aber nach dem Kriege, dann wird es auch für Dich, mein Lieb, besser werden’; Rosa M. to Adolf Hitler, Grombach, 29 March 1943, ibid.: ‘Nur dadurch, weil ich das Große im Herzen trage, ist mir mein Mann fremd geworden.’ 18. Ritschie to Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 2 December 1940, 17 August 1941, 30 January 1943; Miele to Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 10 September 1939; Margarete to Adolf Hitler, Königsberg/Ostpreußen, 10 December 1939; anonymous to Adolf Hitler, Arnsdorf, January 1945; Maria to Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 12 June 1939; Milly Fahlert, geb. Könick (?) to Adolf Hitler, Bergstraße, 23 June 1939; Lucie Hitler (sic) to Adolf Hitler, 2 May 1939, all ibid.: ‘Adilie’, ‘mein lieber zuckersüßer Adolf ’, ‘mein Herzensmann, Purzelchen, mein Herzensadolf ’, ‘Heil Adöfflilein’, ‘Lieber Adi!’, ‘Süßes Adilie!’, ‘Mein heißgeliebtes Herzelchen!’, ‘Du süßes herzensbestes Lieb, mein Einzigstes, mein Allerbester, mein trautes und heiß Geliebtes’, ‘Mein herzlieber Mann!’, ‘mein lieber Ehegatte, Führer und Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler’. 19. Margarethe Marie Louise to Adolf Hitler, Prague, 22 December 1941, ibid.: Ich weiß, hochgeehrter Herr Reichskanzler und Führer des großdeutschen Reiches, daß Ihre Majestät formal nicht gekrönt sind: jedoch in meinem Innern spreche ich Ihre Exzellenz, Ihre Hochwürdigkeit, hochgeehrter Herr Reichskanzler und Führer des Großdeutschen Reiches, nicht anders als mit dem Wort “Majestät” an – und deshalb wage ich das Wort Majestät in diesem Privatbriefe als ein für mich “im stillen” ganz übliches Wort auszusprechen – zu schreiben. 20. Gertrud Z. to Adolf Hitler, Berlin-Charlottenburg, 14 March 1943, ibid.: Es ist kein Wahn, der mich den Führer bitten läßt, er soll mich bei ihm (sic) lassen, zu sich nehmen. Man konnte doch früher auch einmal mit einem König sprechen. Warum heute nicht mit seinem Führer? Ich kenne keinen Wunsch als beim Führer zu sein. Dieser Wunsch bin ich selber. Ich kann ihn nicht streichen … Ich denke oft darüber nach, ob ich nicht doch verrückt bin? Aber dann wäre es der Führer ja auch. Ich kann doch nur lieben, was mir ähnlich. 21. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges. Etude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Librairie Istra, 1924); Klaus Schreiner, ‘“Wann kommt der Retter Deutschlands?” Formen und Funktionen von politischem Messianismus in der Weimarer Republik’, Saeculum 49 (1998): 107–160.

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22. Martha H. to Adolf Hitler, Halle an der Saale, 27 January 1939, ibid.: ‘Du suchst eine Frau, ich suche einen Mann... Es liegt alles nur an Dir, ich bin zu allem bereit. Bestelle mich und komme.’ 23. U. to Adolf Hitler, 25 August 1942, ibid.; Margarete ‘Weiberl’ to Adolf Hitler, Königsberg/Ostpreußen, 10 November 1939, ibid.: Mein Herzensmann! … Ich laß für Dich einen Hausschlüssel und einen Schlüssel von meinem Zimmer anfertigen, vielleicht gibt’s sie auch gleich passend zu kaufen … Also, mein Herz, Du kommst dann her, möglichst früh, wenn Du willst, klingle bei der Vermieterin meines Zimmers … an, und frage, ob ich da bin. Und wenn alle Stränge reißen, haben unsere Eltern (denn Deine sind es ja jetzt auch) mir erlaubt, daß Du jederzeit zu uns in Haus kommen kannst, also dann übernachten wir gemeinsam im Elternhause! Eva Koch to Adolf Hitler, 22 July 1940, ibid.: ‘Ich küsse Dich auf Deine 4 Buchstaben und tue Front frei, damit Du fühlst, wie lieb ich Dich hab. Mehr Patriotismus kannst Du nicht verlangen.’ See also Alf Lüdtke’s contribution to this volume. 24. Staatssekretär und Chef der Präsidialkanzlei to Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, Abtlg. VIII, Berlin, 7 May 1936, GCDC, Reel 18: ‘Empfangsbestätigung oder Danksagung im einzelnen ist nicht erfolgt. Die Eingänge haben dem Führer listenmäßig vorgelegen.’ ‘Für Ihre freundlichen Grüße und für die mir in Ihrer Zuschrift zum Ausdruck gebrachte treue Gesinnung spreche ich Ihnen meinen aufrichtigen Dank aus. Gez. A. Hitler.’ 25. Reichsicherheitsdienst an den Chef der Reichskanzlei, 26 August 1942; Reichsminister und Chef der Reichskanzlei an den Herrn Reichsminister des Innern, 14 May 1942; Reichsminister und Chef der Reichskanzlei an den Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD; Frau A. to Adolf Hitler, 10 April 1944, all WCEC. 26. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, ‘Psychoses passionnelles’, in Oeuvre psychiatrique, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), 309–451, esp. ‘Érotomanie pure, érotomanie associée. Présentation de malade’ (1921), 346–370. 27. Paul E. Mullen, Michele Pathé, and Rosemary Purcell, Stalkers and Their Victims (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); G.E. Berrios and N. Kennedy, ‘Erotomania. A Conceptual History’, History of Psychiatry 13 (December 2002): 381–400; Rebecca Löbmann, ‘Stalking. Ein Überblick über den aktuellen Forschungsstand’, Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform 85, no. 1 (2002): 25–32; Martin Brüne, ‘Erotomanic Stalking in Evolutionary Perspective’, Behavioral Sciences and the Law 21, no. 1 (2003): 83–88. 28. Personal communication with Sigrid Krampitz, Gerhard Schröder’s former executive secretary, and Dr. Ulrich Gundelach, Leiter des Petitionsausschusses des Bundeskanzleramts, Berlin, 16 January 2006. Available information is scarce because these letters are not publicly accessible. Unfortunately, the Bundeskanzleramt repeatedly refused to provide any further information and made it quite clear that they were not interested in cooperating. See also Park Elliott Dietz, Daryl B. Matthews, Cindy Van Duyne et al., ‘Threatening and Otherwise Inappropriate Letters to Hollywood Celebrities’, Journal of Forensic Science 36, no. 1 (January 1991): 185–209. 29. In 1989, a small selection of 80 letters was published as Caro Duce. Lettere di donne italiane a Mussolini, 1922–1943, ed. Giorgio Boatti (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989). However, that the number of love letters properly contained in this anthology is so limited may well be the consequence of an undisclosed editorial decision. See in this context Piero Melograni, ‘The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini’s Italy’, Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 4 (October 1976): 221–237, and Richard J.B. Bosworth, ‘Everyday Mussolinism. Friends, Family, Locality and Violence in Fascist Italy’, Contemporary European History 14, no. 1 (2005): 23–43. The love letters that Mussolini himself wrote in 1937 to Claretta Petacci (1912–1945), his ‘official’ lover of many years, recently disappeared mysteriously from the central archives in Rome without a trace. 30. Vergani, ‘Lettere a Mussolini’. 31. Ida Erbe to Adolf Hitler, Barchfeld, 20 April 1932, GCDC, Reel 18: Meinem geliebten Führer! Mir ist das Herz so voll, meine Geburtstagswünsche wurden zum Gebet. Nun weiß ich, dass Gott, der Sie in seiner unendlichen Liebe zu uns geschickt hat, Sie führen und schützen wird. Sie sollen Adolf Hitler bleiben und unser

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zweiter Bismarck werden. Wir leben, und wenn es sein muß, sterben wir für unseren Führer und sein Ziel!... Heil! Heil Hitler! Weiter im Kampf! Unser ist die Wahrheit! Unser der Endsieg! Mit Geburtstagsgruß, Ida Erbe. 32. Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher (13 July 1937), 3: 1099: ‘Der Führer ist unermüdlich zu den Menschen. Aber sie lieben ihn auch aus vollem Herzen’; ‘Die allgemeine Situation in Deutschland’, Deutschland-Berichte der Sopade 2.3 (14 March 1935): 275–286, here 279: ‘Er wird von vielen geliebt.’ 33. Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998); Robert Michael and Karin Doerr, Nazi-Deutsch. An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich (Westport: Greenwood, 2002). Deutschlands Erwachen in Bild und Wort, introduction: ‘Ein Mann, aufgestanden mitten aus dem Volk, verkündet das Evangelium der Liebe zum Vaterland’; cf. Schmölders, Gesicht, 105f. 34. Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, 1: 243, 266: ‘Adolf Hitler, ich liebe Dich, weil Du groß und einfach zugleich bist. Das was man ein Genie nennt’ (19 April 1926); ‘Er ist ein Genie. Das selbstverständlich schaffende Instrument eines göttlichen Schicksals. Ich stehe vor ihm erschüttert. So ist er: wie ein Kind, lieb, gut, barmherzig. Wie eine Katze listig, klug und gewandt, wie ein Löwe, brüllend-groß und gigantisch. Ein Kerl, ein Mann’ (24 July 1926). Joseph Goebbels, ‘Deutschland ist wahrhaft auferstanden! Dr. Goebbels zum Geburtstag des Führers’, Münchner Neuste Nachrichten 110, 21/22 April 1935, 1f.: ‘nicht nur mit Verehrung, sondern mit tiefer, herzlicher Liebe.’

CHAPTER

9

Love, Again Crisis and the Search for Consolation in the Revista de Occidente 1926–1936 ALISON SINCLAIR

In the relationship of Spain to Europe in the early twentieth century, and up to the outbreak of Civil War in 1936, the Revista de Occidente (RO) occupies a special position.1 Founded in 1923, under the direction of Ortega y Gasset, RO’s purpose was to be a major conduit for ideas from abroad to reach Spain. It aimed at a well-educated and cultured elite, and was deliberately and explicitly non-political. RO was, however, only part of a complex structure of cultural exchanges between Spain and Europe in this period, a complexity to be seen in the wide spectrum of Ortega’s activities in disseminating culture. Other ventures of Ortega besides RO, such as El Espectador (1916–1934), would run as subscription only (and with Ortega as the sole contributor); España (1915– 1923), which again included in its agenda that of opening Spain to foreign culture, was political, unlike RO, and Ortega left it in 1915 as it moved politically further to the left.2 He published in the daily paper El Imparcial (in publication until 1933), and in 1917 joined with Nicolás María de Urgoiti in setting up another daily, El Sol (in publication until 1939). Through his participation in both of these other papers, it is arguable that his impact on the public was more far-reaching than through RO. The received view on Spanish intellectual and cultural life in this period has highlighted elite journals such as RO, and elite institutions such as the Residencia de Estudiantes, founded in 1910,3 as prime channels through which Spain had its cultural contacts with the outside world. It is clear that both RO and the Residencia were indeed of signal importance in Spain’s cultural and intellectual life in this period. Their functioning is still in need of re-assessment, Notes for this section begin on page 194.

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as is the degree to which there was networking between members of different institutions such as the JAE, the Ateneo de Madrid,4 and diverse professional associations.5 In relation to the project of Europe in Love, the major contribution of RO in the period of 1923 to 1936 is that it is instrumental in bringing Spain into a relationship with the ideas of civilisation, specifically those of European civilisation. It achieves it not in specific articles about love as such, but in a series of articles that consider issues of gender, and which consequentially have implications for the idea of love. This essay considers the dynamics of this discourse on gender in the early years of RO, from 1923 through to the outbreak of war in 1936, when the review’s regular publication was interrupted.6 The years under discussion cover two sharply contrasting periods in Spanish politics: the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) and the Second Republic (1931–1936). In the light of the dramatically shifting politics they represented (a move from a right-wing dictatorship to the liberal politics of the Republic), the non-political or apolitical stance of RO is noteworthy, and constitutes a careful balancing act. While it eschewed the overtly political, it could be argued that RO engaged in the projection of structures of society that in a broader sense could be construed as political. The idealisation of relationships between the sexes appearing with consistency through these pre-Civil War years reveals a type of cultural attitude with resonances that are social and consequently political in a broad sense. The articles on gender in RO throughout this period present a nostalgic and in many ways traditional view of the relations between the sexes, and they continue to do so up to the Civil War. At the inception of the Republic in 1931, one might imagine a shift in the tenor of the articles concerned with gender, but this noticeably and remarkably fails to happen. My argument is that the review engaged in an imaginary of consolation in which a series of articles sketched out an attitude toward society that favoured and linked together concepts of love, the feminine and civilisation. The view of gender thus promoted – first in the years of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, and then through the years of the Second Republic – is essentialist and tidy. In offering a consolation of tidiness, the articles run curiously against the current of liberal social developments of the time, most notably concerning the emancipation of women, both in Spain and Europe. In so doing, they complicate our understanding of Ortega’s role in facilitating Spain’s cultural relations with Europe. While RO has a reputation for looking forward and outward, this aspect of its activity and the specificity of its importations suggest a type of retrenchment of social attitudes that inevitably carried an implied political message. The imaginary of consolation I have alluded to does not engage directly and centrally with the question of love. But the articles in question show a view of relations between the sexes that is set in a structure of stability. This is a significant structure to present within Spain in this period, given that a purely

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superficial political and social stability during the dictatorship gave way to overt and disruptive instability during the Republic, resulting from extremes of social and political progressiveness, on the one hand, and a conservative championing of traditional values, on the other. Spain was, of course, not alone in Europe in experiencing social and political disruption in this period, and arguably the proffering of an imaginary of consolation would have been as relevant in England, France or Germany. Where Spain stood to be ‘different’ from elsewhere in Europe was in the concept of where stability of society (and relations of gender and love) might lie. Outlining gender relations that echoed patriarchal structures, and that because of those structures offered a sense of social stability, responded to a conservative tradition, but was also one that was far from absent from more liberal standpoints. The articulation of ‘proper’ gender positions that would be found in the work of sexual reformers in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly among champions of eugenics such as Marañón and Pittaluga, discussed later, for example, looked toward a utopian future in which the disorders caused by disease (and thought to be linked to degeneration) might be removed. Such utilitarian underpinning might seem distant from ideas of ‘love’, but it formed a major part of the discourse on matters of gender in this period in Spain. Love is presumed to occur within a structure in which there might be ‘proper’ gender roles, a ‘proper’ functioning within society, and love will thus contribute to a civilised future. Implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, the imaginary of consolation stands, then, in counterpoint to the instability of political and social life in the West in this period and maps out gender relations in which – one deduces – ‘love’ might occur. It thus has a bearing on the theme of Europe and Love, albeit a somewhat indirect one. In the context of the articles of RO, love is rarely if ever discussed explicitly. Apparent exceptions, such as Bertrand Russell’s essay of January 1930 on ‘The place of love in human life’, or that of Rosa Chacel on the ‘Schema of practical and present-day problems of love’, are in fact largely philosophical or sociological. The selection of which authors would have their work published in RO was patently in line with Ortega’s strong editorial policy. Publications with a bearing on psychoanalytic thought demonstrate this: here, Ortega was cautious and selective, and while a number of articles by Jung appeared, there is a striking sparseness of reference in RO to the work of Freud.7 In terms of the imaginary of consolation that RO pursues in relation to matters of gender, it is as though Freud might disturb a vision of the imaginary in which a social structure guaranteed some stability and meaning. Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) did nothing to produce a reassuring vision of society, but, on the contrary, emphasised the aggressive nature of man. RO appears to assert that – whatever the conflicts and difficulties of the Western world in the interwar years – structure and meaning were still retained. It is curious in the light of his attitude to Freud that Ortega would voice his own concerns about the role

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of the masses in modern society. He did this famously in The Rebellion of the Masses (1930), a work in which he recognised social change, and argued the case for a new order that would be born out of an elite coming into awareness of its proper role in society. Ortega’s intention in setting up his review was to create a circle of intellectuals, to bring into being a set of others with whom he could discuss things of the day. For Evelyne López Campillo, the chosen non-political nature of RO constitutes a reduction in Ortega’s ambition.8 Yet Ortega’s propositions (‘Propósitos’), published in the first number of RO, suggest something other than that. He speaks of wanting to appeal to the ‘curiosity’ of a readership envisaged as ‘calmly’ interested in culture and the arts. This curiosity is free-floating, detached from hierarchies and divisions of social and cultural structure – a type of curiosity that is neither exclusively aesthetic nor particularly scientific or political. It is what the alert individual feels in his desire to confront and know the depths of contemporary reality.9 These aims can thus be seen as the expression of a different ambition. In part, they contain the general ideal of producing an educated and cultured population by exposure to the ‘best’ ideas from Europe and elsewhere. But something more complex is suggested in Ortega’s explanation of the reference to the West (‘occidentalidad’) in the title of his review. Rooted in the belief that there is a Europe that is cosmopolitan and cultured, history had changed things. The cosmopolitan spirit before the First World War, he says, could be seen as a surface style of internationalism, in which national differences and peculiarities were ‘annulled’, whereas the postwar cosmopolitan spirit of the West was one that now existed in a more realistic way. War had brought closeness through conflict, but this did not prevent those involved from having to rely on one another more and to have co-existence. Ortega conjures up, therefore, an idea not of tough love, but of a tough togetherness between countries, born of the difficulties of their recent contact/conflict. This is coupled with the idea that many feel the current world to be the one they experience as chaos. He hopes that RO will bring some light to the situation, and more significantly, that it will put its readers in touch with the ‘new architecture’ currently being reconstructed in the West.10 Simultaneously, then, the experience offered by this review is of difficulty and of encounter, of order for the chaos of experience and hope that Spain will be brought into the development of the countries of the West.11 The articles on gender in RO might be considered as an element not wholly consonant with the forward thinking nature of Ortega’s aims for the journal, given that they offer strikingly calm and reconciled views on how to understand gendered difference. Yet, they are outward looking. In publishing articles on gender that form an imaginary of consolation, and specifically in choosing articles that in their majority are authored outside of Spain, Ortega subscribes to an ideal of love and gender relations that is European rather than Spanish, cultivated and civilised rather than passionate and individualistic (the contemporary stereotype norms for Spain);

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in short, an ideal that will be soothing and consoling in troubled times. That it has an embedded imbalance, insofar as woman is frequently figured in the articles as ‘superior’, and yet excluded from the world of action, is not in conflict with the idea of love, but rather maps well onto the model of courtly love, in which the woman appears as a superior, and, at times unapproachable, being. An implied message in this article is arguably that there could be an orderly and ‘civilised’ world not just in the sphere of gender relations, but also elsewhere. The arena of politics that Ortega eschews in RO is one that for Spain, throughout the years RO was being published, was violent, turbulent and would eventually explode into the Civil War. RO presents an alternative form of public life, in intellectual exploration and debate, and in the exchange of ideas without acrimony or political agenda. The articles on gender (some two dozen between 1923 and 1936) are thus tinged with a desire to analyse and interpret the present with a view to a future that is intuited as uncertain. They appear at the average rate of two a year in the period up to the Second Republic, after which they are much more sparse. By working chronologically, I shall track how Ortega created over time a collection of others with whom he could converse, simultaneously creating a corpus of ideas.12 The review as a whole had a strong pedagogical intent. There are numerous introductory footnotes or epigraphs that place the authors of articles in modern society, and that offer an evaluation of their importance to the cultured reader. A discussion of all of the authors of articles dealing with gender is not possible in this essay: they include Kretschmer, Spranger, Frank, Russell, Giménez Caballero, Pittaluga, Dantín Cereceda, Kierkegaard, Chacel, Simmel, Marañón, Keyserling and Jung.13 I shall concentrate on a small selection representing Ortega’s desire to give his readers the ideas of those he considers to be from the foremost European thinkers, underpinning their work with local writers whose work might be considered ‘scientifically respectable’.

Georg Simmel Prominent in RO is the German sociologist Georg Simmel. He died in 1918, some five years before his articles started to appear in Spain, and it is evident that Ortega had a didactic aim in bringing Simmel to the attention of the Spanish public. Ortega had become acquainted with Simmel’s work when he went to Berlin in August of 1906, where he attended Simmel’s lectures, which then led to Simmel becoming a major influence on his work.14 Ortega’s note accompanying Simmel’s article on ‘Masculine and Feminine: Towards a Psychology of the Sexes’ (November and December 1923) declares: ‘I shall take the liberty of recommending to the readers of this Review that they make an attentive reading of these exceptional pages which shed so much light on the lasting

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conflict between masculine and feminine.’15 The essays reproduced in RO are, incidentally, straightforward translations of the originals, not adapted especially for the Spanish reading public. A curiosity is that this was not Simmel’s first appearance in the review. His first appearance had been in July and August of 1923, and with what was arguably a more challenging piece on fashion (‘Philosophy of Fashion’), and one that revealed him as a subtle philosopher and critic. In many ways, this initial contribution sets Simmel up as a writer of distinction, and prepares the reader to respect him. The fact that Simmel’s writings on gender are acknowledged as a problem area in his output by current scholarship was either not perceived as such by Ortega, or was skirted around by introducing Simmel via another area of writing first. The status of Simmel’s writings on gender has been much debated, and an excellent evaluation of the debate is offered by Witz.16 She notes that many current evaluations rely on a curate’s egg motif to explain the unevenness of the writing. Her own reading, by which Simmel’s ontology of gender consigns woman to the periphery, while his sociological imagination releases man into a more fertile working area, is a discrimination singularly helpful in situating him in the corpus being established by RO. ‘Philosophy of Fashion’ has a bearing on gender in a way that is significant for the implied status of its author in RO’s corpus, since it designates Simmel as a philosopher and sociologist who has an eye to historical reality. One might observe that Ortega shows himself imaginative and forward thinking in having this particular essay as the first example of Simmel’s work to bring to his reading public. Simmel points out how fashion satisfies two fundamental and yet opposing desires in man: to be like the rest, to be anonymous within the masses, and at the same time to be distinguished and different.17 Fashion is, for Simmel, not just related to existential human desires, but relates to those sub-structures of society that we create. It is, thus, an aid to create a distinct inner circle, from which those deemed inferior will be excluded. The double and contradictory function of fashion maintains us in a temporal suspense that lends vitality to the present moment.18 Simmel’s contribution to existential philosophy is exemplified in this first part of his essay on fashion. It is only in the second part (August 1923) that he makes the more obvious, and in some senses, more pedestrian association of fashion with women. Yet this link is saved from its potential triviality by the fact that Simmel identifies woman with a social position of inferiority as determined by history, one that predetermines her adherence to fashion.19 The function of history in guaranteeing Simmel’s respectability as an author will have its counterpart in the recourse to medicine and science in other articles on gender, as set out below. In ‘Masculine and Feminine’ (November and December 1923) Simmel argues for a traditional (Platonic and Aristotelian) split between the worlds of the masculine and the feminine. The crux of his contribution lies in his attempt

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to define and place woman outside of the familiar binaries, so as to secure her a sense of ‘authentic femininity’, and in so doing, he follows the tradition of Herder, Goethe and Nietzsche, rather than that of Kant and Hegel.20 He is not simplistic, yet there is a patriarchal traditionalism underlying what are presented as contemporary and challenging analyses. While he appears to retain the sharp critical edge of historicity that had raised the level of his discussion of fashion, he slips between this and a disturbing essentialism. Thus, man’s position of social superiority, his ‘place of power’ (posición de fuerza), recognised historically, means that he considers his position less than woman does hers, with the result that man is more objective. This ‘objectivity’ becomes a type of ‘objective truth’, valid for both men and women.21 Yet the fact that Simmel perceives the supposed ‘objectivity’ of the world as one associated with the masculine (as a social and historical fact) is one of his major insights, albeit one not entirely comfortable for those excluded from that field of objectivity. Simmel argues biological difference to be the foundation of social difference,22 a schema within which woman was more bound up with her sexual being than man. Viewed retrospectively, we can see how the style of this argument on gender will be consistent with that presented by Marañón. More generally, it was consistent with the organicist strand of thinking on gender and sexuality in Spain during this period.23 Simmel does something quite curious in this paper. He argues that woman was more conscious of her subordinate place in society, but maintains that the difference with man, based on biology, matters less to her, precisely because of the nature of that sexual difference. Appealingly (and this is where we can see the beginning of the narrative of consolation), he views her as removed to a place out of history and strife by virtue of her sexuality: ‘Woman reposes in her femininity as if in an absolute substance.’24 He thus invites approbation for his acuity in perceiving that gender difference is a matter of construction and social norms as well as any biological foundation, and then affirms that the difference in fact lies in sexuality. His very emphasis at this point nonetheless suggests some need to over-compensate the weakness of the essentialist argument. ‘In the life of woman, being and sexuality are profoundly identified. Woman encloses herself in her sexuality, absolutely determined, determined within herself, without need to refer to the other sex for the essential nature of her own character.’25 The use of ‘profoundly’ invites the reader to acquiesce to some spiritual appeal. At the same time, the observation that woman relates to her own sexuality independent of her relationship to man simultaneously sets her free from her observed subservience and appears to make her the positive and self-determined possessor of the essential nature ascribed to her. Why did Ortega so support Simmel? One simple answer is to be found in Ortega’s own disarmingly patriarchal judgment made on the poetry of Ana de Nouailles in July 1923, a judgment where his liberalism of earlier years is no

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longer evident.26 Here, he balanced on a knife-edge in relation to the feminine similar to the one evident in Simmel: woman is ‘superior’, and as such she is unsuited to make public the feelings that are associated with lyrical poetry, revealing as she does the monotony associated with the ‘eternal feminine’.27 By this, Ortega cunningly relegates woman to a position of superiority, abstracting her from the field of existential struggle that is the world of the masculine. Thus, Ortega articulates the way that the liberal mind can operate in two directions in order to preserve the terrain of power and interest ascribed to the masculine by traditional gender structures. Woman is apparently praised for her devotion, and her total absorption of herself in her role of the feminine (by which, among other things, she will never be in a position to challenge man in his ambitions). But in a move that betokens sour grapes in the face of this conceded moral superiority of woman, she (with the products of her intellect) is dismissed as of little interest. The logic of the dismissal lies within the characterisation of woman as genre rather than individual. Only man is engaged in existential struggle, and thus only the contents of his soul will be of real interest. The relation of Ortega’s views on Ana de Nouailles to the articles of Simmel that he later published does, however, seem clear. In particular, the discussion of woman’s unsuitability for creative work in the arts, as advanced by Simmel in ‘Feminine Culture’ – an article that would be published in RO in 1925 – is a significant pointer to the way Ortega would produce his own reading of an example of feminine culture.28 Ortega is therefore consciously and deliberately selective about the profile of Simmel published in RO. His experience in Berlin was that he valued in particular the work of this sociologist who, albeit with six books published, was nonetheless not far up the academic ladder.29 Ortega was happy to publish elsewhere other areas of Simmel’s work: between 1926 and 1927, seven volumes of Simmel’s sociological works appeared in the Revista de Occidente press, that largely centred on the sociology of groups.30 But the writings with a bearing on gender, as is evident from those of Marañón and Pittaluga that would come to support them, are intended to form a corpus. Indeed, what is as interesting as Ortega’s choice to publish the article on fashion, and that on masculine and feminine, is the fact that he did not publish ‘On Love (A Fragment)’, which had appeared in Logos (1921–1922) in German. It is unlikely that Ortega would have been unaware of it. This provocative and engaging piece discusses love in a manner consonant with it being a civilised ideal, but does so without reference to gender structures in society. The omission from RO suggests Ortega’s determination to create a corpus of work on gender relations and attributes rather than to engage fully in a discourse on love. That said, the degree to which there are moral implications to be drawn about the value and function of the feminine relates to a concept of love as civilisation.

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Trust me, I’m a Doctor Reading the articles on gender chronologically allows us to see a dynamic of development in the corpus. Ortega’s views, sketched out briefly in the review of Ana de Nouailles, come in shoulder-to-shoulder with the offerings of Simmel, the latter made weightier by having been established first as a sociologist of repute. Subsequently, a contemporary respectability is added to the debate by the intervention of those known for their work in the sciences. Foucault has reminded us of how medical discourse came to control and police sexual activity,31 but also of how – paradoxically – the increased discourses in relation to sex led to a series of evasions, in that what was recounted, predominantly, was the range of aberrations and departures from the norm.32 In this context, therefore, we could read the scientific backing of the discussions on gender in RO as both bringing the body and sexuality into the discussion, and at the same time denying their unruly presence, given that the source of the scientific backing was one that was so intent on systems and control. There is thus a type of double bind of discourse about gender and sexuality. While they become a topic for public debate, that debate simultaneously allows for greater policing. When what is written is penned by a medically or scientifically qualified writer, there is a claim, explicit or implicit, to evidence-based authority, so that the inclusion in RO of writings on gender from those in the field of medicine can be read as a strategy that offers the modern authority of science to add to the gravitas of philosophy. In the specific context of Spain in the early twentieth century, there is a further dimension – doctors were prominent in public life and politics. When the Second Republic was voted in, some 50 out of the 472 deputies were medically qualified,33 and their place of power in public life was affirmed. The strategy of scientific weight applies particularly to the articles of Gregorio Marañón, an eminent endocrinologist. Marañón’s work on sexuality attracted considerable attention in Spain, and he would head the Spanish branch of the World League of Sexual Reform in 1932.34 His placing in a world of sexual reform suggests that his views might be generally liberal in character, but his interest in eugenics places him (and others) in markedly prescriptive positions. The apparent mismatch between his role as the leader of sexual reform and the nature of his theories is arguably characteristic of Spain at the time, rather than exceptional and puzzling. Marañón (and others such as Gustavo Pittaluga) spoke from a belief in science, specifically in medicine, and with a driving conviction that eugenics, the science that, if acted upon, stood to improve the race. Such beliefs might entail revolutionary and liberalising legislation, but in social terms, they largely sprang from profound convictions about the proper nature and occupations of men and women. The background of Marañón in eugenics makes an addition of cultural capital to his support for Simmel that derives not from any way in which the articles themselves are more ‘scientific’,

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but from the scientific standing of their author in Spanish society. In the case of Marañón, this scientific standing was based, in a formal way, on his work as an endocrinologist, a doctor and a man much in the public eye. Ortega could thus be viewed as consolidating the academic respectability of the pieces on gender. In a similar manner, the original use of Simmel could be related to an interest in mapping gender that was historicised (so using a ‘science’ of the humanities, that is, an objective and empirical view) as well as being philosophical. Two essays by Marañón, of January and December 1924, contribute to the debate on the construction of gender relations in society: ‘Notes towards a biology of Don Juan’ ( January 1924), and ‘Sex and Work’ (December 1924). Their central message is syntonic with the assertions of Simmel and Ortega of a traditional division of existential space by man and woman, in that Marañón conveys his idea of the ‘proper’ nature of men and women (part of his championing of the cause of eugenics). In ‘Notes towards a biology of Don Juan’, questions are raised about the nature of love by association with an icon now seen to represent a loss of value, and ‘proper’ love is associated with the social function of reproduction. Marañón places his focus on the consequences of a deviation from ‘proper masculinity’, proclaiming that Don Juan is not the masculine superhero he has traditionally been construed as being, but rather represents a style of masculinity that is deficient.35 Don Juan is not the Romantic hero of a narrative of love, but is a type that reveals degeneration, within which there is a dangerous approach between masculine and feminine, dangerous because it is not through attraction, but similarity. The originality of Marañón here is his offering that the image of the ‘pseudo-virility’ of Don Juan is the result of locker-room chat.36 It betokens, thus, we might conclude, not confidence in virility, but lack of confidence in the same, since the conversation of pseudo-virility is engaged in as an attempt by the men concerned to distance themselves from a feared version of their own sexuality. Marañón simultaneously scorns both Don Juan and the feminine he is said to resemble: ‘the man who does nothing but make love is, in the first place, half a man, as we shall see presently, and, in consequence, a man of low mental state and of insignificant moral structure’, adding to this that the very type of woman attracted to Don Juan is of a deficient nature: the deficient masculinity that is allied to femininity attracts only the deficient form of the feminine.37 The ‘proper’ nature of woman merely implied in the Don Juan essay (a ‘proper’ nature that would participate, one deduces, in ‘proper’ love) then emerges in ‘Sex and Work’ (December 1924). Here – to a degree – Marañón concurs with woman’s relegation to a position of superiority (as outlined by Simmel and Ortega). In this essay, he produces a eugenic and utopian vision of society that is – if its members act ‘properly’ – devoted to the production of offspring. He rescues woman from her potential deficiency of being attracted to Don Juan, and reinstates her to a position of superiority and consolation for

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the future. Man is equipped to be energetic and to provide, woman is totally engaged in reproduction and nurturing and love is harnessed to the production of the race. There is a degree of over-statement in this essay that suggests that there is more at stake, and, as might be observed of many of the contributions to RO, there is an underlying struggle for cultural power. I suggested earlier that Marañón was brought into RO at this point to add scientific weight to a cultural exchange. In his turn, he is at pains to present himself as one who is in a position to pronounce with authority on topics that others – without his experience – could only sketch out as philosophical and sociological possibilities. One can detect, for example, a need to carve out his position of authority, particularly in his disparaging references to Freud. He refers to Freud, for example, in a way intended to trivialise and downplay his contributions; Freud is in fashion, the darling of the café crowd: ‘Right now there is a fashion for the ideas of a Viennese psychologist whose fame has come to be known by the non-scientific public and now figures in the cultural heritage of café experts: I refer to Freud.’ He tries to upstage Freud, criticising him for having confused the sexual impulse (libido) with the sexual instinct. This last he labels as ‘a concept that is much wider and more noble than that (libido)’.38 The difficulty with Freud may not belong to Marañón alone, and arguably applies to other essays published in RO to this point. Freud’s theories presented problems to those desiring to keep woman in a separate realm and neatly occupied with the task of mothering. Freud’s awareness of woman as a sexual being would have been contained with some difficulty in the simple and anxietyreducing models so far discussed, and it is significant in this context that whereas his clinical methods were adopted in Spain in the early twentieth century, he was far less adopted as a theoretician.39 Specifically, the complexities of Freud’s view of the sexes are absent from the schema proposed by Marañón, according to which woman, besides being physically less well-equipped than man for physical labour, has a nervous system which equally unfits her.40 Marañón’s model of woman in society is clearly congruent with that of Simmel. But while Simmel’s model consists of one active member of society, and one that is passive and all-enduring, and wrapped in its own activity and devoted to it, Marañón’s model is presented with a utilitarian and eugenic cast. The life Marañón depicts, or assumes, takes on two characteristics. Firstly, his arguments for the way in which man is better suited than woman to take on work outside of the home are based on the model of man as the hunter, with woman devoted to the home. Curiously, the latter is referred to as the sexual, so that man is placed in an asexual sphere. Simmel had imagined woman as being bound up in her sexual being, and thus far from the state of excitement produced by the perception of sexual difference (which for the woman, according to Simmel, is not a topic of concern). But it is precisely the desire for self-preservation, or rather for the preservation of the species, that drives the

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model of the division of sexual labour proposed by Marañón. Man and woman are equally yoked to this destiny.41 The burden of Marañón’s argument here is that woman is bound to the life of sex while man is destined to struggle in the external world to support the life of the home. Puzzlingly, the roles of man and woman are reversed – in a sleight-of-hand – to suggest the degree to which man and woman are united in their destiny of producing and protecting their offspring. Love, as such, is not under discussion, but implied as part of this utopian arrangement. That Marañón was not out on a limb in Ortega’s eyes is suggested by the publication in March and May 1925 of a further piece by Simmel. This cannot have been other than the editor’s choice, given the fact that Simmel had died in 1918. The essay, ‘Feminine Culture’, supports Marañón’s ‘Sex and Work’ in that it perceives feminism as a problem, and claims, by way of consolation (to men?), that those women who seek further participation in the world of men are unlikely to increase.42 Anticipating Ortega’s works of 1930, The Rebellion of the Masses and The Mission of the University, Simmel targets specialisation in work as an evil while presenting a modern perception of woman as a multitasker.43 Yet woman’s participation in the world of work is seen as working against her essential personality – that of not having one. While still limiting woman’s possible spheres of activity (he suggests that she might participate in medicine, history and writing), he nonetheless has a broader perception of her range of action than that intimated by Marañón. If Marañón lent scientific weight to the writings of Simmel, those of Gustavo Pittaluga bolstered that scientific support. Pittaluga – a doctor, and like Marañón, a founding member of the Spanish chapter of the World League for Sexual Reform – offers three articles that underline the essentialism of what has preceded them, and provides further organicist authority through their references to Kretschmer, a German psychiatrist whose work set out to correlate body build and physical constitution with personality characteristics and mental illness, a brief account of which had appeared in the second number of RO in August 1923.44 Pittaluga’s essays, ‘Biology of the vices’ (December 1925), ‘Irony, Temperament and Character’ (May 1927) and ‘Climacteric of Courtesy’ (December 1930) take up and develop strands already presented in RO. In the first of these essays, notable for being entirely free of references to Freud, Pittaluga re-iterates the stance of Simmel and Marañón on woman. Indeed, he is even more socially committed and applied, and pronounces a judgment on woman in a way more fitted to pastoral theology than to a journal of liberal views. Woman, for example, is naturally repelled by vice,45 vice being an activity that wastes vital energy, above all the energy that might go into furthering the purpose of the race. More specifically, Pittaluga’s support for Marañón as a contributor to RO is shown in the degree to which he promotes a specific scientific culture, particularly by his underpinning of his argument with the work of Kretschmer in his second article. His clear alignment with Marañón is

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signalled by the title of his third article, ‘Climacteric of Courtesy’ (December 1930), an obvious reference to Marañón’s work on the mid-life crisis, and again another piece that combines a biological/medical approach with a reading of culture.

Jung and the Revista de Occidente Lastly, but by no means least, we come to the presence of C.G. Jung in RO. This is significant because of Jung’s international standing, his complex relationship with Freud and the fact that he – and the concepts he stands for – appears to be adopted in lieu of those of Freud. This adoption of Jung, particularly in the selection of works published and referred to, would seem initially to confirm the desire of RO to publish analyses of structures of gender that console, rather than disturb, and are oriented to a stable and productive society. Again, love is implied as positive and civilising. The overall position of Jung in the Spanish intellectual life in the early twentieth century is not entirely clear, despite the prominence accorded him in RO, and it merits further and more detailed research. The break between Freud and Jung (evidenced in their letters) had come about in 1914,46 well before the founding of RO or the publication of the complete works of Freud in Spanish, which began in 1922. The evidence of the two in Spanish print culture is hard to track, but greater than might be supposed, given the existence in libraries of translations into languages other than Spanish. There were English and French versions of a number of single works by Freud available at this early stage. The library of the Ateneo contained, for example, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914), The Interpretation of Dreams (1920), Introduction à la psychanalyse (1922), Trois essais sur la théorie de la sexualité (1923), Totem et Tabou (1924) and Psychologie collective et l’analyse du moi (1924). Meanwhile, the full German edition of Jung’s work Psychologische Typen was available in the Ateneo in a 1921 edition. Other works by Jung appeared in French: Metamorphoses et symboles de la Libido (1927), L’inconscient dans la vie psychique normale et anormale (1928), Essais de Psychologie analytique (1931, two copies of this edition in the Ateneo), La psique y sus problemas actuales (1935) and Conflits de l’ame enfantine. La rumeur. L’influence du père (1935). The presence of these editions in the Ateneo library suggests that they were sought after and valued by that reading public, one of intellectuals and men in public service, and in an institution that included scientific as well as cultural and literary sections. Conceivably, one could mark the ‘arrival’ of Jung in Spain with the Spanish editions of Lo inconsciente (1927) (the only work by Jung to be published by the press of the Revista de Occidente), which would be followed by publication in other presses of Teoría del psicoanálisis (1935) and El yo y lo inconsciente (1936).

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The 1925 contribution of Jung to RO was ‘Psychological types’ (November 1925). This positively supported extract, with the editorial note that it constitutes one of the earliest and most fertile attempts made recently to establish a science of character,47 appears to indicate that the initial enthusiasm for Jung in RO was linked to other work on body and character, including that of Kretschmer, and those interested in eugenics. The meaning we should ascribe to the promotion of Jung in RO is one that requires analysing considerable nuances. As indicated, Jung’s works were readily available in Spain in this period, in a variety of languages. While I have suggested that we can read the supplantation of Freud by Jung in RO as part of a project to publish theories consonant with a view of gender that had been gradually but consistently promoted within the journal, the case may not be quite so simple. What we might refer to as the ‘presence’ of Jung in Spanish intellectual life in general in this period (his existence in the print culture, and the interest of his work in intellectual circles, both as yet insufficiently documented) was probably on a broader platform than that of clinicians and psychiatrists, and this is evident in the selections produced by RO itself. With the exception of ‘Woman in Europe’, a reprint of Jung’s essay of 1917 published in October 1929, the contributions to RO by Jung are less gender-oriented than they might be. ‘Psychological types’ advances Jung’s theory of individuation that envisions human development in the course of a life to be possessed of a dynamic of balance and self-righting. The increasing presence of Jung’s cultural style of interpretation (which will be later supplemented by ‘Archaic man’, published in April 1931, the month that the Second Republic was declared) is consonant with the interest expressed both in RO and the Residencia de Estudiantes in ancient history and archaeology. The leaning toward history, culture and civilisations can also be read as an urge toward wholeness, an urge which is further expressed in writings by Jung and others, particularly noticeable in the later years of RO. Yet it is tangentially, but unmistakably, that this cultural approach is aligned with views about gender, and by implication a framework into which love might fit. ‘Archaic man’, for example, will reveal Jung’s belief in the fact that man had a soul, and that the collective unconscious could be referred to as humanity’s soul.48 This has obvious congruence with the allencompassing structures of Simmel (for all of their tensions and subtleties), and the binary models deriving – according to their authors – from the observations of biology and medicine. Jung’s concept of the unconscious, both collective and individual (the latter expounded to some degree in July 1936 in ‘The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’) was distinctive from Freud’s in its fundamentally positive outlook and conviction of the rightness with which things would evolve. Jung did not avoid the problem of evil, and incorporated the idea of the shadow into his psychology as a way of situating the source of

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unacknowledged urges. But Freud conjured up a world in which unacceptable desires and ambitions were clearly prominent in motivating action, and his overall understanding of the individual and the society he formed was that they were complex and ultimately unruly. Freud alerted his readers about hidden dangers and desires. Jung, meanwhile, acknowledged them, but did so in a way that made them less a subject for apprehension. In Jung’s world, solutions are offered, some of them in line with the consolation myths already outlined. ‘Woman in Europe’ opens with a questioning of whether it is even possible for man to write about woman.49 The woman conjured up by him is one who lives in major urban centres. He introduces the subtle and insightful suggestion that the behaviour of woman is constructed by her response to the projections placed upon her by man, but he states that her ‘true nature’ is one of modest withdrawal to the background so as not to get in man’s way. Because of her fundamentally passive nature, woman cooperates (arguably even for Jung, it could be interpreted that she colludes) in her destiny: ‘at the same time she joins and becomes entangled in her destiny; for whosoever digs a pit for others will themselves fall into it’.50 But if there is this cautionary note about woman colluding with her destiny, she is also conceived of as the solution to present ills. Hers is the sex with a leaning toward higher things, precisely because of her devotion to love. Luisa Passerini has highlighted the way in which the process of transition being undergone by the West is, according to Jung, experienced as a form of psychic conflict, thus contrasting with the reaction of man whose reaction is within the realm of the scientifically applied intellect. Women are, according to this essay, in a much more acute state of crisis in their response to what is around them, yet it is with them that, through love, new meanings for life might be found. This view offers a new angle on woman as relegated to a position of superiority (as in Simmel), and places the role of love in a more explicit position. As Passerini neatly summarises, the Jungian interpretation ‘is concerned with love between the heterosexual couple and the cultural components connected with it’.51 This encapsulates both the conclusions to be drawn from Jung’s essay and, more broadly, the link between the gender models discussed in RO and the idea of love.

All Change for the Second Republic? One might have expected the Second Republic to tell a different story. The fact that it does not do so, at least in RO, reinforces the conclusions I have so far advanced about the nature of RO and Ortega’s intentions related to it. Relative to the period of the dictatorship, there are now fewer articles on gender, society and culture. Concepts relating woman to the unconscious are directed to a reading public well educated in that domain. Thus, Jung’s essay ‘The Psychic

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Problem of Modern Man’ (May 1932) presents man as a solitary creature slowly being led away from his immersion in the collective unconscious.52 The Second Republic came in on a wave of optimism and of resolve to bring in liberal reform. By 1933, however, the atmosphere had become more embattled, and it is into this context that we can place the increasingly strident notes of some of the later articles in RO of the 1930s. The desire for consolation is picked up in the 1933 essay on ‘Inclination’ by Count Hermann Keyserling, a well-travelled German social philosopher who had lectured at the Residencia de Estudiantes in 1924,53 but it is as though the model sketched out by Jung is now unsettled. Keyserling extends the patriarchal and essentialist strands of theory presented in RO thus far, and produces a further spin: he presents woman in a new guise now, primitive, passive, passionate and almost exclusively governed by ‘gana’.54 The danger for man is when he succumbs to her and accepts her norms.55 By a curious quirk, Keyserling then presents man as feeling inferior to woman, and thus engaging in a structure of courtly love, and it is thus through his essay that the discussion on gender and love in RO reaches a further state of resolution. Like Marañón, Keyserling sees the Don Juan figure as a cultural danger point. He is a Don Juan who has lost what is ‘primordially’ masculine, has become feminised, one who moves toward idealising woman, and hence to courtly love. This characterisation of Don Juan is presented as specific to Spain, and is notably distinct from the model as it appears in France and Germany.56 Keyserling thus steps over the European border to empathise with the Hispanic preoccupation for endangered masculinity. His manoeuvre fits in with the note that we could call the ‘clarion call’ and which is prominent in a number of the essays of the 1930s in RO, particularly those of the latter part of the Republic.

Conclusion In public life in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, there is considerable anxiety and social unrest. The discourse of the imaginary of consolation does not reflect this, but allows it to be intuited, as something produced defensively as a type of reaction-formation. At the same time – curiously – it shows Spain to be in touch with Europe. Rita Felski has argued for a complex model of modernity obtaining in Europe in the early twentieth century, and suggests that if we read modernity as masculine (disruptive, restless, individualistic), it is accompanied by an urge to the opposite. Thus, alongside (masculine) modernity there is a cultural nostalgia pervading public and philosophical discourse.57 Read in the light of her discussions, the articles in RO that are treatments on gender are arguably a sign of Spain’s Europeanness (or of Ortega’s desire to make Spain participate in European modernity). As Michael Richards has detailed, the reception of ideas on science in Spain in this period is remarkably complex, and

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the reception of cultural ideas is no less so.58 The evidence points, nonetheless, to a directive approach within RO toward contained and consoling versions of gender and gender relations, and to that aspect of complex modernity that places emphasis on the response to the disruptive aspects of modernity. As shown in the examples of Jo Labanyi’s contribution to this volume, most specifically in her examples from Giménez Caballero and Madariaga, some of the expressions within Spain of the gender polarities and counter-positions were more extreme than elsewhere in Europe. Arguably they became more so through the 1930s, as tension about conflict and change mounted. The fears about masculinity (improper) and the hopes for femininity (potential salvation) are given emphasis, and Don Juan is figured as decadent rather than romantic. Despite the turn given to the account of gender relations in 1933 by Keyserling (framed in terms of courtly love, but perceived as dangerous because of the denatured Don Juan figure at its centre), the overall discourse of gender in RO can be seen within the broad framework of the Europe in Love project in that a distanced dialogue is held with selected features of European thought on social structures within which love might fit. The way in which it appears, however, underscores the caution with which we should approach the idea of a discourse of courtly love in modern Spain: what it participates in is, above all, a defensive discourse that accompanies modernity and a denial of movement and unrest.

Notes 1. This article, part of the Europe in Love project, forms part of a project on ‘Centres of Exchange’, funded by the British Academy. An expanded Hispanic context for this discussion can be seen in Alison Sinclair, Trafficking Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Spain (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009). I would like to thank both the KWI and the British Academy for their support for this work. 2. Andrew Dobson, An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 28. 3. The Residencia de Estudiantes was founded by the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios ( JAE). A private institution, it provided a university residence in Madrid for those attending university courses, but more significantly offered tuition and cultural events of its own. Its aim was, like that of the JAE, to broaden the field of knowledge of the students, particularly through contact with cultural activity outside Spain. 4. Founded in 1835, the Ateneo de Madrid was a meeting place for members of diverse professional and political circles. See Sinclair, Trafficking, 113–114. 5. See Alison Sinclair, ‘“Telling it like it was?” The “Residencia de Estudiantes” and its Image’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 6 (2004): 739–763 and Sinclair, Trafficking. 6. See Evelyne López Campillo, La Revista de Occidente y la formación de minorías (1923–1936) (Madrid: Taurus, 1972), 255, for details. 7. See Sinclair, Trafficking, 133f. After 1925, Freud’s presence in RO is in the form of brief references only, and at no point are excerpts from his work published. Although Ortega had promoted the translation of Freud’s Complete Works by Biblioteca Nueva in 1922, he later moved to a position of increasing distance from Freud and had reservations about his theories. 8. López Campillo, La Revista de Occidente, 55f. 9. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Propósitos’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 1 (1923): 1–3, here 1.

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10. Ortega y Gasset, ‘Propósitos’, 2. 11. The belief that Spain stood to gain from Europe in education, social beliefs and social organisation had been prominent in Spanish public thought since the establishment of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) (Free Institution of Education) by Francisco Giner de los Ríos in 1876. See Sinclair, Trafficking, 32–57. 12. The strong pedagogical intent of RO can be seen in its numerous introductory footnotes or epigraphs intended to offer orientation to the reader of the importance of the authors concerned. 13. There are significant links here with the activity of the Residencia de Estudiantes and its publication Residencia, in which Kretschmer, Giménez Caballero, Pittaluga, Keyserling, Jung, and Marañón all appear, the latter repeatedly. Marañón, Pittaluga, and Dantín Cereceda were linked through their membership of the World League for Sexual Reform. The articles of Spranger, Frank, and Kierkegaard appeared as works that were being published by the Revista de Occidente press, while Russell’s article was a chapter of Marriage and Morals, being published by the press of España, with which Ortega had been involved until 1915. 14. Nelson Orringer, Ortega y sus fuentes germánicas (Madrid: Gredos, 1979), 30. 15. José Ortega y Gasset, editorial note to Georg Simmel, ‘Lo masculino y lo fememino. Para una psicología de los sexos’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 5 (1923): 218. 16. Anne Witz, ‘Georg Simmel and the Masculinity of Modernity’, Journal of Classical Sociology 1, no. 3 (2001): 353–372. 17. Georg Simmel, ‘Filosofía de la moda I’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 1 (1923): 43–66, here 46. 18. Ibid., 58. 19. Georg Simmel, ‘Filosofía de la moda II’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 2 (1923): 211–230, here 211. 20. Witz, ‘Georg Simmel’, 358. 21. Georg Simmel, ‘Lo masculino y lo femenino. Para una psicología de los sexos I’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 5 (1923): 220–222. 22. Ibid., 225. 23. See Michael Richards, ‘Spanish Psychiatry c.1900–1945. Constitutional Theory, Eugenics, and the Nation’, Alternative Discourses in Early Twentieth-Century Spain. Intellectuals, Dissent and Sub-cultures of Mind and Body, special number of Bulletin of Spanish Studies, eds Alison Sinclair and Richard Cleminson, 81, no. 6 (2004): 823–848. 24. Simmel, ‘Lo masculino y lo femenino. Para una psicología de los sexos I’, 225. 25. Ibid., 226. 26. López Campillo, La Revista de Occidente, 31. 27. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘La poesía de Ana de Noailles’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 1 (1923): 29–41, here 37f. 28. Georg Simmel, ‘Cultura femenina I’, Revista de Occidente 3, no. 21 (1925): 286f. 29. Orringer, Ortega y sus fuentes germánicas, 30. 30. Vol. 1: I. El problema de la sociología. II. La cantidad en los grupos sociales. Vol 2: III. La subordinación. Digresión sobre mayorías y minorías. Vol. 3: IV. La lucha. V. El secreto y la sociedad secreta. Disgresiones sobre el adorno y la comunicación secreta. Vol. 4: VI. El cruce de los círculos sociales. VII. El pobre. Disgresiones sobre la negatividad de ciertas conductas colectivs. Vol. 5: VIII. La autoconservación de los grupos. Disgresiones sobre las funciones hereditarias, sobre la psicología social y sobre fidelidad y gratitud. Vol. 6: IX. El espacio y la sociedad. Disgresiones sobre la limitación social, sobre la sociología de los sentidos y sobre el extranjero. X. Ampliación de los grupos y formación de la individualidad. Disgresiones sobre la nobleza y sobre la analogía de la psicología individual con las relaciones sociales. 31. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1, 54. 32. Ibid., 51. 33. Thomas F. Glick, ‘La “Idea Nueva”. Sciencia, política y republicanismo’, in La voluntad de humanismo. Homenaje a Juan Marichal, eds B. Cibplijauskaité and C. Maurer (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1990), 57–70, here 62.

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34. The WLSR was founded in 1928 at a congress in Copenhagen, and lasted until 1935. Its objectives (referred to as the ‘planks’) included reforms in the conditions of marriage, birth control, sex education and greater tolerance in sexual matters, including the de-criminalisation of ‘aberrant’ sexual desire. See Ralf Dose’s outline in ‘The World League for Sexual Reform. Some Possible Approaches’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 1 (2003): 1–15 (a special issue on the WLSR). 35. Gregorio Marañón, ‘Notas para la biología de Don Juan’, Revista de Occidente 2, no. 7 (1924): 15–53, here 18f. 36. Ibid., 20. 37. Ibid., 22. 38. Gregorio Marañón, ‘Sexo y trabajo’, Revista de Occidente 2, no. 18 (1924): 305–342, quote at 314. 39. Thomas F. Glick, ‘The Naked Science. Psychoanalysis in Spain, 1914–1948’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (1982): 533–571. 40. Marañón, ‘Sexo y trabajo’, 315. 41. Ibid., 318. 42. Simmel, ‘Cultura femenina I’, Revista de Occidente 3, no. 21 (1925): 273–301, here 275. 43. Ibid., 280–281. 44. Kretschmer’s place in the RO canon would be confirmed in no. 5 (49), July 1927, with ‘La concordancia de cuerpo y alma en el matrinomio.’ 45. Gustavo Pittaluga, ‘Biología de los vicios’, Revista de Occidente 3, no. 20 (1925): 146–75, here 172. ‘Vicio’ is a term that needs to be understood in the social sense of ‘bad ways’, rather than in the moral sense of ‘vice’. 46. William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters, abridged by Alan McGlaschan (London: Picador, 1979). 47. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Tipos psicológicos’, Revista de Occidente 3, no. 29 (1925): 161–183, here 161. 48. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘El hombre arcaico’, Revista de Occidente 9, no. 94 (1931): 1–36, here 27. 49. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘La mujer en Europa’, Revista de Occidente 7, no. 76 (1929): 1–32, here 1. 50. Ibid., 7. 51. Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars (London: Tauris, 1999), 93–95. 52. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘El problema psíquico del hombre moderno’, Revista de Occidente 10, no. 107 (1932): 202–234, here 203. 53. Sinclair, “Telling it like it was”?’, 756. 54. ‘Gana’ does not translate easily into English. It is less obvious than desire, and is associated with ‘tener ganas de…’ (to want to, to desire to do something), as in ‘avoir envie de…’. 55. Count Hermann Keyserling, ‘Gana’, Revista de Occidente 11, no. 120 (1933): 294–325, here 304. 56. Ibid., 306f. 57. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 35–60. 58. Richards, ‘Spanish Psychiatry c.1900–1945’.

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Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s JO LABANYI

Walter Mignolo has argued that the 1898 Spanish-American War in the Caribbean and the Philippines marked an epochal shift in the world system, ending the period of Western European hegemony instituted in 1492, as the United States entered the world stage as an imperial power.1 Spanish intellectuals were quick to recognise this shift since Spain had been the direct victim of US aggression. In fact, in the seventeenth century, Spain had already lost its place as the centre of Western European hegemony as Amsterdam took over from Seville as the centre of Atlantic trade.2 The early twentieth century saw a proliferation of Spanish publications responding to this shift in the world system; these writings have been seen as a bout of soul searching about Spain’s relation to the rest of the modern world, but they can also be read as part of a wider discussion on the relative values of ‘Old Europe’ and ‘New America’ (to use current terminology). Spanish intellectuals – assigned to a marginal position for the previous three centuries – were well placed to appreciate Mignolo’s insight that loss of hegemony means loss of cultural credibility: this epochal shift was a challenge not just to Western Europe’s political and economic hegemony, but also to the ‘universality’ of Western European culture. It could be argued that at least some of the numerous essays written in Spain from 1905 – the tercentenary of the Quixote – through to the 1940s about Spanish literary types associated in various ways with love (Don Quixote, Don Juan, Celestina) are not defending a Spanish exceptionalism, but positing Spain as a repository of a universal European culture based on love, which the more economically sucNotes for this section begin on page 210.

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cessful European nations are felt to have abandoned. The claim often made in these essays, that Spain can offer a model to northern Europe, has been interpreted in existing criticism, including my own, as a sour grapes justification of Spain’s economic backwardness.3 They can perhaps be read more interestingly as echoes – and in some cases anticipations – of the crisis of European values that would become a major cultural issue in northern Europe with the carnage of the First World War. It is not coincidence that two of the three Spanish intellectuals whose writings on Don Juan will be examined here – Ramiro de Maeztu, who swung from guild socialism to the Spanish equivalent of Action Française, and the liberal humanist Salvador de Madariaga – had been war correspondents in England during the First World War (in which Spain did not participate). The third intellectual examined – the avant-garde writer and convert to fascism, Ernesto Giménez Caballero – witnessed the immediate aftermath of the First World War in Strasbourg, which had recently returned from German to French control, where he taught at the University from 1920 to 1921 and from 1923 to 1924. It is also not coincidental that Madariaga – the only one of these writers who championed liberal humanism – should propose Romantic love as an ideal; for this reason, in addition to his writings on Don Juan, this discussion will include the exploration of Romantic love in his historical romance on the conquest of Mexico. This essay will not consider those Spanish intellectuals, notably, Unamuno and Azorín, who turned to Spanish literary figures – especially Don Quixote – in order to idealise Spain’s supposed failed modernity, since this has been much discussed. I prefer to focus on less studied intellectuals who were political figures. Consequently, this discussion will also exclude the considerable number of writers – literary and medical – who drew on Don Juan not for political purposes, but to elaborate views on sexuality.4 Another reason for choosing these three writers is that all three married women from another European country, whose intellectual life would impact significantly on them. Their lives thus mirror the fusion of ideas and feelings that is the key strength of their recourse, for political ends, to literary figures associated with love. This essay will stress that these three thinkers are concerned not just with Spain, but also with a wider geopolitical scenario, including both Europe and the Americas. It is useful to start with brief biographical sketches in order to show how the physical, intellectual and amorous trajectories of these three writers crossed European (and Atlantic) boundaries.

Three Political Biographies Maeztu (1874–1936) was born to an English Protestant mother (whose first language was French, having grown up in France) and the owner of a Cuban

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sugar plantation who had returned to Spain. From 1891 to 1994, the young Maeztu worked on a sugar plantation and in the tobacco industry in Cuba, which impressed on him the belief – prior to reading Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), whose linkage of capitalism and religion would deeply influence him – that capitalism was perfectly compatible with Catholicism: a point which he felt was also demonstrated by the industrialisation of his native Basque Country and Catalonia. He lived in London as a foreign correspondent from 1905 to 1919, studying philosophy at Marburg University in 1911. In England, he established close contacts with the thinkers associated with the journal The New Age and with Catholic intellectuals. He returned to Spain in 1919 with an English wife, Alice Mabel Hill, and their British-born son. The 1926 book studied here, Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina: Ensayos en simpatía (Don Quixote, Don Juan and Celestina: Essays in Collective Sentiment) was begun during a 1925 lecture tour of the United States. From 1927 to 1930, he was Ambassador to Argentina. In 1931, reacting to the declaration of the Spanish Republic, he founded Acción Española, based on Maurras’ Action Française, and became the editor of its journal. In October 1936, three months into the Spanish Civil War, the British government unsuccessfully interceded with the Spanish Republican authorities to save him from death by firing squad, on account of his open support since 1931 for a counter-revolutionary uprising. Giménez Caballero (1899–1988) married Edith Sirone, daughter of the Italian consul in Strasbourg, in 1925. Two years later, he converted to fascism after a trip to Rome, establishing long-term links with Italian fascist intellectuals – especially Bottai, editor of Critica fascista, and Malaparte, whose work he translated.5 In 1928, he undertook a European lecture tour as a fascist intellectual. A major avant-garde cultural entrepreneur in the late 1920s, he is regarded as the first Spanish surrealist writer to draw on the theories of Freud. As the editor of Spain’s leading arts magazine La Gaceta Literaria and founder of Spain’s first film club, he played a key role in introducing to Spain the work of European avant-garde writers and filmmakers of all political persuasions, including Eisenstein. Giménez Caballero himself directed two avant-garde films, plus a short documentary on Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews in the Balkans and Middle East, whom he visited on behalf of the Spanish Republican Government during the 1934–1936 period of conservative rule.6 In 1933, he became a founding member of the Spanish fascist party, Falange Española. A leading figure in the Francoist propaganda apparatus during and after the Civil War, he visited Hitler and Goebbels in Germany in 1941. An unrepentant fascist to his death, he became an embarrassment to the Franco regime as it strove to court US support after 1945, and thus he was shunted off to Stroessner’s Paraguay as Ambassador from 1958 until his 1969 retirement. The main work I shall discuss here, Dialoghi d’amore tra Laura e Don Giovanni o Il Fascismo e l’Amore (Love Dialogues between Laura and Don Juan or Fascism and Love), was delivered orally by him in Florence on 25 May 1935, at the Maggio Fiorentino cultural

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festival, and published in September of that year in the Rome-based fascist journal AntiEuropa.7 Madariaga (1886–1978) – who wrote equally well in Spanish, French and English – was educated in Paris and moved to England in 1916. He was recruited by the British Foreign Office to write pro-Allied war reports for the Spanish press, due to his having married the Scottish political economist Constance Archibald in 1912. In 1927, he was appointed to the newly created King Alfonso XIII Chair of Spanish at Oxford, returning to serve the Spanish Republic on its election to power in 1931 – among other things, as Ambassador in Washington (1931) and Paris (1932). Although Oxford remained his family home until his death, he was based for much of his life in Geneva, working for the League of Nations from 1921 to 1927 and again as Spanish Republican representative from 1931 to 1936. In 1936, he broke with the Republic on account of what he saw as its drift toward totalitarianism, and went into lifelong exile in England, from where he worked to denounce the Nationalist uprising and subsequent Franco Dictatorship.8 In this capacity, he undertook repeated lecture tours of the United States and Latin America. After the Second World War, Madariaga continued to work for European unity through the European Movement and as founder and first President of the Collège d’Europe, created to form a European intellectual elite; from 1946 to 1952, he was President of the newly founded Liberal International, and chaired the Cultural Section of the 1949 Congress of Europe at The Hague. In his concluding speech at The Hague, Madariaga declared his faith in a Europe based on love: ‘Above all, let us love Europe’, by which he meant love for Europe’s cultural heritage.9 The 1943 historical romance El corazón de piedra verde (The Jade Heart) that will be analysed here was written in Oxford, based on research conducted by the Hungarian Emilia Rauman, whom he had met at the Spanish Embassy in Vienna in 1934, and whom he had helped escape Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, with her Austrian Jewish husband, by offering her work as his literary secretary. Madariaga married Emilia in 1970, at the age of eighty-four, on the death of his Scottish wife – Emilia by this time also being widowed. Through the coyness of Madariaga’s biographers, one deduces that this was a love of a lifetime.10 It is crucial to bear in mind the distinct biographical trajectories of these three political figures when considering their writings, to which we will now turn.

Maeztu: The Critique of Don Juan as Modern Egoist As Villacañas argues, Maeztu’s reading of Weber clinched his lifelong attempt to encourage the construction of a Spanish industrial bourgeoisie driven by an ethic of labour rather than consumption.11 His youthful admiration for Nietzsche,

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which nourished an equally lifelong dislike of State control, led him in the late 1890s and early 1900s to reject Marxism for a version of social democracy. His political evolution while in England follows that of The New Age, with which he was associated, moving from Fabianism to guild socialism, with an increasingly strong religious dimension.12 In this last respect, he was influenced by his contacts with British Catholic intellectuals, including Chesterton and Belloc, and particularly his close friend T.H. Hulme, whose death in the First World War reinforced his belief that liberal humanism was in crisis. Maeztu’s Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of the War, published in English in 1916 (The New Age printed an extract in 1915), championed a modern industrial version of the medieval guild system, based on a spiritually informed notion of mutual responsibility rather than the liberal notion of individual human rights, which he saw as having led to a selfish, competitive and destructive consumerism, whose consequence was the expenditure of lives in the First World War. The 1919 Spanish version of this book was explicitly titled La crisis del humanismo (The Crisis of Humanism); from then on, Maeztu became an advocate of a curious mix of modern industrialism within a pre-modern Catholic framework, which he saw Spain as particularly well placed to develop, leading the way illuminated by the contemporary European Catholic Right. This mix is summarised by the phrase ‘the reverential sense of money’ he coined, adapting Weber, in a series of 1926 press articles, coinciding with the publication of Don Quixote, Don Juan and Celestina. From 1927, Maeztu flipped politically, espousing a retrograde authoritarianism based on a pre-modern notion of the Divine Right of Kings, while continuing to advocate capitalist industrialism. His political activism became openly counter-revolutionary with the 1931 declaration of the Republic. Villacañas rightly sees him as the unacknowledged precursor of the Opus Dei technocrats, who would clinch the Franco Dictatorship’s fusion of National-Catholicism and capitalism in the 1960s.13 Don Quixote, Don Juan and Celestina – Maeztu’s most famous book – is a brilliant exercise in historical-cultural analysis. Central to it is Maeztu’s critique of Don Juan, viewed as an embodiment of the hedonistic individualism that Maeztu sees as the outcome of modern humanism, which then culminates in a narcissistic capitalist consumerism. He notes, rightly, that northern Europe has turned Don Juan into a Faustian idealist – the restless hero in pursuit of impossible love – but that this is completely lacking in the Spanish dramatisations of his story: not only in Tirso de Molina’s 1630 play, El burlador de Sevilla, which created the figure, but even in Zorrilla’s 1844 Romantic version, Don Juan Tenorio.14 The Spanish Don Juan mocks divine and earthly authority, caring only for instant gratification through sexual conquest. Maeztu notes that Zorrilla’s Romantic Don Juan finally falls in love only when he encounters the innocent Doña Inés, who satisfies his egocentric power drive by surrendering to him totally, because he is incapable of love in the sense of altruism. Maeztu sees Don Quixote as an embodiment of altruistic love; Celestina (the procuress

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in Rojas’s 1499 tragicomedy of the same name) as an embodiment of knowledge; and Don Juan as an embodiment of power, noting that they represent a splitting and humanist abrogation of the attributes of God. That is, they represent the modern separation of spheres, which Maeztu wishes to counteract by returning to a medieval corporatism in which the various capacities work in unison and are driven by a religious sense of communal responsibility. Maeztu sees Don Juan as an option only for socially irresponsible egoists in a godless world. What is needed is a marriage of Don Quixote’s capacity for selfless love and Celestina’s practical skills, infused with the power and energy that Don Juan has monopolised and squandered. Here, Maeztu is advocating the severing of US-style capitalism (power harnessed to practical skills) from liberal humanism and its injection into an Old World pre-modern belief system built on divinely ordered communal love (as illustrated by Don Quixote’s fusion of chivalric love with social justice). Without power and practical skills, Don Quixote’s capacity for love makes him a figure of ridicule; with them, he becomes a blueprint for a new universal order that combines the best of the New World with the best of the Old World. Villacañas argues that we should not see this eclectic ideological mix as pre-determined by Maeztu’s subsequent political evolution, but that we should value it – while recognising the naivety of its reading of medieval corporatism – as a major contribution to the theorisation of a conservative modernity.15

Giménez Caballero: Don Juan as Fascist Superman Giménez Caballero is also a critic of liberal humanism, but takes up the figure of Don Juan as a revolutionary antidote to what he sees as a debilitating European courtly love tradition that places men in the service of women. The title of his 1935 fascist tract Love Dialogues between Laura and Don Juan or Fascism and Love is a critical reference to the sixteenth-century neo-Platonic text Dialoghi d’amore, published in Italy by the Spanish Jewish humanist Leo Hebraeus, expelled from Spain with other Jews in 1492. Giménez Caballero’s text was reissued in Spanish in 1936 with the title Exaltación del matrimonio (Exaltation of Marriage), for in it he subjects Petrarch’s Laura and Don Juan to a forced marriage. Giménez Caballero’s best-known 1932 work, Genio de España (Genius of Spain), is a Freudian analysis of the malaise of Western individualism.16 The ideal of love he proposes in Love Dialogues is likewise an antidote to the Western individual subject. The book stages an imaginary love encounter between Laura and Don Juan, immodestly declaring that he himself, as a Spaniard, is Don Juan and his Florentine wife is Laura. Giménez Caballero insists that he has fallen in love with fascism as a result of falling in love with his Italian wife: fascism is for him a passionate stance. In Love Dialogues, he sees Laura and Don Juan as embodying two conflicting European models of love, which are both

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products of the modern Western individualism that first developed in the Renaissance, bound on a collision course. For, if Don Juan represents the anarchic male hero who subjects women to his will, Laura represents the Petrarchan inaccessible female who spurns her male lover. Both Don Juan and Laura are admirable in their massive egos, but both are sterile: Laura because she refuses to surrender to a man, Don Juan because he moves on rather than begin a family (and indeed is hardly ever depicted as leaving his female victims pregnant). In a famous 1924 article, ‘Notes towards a Biology of Don Juan’, published in Ortega y Gasset’s journal Revista de Occidente and discussed in Alison Sinclair’s essay in this volume, the Spanish medical specialist Gregorio Marañón had noted this fact, suggesting that Don Juan’s failure to adopt the paternal role was a sign of effeminacy.17 By contrast, Giménez Caballero denounces as effeminate the courtly lover who is in thrall to his disdainful lady. There are clear male anxieties in this denunciation of the woman who refuses to subject herself to a man, while Don Juan is criticised, not because he subjects women to his will, but because he does not get them pregnant. Both types, Giménez Caballero suggests, are leading the West to sterility. His answer is to force Don Juan and Laura to marry, discovering love in perpetual conflict and through the selfsacrifice of having children. (If this is autobiographical, as he claims, one wonders what his wife thought about it.) The Petrarchan figure of Laura is thus forced into the mould of the Madonna and Child – though she is not a virgin, but is subjected to an ongoing violation by Don Juan. Giménez Caballero is explicitly advocating a Christian marriage based on procreation and the self-sacrifice of both parties as an antidote to what he sees as the threat of female emancipation (women no longer agreeing to submit sexually to men). He thus describes Laura as a ‘“femme fatale”, Greta Garbo of the Renaissance. Nordic and blonde, like Greta’.18 Although both Don Juan and Laura have to sacrifice their individual freedom, their forced marriage means that Don Juan will subject Laura to lifelong sexual conquest, to which Laura has to consent – the self-sacrifice is not an equal one. Hence, Giménez Caballero declares that his text is a treatise on fascism and love, since it expounds a notion of love based on hierarchy and violent subjection – but love nonetheless. It should be said that there is a surrealist aspect to this project of marrying two irreconcilable opposites – Laura and Don Juan – not least in the rejection of the neo-Platonic amor intelectualis of Leo Hebraeus for an explicitly sexual notion of union. Giménez Caballero describes Hebraeus’s neo-Platonism as deriving directly from ‘the most refined casuistry of the Provençal troubadors’ together with ‘the most subtle ardours of the Jewish Cabbala’.19 While this may seem to have anti-Semitic overtones, we should note – in addition to Giménez Caballero’s positive attitude to the Sephardic Jewish Diaspora, mentioned above – that in this passage, he breaks with the stereotyping of Jews as carnal by aligning them with the neo-Platonic tradition that he is critiquing. Giménez Caballero’s concept of fascist love is overtly based on sexual conquest and not

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on mystical transcendence. He explicitly praises Don Juan’s sexual prowess because it represents an urge to ‘punish woman’.20 As he puts it in Genius of Spain: ‘When Don Juan … fell in love with a woman, it was not to become her friend and partner, but her adversary. To conquer her, force her to the ground – admirable enemy! – and in the supreme ecstasy of genital triumph stamp an unforgettable, burning kiss on her mouth.’21 Elsewhere in Genius of Spain, Giménez Caballero corroborates this notion of fascism as violent sexual subjection, the important point being that the fascist hero, like Don Juan, incites undying love in the women he conquers: ‘Every people is driven by a female longing. When it finds its man, it surrenders.’22 In Love Dialogues, Giménez Caballero insists that Don Juan is quintessentially Spanish, and that the Petrarchan idealisation of woman is alien to the Spanish tradition. At this point, he links his discussion of Don Juan to Spain’s conquest of its American empire. How, he asks, could Petrarchism exist in the ‘ardent, virile atmosphere’ of a Seville (Don Juan’s hometown) ‘ringing with the virile, macho tones of a recently discovered America, smelling of recently expelled Africans, Moors, jealous passions, conquest, rape, war, adventure, heroism’?23 His blatantly racist apology for imperial violence is at least honest in its transparency. Empire is explicitly equated with sexual violence (rape) and with the conquest of racial others. Giménez Caballero is here arguing that Spain can offer something to fascist Italy, since Don Juan – who knows how to conquer empires – could not have been born in Italy, the land of unconquerable Petrarchan Lauras. We should remember that this is written at the time of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, as Giménez Caballero observed24 when recycling chunks of this text in his Roma madre (Mother Rome), which won an Italian fascist prize (as the author, never modest, notes in his introduction). In highlighting Don Juan’s Andalusian origins in this passage, Giménez Caballero is also proposing him as an amalgam of West and East. A key feature of his earlier Genius of Spain had been his suggestion that fascism amalgamates the strengths of both cultural systems (Lenin being the Eastern ‘superman’), thus again placing Spain, with its eight centuries of Arab rule from 711 to 1492, in a privileged position to take a leading role in European fascism.25 Don Juan represents for Giménez Caballero an embodiment not only of the cultural miscegenation of West and East, but also of the mixing of races in Spanish America. The 1939 fourth edition of Genius of Spain again links the sexual violence of Don Juan to empire, whose goal is seen as miscegenation: ‘as a people we are makers of races but never racist … We are race-makers, Don Juans, magnificent virile studs’.26 In the case of imperial conquest, it seems that, in order to produce children, Don Juan does not have to be settled in a forced marriage. Indeed, Don Juan’s restless urge constantly to move on is necessary to make him a figure of empire, always pushing at the boundaries – Plus Ultra, as Charles V’s imperial motto put it. In an earlier fascist tract, Circuito imperial (Imperial Circuit) (1929), Giménez Caballero had proposed Don Juan as the im-

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age of a fascist modernity because of his sportive attitude, always trying to beat records: ‘Splendid performances of Don Juan! … Don Juan, recordman’.27 When, in his 1942 text Amor a Cataluña (Love for Catalonia), Giménez Caballero advocates this same kind of love based on violent subjection as a way of dealing with Republican Catalonia on its fall to Franco’s army (Giménez Caballero had entered Barcelona with the victorious Nationalist troops in January 1939), he speaks of subjecting Catalonia to the ‘yoke’ of marriage to the Spanish State. In Mother Rome, he similarly talks of Mussolini’s march on Rome as ‘a Don Juan, a virile tyrant’ taking Italy by force: ‘But Mussolini did not rape Italy. He married her in Rome!’28 It seems that, in a European context, Don Juan needs to be made productive via the straightjacket of marriage, but that, in the context of empire, the more women he can violently fertilise, the better.29

Madariaga: Political Union via Romantic Love Giménez Caballero and Madariaga disliked each other intensely. The two men met at least twice as political antagonists: in fascist Italy in July 1934, during Madariaga’s visit to Venice representing the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, Giménez Caballero being one of the fascist intellectuals invited by the Italian host delegation; and at the Council of Europe’s Strasbourg sessions in 1949–1950, when Giménez Caballero was sent by the Franco regime (not recognised by the Council) as an unofficial observer to obstruct debate on Spain.30 In his reports on these sessions,31 Giménez Caballero recounts how, at a reception, the wife of the US Head of Intelligence asked him, ‘Is it true that the Aztecs are so cruel?’, because she was having nightmares after reading Madariaga’s historical novel, The Jade Heart. The US Head of Intelligence tried to bring Giménez Caballero and Madariaga together to pursue the topic but they avoided each other. Giménez Caballero refers to the League of Nations, for which Madariaga worked for two decades, as ‘that cesspit in Geneva’.32 Madariaga’s role as head of the League of Nations’ Disarmament Committee from 1922 to 1927 and his continued efforts to secure a peaceful Europe throughout the 1930s, particularly his 1935 role as Chairman of the League of Nations’ Committee of Five, which vainly tried to halt Italian aggression in Ethiopia, clashed directly with Giménez Caballero’s open calls for a fascist politics of violence to renew what he saw as a decadent, liberal Europe. Madariaga wrote about Don Juan in two texts. In his 1952 Bosquejo de Europa (Sketch of Europe), he named Don Juan as one of Europe’s four major cultural archetypes (with Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet). Like Giménez Caballero, but more ambivalently, he sees Don Juan as an incarnation of European individualism and of imperial conquest: ‘Don Juan embodies the spirit of expansion, discovery and conquest that has made Europe the creator of America. And the torch-bearer of universal culture. It is true that Don Juan

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is also the source of the crimes and excesses that sully the history of Europe’s empires.’33 Madariaga notes that, in Zorrilla’s Romantic version, Don Juan is, like Faust, saved by the love of a woman (contrary to Tirso de Molina’s original in which he goes unrepentant to hell). Unlike Giménez Caballero, who has no dealings with romantic love, Madariaga clearly privileges Zorrilla’s version. In Madariaga’s earlier 1948 radio play, La don-juanía o seis don Juanes y una dama (Don-Juanism or Six Don Juans and a Lady), written for the BBC Latin American Service for broadcast to Latin America on Halloween34 and published with a substantial essay in his 1950 Don Juan y la Don-juanía (Don Juan and DonJuanism), he brought together six different European versions of Don Juan, whose brawling – an implicit allegory of the Second World War – is stopped by a veiled Doña Inés, who declares herself to be the eternal feminine. Only Zorrilla’s Romantic Don Juan is capable of appreciating her message of redemption through love. Madariaga’s writings on Don Juan largely echo those of Maeztu, as he sees him as a negative image of brute male force – except that he uses the Romantic redemption of Don Juan to argue for a Western individualism tempered by love, that is, the taming of the masculine by the feminine. We may note that, in Madariaga’s radio play, it is the Spanish Don Juan and Doña Inés who offer a model of redemptive love that brings peace to Europe. Given Madariaga’s preference for Zorrilla’s play, in which Don Juan is redeemed by romantic love, it is not surprising that his 1943 novel about the conquest of Mexico, The Jade Heart, should be cast in the form of a historical romance. The novel proposes an inter-racial marriage based on mutual love and respect as a model for empire – one which the novel makes clear is an ideal not borne out by the Spaniards’ general behaviour in New Spain (as the Vice-Royalty of Mexico was called) nor in the Old Spain of the Inquisition. In keeping with Madariaga’s critique of Don Juan as the prototype of the imperial plunderer in Bosquejo de Europa, the novel describes Cortés as the greatest womaniser among the Spanish conquistadors. The novel’s Spanish hero, Alonso Manrique, is clearly meant as a utopian antidote to the donjuanesque behaviour of the novel’s real life (and some of its fictional) male characters. This is popular romance fiction in the utopian form of ‘history as it might have been’. Thanks to its popular fictional format, The Jade Heart is one of the few texts by Madariaga still in print, last issued in 2004. The novel was conceived as an antidote to Cortés also in that it was written as a way of using the vast amount of historical research – chiefly of indigenous Mexican customs and beliefs – undertaken for Madariaga’s 1941 biography of Cortés, which he had not been able to include in the ‘factual’ account. Because Madariaga turned to the popular genre of the historical romance for pleasure, after the efforts of writing a serious biography, he can allow himself a freedom of imagination that he does not permit himself in his more overtly political works. The result is a text that provides insights into his political assumptions precisely because they are betrayed indirectly through his treatment of the love

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plot. The novel was a labour of love also in the sense that, as noted above, the research for it was undertaken by Emilia Rauman, whom he would later marry and to whom he dedicated a volume of dreadfully clichéd love poetry.35 The Jade Heart is dedicated to her as its ‘godmother’. Given that she had already published studies on Spanish history before she met Madariaga,36 one wonders whether she was in fact responsible for some of its writing. The Jade Heart is notable for its efforts to get inside the indigenous mindset prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, who only reach Mexico City at the end of the second of its three parts. The whole of the first two parts are an anticipation of Alonso’s meeting with the Aztec princess Xuchitl, which occurs on the very last page of Part 2, for they have both dreamed of each other for years – this is a love foretold. This legitimises the Spanish conquest as something that was ‘meant to be’. The fact that Alonso is not part of Cortés’s army allows him to be untainted by the generally violent behaviour of the Spaniards in Mexico; he consistently refuses to participate in their looting and raping, similarly refusing the offers of women by local chiefs. His chastity is that of the courtly love hero, driven by desire for an inaccessible ideal – something that, as an adolescent back in Spain, he had sought in religious faith, becoming disillusioned by his experience of the Spanish clergy. Consistent parallels are drawn between the Old World and the New. The chapters of Part 1 and Part 2 alternate between Xuchitl and Alonso (she comes first), until their two stories converge at the end of Part 2. Both New and Old World societies are shown to be driven by contradictions, and are ethnically and culturally diverse. Madariaga gives Alonso an Arab great-grandmother, a converted Jewish mother and an Arab nurse; he is brought up to read Hebrew and Arabic texts. He is born the day that Granada falls to the Catholic Kings, in a southern Spain where Jews are generally respected, but where anti-Semitic pogroms are starting. The novel depicts in tragic terms the departure for exile of the Jews expelled in 1492, including Alonso’s Rabbi grandfather ha-Levy, though this tolerance of religious diversity is attenuated by the fact that haLevy has come to believe in the Christian faith (like his daughter before him). Both he and his daughter convert out of rational conviction; this could not be more different from Giménez Caballero’s passionate conversion to fascism. The novel contains a large amount of rational questioning by Alonso and Xuchitl of their respective societies’ religious beliefs. Both Christian and Aztec belief systems are shown to be based on rigid binary oppositions, which Alonso and Xuchitl discover do not hold, since opposites can coincide and the same thing can have a positive and negative side. This is especially true of sexuality: both Xuchitl and Alonso – she particularly – are brought up with an open, natural attitude to the body, later complicated by their exposure to a religion based on the notion that the body must be chastised. If, as previously recounted, the wife of the US Head of Intelligence was horrified by Madariaga’s descriptions of Aztec sacrifice, she had missed the point because the novel draws explicit

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parallels with Christian practices: when Xuchitl, converted and married to Alonso, witnesses an auto da fe in Spain, it reminds her of the smell of burning flesh of the Aztec human sacrifices she had so deplored. While these parallels put Aztec and Spanish culture on a par, they also show Madariaga’s inability to think outside the secular rationalism that the European Enlightenment disseminated as a universal category.37 The novel’s romance format is undercut by Part 3 when Xuchitl and Alonso return, married, to Spain, only to find Alonso’s converted Jewish mother arrested by the Inquisition. After her release, his mother will die from the effects of torture, before Alonso, who has been arrested in turn, can be reunited with her. Xuchitl finds herself not at the heart of civilisation, but alone and pregnant in a hostile, primitive land. Notwithstanding its negative depiction of Spain, the novel takes it for granted that Christianity is a superior religion of love – albeit imperfectly practised by most Christians. Like Giménez Caballero – despite their vast political differences – Madariaga appeals to the image of the Madonna and Child as the emblem of this religion of (maternal) love. The difference is that, for Giménez Caballero, the female is the conduit for producing the son, whereas Madariaga shows the female’s need for love and succour, as well as that of the male. Despite Madariaga’s clichéd love poetry, in this historical romance he creates female characters who are as much agents as their male counterparts, and who are equally capable of intellectual reflection and growth. The ethnocentric representation of Xuchitl’s ecstatic discovery in Christianity of the religion of love she had always intuited but had never known is tempered by immediately plunging her into an intolerant Spain in the Inquisition’s grip. The last page, however, holds out the possibility of a happy ending, as she and Alonso set sail back to the New World with their newborn son, whose string of names – Rodrigo Manrique ha-Levy ben-Omar Nezahualpilli38 – proclaims racial fusion, albeit hierarchically ordered. This happy ending is, however, disturbed by the novel’s final words, which describe the mixed-race infant trying to put in his mouth the jade heart that provides the novel’s title. The jade heart’s presence in the novel complicates the Enlightenment secular rationalism that pervades its pages, for it is a magic amulet representing the contradictory nature of love: it brings a perfect experience of love to the person who has a healthy attitude to the body, but sexual torment to the person who regards sexuality as sinful. The jade heart has passed from Xuchitl’s mother, on her death, to her father, for whom it signifies the torment of his sexual desire for the Bad Queen: an exotic femme fatale with a penchant for killing her lovers after lovemaking. What is going on in this extraordinary strand of the story is not clear, except that through it Xuchitl, who steals into the Bad Queen’s secret chambers, learns that love has its dark side. Alonso has a similar induction through the brazen Marta, the daughter of the Jewish Esquivel family who are the novel’s villains: converted Jews who denounce other Jews to the Inquisition, and who dog Alonso in both Old and New Worlds,

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father and son finally meeting their end in the auto da fe that Xuchitl and Alonso witness. The depiction of the Bad Queen and Marta Esquivel introduces some unfortunate ethnic and sexual stereotypes, despite the novel’s generally positive depiction of Aztec and Jewish (and Arab) women. Nonetheless, the novel’s hero, who represents the ideal, humane, loving coloniser, though a coloniser for all that, is presented as a mixture of the three races that made up early modern Spain, and is shown to be capable of romantic love for a woman of yet another race – just as she, importantly, is shown to be capable of the romantic love that has so often been seen as an exclusively European phenomenon. Both Giménez Caballero and Madariaga exalt miscegenation as the major achievement of Spain’s empire – as would Maeztu in his last book, Defensa de la hispanidad (Defence of Hispanic Values) (1934), which proposed the Spanish model of colonial relations as the basis for a new world system embracing all peoples, regardless of race, by contrast with the Northern European segregationist model. It is striking that all three of the very different writers discussed in this essay should be united by belief that the miscegenation practised in Spain’s early modern empire signified a political order based on love. This view has regularly been advanced under modernity to justify Spain’s imperial project, by both Spanish Right and Left – and is still heard in Spain today to argue that Spaniards are not racist.39

Conclusion The three writers we have analysed all use the trope of love to position Spain in relationship to the Americas as well as to Europe. Maeztu rejects the hedonistic egoism of Don Juan for Don Quixote’s chivalric notion of altruistic service, allied to Don Juan’s energy and Celestina’s practical skills, as a way of harnessing the strengths of capitalism to those of medieval corporatism, in order to establish an alliance with the European Catholic Right that will allow Europe to confront the new hegemony of the United States. The implication is that the Spanish legacy in Spanish America, which implanted medieval corporatist structures in the New World, will allow the latter to do the same. Giménez Caballero’s work is more closely focussed on Europe, Don Juan being proposed as the charismatic leader of a Spanish-Italian fascist alliance. When Giménez Caballero proposes Don Juan as the prototype of the Spanish conquistador, he is not concerned with the future of the Americas, but is arguing that Spain’s past capacity for imperial conquest allows it to play a leading role in European fascism. The United States comes into this political scenario only by implication, via Giménez Caballero’s Spenglerian belief in European decadence, requiring an injection of virile energy from the fascist Don Juan. His defence of fascism represents a desire to re-establish a threatened European pre-eminence, achieved by drawing on Europe’s position (and particularly that

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of Spain) as a meeting point of West and East. It is often forgotten that the subtitle to his fascist tract Genius of Spain is Exhortations towards a National and World Resurrection; the goal is the creation of a new world order. Madariaga, as an upholder of liberal Enlightenment values, rejects Don Juan as sexual predator – seen as the unacceptable face of European (and not just Spanish) imperialism – for a romantic notion of love, represented by Zorrilla’s version of the Don Juan story, which can unite Europe after the Second World War. Romantic love is similarly used by him to shape the fusion of races in both Spain and Spanish America. Although his use of love as political trope does not address the question of Europe’s relation to the United States, it should be remembered that a major drive behind the movement to create a united Europe, to which Madariaga devoted his political career, was to counter a growing US hegemony. Love means very different things to these three writers, but they all see it as something that derives from European culture. Even the liberal Madariaga, despite his positive depiction of his Aztec heroine, grants her the possibility of romantic love only via union with a Spaniard. For Maeztu, US capitalism needs to be redeemed by an ‘Old European’ chivalric altruism. For Giménez Caballero and Madariaga, the United States simply does not figure in their explorations of love as political allegory. If these writers draw on Spanish literary models, or, in the case of Madariaga’s historical novel, incarnate romantic love in a multiracial Spanish hero, it is in order to suggest – explicitly or implicitly – that Spanish culture and history offer models for rethinking Europe. We should remember here that not all of the models of love explored by these three writers are positive; all of them reject at least certain aspects of the Don Juan figure, and the writer who most valorises Don Juan – Giménez Caballero – proposes him as the fascist superman: a model that cannot be regarded as positive by any reader with a concern for ethics. Perhaps one of the most important points to emerge from this discussion is that the northern European idealisation of Don Juan as a restless hero in search of an impossible ideal is not supported by the Spanish representations of him, whether in Tirso de Molina’s and Zorrilla’s source texts, or the works by the early twentieth-century Spanish political thinkers we have studied. We have here a key example of how northern Europe has appropriated southern European culture for its own ends, turning a character whose egoism can indeed be seen as a figure of the negative side of modern individualism into a tragic hero, thereby idealising the pursuit of selfinterest as Promethean curse – what one is tempted to call ‘Don Juan’s burden’.

Notes 1. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

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2. Ibid., 58. 3. See Jo Labanyi, Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4. For discussion of medical analyses of Don Juan’s sexuality, see the essay by Alison Sinclair in this volume. For an overview of the Don Juan theme in early twentieth-century Spanish literature, see chapters 3 and 4 of Roberta Johnson, Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), which includes women writers; and A.S. PérezBustamante, ed., Don Juan Tenorio en la España del siglo veinte. Literatura y cine (Madrid: Cátedra, 1998), which includes cinematic representations. 5. See Mónica and Pablo Carbajosa, La corte literaria de José Antonio. La primera generación cultural de la Falange (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003), 54. 6. Despite his fascist politics, Giménez Caballero maintained a lifelong interest in reintegrating Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain in 1492, back into their Spanish ‘homeland’. In the 1920s, he toured Sephardic Jewish communities in Morocco with the cultural historian Américo Castro, who in the 1940s and 1950s, as a Republican exile in the United States, made his scholarly reputation as a defender of the medieval Jewish contribution to Spanish culture. 7. See Ernesto Giménez Caballero, ‘Dialoghi d’amore tra Laura e Don Giovanni o Il Fascismo e l’Amore’, AntiEuropa 5 (1935): 567–599, here 567, and Exaltación del matrimonio. Diálogos de amor entre Laura y Don Juan (Madrid: E. Giménez, 1936), 9. 8. For a politically acute account of Madariaga’s career, which stresses his role in keeping alive international opposition to the Franco regime, see Paul Preston, Salvador de Madariaga and the Quest for Liberty in Spain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). 9. See O. Victoria Gil, Vida y obra trilingüe de Salvador de Madariaga, 2 vols. (Madrid: Fundación Ramón Areces, 1990), 1: 288. 10. See Octavio Victoria Gil, Vida y obra; and Carlos Fernández Santander, Madariaga, ciudadano del mundo (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1991). 11. See José Luis Villacañas, Ramiro de Maeztu y el ideal de la burguesía en España (Madrid: Espasa, 2000). 12. For the intellectual trajectory of Alfred R. Orage, editor of The New Age, who in 1922 would become a disciple of Gurdjieff, see Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: Tauris, 1999), 107–118. 13.Villacañas, Ramiro de Maeztu. 14. A key factor in the northern European ‘misreading’ of Don Juan is the ‘discovery’ and subsequent dissemination of Spanish Golden Age literature by the German Romantic critic, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, for whom it represented a primitive energy untamed by classicism – Don Juan being seen as a prime example. 15.Villacañas, Ramiro de Maeztu. 16. Curiously, Madariaga’s first book, published in English, was called The Genius of Spain (1923). Giménez Caballero makes no reference to it. 17. For Marañón’s various essays on Don Juan, see Johnson, Gender and Nation, 186–189; and Pérez-Bustamante, Don Juan Tenorio, 317–333. Marañón’s crucial point was that, in devoting himself to love, Don Juan was shirking his male responsibilities in the public sphere, in which men legally participated as heads of family. 18. Giménez Caballero, Exaltación del matrimonio, 45. All translations of quotations from Spanish originals in this essay are my own. 19. Ibid., 17. 20. Ibid., 31. 21. Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Genio de España. Exaltaciones a una resurrección nacional y del mundo (Barcelona: Planeta, 1983), 140 (emphasis in original). 22. Ibid., 103. 23. Giménez Caballero, Exaltación del matrimonio, 61. 24. Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Roma madre (Madrid: Ediciones Jerarquía, 1939), 120.

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25. For discussion of Giménez Caballero’s analysis of fascism as an amalgam of West and East, see Jo Labanyi, ‘Women, Asian Hordes and the Threat to the Self in Giménez Caballero’s Genio de España’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 73 (1995): 377–387. 26. Giménez Caballero, Genio de España, 105. 27. Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Circuito imperial (Madrid: La Gaceta Literaria, 1929), 18–19 (emphasis in the original). 28. Giménez Caballero, Roma madre, 125, 128. 29. Although Giménez Caballero, like most Spanish fascist intellectuals, was shaped by contact with Italian rather than German fascism, his violent misogyny invites analysis in the light of Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalysis of the Nazi ‘soldier male’, whom Theweleit sees as defined by an insecure sense of ego-boundaries epitomised by the fear of women. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987/1989), whose ideas are applied to Giménez Caballero in Labanyi, ‘Women, Asian Hordes and the Threat to the Self ’. 30. See respectively Victoria Gil, Vida y obra, 1: 191; and Ernesto Giménez Caballero, La Europa de Estrasburgo (Visión española del problema europeo) (Madrid: Istituto de Estudios Políticos, 1950), and Informe sobre el Consejo de Europa (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1950). 31. Giménez Caballero, La Europa de Estrasburgo and Informe sobre el Consejo de Europa. 32. Giménez Caballero, Genio de España, 62. 33. Salvador de Madariaga, Bosquejo de Europa (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1969), 79. 34. It was traditional in Spain, until relatively recently, for Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio to be performed on Halloween because of its ghost scene. 35. Salvador de Madariaga, Poemas a Mimí, in Poesía (Madrid: Austral, 1989), 143–158. 36.Victoria Gil, Vida y obra, 1: 179. 37. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity. Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20–37. 38. ‘Rodrigo Manrique’ and ‘Nezahualpilli’ are the names of Alonso’s and Xuchitl’s fathers, respectively. 39. There is not space here to go into the complexities of Spanish racial discourse, which has varied hugely over time as well as being massively contradictory. Suffice it to say that the Inquisition’s obsession with ‘purity of blood’ was concerned more with religious deviance than with miscegenation, and was based on the notion that racial ‘others’ could be ‘saved’ via their assimilation (voluntary or enforced) into Christianity. Mixed-race alliances in the Americas were often justified, particularly under modernity, as ‘whitening’ the race. Giménez Caballero’s support for the repatriation of Spanish Jews formed part of this project for ‘saving’ racial others via their incorporation.

Part III

EUROPEAN BORDERS AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN LOVE RELATIONS

CHAPTER

1 1

Between Europe and the Atlantic The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism MARGARIDA CALAFATE RIBEIRO

Between Europe and the Atlantic: Portugal as Semi-Periphery An overview of the history of Portuguese expansion and imperialism shows that Portugal tended to define itself simultaneously as the centre of a colonial empire and a periphery of Europe: in the words of Boaventura Sousa Santos, as a semi-periphery.1 Portugal’s ambiguous position was, early in its history, inscribed in frequent references to the country’s geographical location. In his first chronicle of the expansion (1449–1450), Gomes Eanes de Zurara states: ‘here on one side the sea hems us in and on the other we face the wall of the Kingdom of Castile’.2 The notion of a siege implied by this definition was developed by Luís de Camões, the national poet, who wrote in the sixteenth century. In his epic Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), Camões elevates a confining geographical condition into the identity of an expanding homeland. He describes the ‘Lusitanian Kingdom’ as a borderland ‘where the land ends and the sea begins’.3 The fact that Portugal shares a border with the hitherto unexplored ocean means that a large part of its history has taken place outside of European circuits. In The Lusiads, Portugal is the ‘head of Europe’, which may be defined more widely as the head of the world given the poem’s Eurocentric parameters. This founding discourse of national identity is elaborated from its inception as a journey that unites origin, that is, the West with the unknown world of the East. To cite Camões’ poem: ‘We Portuguese are from the West, / We come in search of the lands of the East’.4 A further foundational notion contributes to Portugal’s sense of identity: its pioneering role as a mediator between worlds. This turns its frontiers into Notes for this section begin on page 228.

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arbiters of communication and thus also arbiters of control over the worlds on either side. Such a notion is driven by a doubly centrist image of Portugal: in relation to Europe, Portugal was the discoverer of new worlds, spreading news of their existence throughout the European nations; in relation to a variety of Others, Portugal was the representative of Europe. Thus, Portugal is perceived as a Janus-figure facing both Europe and the Atlantic. However, besides celebrating Portugal as centre of the world, The Lusiads also depicts Portugal’s ‘fragilities’ in its attempt to retain its central position. This explains why the poet, who starts his epic by beseeching the ancient Muse to stop chanting because ‘another higher valour is rising up’,5 ends it on a melancholic note, referring to the ‘dark and vile sadness’6 into which his homeland has plunged. Through its artistic elegance, the subtle, ambiguous discourse embodied in The Lusiads provides a complex image of the Lusitanian Kingdom. This image swings between celebration of the nation as the vanguard of Europe and consideration of the threats that would cause its decline, turning it into a backwater of Europe as foretold in the epic.

Lusotropicalism: Romance at the Semi-Periphery The Lusiads is an epic about a small nation on the western edge of Europe that traversed the open seas in search of universal status. The poet’s perspective is infused with a notion of universality mediated through romantic love. It is out of love that Tethys opens up the seas and the ‘gates to the East’ to Vasco da Gama, the heroic Portuguese navigator celebrated in the epic. Nymphs repeatedly save the Portuguese sailors from the dangers of the unknown, from strong winds and from the boundless ocean. Finally, it is through romance that the Portuguese celebrate their empire on the famous Island of Love (Island of Venus) in the epic’s ninth canto. The island represents the warriors’ reward and regeneration through love. Following Helder Macedo’s analysis, for Camões, love is an existential process and the ultimate goal of human endeavour.7 Camões was one of the first European poets to weep for the death of a lover from the East, his Chinese Dinamene, with her ‘meek and pious gaze’, whose virtues (gentleness, gravitas, modesty, goodness and serenity) were those traditionally associated with the European model of the donna angelicata. In addition to oriental beauty, Camões celebrates ‘blackness of love’ for the slave Bárbara, ‘so sweet that the snow vows to exchange its colour for hers’, whose revitalising serenity, shy smile and gentle sweetness are described in terms very similar to those used by the poet to describe his ‘“heavenly” Circe’.8 Macedo notes that to have sexual relations with native women is one of the perks of empire, but what is unusual is the way the poet dignifies the racial aspect of his dark mistress, who ‘seems strange but not barbarous’.9 As Macedo observes: ‘The onomatopoeic non-word “barbara” is derived from the Greek term used to mimic the sub-

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human non-intelligibility of languages spoken by other peoples and is a form of denial of their different human identity. By using it as the beloved’s name in a poem celebrating her blackness, Camões transforms it into an affirmation of identity for his strange, but certainly not barbarous servant-mistress.’10 Nevertheless, the same poet who elevates love for the Other, recognising it as an independent identity, writes in a letter to a friend from Goa about the lack of beauty and dignified courting among local women, begging for white European women to come from Portugal: So what about the women of the country? Apart from being the colour of brown bread, just suppose you try Petrarchan or Boscanesque gallantries on them: they answer you in language as coarse as vetch, which tastes bitter to the palate of one’s understanding and dampens one’s ardour, be it the most fervent in the world. Just imagine, sir, the feelings of a stomach accustomed to resisting the false charms of the adorned little face of a Lisbon lady, being confronted now with this loveless salted meat.11

This double standard manifest in Camões’s love for the Other parallels the double positioning that marks Portugal’s long colonial presence in the world. The duplicity, or at least ambiguity, inherent in Portugal’s relationship with the Other and in Portuguese colonialism itself has undoubtedly marked Portuguese imperialism, just as, in a different context, it allows the nation to be classified as semi-peripheral, even in today’s changed context. Boaventura de Sousa Santos follows the earlier historian Charles Boxer in classifying Portuguese colonialism as a semi-peripheral colonialism, a colonialism enacted by a country that was imperially deficient.12 For Sousa Santos, Portugal failed to colonise effectively and at the same time induced an excessive degree of colonisation, since its colonies were subjected to a double colonisation: by Portugal itself and, through Portugal, by the more powerful European players on which Portugal was often dependent. This accounts for the distinct nature of Portuguese colonialism. Sousa Santos’s interpretation is premised on a hierarchy of models of colonisation, with the British model, from the nineteenth century onward, being normative. While British imperialism maintained a precarious balance between colonialism and capitalism, Portuguese imperialism was marked by a precarious imbalance between excessive colonialism and insufficient capitalism.13 This helps to explain the self-representation of the Portuguese coloniser as positioned somewhere between colonised and coloniser; to use Sousa Santos’s metaphor, between Prospero and Caliban. In Portugal’s African empire, established at the end of the nineteenth century, the need for the Portuguese to view themselves as colonisers was directly proportionate to their proximity to the colonised. From very early on, this situation created alternative models of colonial society, based on the mixed-race relationships resulting from the fact that the colonising group was overwhelmingly male and poor, and from the fact that men who had relations with native women would often take the mulatto offspring of these liaisons into their homes, so that they could be brought

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up to be ‘civilised’. Such children were called ‘mulattoes of the colonial house’, normally begotten by a male coloniser before or during his marriage to a white woman. Many so-called ‘old colonials’ in Portuguese Africa were ostracised by their peers because they took up with native women and brought up mulatto children. With a few exceptions, such as the famous case of Ana Olímpia from Luanda who became the subject of an inter-racial love story at the end of the nineteenth century,14 most mulattoes were born as a result of rape or similar abuses in which the power relationship was fundamentally unequal. To use the anthropologist Christian Geffray’s term to sum up this kind of Portuguese colonial love, it was an ‘amour dans la servitude’,15 a perfect instance of the precarious positioning of the Portuguese somewhere between Prospero and Caliban. The socio-political, scientific and literary discourses of the twentieth century barely analyse these inter-racial relationships as such, preferring instead to focus on their product, the mulatto. The result is that the relative value of the mulatto oscillates wildly, depending on the interplay between changing geographical and historical factors within the Portuguese Empire. This situation is reflected in the co-existence of two types of discourse in the Portuguese inter-racial collective imaginary: one almost epically glorious and the other ruinous. In 1892, as Portugal began to adopt an European colonial model in Africa, the Portuguese explorer and scientist Henrique Carvalho wrote in his book Expedição Portuguesa ao Muatiânvua. Meteorologia, Climatologia e Colonisação (A Portuguese Expedition to Muatianvua. Meteorology, Climatology and Colonisation): As you undoubtedly know, two evident principles distinguish colonising nations as they function in the Tropics: the first replaces the native with a white individual as a means of transforming the territory they occupy, and the result is the extinction of the black race; the second takes advantage of the native as a natural component of the task hand, preparing through him the acclimatisation of the white race so that eventually the bloods of the two races mix, for the resulting benefit of humanity.16

Henrique de Carvalho summarises the two epistemological positions of his era: the first, politically popular and based on ‘the survival of the fittest’, imposed racism as the cornerstone of colonisation; the second, in his view on a sounder footing, was based on a vibrant hybridity, which he saw as the most promising evolutionary path for humanity. Far from the pre-lusotropical colonialism expressed by Henrique Carvalho, who foresaw a fusion of the races that would be to the benefit of all humanity, at around the same time (1873), António Ennes, a high-ranking colonial official, sought to blame black women for what he saw as the degeneration of the human race, referring to the mothers of mulattoes as follows: Africa has charged the black woman with wreaking vengeance on Europeans, and the vile black woman – for all black women are vile – has subdued the proud conquerors of the Dark Continent, reducing them to the sensuality of monkeys, the ferocious jealousy of tigers, the inhumane brutality of slave-traders, the delirium of alcoholism, all the brutalizing effects of inferior races.17

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In the 1930s, Germano Correia, a Goan doctor and scientist, and author of numerous books on Portuguese colonisation, shared this racist vision. Cristiana Bastos enjoins us to read his work in order to revisit the ghosts of racism present in the history of Portuguese colonisation, in relation to the identity of Luso-descendants in India. Germano Correia endowed this racial group, born of mixed Indian-Portuguese parentage, to which he himself belonged, with an immaculate pedigree based on physical anthropology and anthropometry, and the concepts of blood purity, genealogy, class and whiteness of skin – thus denying their indigenous component.18 At around the same time, Mendes Correia, a driving force behind physical anthropology in Portugal, began his address to the First National Congress on Colonial Anthropology in Oporto (1934) – entitled ‘Mulattoes in the Portuguese Colonies’ – by citing passages from the novel Ana a Kaluanga (Ana the Kalunga), by Hipólito Raposo, in which the mulatto is referred to as ‘an unexpected being in the grand design of the world, an unhappy experience of the Portuguese’.19 A little later, in a nation that had emerged from the same empire – Brazil – Gilberto Freyre developed radically different theories on the adaptation of the Portuguese to the Tropics and the results of this contact. In the words of the author, this ‘new civilisation’, generated in the ‘contact zone’, is the luso-tropical. What Germano Correia, in Portuguese India, tried to ignore, and what Mendes Correia criticised as proof of colonial failure – the mulatto – was elevated by Gilberto Freyre in Brazil as proof of the superiority of Portuguese colonialism. According to Freyre, the Portuguese were a people caught between Europe and Africa, with a unique aptitude for living in harmony with peoples from the Tropics and for playing a mediating role: The Portuguese man is great for the following magnificent peculiarity: he belongs to a lusotropical people. Every time he has tried to be a European in the Tropics, like the English, Belgians, and French, a white lord among tropical peoples of colour, he has been reduced to a ridiculous caricature of those imperial nations. Imperial nations which are today in rapid disintegration. For there are no longer people of colour who are inclined to be a forever defenceless reserve of labour, almost an animal in the service of white exploiters.20

What had been viewed as a weak point in Portuguese colonialism – from the nineteenth century European (and particularly British) imperialist perspective, which saw Portugal as a country that had failed to modernise, just as it had failed in its colonial mission – was, in Freyre’s model, elevated to an original status that legitimised a new world order: the lusotropical order.21 The new concept that he introduced was an ennoblement of inter-racial sexual relationships, using the traditional framework of the sugar plantation system as his reference point. This was the system in which he had been born, and which he studied in landmark publications such as Casa Grande & Senzala (Slaves & Masters, published in 1933), which analyses the patriarchal rural society of the sugar plantations that resulted from the slave trade. There, slaves and masters, blacks and whites, lived together, around the hearth, and it was this environment that

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produced the mulattoes comprising the dominant element in Brazil’s racial make-up. As rightly pointed out by several of the authors who have prefaced his works,22 Freyre looks at the sugar plantations from the Casa Grande – that is, from the master’s perspective – and not from the Senzala – the slaves’ point of view. On the other hand, it is important to stress that Freyre was trained in cultural anthropology of the time, and was in fact reacting to a social anthropology from the North (particularly from the US where he studied) that considered the southern hemisphere, and particularly his Brazil, as a ‘little world of no importance’.23 At the same time, he was reacting to some of the foundational narratives of the Brazilian nation that associated mulattoes with racial degeneration, and viewed their ‘bleaching’ as the only possible redemption.24 As Cristiana Bastos shows, in Brazil, scientific racism was interpreted in a sui generis fashion to argue that it was possible to diminish the supposedly harmful effects of mixing the races by promoting marriage between whites and mulattoes; for that reason, immigration from Europe was encouraged.25 Freyre rejects this notion, preferring instead to see Brazil’s mixed racial make-up as its strength. According to Freyre: ‘the product of that hybridity was no longer deemed to be the fruit of an original sin and condemned to marginality. Rather, it became the happy result of a fertile and creative hubris, destined to spawn an entirely new civilisation.’26 For good or ill, Brazil is probably the most racially mixed country in the world, and Luanda the most hybrid city in Africa. This may explain how this geographical region, united by the Atlantic and an experience of Portuguese colonisation, has given birth to the dangerous, if reassuring, concept of a ‘cordial colonialism’ that stands at the heart of the theory of lusotropicalism. This theory views miscegenation as an absence of racism, when in practice, it was a different kind of racism.27 The Estado Novo (New State), which took power in Portugal after the military coup of 1926 and was headed by Salazar from 1932 until his death in 1968,28 was based on nationalist policies, grounded in the concepts of national unity and empire. The cornerstone of the intended national resurrection was a return to the original values of the Portuguese imperial adventure. These shored up, within an imperial ideology, the notions of the ecumenical Christian vocation of the Portuguese and an unconditional unity between the metropolis and its colonies. Salazar’s foreign policy was based on the conviction that Europe only ‘conspired against Portugal’. During his long rule, Europe marginalised Portugal, and Portugal, in turn, marginalised itself from Europe. The resulting isolation, grounded in an uncompromising belief in the territorial integrity of Portugal and its colonies, was ideologically rooted. It assumed that the uniqueness of Portuguese identity could be fulfilled only from within the history that had helped to shape that identity.29 After the Second World War, following the emergence of the Asian and African liberation movements, the status of Portugal’s colonial territories was called into question in international in-

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stitutions such as the United Nations. The Constitutional Revision of 1951, provoked by foreign pressure but also by some internal pressure, changed the surface appearance of Portuguese imperialism. Thus, a ‘history of five centuries of colonisation of which we should be proud’ was – overnight – rewritten as ‘five centuries of relations between different cultures and peoples’, to quote an important Salazar cabinet minister, Caeiro da Matta.30 A colonial society became ‘pluriracial’. The nation that had been imperial suddenly became ‘pluricontinental’, and the colonies were renamed ‘overseas provinces’ – a term that had, in fact, been used in the past. Portugal’s special civilising mission became the equally special mission of ‘integration in the Tropics’. The adaptation of the theories and discourse of Freyre was swift and so was their ensuing promotion via the media, providing a philosophy to support and lend credibility to the ‘changes’ of 1951. Freyre’s work made it possible to continue to claim that Portuguese colonisation was unique, while at the same time making it appear scientific and modern. The element allowing for the adaptation of the Brazilian discourse of lusotropicalism by Portuguese discourse under Salazar is the messianic tone that proclaims the ‘new order’ through which Portugal could be reborn.31 At the time, Europe was engaged in the decolonisation process and caught between the economic hegemony of the United States and the ‘communist threat’ of the USSR. In foreign policy, lusotropicalism, appropriated by the Estado Novo, would first be used to defend the concept of an ‘Iberian bastion’32 suspicious of a democratic Europe. It would subsequently be used to articulate a defence of the whole of Europe, whose survival was threatened by the emergence, at the end of the Second World War, of the two superpowers. It claimed that the future of Europe and of Western Christian civilisation could only be guaranteed through the creation of a Euro-African space. Portugal, the pluricontinental nation and creator of multiracial societies – Brazil being Freyre’s paradigm – was once again at the centre of the world. It signalled the creation of a ‘EuroAfrica’, and skirted round the problem of de-colonisation. The long-lasting Salazar regime co-opted Freyre’s lusotropicalism as a ‘magic formula’33, in response to increasing international criticism of its continued support for colonialism in the late 1950s and 1960s. In fact, there was more to this image of racial harmony, based on inequality, than Salazar’s mainstream racism. Appropriating Freyre’s lusotropicalism for political expediency, when in 1961 armed resistance movements rose against the Portuguese in Angola, Salazar ordered the immediate, brutal crushing of the liberation movements without even a hint of an inclination to negotiate. So began a thirteen-year war fought on three fronts, as Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau quickly followed Angola’s example. However, according to the regime, Portugal was not at war but merely exerting its sovereignty since Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were integral parts of Portugal. Concomitant with the regime’s view of ‘cordial colonialism’, this was also a ‘cordial war’. Thus, in a very informal way, Portugal

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encouraged the wives and families of military officers serving in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau to accompany them – something that was unheard of in other colonial wars in Africa. In its publications, the National Women’s Organisation declared full support for the role of those women who went to Africa with their husbands, normally spending two years there during which time they were charged with the mission of ‘improving the black woman’.34 Such a mission, conceived in the traditional corporatist terms of the regime’s ideology, combined service to the family with the nation’s civilising mission, in what can be viewed as an attempt to provide support for the Portuguese military. By transferring the family unit to Africa, the Estado Novo seems to pursue its policy of colonising through the family, at the same time offering greater stability to those whom it displaced from Portugal to fight a war, by allowing them to share their day-to-day experiences with their families. While this strategy helped to stabilise populations, particularly in the capitals and main cities, it triggered a policing of the moral and political values to which the Estado Novo subscribed, and so inter-racial liaisons began to be avoided, at least among the elites. It also gave a younger Portuguese generation the chance to experience Africa, not as a distant place where one went to war, but rather as a place where one lived with one’s family, where one worked, where one’s children were born and educated and where opportunities for work not available in the metropolis could be enjoyed. It encouraged people not just to go to Africa, but also to stay in Africa; in other words, to fuse emigration, colonisation and waging war. Today, when many of these military wives discuss this episode in their lives, they claim to have been unaware of the manipulation of which they may have been agents. They rarely feel that there was a deliberate, thought out policy – and, in fact, we cannot state that there was a deliberate policy to that effect – but they recognise that their presence gave an air of ‘normality’ to a highly abnormal situation, that is, to a colonial war.35 The discourse of lusotropicalism, which continues in some quarters to this day, never really signposted a cultural end to the Portuguese Empire. However, literary texts steeped in the experience of this colonial war did herald an end, even if they were generated by the ideological intolerance of a regime that supported and relied on war. Of course, official discourse was cloaked in a lusotropicalism that converted the war into a sovereign mission, and for which mutilation or death was a heroic gesture in defence of the homeland. But the experience of war undid that officially sanctioned fiction, and initiated a textual and literal journey home to Portugal. Indeed, the military coup of 25 April 1974 was a simultaneous liberation for Portugal and its colonies, directly attributable to the military’s experience of war in Africa. The ‘romantic’ result of those thirteen years of war, which had taken nearly one million Portuguese to Africa, is registered on the skin of the many mulattoes distributed throughout Portugal as well as the former colonies, as well as in the many literary works that are usually classed as ‘literature of the colonial wars’.

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Luso Love in a Time of Colonial War In Jornada de África (African Journey), a novel from the 1960s colonial wars in Africa, Manuel Alegre36 evokes a revised version of Camões’s love affair with the slave Bárbara. The Bárbara in African Journey is in the process of becoming free, as she is a member of an Angolan liberation movement (MPLA – Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola)37. However, she is in love with a rebellious officer of the Portuguese colonial army. To quote the novel, she is free, but is ‘colonised by love’, while he is ‘captivated’ by love. The book’s title, African Journey, signals an immediate intertextual link to the 1607 text African Journey by Jerónimo de Mendonça. Mendonça’s text was an account of the 1578 military expedition to Alcácer Quibir in North Africa, where a dramatic battle lost Portugal its King D. Sebastião and a large part of its nobility and middle class, leading to its annexation by Spain and its loss of status among the nations of Europe. This shared title activates an allegory extensively deployed in Portuguese literature and in Manuel Alegre’s own poetry, which fuses the historical and mythical image of Alcácer Quibir with the territories in conflict during the colonial wars. Such an equation confirms the poet’s vision of this war as the marker of an end. In the novel, Sebastião, the hero, and his companions in arms, whom Manuel Alegre renders perfect inheritors of the tradition of Camões, are fighting a colonial war in Angola. This revisitation of the mythical space of Alcácer Quibir was already explicit in Alegre’s poems,38 where it takes on a double meaning encapsulated in the myth. First, it makes the territory at war into a symbolic space of national loss with no possibility for recuperation. Second, it opens up the archetypal place of rebirth through the return of the king. Through the use of this allegory, an ambiguous time is represented, as was indeed lived in Luanda and Lisbon during the years of the colonial wars. The subversion contained in this strategy of intertextual intersection of times, spaces and personalities in the fabric of Alegre’s poetry39 takes on a greater and more prominent role in the novel, due to its narrative structure in the form of a prose chronicle written by a poet. The poet’s style opens up a rich texture of polyphonic meanings, in a novel in which several personalities are rolled together, and where they also dissolve into other characters (e.g., Sebastião and the Poet). Furthermore, the amalgam of several times and spaces allows for the dramatisation of a jigsaw puzzle of subversive identifications between Sebastião and the king who disappeared on the shores of Alcácer Quibir, the Angolan Bárbara who is a militant of the MPLA, and Camões’s Bárbara; between planes and boats, steeds and jeeps, troop carriers and cavalry loads; and between Luanda and Alcácer Quibir. In addition to its strategy of textual fragmentation combined with historical reference, African Journey also contains textual fragments in parentheses, as a way of communicating to the reader the opinions of the movements on the other side of the war. These textual fragments relay the thoughts of Domingos

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da Luta, an MPLA guerrilla fighter. Related to these fragments are the letters between Sebastião and Bárbara that reveal, through their intimacy, the impossible love and disintegration of Sebastião. He seeks a precarious grounding in textual quotations from poets and novelists, whose voices prolong his interrogation of this anti-epic time when love is lacking. Added to these contemporary voices, which plot out alternative discourses to the authoritarian master narrative through which the nation’s identity was conceived, are clippings from newspapers, which Sebastião reads to keep up to date. This textual alignment of multiple voices not only tries to counter the monoglossia of the regime, but it also tries to create an alternative decentred discourse located in a ‘somewhere’ where all of the action seems to be taking place, revealing the emptiness at the centre (that is, Portugal, which ordered the war). Thus, Manuel Alegre’s African Journey repeats the book previously written by Jerónimo de Mendonça, the chronicler of the battle of Alcácer Quibir, but in a different mode.40 It is no longer just the chronicle of an expedition to restore empire that led to death, but also the chronicle of a struggle for liberty. In Alegre’s African Journey, Sebastião is not a sovereign destined to create a myth, but a rebel officer sent to Angola, destined to deconstruct the myth.41 Similarly, the writer Jerónimo de Mendonça, the homonym of the writer of the other African Journey, is an anti-colonialist resident of Luanda, destined to write a different chronicle. Sebastião’s companions – Jorge Albuquerque Coelho, Alvito, Duarte de Meneses, Vasco da Silveira, Miguel de Noronha and other names associated with the battle of Alcácer Quibir – are reincarnated as protagonists in another fatal battle, and are destined to be the heroes of another epic. In this way, personal and national identities are interrogated and are confronted by the experience of lived realities. The narrator undertakes a voyage from self to Other, and, following Camões’s example, he does it through the love of a woman. Throughout his wanderings in Africa, Sebastião falls in love with the Other, with whatever Portugal designates as barbarous – to draw again on the onomatopoeia which in Greek tradition signals sub-humanity, a sub-humanity that Camões had already denied in his Endechas a Bárbara Escrava (Lamentations for a slave called Bárbara). Bárbara, in African Journey, is the sister-in-law of the writer Jerónimo de Mendonça who introduces Sebastião to the world of Angolan poets and explains to him the position of whites in Angola, caught between the heritage and privilege associated with their colonial side and an African identity. Bárbara is a ‘daughter of the empire’, with a Goan father and a Cabo-Verdean mother, while self-identifying as an Angolan woman and member of the MPLA. Sebastião describes her through the eyes of someone from the metropolis who has been seduced, in a discourse fraught with lusotropicalism. She is the one who confronts him with his unsustainable double position, as a member of the colonial army and an anti-colonialist, telling him that coincidences do not cancel out differences and that history does not repeat itself but rather evolves:

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Mixed blood, Sebastião thinks, only the greatest of mixing could achieve such beauty; Europe, Africa, Asia. Long live the great Lusiad journey. ‘Our culture is a culture of miscegenation.’42

Manuel Alegre refashions in his MPLA member, Bárbara, Camões’s cativa (captive), who centuries before had seduced and rendered cativo (captivated) the poet Camões, inducing him to write the verses cited by Sebastião. In another strategic echo of Camões, in Alegre’s novel love is the guide to knowledge, giving ‘understanding to things that did not have it’.43 As they discuss their identities in the their first encounter, Sebastião, despite being anti-colonialist, is blatantly confronted with his position as a lieutenant in the fascist colonial army. In their dialogue, not only are the political and geographical camps of both of them defined, but also their different memories of a history in common, which determine the different centres of their identities. Sebastião is a European Portuguese, who fought against the regime. Bárbara, the daughter of empire, was fighting for a country. In wartime, Bárbara was the Other. But in the time frame within which Sebastião insists on recuperating her for himself – the time of Sebastião the rebel and fighter against the dictatorship, now more or less adrift in this conflictridden land – Bárbara’s love is transformed into hope for a possible regeneration, saving him from his doomed position. However, the time in which they live and over which they have no control is still one of division, and the exit to different destinations imposes itself. Bárbara will leave for exile and Sebastião for Nambuangongo/Alcácer Quibir. Only the son of Sebastião, desired by Bárbara, might bring the sign of a new time, sought by both – a transnational time. Bárbara wanted to create such a time in the midst of the barracks where Sebastião was on duty – a barracks she invades with her love and her subversive power. That power shows both the fragility of the Portuguese forces, who, in the middle of Luanda, allowed themselves to be penetrated by the enemy represented by her, and also the greater subversion of wartime by love. However, Bárbara’s desire was not realised against the troubled backdrop of a war between opposing sides, which immediately interrupts them with more deaths, amputations, persecutions and departures in this ‘time to which we are condemned’,44 as Bárbara writes in her last letter to Sebastião. Through it, the last chance to save Sebastião and, along with him, the country seems to be denied. However, the love of Bárbara, through its alchemic power, came to transform ‘appetite’ into ‘reason’, to draw on Helder Macedo’s interpretation of Camões’s lyrical poetry,45 giving meaning to Sebastião’s mission, and leading him to transpose the lack of logic underpinning a futile war into the logic of a war for liberation. Through the narrative, Bárbara emerges as the symbol of Sebastião’s confrontation with himself and with his own history. The deep meaning of the love between Bárbara and Sebastião is a symbol of the lesson for all humanity learnt from the conflict, and a call for reconciliation, love and

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peace, and to oppose division, lovelessness and war, as indeed was inscribed in The Lusiads: Camões had clearly shown that it was Tethys’s love for Vasco da Gama, and not conquest, that made the Portuguese sea the mare nostrum. We learn in the novel that Sebastião ‘entered alone deep into the forest, god knows in the direction of what’. But as the poet continues ‘There is still the sea (Dom Sebastião will appear in a large boat behind the islet in Vila Franca do Campo)’.46 It is on this sea, which unites rather than separates, that the imaginary of the future nation will be constructed, a nation that, following Camões, only love will bring about, as Alegre later wrote in Com que Pena – Vinte Poemas para Camões (Twenty Poems to Camoens): From Barbara came that missing difference After her, language was no longer just one colour From Barbara a being herself she was the Other Lady of ours sacred blackness Before Barbara Europe was so little We are the captive, not Barbara.47

Europe and the Shadow of Former Empire The literature of the colonial wars that appeared after 25 April 1974 is a literature of return and not of departure, of loss and not discovery, of emptying rather than replenishment, of guilt and remorse instead of exaltation and heroics. The image of Portugal emerging from this literature is one of Portugal disintegrating bit by bit in Africa. This explains the obsessive recourse by some poets and prose writers to issues of personal identity and the rediscovery of the Portuguese subject, against a backdrop of violent physical, psychological and social rupture inflicted on all sides: Portuguese and African. Contrary to the time of Camões’s Bárbara, the inability to consummate relationships between African women and Portuguese men is the dominant note in the literature of this period. Likewise, an intransitivity that echoes the zeitgeist into which the characters were born and the war that separated them haunts the diversity of literary relationships. After 25 April 1974, Portugal changed from a ‘colonising nation to a country that created new nations’.48 This transformation provided the necessary foundation to redeem Portugal’s young democracy as, in Portugal, post-colonialism is intimately linked to post-Salazarism, the birth of the democratic process and Portugal’s European dimension. Unlike the nineteenth century, when the Portuguese exorcised the loss of one empire (Brazil) by recourse to another (Africa), the key image of the 25 April movement was the end of Portugal as an imperial nation. This new image of the nation quickly found expression in the first post-Revolution works on the colonial wars, where we can read ‘For me, Portugal is over’; ‘Guinea has disappeared. It has been wiped off the map’; ‘Mozambique is finished’; ‘Angola has ceased to exist’.49

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Portugal’s entry into the European Economic Community, in 1986, may initially have been viewed as the volte-face necessary for rapid relief from imperial traumas; it neutralised the vague dream of reconnecting with that emotive, cultural geography linking Portugal to the image of its former empire. It was also the political mechanism through which Portugal could quickly pass into the European, post-colonial era. Lourenço has noted that it was not merely a case of the Portuguese going into Europe; Europe had also arrived in Portugal. The famous slogan of the time – ‘Europe With Us’ – highlights this subtlety. By changing the direction of the search, which for centuries had originated in the periphery and been toward the centre, the Portuguese were able to sit comfortably at the table of European nations. As Sousa Santos emphasises, the slogan contained the promise that Portugal could ‘construct a democratic and stable society, a society like those in Western Europe’.50 Europe nurtured Portugal’s fledgling democracy, ensuring that it followed the Western model. Concomitantly, Portugal projected a European identity, which it reconciled with its nostalgia for the empire. Manuel Alegre sums up well Portugal’s position as a country with no empire and on the geographical, cultural and economic periphery of Europe. That position could be sublimated by emphasising the nation’s different relationship to Europe, a difference seen as a value based on a unique imperial experience: We have something to take to Europe too, our own historical experience, and the great richness we have – our culture and our extraordinarily special relationship with other peoples and other continents – and we are going to take to Europe a conceptualisation that is open to the world, that respects others, rather than being Eurocentric, along with the capacity to understand the differences of others. At the end of the day, that is the special singularity of our identity and of our culture; that is the contribution that we must take to Europe.51

If this sublimation were to be realised, would other dreams remain suspended between the image of that distant empire and Europe? After Portugal’s integration into Europe, in the late 1990s, the concept of lusophonia, manifested in the Community of Officially Portuguese-speaking countries and in Portuguese official discourse, became the founding myth for this particular ‘post-lusotropical’52 European democracy. Literature, architecture, art, European cultural programmes established in Portugal, exhibitions (such as Expo98 in Lisbon), the names of new developments and shopping malls all register the memory of the Portuguese seaward drift and of the contacts to which it led, as the hallmark of Portugal in Europe.53 This is ‘lusotropically’ embodied in the ‘particular aptitude of the Portuguese to contact with the tropical peoples’, as evidenced in the exemplary legal text that instituted the school inter-exchange programme, Entre Culturas (Between Cultures), promoted by the Ministry of Education and financed by the European Community.54 Portugal’s peripheral geographic position led it, in the sixteenth century, to be the first European empire. This frontier geography had been poetically

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elevated to an identity in Camões’s famous verses, which put the Lusitanian kingdom at the head of Europe, in what was the first European modernity, one with a markedly Iberian flavour. Its peripheral position in Europe from the 1950s to the 1970s allowed it to be the last European empire. The colonial wars, to which this peripheral condition led Portugal and its empire, sought to defend the fiction that Portugal was a centre. However, at the same time, ‘Africa becomes a mirror in which the unspoken and undisguised face of Portugal is reflected.’55 Therefore, the war would also undo the fiction and initiate the journey home to Portugal and to Europe. Taking up a suggestion advanced by Eduardo Lourenço, one can wonder whether, for the Portuguese of today, lusophonia might not be the new Portuguese ‘Rose-coloured map’, where all of the real empires of the past continue in Portuguese dreams, shining as both fantasy and phantom in Portuguese souls.56 Bárbara, the historic image of a conquered Africa and of Portuguese love for the continent, continues to raise its head among us in the space between the fantasy and phantom of an empire under whose shadow the Portuguese still live. But in fact, and as Isabel Castro Henriques argues, ‘without the remotest recourse to lusotropicalism’, the consequences of the colonial enterprise can never expunge the demands of prolonged cohabitation, something that alters the past, while sketching out the future.57 The future would be a politically, socially, economically and culturally European one, but historically and culturally anchored in the South Atlantic, as metaphorically encapsulated by José Saramago in Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft), which imagines Portugal and Spain splitting off the European landmass and drifting toward the South Atlantic.

Notes 1. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘O Estado, as relações salariais e o bem-estar social na semiperiferia: o caso português’, in Portugal. Um Retrato Singular, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Porto: Afrontamento/Centro de Estudos Sociais, 1993), 17–56, here 20. 2. All translations from the original Portuguese are my own, unless otherwise indicated. ‘Ca da ua parte nos cerca o mar de outra havemos muro no reino de Castela’; Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta (Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1992), 52. See also Luís Filipe F.R. Thomaz and Jorge Santos Alves, ‘Da Cruzada ao Quinto Império’, in A Memória da Nação, eds Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1991), 81–164. 3. Luís Camões, Os Lusíadas (Lisbon: Instituto Camões, 1992), 3: 20. 4. Ibid., 1: 50. 5. Ibid., 1: 3. 6. Ibid., 10: 145. 7. Helder Macedo, ‘Love as Knowledge. The Lyric Poetry of Camões’, Portuguese Studies 14 (1998): 51–64, here 51. 8. Ibid., 60. 9. To quote the ‘Lamentations for a slave called Bárbara’. Cf. Luís Camões, ‘Endechas a Bárbara Escrava’, in Lírica (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1980), 82 and 85. 10. Macedo, ‘Love as Knowledge’, 61.

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11. Quoted in Clive Willis, ‘The Correspondance of Camões (with Introduction, Commentaries and Translation)’, Portuguese Studies 11 (1995): 15–61, here 61. 12. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Entre Próspero e Caliban. Colonialismo, pós-colonialismo e inter-identidade’, in Entre Ser e Estar – Raízes, Percursos e Discursos da Identidade, eds Maria Irene Ramalho and António Sousa Ribeiro (Porto: Afrontamento, 2001), 23–85, here 26. 13. Ibid. 14. Ana Olimpia Vaz de Caminha was a late nineteenth-century Angolan woman of the Creole bourgeoisie of Luanda, Angola. She was born a slave and became one of the country’s richest women by marrying a slave trader. She is the main female character in the novel Nação Crioula (Creole) by the Angolan writer Jose Eduardo Agualusa. 15. Christian Geffray, ‘Le lusotropicalisme comme discours de l’amour dans la servitude’, Lusotopie (1997): 361–372. 16. Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho, Expedição Portugueza ao Muatiânvua 1884–1888. Meteorologia-Climatologia-Colonisação (Lisbon: Typographia do jornal ‘As Colónias Portuguezas’, 1892), 2. 17. António Ennes, 1946, 192, quoted in Santos, ‘Entre Próspero e Caliban’, 67. 18. Cristiana Bastos, ‘Um lusotropicalismo às avessas. Colonialismo científico, aclimação e pureza racial em Germano Correia’, in Fantasmas e Fantasias no Imaginário Português Contemporâneo, eds Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Ana Paula Ferreira (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2003), 227–253, here 230f. 19. Quoted ibid., 244. 20. Gilberto Freyre, Aventura e Rotina. Sugestões de uma Viagem à Procura das Constantes Portuguesas de Carácter e Ação (Lisbon: Livros do Brasil, n.d.), 10. See also on the same page: This is the aspect of Portuguese greatness that particularly attracts me: they are almost an entire nation of precursors to the French Rimbauds, or the British Lawrences of Arabia, or the American Lafcadios or even the German Humboldts, in their realization of a vocation that has in its sights the destiny of an entire transnational civilization: the lusotropical civilization of which Brazil is a part. Through my contact with the Portuguese Orient and with Lusophone Africa, with some of the main Portuguese islands in the Atlantic, with the Algarve which is almost Africa, with the Alentejo which is half-Moorish, with a Portugal that from Trás-osMontes to Minho, not to mention the Beiras, dreams of the tropics, of the sun and the heat, and disenchanted Moorish girls through women of colour, I was able to confirm a reality that I had only guessed at years ago, and predicted in some studies and contemplations. 21. See Cristiana Bastos, ‘Tristes Trópicos e Alegres Luso-Tropicalismos. Das notas de viagem em Lévi-Strauss e Gilberto Freyre’, Análise Social 33, nos. 2–3 (1998): 415–432; Bastos, ‘Um lusotropicalismo às avessas’; Cláudia Castelo, ‘O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo’ – o Lusotropicalismo e a Ideologia Colonial Portuguesa (1933–1961) (Porto: Afrontamento, 1998). 22. Cf. Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande y Senzala. Formacion de la familia brasilena bajo el regimen de la economia patriarcal, Prologue and Chronology by Darcy Ribeiro (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977); and Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e senzala. Formação da família brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarcal, presented by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 50th ed. (São Paulo: Global Editora e Distribuidora, 2005). 23. Bastos, ‘Tristes Trópicos e Alegres Luso-Tropicalismos’, 427. 24. See Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões. Campanha dos Canudos (Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1957), especially the chapter ‘Um Parênteses Irritante’; Aluísio de Azevedo, O Mulato (Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, n.d.). On lusotropicalism see Déjanira Couto, Armelle Enders, and Yves Léonard, eds, ‘Lusotropicalisme. Idéologies coloniales et identités nationales dans les mondes lusophones’, dossier in Lusotopie (1997) (Paris: Karthala): 195–478; Castelo, ‘O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo’; Bastos, ‘Tristes Trópicos e Alegres Luso-Tropicalismos’; Yves Léonard, ‘O Império Colonial Salazarista’, in História da Expansão Portuguesa, eds Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, vol. 5 (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1999), 10–30; Yves Léonard, ‘Salazarisme et lusotropicalisme, histoire d’une appropriation’, Lusotopie (1997): 211–226; Miguel Vale de Almeida, Um Mar da Cor da Terra. Raça, Cultura e Política da Identidade (Oeiras: Celta, 2001).

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25. Bastos, ‘Um lusotropicalismo às avessas’, 249. 26. Ibid., 250. 27. As the British historian Charles Boxer pointed out in the 1960s in his book Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) and recently Boaventura de Sousa Santos showed in ‘Entre Próspero e Caliban’, here 41. 28. Salazar died in 1970 and his successor, Marcello Caetano, failed to live up to early expectations of reform and was overthrown by the military coup of 25 April 1974. 29. História de Portugal, directed by José Mattoso, vol. 7: O Estado Novo (1926–1974), ed. Fernando Rosas (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1994), 297. 30. Quoted in Castelo, ‘Congressos e conferências culturais’, in Dicionário de História do Estado Novo, eds J. M. Brandão Brito and Fernando Rosas (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1996), 191f. José Caeiro da Matta was a diplomat and a minister in Salazar’s regime: Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1933 to 1935 and from 1947 to 1950, and Minister for Education from 1944 to 1947. In 1960, he was the director of the Commemorations of Henry the Navigator, and in charge of all publications regarding the event. 31. See Castelo, ‘O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo’, 37. 32. See António José Telo, ‘O fim do ciclo africano do império’, in Portugal na Transição do Milénio. Colóquio Internacional, eds J. M. Brandão Brito and Fernando Rosas (Lisbon: Fim de Século, 1998), 327–355, here 335. 33. Ana Calapez Gomes, ‘Aspectos da ideologia na época das descolonisações’, Vértice 13 (April 1989): 70–75, here 70. 34. Quoted by Irene Flusner Pimentel, ‘Movimento Nacional Feminino’, in Dicionário de História do Estado Novo, eds J. M. Brandão Brito and Fernando Rosas, vol. 2 (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1996), 639. 35. These considerations are based on a study the author is undertaking about the presence of Portuguese women in Africa during the years of the Colonial War, which includes interviews with women who experienced such a situation. Cf. Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, ‘África no Feminino. As mulheres portuguesas e a Guerra Colonial’ and ‘Depoimentos: a presença e a participação feminina na Guerra Colonial’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 68 (April 2004): 7–29 and 129–166, respectively. 36. At the time Manuel Alegre published African Journey, 1989, he was an irreverent Socialist Member of Parliament. However, in the memory of most of his generation, who had been condemned to war and to exile, he was the poet who had published Praça da Canção (1965) and O Canto e as Armas (1967). In these poems that were read, copied and chanted by so many Portuguese, we find an accentuated rhythm and the sense of an epic, the voice of a collective sense of national damnation that the poet tried to reverse. It had been a charismatic call to arms from a poet with outstanding credentials as an opponent of the fascist regime. Manuel Alegre was the first student from Coimbra University to articulate a public discourse against the Colonial Wars. He was also the first army official to be arrested by the Portuguese secret police (PIDE) as a result of a failed uprising in Angola. He was an important exile in Paris and Algeria, where he ran ‘Rádio Liberdade’. Furthermore, he was the only Portuguese person to speak at the funeral of Amílcar Cabral. 37. The MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) was, with UPA (Union of the Peoples of Angola), later FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for Total Independence of Angola), one of the three liberation movements in Angola. After the 1975 independence, the MPLA was internationally recognised as the representative of the Angolan people. An almost 30 year civil war started soon after independence, which was fought between the MPLA government and UNITA. After a peace agreement and particularly the death of Jonas Savimbi in 2002, the MPLA shares power with UNITA in the government. 38. See, for example, the poems in the sections ‘Nambuangongo meu amor’ and ‘Três Canções com Lágrimas e Sol para um Amigo que Morreu na Guerra’ from Praça da Canção, and the poems in the sections ‘Continuação de Alcácer Quibir’, from O Canto e as Armas, in Manuel Alegre, Obra Poética (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1999), 125–136 and 173–183, respectively.

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39. This strategy was already used in Manuel Alegre’s poetry in ‘Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta’, in which a personal account of his departure for Angola is juxtaposed next to the departure of the Portuguese for Ceuta at the beginning of colonial expansion. Similarly, in ‘Crónica de El-Rei D. Sebastião’, the experiences of damnation lived by the poet in the ambushes between Quipedro/Nambuangongo are juxtaposed to the damnation of the Portuguese army on the beaches of Alcácer Quibir. Cf. Alegre, Obra Poética, 382–387 and 414–418, respectively. 40. Roberto Vecchi, ‘La guerra coloniale tra genere e tema: Jornada de África, di Manuel Alegre’, in Dalle Armi ai Garofani. Studi sulla letteratura della Guerra Coloniale, eds Manuel Simões and Roberto Vecchi (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1995), 51–58, here 55. 41. Ibid. 42. The dialogue continues: ‘Our father was Goan, our mother was Cape Verdean, and on our father’s side, we even have a Chinese grandmother.’ Sebastião could not contain himself ‘That captive who has captivated me’ ‘Without doubt. Because of her, my father called me Bárbara’… ‘It’s all the same chronicle’ Sebastião replied… ‘I am Angolan, and the liberty of Angola will be won by Angolans.’ ‘I am Portuguese, and I tell you that there will be no liberty in Angola while there is no liberty in Portugal.’ ‘Angolans are not just struggling against a regime. They are struggling for the right to independence.’ ‘MPLA.’ ‘Victory or death’, Bárbara replied ‘And I am the enemy, even if I am anti-colonialist.’ ‘You are a soldier.’ ‘And a resister.’ ‘That is a problem among the Portuguese. Here, you are part of the colonial army.’ Cf. Alegre, Jornada de África, 156f. and 162f. 43. Camões, Lírica, 462. 44. Alegre, Jornada de África, 198. 45. Macedo, ‘Love as Knowledge’, 61. 46. Alegre, Obra Poética, 551. 47. Ibid., 605. 48. Eduardo Lourenço, ‘Da ficção do Império ao império da ficção’, Diário de Notícias. Suplemento 10 Anos de Democracia (24 April 1984), 26. 49. Augusto Abelaira, Sem Tecto, Entre Ruínas (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1979), 199; Álamo Oliveira, Até Hoje. Memória de Cão (Lisbon: Ulmeiro, 1986), 73; António Lobo Antunes, Fado Alexandrino (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1989), 19; Rocha de Sousa, Angola 61 – uma crónica de guerra ou a visibilidade da última deriva (Lisbon: Contexto, 1999), 498. 50. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Pela Mão de Alice. O Social e o Político na Pós-Modernidade (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1996), 49 and 58. 51. Alegre interviewed by Brito Vintém, ‘Sou um filho da língua de Camões’, Notícias do Interior (July 1991), 16. 52. The expression is from Almeida, Um Mar da Cor da Terra – Raça. 53. For a long historical perception of this question see Francisco Bethencourt, ‘A Memória da Expansão’, in História da Expansão Portuguesa, eds Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, vol. 5 (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1999), 442–483. 54. The quotation continues: Portuguese culture, characterised by a deliberate universalism and by the multiple civilisational encounters which allowed the welcoming of the diverse, the understanding of the Other and the universal embrace of the particular, is an open and miscegenated culture, enriched by the wandering of a people set in a search of its whole dimensionality

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beyond its borders … Having achieved a fascinating pilgrimage of centuries, Portugal returns to the folds of the European continent and integrates itself in its original cultural space, contributing with its worldliness to the construction of an open, ecumenical Europe. Despacho Normativo n. 63/91, Ministry of Education. 55. David Robertson, ‘The Vision of Colony and Metropolis in Portuguese Colonial wars Literature’, in Literature and War, ed. David Bevan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 119–140, here 156. 56. Eduardo Lourenço, A Nau de Ícaro seguido de Imagem e Miragem da Lusofonia (Lisbon: Gradiva, 1999), here 177. 57. Isabel Castro Henriques, ‘A sociedade colonial em África. Ideologias, hierarquias, quotidianos’, in História da Expansão Portuguesa, eds Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, vol. 5 (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1999), 216–274, here 274.

CHAPTER

1 2

The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic SANDRA MASS

In the aftermath of the First World War, the concept of Raum (space) gained new importance in both German literature and political debates. Although it had already been present in the geopolitical and colonial planning for the ‘imperial infrastructure’, as the historian Dirk van Laak has recently shown, the synthesis of Raum and Volk (people) only became widely recognized publicly in the Weimar Republic.1 The geographic position of Germany, the handing over of territories in the wake of the Versailles Treaty and the loss of the German colonies were all lamented in post-war discourses on the ‘national narrowness’ by almost all of the political camps. The front-line soldier of the First World War and main author of the ‘soldierly literature’ of the Weimar Republic, Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), for example, put it this way: ‘In our time the borders have become so narrow in every sense, that everywhere one has the desire to blow them up.’2 Jünger formulated an active and aggressive attitude toward the border question, whereas most of the other commentators described Germany as a conquered nation and as a defence community. The most obvious indicator of this perception was the success of the book Volk ohne Raum (People without Space) published in 1926 and written by the colonial author Hans Grimm (1875–1959). On its publication, this book about the former German colony Deutsch-Südwestafrika (German Southwest Africa) gained a public beyond the author’s usual readership, who was then heard throughout German society.3 Its title became a political slogan of everyday life and an exceptional semantic carrier in all of the fields that concerned themselves with the question of Raum, for instance geopolitics.4 Furthermore, in the conservative and National Socialist use of the concept of Raum and Lebensraum, respectively, the East Notes for this section begin on page 246.

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signified the representation of Slavic and Bolshevik threats toward the German people.5 Alongside the nationalist fixation on one’s ‘own’ borders and spatial limits, there existed a political and mental clinging to the old monarchic and imperialist system. This mindset of eternally looking backward was to become a fundamental problem of the Weimar Republic, as more progressive and democratic forces did not seriously fight against this mentality and ideology. The racist connection between Volk and Raum could be established in the course of the Republic’s history and became one of the key concepts of the National Socialists. The propagandist literature and practice concerned with the national narrowness in the Weimar Republic focussed mainly on three border territories: firstly, in the Rhineland, one dealt with the propaganda that became known as the campaign against the ‘Black Horror’, directed against the stationing of African colonial soldiers in the territory under French occupation. Secondly, there was the East, the ‘bleeding border’, where marauding German Freikorps – paramilitary organisations – continued to fight against first the advancing Red Army and then against the Baltic nationalists. Thirdly, the revisionist colonial literature reached its climax in the Weimar Republic where overseas colonies envisaged as middle-term goals literally became ‘fantasy empires’.6 These border territories were described and illustrated in a substantial body of propaganda literature, novels, newspaper articles and autobiographies, whose authors represented almost the entire political landscape of the Weimar Republic, apart from the far left. They were high-ranking civil servants and military men, officers as well as generals and members of the Women’s movement and the Colonial movement. This essay concerns itself with the analysis of all three geographical frontiers, and stresses the phantasmagorical differences next to the similarity in their lamentation of the loss of territory.7 Beside the political claims made by the propaganda, this essay shows how the texts under review here can be understood as attempts at creating an ‘imagined community’ in post-war Germany. They were written to tell the reader where the border of the nation runs, or better, where it should be. This function of the propaganda was hardly made explicit; rather, it used gendered and sexual images of space and border to represent the political aim so widespread in the Weimar Republic. With the use of the allegory of sexuality, respectively non-legitimate forms of sexuality, to illustrate the loss of space, the former became a distinct sign to differentiate between oneself and the other, to mark the ‘alien’ and the menace emanating from it for the nation. Nevertheless, sexuality did not just serve as a metaphor, representing dominance and colonial rule, as Ann Laura Stoler notes: ‘It was a fundamental class and racial marker implicated in a wider set of relations of power.’8 The analysis of official and semi-official propaganda and colonial and martial remembrance literature offers insights into the relation between the nation seen as a body and gendered and racial concepts of sexuality.9 The concept of the Volkskörper (imagined community of bodies) contained

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an analogy between an individual body and a social body of a community – a transfer of physiological descriptions of the individual body onto the imagined image of the nation or the people. Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), a well-known geopolitician, gave a very lucid impression of the contemporary use of the analogy: in 1927, he compared the loss of territories with ‘unhealed burns in the outer skin of the Volkskörper’.10 Its use was not limited to the far right, but widely accepted in the Weimar public and political sphere. In the contexts of colonialism and occupation, sexuality and especially inter-racial sexuality, functioned as images and representations of national borders and its transgression. In the interpretation of contemporary racial-hygienic authors, for example, inter-racial sexuality caused pollution and degeneration of the Volkskörper. The concept stressed the necessity to defend itself against attacks from ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. Thus, inter-racial sexuality represented the most severe assault on the virility and health of a people as it is interpreted as contagious infection. While the common interpretation acknowledges the assumption that women are seen as the ones who posed the threat to the imagined community, this article underlines the importance of the concepts of male subjectivity and masculinity for the negotiation of post-war stability, following up on the results of feminist historians who have shown the link between the nation’s body and the female body.11 The three discourses on the national narrowness used different forms to talk about contagious infections of the Volkskörper in the realm of a frontier. This essay shows the different ways in which the relation between the categories of gender, sexuality and race were constructed and contested. Whereas the discursive use of sexuality in the sources under review here were to fix the images about who is virile, manly and white, or weak, feminised and black, respectively Slavic, they did at the time lead to an intermingling of these dualistic patterns. In accordance with the common assumption in Postcolonial Studies, that racial or ethnic identities as ‘Whites’ or ‘Blacks’, as ‘colonisers’ or ‘colonised’ are only supposedly fixed and stable, this essay enquires about the discursive forms in which these identities of the self were in danger and argues that sexuality itself caused the irritations and failures in the discursive attempt of masculine subject formation.

‘Black Horror’ In the course of the French occupation of the Rhineland, African soldiers were stationed in Germany. In 1920, the men coming to the Rhineland were primarily from North Africa and Senegal and were made up of about 30 per cent of the French occupation troops. On the side of the Anti-Versailles Coalition, this was interpreted as an especially humiliating aspect of the conditions dictated to them by the treaty. They regarded it as a slap in the face at the hands

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of the victorious French. Thereafter, numerous groups and individuals took part in propaganda, by publishing pamphlets and organising public protest rallies against the ‘Black Horror’.12 It was especially through pamphlets and in the daily press that groups closest to the government launched the campaign on a massive scale.13 The ‘Black Horror’ campaign was particularly effective because it could rely on an acceptance of an inner disjunction among the German people and on the limitation of the geographical space, where France was named as the cause of the ‘German narrowness’. With the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine to France, the uncertain political future of the Saarland and above all with the occupation of the Rhineland, France was said to have seriously reduced the territory on which Germans were to live. At the centre of the texts about the ‘Black Horror’, one can find the racial and colonial perceptions of the character of the African male. The body of the colonial soldier was the primary criterion of distinguishing and separating him from the ‘White’ man. Africans were thought of as a primitive people and as creatures driven by instincts, animal-like, as ‘devoid of culture’,14 as ‘savages’,15 as ‘Barbarians’,16 and were constructed as a ‘race’ inferior to European civilisation: all representations stressed the instinctive nature of the colonial soldier, his sexual energy and the necessity to keep these energies in check. ‘The sexual drive of the Black soldier is simply devoid of all inhibition and doubly dangerous, because they see things differently from us’, writes Bruno Stehle in his brochure Die farbigen Fronvögte am Rhein (The Coloured Socage Bailiffs on the Rhine).17 The threat this represented was primarily projected onto German women, who were said to be the much-desired victims of the colonial troops. The rape of white women seemed to be the logical conclusion to draw from the unbridled sexuality of the Africans. However, the propaganda did not succeed in denying the fact that the African soldiers had not always been met with hostility and fear in the Rhineland. References to instances of consensual relationships between German women and the soldiers were too obvious. Love relationships, affairs and marriages between African soldiers and German women are testimony to an at least heterogeneous standpoint of the female population in the occupied areas.18 This much was also clear to various government bodies. The Governing President of Düsseldorf, concerned with female morality, wrote to the Supreme President (Oberpräsident) of the Rhine Province in 1921: ‘The growing proximity between the female youth and members of the occupation has started at the outset of the occupation. German citizens are outraged that a large number of women and girls have demeaned themselves by embarking upon intimate relationships immediately after the last German troops had left.’19 These women were described as ‘wenches forgetting their honour, immoral creatures’,20 as women who followed ‘their over-heated senses into sexual depravity’.21 They were then integrated into the campaign under the header of the ‘white shame’

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and ‘white disgrace’, respectively.22 This ‘fraternisation’ was lamented by all of the political groups of the propaganda movement and even by its opponents. Whereas right-wing newspapers and political formations thereby wanted to illustrate the downfall of the ‘white people’, the so-called ‘white shame’ was used on the political left as an argument where it was levelled at those accusing the colonial soldier of having a violent character.23 In the minds of those instigating the ‘Black Horror’ propaganda, the task of national education had to be expanded into controlling sexuality. Here, two threats had to be faced: the presence of the Africans in Germany and the behaviour of German women. Whereas the Africans were regarded as a danger per se, the behaviour of the German women in the Rhineland was viewed as a threat to the Volkskörper. Sexual relationships with African soldiers were seen as an indicator of their treason. Prostitutes, partners of African men and mothers of Afro-German children were therefore excluded from the national community. Individual sexual behaviour ultimately constituted Rassenschande (racial desecration), thus the Rheinische Frauenliga (Women’s League of the Rheinland) wrote in 1923: ‘Every country knows women who forget their honour, who barter their female dignity for money … We have every right to refuse to recognise as German women those women from which the blacks have to be protected.’24 While the condemnation of inter-racial sexuality alluded to the imagined threat to the racially conceptualised nation and can also be seen as an attempt to control female sexual behaviour, inter-racial sexuality was at the same time regarded as an indicator for the decline of the white man. The German man, thus the propagandists, was not able to safeguard the German women, and, consequently, the German nation.25 The obsession with inter-racial sexuality and the sexualised language by which acts of rape and non-respectable sexuality were described, were found in the semantic and allegorical analogies appearing in speeches made about the threatened Volkskörper. The ‘humiliation’ of the nation was described in anatomical metaphors. The assault on the female body in the texts therefore metonymically stood for the political situation and the generally prevalent idea of crisis and threat. The Versailles Treaty was interpreted as a ripping apart of the community, as a ‘shameful rape’, where the loss of certain German territories was compared to ‘the foreign powers tearing pieces out of the body of the German Reich’.26 As a final stage, the ‘total fragmentation of Germany’27 was imagined. Germany was seen as a ‘humiliated people’ with ‘a slur on its honour’, thus said the propagandist August Eberlein, using the same phrases for the rapes of women as for the description of the national situation.28 Evaluating the signing of the Versailles Treaty, the historian Gerhard Ritter said the German Reich would thereby be degraded to a ‘brutally exploited colony’.29 The women’s rights activist and nationalist Käte Schirrmacher went so far as wanting to discuss the situation in the Rhineland at the Anti-Slavery Congress

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in Rome (1921): ‘One would now be inclined to believe that an “Anti-Slavery Congress” would have to regard the occupation in the Rhineland by coloured troops as the intolerable slavery of white, Christian Germans. But far from it!’30 The propaganda against the African occupation soldiers mainly concerned the geographical space of the nation. With the allegorical representation of the ‘raped nation’ and the reference to the ‘tearing away of pieces of the national body’, the propagandists combined images of individual and collective bodies and connected them with the loss of Raum in the West. On a second level, the propagandists tried to overcome national restrictions and asked for international support. In their brochures, which were frequently translated into other languages and spread by diplomatic representatives in the respective countries, the German propaganda groups attempted to increase their influence by appealing to the ‘solidarity of the white race’, as done, for example, in 1921 in the anonymous propagandistic text Was droht dir, Europa? (What is threatening you, Europe?).31 It was in particular the US upon which the propagandistic attention focussed. But also the colonial powers of England and Italy became the target of such propaganda campaigns, by pointing out the endangered unity of Europe – endangered by France. France was accused of having gone against the ‘solidarity of the white race’ by stationing colonial soldiers in Germany, as written by the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung in 1921: ‘That coloured troops are employed as institutions watching over whites is indeed a cultural crime, a betrayal of the feeling of solidarity among white races, and a continuation of the politics of England and France that had already been started during the war.’32 With the prognosis that the arming of African men and the experience of superiority toward the German population would cause a destabilisation of the European colonial system in the nearest future, the propagandists aimed to widen the debate toward the European level. In 1921, Joseph Lang published his apocalyptic vision of the descent of the ‘white race’ in his brochure Die schwarze Schmach. Frankreichs Schande: ‘If the whole civilised world does not stand up soon and demands the withdrawal of the coloured troops, the day will come where the rolling avalanche cannot be hold.’33 In mirroring European whites, the propaganda presented a space where the disruptions and divisiveness of war could be overcome as long as France was excluded from this community. The ‘Black Horror’ campaign explicitly charged France of being a traitor of the attempt to create a community based on the White race that transgressed national borders. Edmund Dene Morel, the British Labour representative, held a similar position. His publications on the so-called ‘Black Horror’ gained full support by the German propagandists, especially because Morel, as a socialist, did not arouse public suspicion as a right-wing propagandist.34 He had already been popular for his engagement against the Belgium colonial politics and slavery in Congo.35 His warnings were directed to a European audience: ‘For the European democracy, this … introduction of African troops upon European soil is a terrific portent.’36

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For the propagandists, it was incontestable: belonging to the German nation meant being White. Additionally, sharing a bed with a Black occupation soldier could lead to an exclusion from the national community. Furthermore, the relation between being German and being White included the belief of belonging to the community of the ‘White race’. This link was not only valid in the views of right-wing politicians in the propaganda, but also left-wing authors supported the idea of a common European heritage, a community of a superior civilisation, which was seen under threat by the stationing of African soldiers on European ground. Male and female authors used the gender order to strengthen this racist imaginary. At the same time, though, the campaign was used to implement a discourse about legitimate forms of sexuality. The multitude of functions of the propaganda could be interpreted as one reason for the encompassing support of the campaign in the early Weimar years.

Balticum The post-war fantasies of Germany’s eastern border were of a different kind, even though they, too, were permeated with sexual imagery. After the end of the war, Freikorps soldiers remained in the area of the former Ober-Ost, which the German army had occupied and administrated during the war.37 In the period following the armistice, they, on the one hand, fought against leftist rebels within Germany, and tried to regain their former power by staging coups d’états. On the other hand, at the request of the government and with permission of the Allied forces, they were to ensure the retreat of German soldiers at the eastern frontier and to slow down the advancing Red Army. Approximately 20,000 to 40,000 soldiers crossed the border into the Balticum, as the soldiers now called the former Ober-Ost. After the retreat of the Red Army, the Freikorps also turned against the national movement of Lithuania and Poland; this period of conflict between armed militias resembled a civil war, with thousands of civilians dying in the process. This war was represented in an enormous quantity of memory and propaganda literature written in particular by fascist men in the 1920s and 1930s. In their books, authors and Freikorps soldiers, such as Ernst von Salomon or Rüdiger von der Goltz, created a ‘different world’, an anarcho-fascist ideal state, as is prominent in the works of Ernst Jünger, that was the exact opposite to bourgeois life.38 The way the soldiers depicted themselves, their conception of the soldierly man, can be traced back to the mindscape of the East as developed during the war, which has been described so clearly by the historian Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius in his book on the perception of the Eastern front.39 This mindscape consisted of images of an endless and hostile nature, boredom and the fight against the enemy.40 In German descriptions, the nature and landscape was riddled with dirt and diseases.41 In their war memory books, Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), field marshal during the war and, from 1925

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onward, President, and Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937), chief of general staff, wrote about the ‘uncivilised country’ in Ober-Ost.42 Dirt was a most prevalent synonym for Russia, and the task of cleaning it fell to the German soldiers occupying it. Directives told German soldiers to make themselves homes in Ober-Ost and thereby render visible German culture.43 From the perspective of German military and cultural politics, the goal was to import German culture and to remove the ‘dirt’ from a piece of earth described as rich and promising. Propaganda campaigns, orders and directives warned soldiers of visiting the brothel and of venereal diseases. So-called ‘dirty literature’ was to be eliminated by the occupation army itself. In the post-war period, countless autobiographical texts were published in which these mostly right-wing men transfigured the battles in the Balticum into a personal process of maturing, which finally led to the existence of the soldierly man. The literature provided the reader with an encompassing image of the male Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people), built by African colonialists, soldiers, Freikorps and the male youth, united in the yearning for more space.44 Descriptions of nature constructed the images of the space for which they were fighting. The landscape was seen as ‘a landscape of gentle and treacherous loveliness’, as a ‘lovely landscape’ where one seemed ‘always in fact to be standing on swaying swamp-ground’, as both tempting and repulsive.45 This ambivalence toward the place where the soldiers lived and fought for at least one year can be interpreted as a colonial trope. And in fact, some of the Freikorps had colonial plans for further German peasant settlement in the Balticum; others directly characterised the civil war in the East as ‘an expedition in the interior of Africa’.46 The visions the soldiers had were manifold: nevertheless, all shared the characteristics of ‘eternal soldierhood and onward-pressing spirit of colonisation’.47 Anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism and a distinct hate for the other woman characterise these texts. The women of the enemy army are described as savage and uncivilised female warriors. These women took a very active part in the ‘butcheries’, thus wrote Georg Heinrich Hartmann in his description of the time he spent in a Freikorps, published in 1929.48 The texts display an intense feeling of revulsion against Communist women, who, according to Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalytical study of the Freikorps-literature, symbolised ‘a horror’ that ‘had no name in the language of the soldierly man’.49 ‘At the hands of seductively smiling, gun-toting women’ one received ‘the longest death …, the most bitter and the most cruel which one could suffer’, wrote the Freikorps author Thor Goote.50 At the same time, these descriptions of the other women are ambivalent: the sensuality and the sexual prowess imputed to them are seductive and tempting. The way in which these descriptions are placed in the texts illuminates their function as a legitimisation for the following violent excesses. Communist and Latvian women are desired but at the same time mutilated beyond recognition. The depictions of their executions are bloody, cruel and

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sadistic; they refer to the dangers of desire. Sexuality here uncovers the instable process of the construction of borders. The Freikorps literature stressed the loss of borders, both national and subjective. Beyond the frontier, the soldiers imagined the East as a space of boundlessness, with regard both to the landscape as well as to the rape and slaughter of the population. To the mind of the Freikorps, the loss of limits and the battles along the frontier were to be used fruitfully to establish a vision of Germany’s national future.

Africa Africa also offered the possibility of boundary transgression, as it transpired from the colonial memory literature after 1918. There, dreams and experiences were possible that could not be experienced in a Germany ‘impoverished in dreams’. German colonialists, especially the soldiers of the colonial army, kept on writing about the love they had developed for their second Heimat: ‘ardent love’ had replaced the violence of colonisation.51 As can be read in the memories, many soldiers laid down their weapons to return to Germany only with a ‘heavy heart’.52 The ‘love for Africa’ was bound to the perception of Africa as a country that could be shaped, where the influence of the individual was still noticeable and actions would have consequences, and which also offered a space that could be individually shaped, offering men and women more possibilities of self-development. Every memory and every description of the former colonies, be it in a novel or in the allegedly dispassionate representations of a battle, were located in a space that was to contain the possibility of individual improvement. The alleged namelessness of the landscapes and the German ignorance of the local population, which revealed itself when talking about the uninhabited areas, were not only indicators of the colonial act itself, in which the landscape was subjugated to the German order, but also offered possibilities to lose oneself in it, to transcend one’s own boundaries. The war in German East-Africa became the most prominent public example for Africa’s ability to create ‘manly heroes’. This trope was not new in colonial literature. Ernst Jünger, who went to Africa with the Foreign Legion in 1913, imagined in Das abenteuerliche Herz the expansion and the possibility of Africa in connection to the narrowness of Germany: ‘Africa was, to me, the epitome of wildness and of the original, the only conceivable space for a life on the scale that I had planned to live mine on; and it was clear that, as soon as I was free to do so, I had to go there.’ Elsewhere, he wrote that Africa appeared to him as the place ‘in which one could move without coming up against a brick garrison or a prohibitive sign at each step, where it was still possible to be a self-determined master possessing all attributes of power’.53 Frequently, the descriptions of the ‘love for Africa’ are interspersed with motifs of sexual encounters, where parts of Africa’s landscape are coded as the

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bodily shape of a woman, as in the remembrance novel by the mostly unknown colonial author H. Consten: Firm liana-arms embrace and strangulate the inclining tree giants, who feeble and tired and exhausted by the strangulating embrace, surrender to death at the hands of this female vampire of the jungle, drained of all their juices and resistance. Fully aroused at touch, like a woman’s succulent thighs, other lianas, whose soft texture flushes as if alive, cling to the trees … Red blossoms quiver like ever-thirsty woman’s lips! … Thus I ponder and I dream.54

Sexual and sexualising representations of ‘Africa as nature’ made flesh its spatial expansion. These representations underscored its ‘virgin character’ and saw therein unlimited possibilities for male fantasy: ‘Thus I ponder and I dream’. At the same time, the (sexual) encounter with nature transported narrowness and deadly embrace. The abundant female landscape sucked dry, clung to and strangulated until death occurred. The colonial landscape stood for Ur-mother and vampire at the same time.55 One can find the image of the ‘ever-growing mother’ also in the work of Ludwig Deppe in the description of a war burial: ‘the hero’s grave is completely covered with clinging plants and blossoming flowers: thus our comrades rest in the African jungle, as if put to sleep by a mother, in the infinite peace of our eternal mother nature.’56 The colonial author De Haas remembered Africa as ‘the maternal earth, who gave man enough room for contemplation, so that he may be reminded that he has from the beginning of time been connected to her bosom as to nothing else, which spoke to him and in him’.57 The image of ‘Mother Nature’ was associated with both ahistoricity and authenticity, which was diametrically opposed to ideas of the modern society as a space of acceleration – as genuinely anti-modern modernity, as space for personal development, the image as welcomed by colonialists, enabling them to put into words their longings by harking back to romantic descriptions of nature and the cultural pessimism of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German middle-class. Furthermore, these descriptions of nature offered an opportunity, in particular for soldiers, to display their level of education, especially when they used the well-known middle-class descriptions of nature as a model, as the historian Birthe Kundrus put it.58 The colonial landscape became ‘a place of desire and longings, an aesthetic emotion’,59 a stage also for sexual encounters, which were endowed with a particular ‘magic’60 and in which wild beasts became metaphors for orgiastic unions, which for a moment over-ruled female modesty: Blissful days and nights! African nights! What may you at home know of the magic of holding a dear wife in your arms in the midst of the wildest, the most untouched nature. When the breeze floats around the temples like silk, when thousands of glow-worms dance a marriage gig, when nocturnal birds and crickets sing the ceremonial tune and then, when the primitive roar of the lion tears asunder all that is peaceful, and makes the loving woman shudder and lean against the man’s chest.61

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The description of Africa’s landscape rarely managed to do without pointing out the violence: lion’s roar, vampire-like lianas likened to women’s legs, wildfires, the threat of the Ur-mother, etc. All of these represented the counterpart to the romanticising view of the ‘magic’ of Africa. But it was this ambivalence that created the colonial man, who could at the same time feel love and prove himself in the face of danger. This offered him a so-called multitude of being: in Africa, longing and violence seemed to lie closer together than on the European continent. In the colonial literature on the World War in Africa, one can deduce from most of the memories and descriptions that in the last two years of the war, the war had increasingly become an existential strain on the Europeans as well and had lost the attraction of adventure. The physical condition of the soldiers became critical; they ran high fevers and were weak.62 The memories also tell of an increasing occurrence of psychological illnesses. The white soldiers had lost the feeling of a sense of all of their ‘wanderings’, the sense of the war. What formerly had been dismissed, the narrowness of home, then appeared to the medical doctor Ludwig Deppe as a dream image of the Heimat. The mythological idea of the Europeans and their paradise in Africa seemed to have run its course by the end of the war. At the end of the nineteenth century, colonial critics above all had pointed out the psychotic manifestation of the colonial project. The bloody repression of rebellions and the torturing of the indigenous population were denounced under the name of Tropenkoller (frenzy of the tropics), as an effect of the hegemonic position that rendered some whites unable of self-control.63 The Tropenkoller was the transferral of the neurasthenic debate into the colonies. But still, the ‘nervous metropolis’ became the opposite of the calm wide space of Africa, as a fantasy of free sexuality and a place to escape from middle-class morals. Colonial expansion, thus, became medication for ‘nervous Germans’, not without the constant referral to the dangers generated by the ‘Heart of Darkness’, which Africa represented as well.64 In the interest of colonial propaganda, it was stipulated not to write too often or in too much detail about wartime violence. From the point of view of colonialism’s defenders, an eventual ‘returning’ of the German colonies was after all connected to the civilising abilities of the Germans. Furthermore, the romanticisation of Africa was used to deflect attention from the war in Europe. The huge popularity of stories about the ‘African adventures’ and the ‘colonial heroes’ also stem from the experience of the European World War, the destruction of lives, ideas and landscapes, and from the crisis of valiant masculinity.65 As the colonial forces returned to Germany in 1919, they found there a society defined by military defeat and marked by the experiences of the war. The unprecedented violence, the unimaginable number of its victims and the yet to be ascertained number of physically and psychologically damaged people do, indeed, beyond cultural pessimism about the mechanisation of war, indicate a ‘historically unprecedented amassment of death and destruction’.66 It was this

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tremendous experience of killing that produced an audience for further colonial fantasies, creating African spaces as a romantic and beloved landscape.

Conclusion This essay suggests not limiting the analytical tools that have helped research in colonialism to the colonial times. The German case is particularly interesting and unique for the political conditions after the First World War, as Germany had to give up its colonies with the signing of the Versailles Treaty and it became, though of course not colonised, an occupied country. But was Germany a post-colonial society after 1918? In the strict sense of the definition – referring only to the existence of overseas colonies – it was. But colonial images, metaphors and allegories still shaped public discourses and political ideas after the German Empire had vanished. Although it remains important to maintain the fundamental differences between a colonial system and colonial imaginations, the essay shows that new results can be gained concerning the continuity and discontinuity of colonial mentality if one sets aside a rigid definition of colonialism.67 Furthermore, this analysis suggests that the Balticum and the Rhineland should be discussed in the sense of colonial spaces. Racist imaginations and expansionist conceptions of space were established in the two propaganda campaigns as in the colonial memory literature. While it was the exclusive domain of the colonial authors to fantasize about the vastness of Africa, they did find a common ground with the propagandists railing against the Rhineland occupation and the Freikorps literature, when both lamented the narrowness of Germany. All three of them also stood for the defence against the ‘Bolshevik or Slavic threat’. The demise of the monarchy and the dissolution of the old Wilhelminian order left behind a political and mental void, which seemed increasingly to be filled by the Left. Whereas the geographical space had become ever smaller because of the cessation of territories, the internal intellectual and political space was said to be marked more and more by disorder and to have been taken over by Communists. It was within this political climate that Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (1870–1964), the former General of the Schutztruppe (Colonial Army) in German East-Africa and a leader of Freikorps soldiers after the war, was made into a colonial hero who still carried with him the signs of the ‘old world’ and was seen as capable of winning back the geographical space and reinstating the intellectual and political hegemony of the Right.68 Numerous press articles commented on Lettow-Vorbeck’s return to Berlin in 1919 and described the political character of the march through the Brandenburg gate, as, for example, in an article in the Post: Berlin’s second major Reicke said: “You, who came back to us over the sea, you are our last hope. You are men, help us, protect us from the dreadfulness, which

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that monster of Russian origin – once depicted as a hyena, then as a blood-sucker – is currently preparing to accomplish.” No socialist spoke, and that was good … The “International” was not sung; instead it was “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”.69

The identification of the colonial hero as male underlines what the analysis made clear from the three propagandistic spaces: the identification of Germany as a nation too narrow and stripped down was illustrated with gendered and sexual allegories and metaphors. The propaganda used forms of illegitimate sexuality to illustrate the danger that the Rhineland occupation meant for the image of the German Volkskörper. Sexuality, especially inter-racial sexuality, was repeatedly acknowledged as a threat to the White and European culture. The propagandists used an image of a White man’s community that was presented as a space where inter-racial relationships between Africans and Europeans were eliminated. In the case of the Eastern border, the imaginations of sexual threat were related to the Red Army soldiers and later, after the retreat of the Red Army, to Lettic and Latvian women, who with their ‘man-murdering sensuality’, threatened to endanger the ‘soldierly’ of the Freikorps male soldier, if we follow here Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of the Freikorps literature in Male Fantasies.70 The Freikorps literature presented what happens, when, in the process of expanding space, the borders were transgressed. The texts about the Baltic battles pointed less to the fact of a spatial shortcoming; rather, they stress the concept of the border, the frontier that was to be transgressed. The frontier, however, was an ambivalent concept; it integrated both desire and repulsion. In a way similar to the Rhineland, speaking about the conquest of the space and the conquest of the women became interchangeable. But whereas the speaking of the rapes in the Rhineland were told as the story of the national ‘narrowness’, the killing and the raping of Communist women were described as if representing spatial expansion and border crossing. The female German victim, the German passive male and the virile African occupation soldier represented the Rhineland, whereas the ‘East’ was represented via the German man being active and raping the female inhabitant. The texts all deal with men moving in lost spaces. Whereas the East and the Colonial space appeared to be open, though dangerous, the Rhineland space illustrated the fear of what would happen when German men were not allowed to move: the other man started to enter the space. Vastness and border crossing, though, also included dangers for the construction of masculinity. The landscape in the Colonial literature is illustrated with fantasies of romantic love and beautiful nature. ‘Africa’, described as female, could thus be interpreted as a place for male catharsis. At the same time, the literature used the colonial trope of the Tropenkoller to point to the threat that the ‘heart of darkness’ posed to the male subject. Translated by Karen Diehl

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Notes 1. The editors of this book and Christina Benninghaus (Universität Bielefeld) were helpful critics of the article. I would like to thank them. Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur. Deutsche Planungen für eine Erschließung Afrikas, 1880–1960 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004); Werner Köster, Die Rede über den ‘Raum’. Zur semantischen Karriere eines deutschen Konzeptes (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2002); Heike Wolter, ‘Volk ohne Raum’. Lebensraumvorstellungen im geopolitischen, literarischen und politischen Diskurs der Weimarer Republik. Eine Untersuchung auf der Basis von Fallstudien zu Leben und Werk Karl Haushofers, Hans Grimms und Adolf Hitlers (Hamburg: Lit, 2003); Vanessa Conze, ‘Die Grenzen der Niederlage. Kriegsniederlagen und territoriale Verluste im GrenzDiskurs in Deutschland (1918–1970)’, in Kriegsniederlagen. Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen, ed. Horst Carl (Berlin: Akademie, 2004), 163–184. 2. Ernst Jünger, ‘Der Frontsoldat und die Wilhelminische Zeit’, Die Standarte, 20 September 1925, reprinted in Jünger, Politische Publizistik, 1919–1933, ed. Sven Olaf Bergötz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), 81. 3. Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum (Munich: Langen, 1926). Until 1935, 315,350 copies were sold. It therefore belongs to the twenty ‘most sold books in Germany of the first half of the twentieth century’. See Annette Gümbel, ‘Instrumentalisierte Erinnerung an den Ersten Weltkrieg. Hans Grimms “Volk ohne Raum”’, in Krieg und Erinnerung. Fallstudien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, eds Helmut Berding, Klaus Heller, and Winfried Speitkamp (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 93–111, here 106. 4. For an overview concerning the history of geopolitics and geography see Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Die Wiederkehr des Raumes. Geopolitik, Geohistorie und historische Geographie’, Neue Politische Literatur 43, no. 3 (1994): 374–397. 5. See, for example, Alfred Rosenberg, Der Zukunftsweg einer deutschen Außenpolitik (Munich: Eher, 1927); for the National Socialist use of the concept of Raum see Mechtild Rössler, Wissenschaft und Lebensraum. Ein Beitrag zur Disziplingeschichte der Geographie (Berlin: Reimer, 1990); Birgit Kletzin, Europa aus Rasse und Raum. Die nationalsozialistische Idee der Neuen Ordnung, 2nd ed. (Münster: Lit, 2002). 6. Birthe Kundrus, ed., Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003). 7. Frontier should not be understood as a fixed border, but as a contact zone with a moving border, in which encounters, e.g., between colonisers and colonised take place and in which inclusion and exclusion are negotiated. 8. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of Calilfornia Press, 2002), 45. 9. Inge Baxmann, ‘Der Körper der Nation’, in Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich (19. und 20. Jahrhundert), eds Etienne François, Hannes Siegrist, and Jakob Vogel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 353–365; Wulf D. Hund, ‘“Fremdkörper und Volkskörper”. Zur Funktion des Rassismus’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 42 (2002): 345–359; for an overview concerning racial hygiene and eugenics in Germany see Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte der Rassenhygiene und Eugenik in Deutschland, eds Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayertz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). 10. Karl Haushofer, Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung (Berlin: Vowinkkel, 1927), XIV, quoted in Conze, Grenzen, 168f. 11. Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 12. Sally Marks, ‘A Black Watch on the Rhine. A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience’, European Studies Review 1 (1983): 297–333; Gisela Lebzelter, ‘Die “Schwarze Schmach”. Vorurteile – Propaganda – Mythos’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985): 37–58; Sandra Mass, ‘Das Trauma des weißen Mannes. Afrikanische Kolonialsoldaten in propagandistischen Texten, 1914–1923’, L’Homme 12, no. 1 (2001): 11–33; Christian Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt”. Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus,

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Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914–1930) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001); Jean-Yves Le Naour, La honte noire. L’Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises, 1914–1945 (Paris: Hachette, 2003). 13. Anon., Was droht dir, Europa? (Munich: Gmelin, 1921); Ray Beveridge, Die schwarze Schmach. Die weisse Schande (Hamburg: F.W. Rademacher, 1922); Alfred Brie, Geschändete deutsche Frauen. Wie die farbigen Soldaten in den besetzten Gebieten wüten (Leipzig: Graphische Werke, 1921); Heinrich Distler, Das deutsche Leid am Rhein. Ein Buch der Anklage gegen die Schandherrschaft des französischen Militarismus (Minden: Köhler, 1921); August Eberlein, Schwarze am Rhein. Ein Weltproblem (Davos: Schroeder, 1921); Adolf-Viktor von Koerber, Bestien im Land. Skizzen aus der mißhandelten Westmark (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1923); Joseph Lang, Die schwarze Schmach. Frankreichs Schande (Berlin: Neudeutsche Verlags- und Treuhandgesellschaft, 1921); Rheinische Frauenliga, Farbige Franzosen am Rhein. Ein Notschrei deutscher Frauen, 4th expanded ed. (Berlin: Engelmann, 1923); Fr. Rosenberger, Denkschrift über die Seuchengefahr infolge der Besetzung europäischen Gebietes mit Farbigen. Für den ‘Deutschen Notbund gegen die Schwarze Schmach’ e.V. in München (Munich: Gmelin, 1922); Wilhelm von der Saar, Der blaue Schrecken und die schwarze Schmach, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Curt Winkler, 1921); Hugo Ferdinand Sigel, ‘Sind die schwarzen Besatzungstruppen eine besondere gesundheitliche Gefahr für das deutsche Volk?’, (unpublished) Ph.D. Thesis, Universität Tübingen, 1923; Bruno Stehle, Die farbigen Fronvögte am Rhein. Eine Tragödie (Munich: Privately Published, 1922). 14. Frauenliga, Franzosen, 57. 15. Eberlein, Schwarze, 87. 16. Ibid., 35. Eberlein quotes a Norwegian newspaper. 17. ‘Der Geschlechtstrieb ist bei den Farbigen eben bar jeder Hemmung und doppelt gefährlich, weil sie über die Dinge anders denken als wir.’ Stehle, Fronvögte, 13. The topos of the ‘over-abundant sexuality of the savages’ already surfaces in the contemporary writings of the colonial expansion of the early modern period. Cf. Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, Edle Mohren. Afrikaner im Bewußtsein und Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 1993); Sabine Schülting, Wilde Frauen, Fremde Welten. Kolonialisierungsgeschichten aus Amerika (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1997). 18. Myron J. Echenberg, Colonial Conscript. The Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991), 67. 19. ‘Die Annäherung der weiblichen Jugend an Angehörige der Besatzung hat mit Beginn der Besetzung eingesetzt. Es hat die deutsche Bürgerschaft ganz schön empört, daß sich eine große Anzahl von Frauen und Mädchen sofort nach Abmarsch der letzten Deutschen dazu hergab, intime Beziehungen anzuknüpfen.’ Von Keudell to the Supreme President of the Rhine Province, 21 January 1921. Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz, 403, Nr. 13464: Akten betr. sittlicher Schädigung durch die Besatzung (Files concerning the moral risk of the occupation). 20. Eberlein, Schwarze, 19. 21. Ibid., 145. 22. Ibid., 17: ‘Certainly there also exist among the Germans – as with any other people – such elements that will fraternise with the enemy for their own personal gain.’ 23. Lilli Jannasch, Schwarze Schmach und schwarz-weiß-rote Schande (Berlin 1921: Neues Vaterland), 2nd ed. (Flugschriften des Bundes Neues Vaterland; no. 18/21). 24. ‘In jedem Land gibt es Ehrvergessene, die ihre weibliche Würde um Geld verschachern… Wir haben alles Recht, uns zu weigern, die Frauen, vor denen die Farbigen geschützt werden müssen, als deutsche Frauen anzuerkennen.’ Frauenliga, Notschrei, 57. For the history of the Rheinische Frauenliga see Sandra Mass, ‘Von der “schwarzen Schmach” zur “deutschen Heimat”. Die Rheinische Frauenliga im Kampf gegen die Rheinlandbesetzung, 1920–1929’, WerkstattGeschichte 11, no. 32 (2002): 44–57. 25. Beveridge, Schmach, 28; Lang, Schmach, 10; for a detailed analysis of this argument see Mass, Trauma. 26. ‘Deutsche Schmach’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 June 1921. 27. ‘One of the French goals is the fragmentation of Germany. It has, however, achieved the opposite: the German people has been bound together stronger than ever in its hate of the arch enemy’, in ‘Frankreich und die schwarze Schmach’, Grenzlandkorrespondenz, no. 6 (December 1922).

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28. Eberlein, Schwarze, 2. 29. Quoted in Christoph Cornelißen, ‘“Schuld am Weltfrieden”. Politische Kommentare und Deutungsversuche deutscher Historiker zum Versailler Vertrag, 1919–1933’, in Versailles. Ziele – Wirkung – Wahrnehmung, ed. Gerd Krumeich (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 237–258, here 237. 30. ‘Ein Lügenkongreß’, Deutsche Zeitung, 14 April 1921. 31. Anon., Europa. 32. ‘Die Wahrheit ins Ausland! Die schwarze Schmach’, in Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 24 February 1921. Further examples of an unlimited number of such comments: ‘The German government must categorically refuse that the population of the territories occupied by the Entente has to suffer the ignominy of a coloured occupation … The occupation of the left Rhine German territory does not happen as a hostile act of war but peacefully, on the basis of a signed treaty. The stationing of Black troops makes a mockery of the feeling of solidarity of the community of the white race.’ ‘Protest gegen die schwarzen Besatzungstruppen’, Vossische Zeitung, 3 December 1918; ‘The employment of these coloured people, who are unable to communicate with the population, as guards, as personnel checking papers, etc., is perceived as a serious threat to the population.’ ‘Hamburg und die Schwarze Schmach’, Hamburger Nachrichten, 12 May 1921. 33. ‘Wenn nicht bald die gesamte zivilisierte Welt geschlossen aufsteht und die Zurückziehung der farbigen Truppen von europäischem Boden verlangt, wird der Tag kommen, an dem sich die rollende Lawine nicht mehr aufhalten lässt!’ Lang, Schmach, 16. 34. Edmund Dene Morel, The Horror on the Rhine (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1920). Morel’s arguments fit with the contemporary ideas of some European socialists about a ‘supra-national control’ of African colonies. See Liliana Ellena, ‘Political Imagination, Sexuality and Love in the Eurafrican Debate’, European Review of History 11, no. 2 (2004): 241–272, here 245. 35. For Morel see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. A Story of Greed,Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 36. Edmund Dene Morel, The Black Man’s Burden (Manchester: The National Labour Press, 1920), 222, quoted from Koller, Wilden, 287. In Gümbel’s essay on Hans Grimm, one can also find the interesting remark that Grimm had the idea for his novel Volk ohne Raum after having met Morel. Gümbel, Erinnerung, 96. 37. Freikorps were volunteer associations, who recruited demobilised soldiers. See Hagen Schulze, Freikorps und Republik, 1918–1920 (Boppard: Boldt, 1969); Robert George Leeson Waite, Vanguard of Nazism.The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). 38. Ernst von Salomon, Die Geächteten (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1930); von Salomon, ed., Das Buch vom deutschen Freikorpskämpfer (Berlin: Limpert, 1938); Rüdiger von der Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland und Baltikum (Leipzig: Koehler, 1920); on Salomon see Jost Hermand, Ernst von Salomon.Wandlungen eines Nationalrevolutionärs (Leipzig: Hirzel, 2002). Rüdiger von der Goltz was the leading general in the Balticum after the war. 39. The following part of the essay is mainly based upon Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 40. Ibid., 151–175. 41. In a less dramatic way the landscape was characterised in Freikorps literature by its greyish and overall dull atmosphere. See, e.g., Edwin Erich Dwinger, Die letzten Reiter ( Jena: Diederichs, 1935), 11. 42. ‘Merely by itself, the totally mixed population will not create a culture, left to itself it will cave in to Polish-ness.’ Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserinnerungen (Berlin: Mittler, 1919), 138; the Russian soldiers, however, are regarded as ‘splendid soldier material’ (prächtiges Soldatenmaterial). See Paul von Hindenburg, Aus meinem Leben (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1920), 89. 43. Liulevicius, War, 220; Das Land Ober-Ost. Deutsche Arbeit in den Verwaltungsgebieten Kurland, Litauen und Bialystok-Grodno, ed. Oberbefehlshaber Ost (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1917).

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44. See, e.g., Dwinger, Reiter, 18. 45. Salomon, Geächteten, 134, 133. See also Luilevicius, War, 234f. 46. Quoted in Luilevicius, War, 240f. 47. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, ‘Der deutsche Vorstoß in das Baltikum’, in Curt Hotzel, Deutscher Aufstand. Die Revolution des Nachkrieges (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1934), 48, quoted in Luilevicius, War, 238. 48. Georg Heinrich Hartmann, ‘Erinnerungen aus der Kämpfenden Baltischen Landeswehr’, in Der Kampf ums Reich, ed. Ernst Jünger (Essen: Deutsche Vertriebsstelle ‘Rhein und Ruhr Kampf ’, 1929). 49. Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 2 vols. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990), 1: 77. 50. Thor Goote, Kamerad Berthold, der ‘unvergleichliche Franke’. Bild eines Deutschen Soldaten (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1937), 286, quoted from Theweleit, Männerphatasien, 1: 81. 51. Adolf von Mecklenburg, ‘Zum Geleit’, Kolonial-Post 22, no. 1 (1928). 52. Richard Wenig, Kriegs-Safari. Erlebnisse und Eindrücke auf den Zügen Lettow-Vorbecks durch das östliche Afrika (Berlin: Scherl, 1920), 12. 53. Quoted in Dirk Blotzheim, Ernst Jüngers ‘Heldenverehrung’. Zu Facetten in seinem Frühwerk (Oberhausen: Athena, 2000), 27. Jünger, however, fled the Foreign Legion and was arrested in the desert. Only after his father’s intervention was Jünger released and then returned to school to finish his final examination. 54. Hermann Consten, …und ich weine um dich, Deutsch-Afrika (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1926), 2. See also F. Behn, who described the longing for Africa as ‘the mourning of a lover, who had been strange and sweet, which left a longing in the soul that was forever unsatisfied’. Quoted in Herbert Todt, Die deutsche Begegnung mit Afrika im Spiegel des deutschen Nachkriegsschriftums (Frankfurt am Main: Blazek & Bergmann, 1939), 3. See also Leo Frobenius, who explicitly calls Africa ‘his Africa’ and effusively and tenderly speaks of its ‘sisterly-motherly hand’ that he again and again seeks out and has to take. Leo Frobenius, Erlebte Erdteile, vol. 3: Planmässige Durchwanderung Afrikas (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, 1925), 454. 55. The descriptions call to mind the dreamlike journey described by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Urs Widmer has termed Marlowe’s journey a ‘journey to the mothers’, ‘in a metaphorical as well as a very concrete sense, to the mother, the archaic mother, who all-giving and omni-potent, is everything to the child, a journey into a “dark continent”, a journey into that “dark continent”, in general, which prior to that had also been talked about (in a surprisingly similar metaphor), i.e., Sigmund Freud, a journey, thus, to the women, their mysterious sexuality.’ Urs Widmer, ‘Nachwort’, in Joseph Conrad, Herz der Finsternis mit dem Kongo-Tagebuch (Zurich: Haffmanns, 1992), 191–208, here 203. 56. Ludwig Deppe, Mit Lettow-Vorbeck durch Afrika (Berlin: Scherl, 1919), 468. 57. Rudolf de Haas, Der Wilderer von Deutsch-Ost (Berlin: Scherl, 1927), quoted in Todt, Begegnung, 6. 58. See also the excerpt from a soldier’s letter from German South-West-Africa: ‘I have now seen more of the country of Africa than I have of Germany (but really seen, sitting on a horse and not fleeing through the landscape in a train, as do sinners against God’s beautiful nature.) How marvellous, to be free of the revolting teeming of the masses of your cities! … No smothering police force to bother about. And how simple one’s desires become! No need of theatre, concerts, and such. No watch is necessary … And a most wonderful advantage, newspapers are obsolete! One washes oneself now and then, and if there is enough water, one also takes a bath.’ Franz Henkel, Der Kampf um Südwestafrika (Berlin: Paetel, 1908), 11, quoted in Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten. Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Boehlau 2003), 152. 59. Kundrus, Imperialisten, 139. 60. The expression ‘magic’ (Zauber) can be found often in the memories of the African colonial period. It was not necessarily a sexual connotation. See, e.g., Lettow-Vorbeck’s description of German East-Africa before the outbreak of the war: ‘It must be mentioned that on my ceaseless travelling I fully enjoyed the magic of the tropics, the immersion in the vast wilderness, far removed from all culture, the glorious chase for dangerous beasts, the nights spent under the sparkling

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stars to the deep roar of the lion a-hunting.’ Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, Mein Leben (Biberach: Koehler, 1957), 121. Also Hans Paasche, a liberal defender of colonialism and, later on, an opponent of colonialism, pointed out the ‘naturalness’ of the place, to which ‘many of us had lost their hearts’, ‘to the African nature with her people and animals und her freedom’. Hans Paasche, Das verlorene Afrika (Berlin: Neues Vaterland, 1919) 16, quoted in Adjai Paulin Oloukpona-Yimon, Unter deutschen Palmen. Die ‘Musterkolonie’ Togo im Spiegel deutscher Kolonialliteratur (Frankfurt am Main: IKO, 1998), 2; on ‘magic’ as a topos in colonial literature on German South-West-Africa, see Kundrus, Imperialisten, 147. 61. Hugo Erdmann, Deutsch-Ostafrikaner. Ein Tropen-Roman (Berlin: Scherl, 1918), 101. 62. Deppe, Lettow-Vorbeck, 292. 63. Thomas Schwarz, ‘Die Kultivierung des kolonialen Begehrens – ein deutscher Sonderweg?’, in Kolonialismus als Kultur. Literatur, Medien, Wissenschaft in der deutschen Gründerzeit des Fremden, eds Alexander Honold and Oliver Simons (Tübingen: Francke, 2002), 85–102, 87. 64. Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Hanser, 2000), 407–421. 65. Cf. similar readings of Lawrence of Arabia in England 1919/1920: Graham Dawson, ‘The Blond Bedouin. Lawrence of Arabia, Imperial Adventure and the Imagining of English-British Masculinity’, in Manful Assertions. Masculinities in Britain since 1800, eds Michael Roper and John Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), 113–144. 66. Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Die Eskalation des Tötens in zwei Weltkriegen’, in Die Erfindung des Menschen 1500–2000, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Vienna: Boehlau, 1998), 411–429, 414. 67. For a definition cf. Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus. Geschichte – Formen – Folgen (Munich: Beck, 1995), 21. 68. On Lettow-Vorbeck and the construction of colonial heroes cf. Sandra Mass, Weiße Helden, schwarze Krieger. Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland, 1918–1964 (Cologne: Boehlau 2006). 69. ‘Berlins zweiter Bürgermeister Reicke sagte: “Ihr, die Ihr über’s Meer zu uns zurückgekommen seid, bedeutet unsere letzte Hoffnung. Ihr seid Männer, helft uns, bewahrt uns vor dem Fürchterlichen, das jenes Ungeheuer russischen Ursprungs, das bald als Hyäne, bald als Blutsäufer dargestellt wird, zu vollbringen sich anschickt.” Kein Sozi sprach, und das war gut... Nicht die “Internationale” wurde gesungen, sondern entblößten Hauptes “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”.’ Die Post, 3 March 1919, quoted in Adolf Rüger, ‘Das Streben nach kolonialer Restitution in den ersten Nachkriegsjahren’, in Drang nach Afrika. Die deutsche koloniale Expansionspolitik und Herrschaft in Afrika von den Anfängen bis zum Verlust der Kolonien, ed. Helmuth Stöcker, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie, 1991), 262–283, here 268. 70. Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 1: 77.

CHAPTER

1 3

Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein Love in the Time of War* SVETLANA SLAPŠAK

I do not want to theorise on love as a counterpart of war, and thus to diminish the immeasurable dimensions of war, compared to any other human and social activity – or worse, to fall into the trap of naive and blurring stereotypes on love preventing war, or stopping it. Anyone remembering the 1960s and 1970s could ponder on how love was merely an often unsuccessful rhetoric gimmick appealing to underlying cultural layers of the discourse of Christianity, while hard political and public work was necessary in organising the anti-war movements in many countries, which were aimed at stopping the war(s) in the warring areas (Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Congo, etc.) On the contrary, I want to reflect on love as one of the civic activities, pertaining to collective identity and citizenship, and therefore one of the fields of public discourse and activity that can oppose war on equal terms of public concern and aims, and not as a possible refuge from it. The opposition war-peace, the expected and the ‘natural’ one remains in the field of public discourse and politics: the shift should be to thematise the history of emotions, or the anthropology of emotions of war times, and to follow a gender divide in it. A rather narrow space, a kind of site-catchment, that I want to explore is that of women from the intellectual elite, each of them in their well defined, small unit of exchanging and producing ideas, approximately at the same time – during the Second World War. Site-catchment is an archaeological term, and means defining possibilities of controlling a space (site) in everyday mobility requirements of a human group settled there, usually over a one-day span. My use of the term underlines limited communication frameworks – in this case Notes for this section begin on page 267.

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siege, war zone, exclusion and eventually concentration camps, and the expansion of theorising under such restrictions. Further re-semantisation of the term goes into the texts: war, as a kind of hypo-text, is hardly mentioned, the pain and the toils of everyday life are generally omitted and they cannot be read from the core texts that firmly reside in theory – philosophy, ethics, history, folklore. This clear division allows for reading biographical data as part of the hypo-text. Standard textual procedures of a scientific discourse in humanities, in the times of war, have to be seen in such a multi-level division. Beside the hypo-text (life during war) and the core text (scientific discourse in this case), there is also a third text to be read – the meta-text, or the explanatory hints in the choice of topics, examples, quotations, etc., from which immanent poetics can be construed. If all of the three texts have some same narrative units, like war and opposition to war, then we could even speak of a genre, or sub-genre, polemography, which is not historiography, nor war prose, but a reading-in the war through a basic anti-war procedure, the continuation of writing just as if there still were peace and normality. Feminism and gender studies of modern times have done a lot first to ‘mythify’ women’s ‘innate’ opposition to war, and then quite a lot to deconstruct and de-mystify this construct, still ‘workable’ in war zones and in grassroots activism. Women against the war remains a powerful narrative, in which some features of women’s writing can be seen more clearly against a gloomy background: life and living as the only sense bearers; everyday and common as meaningful and even subversive; trivial as resistance to highbrow and false discourse on sacred goals, patriotism and necessity of violence. Women theorising on love during war, as scarce a phenomenon as it is in Europe during the Second World War, opposes both mainstream gender-genre conventions, and women’s writing during (or on) war.

Reinterpreting Antiquity in Search of Love Theories By choosing three women that opposed the war through thinking and writing on love, all three of them writing during the Second World War, I position the philosophy of love in women’s culture, in order to celebrate these women’s breach into the field of man’s privileged reflective, spiritual and intellectual competence, such as philosophy, and in order to put forward an unexplored but convincingly justified European invention of Antiquity. There are only two moments in European history in which love is defined as a public affair, pertaining to citizen’s identity: more largely confirmed, the culture of Greek polis of the classical period, especially the Athenian one, and much contested but almost lasting as much as the ‘golden era’ of Athenian democracy, the 1968 revolution in understanding, acting and presenting love.

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Of course, there have been several intellectual projects, more precisely utopias in modern Europe, and the one invented by François Rabelais is particularly evocative, of proposing a liberal sexual life as a foundation of civic fulfilment. We cannot deny that our ways of making love, living together, choosing partners and presenting sexuality have radically changed ever since 1968, with deep traces in almost every section of culture and everyday life, most visibly in the popular culture and in the media. The ‘Make love not war’ slogan can also be understood as re-vindicating the public space for love as a civic activity in the context that I try to limit and define in this chapter. It was not surprising that one of the most successful global cultural activities in March 2003, aiming at preventing the war in Iraq, was the simultaneous performance of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in more than 300 places all over the world. Lysistrata’s carnivalesque plot is about women of Athens, who proclaim a sexual strike until the peace treaty between Athenians and Spartans is concluded, and they gain the support of the Spartan women for the strike as well. The needy male citizens on both sides consent to peace after a number of comic twists and turns. The male sexual suffering is a public affair, seeking solutions in confronting or negotiating women’s refusal of sex as their own public and political intervention: women were not citizens, Aristophanes’ upside-down comic world is conditioned by genre and context – and an exclusively male theatre public. But there are many other aspects that point to the Ancient understanding of love and sexuality as a public matter. The recent study by Paul Ludwig sheds a new light on Ancient understanding of desire and power, and on how sexuality formed political space by the use of women and homosexuality. However, the male sexuality and its phenomena and divergence (patriotism, friendship, military discipline/imperialism, public nudity) remain the main topic of Ludwig’s debate, without special attention to female sexuality and its role in the society.1 Interestingly enough, a stable motive of Ancient Greek literature, from the Classical period to the late Hellenistic times, that of the dangers of male sexuality for the stability of the state, does not occupy much space in the book.2 The argument that social stability depends largely on satisfied male sexual desire, or that the male sexual desire can de-stabilize the state, can be easily traced back to Lysistrata and Aristophanes. But it reappears in different literary genres later, and it becomes a standing motive in writings of Alciphron3 and other late ‘re-inventors’ of the Athenian Golden Age: hetaerae, the courtesans, give themselves a credit of keeping dangerous philosophers’ minds away from concocting revolutions and instability by keeping their bodies sexually satisfied. Instead of preparing civil war and tyranny, philosophers are somewhat too tired to get up early and go to exercise politics after a night of love. Furthermore, the courtesans prevent male folk from incestuous relationships and from adultery, hence confirming family values. Social stability and stability depending

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on a good sexual life? Male sexuality as a natural threat to the stately order and democracy? The Athenian democracy constantly feared the destructive force of male sexuality in its more political form – the homosexual relations, always constructed as power relations (younger and older lover, never two consenting adults), because they reflected aristocratic behaviour and the threat of aristocratic conspiracy against democracy. That fear was well confirmed by history (Harmodios’ and Aristogeiton’s tyrranoctony), and by more recent events in Athenian democracy (the tyranny of the Thirty, executed by Socrates’ pupils). Alciphron’s ironic arguments follow a long line that can be seen in Plato’s dialogues, especially Menexenes, where Socrates produces an ironical theory that Aspasia in fact wrote Pericle’s speeches, and that she is an excellent, though secret, teacher of rhetoric. In Aristophanes’ Women in Parliament (Ecclesiazousae), women easily steal their husbands’ language, and make the Parliament vote to delegate the power to women. The connection with wit and irony, which in Plato’s case serves more as a simple equation of women = (means) irony, went through a more subtle change after the death of democracy and deep cultural transformations in the Hellenistic era. On the one side, clever Alciphron’s argumentation, which does not include the real fear of anti-democratic conspiracy, and on the other, the case of Athenaeus, chronologically close to Alciphron, who developed a concept in which gender and genre are related. His Deipnosophistae, or Philosophers at the Feast, is a curious work, of which half of the text is preserved. Athenaeus is interested in everything and anything: his guests at the imaginary (or real?) symposium debate on history, literature, mythology, techniques, hard sciences, geography, travel, food, love, philosophy, art, architecture, plants, animals, condiments, but avoid any allusion to the local, political, actual or anything concerning power games. In Book XIII, which bears the title On women, Athenaeus’ intellectuals discuss women and love. Feasting intellectuals do not have a single woman-guest among them. They also do not have women entertainers, as was customary for men-only symposia – at least in earlier times. Some of the philosophers’ schools, present in Athenaeus’ group, are Epicureans, thus familiar not only with women’s presence, but also with their participation in philosophic and academic activities. The absence of women might be explained with a new and different mentality, or maybe a new social status, which did not allow for hiring expensive sexy entertainers (their role was always multiple), but whatever the reason, Athenaeus’ group looks like an old boys’ club. When they refer to tacky, or overtly obscene narratives, they seem to enjoy it acoustically, which is one of the most expanded modalities of sexual satisfaction today (sex-prone phone industry), being cheaper, more comfortable and a less risky way of enjoying oneself. The contextual scenery of Book XIII can be understood fully only when we compare it to the complex setting of the Ancient symposium seen by today’s historic anthropologists – readers of images4 – and also to the changed

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context of Hellenistic symposium: it is definitely miserable when it comes to gentlemen’s delights. The acoustic aspect of enjoyment, boldly compared and arguable through today’s technologically advanced but anthropologically parallel practice, appears as the main semiotic code of Book XIII. Again, the work of memory is masterly displayed, by quoting, using and re-narrating the plots of the so-called Middle Comedy – collections of anecdotes, bits and pieces of many authors, historians and polyhistors, and the textual tradition which is defined as pornography, or writing on whores. Athenaus is the inventor or the first user of the term we know of, and whores, or hetairai, are the class of women that serve as a screen for projecting this gender specificity, or strategy of complexity. Hetaerae are given a literary genre and a discourse. The literary genre is pornography, which is obviously understood as a form of prose, apart from comedy, and the discourse, or the oral genre, is the joke (Witz). The hidden complexity of gender relations is thus deconstructed and re-classified, with an innovative solution to the problem of self-expression and intellectual emancipation of hetairai. In fact, all the jokes cited by Athenaeus’ participants (the old boys’ club) are about the intellectual superiority of hetaerae, especially when their charms do not work any more in their old age. They typically outsmart men, be it philosophers, butchers, soldiers or kings. By treating gender concepts in this way, Athenaeus proposes not only a new strategy of dealing with complexity, which we could define as the disciplinary expansion, interdisciplinary cooperation and looking for a definition between genre and discourse, but he does a much more remarkable job of connecting gender and culture. The debate about women and love moves from the anthropological situation of alterity of women toward the integration of women into the world – even if it is the virtual world of memory – allowing for women to excel in the same privileged art of commanding the memory, and having a genre/discourse to do it properly. That gender is conceptualised – and realised in culture, which is accepted as a general framework – is a theoretical precondition today for all the gender studies area. Athenaus’ old boys’ club did reflect on women as secondary, from the position of power and a restrained acoustic command of sexuality. But from this position, new options for dealing with complexity appeared, and the ancient alterity has been replaced by a much more responsible and intellectually challenging process of inventing new (textual/discursive) spaces for women’s identity. Athenaeus’ strategy of complexity can be read as a good example of epistemological experiment, an impressive endeavour coming from the neglected part of the past in which we should certainly invest more of our attention. Rediscovering the Ancient politics about love (with all of the conceptual differences) unveils indirectly the still functioning contemporary censorship and re-naturalisation of love, muffled into ‘nature’, which is very much like the gender itself used to be presented. The cultural and performative aspects of love

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become especially challenging and inspirational when theorised by women authors before and out of great places, seasons and jargons of theory on gender, love and sexuality.

Chronodistopia: Three Women, Same Time, Different Places My point about this topic is that it was already presented, researched and used in public discourse for defining a certain anti-war intellectual attitude and the philosophical relation to the Ancient views on love and public sphere long before 1968 and Ludwig’s book, but in cultures less resonant and hardly recorded in what we might understood as the collective (Western) European memory. I am referring to the case of Anica Savic; Rebac, who was educated in quite a unique social-cultural context of Viennese, Novi Sad and Beograd intellectual circles at the peak of the activities of these circles to invent/imagine a new society and its culture, namely, the Yugoslav society and culture. To do this, it was necessary to construct a code of interpretation of Antiquity and to establish a certain intimacy between Balkan/Yugoslav and Ancient, which would not use ‘origin’ as a tool, or any of the known tools of the European appropriation of Antiquity. Anica Savic;’s godfather and mentor, Laza Kostic;, a poet and a theoretician, wrote a treaty about beauty, in which he relies on Heracleitos’ teaching, but repeats in fact many of Athenaeus’ statements: a large portion of this treaty is in fact on love.5 Not only Anica Savic; Rebac, but the whole generation of students of Antiquity from the region were well aware of Laza Kostic;’s attempt to bring closer the Balkan cultures and the Antiquity, including Kostic;’s experimenting with the translation of Homer into the Serbian epic decameter, his theory of theatre originating in Balkan ritual performances and so on. In the case of Olga Freidenberg, the early revolutionary energy in her circle of Petrograd intellectuals was also translated into a re-interpretation of Antiquity, again against the model of origins and appropriation, more toward universal anthropological and folkloric lineage or parallels (paligenesis+polygenesis). In this case, as well, the ‘classical’ was less interesting to research than pre-classical or post-classical, both in terms of chronology and evaluation. This interest was local and responded to the local needs. When a new interest in Athenaeus, for instance, emerged just a couple of years ago, nothing of this ‘peripherial’ European tradition was mentioned.6 Looking at issues treated by less known Hellenistic authors, not only as if their works were mere reference treasures, occurred far from academic centres and produced original theories. No better parallel could be presented than Michael Bakhtin, who ‘unearthed’ Menippos, a nearly forgotten Hellenistic author, when he constructed a relevant literary theory around Menippos’s work, approximately at the same time as Savic; Rebac and Freidenberg were working on similar operations of re-reading.7 Even in the case of Edith Stein, who wrote in the very heart of Western (Ger-

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man) philosophical tradition, there is a veil of oblivion woven from different aspects of her otherness: gender, fluctuating ethnic and religious positioning and the eventual closure inside the institutions of the Catholic church. The ignorance of these data lies in the (Western) European cultural colonialism, and the gender constraints that are of a more universal nature, a kind of longue durée feature, and certainly not limited to Europe. The three authors that I am interested in analysing belong in different degrees to liminal cultures, languages and disciplines. They are outsiders in humanities and academia today as they were outsiders in their lifetimes. In the cases of Freidenberg and Savic; Rebac, gender instigated censorship is one side of the problem, the European cultural supremacy the other; while in the case of Stein, we see that the intensity of the first can easily cover the absence of the latter by its sheer intensity.

How European is Theorising on Love? Three aspects of the politics of love in Europe at the same historic moment of the Second World War are to be explored in this chapter: gender, history and anthropology of intellectuals. Before them, the overall notion of ‘European’ should be addressed: what is European about these three women and their work? The tradition of theorising love starts with Plato’s Symposion, which is the first attempt at confronting contemporary sexual practices, patterns of behaviour and ruling discourses in their variety (all of the guests at the symposium), and the need to theorise them critically (Socrates), who in fact ‘translates’ an absent authority in the matter, Diotima. There is a strong European tradition of interpreting Plato’s dialogue (together with Phaedros) over the centuries, whenever love and beauty come to the field of vision of philosophy, but also for less theoretical purposes, like a crypto-defence of homosexuality. A clear reference to this can be seen in Anica Savic; Rebac’ thematic approach to ‘pre-platonic erotology’ (the title of her Ph.D. thesis), which immediately stresses her distancing from this tradition, and a remarkably ambitious project of exploring its unrecognised sources. Another European feature in this case can be a model of intellectual closure – monasteries, universities, intellectual circles, (revolutionary) salons. All three women were functioning in such closures, which deteriorated radically during the war, while other, violence-based closures were formed. Communicating under such conditions is certainly not specifically European, neither is feminist networking (the case of Rebecca West and Anica Savic; Rebac), but neglecting non-Western European achievements in humanities, both arts and academia, is a recognisable – and questionable – European feature. Women in philosophy, with all of the difficulties of affirmation, pushing women where they belong, into literature, is also a European feature: Olga Freidenberg is mostly known today through her correspondence with her famous cousin, Boris Pasternak; Anica Savic; Rebac – for those who

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recognize the coded name Militsa – from her presence in Rebecca West’s travelogue. Multilingual capacity is another European feature, along with constant translation and terminological invention, such as Anica Savic; Rebac’ erotology for the philosophy of love. This contribution should serve to fixate, date and put the name of the author on this very useful neologism. The aspect of gender difference is thematically situated: conceptualising love in theoretical terms, in spite of circumstances. In their work, love is not a symbol of hope or human values, and it is not escapist, even for a bit; it is a proposal for a public civic attitude, although addressed to different recipients and thus differently presented. Parallels for such intellectual behaviour can be found in war-torn Europe, the example of Carl Orff ’s Catulli Carmina (1943) should suffice in this sense. However, although love and sex are the principle topics of Orff ’s musical and theatrical work, they do not send a political/civic message. The only message that could have been constructed in reception of his work was on the ‘universal’ level. In the cases of the three women I am presenting, the political move is clearer, also because it is not backed up by any state institution. Their insisting on love affecting upon and originating from public life – be it historical, thus slightly masked as a message, be it an open call to the Pope (as in the case of Edith Stein), does not invoke personal human happiness and consolation, but social and political action that is openly against the romanticising of love in its Western intimate/bourgeois context, and ‘hailing’ its political energy. Such political tension, quite close to a high emotional exciting, can be found in the texts of Western intellectuals who felt compelled to explore the horrors of the just finished Second World War – Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt and especially Simone de Beauvoir, who saw the double victimisation of human and women, continuing, not purged or punished, after the war. The three women, whose reflections on love remained unknown for a long time, could be perceived today as almost prophetic figures, or at least very early birds in thinking love in terms of public responsibility. The three women ‘exemplifiers’ are Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg and Edith Stein. In fact, I chose Edith Stein as tertium comparationis because she, both by her writing and her public role, became well known in the Catholic Church culture (as a Jewish woman who turned to Catholicism, who was killed in a concentration camp as a nun and eventually was sanctified). Her position seems to be much more interesting in the secular culture after her letter to the Pope Pius XII was recently released by the Vatican and published, stirring a new controversy over the position of the Vatican on the genocide of the Jews. I will have to go to the biographies of the three chosen women, in order to illustrate the context, to underline the synchronicity and last but not least, to establish a hypo-text: their life stories as conforming-confirming texts of their core texts. There is, of course, my intervention regarding choice of data, epitomisation of data, choice of narrative – in one word, intentionality. I would like to put

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it even more bluntly: it is a clear intention of feminist solidarity by telling a she-story.

Hypo-text: Anica Savic; Rebac Anica Savic; (married Rebac) was born in 1894 in Novi Sad (former Yugoslavia), the cradle of modern feminism in the Balkans, into a wealthy family of intellectuals of mixed Greek and Serbian origins. As a girl, she could not attend the high school reserved for boys, but she received the maximum of attention and the best education at home, which was one of the liveliest intellectual focuses of the city – then under Austro-Hungarian Empire, hosting the best of Serbian intelligentsia at the time. The little girl published her first translations from Ancient Greek (Pindarus) at the age of 10, her pioneer translations of Emile Verhaaren’s poetry at the age of 12 and she wrote her dramas, mainly with Ancient and Anti-Christian motives, at the age of 13. By the age of 18, she commanded Ancient Greek and Latin, German, French, English, Italian and Hungarian. This Wunderkind was accompanied by her mother to the University of Vienna, probably one of the intellectually most exciting cities in Europe around 1910, and studied there the crown discipline of academia of that time – Ancient Studies. She was also involved in the Yugoslav movement, fostered by students coming from different parts of the Balkans, dreaming about destroying the Austro-Hungarian Empire and constructing a new, democratic, multiethnic state(s) in its place. She had to flee back home before she presented her Ph.D. because of the outbreak of the First World War. In the meantime, she met Hasan Rebac, a Muslim of Serbian origin and a well-known guerrilla fighter for the Serbian cause in Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Austrian rule. They married after the war, and Anica Savic; Rebac consequently lost most of her social support in Novi Sad. The couple settled in Beograd, where she could not get a post at the University, although she brilliantly defended her Ph.D. thesis at the Beograd University. They were soon both employed by the state in Skopje, today Macedonia, she as a teacher in a girls’ high school, he as a teacher at medressa (Muslim religious school): this unprivileged position was due to the couple’s staunch opposition to the monarchy and its right-wing government, and to their socialist ideas. This is where Rebecca West, alarmed by the French philosopher Denis Saurat8 and by her Beograd ‘informer’ and guide, a Serbian Jew and multi-talented Stanislav Vinaver,9 travelled to meet Anica; upon meeting, the two women forged a lasting friendship. Anica is described as ‘Militsa’ in Rebecca West’s book on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), in the following terms: ‘Once I showed Denis Saurat, who is one of the wisest of men, a letter that I had received from Militsa. “She writes from Skopje, I see”, he said. “Really, we are much safer than we suppose. If there are twenty people

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like this woman scattered between here and China, civilization will not perish”.’10 Or, a little further in the book: ‘Yet these two are steady as pillars. They are pillars supporting that invisible house which we must have to shelter us if we are not to be blown away by the winds of nature. Now, when I go through a town of which I know nothing, a town which appears to be a waste land of uniform streets wholly without quality, I look on it in wonder and hope, since it may hold a Mehmed, a Militsa.’11 It is with Anica-Militsa that Rebecca West visits a sacrificial site in Macedonia, guided by her new friend, who is an excellent authority in matters of Balkan rituals, and this is where she formulates her predominant metaphor of useless sacrifice (black lamb) in the Balkans. West’s critical eye tries to spot internal signs of collapse in the Yugoslav society and culture, while she was convinced that Yugoslavia was an easy prey of the rising Nazi-fascist coalition around it. In fact, that was the main reason for her decision to visit and research this part of Europe – the fear that it will vanish soon in its cultural diversity. And she was right in her prediction. Black Lamb is a figure that denotes internal violence and its irrational motivation in the Balkans, an active cultural memory far from today’s Western – and European – stereotypes on the Balkans. Ironically enough, the work of Rebecca West was silently neglected and prevented from translation for many years by the Yugoslav authorities after the Second World War, because of her sympathies for the Serbian royal house of Karadjordjevic;i.12 Anica Savic; Rebac exchanged letters with Rebecca West before and after the Second World War. While one of the letters, where she describes the horrors of war and her and Hasan’s successful attempts at escaping Serbian nationalist paramilitaries (tchetnik) to get them, while they were hiding in a deep Serbian province, was published, others remain unknown to the public. She also had a rich exchange of letters with the people that she was consulting with about her ideas and research: Gershom Sholem, whom she asked several questions about Kaballa; Heinrich Leisegang; and her professor in Vienna, Ludwig Radermacher. Denis Saurat had been among the people she addressed when researching Christian and Jewish mysticism. In order to clarify her position, she translated much of her work to German. An excellent translator (Pindarus, Lucretius, Shelley, Goethe, Thomas Mann), she also translated the mystic epic The Ray of Microcosm by the Montenegrian romantic poet P. P. Njegoš (who was both the religious and political ruler of Montenegro in the early nineteenth century) into English and German – this translation was published after her death in Harvard Slavic Studies. Her relation with Thomas Mann was remarkable: she was the first one in Yugoslavia to qualify him as a great European writer; she translated his three novellas (Tonio Kröger, Der Tod in Venedig and Tristan) in 1929, and these translations are still considered the best in Serbo-Croat; and she followed his work with a keen critical interest until the very end. He in return included her definition of love in his Joseph und seine Brüder.13 Anica Savic; Rebac finally got a position at the Beograd University in

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1945, as her socialist ideas were considered relatively acceptable by the new communist authorities, and her anti-fascist convictions were well known. She contributed to the new socialist and Marxist ideological concepts by presenting P.B. Shelley’s socialist ideas in a public lecture in 1945, and by translating folk partisans’ song (most of them women’s songs) into English. Her first public appearance might not have been the most popular among political leaders, since Shelley’s socialism was the topic whose political reflection was contained in a shortened Lenin’s (or Stalin’s) interpretation of Marxism. But this was more a sign of political solidarity on both sides, and she at least was not punished for it. She refrained from any public support for the new authorities later on. Since she was a convinced feminist before, the new turn toward feminism was nothing new to her, and she wrote a number of articles for a periodical of university educated women. In 1953, Anica committed suicide after the sudden death of her husband.

Hypo-text: Olga Freidenberg Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955) was born into a Jewish family; her mother was the sister to Boris Pasternak’s father and her father, also a good friend of Pasternak’s father, was an ingenuous inventor – among others, of the automatic telephone switch.14 Olga Freidenberg, whose life is known mostly through her correspondence with her cousin Boris Pasternak,15 was a brilliant young woman with the knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin, German, English, French, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese languages, who received the opportunity to study at the University of Petrograd after the revolution, and obtained a unique chance to form a new department of Classical studies, as a student of then influential linguist, Nikolai Marr. She introduced an innovative approach to the study of Antiquity, based on semiotic theories and the study of folklore, thus becoming a forerunner of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michael Bakhtin.16 Although she did not share Marr’s rather fantastic linguistic theories, favoured by the regime, she had to pay the consequences of being connected to him when he fell out of grace: her major study on poetics of Ancient literatures was refused to be published in the 1930s. In fact, most of her work was never published. A victim of petty intrigues at the department she founded, she did not have real collegial support, or students-followers. Her brother died a prisoner in Siberia. She endured teaching and researching in almost total isolation, cut off not only from Western developments in the discipline, but also from access to sources in her own surrounding. During the siege of Leningrad, she taught courses to her students and languages to privates for bread. After the war, her situation did not get better, and her health was ruined. She retired, and then died in 1955. More than 15 years after her death, her correspondence with Pasternak, her diaries (more than 2,500 pages) and her studies were discovered.

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The collection of her main studies on Antiquity was first published in 1978 in Russian, translated into Serbo-Croat in 1987 and into English in 1997.

Core text: Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg The parallels between the two contemporary lives and works, those of Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg, and the individual intellectual histories are striking; that is why I am adding the tertium comparationis, Edith Stein, separately. Both Olga Freidenberg and Anica Savic; Rebac were classicists; they may have had a common influential predecessor, Polish classicist Theodore Zielinski, who cooperated with Anica Savic; Rebac’s colleagues in Revue internationale des études balkaniques (RIEB), published in Beograd in the 1930s by Milan Budimir and Petar Skok (1932–1938) as a playground for the innovative approach to Antiquity and Balkan history, with a strong anti-fascist and pro-Yugoslav orientation. Thus, positions of Anica Savic; Rebac in her link with RIEB and Olga Freidenberg in her avant-garde formalist surrounding have several common features in researching Antiquity: interest in folklore and comparative insight; semantic and semiotic analysis; clear political investment (against traditionalism, favoring democratic aspects and values, with a ‘zing’ of hidden pro-communist sympathies added to that); and linking Ancient phenomena to their own contemporary situation, including a certain ‘feminist practice’ represented both by men (for instance, the editor of RIEB and colleague Milan Budimir) and by women (Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg). By ‘feminist practice’, I refer to a position of taking for granted women’s equality in everyday life and careers, and, thematically, working toward the toughest and most authoritarian disciplines and academic circles – Ancient studies, philosophy, literary theory, religion and folklore, with an energy that we could define today as deconstructive. Anica Savic; Rebac took an active attitude, writing about forgotten feminists from her native region, and taking part in Association of Women Academics after the Second World War. Olga Freidenberg, living in a new culture in which the feminist ideas were at least proclaimed popular in the early revolutionary days, was almost obsessed in tracing Ishtar, the Mediterranean goddess of fertility, in many rituals and texts; both Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg had similar conclusions about the double nature of Phaidra (from Euripides’ play Hippolytos) as a possible ritual memory of the old goddess. Curiously enough, both Anica Savic; Rebac’s and Olga Freidenberg’s work is saved thanks to their feminine friends and relations. Anica Savic; Rebac’s friend happened to be the Director of the University Library in Beograd, where her archives are still kept; her student, a woman, published her manuscript on Ancient aesthetics a year after her death; two women (I was one of them) took care of publishing her complete works in 1984–1988; and two women took care of preserving, opening and handing over Olga Freidenberg’s work for publishing.

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Meta-text: Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg But the most fascinating facet of both women’s work is their synchronous work in theorising love in Antiquity, that is, Eros. Anica Savic; Rebac’s work is more complex and theoretically refined: she forged a term to denote the philosophy of love, erotology, which might be attractive even today, in the situation of hyperproduction of terms and jargon. She published her Ph.D. thesis on erotology in 1932, but worked on the topic throughout the 1940s, enlarging the picture to mysticism and Judaeo-Christian folklore, to bogomils of Bosnia in the Middle Ages (a dualistic heresy that was extinguished by Serbian kings, but continued in Bosnia), up to the concept of love in the mystic poetry of P. P. Njegoš. That is why she needed interpretations of Milton’s Paradise Lost (and one of the contemporary interpreters happened to be Denis Saurat) and of Kaballa. She invigorated her interpretation of Eros and the state in her book on Ancient aesthetics, which contains an outline of the erotology of Plato and Aristophanes. As a taste of her way of thinking, there is the example of her imaging of what art could be like had Plato’s aesthetic model ever come to life: it would be most similar to Piet Mondrian’s paintings. Anica Savic; Rebac discusses different phases and different forms of Eros in the god’s ritual varieties – diverging and converging gender constructs and social functions – from the cosmic egg (feminine) to wind and fire daemon (masculine), and military and gymnastic friendship protector (homosexual). This double or multiple nature of Eros goes through a serious political modification in the Athenian democracy, ending in two forms (dual Eros): Eros, the erotic passion as a danger for the inner state’s stability, be it male or female, and, Eros, the wisdom master, the one that provides for civic values, or ‘social virtues’ as Anica Savic; Rebac calls them.17 This Eros takes care so that the uncontrollable sexuality does not create stasis, the civil war.18 She attributes this development to Euripides and Socrates and their influence in Athens. Anica Savic; Rebac’s approach relies on semantic history, folklore elements connected to rituals and the history of ideas, along with the ‘classic’ European philosophical practice. Her civic Eros, presented in the model of a minimal education for Athenian citizens in her book on Ancient aesthetics, has in fact a distinctive anti-war political meaning. This is the most delicate part of Anica Savic; Rebac’s discussion, since she cannot deny that war was conceived as one of the activities of the Athenian democracy – any war against enemies outside, be it for reasons of colonial expansion and supremacy, against other Greeks, or against ‘barbarians’ and other non-Greeks. In fact, as it is quite clear from Pericles’ speech over dead Athenians killed in the Sicilian expedition during the Peloponesian war (as rendered by Thucidides), making war is one of the basic democratic activities of a male citizen, and the line of equal Athenian heavy pedestrians (hoplites) is its main visual presentation (isokephaleia, or all of the heads in the same line). And, at the same time, stasis, the civil war, is considered the ultimate evil for the

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polis. To bypass this problem, Anica Savic; Rebac insisted on the apparent simplicity of a citizens’ education: little grammar, geometry, music and swimming. Preparing for the war remains in the area of sports, that is, competition and rites de passage. This ambivalence allowed her to focus her interest on the first cluster of civic education. Many years later, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Alain Schnapp19 researched this ambivalence in detail and came out with groundbreaking results on complex practices and representations of identity-construct in Antiquity. A good portion of Schnapp’s seminal work is about the anthropology of love. In Anica Savic; Rebac’s later work on Ancient aesthetics, in which she had to oppose openly Croce’s negation of such theorising in Antiquity, the relation of peace-love is easily integrated into her reading of immanent aesthetic theories contained in different Ancient texts – epics, lyrics, drama, philosophy. No wonder her favourite author in this study is Aristophanes, who is a partisan of peace, has respect for the sexual needs of women – even older women, as in his comedy Ecclesiazousae – and ridicules Athenian male citizens as obsessed with war and power. Her work on aesthetics in Antiquity, done during the war and published after her death in 1953, relates as a meta-text also to the situation in war-torn Yugoslavia, where different nationalist groups were fighting each other, forming both fascist and anti-fascist coalitions. She was undoubtedly in favour of the latter. Olga Freidenberg’s analysis of Eros is more fragmentary, incorporated in her study on Ancient and earlier (in her terms folkloric) times. She constructs Socrates (in Plato’s Symposion) as a ‘mask’, a dissimulator, but with a ‘shining divinity’ inside him,20 the one who can exclusively reflect on the double nature of Eros. As a master-obstetrician of truth (maieutike techne), Socrates must have a female double (Diotima) and must operate in a specific genre, defined by irony and parody. If the Eros in the state is ‘controlled’ by double-minded thinkers, who can combine distance and passion, irony and mystical conviction, then it is possible to make a linkage in interpretation. This Eros is adapted to the case of war through which Olga Freidenberg had to live: an invisible enemy outside, and a single-minded enemy of constraining ideology within, which can be fought only with a double sense and irony. The passionate and destructive Eros, the war Eros in her case, originated from restricted/censored thinking, while the state-constructive Eros is his opposite. Let me plunge into an anthropological aspect of their position on Eros: during the war, Anica Savic; Rebac was surrounded by people who could turn into killers without any previous notice, and was also in a precarious situation of foreign occupation. Olga Freidenberg was living in an unpredictable situation with denouncers following the moves of the power, and, at the same time, living in impossible conditions (hunger, cold, danger and disease), imposed by an otherwise invisible enemy. The stateconstructive Eros invented by Anica Savic; Rebac had to take care of the inner instability in order to resist the danger coming from the outside; the stateconstructive Eros invented by Olga Freidenberg had to destabilise the paranoid

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ideological unity in order to win over the outside danger, and in order to regain its civic qualities. In both cases, the Ancient Eros was considered the affair of the state, a public and social construct, with ritual roots and imaging, but also a simulacrum or projection of an imminent political desire. This private LoveEros was for both of them something public in the distant European past, and it could be re-established as such in the time of need, for instance, in the massive catastrophe of the world war. The necessary corrections in the concept of a citizen diverge, of course, in the two cases, but there was a synchronous turn in thinking of the two women in the same discipline and in a similar context.

Hypo-text, Core Text and Meta-text: Edith Stein How does Edith Stein fit into this equation? While Olga Freidenberg and Anica Savic; Rebac remained unjustly unknown, even in their own discipline, Edith Stein is globally known: she is a saint. She was born into a Jewish family in Breslau, in 1891, studied philosophy and was Husserl’s assistant in Freiburg. Her Ph.D. thesis concludes in proposing empathy as a specific form of knowledge. We are not far from the concept of love in her thesis, but Edith Stein would follow a different path. After reading the autobiography of Saint Theresa d’Avila, she converted to Catholicism, just as many years before Husserl turned from Judaism to Protestantism. Changes of churches and religions are certainly a distinctive European feature when it comes to the history of intellectuals, and it will not be tackled here. First among Dominicans, and then among Carmelites in Cologne, Edith Stein continued her philosophical writing, trying to connect phenomenology with different Christian philosophies. She fled to Holland in 1938 because of the Nazi threat, but was taken from the monastery into Auschwitz in 1942, where she was gassed with her sister that same year. She was beatified in 1987, and proclaimed a saint in 1998. Her letter to the Pope Pius XI, written in 1933, was released from the Vatican archives to be published immediately, in February 2003. One line of research would be to follow the empathy in her writings, and also to try and link phenomenology to semiotic and anthropological approach, which can be done, like in the case of Ernst Cassirer. The other line of research is somewhat awkwardly obvious – and that is the concept of Christian love, which is by definition related to public domain, civic construct and the state, but is deprived of any relation to sexuality and desire. From Edith’s letter to the Pope, this aspect of Christian love is highly politicised, implicating the responsibility of the Catholic church if it does not react politically to Nazism: if Christian love toward the other – the Jews, is neglected, and if the other is not protected, it may cease to function as the motor of the Catholic teaching, which is public and state-related. There is another thin thread to follow in the work of Edith Stein, exemplified in the book on woman published after her

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death.21 Although the woman’s love can be only motherly love according to Edith Stein, there is a lot of debate on women’s career, women’s choices and women’s institutions. In fact, Edith’s book is a seminal work in what we today call feminist theology. Whichever way we think today of her theorising and the practice of Christian love during the war, with the most tragic of consequences, Edith Stein’s example is the one of acting on behalf of love and performing love against the war, which includes many aspects of civic and state construct of values still in use today in the overall pacifist thinking and rhetoric. Therefore, she presents a necessary mirroring counterpart of the openly atheist approaches of Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg, but also the most clearly structured and the most politically efficient relation between peace and love. This, of course, is secured by a different epistemological status of their respective objects of theorisation – love. Edith Stein operates within the framework of sustainable and obtainable truth – Christian truth – while the other two operate in the unmapped territory of knowledge. Their point of convergence is, however, in the public discourse, which for the two academics always remains in the domain of desire, while for Edith Stein it represents an area of possible/controlled invasion. Restrictions for Stein come only from organisational hierarchy, which also includes gender. Although remaining on different sides of the stream, the academics and the nun could not only easily communicate if given a chance during their lifetimes, but could also politically cooperate in favour of peace and against the war, using love as the central notion. The three women never met, never wrote to each other and probably never even heard of each other. But their point of convergence can be easily reconstructed – and functional – in modern gender studies and feminist theorising and practices today. The three women reflecting on love at the time of (the same) war, from which one of them did not survive, has opened some still relevant epistemological questions pertaining to philosophy, anthropology and history of love, but also pertaining to gender studies and feminism. The contexts of communist, enlightened Catholic and socialist ideologies of their social and political environment conditioned their ‘feminist practice’ or self-understood feminism, which can be read through their hypo-, core and meta-texts, but is not the very subject of their reflection – while love certainly is. The contextual narratives can be used in interpreting Anica Savic; Rebac’s and Olga Freidenberg’s explanations of the Ancient Greek stately Eros, the positive and the citizenforming one. They both postulate love as a cultural and social construct, not only ‘translatable’ into, but originating from ideologies and accommodated politics. The historic link with rituals, in the case of Olga Freidenberg, does not turn toward ‘nature’ as explanation, but serves as one of the tools to build a convincing framework of anthropological features (‘structure’ avant la lèttre) in order to read super-positions or chronology of Ancient concepts of love. Anica Savic; Rebac historicises less, in order to conceptualise anthropological features of love in Antiquity into a system of thought, following the model of the his-

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tory of ideas. If Olga Freidenberg precedes structuralism, Anica Savic; Rebac in a way precedes new historicism. They both do not include a psychoanalytical or symbolic approach to Eros, but insist on social and political aspects of love. For both women authors, symbols present phases of semantic/semiotic history, or condensed lemmata in an imaginary dictionary of ideas. Edith Stein, on the other hand, proposes a clear and direct concept of (Christian) love as a political tool, restrained by the clerical context and by its recipients, but at the same time following a clear line of critique of ideological and ethic inconsistencies within an uncontested conceptual framework in the intellectual history of Europe, as exemplified by Luther’s or even Trotsky’s ‘believer’s criticism’. Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg seem to have had a hidden agenda of deconstructing their contemporary ideological narratives by introducing a new and quite paradoxical political narrative – that of love in the distant past. Addressing ideological and intellectual circles that seemed to accept the idea of constant innovation and change, they propose a subversive side-plan that would enlarge the space of civic consciousness and action. Both of their Erotes have democratic spirits of expanding political and civic practices beyond the limits defined by present politics and ideological narratives. Edith Stein’s love does not connect to democracy, but to inside rules and proclaimed principles. All three, Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg and Edith Stein, challenge philosophy and humanities in general to rethink one of the least debated and largely minimised topics, love, while their personal life stories invite us to look at many tragic aspects of otherness – geographical, cultural, gender-defined and linguistic.

Notes * The reason I wanted to analyse how reflecting on love in a theoretical framework is done in the situation of war was due to my personal experiences during the war in Yugoslavia. 1. Paul W. Ludwig, Eros and Polis. Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2. See Claude Mossé, La femme en Grèce antique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1983), and Florence Dupont, L’érotisme masculin dans la Rome antique (Paris: Belin, 2001). 3. This second-century AD Greek author wrote fictitious letters of courtesans, parasites, fishermen and peasants, placing them in the fourth century BC. Motives are taken from the socalled New Comedy (Menander as the representative author, also appearing in the letters). See Allen R. Benner, ed., The Letters of Alciphron, Aelian and Philostratus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 4. François Lissarrague, Greek Vases. The Athenians and Their Images (New York: Riverside, 2001). 5. Laza Kostic;, Osnove lepote u svetu s osobitim obzirom na srpske narodne pesme (Novi Sad, 1880) (Foundations of Beauty in the World, with a Special Attention to Serbian Folk Songs). 6. David Braund and John Wilkins, Athenaeus and His World. Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). In the foreword by Glenn Bowersock, an innovative approach in reading Athenaeus as an author, not only as a reference, is proposed.

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7. See Robert Bracht Branham, ed., Bakhtin and the Classics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002). 8. One thing remains unclear in the information about Saurat, and that is who, in fact, was the first to communicate with him, Anica or Rebecca? 9. He appears as ‘Konstantin’ in West’s book: avant-garde theoretician, poet, linguist, critic, translator – among others of Rabelais’ works. 10. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey through Yugoslavia (London: Macmillan, 1982 (1942)), 807. 11. Ibid., 809. 12. A lame, heavily cut and censored version of her book appeared at the beginning of the crisis in Yugoslavia, fostering a very pro-Serbian version of the work. The translator, Nikola Koljevic;, former university professor and specialist in English literature, was a close collaborator of Radovan Karadžic; in Bosnia, and committed suicide in 1996 in the Serbian para-state in the region. 13. On the reception of Thomas Mann and translations by Anica Savic; Rebac, see Tomislav Bekic;, ‘Thomas Mann in Jugoslawien’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Universität Jena 25, no. 3 (1976): 385–393; on Mann’s quotation of Savic; Rebac’s work, see Tomislav Bekic;, ‘Anica Savic; Rebac i Tomas Man’, Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik 27, no. 1 (1979): 81–90. 14. See Olga Freidenberg, Image and Concept. Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, eds Nina Braginskaia and Kevin Moss, with a foreword by Vyacheslav V. Ivanov (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997). 15. See Elliot Mossman, ed., The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg 1910– 1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982). 16. Freidenberg, Image and Concept, X. 17. See Anica Savic; Rebac, Predplatonska erotologija, Književna zajednica (Novi Sad: Književna zajednica Novoga Sada, 1984), 90. 18. See Nicole Loraux, The Divided City. On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (New York: Zone, 2001). In her book, published earlier in French, Nicole Loraux examines the case of statis in the Athenian democracy. 19. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter. Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Alain Schnapp, Le chasseur et la cité. Chasse et érotique en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). 20. Freidenberg, Image and concept, 107. 21. Edith Stein, Die Frau. Ihre Aufgabe nach Natur und Gnade (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1959).

CHAPTER

1 4

Secular Couplings An Intergenerational Affair with Islam RUTH MAS

In 1995, Alain Ruscio launched a study of French colonial discrimination in the Maghreb in which, discussing mixed marriages, he provocatively asks, ‘Are the two communities at least able to encounter each other, to come to know each other better through the most natural of relations, love?’1 Some of the most salient questioning of the acceptance of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims into France has centred on the physical and emotional coupling of members of the two communities. Since at least France’s colonial project of assimilation, its claims for the ‘liberation’ of the Maghreb have gone hand in hand with mixed marriages in order to ensure the control and ‘equality’ of its colonised people.2 Mixed marriages were de facto métissage-in-action, propped up by French racial policies that ‘endorsed’ Islam and endorsed these marriages as an ideal of assimilation and racial regeneration.3 The primary object of the politics of regeneration, promoted under the guise of mixed marriages, was the feminine Algerian Muslim subject who needed to be saved from the restrictions of oppressive and patriarchal Islamic law, forced marriages and polygamy.4 Studies that have attempted to recover the ‘muted’ Maghrebi feminine subject have yielded how resistant she could be to France’s liberating ‘overtures’; despite the strong efforts by feminist groups to address the situation of colonised Muslim women, the latter did not all welcome French forms of liberation.5 Arguments made about the emancipatory promise of métissage and of mixed marriages persist in contemporary France, especially after the term entered common parlance in the 1980s in order to subvert its racial connotations and to render French notions of universalism more complex. However, while the success of a mixed mar-

Notes for this section begin on page 286.

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riage embodies a pluralist imaginary about the coexistence of different cultures within the nation state, the colonial resonances of such an imaginary in France continue to focus on the liberation of Muslim women. In order to approach the continued significance of the question of métissage in contemporary France, I will focus on the work of Fethi Benslama, a practising psychoanalyst whose clinical study of the trauma of exile for Franco-Maghrebis both informs his sociological and anthropological academic work and contributes to the growing body of scholarship by Muslim Franco-Maghrebi intellectuals. Métissage emerges as a particularly salient site of reflection for Benslama, especially in La demeure empruntée (The Borrowed Dwelling, published in 1995), a case study of Samia, a young Franco-Maghrebi woman who married a nonMuslim French man. Through it, we can analyse the ordering of the social, historical and political relations between France and the Maghreb – themes that run through Benslama’s La Nuit brisée (1988), Une Fiction troublante (1994) and La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam (2002). Benslama puts forward a complicated analysis that stems from the displacement of a post-colonial writer, in which the story of colonial violence behind exile can be retrieved to examine how it rearticulates the differences in citizenship, religious affiliation and ethnicity in the historical coming together of (post-)Christian and/or the dominant majority French and Muslim Maghrebi cultures in France. Using Benslama as a platform, I question the usefulness of mixed marriage as an ideal that mitigates the impact of a history of colonisation on the postcolonial feminine subject. Of course, this is not to deny the subjectivity and agency of the (post-)colonised whose relationship to the politics of the coloniser (with regards to the forces of power that structure the Maghreb’s relationship to France) are in a sense paradoxical. My point is to emphasise the inherent inequality in the distribution of power between coloniser and colonised, which is sedimented into a post-colonial context instead of presenting an image of the fully submissive colonised subject as delivered to the overwhelming and allpervasive power of the colonialist, which not only controls the colonised, but moreover seems to be fully in control of the effects of his political strategies. The figure of Samia in La demeure empruntée allows us to trace the re-elaboration of the French colonial project of assimilation back into the métropole through the colonial tropes of métissage6, which are now being elaborated as part of the French post-colonial project of integration. In this regard, La demeure empruntée should be read in relation to Robert Young’s argument (through G.C. Spivak) that when sex is set up as the heart of race and culture, ‘hybridity suggests the necessity of revising normative estimates of the position of woman … who only becomes a productive agent through an act of colonial violation’.7 Doing so positions the (post-)colonised Muslim Franco-Maghrebi woman as the primary subject of this inquiry into métissage and establishes the ethico-political boundaries of ‘mixed unions’ as the enactment of hybridity.

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It is the Story of Samia… The ambivalent status of le couple métissé is a metonymy for the ambivalence of métissage in an environment whose consistent resistance to the integration of its Maghrebi immigrants crosses both liberal and conservative anxieties about the presence of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims in France. La demeure empruntée evokes the development of Benslama’s thinking and his position on the particular problematic of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims in France. After summarising Benslama’s case study with special attention to his interpretation, I will discuss it in terms of his theorising of métissage in order to draw out how Benslama, in supplementing métissage with the concept of intersigne, makes exile a condition of integration. I then turn to a discussion of the utility and value of Benslama’s analysis and the post-colonial reading that it enables. In such a reading, Samia’s ‘mixed marriage’ stands as a prototype for the historical coupling of Algeria with France – a model of le couple métissé – in which the interplay between ‘mixed marriages’ and the integration of Maghrebis into France continues to be structured by a colonialist discourse on race and sexuality. La demeure empruntée was published as an article of the same name.8 Because of its 1995 publication and some of the references it contains, we can assume that the case study Benslama recounts took place in the mid 1990s, probably between 1993 and 1995. It tells of a family of Franco-Maghrebis, who have come to see him in a public clinic that Benslama describes as located ‘in the heart of one of the distraught housing projects in the northern suburb of Paris’, and in which Benslama has been working as a psychoanalyst for over a decade. Samia figures within this case as a young woman of Algerian extraction who runs off against her parent’s will and marries a French (i.e., non-Franco Maghrebi) man. La demeure empruntée reflects the struggle of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims against the constraints of French assimilation, and Benslama has published his study to analyse the effects of forces of globalisation on the postcolonial processing of Maghrebi Muslims into France. Benslama’s argument about the socio-political stakes involved in ‘constraining subjectivity along ethnic lines’ is developed in a context where the totalising nature of the nation state is in conflict with religious, ethnic and cultural totalities. In La demeure empruntée, his argument is directed against the currency given to ‘l’âme de l’étranger’ (the psyche of the foreigner), which has been constructed out of the relativisation and essentialisation of culture in current French theories of ethno-psychiatry. What Benslama objects to most specifically is the ‘increasing ethnicisation of psychological uniqueness (singularité), such as the idea of an ethnic unconscious … which is always concerned as if by chance, with Africans and Maghrebis, but never Europeans’. ‘You would think’, he continues, ‘that the latter are endowed with a universal unconscious, or with the universal as unconscious’ (78). The problem that this poses for the immigrant, according to

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Benslama, is that s/he is ‘no longer the object of discovery in her or his singularity, but of re-cognition (re-connaissance), in other words, of a postulate whose truth is anticipated by well established anthropological knowledge’ (78). Benslama argues that, moreover, faced with ‘horrifying ruptures of transmission, [parents] are sometimes prone to make their children find again, at all costs, the fiction of the community body of their origin … [The] children of the foreigner who are born in the exile of their parents … are sacrifice[d] in order to find once again the originary metaphor supposedly lost to the generation of the parents’ (79). Benslama challenges normative and essentialising understandings of ethnicity on the grounds that they erase (sacrifice) the singularity of the FrancoMaghrebi subject, and that such erasure ignores and thus renders meaningless the trauma and pain of their exile (especially the second generation) who are consequently deprived of the capacity to ‘metaphorise’ it (79). Benslama sets La demeure empruntée in three movements of what he terms as a ‘genealogical billiard game’. The first movement began when Samia was about sixteen years of age, two years before Benslama actually meets her. Samia’s parents, Mr and Mrs K., had been living in France for twenty-five years, have Algerian citizenship and were fostering French (i.e., non Franco-Maghrebi Muslim) children within the context of a ten-year collaboration with an association for the protection of children.9 Benslama describes them as a ‘modern couple whose four children were brought up with little reference to the Islamic tradition, which had hardly taken into consideration religious holidays’ (81). Benslama does not provide any additional details about the family’s economic situation or milieu in either Algeria or in France, or about the parents’ profession. After a serious car accident almost costs Peguy (one of the children whom they have fostered since babyhood) her life and she falls into a coma, the parents, who have been by her bedside night and day, vow to adopt her if she survives. Benslama states that Peguy’s eventual emergence from the coma was considered to be a ‘renaissance’. After getting the consent of Peguy’s elderly grandparents, whom they have also brought into the family and support, Mr and Mrs K. eagerly start their proceedings for adoption. However, after a lengthy process of application, Mr and Mrs K. are refused the right to adopt Peguy, who is a French citizen, on the grounds that as Algerian citizens, they must conform to the prohibition of adoption by Algerian law. Peguy continues to remain a ward of the State placed with Samia’s parents. Peguy’s age is not mentioned and we can only assume that she is an elementary school child when Benslama recounts: ‘Peguy, who had been placed at the K’s home since she was a baby, considered herself as their child to the point that, at school she refused to answer to her original family name. She finally found this subterfuge, to write on her books: Peguy B. (her patronymic) family K. It is in this way that this child, even though she knew her natural genealogy had herself constructed a montage, a fiction that permitted her to face her situation.’ Benslama describes how Peguy begins to resemble the other children

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physically, to speak Arabic like them and to ‘melt completely into the family landscape’ (81). Mr and Mrs K. are assigned to Benslama as soon as the administrators inform them that it will be impossible to pursue the adoption. Benslama describes how Samia’s parents do not take the news well at all, how they are utterly and completely devastated, are crying and overcome by a complete sense of injustice. In reference to the second time he sees them, one month later when they present themselves at his practice, Benslama states, ‘I noticed the drastic change in their attitudes, in their speech and even in the way they dressed. I couldn’t help noticing that Mrs K. was wearing a scarf that covered her hair.’ Mrs K. then promptly informs Benslama that they had just discovered that Islam prohibited the adoption of Peguy and that even if the time ever came when they would be allowed to adopt her, they would refuse. Benslama states, ‘It is true that not only does Qur’anic law not recognise adoption, but it prohibits … changing the name and the genealogy (filiation) of the child’ (81).10 ‘Then’, Benslama states, ‘their discourse becomes religious, very conservative, and one day a closure, a withdrawal suddenly took place, which subsequently did not stop from hardening; it was to the point that we began to ask ourselves whether we should continue collaborating with them, [even though] they fostered, moreover, two other children with the service’ (81). Samia appears in the story a year and a half later. Having reached the age of majority (18 years of age), she decides to acquire French citizenship, which, despite the fact that she was born in France, she can acquire only as an adult. Her parents, whom Benslama describes as having ‘rapidly converted to religious tradition’, are hostile to her holding anything but Algerian citizenship. Samia, who has not adapted well to the conservative pressures of parents who now control her every move, refuses to go to school and even disappears for two weeks. Benslama describes Mr and Mrs K. as living through ‘unspeakable anguish’. When she finally returns, she agrees to visit Benslama on her parents’ suggestion. When Samia enters his office, Benslama remarks that physically, she looks no older than fifteen years of age, and that later on he realises that her emotional maturity was not far from that level. He describes her as ‘an adolescent in great difficulty, sad, who couldn’t look anybody in the eye, and wouldn’t stop fidgeting, not comfortable in her own skin, who didn’t know where to stand and [who was] in a permanent state of anxiety’ (81). She promptly asks Benslama for the name of a church because she ‘felt Christian’, wanted to practise Christianity and has only come to see Benslama to tell him so. Benslama quickly ascertains that she has no knowledge of Christianity. Faced with his realisation of this, Samia breaks out into an ‘abusive tirade against Islam, about her hatred of the religion, about how she doesn’t consider herself an Arab and how she wants to change her first name. And how sorry she was she hadn’t done it when she could have’ (82). Benslama assumes that she is referring to the opportunity to do so afforded to her by French citizenship and wonders about

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the significance of the effect that the proposal to ‘de-baptise’ herself must have had on a candidate applying for French citizenship. She violently condemns ‘her parents, their religious attitude, their national belonging’, and, at times, Benslama fears that she is going to storm out and slam the door. When Benslama turns the conversation around by asking her if there is something that she enjoyed doing that had nothing to do with her parents or her family, Samia responds that she wants to be a writer like George Sand. After being able to engage her on the topic of Sand, Benslama realises that she will probably return to see him. He states: The figure of this writer remained thereafter, for more than a year that the sessions lasted, present between us, like a pact that represented an essential cloud that obviously had identifying value for Samia and it was an identification that I accepted – that rendered possible the transference – and that permitted to put into work a metaphoricity of étrangement for her … an entrance through fiction that writing represents of literature in the body of the Other. It is the possibility of identity that is no longer caught in the dilemma between faithfulness to the ethnic body and its betrayal in entering the glorious body of an other-nationality (nationalité-autre). From the identitarian cry of one identity to another, toward an identity that writes itself, that is the … solution that Samia chooses, the importance of which I would only fully come to grips with later. (82)

Benslama worked with her throughout the next nine months as she slowly began to ‘untangle the web of hate in which she felt enclosed, where confusion reigned between the national, the ethno-linguistic and the religious’ (82). Together, they sorted out the differences between being an Arab or Algerian and a Muslim, and how having French citizenship does not exclude being a Muslim. Benslama states that: These simple differences were not simple for her, because her parents themselves had set the categories at odds … It is obvious … that for an identity to constitute itself in its singularity, readability is required, and thus, distinct lines and spacing outs. But wasn’t it necessary that she first be able to accept herself and to be accepted in the ideal of writing in the French language in order to tolerate such or other identitarian representations of her parents? Samia was beginning to assume her origin without passing through the reactive faith or the religiosity of her parents. The choice of this feminine figure that surpasses the position of the traditional woman, as much by her name (George) as by the trajectory of her life, was not a coincidence either. (82)

However, Benslama assesses that ‘as Samia advanced on the path to autonomy and self-affirmation and that she liberated her autonomy as a theologico-sexual identity, the hatred of Samia for her mother grew’ (83). Benslama recounts how she became increasingly sexually provocative and spent more and more time with boys, into whose arms she would throw herself whenever she saw her mother. The worried parents visit Benslama and relay the humiliation they feel before their neighbours and the rest of the family. Samia’s mother is especially vigilant about her daughter’s virginity and states, ‘The dresses she wears

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are rape dresses’ (82). During the summer holidays, Samia is raped. Benslama reports that her mother dramatically lived the loss of her daughter’s virginity. Feeling that they have reached the depths of humiliation and indignation, her mother asserts, ‘Samia has done everything to us – nationality, the rejection of religion, rape – what else can she do?’ (83). However, it was the father, Benslama recounts, who surprised him the most because of the compassion he demonstrated toward his daughter. Samia later told him, ‘I had to be raped and to lose this piece of skin in order for my father to take interest in me and to tell me that he loves me’ (83). Because for the family there is nothing else to do and ‘the irreparable had been committed’, the atmosphere relaxes and Samia is sent off to Bretagne to train as a librarian. After six months, she decides to live with Eric (a non-Muslim youth from Bretagne) and eventually becomes pregnant. When her mother finds out, she faints and decides to cut off all contact with Samia. ‘However’, Benslama states, ‘at the eighth month of her pregnancy, Eric wrote a letter to Samia’s mother in which he told her he wanted to give the baby an Arabic name’ (84). The very same day, without consulting her husband, Samia’s mother hurries off to her daughter’s house and ‘returns with Eric’s promise to marry Samia and to convert to Islam, at least for appearances sake’ (84). They eventually get married with both families in attendance, but the conversion of Eric, Benslama tells us, is sincere and not a ‘simulacra’. During Samia’s last visit to Benslama, where she shows him the baby, Samia sardonically comments, ‘It had to be me, a non-believing Muslim, who ends up with the only Breton capable of becoming a practising Muslim’ (84). She goes on to tell Benslama that Eric’s mother and his sister were increasingly interested in Islam, and that they were finding many points in common with Christianity. Benslama concludes, ‘Long ecumenical conversations brought the two families together. And throughout this time, in the middle of them, Samia continued to entertain her passion for George Sand’ (84).

L’entre-deux and the Debris of Colonisation My aim in what follows is to provide a contrapuntal analysis to that of Benslama’s language of metaphor in his psychoanalytic reading of La demeure empruntée. As such, I propose a reading that is undergirded by an understanding of subjectivity whose constitution can be understood in relation to the continued materiality and discursivity of power and the sedimentation of historical ontologies through which colonial structures endure.11 In such a reading, the colonial context of mixed marriages surfaces in the European political imaginary that has structured ‘le couple métissée’ at a time when efforts are being made to efface colonial memory along with its subjects.12 The allegorical significance of La demeure empruntée in relationship to this debate lies in how the people involved in Benslama’s case study revive and illustrate France’s past and

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continuing relationship with Algeria, and the points of divergence and convergence between the Maghreb and France. My attempt is thus to exploit the representational qualities of La demeure empruntée in order to then highlight their historical sedimentations at the same time as I maintain the primacy of subjectivity throughout the analysis. In other words, I take distance from metaphorical readings of the subject in order to avoid the trap of analogy, which would collapse colonial history and the post-colonised subject, thus erasing the subjectivity of the latter. Samia’s marriage to Eric is grounded in the history of France’s project of assimilation of its ex-colonies. Through Samia’s rape, the body of Samia becomes the site for the recognition of the violent interplay between Algeria and France; it is only after forcing ‘violence’ to be acknowledged that Samia is free to marry Eric. Ultimately, the mixed marriage continues to speak its colonial ontology in a context where the social marginalisation of Franco-Maghrebis is refracted into the contemporary debate on mixed marriages in France. In what follows, I want to examine how Benslama approaches this issue in his description of European fascism and Islamic intransigence as the double hegemony within which Franco-Maghrebis are caught, i.e., a struggle for and against the internal colonialism of Franco-Maghrebis in France. I will examine Benslama’s discussion of exile in relation to métissage in order to emphasise the importance of the historical sedimentation of the power of empire for the consideration of Benslama’s liberal reading of Franco-Maghrebi subjectivity in relationship to Islam. Métissage, Benslama argues, ‘does not open the doors into the paradise of subjectivity, which, often in the clinical field, is usually the correlation of psychic suffering and sometimes catastrophes, especially at the heart of transmission between generations. I am referring here to the children of migrants … (Métissage) does not suffice in order to be creative, to become more free, or more respectful of others.’13 For Benslama, the problem with notions of métissage is that they do little justice to the question of subjectivity, namely, the subjectivity of Muslim Maghrebi migrants whose genealogies and histories are lost in the free-floating relativistic plurality of identities evoked by theories of métissage. The extremity of the ‘hyperparadoxical’ qualities of métissage posited by some scholars worries Benslama because of their potential to swing over to what he terms a delimitation, which feeds into the culture of globalised markets, ‘where anything can coexist with anything and ally itself with anything else’.14 Métissage risks, according to Benslama, the danger of ‘dis-affiliation, de-institutionalisation, and de-localisation that submits them to market logics … of consumption. Consumable alterities’.15 Benslama has further qualified this condition as the interplay of disinheritance between territory and psyche that takes its toll on the subjects of exile.16 Exile for Franco-Maghrebi Muslims is thus not only an exile into another world, that of the West, but also stems from the violently imposed exile into

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the economic processes of modernity set into motion by empire and ‘marked by colonial violence, the devastating rapidity of the processes of transformation, and the way in which they are disrobed by the economic ideology of development’.17 Benslama analyses the symptoms and effects of exile with respect to the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject as having both physical implications and characteristics as well as psychic ones that stem from the displacement of the religious from their existences.18 Supplementing the notion of métissage with intersigne opens up the discussion of métissage to incorporate the experiences of those who are marginalised in France, such as Samia and her family; positioned at the intersigne, they are the by-product of the link between France and Algeria, never fully located in either France or Algeria. When read against the theorising of métissage, the Franco-Maghrebi Muslims in La demeure empruntée provide the subjective ground of l’entre-deux (between-two), which Benslama describes as ‘the location of the sign of love and death, the location of thought’.19 Benslama’s entre-deux puts a finger on the Orientalist dichotomies of East/Islam and West, in order to carve out a space in the present for the historical recognition of the binary and violent logic of the relationship between France and the Maghreb within which Muslim Franco-Maghrebis have been trapped. ‘(T)he rapport of co-belonging is designated as the illegitimate product of the coupling between Islam and the West and is caught between the horrified interpellations of the two.’20 The individuals in La demeure empruntée illustrate Benslama’s identification of Franco-Maghrebis Muslims as ‘movers between worlds’,21 subjects caught between diasporic movements of mass displacement and the lived exile of their lives in France. La demeure empruntée provides a point of departure for Benslama’s theorising of ‘disconnection and dispersion’ implied by métissage and its effects on the subjectivity of Franco-Maghrebis Muslims, who, Benslama argues, are in ‘antagonistic and violent rapport’ with their ‘location’.22 La demeure empruntée delimits the tensions in the spectrum of co-belonging in France. Benslama’s work is useful in setting up the problems that Franco-Maghrebi Muslims encounter in France against the background of the hegemony and violence of French colonial power. Samia’s fate can be read as being intertwined with that of her sister’s. Both are products of repudiated Algeria (encapsulated most vividly by their mother), with which France refuses to ‘hybridise’. Peguy evokes the potential for the ‘adoption’ of France by her Algerian parents. Their initial decision to adopt her transcends the political history of conflict between them resulting in part in their own disaffiliation from France; they do not have the right to French citizenship and are consequently still bound to Algerian law. Peguy represents the ultimate limit of their affiliation with France. The impossibility for Peguy’s/France’s adoption is not an isolated incident, and it simultaneously disrupts the acceptance of Peguy’s Algerian family in France. Given the fact that Samia’s ‘Frenchness’ is not as concretised as Peguy’s, the effects of the ‘dislocation of Algeria’ are also nefarious to her.

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Ultimately, Samia is doubly dislocated/exiled, first via the aftermath of France’s/Peguy’s inability to be adopted by Algeria/her parents, which severs her affiliation with her mother and which impedes her integration into France. Secondly, her dislocation is reflected in the need for her to ‘apply’ to be ‘located’ in France when she has to apply for French citizenship despite the fact that she is born in France. Samia’s ‘dislocation’ is sedimented as the historical debris of Algeria’s status as a legal French territory after Algerian Independence in 1962, ever since then, the French have struggled over which ‘French’ to consider ‘French’. More recently, France’s attempts to cease immigration have caused Benslama to blame the French state for the mass-denationalisation of Franco-Maghrebis by passing the 22 July 1993 law. The law declared that children born in France of Maghrebi parents (some of whom already had French identity cards that were eventually withdrawn) no longer automatically acquired French citizenship. Plans were also made for the mass deportation/repatriation of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims and provoked the social dismemberment of the millions who have since been marginalised economically and culturally to the banlieues. Not only were many Algerians expelled and their identity regularly policed, but laws requiring children of Algerian born parents to apply for French citizenship were also implemented. The social violence in France that has affected Samia and that has resulted in the exclusion of Samia’s mother/Algeria from its body politic has been a contributing factor in the transposition of ‘race’ as a contemporary category of exclusion. The racial categories and discourses of exclusion that figure in France’s public discourse have enabled Benslama to critique the French nation state on the grounds of citizenship: ‘Three processes of the destitution of immigrants are being produced for twenty years under our eyes: the discourse of the naturalisation of a common (comme-un) body from which they are ejected, masse de-nationalisation and legal de-legitimisation.’23 Benslama compares France’s passing of the 22 July 1993 law to the Vichy regime’s withdrawal of French nationality from its Jewish citizens: ‘The Nation of laws’, Benslama contends, ‘has gone against its principles, through a historically continuous line that goes from colonialism in Algeria whose natives were nationals without citizenship or rights, to the situation of migrants today, and passing through Vichy’.24 ‘The ability of fascist discourse to prey on the present condition of Franco-Maghrebi Muslim immigrants has been facilitated by their exile from their homelands. Fascist discourse has fragmented to such an extent that it no longer can be identified solely with Le Pen’s party and followers and attached as it currently is to fears over the naturalisation of those not covered by state birth, [it] uses the immigrant [as] its subject as well as its vehicle.’25 Due to the large-scale post-colonial Maghrebi immigration of the last decades, the anxiety over mixed marriages as the objects of métissage (as the model for the encounter of ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’) is now being extended to the issue of immigration. In France, the stories of mariages blancs – ‘fake marriages’ – whose

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aim is only to obtain residency papers for one member of the couple, have filled the pages of popular newspapers and overshadowed (if not been conflated with) discussions of mixed marriages, which are believed to be on the rise.26 In line with its intention to curb public fear about the invasion of France by Maghrebi immigrants, the French government has done everything it can to curtail ‘fake marriages’ by denying many mixed couples the right to get married unless both partners have met official residency requirements. The nationality laws passed on 27 July 1993 and the restrictions on entrance and stay introduced on 24 August 1993, harshly reinforced control, introduced ‘fraud’ clauses into the legislation and rendered the status of the partner applying for residency even more tenuous than it had been before.27 Not only are marriages found to be fraudulent delayed, postponed or legally annulled after the fact, many precautions have been put into place in order to discourage those who intend to marry solely to acquire citizenship. For example, a residency card can only be obtained one year after marriage as long as the couple is still living together, and now, in that year, the applicant can be deported at any time; the 1993 laws and those since have provided more categories under which that can happen and citizenship applications have also tightened to allow for the revoking the citizenship of those not found to be properly assimilated.28 The present context grounds Benslama’s suspicion of what he terms the ‘fiction of the common body’ of the host country, to which access and belonging is assured through the principle of nationality, and which considers Samia and her family strangers. Yet the mixed marriage of Samia to Eric has not overcome the problem of violence so long as Samia has been completely cut off from her mother/Algeria. In other words, the subjectivity of Samia cannot be fully integrated because the relational lines between Samia and her mother/ Algeria are disrupted. I want to suggest that the association of Islam with the extra-national forces that have oppressed Muslim women in Islamic countries circumscribes the idea of Islamic community in France and, consequently, the possibilities for the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject enabled by Benslama’s discussion of La demeure empruntée. Samia figures within it as the prime example of those who are caught between what Benslama calls the ‘fiction of community bodies’, namely, ‘the social discourse of assimilation and identitarian claims’ and ‘religious and communitarian proselytism’.29 Benslama also resists the idea of ‘other fictions of common bodies’, which run into conflict with that of the French nation state, which is presently being compounded by the internationalised fears of Islam, especially post-September 11.30 His description of La demeure empruntée as being based on the “tryptic” of identity-nationalityintegration (that) shows the crucial stakes in assigning the foreigner to the identity of her origin, to the fiction of the community body, in the host country’,31 suggests that for Benslama, there are grounds on which the possibility of an extra-nationally defined body-politic in France can be problematic. Those grounds extend beyond Benslama’s initial concerns in La demeure empruntée

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about immigrants being restrained within totalised prescriptions of ethnic and religious community in the field of anthropological psychology. They centre on the political possibilities for religiously (read, Islamically) defined community and the hegemonic potential that they carry for the Muslim feminine subject, which Benslama rejects as much as he does the force behind French nationalism. Benslama’s anxiety about the hegemonic potential behind unified notions of Islamic community is transposed into La demeure empruntée and results in a few tensions within Benslama’s work. After all, it is only when Samia rejects Islam altogether and runs off and marries a French man that she is ‘liberated’ from her mother, who wants to control her with the weight of Islamic custom and tradition. What gives me pause in this scenario is how easily readers of La demeure empruntée can couple the ‘liberation of Muslim women’ with the ‘violence of Islam’ and ignore the very clear association of violence with the French nation, a violence that Benslama does emphasise throughout his work, but that he somehow ignores in his claim that Samia’s parents had set at odds what it meant to be Algerian, Arab and, Muslim. Benslama’s anxiety also surfaces within the shift in descriptions of Samia’s mother before and after her ‘conservative hardening’: first, Samia’s mother is a ‘modern’ parent who brought up the children ‘with little reference to the Islamic tradition or even to holidays’. What Benslama has done here is dichotomise modernity and Islam – modern couples, in other words, are those who have little reference to religious traditions – thus ignoring the very many modern Muslims around the world whose adherence to the Islamic tradition is conservative. Such a conflation also permits Benslama to speak of the categories such as ‘Arab’, ‘French’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Algerian’ as being brought into conflict by Samia’s parents. However, the onus is on Benslama to establish how that is so – has he not been arguing at the same time that those categories are also in conflict under the weight of France’s imperial ambitions, French society and French government? This conflation also enables Benslama’s relative silence around the subjectivity of Samia’s ‘extreme’ mother, who, paradoxically, as a Muslim woman, serves as the image of violent Islam through her association with Algeria; Benslama never fully explores her resistance to Samia’s mixed marriage. Instead, Samia’s mother can be easily understood as a woman besought with extreme religious conservatism, coldly narcissistic with regards to her daughter’s rape, who cuts off her daughter completely and who tries to force Eric to convert to Islam. The resistance to Islamic extremism that directs Benslama’s thinking about Islam, especially with regard to his attempts to safeguard the Muslim FrancoMaghrebi subject, can garner him accusations of having constrained and essentialised the question of Franco-Maghrebi subjectivity along Islamic or religious lines. By relaying the question of violence against Algerian women back to the French context, the malevolent forces of ‘Islam’ are kept outside of France’s political structures; this reinforces the French state as necessary to the control

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and limitation of both an internal and external Islamic terrorist threat. Such a reading is enabled because, again, unexplored, the image of Samia’s mother brings the Islamic tradition closely in line with ‘hegemony’ and risks inflating Islam to such despotic proportions that the ‘genealogical de-legitimisation’ that Benslama so decries is rendered legitimate. That the subjectivity of Muslims is kept within the confines of the French nation and the link to the Maghreb serves only to amplify the international stakes that pit Islam against the West is consonant with Talal Asad’s argument that adherence to an ‘imported’ religious tradition is the pivot around which such loyalties are often tested with regards to immigrants in a post-Christian secular West. ‘The politicization of religious traditions by Muslim immigrants’, he contends, ‘serves to question the inevitability of the absolute nation-state – of its demands to exclusive loyalty and its totalizing cultural projects’.32 In this case, loyalty, exclusive loyalty to the liberal ideological unity of the French nation state functions as the precondition to the ‘liberation’ of the Muslim Franco-Maghrebi feminine subject by severing authority from her own religious traditions understood to be located in the Maghreb. What I am trying to emphasise is how easily her subjectivity is kept within the confines of the French nation and circumbscribed to the extent that it is obscured, so that her agency is derived only from the failure or rejection of Islam writ large. Yet I maintain that Benslama nevertheless leaves the experience of ‘Islam’ open to the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject. The salient point that emerges from the consideration of Franco-Maghrebi subjects as Muslims is how their subjectivity is configured by the apparatus of power put into play by a modernising liberal state such as France, where the key role that France plays in Algeria is left completely silent. Such silence actually speaks to the fact that Islam bears the responsibility of its compatibility with liberalism, whose authority is internationally unquestioned as are the hegemony of its political ideals and salvific capacities, especially post-September 11.33 To accept this, however, is not to deny that the processes of power accompanying the liberal state do disclose other types of subjecthood for Franco-Maghrebis that intersect heterogeneously with Islam as a religious tradition.34 In this regard, Benslama’s discussion of métissage, when brought in relation with the issue of mixed marriages, exposes other possibilities of Muslim subjectivity in relation to secular workings of the liberal French state. These include, as in the case of Samia’s disavowal of Islam, somebody of Muslim culture or, in her own words, ‘a non-believing Muslim’, signifiers that speak to the ambivalent positioning yet intersecting of ‘Muslim’, ‘liberal’, ‘French’ and ‘secular’, within the regenerating mechanisms deployed by the secular liberal nation state.35 The vitality of such intersections for the Muslim Franco-Maghrebi subject is put into play through the baby with a Muslim name, the embodiment of l’entre deux, which is born into a union that qualifies in significant ways the binary logic that puts métissage into motion. How severely this vitality is mitigated by the fact that in

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Benslama’s narrative, the baby with a Muslim name remains nameless, is still, nevertheless, a question. The undoing of the binary logic of métissage that would antagonise the categories of ‘Muslim’ and ‘French’ is activated by and figured in Eric’s conversion to Islam as well as Samia’s definition of herself as a non-believing Muslim. Here, I want to begin by heuristically considering religious conversion as another agentialised form of métissage so as to locate Benslama’s liberal reading of Muslim subjectivity within it. Gauri Viswanathan, in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief, has argued for understanding conversion as an ‘oppositional gesture’, which ‘in an era of religious tolerance functions an expression of resistance to the centralizing tendencies of national formation’.36 I find intriguing Viswanathan’s interlacing of conversion with the notion of ‘dissent’ to argue that conversion can ‘unbuckle the consolidating ambitions of the secular state, within which former religious orthodoxies are subsumed’.37 However, I would suspend the categories of ‘resistance’ and ‘dissent’ and provisionally replace them with ‘reconfiguration’ in order to more aptly address the possibility of ‘oppositional gestures’ to the French state without giving undue emphasis to the effectivity of the subject. La demeure empruntée is replete with the ‘oppositional gesture’ of conversions in an age of religious intolerance: Samia’s conversion away from Islam, and even France/Peguy’s stubborn insistence on being affiliated to the family (to Algeria), which may be understood as an aborted attempt at conversion into what Benslama terms as the culture of Islam,38 despite her parent’s difficult ‘reconversion’ to Islam. It is useful to recall Asad’s discussion of the concept of culture as part of the totalising project of the liberal modernising state and empire, which sought to transform colonial subjects into more progressive secular beings by conceiving of culture as of a common way of life. Conversion, which also does not escape a colonial construction, here functions not only to define the parameters of the intersection between subjectivity, Islam and the nation state, but also reflects how the ‘conversions’ of Samia and Peguy can figure differently as assimilation or adoption into a community, neither of which are religiously defined, in which nation and ethnicity are contiguous. In comparison, Eric’s conversion to Islam does not directly link the question of subjectivity to religion and ethnicity, but it may reconfigure the colonial heritage of the intersections of ethnicity and the nation because of the way it situates the issue of religion within the post-colonial French state.39 Cast in this way, the conversion of Eric to Islam can easily be interpreted as a destabilising of secular power that undermines the fixed boundaries of both the nation and the subject – a ‘conversion’ seen as trumping all of the others in the story of Samia and that forces religion onto the public sphere of the French state despite its very rigid advocation of laïcité. However, Benslama’s take on Eric’s conversion, as being followed by ‘long ecumenical conversations that brought the two families together’, seems to echo an ideal of tolerance and the ‘finding points

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in common’ between Islam and Christianity that can be comfortably contained by secular structures of power. I suggested above that Benslama’s discussion of the ‘conversion’ to Islam of Samia’s parents facilitates a reading of Islam that can be read more like a ‘reversion’ to or of Islam (i.e., retrograde Islam) than a conversion. Juxtaposed, it is difficult to see how Benslama would justify his support of Eric’s relationship to the Islamic tradition over that of the parent’s of Samia and this may very well have to do with the ability of Eric to not overtly challenge the state’s secular ordinances. However, any conclusion that Benslama is leaving room for the subject’s experience of Islam only as a privately defined religion is at least partially undermined by his reporting of Samia’s ironic comment that as a non-believing Muslim she married Eric, the only Breton capable of becoming a practising Muslim. The analysis of Eric’s religious conversion to Islam begins to hint at how Benslama’s liberal reading of métissage yields a range of relationships that the Franco-Maghrebi subject can have to ‘Islam’, a range whose outermost boundaries simultaneously engage and eschew the normativity of Islamic textualities that accompany Islamic practice. This issue perhaps may be approached more directly through Samia, especially in relation to how ‘Islam’ has been foreclosed as violent. In this regard, I want to turn to how the question of the possibilities opened to the FrancoMaghrebi Muslim subject is raised when Benslama ‘revives’ the integration (politically and psychoanalytically) of the feminine Muslim Franco-Maghrebi fragmented subject through his description of Samia’s fascination and identification with the nineteenth-century female novelist George Sand, known for her many love affairs and for her idealisation of love. What strikes me here is Benslama’s featuring of ‘the ideal of writing in the French language’ within which he claims Samia had to be accepted in order to ‘tolerate the identitarian representations of her parents’. Benslama privileges the French non-Muslim body of writing in so far as it enables the subject to ‘engage and become active in her own future … open a rapport of debt to the Other of all identity (l’Autre de toute identité) – the metaphor of a borrowed dwelling’.40 I will return to this point below, especially with regards to how he links the question of subjectivity to the ‘religious’ or the ‘metaphysical’. But, for the moment, I want to consider Asad’s argument that: ‘The emergence of literature as a modern category of edifying writing has made it possible for a new discourse to simulate the normative function of religious texts in an increasingly secular society.’ ‘The remarkable value’, he continues, ‘given to self-fashioning through a particular kind of individualized reading and writing is entirely recognizable to Western middle-class readers of literary novels but not to most Muslims in Britain or the Indian subcontinent’.41 Asad is writing from the context of the reaction by Muslims in Britain to the Rushdie Affair and should not be read as prescribing a normative definition for all Muslims or of the Islamic tradition that stands in opposition to the secular West, but instead as pointing to the employment of literature in the larger project of modernising ‘unprogressive subjects’. Asad, of

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course, would not deny the fact that while most Muslims in France (or elsewhere) might not welcome refashionings in which they have no say, this does not preclude the fact that some Muslims would agree with them and that they might even do so in ways that reconfigure the power of the French state. What I am pointing to here is the manner in which Benslama’s advocacy for the fiction of literature also raises questions about the limits of the type of ‘literature’ that enables the integration of the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject in a socio-political context, whose attempts at marginalising Islamic religious practises from the public sphere increasingly reflect their hegemony over what constitutes ‘community’ in a liberal nation state such as France. What possibilities are there for Samia, for example, other than to relate to France through the body of texts considered to be properly European? The answer to this question depends on the manner in which texts attributed to an ‘ethnic origin’ or, more accurately, to a ‘religious origin’ are allowed to reveal other spaces of identitarian articulation and engagement within the French state. The consideration of such possibilities beg the following questions: has the French nation state put the categories of French and Islamic at such odds for Samia that for her to ‘choose’ one is for her really to reject the other? And, can Franco-Maghrebi Muslim women in France try to define themselves by way of Islamic textualities or have we already decided that pious, traditional, orthodox, etc. readings of the Qur’an cannot enable the ‘integration’ of the female Muslim subject? Such a ‘choice’ is driven by prescriptions of the modern appropriateness of the religious texts of Islam (Qur’an and Hadith) for the feminine subject. In this way, the questions of the identitarian ‘obligation’ to Islam as defined by a dogmatic reading of the Qur’an – a reading that looms behind Samia’s subjectivity in the image of her mother – are really questions of the obligation of Muslim citizens to the French state in which the Islamic religious tradition is represented as contradicting its totalising cultural and political project. This is not so much a statement about the psychological usefulness of (French) literature as opposed to religious texts for subject formation as it is a question about the subject’s relation to power, whether we attribute such power to the French state or to putative assumptions of what Islam is. Thus, my query is not whether Samia’s fragmented self should or should not be integrated in interaction with French texts or if it would be better integrated in relation to the Qur’an. My aim is to pose a different question – to ask what choice has Samia been given? Would the French state, which is disavowing its colonial history with Algeria, which resists granting either her or her parents citizenship and which encourages her to change her ‘ethnic/Muslim’ name, would this very same state encourage Samia to define herself in relation to Islamic textualities, from which the practices that emerge challenge the hegemonic norms of secular liberal governance? I do not doubt that Benslama’s analysis of Samia’s reading of Sand could enable other possibilities for the feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject. Within such a liberal reading of Muslim subjectivity, Samia’s identification with

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the status of the almost revolutionary and visionary figure of George Sand (a simultaneous insider and outsider noted for her courageous stance against the violence and fear of France’s Revolution of 1848, and her challenge to normative assumptions about gender and sexual identity) would provide an intriguing point of entry into the analysis of the potential that a Sandian version of France holds for the accommodation of the religious as well as cultural or ethnic differences of France’s many Samias and the limits of such an accommodation to the centralisation of state power. In this regard, Samia’s refashioning into an idea of the French nation through her engagement with the image of Sand, positioned at the margins and yet at the pinnacle of French modernity and the Romantic movement, complicates any notion that such a positioning of the feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject or subject of Muslim culture is uniformally aligned with the interests of the French nation state. Thus, I do not want to be taken as saying that Benslama is prescribing only certain ‘French’ choices for the Franco-Maghrebi subject – I am not. To do so would be to maintain the rigid dichotomy between Islam and France that I am arguing Benslama is working against, despite the tensions in his work. Instead, what I am interested in is how the implied preclusion of certain practices and ways of being Muslim in France from normative definitions of what constitutes French literature – namely, those practices identified with traditionalist interpretations of the Qur’an – speaks to how Benslama’s emphasis on subjectivity is tied to the secularising and hegemonic project of the liberal modern nation state. The role that the state plays in enacting what Asad has called the hegemonic political goals of modernity highlights the inevitability of the primary position that ‘the ideal of writing in the French language’ holds in Benslama’s work.42 This line of questioning assumes Asad’s critique of the ‘regenerating’ machinery of modernity and the asymmetry of power that exists between nation states and between the states and their subjects.43 I have used Benslama’s work to explore how, within such processes, the subject is situated in a complex web of power relations that she is subjected to, however variegated that positioning may be.44 Benslama’s liberal reading of the Franco-Maghrebi subject is consequently productive of a kind of plural thinking of the relationship between Islam and liberalism. As I have argued elsewhere, hidden in his statement that the subject can ‘open a rapport of debt to the Other of all identity (l’Autre de toute identité) – the metaphor of a borrowed dwelling’ is the fact that Benslama is very much working from the perspective of the ever-reformability of a transcendental Other, in order to simultaneously advocate the unboundedness of the nation and of Islam.45 The success of such an endeavour ultimately depends on whether the reconfiguring of ‘Islam’ to the ‘West’ and of their relationship, that Benslama’s thinking, suggests does not presuppose the marginalisation of religious practices of collectivities and the texts that accompany them in liberal states, as well as whether the relations between states can be equitably reconstituted.

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Within such a fashioning of a religious and political project, which conceives of accommodating the multiplicity of changing traditions and accompanying modes of being and practices of Europe’s new Europeans in order to transcend civilisational or modern and pre-modern dichotomies, the limits of the possibilities for the Franco-Maghrebi subject that Benslama opens up in relationship to ‘Islam’ are met most forcefully with regard to the feminine subject. What a reading of La demeure empruntée yields is that the historical mutability of and violence toward the feminine subject that scholars such as Young and Spivak so decry will not be dissolved so long as her possibilities of subjecthood are dichotomised between violent Islam or liberating France. Thus, my aim in discussing what constitutes the Muslim subject in France (or how such a subject is constituted) has been to avoid advocating the dichotomous aspects of métissage, which would polarise traditional Islamic subjectivities to liberal secular ones, but to see them both as inter-relatedly functioning within the same grammar of political possibilities. To that end, I have been asking if, within the interconnectedness of Islam and secularism, the feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject is allowed to ‘reflect [on] whether other traditions, such as Islam, might have their own resources for imagining such an ethic that respects dissent and honours the right to adhere to different religious or non-religious convictions’.46 As Asad has shown, such reflections may and do function within a secular project of modernity, where the two, both secular and traditionalist, co-exist by being intimately connected and located at the interstices of the webs of power of the liberal state. To allow for such reflections would enable a radical reconsideration of the secular, liberal politics of the French state sedimented in the ambitions of French empire and colonialism, and of the repositioning therein of the feminine Muslim subject.

Notes 1. Alain Ruscio, Le Credo de l’homme blanc. Regards coloniaux français (XIX-XX siècles) (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1995), 185. I have provided all of the translations in the text. 2. In Le Maghreb à l’épreuve de la colonisation (Paris: Hachette, 2002), Daniel Rivet argues against the oppositional understanding of colonialism in the Maghreb. 3. Jean-Loup Amselle, Affirmative Exclusion. Cultural Pluralism and Rule of Custom in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 72. 4. Ibid., 70–74. While Muslims were permitted to practise Qur’anic law, they did so only at the expense of their local customs and through the French colonial surveillance of its application that prepared the ‘necessary invasion’ of their own. To this end, the project to ‘regenerate’ the Muslim populations of Algeria into French citizens involved imposing rational legislation whose purpose was to annihilate religious and cultural traditions. It was a regenerating of the local justice system that took as its object the ‘liberation’ of women from Qur’anic dictates. 5. Jean Dejeux, Image de l’étrangère. Unions mixtes franco-maghrébines (Paris: La Boîte à documents, 1989), 175. 6. Ruscio, Le Credo, 36.

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7. Robert Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London-New York: Routledge, 1995, 19. 8. Fethi Benslama, ‘La demeure empruntée’, Transeuropéennes, no. 6/7 (winter 1995/96): 76–84, hereafter cited in text. 9. From the case study, it is not clear how many children they have. 10. Family law in Tunisia (the Majalla, codified after Independence in 1968), for example, recognised in the law passed on 4 March 1958 the right of a child to be adopted if abandoned, even though it has been accused of going in contradiction with Qur’anic principles. However, family law in Algeria (Qânûn al-usra) forbids adoption according to article 31. See Dejeux, Image de l’étrangère, 175. 11. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 12. Ruth Mas, ‘Compelling the Muslim Subject. Memory as Postcolonial Violence and the Public Performativity of “Secular and Cultural Islam”’, The Muslim World 5, no. 96 (October 2006): 585–616. 13. Fethi Benslama, ‘Le Métissage de l’inconscient. Réponse à l’exposé de François Laplantine’, L’Information Psychiatrique 3 (March 2000): 249–251, here 250. 14. Ibid., 250. Benslama’s objection to scholar François Laplantine, for example, was based on the lack of empirical grounding of his theorising of métissage and how it ignored ‘analysable identities’. Thus, Benslama’s concern lay beyond the scientific criticism of the void absolutes of philosophy, however differentially defined. 15. Benslama, ‘Métissage de l’inconscient’, 250. 16. Fethi Benslama, La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam (Paris: Aubier, 2002), 91f. 17. Ibid. 18. In other words, Franco-Maghrebi Muslims suffer from being cut off from their culture, society and family, and the continuity and interconnectedness with which these different spheres adhere to the Islamic tradition; this is what Benslama terms a genealogical de-legitimisation. 19. Fethi Benslama, ‘Présentation’, Cahiers Intersignes, no. 1: ‘Entre Psychanalyse et Islam’ (1990): 5–8, here 5. 20. Ibid., 7. Benslama’s engagement with the discourse of métissage is most succinctly spelled out in his response to François Laplantine, a French ethnologist who lectured at a conference entitled ‘Psychiatrie, langue, culture’, in Fort-de-France from 5–10 December, 1999. Laplantine’s lecture, ‘Pour un pensée métissée’, and Benslama’s response, ‘Métissage de l’inconscient’, were published in the March 2000 edition (no. 3) of L’information psychiatrique. 21. Fethi Benslama, ‘Majida Khattari. Hyperbole du féminin’, Art Press 18 (1997): 107–109, here 109. 22. Fethi Benslama, ‘L’enfant et le Lieu’, Cahiers Intersignes 3 (1991): 51–68, here 51. 23. Fethi Benslama, ‘Il est naturel…’, Lignes 31 (May 1997): 69–77, here 77. 24. Ibid., 76. 25. Ibid., 73f. 26. France Proulx, ‘Recent Demographic Developments in France’, Population-E 58, no. 4–5 (2003): 525–558. Although French statistics do not officially differentiate between the religious or cultural origins of its citizens, figures suggest that the number of marriages between French citizens and non-French citizens is rising more quickly than the number of non-mixed marriages. 27. Claudine Phillipe, Gabrielle Varro, and Gérard Neyrand, Liberté, Égalité, Mixité… Conjugales. Une sociologie du couple mixte (Paris: Anthropos, 1998), 49. 28. Ibid., 49-51. 29. Benslama, ‘Présentation’, 7. 30. Benslama, La Psychanalyse, 106f. 31. Benslama, ‘La demeure empruntée’, 76. 32. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 266.

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33. For a discussion of the intersections between liberalism and Islam see Saba Mahmood, ‘Questioning Liberalism Too’, Boston Review 28, no. 2 (April/May 2003): 18–20, here 19. 34. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 12–14, in which he discusses understanding modernity as a project and the role that ‘imaginative literature’ plays within it. 35. Mas, ‘Compelling the Muslim Subject’, 585f. 36. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold. Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 50; emphasis added. 37. Ibid., 47. 38. Asad, Genealogies, 248–253. 39. The colonial agenda of the liberation of the Muslim feminine subject was most carefully executed by the Bureaux Arabes, which, supported by the crypto-Catholicism of St. Simonian ideas, articulated the hope of fusing the races through its promotion of mixed marriages. The prominent St. Simonians in the Bureaux took the belief in the fusion of races to heart by marrying Maghrebi women, converting to Islam and eventually introducing and developing the concept of a ‘French Muslim’, so that French Muslims also were the ones who assured the control over their Maghrebi subjects in function of French imperial aims. 40. Benslama, ‘La demeure empruntée’, 84. 41. Asad, Genealogies, 287f. Asad is writing in the context of the reaction to the Rushdie Affair in the UK, which also had a strong impact in France and to which Benslama also reacted. See Fethi Benslama, ‘Rushdie or the textual question’, in For Rushdie. Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech, ed. Anouar Abdallah (New York: Braziller, 1994), 82–91, and Benslama, Une Fiction troublante. De l’origine en partage (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 1994). 42. Asad, Formations, 13. 43. Ibid., 7. Asad argues: ‘The difficulties with secularism as a doctrine of war and peace in the world is not that it is European (and therefore alien to the non-West) but that it is closely connected with the rise of a system of capitalist nation-states – mutually suspicious and grossly unequal in power and prosperity, each possessing a collective personality that is differently mediated and therefore differently guaranteed and threatened.’ 44. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 777–795, here 778. 45. Ruth Mas, Margins of Tawhid. Liberalism and the Discourse of Plurality in Contemporary Islamic Thought, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 2006. 46. Mahmood, ‘Questioning’, 19.

Contributors

Margarida Calafate Ribeiro is Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and has held Eduardo Lourenço’s Chair at the University of Bologna since 2008. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, Portuguese literature and literature from Portuguese-speaking countries, the history of the Portuguese Empire, colonial wars, and women and war. Her latest work was on the Portuguese colonial wars and the experience of wives of war veterans in Africa, whose testimony she gathered and edited. She is the author of Uma História de Regressos. Império, Guerra Colonial e Pós-Colonialismo (2004) and África no Feminino. As mulheres portuguesas e a Guerra Colonial (2007). She has also co-edited Fantasmas e Fantasias Imperiais no Imaginário Português Contemporâneo (2003); Lendo Angola (2008); Moçambique. Das palavras escritas (2008); and Atlantico periferico. Il postcolonialismo Portoghese e il sistema mondiale (2008). Liliana Ellena teaches Women’s and Gender History at the University of Turin, Italy and has been a Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen. She completed her master’s degree in Gender and Ethnic Studies at the University of Greenwich (UK) and received a Ph.D. from the University of Turin. Her work, concentrated on the fields of gender and cultural history, has explored links between visual sources and new objects and approaches of research including post-colonialism and transnational history. She is the coauthor of Il Quarto Stato. La fortuna di un’immagine tra cultura e politica (2002); has edited the new Italian edition of Frantz Fanon’s I dannati della terra (2007); and has co-edited a monographic issue of the journal Zapruder on transnational women’s movements (2007). Her most recent publication is ‘“White Woman Listen!” La linea del genere negli studi postcoloniali’ in Gli studi postcoloniali. Un’introduzione, eds Shaul Bassi and Andrea Sirotti (2010). During the last few years, her research has focused on the memory of colonialism in European cinema. Currently, she is completing a monograph on competing representations of modernity in interwar Italian cinema.

290

Contributors

Alexander C.T. Geppert directs the Emmy Noether research group ‘The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century’ at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of Freie Universität Berlin. He received master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Georg-AugustUniversität Göttingen, and a Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence. He has held various long-term fellowships at the University of California in Berkeley, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the German Historical Institute in London, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen and at Harvard University. Publications include numerous articles and six (co-)edited volumes: European Ego-Histoires. Historiography and the Self, 1970–2000 (2001); Orte des Okkulten (2003); Esposizioni in Europa tra Otto e Novecento. Spazi, organizzazione, rappresentazioni (2004); Ortsgespräche. Raum und Kommunikation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2005); Wunder. Poetik und Politik des Staunens im 20. Jahrhundert (2010); and Imagining Outer Space. European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming 2011); as well as a monograph, Fleeting Cities. Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (2010). At present, he is working on a comprehensive history of outer space and extraterrestrial life in the European imagination of the twentieth century. Jack (John) Rankine Goody was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. During the Second World War, he was stationed in the Near East, Italy and Germany. He undertook fieldwork in Ghana, later in India (Gujarat) and in China. Jack Goody has written extensively on literacy, the family, the Bagre myth of the LoDagaa, and on cuisine and the culture of flowers. His most recent works are The East in the West (1996); Islam in Europe (2003); Capitalism and Modernity.The Great Debate (2004); The Theft of History (2007); Renaissances. The One or the Many? (2009); The Eurasian Miracle (2009); and Europe, the Near East and Metals (forthcoming). Jo Labanyi is Professor of Spanish at New York University and a Fellow of the British Academy. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish cultural history, she is founding editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Her most recent books are Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel (2000); the edited volume Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain (2002); and Spanish Literature. A Very Short Introduction (2010). She is currently coauthoring Cinema and Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain and A Cultural History of Modern Spanish Literature, and co-editing Europe and Love in Cinema and A Companion to Spanish Cinema. Alf Lüdtke is Honorary Professor at the University of Erfurt and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hanyang University, Seoul/Republic of Korea. The foci of his research are the history of work and of working people; domination as

Contributors

291

socio-cultural practice and process (especially policing); notions and perspectives of the history of the everyday; and the visual in history and historiography. His publications include: Gemeinwohl, Polizei und Festungspraxis. Staatliche Gewaltsamkeit und innere Verwaltung in Preußen, 1815–1850 (1982; trans. into English 1989); Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (1989; trans. into French 1993, English 1995 and Korean 2002); Herrschaft als soziale Praxis. Historische und sozialanthropologische Studien (1991, ed.); Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (1993); Die DDR im Bild (2004, co-ed.); and The No Man´s Land of Violence. Extreme Wars in the 20th Century (2006, co-ed.). He has founded and co-edited the journal Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen (SOWI), and is one of the founders of the journals Historische Anthropologie and WerkstattGeschichte, as he is a co-founder of the book series Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit. Ruth Mas is a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Islam and Critical Theory in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Currently, her scholarly focus is on the production of secular Islamic intellectual traditions in France and their engagement with post-structuralist thought. She has received visiting fellowship at Cambridge University, Viadrina University, and has been a Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen. She has also attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University and the Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to editing two special issues of the journals European Review of History and Nations and Nationalism, her publications include ‘Love as Difference. The Politics of Love in the Thought of Malek Chebel’, European Review of History (2004); ‘Compelling the Muslim Subject. (Post)Colonial Violence, Memory and the Public Performativity of “Secular/Cultural Islam”’, Muslim World (2006); and ‘Transnational Politics. Recent Accounts of Muslims in France’, Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies (2010). Sandra Mass is Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Universität Bielefeld, and Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS). Her publications include Weiße Helden, schwarze Krieger. Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit, 1918–1964 (2006) and articles on racism, development aid and gender in the twentieth century. Her most recent publication is ‘Mäßigung der Leidenschaften. Kinder und monetäre Lebensführung im 19. Jahrhundert’ in Das schöne Selbst. Zur Genealogie des modernen Subjekts zwischen Ethik und Ästhetik, eds Jens Elberfeld and Marcus Otto (2009). She is also one of the editors of L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft. Her current research project concerns the history of capitalism and focuses on the cultural and everyday history of money during the nineteenth century, entitled ‘Kinderstube des Kapitalismus: Geld, Kinder und ökonomische Erziehung im 19. Jahrhundert’.

292

Contributors

Almira Ousmanova is Professor of the Department of Media at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her research interests include theories of visual culture (in particular, film theory in the digital age and visual sociology); studies of gender representations in visual arts; and the social and cultural history of Soviet cinema. Her main publications include Umberto Eco. Paradoxes of Interpretation (2000); Gender Histories in Eastern Europe (2002, co-ed.); Bi-Textuality and Cinema (2003, ed.); Gender and Transgression in Visual Arts (2006, ed.); Visual (As) Violence (2007); and Belarusian Format. Invisible Reality (2008). Currently, she is working on a monograph History and Representation. Cinematic Images of the Soviet. Luisa Passerini is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turin and External Professor of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute, Florence. Among her recent publications are, as author: Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics Between the Wars (1999); Il mito d’Europa. Radici antiche per nuovi simboli (2002); Memory and Utopia.The Primacy of Intersubjectivity (2007); Love and the Idea of Europe (2009); Sogno di Europa (2009); and, as editor: Across the Atlantic. Cultural Exchanges between Europe and the United States (2000); Figures d’Europe. Images and Myths of Europe (2003); a special issue of the European Review of History on ‘Europe and Love – L’Europe et l’amour’ (2004, with Ruth Mas); Fuori della norma. Storie lesbiche nell’Italia della prima metà del Novecento (2007, with Nerina Milletti); and Women Migrants from East to West. Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe (2007, with Dawn Lyon, Ioanna Laliotou and Enrica Capussotti). William M. Reddy is William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. His published works include Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (1987); The Invisible Code. Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France (1997); and The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions (2001). His current research interests include theories of culture, methodological approaches to the history of emotions, and the history of romantic love. Alexis Schwarzenbach studied modern history at Balliol College in Oxford and received a Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence in 1997. He is currently finishing a post-doctoral research project on the cultural history of twentieth-century monarchies at Universität Zürich. His publications include an article in Contemporary European History entitled ‘Royal Photographs. Emotions for the People’ (2004); a biography of the most famous Swiss scientist, Das verschmähte Genie. Albert Einstein und die Schweiz (2005); and a biography of his great-grandmother Die Geborene. Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille und ihre Familie (2004). Both biographies have been translated into French.

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293

Marci Shore is Associate Professor of History at Yale University, where she teaches European intellectual history and carries out research on poetic milieus, intellectual exchange and the cultural history of totalitarianism. She is the author of Caviar and Ashes. A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 and articles on Jewish, gender and literary history, and the translator of Michał Głowin;ski’s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons. She is currently at work on two studies: The Self Laid Bare, an examination of the central European encounters occasioned by phenomenology and structuralism; and The Taste of Ashes, an account of Eastern Europe’s grappling with its memories of totalitarianism at the century’s end. Alison Sinclair is Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and Professor of Modern Spanish Culture and Intellectual History at Cambridge University. Her published works include The Deceived Husband. A Kleinian Approach to the Literature of Infidelity (1993); Uncovering the Mind. Unamuno, the Unknown, and the Vicissitudes of Self (2001); Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-century Spain. Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform (2007); and Trafficking Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Spain (2009). She has also done work on sexual reform and the comparative history of eugenics in Europe. Her current project is on ‘Wrongdoing in Spain, 1800-1936: Realities, Representations and Reactions’. Svetlana Slapšak is Professor of Anthropology of the Ancient Worlds and of Gender Anthropology, and the Dean at Ljubljana’s Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH) – Ljubljana Graduate School in Humanities. Her research as a classical philologist and anthropologist has mainly focused on women’s cultures in the Balkans – from ancient Greece through romanticism to the conflicts of the 1990s and the present day. Since 1994, Svetlana Slapšak has been the editor in chief of the journal ProFemina, a quarterly for women’s culture and feminism in Belgrade. Her main publications include War Discourse, Women’s Discourse. Studies and Essays on Wars in Yugoslavia and Russia (2000); Balkan Women for Peace (2003); Women’s Icons of the Twentieth Century (2003); Women’s Icons of the Antiquity (2006); and Little Black Dress. Essays in Anthropology and Feminism (2007).

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Index

abdication 145, 149 Acción Española 199 Acerbi, Libero 81 Action Française 13, 198–9 Adam and Eve 26–7 Adams, Michael 34, 52n7 admiration 37, 40, 71, 78, 84, 85, 96, 147, 155n53, 200–201 adoption 272–3, 277, 282, 287n10 Adorno, Theodor W. 258 Africa 5 Central Africa 8 colonialism in 7–8 East Africa 89, 241–4 Euro-African romance in Congo 77–83 in First World War, colonial literature on 243–4 German East Africa, boundary transgressions in 241–4 Heimat in 16 love for 90–91 sexual representations of 242 soldiers from, fear of 235–9, 245 white colonial romance, adaptation for Fascist times 83–7 see also Angola; overseas Europeans African Journey (Alegre, M.) 223–6, 230n36 African Journey (Mendonça, J. de) 223–5 L’Airone (Cipolla, A.) 77–9, 83, 84, 85 Albert Victor, Prince 150 Alcácer Quibir 223, 224, 225, 230n38, 231n39 Alciphron 254

Alegre, Manuel 15, 223–6, 227, 230n36, 231n39 Alfieri, Dino 94n56 Alfonso XIII 200 Algeria 230, 269, 274, 286n4 citizenship of 272, 273 family law in 272–3, 277, 287n10 and France, past and continuing relationship between 275–86 independence for 278 people of Algerian extraction 271 Allison, Anne 50 Ambedkhar, Dr. B. R. 29 American empire, Don Juan and conquest of 204 Amicucci, Ermanno 94n56 De Amore (Capellanus) 37 L’amour et l’Occident (Rougemont, D. de) 11, 152–3 Amselle, Jean-Loup 93n35, 286n3 Ana the Kalunga (Raposo, H.) 219 Anderson, Perry 72n13 Angola 15, 221–2, 223–4, 226, 229n14, 230n36, 251 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) 15, 223–4, 225, 230n37 anti-Americanism 144–5, 150, 153 anti-Bolshevism 240–41 AntiEuropa 200 Apollinaire, Guillaume 117, 118, 119, 121, 128, 129, 133 Archibald, Constance 200 Arendt, Hannah 258

302 Aristogeiton 254 Aristophanes 16, 253–4, 263, 264 Armani, Luigi 92n16 Arni, Caroline 18n2, 75 As Good as It Gets ( James L. Brooks film) 46 Asad, Talal 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287n32, 288n34, 288n43 asexual love 24, 188 Asia 5, 22, 104, 225 liberation movements 220 literature of, love in 2–3 South Asia 6–7, 51 Aspasia 254 aspiration 34, 65 disillusionment and 99 assimilation 87, 212, 269–70, 271, 276, 279, 282 Ateneo de Madrid 179, 190, 194n4 Athenaeus 254–5, 256 Athens, golden age of 253–5 attraction, physical 23–4, 31, 44, 56n61, 79, 82, 99, 187 Atze, Marcel 174n7 St Augustine 10, 39, 127 Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of War (Maeztu, R. de) 201 auto da fe 207–8, 209 autoeroticism 96 avant-garde 118, 121, 123, 128, 133 Azorín ( José Martinez Ruiz) 198 Aztec societies, religious beliefs of 207–8 Baartman, Saartjie 86–7 Baccari, Edoardo 92n15 Bakhtin, Michael 132, 256, 261 Baldwin, John 43–4 Baldwin, Stanley 138, 140, 142–3, 148 Balibar, Étienne 88, 94n59 Balkans 14, 199, 256, 259–60, 262 Balticum 239–41, 244 Freikorps in 239–41 Barrera, Giulia 90, 94n65 Barthes, Roland 2 Basch, Norma 155n42 Bassi, Shaul 93n53 Bastos, Cristiana 219, 220 Baxmann, Inge 246n9 Beauvoir, Simone de 258 Beaverbrook, Lord Max Aitken 142, 143 Beck, Ulrich 34, 52

Index

Beck-Gernsheim, Elizabeth 34, 52 Beigbeder, Frédéric 47 Belloc, Hillaire 201 Bely, Andrei 103 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 83 Benjamin, Walter 59, 60 Benninghaus, Christina 246n1 Benslama, Fethi 17, 270, 271–5, 275–86 Berghof 158–9, 173n2 Berlin Wall, effect of fall 96–7 Berliner Börsen-Zeitung 238, 248n32 Berrios, German E. 176n27 betrayal 78, 107, 118, 129, 132–3, 238, 274 Beveridge, Ray 247n13 birthday wishes (and cards) 163, 164, 165, 167, 170 Bis zur letzten Stunde ( Junge, T.) 158–9 ‘Black Horror’ 234, 235–9, 245 Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (West, R.) 259–60 Blotzheim, Dirk 249n53 Blum, Léon 147 Boccaccio, Giovanni 43 Bogatko, Marian 125, 126–7, 132 Bolshevism anti-Bolshevism 240–41 love for state, politics of mass participation 62 Boothe, Clare 144–5 de Borneil, Giraut 36–7 The Borrowed Dwelling (Benslama, F.) 270, 271–5, 275–86 changing traditions, multiplicity of 286 ‘common body’, fiction of 279 conversion in age of religious intolerance 282–3 diasporic movements 277 disinheritance 276–7 experience of ‘Islam’ 281 feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject, possibilities for 284–5 France and Algeria, past and continuing relationship between 275–86 Franco-Maghrebi Muslims in France, case study of 271–5 genealogical de-legitimisation 272, 281, 287n18

303

Index

identity-nationality-integration 279–80 Islam, hegemonic potential of 280 Islam and liberalism, relationship between 285 métissage, notion of 269–70, 276–9, 281–2, 283, 286, 287n14, 287n20 migration, exile and 278–80 Muslim subjectivity 281–2 Qur’an and religious texts of Islam 284, 285 religious intolerance 282–3 resistance to Islamic extremism 280–81 social violence in France 278 Bosworth, Richard J.B. 176n29 Bottai, Giuseppe 199 Bottego, Vittorio 82, 93n33 Boudet, Jean-Patrice 41 bouleversement 105 Bowie, David 158, 172–3 Boxer, Charles 217 Boysen, Benjamin 38 Brandt, Willy 169 Branham, Robert Bracht 268n7 Brantlinger, Patrick 92n13 Braun, Mieczysław 118, 120, 121 Braund, David 267n6 Braunschweiger Tageszeitung 163–4 Brazil 6–7, 51, 57, 219–20, 221, 226, 229n20 Brecht, Bertold 130 Brie, Alfred 247n13 Brik, Lila 129 Brodsky, Josef 103 Broniewska, Janina 123, 125, 127–8, 132 Broniewski, Władysław 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–6, 127–8, 129, 130, 132 ‘Bronze Horseman’ (Pushkin, A.) 103 Brownlee, Kevin 54n24 Brüne, Martin 176n27 Buddhism 23, 29 Budimir, Milan 262 Bühmann, Henning 174n7 Bundesarchiv 162, 174n11 Buñuel, Luis 105 Bureaux Arabes 288n39 El burlador de Sevilla (Tirso de Molina play) 201

Butor, Michel 3 Bynum, Caroline 23 Caeiro de Matta, José 221 Café Ziemian;ska 117–33 Calafate Ribeiro, Margarida 15, 17, 215–32 Calvin, John 44 Camões, Luís de 215–16, 223, 224, 225–6, 228 Canning, Mary 152 Cantale, Gianbattista Primo 81, 92n21 Capellanus, Andreas 37, 43 Carbajosa, Mónica and Pablo 211n5 Carey of Clifton, Lord George 35 caricature 104–5, 106, 219 Carmelites 265 Carvalho, Henrique de 218 Casanova’s Cloak (Alexander Galin film) 98–9 Cassirer, Ernst 59, 265 Castro Henriques, Isabel 228, 232n57 Cathars 22, 27 Catulli Carmina (Orff, C.) 258 Cavallo, Adolfo 40 Celaleddin Rumi, Mevlana 26 celebrities 168, 169, 176n27 Celestina (Comedy of Calisto and Malibea) 197, 199, 201–2, 209 Chacel, Rosa 180, 182 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 94n58, 212n37 Channon, Henry (‘Chips’) 142 charisma 160, 173–4n6 charismatic leadership 13, 173–4n6, 209, 230n36 of Hitler, Adolf 160, 171, 173 political charisma 169 Charles, Prince of Wales 35 Charles d’Orléans 41 Charles V 204 Chaucer, Geoffrey 41, 43 Chesterton, G.K. 201 Chevalier de la Charette (Chrétien de Troyes) 43 China 260 ‘incoming-daughter-in-law marriages’ in 24 love poems 28 Chrétien de Troyes 43 Christianity

304 Christian and Aztec societies, religious beliefs of 207–8 ‘Christian European roots’ 3 Christian marriage, advocation of 203–4 in Europe 5 European Christianity 22–3 Judeo-Christian values 25, 27 Reformation 44, 54n31 religion and love 21–3, 27 virtue in 38 chronodistopia 256–7 Churchill, Winston S. 148 Ciano, Galeazzo 90, 94n64 cinema in post-Soviet era 95–9 Cinzio, Gianbattista Giraldi 87 Cipolla, Arnaldo 7–8, 76–7, 77–9, 80–82, 83–6, 87–9, 91 Cipriani, Lidio 87, 93n47 citizenship 16–17, 251, 270, 274 acquisition of 279 of Algeria 272 of France 273, 274, 277, 278 Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud, S.) 180 Clark, Pamela 153–4n1 Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian de 168, 176n26 Collège d’Europe 200 colonialism colonial war, love in time of 223–6 Europeanness and 76–7, 80–81, 86 family colonisation 222 Italian discourse 89 modern colonialism, Fascist interpretation of 84–5 romance, competition for 84 The Coloured Socage Bailiffs on the Rhine (Stehle, B.) 236 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, M.) 47 communal apartments, life in 99–100, 101–2 communism collapse of 97 communism-in-power in Poland 126–8 compassionate love 24 concupiscentia 38, 41–3, 51 Congo 8, 76, 238, 251 Europeans, experiences in 79–80, 81–2, 86

Index

trust in Europeans 85 see also overseas Europeans conquistador, Don Juan as prototype 202–5, 209–10 Conrad, Joseph 121, 249n55 consolation, imaginary of 179–80 Consten, Hermann 242, 249n54 construction of borders 241 of dyad Europe-love 7 of emotional links 151 of Europeanness 4, 9, 91 of gender difference 184 of gender relations in society 187 historical reconstruction 70–71 of masculinity 245–6 of self 34 of sexual desire 47–8 consumer society, lure of 107–8 conversion in age of religious intolerance 282–3 Conze, Vanessa 246n1 Cooper, Eleanor 152 Coppock, Herbert 149 Correia, Germano 219 Il Corriere della Sera 80, 169 Cosmopolitan 47 courtly love 5–6, 36–8, 40, 41–2, 43, 44–5, 50 courtship 23–4, 125 Cousin, Victor 6, 46 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky, F.) 103 The Crisis of Humanism (Maeztu, R. de) 201 Critica fascista 199 Croce, Benedetto 264 culture 33, 181, 221, 225, 227, 236, 253, 256 Balkan cultures 256 Bronze Age cultures 29 Catholic culture 258 Christian culture 25 civilisation and 119 codes of ‘love’ 60–67 coexistence of cultures 270 cultural differences in love relations 14–18 cultural studies 3, 4 culture shock 105 cultured elites 178 cultured readership 182

Index

dissemination of 178 ‘Feminine Culture’ 185, 189 feminism and 262 French culture 104 gender, society and 192–3, 255 German culture 240 indigenous cultures 77–8 institutions of 21 Islamic culture 25, 28 Italian culture 89 liminal cultures 257 Maghrebi cultures 270, 287n18 miscegenation of East and West 204–5 Muslim culture 281, 282 national cultures 88 oral cultures 27 popular culture 34, 253 Portuguese culture 231 in post-Soviet Russia 96, 99, 100– 101, 102–3, 104, 105–6, 109, 111 print culture 190, 191 Russian culture 103, 106, 109, 111 secular culture 258 Soviet culture 100–101, 105, 109 Spanish culture 208, 210, 211n6 universal culture 205–6 Western (and European) culture 23, 99, 104, 109, 197, 210, 245 women’s culture 252 written cultures 28 Yugoslav society and 260 da Gama, Vasco 216, 226 Dages Nyheter 147, 148 Daily Express 142, 145 Daily Mirror (New York) 139–40 Daily Telegraph 143–4 Daily Worker 142 Dal Congo (Cipolla, A.) 81 dalliance 23–4 Damkjaer, Søren 107, 112n27 Dante Alighieri 6, 22, 38 Dantín Cereceda, Juan 182 Davis, Belinda 72n20 Dawson, Graham 250n65 De Clérambault Syndrome 168 death, love and 130–32 decadence 7, 82, 86, 106, 124, 194, 205, 209

305 Defence of Hispanic Values (Maeztu, R. de) 209 Deipnosophistae (Athenaeus) 254–5 Deist, Wilhelm 72–3n21 DeJean, Joan 56n57 Dejeux, Jean 286n5 Denmark 147–8 denunciations 62–3 deportation 278 Deppe, Ludwig 242, 243 Deshpande, Shashi 3 Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung 66–7 Deutscher, Isaac 117, 121, 132 dictators see Franco; Hitler; Mussolini; Primo de Rivera; Salazar; Stalin dictatorship 13, 59, 146, 161, 179–80, 192, 200–201, 225 La Difensa della razza 87 Dinzelbacher, Peter 36 disinterested love 105–11 dislocation 129, 177–8 Distler, Heinrich 247n13 divine love 21, 23, 26 Dobrotvorsky, Sergei 112n14 Dobson, Andrew 194n2 Doerr, Karin 177n33 Doerr, Margarete 68 domination 58–60 Don Juan 2, 3, 49, 206 conquistador, prototype of 202–5, 209–10 cultural danger point 193 decadent rather than romantic 194 hedonism, embodiment of 13, 201, 209 modern egoist 200–202 ‘Notes towards a biology of Don Juan’ 187–8 political readings of 197–205 ‘rake’ and danger to himself and others 45 sexual prowess 203–4 Don Juan and Don-Juanism (Madariaga, S. de) 206 Don Juan Tenorio ( José Zorrilla moral play) 201 Don-Juanism or Six Don Juans and a Lady (Salvador de Madariaga radio play) 206

306 Don Quixote, Don Juan and Celestina. Essays in Collective Sentiment (Maeztu, R. de) 199, 201–2 Donne, John 52 Dörner, Bernward 72n16 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 103 double love 3 Dumont, Louis 28–9 Dunn, Kevin C. 92n30 Eanes de Zurara, Gomes 215 earthly love 21, 23, 27 Eastern Europe 16–17 see also Balticum; Poland Eberlein, August 237, 247n13 Ecclesiazousae (Aristophanes) 264 Echenberg, Myron J. 247n18 Edward VIII 10–11, 137 abdication of 145, 149 criticism from Europe on romance of 147–8 European media, restraint on romance of 146–8 letters from public to king in love 148–51 love, media and role in Britain of 143 media reports on Mrs Simpson and 139–41 morganatic marriage proposal 145 people and king, love story between 151–3 silence in British media on romance with Mrs Simpson 142–5 value of love for 143–4 ‘World‘s Greatest Romance’ 137–8 see also Simpson, Wallis Egypt 5 love in ancient Egypt 28 Eintopfsonntag (Nazi call for nationwide sharing) 63, 72n18 Eiseman, Selse E. 155n43 Eisenstein, Sergei 128, 199 Eleanor of Aquitaine 37 elites 36, 38, 44, 138, 178–9, 181, 200, 222, 251 Ellena, Liliana 7, 16, 18n5, 75–94 elopement 44–5 Emker, William C. (Eucker, Wilhelm K.) 161–2 emotionality 17, 160

Index

modernity and 59, 69–70 emotionology 70 emotions articulation of 60, 68, 70 construction of emotional links 151 emotional disparity in regard for Hitler 160 role in politics 59–60 sexuality and 76 work of being German and 63–5 Enlightenment in Europe 1, 2, 6, 45, 208, 210 Ennes, António 218 Epicurus 254 Epstein, Joseph 155n42 equality and love 28–9, 30–31 Erbe, Ida 170–71, 176–7n31 Erdmann, Hugo 250n61 Eritrea 89 Ermler, Friedrich 104 Eros 263, 264, 265, 266, 267 Esenin, Sergei 121, 130 España 178 El Espectador 178 Esquire 47 Estado Novo in Portugal 220, 221, 222 Ethiopian War 85, 86, 88 ethnicity 15, 207, 270–71, 272, 274, 280, 282 ethnic background 35 ethnic conflict 107–8 ethnic difference 285 ethnic identities 235 ethnic origin 284 ethnic positioning, fluctuations in 257 ethnic stereotypes 209 multi-ethnic states 259 ethnographic remarks 80–81 Étiemble, René 112n24 eugenic vision of society 187–8 Euripides 262, 263 Euro-African romance in Congo 77–83 Eurocentrism 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 18, 75, 78, 215, 227 Europa 129 Europe belonging to 1 ‘Christian European roots’ 3 courtly love in 5–6

Index

criticism on romance of Edward VIII from 147–8 cultural differences in 18 cultural differences in love relations 14–18 Eastern Europe 16–17 Enlightenment in 1, 2, 6, 45, 208, 210 Europe in Love project 1, 18n7, 179, 194, 194n1 exile in 97–8 imperialism of 14 Islam in 17 love in 1–2, 3, 4–5, 7–8, 8–9, 9–10 media in, restraint on romance of Edward VIII 146–8 migrants to, cultural roles of 3 nexus Europe and love 9–14 Orientalism and, clash between internal forms of 90 peripheries of 14–18 Portugal between Atlantic and 215–16 racial differences in 18 romantic love, Western tradition of 6, 21–23, 33–35, 47–48 Russia and, encounters in postSoviet cinema 95–9 European Economic Community (EEC) 227 European Union (EU) 9 Europeanness 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17 colonialism and 76–7, 80–81, 86 construction of 4, 9, 91 divisions within 18 exclusion from and meaning of 96 paradigmatic Europeanness 12–13 Polishness and 121 of Spain 193–4 whiteness in Fascist Italy and 87–91 Evans, Richard J. 72n11 Exaltation of Marriage (Giménez Caballero, E.) 202 exile Europe as place of 97–8 for Franco-Maghrebi peoples 278–80 overseas Europeans 82–3 exotic landscapes 83–4 face 34, 40, 52, 67, 78, 84, 118, 127, 217 faith 22, 44, 133, 144, 200, 207, 274

307 Falange Española 199 family colonisation 222 Fanon, Frantz 90 Fascism 59 Italian Fascist Declaration of Empire 85 love for state, mass participation and 62, 67–8 ‘Father State’, notion of 60, 61–3 feelings, presence and impact of 58, 59–60, 62, 64–6, 67–8, 70–71 Felski, Rita 193 ‘Feminine Culture’ 185, 189 femininity Revista de Occidente (RO) on 184–5, 187, 194 in Russia 105 feminism 3, 46, 189 love in time of war 252, 259, 261, 266 fiction 45 Une Fiction troublante (Benslama, F.) 270, 288 Figes, Orlando 112n22 Filesi, Cesira 92n17 First World War 6, 198 Africa in, colonial literature on 243–4 love for state, politics of mass participation 62, 63–4 romantic love, Western tradition of 46 Versailles Treaty 83, 233, 235–6, 237, 244 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 47 Foreign Legion 241, 249n53 Foucault, Michel 47, 72n10, 195n31, 288n44 Fragment of Empire (Friedrich Ermler film) 104 France 14 and Algeria, past and continuing relationship between 275–86 citizenship of 273, 274, 277, 278 French ‘liberal’ colonialism 84 le couple métissé, ambivalent status of 271, 275–6 mariages blancs (fake marriages) 278–9 métissage, notion of 17, 86–7, 88, 92n28, 269–70, 276–9, 281–2, 283, 286, 287n14, 287n20 ‘racial anarchy’ in 87

308 social violence in 278 see also Paris Franco, Francisco 199, 200, 205 Franco-Maghrebi peoples 17 changing traditions, multiplicity of 286 ‘common body’, fiction of 279 conversion in age of religious intolerance 282–3 diasporic movements 277 disinheritance for 276–7 feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject, possibilities for 284–5 genealogical de-legitimisation 272, 281, 287n18 identity-nationality-integration 279–80 Muslims in France, case study of 271–5 religious intolerance for 282–3 resistance to Islamic extremism 280–81 Frank, Andre Gunder 182 freedom of choice 23–4 Freeman, Kimberley A. 155n43 Freidenberg, Olga 16, 256, 257–8, 266–7 reflections of love in wartime 261–2, 263–5 see also gender difference/love in time of war Freikorps 15, 73n24, 248n37 Weimar Republic and 234, 244, 245 Freud, Sigmund 47, 180–81, 188, 190, 191, 192 Freyre, Gilberto 219–22, 229n20 Führer 63, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173 futurism 118–20, 120–21 Gabrielli, Gianluca 94n61 La Gaceta Literaria 199 Galin, Alexander 98–9 gallantry 45 Gandhi, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) 29 Garbo, Greta 203 Garon, Sheldon 49–50 Gasteiner, Elio 93n52 Geffray, Christian 218 Gehrmann, Suzanne 82 Gellately, Robert 72n15 gender 16–17

Index

discussed in Revista de Occidente (RO) 179, 181–2, 183–5, 186, 187, 190, 191–2, 193–4 relations in society, construction of 187 gender difference construction of 184 love in time of war 258 see also Freidenberg, Olga gender studies 252, 255, 266 Genealogies of Religion (Asad, T.) 287n32, 288n41 genealogy of ‘colonial intimate regime’ 90–91 genealogical de-legitimisation 272, 281, 287n18 Genius of Spain (Giménez Caballero, E.) 202, 204, 210 geopolitical romance 76–7 George V 137, 145, 149–50 George VI 143 Geppert, Alexander C. T. 11–12, 158–77 Germany 14 German engagement with work 65–7 Germanness 66 National Socialism 160, 161, 165, 171, 172 Nazi regime in 9, 11–12, 158–73 Office of Military Government for Germany (US) 162 see also Weimar Republic Gerner, Kristian 112n25 Gerth, Hans 174n7 Gertsen, Alexander 112n21 Gestapo 62, 72 Giddens, Anthony 33–4 Gil, Octavio Victoria 211n9 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto 13, 182, 194, 198, 199–200, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211n6, 212n29 American empire, Don Juan and conquest of 204 Christian marriage, advocation of 203–4 cultural miscegenation of East and West 204–5 Don Juan as fascist superman 202–5, 209–10

Index

imperial violence, racist apology for 204 Gitagovinda ( Jayadeva) 6, 49, 50–51 Glendon, Mary Ann 155n43 Glick, Thomas F. 195n33, 196n39 Gloucester, Prince Henry, Duke of 148–9 God 36, 39, 44 Goebbels, Joseph 159, 171, 172, 177n32, 177n34, 199 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 184, 260 Gogol, Nikolai 100, 103 Goltz, Rüdiger von der 239 Goodall, Richard 155n49 Goode, William Josiah 161, 174n8 Goody, Jack 4–7, 21–32 Goote, Thor 240, 249n50 Greece 12 Grimm, Hans 233, 246n3 grotesque narrative of Window to Paris 100 Guinea-Bissau 221, 222, 226 Hacking, Ian 287n11 Hadewijch 23 Halperin, David M. 53n13 Harmodios 254 Hartmann, Georg Heinrich 240, 249n48 Harvard Slavic Studies 260 Haushofer, Karl 235, 246n10 Hearst, William 140, 141, 143 Heart of Darkness (Conrad, J.) 79, 82 The Heart of the Continents (Cipolla, A.) 83–4 Hebraeus, Leo 202, 203 hedonism, Don Juan as embodiment of 13, 201, 209 Hegel, Georg W.F. 184 Heimat in Africa 16, 241–4 Heinz, Friedrich Wilhelm 249n47 Hempel, Jan 121, 122 Henckel, Heinz 174n13 Henkel, Franz 249n58 Henry, Thomas R. 174n11 Herbst, Ludolf 174n7 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 184 heroic love 46–7 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 34 Herzen, Alexander 103 Herzog, Dagmar 160, 173–4n6 Hill, Alice Mabel 199 Hindenburg, Paul von 239–40

309 Hindu love 23, 28–9, 30, 33, 49, 50–51, 57n80 Hindu society 5 Hippolytos (Euripides) 262 historicization of love 4–9 history of notion of love 24–5 Hitler, Adolf 147, 172–3, 199 absurdity of letters to 169 archive of personal love letters addressed to 161–2 ardent love letters to, warnings against 167–8 charisma of 160, 171, 173 De Clérambault Syndrome 168 educational heterogeneity of authors of letters to 165 effect on followers and power of 158–61 emotional disparity in regard for 160 frequency, form and length of letters to 165 imagined intimacy with 167 importunings 167, 171 love letters to 11–12, 161–2, 162–8, 168–71 motivations of writers of letters to 166, 170–71 number and distribution over time of letters to 163 as object of passionate desire 161 occasions for composition of letters to 163–4 personal circumstances of authors of letters to 164–5 personal presence imagined by writers of letters to 170 public and private concepts of, disparity between 160–61 seduction by 160 social background of authors of letters to 164–5 sovereignty, addresses to 166–7 Hitler, Lucie 166, 175n18 Hoffmann-Curtius, Kathrin 173–4n6 Homer 256 Huang, Chien-shan 24 Hull, Isabel 44, 56n61 Hulme, T.H. 201 human nature 45, 47 human sacrifice 207–8 Hund, Wulf D. 246n9

310 Huschko, Wilhelmine 164, 175n15 Husserl, Edmund 265 Hutton, Betty 145 hybridity 87, 220, 270 colonisation and 218 I Burn Paris ( Jasien;ski, B.) 124 I from One Side and I from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove (Wat, A.) 118–19 Ibn Gabiral 24 Ibn Hazm 25 iconography of romantic love 39–41 identity collective identity, citizenship and 16–17 crisis in Russia of 108–9 ethnic identities 235 nationality and integration for Franco-Maghrebi peoples 279–80 immigration see migration El Imparcial 178 Imperial Circuit (Giménez Caballero, E.) 204–5 imperialism 14, 75, 77, 210, 215, 217, 221, 253 India 6, 29, 50, 219, 283 individualism 13, 14, 25, 45–6, 201, 202–3, 206, 210 infantile sexuality 47 inheritance of love 52 integration 221, 227, 255, 270, 271, 278, 283, 284 identity, nationality and 279–80 intellectual autonomy 122 intellectual circle, formation of 181 inter-racial love 218 inter-racial marriage 84, 87, 206 inter-racial relationships 1–2, 77, 83, 88, 218, 222, 245 inter-racial sexuality 86, 219, 235, 237–8, 245 Intergirl (Petr Todorovsky film) 97–8 internationalism 104, 107, 181 intersigne, concept of 271, 277 intimacy 10, 24, 29, 77, 81, 132–3, 167, 224, 256 conjugal intimacy 31 intimate relationships, public function of 76 sexuality and 76 spiritual intimacy 38

Index

Islam 5 in Europe 17 experience of 281 hegemonic potential of 280 and liberalism, relationship between 285 Qur’an and religious texts of 284, 285 role of love in 25–7, 29 in Turkey 21–2, 29–30 see also Franco-Maghrebi peoples Itacker, Fred S. 152 Italy 12, 147 colonial discourse 89 Ethiopian War 85, 86, 88 Europeanness in Fascist times 87–91 Fascist Declaration of Empire 85 genealogy of ‘colonial intimate regime’ 90–91 manliness in, vulnerability of 90 miscegenation, declaration of 86–7 racial membership, vulnerability of 90 whiteness in Fascist Italy 87–91 Jacques de Lalaing 40 The Jade Heart (Madariaga, S. de) 200, 205, 206–9 Jainism 29 Jampol’sky, Mikhail 112n26 Jannasch, Lilli 247n23 Japan 6, 147 practice of love in 33, 49–50 Jasien;ski, Bruno 119, 120, 124–5, 125–6, 129, 131 Jayadeva 6, 49, 50–51 Je brûle Moscou (Morand, P.) 124 Jesus Christ 23, 27, 39 Joachimsthaler, Anton 175n14 Johnson, Roberta 211n4 Jones, J.R. 150 Jornada de África (Alegre, M.) 15 Juan see Don Juan Judaism 5, 22, 24–5 Judeo-Christian values 25, 27 Judt, Tony 134n2 Jung, Carl Gustav 13, 180, 182, 190–92, 192–3 Jung, Erna 165, 175n17 Junge, Traudl 158–9, 162, 167, 173n2 Jünger, Ernst 233, 239, 241, 246n2

Index

Junta para Ampliación de Estudios ( JAE) 179, 194n3 Kabanova, Elena 113n30 Kalinowska, Izabela 98 Kant, Immanuel 6, 46, 184 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 71–2n9, 167, 175n21 Keen, Maurice 36, 40 Kelly, Henry Ansgar 41 Kempowski, Walter 173n4 Kennedy, Michael 96 Kershaw, Ian 173n3 Keyserling, Hermann 182, 193, 194 Khrushchev, Nikita S. 127 Kierkegaard, Søren 182 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 97, 98, 109, 110 King’s two bodies 61, 167 Klemperer, Victor 74n41 Knappen, Marshall M. 154n28 The Knight of the Vermilion Robe 42–3 Koch, Eva 167, 176n23 Koerber, Adolf-Viktor von 247n13 Koljevic;, Nikola 268n12 Koller, Christian 246n12 Korneichuk, Oleksandr 127, 131–2 Köster, Werner 246n1 Kostic;, Laza 256, 267n5 Krampitz, Sigrid 176n28 Kretschmer, Otto 182, 189, 191 Krüger, Gerd 73n24 Krzywicka, Irena 121 Kundera, Milan 47 Kundrus, Birthe 174n7, 242, 246n6, 249n58 Kun˙zanka, Janina 122, 132 La Fayette, Marie Madeleine de 2 Laak, Dirk van 233, 246n1 Labanyi, Jo 12, 13–14, 194, 197–212 Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de 2, 3 Laidlay, Margaret 149 Landra, Guido 93n51 Landwehr, Achim 71n7 Lang, Joseph 238, 247n13 language and love 110 Latzel, Klaus 74n36 laughter 171–2 Lawton, Anna 97–8, 100 Lebensraum 233

311 Lebina, Natalia 112n19 Lebzelter, Gisela 246n12 Lechon;, Jan 117 Leeson, Robert George 248n37 Leisegang, Heinrich 260 Lenci, Marco 94n57 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 104, 120, 133, 261 Leopold, King of the Belgians 79–80, 81, 84 Lepsius, M. Rainer 174n7 Lessing, Doris 13 letters to Hitler 11–12, 161–2, 162–8, 168–71 from public to king in love 148–51 Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul von 244–5, 249–50n60 Lev, Ola 121–2, 124 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 261 Leyla and Majnun (Nezami Ganjavi) 2–3 Les liaisons dangereuses (Laclos) 2, 3–4 Libera, Alain 53n20 liberalism and Islam, relationship between 285 liberal reform, optimism for 193 libertines 2, 3–4, 18n1 Library of Congress 162, 164n11, 174n13 Lichodziejewska, Feliks 134n6 Lincoln, Bruce W. 112n20 Lissarrague, François 267n4 The Literary Monthly (Miesiecznik Literacki) 124, 128–9, 130 Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel 239, 248n39 Lloyd, George, David 148 Löbmann, Rebecca 176n27 location 15, 215, 277 see also dislocation LoDagaa, Ghana 5, 21–2, 27–8 Loew, Fritz 66–7 Logos 185 Lombard, Peter 41 London Evening Standard 142 López Campillo, Evelyne 181, 194n6 Loraux, Nicole 268n18 Louise, Margarethe Marie 166, 175n19 Lourenço, Eduardo 227, 228, 231n48, 232n56 love absence of conception of, assumption of 81 for Africa 90–91, 241–3

312

Index

ancient politics about 255–6 ardent love letters to Hitler, warnings against 167–8 asexual love 24, 188 in Asian literature 2–3 by association, nature of 187 centrality in medieval period 37–8 collective identity, citizenship and 16–17 compassionate love 24 contradictory nature of 208–9 courtly love 5–6, 36–8, 40, 41–2, 43, 44–5, 50 cultural differences in love relations within European borders 14–18 discourse, tradition in Europe of 2, 3, 75–6 disinterested love 105–11 divine love 21, 23, 26 double love 3 earthly love 21, 23, 27 emotions, sexuality and 76 in Europe 1–2, 3, 4–5, 7–8, 8–9, 9–10 heroic love 46–7 historicization of 4–9 inter-racial love 218 inter-racial relationships 1–2 as intercultural exchange 110–11 intimate relationships, public function of 76 Japan, practice of love in 33, 49–50 language and 110 letters from public to king in love 148–51 letters to Hitler 11–12, 161–2, 162– 8, 168–71 love for state, politics of mass participation 58–71 and lust as ‘desire’, theorisation of 47–8 media and role in Britain of 143 metaphor of love, political implications 26 neo-Platonic amor-intelectualis 203 nexus Europe and 9–14 opportunity and political experience in Russia 98–9 people and king, love story between 151–3 Platonic love 24

political union via romantic love 205–9, 210 as public affair 252–3 public and private loves 7, 9–14 racial boundaries, sexuality and 76–7 religion and 21–31 rule of love 34–5, 51–2 same-sex love 34–5 sexuality and 17–18, 76 social order and 3–4 stages of love’s conquest 43–7 theorising on, European nature of 257–9 ‘triumph’ of love in industrialised West 33, 34–5 universal nature of, idea of 35 unrequited love 96, 99, 161, 167, 170 value for Edward VIII 143–4 vocabulary of 76 see also religion and love; romantic love Love Dialogues between Laura and Don Juan or Fascism and Love (Giménez Caballero, E.) 199–200, 202–4 Love for Catalonia (Giménez Caballero, E.) 205 love for state, politics of mass participation 58–71 Bolshevism 62 cultural codes of ‘love’ 60–67 denunciations 62–3 domination 58–60 Eintopfsonntag 63 emotionality, modernity and 59, 69–70 emotionology 70 emotions, articulation of 60, 68, 70 emotions, role in politics 59–60 emotions, work of being German and 63–5 Fascism 62, 67–8 ‘Father State’, notion of 60, 61–3 feelings, presence and impact of 58, 59–60, 62, 64–6, 67–8, 70–71 First World War 62, 63–4 German engagement with work 65–7 Nazism 59–60, 62, 63, 68–9, 70 order, longing for restoration of 62–3

Index

princely authority 61–2 rationalisation 58–9 Second World War 62 self-will (Eigensinn) 62 sentimental love 60 Volksgemeinschaft 63 work and 60, 63–5, 65–7 work of destruction, engagement in 68–9 love in time of revolution 117–33 ashes of Warsaw 128–30 avant-garde 118, 121, 123, 128, 133 betrayal 118, 129, 132–3 capricious nature of revolution 133 communism-in-power 126–8 death 130–32 futurism 118–20, 120–21 intellectual autonomy 122 intimacy 132–3 Marxism 120, 121, 132–3 Mayakovsky and the revolution 120–26 poets of Café Ziemian;ska 118–20 polyglot poets 117, 118–19 prison, ritual baptism in 124 self-actualisation through selfannihilation 120–21 snobbism 119–20 terror in Soviet Union 125–6 Young Poland 119 love in time of war 251–67 alterity of women 255 ancient politics about love 255–6 Athens, golden age of 253–5 chronodistopia 256–7 feminism 252, 259, 261, 266 Freidenberg’s reflections on 16, 256, 257–8, 266–7 gender difference 258 gender studies 252, 255, 266 love as public affair 252–3 love theories, reinterpretation of antiquity in search of 252–6 men-only symposia 254–5 polemography 252 pornography 255 Savic; Rebac’s reflections on 256, 257–8, 266, 267 sexual strike 253 site-catchment 251–2

313 social stability, male sexual desire and 253–4 Stein’s reflections on 16, 256–7, 258, 262 theorising on love, European nature of 257–9 Lucifer Unemployed (Wat, A.) 122 Lucretius 260 Ludendorff, Erich 240 Lüdtke, Alf 7, 58–74, 176n23 Ludwig, Paul W. 253, 267n1 Lurvey, Ira 155n43 The Lusiads (Camões, L. de) 15, 215–16 amour dans la servitude 218 donna angelicata 216 lusotropicalism 216–22 Other as independent identity, love for 217 lusophonia 228 lust (concupiscentia), love’s dark partner 38, 41–3, 51 Luther, Martin 44, 267 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 16, 253–4 MacDonald, Ramsey 148 Macedo, Helder 216–17, 225, 228n7 Machiavelli, Niccolò 10, 127 Madariaga, Salvador de 13–14, 194, 198, 200 on contradictory nature of love 208–9 human sacrifice, auto da fe and 207–8 negative depiction of Spain 208 Old World and New, parallels drawn between 207 political union via romantic love 205–9, 210 religious beliefs of Christian and Aztec societies 207–8 secular rationalism in writing of 205–8 Maeztu, Ramiro de 13, 198–9, 209, 210 critique of Don Juan as modern egoist 200–202, 209 Mafarka le futuriste (Marinetti, F.T.) 78 Mahmood, Saba 288n33 Maimonides 25 Malaparte, Curzio (Kurt Erich Suckert) 199 Mamin, Yurij 8, 103–4, 108 Manchester Guardian 143

314 Manicheaism 23, 27 Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti 90, 94n66 Mann, Heinrich 158, 173n1 Mann, Thomas 47, 260, 268n13 Mantegazza, Paolo 75 Marañón, Gregorio 13, 180, 182, 184, 185, 186–90, 193 Marglin, Frédérique 51 María de Urgoiti, Nicolás 178 mariages blancs (fake marriages) 278–9 Marie de Champagne 37, 43 Marin, Louis 71–2n9 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 10, 77, 78, 92n11, 117 Marks, Sally 246n12 Marr, Nikolai 261 marriage celebration of 34–5, 45 Christian marriage, advocation of 203–4 ‘incoming-daughter-in-law marriages’ in China 24 mixed marriages 17, 269–70, 271, 275, 276, 278–9, 280, 281, 288n39 morganatic 145 Martin, Kingsley 143 Martin-Marquez, Susan 18n4 Marx, Karl 58–9, 71n2, 120 Marxism 10, 201, 261 love in time of revolution 120, 121, 132–3 Mary of Teck 150 Mas, Ruth 17, 18n6, 269–88 Maschmann, Melita 68 ‘Masculine and Feminine’ 183–4 masculinity 14, 108–9, 169, 187, 193, 194, 235, 243, 245 concepts of 11, 149–50 construction of 245–6 manliness in Italy, vulnerability of 90 Russian studies in 113n29 Mason, Timothy 67 Mass, Sandra 15–16, 233–50 Massis, Henry 94n60 Matsuda, Matt K. 91n4 A Matter of Time (Deshpande, S.) 3 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 10, 117, 118, 120–26, 128, 129, 130, 133 Mead, Margaret 47 Mecklenburg, Adolf von 249n51

Index

media reports on Mrs Simpson and Edward VIII 139–41 and role in Britain of love 143 medical science, sexual activity and 186–90 medieval accommodation of love and sexual regulation 33, 35–41 medieval woman mystics 23 Melograni, Piero 176n29 men-only symposia 254–5 Mendes Correia, António 219 Mendonça, Jerónimo de 223–4 Menexenes (Plato) 254 Menippos 256 Merkel, Ina 107, 113n28 Il Messaggero 85, 88 metaphor of love, political implications 26 métissage, notion of 17, 86–7, 88, 92n28 Franco-Maghrebi peoples 269–70, 276–9, 281–2, 283, 286, 287n14, 287n20 le couple métissé, ambivalent status of 271, 275–6 Michael, Robert 177n33 Mickiewicz, Adam 121 Middle Ages 6 Mignolo, Walter 197 migration 222, 278 of dissenters from Soviet Union 108 European migration to Brazil 220 exile for Franco-Maghrebi peoples 278–80 Italian migration to Congo 80 migrants to Europe, cultural roles of 3 ‘sausage migration’ 107–8 ‘sofa emigration’, phenomenon of 113n29 Miłosz, Czesław 130, 134n1 Milton, John 263 miscegenation 3, 13, 86–7, 204, 209, 212n39, 220, 225 The Mission of the University (Ortega y Gasset, J.) 189 mixed marriages 17, 269–70, 271, 275, 276, 278–9, 280, 281, 288n39 modern egoist, Don Juan as 200–202 Molina, Tirso de 201, 206, 210 Mommsen, Hans 72n17 Mondrian, Piet 263

Index

Montpellier Codex 39 Moodysson, Lukas 112n7 moral economy 63 moral disintegration of ‘decadent’ West 106 Morand, Paul 124 Morel, Edmund Dene 238, 248n34 morganatic marriage 145 Morning Post 143 Morocco 3 Morris, Sylvia Jukes 155n45 Mosley, Oswald 148 Mossé, Claude 267n2 Mossman, Elliot 268n15 Mother Rome (Giménez Caballero, E.) 204, 205 Mozambique 221, 222, 226 Muggeridge, Malcolm 154n29 Mullen, Paul E. 176n27 Münchner Neueste Nachrichten 172 Münkler, Herfried 71n8 Murasaki Shibiku 2–3, 6, 49–50 Muslims Arab, Algerian or, difference between 274, 280 subjectivity of, Franco-Maghrebi peoples and 281–2 see also Islam Mussolini, Benito 12, 86, 90, 163, 169– 70, 205 My Poetic Friendships (Broniewski, W.) 130 Nagy, Piroska 53n21 Le Naour, Jean-Yves 246–7n12 Narveson, Kate 57n87 National Socialism 160, 161, 165, 171, 172 Nazism in Germany 9, 11–12, 158–73 politics of mass participation 59–60, 62, 63, 68–9, 70 Nelson, Horatio, Lord 149 neo-Platonic amor-intelectualis 203 Neue Zürcher Zeitung 146 The New Age 199, 201, 211n12 New Statesman 143 New York American 140–41 New York Times 140 Newman, Francis 5 News Chronicle 143 Newton, Sir Isaac 45

315 Nezami Ganjavi 2–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 119, 184, 200–201 Nisco, Baron Giuseppe 79 Njegoš, P.P. 260, 263 nostalgia 13, 97–8, 102, 111, 131, 193, 227 Nostalgia (Andrei Tarkovsky film) 97 Nouailles, Ana de 184–5, 186 Nouvelle Héloise (Rousseau, J.-J.) 2, 3 La Nuit brisée (Benslama, F.) 270 Ober-Ost 239–41 obsessions 50, 82, 90, 169, 212n39, 237 Obst, Dieter 72n17 Office of Military Government for Germany (US) 162 Old World and New, parallels between 207 O’Neill, William L. 155n42 ontology 183, 275–6 open concealment 38–9 Orage, Alfred R. 211n12 order, longing for restoration of 62–3 Orff, Carl 258 Orientalism and Europe, clash between internal forms 90 origins 5, 30, 33, 41, 48, 90, 169, 170, 204, 256, 259, 284, 287 Orringer, Nelson 195n14 Ortega y Gasset, José 13, 178, 179, 180–82, 182–3, 184–5, 186, 187, 189, 192, 203 Osterhammel, Jürgen 250n67 Oushakin, Sergei 113n29 Ousmanova, Almira 8, 95–113 Outside the Fold. Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Viswanathan, G.) 282 overseas Europeans absence of conception of love, assumption of 81 colonial romance, competition for 84 Congolese trust in Europeans 85 ethnographic remarks 80–81 Euro-African romance in Congo 77–83 Europeanness and whiteness in Fascist Italy 87–91 exile 82–3 exotic landscapes 83–4

316 experiences in Congo 79–80, 81–2, 86 French ‘liberal’ colonialism 84 geopolitical romance 76–7 indigenous population, enforcement of European civil code on 80–81 modern colonialism, Fascist interpretation of 84–5 Orientalism, clash between internal forms of 90 racial association of ‘white’ with ‘European’ 89–90 racial boundaries, sexuality and 76–7 self-reflection 78 sleeping sickness 78, 79 white colonial romance, adaptation for Fascist times 83–7 whiteness, reassertion along gender and racial lines 86 Ovid 39, 53n19 Ozment, Steven 44 Paasche, Hans 249–50n60 Page, Rene 150 Pagine africane di un esploratore (Cipolla, A.) 84 Palacios, Asin 22 Pamela (Richardson, S.) 45 Pankow, Hermann 73n23 paradigmatic Europeanness 12–13 Paradise Lost (Milton) 263 Paris misadventures in 106–7 refusal to return from 100 see also France Parker Bowles, Camilla 35 Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer) 41 partners 44, 46, 49, 145, 279 choice of 23–4, 253 female 62 love partnerships 6, 52 male 170 sexual 6, 28, 35, 36, 51, 52, 53 Passerini, Luisa 56n65, 91n1, 153–4n1, 192, 196n51, 211n12 passion Hitler as object of 161 romantic love, Western tradition of 45 Pasternak, Boris 257–8, 261 Pathé, Michele 176n27

Index

St Paul 44 Paustovsky, Konstantin 128 People without Space (Grimm, H.) 233 Pericles 254, 263 peripheries of Europe 14–18 see also Portugal, Spain Peter the Great 102–3 Petersburg (Bely, A.) 103 Petrarch 6, 13, 38–9 Petrucci, Antonio 89, 94n63 Phaedros (Plato) 257 Philosophers at the Feast (Athenaeus) 254–5 ‘Philosophy of Fashion’ 183 Phule, Mahatma 29 Pilsudski, Marshal Jósef 118 Pindarus 259, 260 Pirandello, Luigi 92n28 Pittaluga, Gustavo 13, 180, 182, 185, 186, 189 Plato 254, 257, 263 Platonic love 24 Playboy 47 A Poem for Adults (Wa˙zyk, A.) 129 poets of Café Ziemian;ska 118–20 Poggiali, Ciro 89, 94n62 Poland 9–10, 68–9 communism-in-power in 126–8 Polishness and Europeanness 121 return home to 98 Young Poland 119 see also love in time of revolution polemography 252 Polezzi, Loredana 87, 93n54 political readings of Don Juan 197–205 political union via romantic love 205–9, 210 Pollard, Sydney 73n22 polyglot poets 117, 118–19 Pope Pius XI 265 Pope Pius XII 258 Le Populaire 147 pornography 255 availability of 34 Portugal 14, 15 Alcácer Quibir 223, 224, 225, 230n38, 231n39 colonial war, love in time of 223–6 Constitutional Revision (1951) 221 Between Cultures (school interexchange programme) 227–8

Index

democracy and transformation in 226 disintegration in Africa of 226–7 EEC entry (1986) 227 Estado Novo in 220, 221, 222 between Europe and Atlantic 215–16 family colonisation 222 former empire, Europe and shadow of 226–8 hybridity, colonisation and 218 lusophonia 228 peripheral geographic position 227–8 racism as cornerstone of colonisation 218, 219 romance and empire of 216–22 Salazar regime in 221–2 A Portuguese Expedition to Muatianvua. Metereology, Climatology and Colonisation (Carvalho, H. de) 218 post-Soviet era in Russia 95–111 post-war period of romantic love 46 Pratt, Mary Louise 83 Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall film) 48 Primo de Rivera, Don Miguel 13, 179 Prince Genji (Murasaki Shibiku) 2–3, 6, 49–50 princely authority 61–2 La princesse de Clèves (La Fayette, M.M. de) 2, 3 prison, ritual baptism in 124 projection 60, 61, 88, 95, 103, 179, 192, 265 propaganda 12, 64, 86, 88, 127, 166, 170, 171, 172, 199, 234, 240, 243, 244–5 black soldiers in Rhineland, propaganda against 236–9 Soviet clichés about West 105–6 Propósitos (Ortega y Gasset, J.) 181 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, M.) 199 Proulx, France 287n26 Proust, Marcel 10, 127 Provençal poetry 5, 203 La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam (Benslama, F.) 270 ‘Psychological types’ 191–2 public and private boundaries between 172

317 concepts of Hitler, disparity between 160–61 emotions 12 loves 7, 9–14 spaces in Russia, dissolution of 101–2 unity of 10 Pujarniscle, Eugene 92n18 Purcell, Rosemary 176n27 Purgatorio (Dante) 38 Pushkin, Alexander 102, 103, 130 The Queen of Spades (Pyotr Tchaikovsky opera) 103 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 3, 13, 197–9, 201–2, 205, 209 Qur’an and religious texts of Islam 284, 285 Rabbi Aqivah 22 Rabelais, François 253 racial association of ‘white’ with ‘European’ 89–90 racial boundaries, sexuality and 76–7 racial differences in Europe 18 racism 17, 91, 221 colonial racism 90 as cornerstone of colonisation 218, 219 scientific racism 220 sentimental racism 79 Radermacher, Ludwig 260 Radkau, Joachim 250n64 Radulescu, Domnica 112n11 Raes, Koen 113n32 rape 44, 204, 205, 218, 236, 237, 241, 276, 280 ‘rape dresses’ 274–5 ‘raped nation’, allegory of 238 Raposo, Hipólito 219 rationalisation 58–9 Rauman, Emilia 200, 207 The Ray of Microcosm (Njegoš, P.P.) 260 Rebac, Hasan 259 The Rebellion of the Masses (Ortega y Gasset, J.) 181, 189 Red Army 15, 73, 126, 234, 239, 245 Reddy, William M. 4, 6–7, 33–57, 70, 76 Reformation 44, 54n31 religion and love 21–31 Adam and Eve 26–7

318 asexual love 24 Buddhism 29 Cathars 22, 27 China, ‘incoming-daughter-in-law marriages’ in 24 choice of partners 23–4 Christianity 21–3, 27 compassionate love 24 courtship 23–4 dalliance 23–4 earthly love, renunciation of 23 equality and love 28–9, 30–31 European Christianity 22–3 freedom of choice 23–4 Hindu love 23, 28–9, 30 history of notion of love 24–5 individualism and love 25 Islam, role of love in 25–7, 29 Islam in Turkey 21–2, 29–30 Jainism 29 Judaism 22, 24–5 Judeo-Christian values 25, 27 LoDagaa, Ghana 21–2, 27–8 medieval woman mystics 23 metaphor of love, political implications 26 secular and divine love, intertwining of 26 secular love 21–2 sexual love 24, 26–7 socio-economic perspective 30–31 Song of Songs 22, 24 Spain, Islamic culture in 21–2, 25–7 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust, M.) 127 repatriation 212n39, 278 representation of love in Russia 109–10 Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Petrarch) 38–9 Residencia de Estudiantes 178–9, 191, 193, 194n3, 195n13 Reuth, Ralf George 173n3 Revista de Occidente (RO) 13, 193–4, 203 biological and social difference 184 consolation, imaginary of 179–80 contemporary reality, search for 181 elitism of 178–9 eugenic vision of society 187–8 Europeanness of Spain 193–4 ‘Feminine Culture’ 189 femininity 184–5, 187, 194

Index

gender discussed in 179, 181–2, 183–5, 186, 187, 190, 191–2, 193–4 intellectual circle, formation of 181 internationalism 181 Jung and the 190–92 liberal reform, optimism for 193 love by association, nature of 187 Marañón’s work in 186–90 ‘Masculine and Feminine’ 183–4 medical science, sexual activity and 186–90 ‘Philosophy of Fashion’ 183 Pittalunga in 189 ‘Psychological types’ 191–2 Second Republic and 192–3 selectivity in 180–81, 185 Simmel and 182–5 utopian vision of society 187–8 ‘Woman in Europe’ 192 woman in society, Marañón’s model of 188–9 Revue internationale des études balkaniques (RIEB) 262 Rheinische Frauenliga (Women’s League of the Rheinland) 237, 247n13 Rhineland, black soldiers stationed in 235–9, 245 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 11 Richards, Michael 193–4, 195n23 Richardson, Samuel 45 Richert, Dominik 72–3n21 Riley, Glenda 155n42 Ritter, Gerhard 237 ritual dance 51, 57n81 El Rivadaria (Patagonia) 141 Robinson, Victor 91n3 Rocca, Gino 92n28 romance and empire of Portugal 216–22 romantic love, Western tradition of 6, 33–52 centrality of love in medieval period 37–8 Christian virtue 38 courtly love 36–8, 40, 41–2, 43, 44–5, 50 elopement 44–5 First World War 46 gallantry 45 heroic love 46–7 human nature 47

319

Index

iconography of 39–41 individualism 45–6 infantile sexuality 47 inheritance of love 52 The Knight of the Vermilion Robe 42–3 love and lust as ‘desire’, theorisation of 47–8 lust (concupiscentia), love’s dark partner 38, 41–3, 51 marriage, celebration of 34–5, 45 medieval accommodation of love and sexual regulation 33, 35–41 natural nature of, idea of 35 non-Western identification with 35 open concealment 38–9 passion 45 pornography, availability of 34 post-war period 46 Reformation, shift of norms 44 rule of love 34–5, 51–2 same-sex love 34–5 sexual behaviour, disciplining of 44–5 sexual love and divine passion, connection between 38–9 sexual regulation 33, 35–41 spiritualised eroticism 47–8, 48–51 spiritualised love 40–41 spiritualised sensuality 36–7 stages of love’s conquest 43–7 sublime love, sexual ardour and 33–4 tapestries 40–41 ‘triumph’ of love in industrialised West 33, 34–5 universal nature of, idea of 35 see also Don Juan Romer, Eric 47 Rosenberg, Alfred 246n5 Rössler, Mechtild 246n5 Roth, Phillip 47 Rothermere, Harold Harmsworth, Viscount 143 de Rougemont, Denis 11, 12, 67–8, 152–3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2 Rovito, Teodoro 93n37 rule of love 34–5, 51–2 Ruscio, Alain 76, 269, 286n1 Rushdie, Salman 283 Rusk, Michael 73n24 Russell, Bertrand 180, 182

Russia 3, 8–9 aspiration, disillusionment and 99 Berlin Wall, effect of fall 96–7 bouleversement 105 caricature 104–5 cinema in post-Soviet era 95–9 communal apartments, life in 99– 100, 101–2 communism, collapse of 97 consumer society, lure of 107–8 culture in post-Soviet era 96, 99, 100–101, 102–3, 104, 105–6, 109, 111 disinterested love, profitable exchange or 105–11 Europe and, encounters in postSoviet cinema 95–9 exile, Europe as place of 97–8 femininity 105 grotesque narrative of Window to Paris 100 identity, crisis of 108–9 language and love 110 love, opportunity and political experience 98–9 love as intercultural exchange 110–11 moral disintegration of ‘decadent’ West 106 Paris, misadventures in 106–7 Paris, refusal to return from 100 post-Soviet era 95–111 public and private spaces, dissolution of 101–2 representation of love 109–10 romantic love, longing for 111 St Petersburg 102–4 subject in post-Soviet era 95, 96, 99, 101, 107–9, 111 symbolic order 101 Rycaut, Paul 24 Saar, Wilhelm von der 247n13 Sade, Marquis de 14 Salazar, António de Oliviera 220–21 Salomon, Ernst von 239, 248n38 Sälter, Georg 71n7 same-sex love 34–5 Sand, George 274, 275, 283, 284–5 Saramago, José 228 Sartre, Jean-Paul 120, 258

320 Sauer, Margarete 168 Saurat, Denis 259, 260, 263 Savic; Rebac, Anica 16, 256, 257–8, 266, 267 reflections on love in wartime 259– 61, 262, 263–5 Schirrmacher, Käte 237–8 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 72n14 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 211n14 Schmitz-Berning, Cornelia 177n33 Schmölders, Claudia 174n7 Schnapp, Alain 264 Schröder, Gerhard 169 Schroeder, Christa 159, 167, 173n2 Schulze, Hagen 248n37 Schwarz, Dennis 112n15 Schwarz, Thomas 250n63 Die schwarze Schmach. Frankreichs Schande 238 Schwarzenbach, Alexis 10–11, 137–57 Sebastião I, King of Portugal 223–5 Second Republic in Spain 192–3 Second World War 62, 251–2 secular love 21–2 secular and divine love, intertwining of 26 secular rationalism 58–9, 205–8 Sedgwick, Eve 48 sedimentation 270, 275, 276, 278, 286 self actualisation through selfannihilation 120–21 construction of 34 self-reflection 78 self-will (Eigensinn) 62 sentimental love 60 sex appeal 109, 158, 160, 171, 173 sex symbol 170 sexual ardour and sublime love 33–4 sexual behaviour, disciplining of 44–5 sexual desire, construction of 47–8 sexual love 24, 26–7 and divine passion, connection between 38–9 sexual partners 6, 28, 35, 36, 51, 52, 53 sexual prowess of Don Juan 203–4 sexual regulation 33, 35–41 sexual representations of Africa 242 sexual stereotypes 209 sexual strike 253 sexuality

Index

allegory of, Weimar Republic as 234–5 emotions and 76 infantile sexuality 47 inter-racial sexuality 86, 219, 235, 237–8, 245 intimacy and 76 love and 17–18 medical science, sexual activity and 186–90 racial boundaries, sexuality and 76–7 social stability, male sexual desire and 253–4 Sexuality, State and Civil Society (Hull, I.) 44, 56n61 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 260, 261 Shems-i Tabrizi (Shemüddin) 26 Shirer, William L. 159, 173n5 Shklovskii, Viktor 128 Shnaider, Mikhail 128 Sholem, Gershom 260 Shore, Marci 9–10, 117–36 Siegel, Lee 56n77, 57n78, 57n79, 57n80 Sigel, Hugo Ferdinand 247n13 Simmel, Georg 13, 182–5, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191 Simpson, Wallis 10–11, 137, 149–51, 151–3 anti-Americanism, divorce-related 144–5, 150 divorces of, media concentration on 144 European media, restraint on romance of 146–8 media reports on Edward and 139–41 silence in British media on romance with Edward 142–5 ‘World’s Greatest Romance’ 137–8 Sinclair, Alison 12, 13, 18, 178–96, 211n4 Sirone, Edith 199 site-catchment 251–2 Sketch of Europe (Madariaga, S. de) 205–6 Slade, Sir Adolphus 30 Slapšak, Svetlana 16–17, 251–68 Slaves and Masters (Freyre, G.) 219–20 sleeping sickness 78, 79 snobbism 119–20 Snobbism and Progress (Žeromski, S.) 119 Social Democraten 148 social difference 184

Index

social order and love 3–4 social stability, male sexual desire and 253–4 social violence in France 278 socio-economic perspective on love 30–31 Socrates 254, 257, 263, 264 El Sol 178 Song of Songs 22, 24 Sorgoni, Barbara 93n49 Sosnovskii, Pavel 97 Sousa Santos, Boaventura 215, 217, 228n1, 229n12 sovereignty, addresses to Hitler’s 166–7 Soviet Union 66–7 early Soviet cinema 104 propaganda clichés about West 105–6 Red Army 15, 73, 126, 234, 239, 245 terror in 125–6 see also Russia, post-Soviet era space (Raum) and people (Volk) 233–4, 238 Spain 3, 147 Europeanness of 193–4 Islamic culture of 5, 21–2, 25–7 negative depiction of 208 public and private love in 12–14 racial discourse in 212n39 see also Don Juan; Revista de Occidente (RO) Spanish America 13 Spectator 143 Spierenburg, Pieter 72n10 spiritualised eroticism 47–8, 48–51 spiritualised love 40–41 spiritualised sensuality 36–7 Spivak, Gayatri C. 270 Spranger, Eduard 182 The Spring to Come (Žeromski, S.) 123 St Petersburg 102–4 Stalin, Josef 126, 128, 129, 261 Stalinism 10, 59, 120 stalking 168 Stanley, Henry Morton 82 Stearns, Peter 47, 70 Stehle, Bruno 236, 247n13 Stein, Edith 16, 256–7, 258, 262 love in wartime, reflections on 265–7

321 Steinbach, Lothar 173n4 Stern, Anatole 118, 119, 120, 127, 129, 131 Sternheim-Peters, Eva 173–4n6 Stoler, Ann Laura 76, 90, 94n67, 234, 246n8 The Stone Raft (Saramago, J.) 228 Stroessner, Alfredo 199 Stuurman, Douwe 174n11 subject in post-Soviet Russia 95, 96, 99, 101, 107–9, 111 subjectivity feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject, possibilities for 284–5 Muslim subjectivity 281–2 subaltern subject 96 sublime love, sexual ardour and 33–4 Svenska Dagbladet 148 Swanson, Gloria 145 Sweden 147–8 symbolic order 101 Symposion (Plato) 257, 264 Tales of Petersburg (Gogol, N.) 103 tapestries 40–41 Tarkovsky, Andrei 97, 106 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 103 Terhoeven, Petra 72n19 terror in Soviet Union 125–6 Theweleit, Klaus 73n24, 212n29, 240, 245, 249n49 The Third Bagre. A Myth Revisited (Goody, J.) 27–8 Thomas, Godfrey 148–9 St Thomas Aquinas 41 Thucidides 263 Tilly, Charles 72n13 Times 143, 144, 145 Todorovsky, Petr 97–8 Tolstoy, Leo 23, 127 Tomasello, Giovanna 93n54 tradition 2, 3, 4, 14–15, 17, 75, 78, 184, 202 Arab tradition 25 changing traditions, multiplicity of 286 Christian tradition 27 cultural tradition 33, 84–5, 100 Greek tradition 224 Hebraic tradition 122 Hindu tradition 29, 49, 50–51

322 Islamic tradition 280, 281, 283, 284, 287n18 love discourse, tradition in Europe of 2, 3, 75–6 Platonic tradition 16, 203–4 of royal intermarriage 141 Russian tradition 100, 103, 106 Spanish tradition 204 see also romantic love, Western tradition of trauma 17, 101, 227, 270, 272 Trilogy of sex (Mantegazza, P.) 75 Tropenkoller (frenzy of the tropics) 243, 245 Trotsky, Leon 267 troubadours 1, 5, 203 Turner, David M. 56n57 Twenty Poems to Camoens (Alegre, M.) 226 Ulshöfer, Helmut 174n9 Unamuno, Miquel de 198 United States 13 anti-Americanism, divorce-related 144–5, 150 Library of Congress 162, 164n11, 174n13 love in 10–11 Office of Military Government for Germany (US) 162 Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, attitudes to romance of 139–41 unrequited love 96, 99, 161, 167, 170 Usborne, Cornelie 246n11 Utekhin, Ilya 101 utopian vision of society 187–8 St Valentine 41 Vaz de Caminha, Ana Olimpia 218, 229n14 Vecchi, Roberto 231n40 Vehlewald, Hans-Jörg 174n9 Vergani, Orio 169, 174n12 Verhaaren, Emile 259 Versailles Treaty 83, 233, 235–6, 237, 244 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 264, 268n19 Viet-Nam 251 Villacañas, José Luis 201, 211n11 Vinaver, Stanislav 259 violence imperial violence, racist apology for 204

Index

social violence in France 278 virginity 77, 274, 275 Viswanathan, Gauri 282 vocabulary of love 76 Volksgemeinschaft 63, 240 Volkskörper 234–5, 237, 245 Vreeland, Diana 151–2 Wallerstein, Immanuel 94n59 Wandurski, Witold 120, 121, 122, 124, 125–6, 132 Warsaw, ashes of see also love in time of revolution; Poland wartime Freidenberg’s reflections of love in 261–2, 263–5 Savic; Rebac’s reflections on love in 259–61, 262, 263–5 Stein’s reflections on love in 265–7 Wasilewska, Wanda 122–3, 125, 126–7, 131–2 Wat, Aleksander 118–19, 120, 121–2, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128–31, 132, 133 Watowa, Ola 123, 127, 130–31, 132, 133 Wa˙zyk, Adam 118, 127, 128–9, 133 Weber, Max 34, 58–9, 71n2, 160, 199, 200 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 174n7 Weimar Republic 15–16, 233–45 Africa, boundary transgressions in German East Africa 241–4 African soldiers, fear of 235–9, 245 anti-Bolshevism 240–41 Balticum 239–41, 244 ‘Black Horror’ 234, 235–9, 245 border territories 234 Freikorps 234, 244, 245 in Balticum 239–41 Heimat in Africa 241–4 inter-racial sexuality 235, 237–8 love for Africa 241–3 Ober-Ost 239–41 ‘raped nation’, allegory of 238 Rhineland, black soldiers stationed in 235–9, 245 Die schwarze Schmach. Frankreichs Schande. 238 sexual representations of Africa 242 sexuality, allegory of 234–5

323

Index

space (Raum) and people (Volk) 233–4, 238 Tropenkoller (frenzy of the tropics) 243, 245 Volksgemeinschaft 240 Volkskörper 234–5, 237, 245 women of the enemy, hate for 240–41 Wempe, Anna 168 Wenge, Gertrud 168 Wenig, Richard 249n52 West, Rebecca 257–8, 259–60, 268n10 Western Mail 144 White (Krzysztof Kieslowski film) 97, 98, 109, 110 Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe 155n44 whiteness in Fascist Italy 87–91 white colonial romance, adaptation for Fascist times 83–7 Wilermith, Margaret 152 Wilkins, John 267n6 Wilkinson, Ellen 142 Williams, A. Susan 154n29 Willis, Clive 229n11 Window to Paris (Yurij Mamin film) 8, 95–6, 98, 105–11 as cultural palimpsest 99–105 Witz, Anne 183, 195n16 Wolf, Arthur P. 24 Wolf, Friedrich 130 Wolter, Heike 246n1

‘Woman in Europe’ 192 women alterity of 255 of the enemy, hate for 240–41 medieval woman mystics 23 woman in society, Marañón’s model of 188–9 The Women (Clare Boothe play) 144–5 Women in Parliament (Aristophanes) 254 work of destruction, engagement in 68–9 and love for state, politics of mass participation 60, 63–5, 65–7 The Worker (Robotnik) 122 World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) 186, 189, 196n34 ‘World’s Greatest Romance’ 137–8 Yalman, Nur O. 25–6, 28–9, 30 Young, Robert J.C. 91n5, 287n7 Young Poland 119 Yugoslavia 139, 259–60, 264, 267, 268n12 Zafrani, Haïm 24–5 Zamponi, Simonetta Falasca 93n42 Žeromski, Stefan 119, 123, 134n11 Zielinski, Theodore 262 Ziemann, Benjamin 250n66 Žižek 110, 111, 113n31, 126–7 Zorrilla y Moral, José 201, 206, 210 Zoshchenko, Mikhail 128