Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies) 3031303113, 9783031303111

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GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts Edited by Kathryn Everly Stefano Giannini Karina von Tippelskirch

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series Editor

Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.

Kathryn Everly  •  Stefano Giannini Karina von Tippelskirch Editors

Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts

Editors Kathryn Everly Syracuse University Syracuse, NY, USA

Stefano Giannini Syracuse University Syracuse, NY, USA

Karina von Tippelskirch Syracuse University Syracuse, NY, USA

ISSN 2578-9694     ISSN 2634-5188 (electronic) Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-031-30311-1    ISBN 978-3-031-30312-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the Central New  York Humanities Corridor funded by an award from the Mellon Foundation for years of research support for our Working Group “Perspectives on Europe from the Periphery.” We are grateful to Gregg Lambert, founding director, and Vivian May, director, of the CNY Humanities Corridor. We thank our fellow Corridor working group coordinators, Patrizia McBride from Cornell University and Monica Facchini from Colgate University, our fellow working group members Ken Frieden from Syracuse University and Matthew Miller from Colgate University, as well as Elizabeth Otto from SUNY Buffalo who participated in many meetings as a guest lecturer. Sarah Workman from the College of Arts and Sciences has been extremely helpful in securing funding and we thank the Syracuse University CUSE grant that provided us with invaluable funding for the 2019 Symposium Centers, Margins, Boundaries and for this book. We are grateful for the flexibility in dealing with Covid-related delays. We would also like to thank Mary Beth Hinton and Carl Good for their keen eyes and constructive commentary and questions when editing the manuscripts.

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Contents

 Introduction: Centers-Peripheries; Literary, Cinematic, and Artistic Spaces  1 Kathryn Everly, Stefano Giannini, and Karina von Tippelskirch  Artistic Practices at the Border: Waiting and Crossing in the Context of Escape and Exile 13 Burcu Dogramaci  Revolutionary Peripheries: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Cinema of Borgata” 33 Monica Facchini Inner Periphery? The Rhine from Borderland to Interzone 57 Matthew D. Miller  Enrico Pea and the Awareness of Never-­Ending Detachment (Alexandria, Egypt 1896–1914) 87 Stefano Giannini  From Mexico to Madrid: Thirdspace in Concha Méndez’s Poemas: Sombras y sueños117 Kathryn Everly

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Contents

 Toward the Periphery of Europe: Erich Maria Remarque’s Novel The Night in Lisbon135 Karina von Tippelskirch  Najat El Hachmi: Away from Patriarchy, Hijab, and Cultural Relativism157 Cristián H. Ricci  Doctor Möbius, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Line183 Bertrand Westphal Index203

Notes on Contributors

Burcu Dogramaci  is Professor of Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-­ Universität (LMU) Munich, Munich. She leads the ERC Consolidator Project, “Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD)” (2017–2022, https://metromod.net) at the LMU Munich. She is co-director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Dis:connectivity in processes of globalization,” established in 2021 at LMU Munich. Her research areas are exile, migration and flight, modern art, urbanity and architecture, photography, textile modernism, and live art. Recent publications include Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century (2020, ed. with M.  Hetschold et  al., Open Access, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/41641); Handbook of Art and Global Migration Theories, Practices, and Challenges (2019, co-edited with Birgit Mersmann); Nomadic Camera. Fotografie, Exil und Migration, special issue of Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie, no. 151 (2019, co-edited with Helene Roth); and Fotografie der Performance: Live Art im Zeitalter ihrer Reproduzierbarkeit (2018). Kathryn  Everly  Professor of Spanish, has published Catalan Women Writers and Artists: Revisionist Views from a Feminist Space (2003) and History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel ( 2010), and co-edited De la edad. Poesía española siglos XX-XXI: Algunas calas [On Youth and Aging: Approaches to XX-XXI Century Spanish Poetry] (2021). She received the Florence Howe Award for feminist scholarship in a foreign language field awarded ix

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by the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages. She is the executive editor of Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures housed at Syracuse University. https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vsym20/current Monica  Facchini  is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies at Colgate University. She has published “Sound and Soundtrack in Italian Cinema” for the Bloomsbury anthology Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image (2020) and a book, Spettacolo della morte e “tecniche del cordoglio” nel cinema degli anni sessanta (2017). Stefano Giannini  is Associate Professor of Italian. His research focuses on the notion of exile, visions of Italy outside of Italy, and modern and contemporary Italian theater. He authored La musa sotto i portici. Caffè e provincia nella narrativa di Piero Chiara e Lucio Mastronardi, (2008) and Vittorio Sereni Niccolò Gallo. L’amicizia, il capirsi, la poesia. Lettere 1953-1971 (2013), and co-edited Tradition and the Individual Text. Essays in Memory of Pier Massimo Forni (MLN Special Issue, 2019). His research analyzes the relationships among the cultures of the Mediterranean basin, in particular between Italy and Egypt. His “Maps of Absence. Modern Italian Writers in Alexandria, Egypt” project investigates the encounters of modern Italian artists with Northern Africa between the end of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Matthew  D.  Miller is Associate Professor of German at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. His book The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge was published in 2018. He has published articles and book chapters on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germanophone literature and culture, co-edited Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River (2016), and is working on a new project on the literature and politics of the first Austrian republic with a focus on Red Vienna. Cristián H. Ricci  is Professor of Iberian and North African literatures at the University of California, Merced. He has published Literatura periférica en castellano y catalán: el caso marroquí (2010), ¡Hay moros en la cosa! Literatura marroquí fronteriza en castellano y catalán (2014), and New Voices of Muslim North African Migrants in Europe (2019). He has also published several articles in academic journals and three anthologies about Moroccan authors of Spanish expression: Letras Marruecas (2012),

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Letras Marruecas II (2019), and Mohamed Lahchiri’s El examen y otros cuentos ceutíes ( 2011). Karina von Tippelskirch  is Associate Professor of German at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German, German Jewish, and Yiddish literature, as well as transnational intellectual and literary transfer between German-speaking Europe and North America. Her interests include the relationship between centers and peripheries, the literary and visual representation of exile, forced migrations, and the Holocaust. Among her publications are Also das Alphabet vergessen? Die jiddische Dichterin Rajzel Zychlinski (2000) and a bilingual edition of Żychlińsky’s poetry, Gottes blinde Augen (1997). She also co-edited Die Waffen nieder! Lay Down Your Weapons! Ingeborg Bachmanns Schreiben gegen den Krieg (Königshausen & Neumann 2014). Her most recent book, Dorothy Thompson and German Writers in Defence of Democracy (2018), explores the collaborations, friendships, and networks formed between one of the most influential American journalists and German writers and intellectuals, many of whom became exiles after the Nazis rose to power. Von Tippelskirch is writing the German biography of Dorothy Thompson, under contract with the Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin. Bertrand  Westphal is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université de Limoges, France. His recent publications include monographs such as L’œil de la Méditerranée. Une odyssée littéraire (2005), Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces (trad. Robert Tally, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, also translated to Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese forthcoming), A Plausible World (trad. Amy Wells, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), La cage des méridiens. Le roman et l’art contemporain face à la globalisation (2016, also translated to Chinese), and Atlas des égarements. Onze études géocritiques (2019). He has also published L’infini culturel. Théorie littéraire et fragilité du divers (2022).

List of Figures

Artistic Practices at the Border: Waiting and Crossing in the Context of Escape and Exile Fig. 1 Francis Alÿs, The Loop, Tijuana-San Diego, 1997, Graphic documentation of an action. In order to go from Tijuana to San Diego without crossing the Mexico/US border, I followed a perpendicular route away from the fence and circumnavigated the globe, heading 67° South East, North East, and South East again until I reached my departure point. The project remained free and clear of all critical implications beyond the physical displacement of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist Fig. 2 Francis Alÿs, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River August 12, 2008, Tangier, Morocco—Tarifa, Spain, Strait of Gibraltar: In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Félix Blume, Ivan Boccara, Abbas Benhim, Fundación Montenmedio Arte, and the kids of Tangier and Tarifa. Video and photographic documentation of an action, 2 video projections, 7 min 44 sec. On August 12, 2008, a line of kids with shoe boats will leave Europe toward Morocco, while a line of kids with shoe boats leave Africa toward Spain. The two lines will meet on the horizon. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Roberto Rubalcava Fig. 3 Francis Alÿs, 1943, 2012–Present, printed text. Image courtesy of the artist

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Doctor Möbius, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Line Fig. 1 “Europa” by Escif Fig. 2 Untitled by Andrea Tarli

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Introduction: Centers-Peripheries; Literary, Cinematic, and Artistic Spaces Kathryn Everly, Stefano Giannini, and Karina von Tippelskirch

Exploring the relationship between center and periphery entails transgressing—in the sense of going beyond, exceeding the limits of—the borders that mark the existence of these two spaces. Such borders can also be internal to the center, demarcating inner peripheries that are created and used by power structures to control political and cultural dynamics. Literary, visual, and cinematic artists often transgress these borders in seeking to envision alternative cultural spaces and draw attention to the arrogance of power. These artists embody, foresee, and announce tensions and possibilities of change that alter human beings’ epistemological perceptions of reality. Their works show how conditions of liminality, marginality, and weakness can, in fact, serve as springboards for drawing attention to the need for a subversive imagination. As Stefania Lucamante shows in her book Righteous Anger (2020), artists who describe precarious lives,

K. Everly (*) • S. Giannini • K. von Tippelskirch Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_1

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injustices, or imbalances in the distribution of power have the agency to trigger moral indignation and spur fights against injustice. Theodore Adorno argued that although art cannot remedy the ills of the world, it can protest against them and raise awareness: The contradiction between the object reconciled in the subject, i.e. spontaneously absorbed into the subject, and the actual unreconciled object in the outside world, confers on the work of art a vantage-point from which it can criticize actuality. Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world. In analogy to a current philosophical phrase we might speak of the “aesthetic distance” from existence: only by virtue of this distance, and not by denying its existence, can the work of art become both work of art and valid consciousness. A theory of art which ignores this is at once philistine and ideological. (2007, 160)

In its focus on the center-periphery relationship, this book examines many such instances of art’s liminal and subversive role. The volume’s contributors seek to articulate an understanding of modern Europe through an interdisciplinary approach, including geocritical and comparative approaches, to concepts of centers and peripheries, borders, thirdspace, exile, and diaspora. Instead of defining Europe as an irradiating center of cultural production, we analyze the impact that migrations, both internal and external, have had on European literary and visual representations since the nineteenth century. We explore the currents of cultural influences that have originated from both within and outside of Europe in order to examine what happens when these currents encounter one another, clash, or come into friction, even in cases when such convergences may seem to have no immediately noteworthy consequences. The movements of humans and their material products define the long history of the center-periphery relationship. In this book we do not conceptualize these movements using economic frameworks of market saturation and exchange but instead approach them through the lens of artistic expressions that have embodied the ideational potential of the movements in question. At the spatial level, we focus our inquiry on the European continent as the center that imposed its models and political control on a large part of the globe—including areas within its own borders—throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our view of this relationship between Europe and its peripheries assesses what have sometimes been cast as “balances,” only to find imbalances in the flows between the

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two poles: usually flows of cultural, economic, and political models sent from the center to the peripheries, and an opposite flux of both human (i.e., migrants, exiles) and material resources toward the center. Works of art cannot directly remedy societal problems, yet the essays in this volume explore the ways in which they can penetrate reality, raise awareness of dangers, and protest inequities. The written, filmic, and visual artistic output analyzed by the contributors to this book highlights the ethical and subversive power of art to influence and transform our understanding of the relation between center and periphery. In exploring this relation, the contributors focus on the ways in which artistic acts can subvert the general acceptance of political and cultural practices imposed by the center on its peripheries. In her poem “Bohemia Lies by the Sea,” Ingeborg Bachmann (2006) evokes the power of utopian thought to transgress borders. Bachmann’s poem explains how it is possible to place Bohemia, a landlocked region, by the sea. Born of a literary reflection (Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale) and rooted in historical vicissitudes such as the plight of Bohemians forced to leave their land during and in the aftermath of World War II, Bachmann’s poem has universal appeal as it illustrates the power of imagination to turn potentiality into reality. Bertrand Westphal (2011) likewise points to this interaction between fiction and reality, noting that literature should be understood as playing an active role, as opposed to a representational function that was attributed to it in premodern conceptions: “Fiction does not mimic reality but . . . actualizes new virtualities hitherto unexpressed, which can then interact with the real according to the hypertextual logic of interfaces” (103). Paul Ricoeur’s idea of a “quasi past” of fiction, which he defines as the “detector of possibilities buried in the actual past” (qtd. in Westphal 2011, 103), also resonates in the essays collected in this volume. Ricoeur’s quasi past interacts with the actual past to overcome the perceived limitations of virtualities that cannot be contained in a past time. In fact, the relation between quasi past and actual past refers to the relation between fiction and reality, or to the inherent power of fiction to bring to life possibilities that lie hidden in our realities. Even if the realist mode remains dominant, the potentialities of the artists’ works studied in this volume show how influential their perspectives and interpretations of realities are in the cocreation of worlds in which referents and their representations do not oppose each other but alert us to new properties in the “sphere of the referent” (Westphal 2011, 103).

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Therefore, this book also aims to subvert a centripetal reading of European cultural production by including peripheral thinkers, writers, and visual artists operating in transcultural contexts. The wide variety of perspectives from scholars working in various media—including Burcu Dogramaci, known for her global approach to urban exile, migrations, and the arts; as well as Bertrand Westphal, a leading scholar in the field of geocriticism—enriches the analysis of this theme. The chapters in this collection explore and highlight fertile artistic discourses generated in spatial peripheries located both outside of Europe, such as regions in North Africa and North America, as well as “in the very ‘heart of Europe’”— where, according to Étienne Balibar “all languages, religions, cultures are coexisting and mixing, with origins and connections all over the world. If this is a ‘middle,’ then, it is not a center, but, rather, ‘a series of assembled peripheries.’ . . . There is no ‘center’; there are only ‘peripheries’” (2009, 200). A geocentered approach, favoring place and chronology over a subject-­oriented point of view, allows us to more effectively interrogate peripheral spaces. This book addresses the need for new geocritical analyses and readings in order to overcome the engrained center/peripheries dichotomy. In the process, we seek to bring a nuanced, multifaceted approach to these concepts to a large transnational audience. We rethink the idea of national literatures and propose what contributor Matthew D. Miller describes as “contact zones of imaginative interaction.” By recovering silenced voices from oppressive political situations, and voices that have been marginalization due to migration, exile, and gender (such as Spanish vanguard poet Concha Méndez; Italian economic migrant, novelist, and playwright Enrico Pea; and Moroccan/Catalan author Najat El Hachmi), we respond to the necessity of understanding works of art—literary, cinematic, and visual—as political expressions. In the volume’s first chapter, “Artistic Practices at the Border: Waiting and Crossing in the Context of Escape and Exile,” Burcu Dogramaci explores historical and contemporary artistic practices that respond to the experience of borders. Examining performative boundary transgressions in drawings by Max Lingner and multimedia works by Francis Alÿs, she reflects on the proximity of borders and boundaries connecting forced migrations in the present and the past and explores how art works negotiate and are affected by the experience of borders. She discusses artistic practices related to this experience in two categories, which are not to be understood as binary constellations: “waiting” at the border can be

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understood as a situation in transition, a staying-walking that can turn into activity in the event of a situation-related change; “crossing,” on the other hand, requires special skill, especially from refugees lacking visas and freedom to travel—detours, interruptions, and camouflage are common practices in dealing with borders in the context of flight and exile. In reflecting on these two categories, Dogramaci joins together historical exile and contemporary flight and migration, exploring how Lingner and other prisoners of the French internment camp Gurs around 1940 reflect their status in drawings; the way in which this waiting status is reflected in their works; and the possibilities offered by the works of Alÿs for overcoming borders at different global border lines. Dogramaci thereby examines how borders become a challenge for artistic and performative practices, and conversely, how artists respond to the limitations they impose. In “Revolutionary Peripheries: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Cinema of Borgata,” Monica Facchini focuses on peripheries located within Italy in her geocritical analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s early cinematic work. Prior to any official political considerations, Pasolini had identified the inner fractures in a seemingly homogeneous country, and Facchini underlines his provocative readings of the new social landscape. The 1960s in Italy marked a controversial period in which rapid economic growth accompanied a sudden and inexorable social and cultural transformation. Later recalled as the years of the “economic boom” or the “economic miracle,” the 1960s witnessed the blooming of industrial centers, with the consequent mass movement of people from the countryside to cities and from the South to the more industrialized North. One of the effects of this sudden geographical reconfiguration of the country was the destruction of particular marginal cultures that did not fit in with the new economic and cultural system organized around consumption, such as the impoverished outskirts of cities known as the borgate. Pasolini’s early films sought to capture the “scandalous” realities of the borgate of one of Italy’s major economic and cultural centers of Italy: Rome. Occupying a sort of postcolonial space within their very nation, these borgate cultures represented for Pasolini the revolutionary forces of society that still resisted the homologizing consumerist threat. Facchini discusses Pasolini’s early films, a trilogy known as his “cinema di borgata,” with a specific focus on the final film of the trilogy, La ricotta (1963), in which the death of a “subproletarian” extra on the set of a film—a film within the film focused on the Passion of Christ—constitutes a revolutionary act against both mainstream cinema and neocapitalist society. By taking a geocritical perspective,

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Facchini analyzes the geographical, cultural, and cinematic space of Pasolini’s borgate through a multifocal view that interprets Pasolini’s cinematic representation and recreation of the space in question as a dialectical confrontation with Fascist culture, neorealist cinema, and the new consumerist society. Focused on a broader framework of a hydrocentric remapping of Europe, Matthew Miller’s essay “Inner Periphery? The Rhine from Borderland to Interzone” discusses the Rhine region as an inner periphery with the potential for both nationalist appropriation and transnational cultural exchange. Following a trend in critical European cultural studies that has productively reformulated the relationship between center and periphery to address not only geographic but also political, socioeconomic, and cultural relations of power (as exemplified in the work of Étienne Balibar), Miller’s chapter examines fault lines of European cultural history and their possible transcendence by revisiting the nineteenth-century Rhine as an inner European boundary in the age of nationalism. Focusing on three literary texts with strong contextual (i.e., geographic and political) references to the 1840 “Rhine Crisis” and the pre-March (Vormärz) period— Victor Hugo’s 1844 Le Rhin, Heinrich Heine’s 1844 Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen, and Georg Büchner’s Lenz (posthumously published in 1839)—Miller’s analysis seeks to contribute to the geocriticism of western Europe’s main waterway. It does so following the hypothesis that a hydrocentric remapping of the continent based on its rivers and watersheds may yield a pluricentric, non-nationalist, and future-oriented outlook on the prospects of European interpersonal and transcultural relations. Constellating Hugo, Heine, and Büchner’s texts against the background of the cultural and political field with a focus on their engagement with historical and contemporary forms of ruination along the Rhine, Miller’s geocritical approach serves to facilitate movement in the European cultural imaginary, from borderlands of divisiveness and their preoccupations with origins and nationalist territorial claims to contact zones of imaginative interaction (i.e., Randall Halle’s [2014] concept of “interzones”) treated as sites of cultural Europeanization. Miller’s chapter serves as a segue to the second half of the book, whose chapters are focused on close textual analyses of specific works that serve as geographical markers of resistance from the periphery. The theoretical concerns of the initial chapters of this second part relate to the specifics of individuals who live and write in precarious situations of exile, diaspora, and isolation, and whose work marks intersections of gender, race, and

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ethnicity. An analysis of a case of exile and migration from the center to the periphery of Europe, Stefano Giannini’s “Enrico Pea and the Awareness of Never-Ending Detachment (Alexandria, Egypt 1896–1914)” examines postcolonial discourse in Italy through the voice of novelist and playwright Enrico Pea. While residing outside of Italy in Alexandria, Egypt, Pea (1881–1954) acquired a unique awareness of the notion of multiethnic societies and the concepts of nationality, borders, and boundaries. Giannini investigates exile literature through multiple gazes focused on Alexandria, and more specifically through the encounters of modern Italian poets and writers with this Egyptian city between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Alexandria is a referential space, the subject of a multifocalization of views. It is a center and, at the same time, a marginal place. Alexandrea ad Egyptum—the door to Egypt, as the city was known in antiquity—brought together Arab and European artistic experiences that converged on, and were triggered by, its cosmopolitan profile. The history of political exile and the migration of Italians to Alexandria dates back to the 1830s, more than thirty years prior to the formation of the Italian state. The number of Italians in Alexandria grew from a few thousand at the end of the nineteenth century to more than 30,000 residents just before World War II. Their original status as migrants shaped a peculiar sensibility toward the notion of a multiethnic society that was largely misunderstood or unknown in their home country. It is a sensibility that understood this city not as a space to conquer and colonize but instead as a surprisingly tolerant society to live in (in the context of dominant European customs at the time). In his mid-thirties, after eighteen years in Alexandria, Pea returns to Italy and reflects on his experiences, examining the complexity of borders and nationalities for exiles and economic migrants who negotiate different cultural systems, nations, states, and state-crossings. His allogenous points of view on Alexandrian life do not constitute a mere effort to reproduce the real city. In his memoir and novels Pea rebuilds the city space and struggles with the wound of detachment from Alexandria. Instead of seeking to reproduce this city’s reality, his literary discourse instead renews it, by bringing to the surface hidden potentialities and spatial continuities that interact with the real. Focusing on this shifting gaze, Giannini examines the theoretical implications of the now nascent postcolonial debate in Italy by mapping and contextualizing the ways in which Pea’s voice differs from contemporary Italian literary and cultural discussions on nationality, borders, and boundaries.

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Continuing the discourse of exile from the center, Kathryn Everly’s “From Mexico to Madrid: Thirdspace in Concha Méndez’s Poemas: Sombras y sueños” looks at the North America-Europe relationship through the experience of Spanish poet Concha Méndez (1898–1986), analyzing her poetry written in Mexico using Edward Soja’s (1996) notion of “thirdspace,” which conflates place and time in literary language. Méndez was a leading figure of the vanguard art movement in Spain prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. With the onset of that war, many liberal artists fled the country, seeking refuge from fascist retaliation. Méndez’s exile took her first to France and Cuba and finally to Mexico, where she would spend the rest of her life and where her poetic oeuvre would function as a literary map of her emotional and intellectual lived experience. Mexico is also a liminal space for Méndez, a space in between reality and nostalgia that emerges in her poetry as she attempts to reconcile two nations (Spain and Mexico) in a creative combination of the “real” and “imagined” world, or as a “thirdspace.” Space and place in Mendéz’s poetry draw an ideological map of individual exile and artistic exploration that echoes a generational experience of displacement. As Everly demonstrates, in Méndez’s work Mexico is read not as a haven or destination but instead as a fluid state of being, always pointing back to a perceived idea of “home.” Drawing on the work of Bertrand Westphal and Edward Soja, Everly analyzes Méndez’s multifocalization of her adopted country to show how she represents place in her poetry as polysensorial, shifting, and malleable. In the process, both individual and societal consequences of exile come into focus, revealing a creative response to trauma. Everly reads this poetry as an expression of both the real and the imagined, of the pain and nostalgia that mark the experience of exile, seeking to vindicate Méndez as an important member of the Spanish vanguard by recovering a voice that was obscured by exile and dictatorship. In “Towards the Periphery of Europe: Erich Maria Remarque’s Novel The Night in Lisbon,” Karina von Tippelskirch explores spatial and temporal movements toward the periphery as representations of the corrosion of the bourgeois order and the era that structured it. Following a brief overview of the historical background of The Night in Lisbon (1963) and a contextualization of the author’s life and work, von Tippelskirch engages in a close geocritical reading of the novel, investigating the disintegration of identities and human relationships within it. The novel’s two protagonists, who render the narrative from different perspectives, have both been forced to move ever farther away from their origins in their efforts to

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escape Nazi persecution. They meet in Lisbon, on the geopolitical margins of Europe, exchanging stories of exile and flight over one night and into the following morning. The historical and geographical places that mark the novel’s central narrative are interpreted as places of literary transit (Wilhelmer 2015); they signal the transgression of borders and boundaries as well as the transformation of the protagonists in exile. During the time span of the characters’ flight and as they move ever closer toward Lisbon, their identities become increasingly fluid; by the end of the narration they have not only assumed new names but will also depart in distinctly different directions. The novel thus mirrors the spatiotemporal revolutions of the twentieth century that resulted in an end of unity and a transition from homogeneity to heterogeneity (Westphal 2011). Von Tippelskirch’s reading demonstrates how in Remarque’s novel the previous spatiotemporal continuum is replaced by a multiplicity of times and orders, or dis-orders, reflecting the fragmentation of existence and identities in exile. In “Najat El Hachmi: Away from Patriarchy, Hijab, and Cultural Relativism,” Cristián H. Ricci brings the multifaceted writing of award-­ winning Catalan writer Najat El Hachmi to a transnational readership and explores the dilemma of her identity politics: as a writer of Moroccan heritage living in Spain and writing in Catalan, El Hachmi defies traditional notions of nationality. Ricci’s chapter focuses on El Hachmi’s two latest works—her feminist essay entitled Siempre han hablado por nosotras [They Have Always Spoken for Us] (2019) and her most recent novel, El lunes nos querrán [They Will Love Us on Monday] (2021)—in order to disclose the foundations of a unique form of feminist account regarding her characters’ identity challenges in Europe. Although El Hachmi (like her characters) has built her home in Europe, has adopted European cultures as her own, and is fully integrated in the continent, her narratives have at least two objectives that emerge from a peripheral perspective: an attempt to improve the situation of her fellow Muslim North African counterparts, spurred in part by a writing process that allows her to analyze cultures from a liminal space; and an effort to turn issues that generate unease in daily life (religion, injustice, violence, patriarchy) into objects of irony and thereby relieve the disquiet. Of all the aforementioned issues, Ricci considers El Hachmi’s relationship with Islam and feminism to be the most important, using this identity conflict as a common thread throughout the chapter in order to demonstrate that the argument of El Hachmi’s work can be organized around two axes of denunciation: (1) Islam as a structural social system that enforces patriarchy, and (2) identity rhetoric and

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cultural relativism as main contributors to backsliding in the fight for women’s rights. The collection’s final chapter, Bertrand Westphal’s “Doctor Möbius, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Line” summarizes the geocritical framework and the transnational context that guide the book. Westphal gives several contemporary cultural examples of the tenuous and malleable notions of borders and margins. He begins with observations about lines as powerful, yet artificial demarcation points as illustrated in the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos’s film The Suspended Step of the Stork, and in the Uruguayan director Álvaro Brechner’s A Twelve-Year Night (2018). Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan expert on both democracy and soccer, observes that there is a very singular cancha (soccer field) somewhere in a small town of Brazil, where teams compete simultaneously on both sides of the Equator. During the first half of the game, they are located in one hemisphere, and when they switch sides for the second half, they move to the opposite hemisphere. During the course of games, no player is prevented from crossing over from one part of the Equator to the other. They play “globall” without caring about boundaries. Galeano’s ideas connect to those of Giorgio Agamben, who in several of his essays deals with topological structures that underline the indeterminacy of all kinds of boundaries. Among them, some pop up between private and public areas, and others, tragically, between the state of nature and the state of exception, and still others between geographical entities such as Europe, the Global South, center, and periphery. To illustrate the fact that “exterior and interior in-determine each other,” Agamben (2000, 24) mentions a series of figures like the Möbius strip, the Klein bottle, or the halo. All these topological projections (lines, borders, halos, inside-outside spaces) emphasize indeterminacy and relativity. The Möbius strip serves as a stimulating metaphor in Westphal’s chapter to approximate it to other indeterminate or deterritorialized boundary frameworks, such as that of thirdspace or reversed maps. All these speculations are fueled by the literary and artistic examples studied. The examples of street art discussed by Westphal show its influential role in calling for a renewed discussion of the notion of hospitality and on the need to rethink what is inside and outside our often-­ artificial lines/borders. The transnational movements and the exchange of individual experiences that are highlighted by this volume’s wide-ranging geocritical context bring to light the importance of artistic, literary, and cinematic productions for unsettling the status quo. If Adorno was correct in

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claiming that literature and art can challenge the world’s ills even while not remedying them, then it is crucial that such literary and artistic practices are circulated and renewed upon each reading. For Adorno, the ills of the world included the devastating effects of World War II, the genocide of the Holocaust, and the unthinkable atrocities of the concentration camps, all of which were products of the divisions of peoples via the marking of borders and imaginary boundaries. It is our hope that this volume addresses the pressing need to rethink European centricity and develop a more inclusive and complex history of personal, transnational, and ethical boundaries within Europe and in a global context.

References Adorno, Theodor. 2007 . Reconciliation Under Duress. In Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Theodor Adorno et al. London: Verso, 151–76. Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bachmann, Ingeborg. 2006. Bohemia Lies by the Sea. In Darkness Spoken: Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. trans. Peter Filkins, 616–617. Brookline, MA: Zephyr. Balibar, Étienne. 2009. Europe as Borderland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2): 190–215. Halle, Randall. 2014. The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Lucamante, Stefania. 2020. Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-­ Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally, Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilhelmer, Lars. 2015. Transit-Orte in der Literatur: Eisenbahn – Hotel – Hafen – Flughafen. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag.

Artistic Practices at the Border: Waiting and Crossing in the Context of Escape and Exile Burcu Dogramaci

Cross-border exile and flight profoundly change the disposition of the subject. Familiar spaces must be abandoned and relationships dissolved. Language and cultural spaces change, and the exiled are continually confronted with the uncertainty of their residence status. Border crossings, therefore, constitute dominant experiences in the context of exile. They represent not only the physical movement across national borders but also an existential, liminal state. In artistic works, border experience, border crossing, limitation, and delimitation are reflected in a variety of ways. This chapter will examine how exile-related threshold states are negotiated and how boundaries and their overcoming affect artistic work. Artistic practices on the border will be discussed in two steps, which, however, are not to be taken as binary oppositions: “Waiting” at the border can be understood as a state of transition, a leaving-staying that can turn into

B. Dogramaci (*) Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, München, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_2

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activity in the event of a situation-related change. “Crossing” of the border, on the other hand, requires special skills, especially from refugees without visas and freedom to travel. Refugees must often deal with detours, interruptions, and camouflage when negotiating flight and exile. In the following I will approach the waiting at and crossing of borders from the perspective of the arts, focusing on both historical exile and contemporary flight and migration: How did the prisoners of the French internment camp Gurs around 1940 explore and reflect upon their forever-­ waiting status? How do the works of the artist Francis Alÿs overcome borders at different global frontiers? The following explorations will thus examine how borders pose a challenge for artistic and performative practices and—vice versa—how artists react to the limitations imposed by borders.

Waiting in Extreme Situations: Camp Gurs at the French-Spanish Border Waiting is the other side of fleeing. If we follow this line of thought, another established notion, that refugees are always on the move, is ruptured. What if refugees were represented not, as is typical, in the context of the avalanche, the storm, or the flood, but rather in the waiting room? People fleeing are also people waiting—at borders, for the right moment to cross; in reception camps; or in holding facilities until a decision is made on their status as asylum seekers. The acts of leaving or staying, fleeing or sheltering, arriving or waiting are not clearly distinguishable from one another. The boundaries between them are permeable, and individual actions are often inextricably tied to one another. The art historian Volker Adolphs comments on the nuances between leaving and staying: “Leaving is perhaps my goal; in leaving I arrived and, simultaneously, I’m leaving to escape from staying; yet my leaving can also have staying as its goal. Aimless staying means, I have arrived at my goal, while goal-oriented staying is a passage and it means, I’m only waiting” (Adolphs and Abramović 2007, 10; translation Karina von Tippelskirch). In the sense of a “leaving-­ staying” instead of a “standing-still,” waiting implies a liminal state, the end of which is caused by an event, a notification, a sudden personal or historical change. Waiting in transition does not mean permanent dwelling, but an existence-in-between—always on call, or anticipating further notice.

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For the writer and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer, waiting is a “hesitant openness,” “a tense activity and engaged self-preparation” (Kracauer 1922/1990, 168–169) Thus, waiting is not passive repose, but an activity geared toward changing one’s state and indicating a “(future-oriented) temporal structure” (Şölçün 1998, 76). In exile literature from the Nazi period, waiting in relation to the loss of the homeland is often interpreted as a provisional arrangement and an existential in-between state. In his novel Exile, Lion Feuchtwanger uses the “waiting room” as a constant motif, brought to light by the subtitle of the book, “Der Wartesaal” (The waiting room), as well as the extraordinary length of the book and the activities of the protagonists, many of whom are characterized as persistently waiting and persevering in exile (Feuchtwanger 1994; see also Pikulik 1997, 122–135). The term “waiting room” was also used by emigrants in Turkey to indicate being stuck in dislocation. The urban planner Martin Wagner describes his exile in Istanbul as a “first-class waiting room” (Wagner 1936). The emigrants thus employed a spatial metaphor to express the undeterminable duration of their exile. Waiting is an active state,1 and at borders or in border camps, that state is entirely owed to external circumstances. Laws, state security, or other instruments of order enforce waiting; even if one is traveling with a suitable travel document—which either guarantees visa-free travel or is filled with all required stamps—an act of waiting will almost always precede the crossing of the border. Thus, we can speak of a superimposition of border and waiting—they coincide: “To a large extent a border can be considered as a waiting act. A border causes a standstill, a distance and difference in time and space” (Van Houtem and Wolfe 2017, 129). Waiting can be emotionally and physically painful, depending on why you are waiting, how long it takes, and whether the end of the waiting period is foreseeable (Levine 2003, 145–146). For individuals waiting in camps in the context of persecution, exile, and war, the future remains uncertain. The correlation between the person waiting and what they are waiting for, as well as the waiting’s temporal aspect, is significant. In his essay Theorie des Wartens (Theory of Waiting), the philosopher Rodion Ebbighausen states:

1  Reflections on “Active Waiting” can be found in Friebe (2013), 42–46. Friebe refers to Frank Partnoy, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, New York: Public Affairs, 2012, available as an audiobook.

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Time also plays an important role in other ways, because our sense of time while Waiting changes and evolves into a form that is specific to waiting. Waiting is always directed towards the future, that is, towards the “not yet”. When waiting, the present becomes an obstacle, a barrier behind which the “not yet” lies promisingly. The presence of the absent is necessarily temporal: what we await has not yet been realized in the present. (Ebbighausen 2010, 48)

But what does waiting for what is to come—freedom, the crossing of borders—look like in the context of internment? And how can such an indeterminate state of waiting be artistically and creatively reflected? In order to approach these questions on dislocation and waiting, in the following I will discuss works by the artist Max Lingner, who produced a series of drawings in the French internment camp Gurs in 1941. These drawings were published in 1982 under the title Max Lingner. Gurs. Bericht und Aufruf (Max Lingner. Gurs. Report and Appeal). Constructed in 1939, Gurs was located on a site in the unoccupied parts of southern France under the control of the Vichy government. Initially, it was planned as a reception camp for republican refugees of the Spanish Civil War. After the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Gurs also took in so-­ called enemy aliens. Following the Armistice with Germany on June 22, 1940, Gurs primarily interned Belgians, French Communists, and Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. Later, deported Jews from Baden, the Palatinate, and Saarland were added, so that in 1941, when Max Lingner produced his drawings, an estimated 20,000 people lived in Gurs (see Wendland 2017, 31). As of 1942, Gurs became a stopover for many inmates on their way to German extermination camps. Although Gurs offered its internees better conditions than the national socialist concentration camps, life in the French camp was similarly challenging due to limited living space, poor nutrition and medical care, and rampant diseases. The internees were particularly hard hit by the winters of 1940–1941 when more than 600 people died (Wendland 2017, 32). In contrast to German concentration camps or the Theresienstadt ghetto, however, the internees were not subjected to forced labor. They only had to perform minor tasks in the canteen, library, or infirmary, and were therefore usually caught up in a state of inactivity, which they tried to compensate for through self-organized cultural activities (Wendland 2017, 32). It is precisely this forced state of inactivity that sets Gurs as a vivid example of how waiting functions in internment camps. Moreover, Gurs

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was situated not far from the border area between Spain and France, so that acts of waiting at the border and acts of waiting in the camp overlapped. Max Lingner’s drawings portray impressions of everyday life in the camp: people trying to warm themselves by a burning barrel—On y a froid (It is cold)—eating meager meals—On a faim (We are hungry)—and sleeping in crude barracks. Waiting, for example, is the theme of a drawing, showing male inmates queuing for soup.2 Lingner’s drawing and its spatial arrangement are structured by hatchings. The landscape orientation of the sheet accentuates the waiting queue. Horizontality translates the act of waiting and the duration of time into an artistic form. The lowered heads and lowered eyes of the men are captured in strict profile, emphasizing the isolation of the internees. They do not communicate, but wait, alone, for their meal. In this drawing, waiting is depicted as a condition oriented toward the intake of food and thus encompasses a foreseeable period of time. Waiting is indefinite in another drawing: . . . ET ON ATTEND (And we wait) shows three seated women behind barbed wire.3 Gurs’s thirteen blocks (called Ilots) were separated by such fencing (Below 187). Here, waiting has no concrete goal, and the drawing does not specify what the women are waiting for. Looking down to the left and gazing somberly at the artist, they wait for the day to pass and their time in the camp to end. Theirs is not an energetic waiting; their postures express sadness and hopelessness. The barbed wire underlines that they cannot overcome the barriers of the camp. Max Lingner’s drawings convey the different semantics of waiting, which can be purposeful and directed toward an event such as the serving of a meal, or impossible to measure and directed toward an uncertain future such as the release from camp. Of no small importance is the fact that Lingner’s cycle of six drawings was meant as a call for help for Gurs. Lingner was able to leave the camp in late autumn 1941 and subsequently became active in the French resistance (Lingner 1982, n.p.). The prints—offering a look behind Gurs’s barbed wire fences—were presumably meant to mobilize resistance. This assumption is supported by the fact that Lingner prefaced his Gurs drawings with a sketch featuring a mother and child, carrying the words “au secours de Gurs!” (To the aid of Gurs!). Although we do not know whether and how Lingner’s drawings had already been circulated during the war, the following observation can 2 3

 Max Lingner, Untitled, drawing from Gurs, 1941, published in Lingner, Gurs 1982.  Max Lingner, “... ET ON ATTEND,” published in ibid.

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be derived from Lingner’s conception of the cycle: his images of waiting had the purpose of activating feelings like compassion, grief, and anger at the unworthy conditions in the camp. As a result, Lingner’s artistic transfiguration of waiting turns into an affective motif designed to activate its recipients.4 In the Gurs internment camp, everyday life for the inmates consisted of the same repetitive routines, of enduring the confinement, and the enforced waiting. In view of the nearby state border between France and Spain, one can speak of a double border situation. The camp border marked the dividing line between inside and outside, imprisonment and freedom, inactivity and activity, waiting and departure, foreign- and self-­ determination. State borders can mean rejection if papers and visas are missing, or protection and rescue if the border is passed. At the same time, state borders mark people as foreign or autochthonous, or as those who are perceived as foreign or familiar. In her essay “We Refugees” (1943), the philosopher Hannah Arendt links the crossing of the border from Germany into France with her later internment in the Gurs camp—in 1940 Arendt had to spend several weeks there before she was able to escape and emigrate to New York via Lisbon. Arendt writes: But having hardly crossed the French borderline, we [refugees] were changed into boches. . . . During seven years we played the ridiculous role of trying to be Frenchmen—at least, prospective citizens; but at the beginning of the war we were interned as boches all the same. . . . After the Germans invaded the country, the French government had only to change the name of the firm; having been jailed because we were Germans, we were not freed because we were Jews. (Arendt 2007, 270)

Arendt indicates here that border crossings lead to attributions of identities that can change depending on the political situation; however, such attributions hardly affect the fate of the refugees, and for Hannah Arendt, internment in Gurs came at the end of her exile in France.

4  This objective can be fleshed out even more when we compare his work to drawings made by Lou Albert-Lasard in Gurs in 1940. She, too, portrays people who wait, sitting on rails or resting in the infirmary. In her sketches, however, she emphasizes interaction, the relationship between the internees (Below 2017, 189–192). In Albert-Lasard’s work, interpersonal interaction takes place even in the borderline situation of the camp.

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Borders, like citizenship, are part of any state’s regulatory and control mechanisms. They determine who is excluded and who is included; they pose insurmountable barriers for some and allow others to pass through without difficulty. Borders may present challenges for the sujet, forcing it into the defensive or into ever-new evasive maneuvers. In his 1941 novel Flotsam (Liebe deinen Nächsten), the German writer Erich Maria Remarque recounts the fate of displaced persons fleeing from the National Socialist regime in 1937–1938, whose persecution does not end at the German borders (Remarque 2017). Rather, they continue to find themselves in danger—in Vienna, Prague, or Paris—of being arrested, detained, or expelled from the country for lack of a residence permit and/or documents. Their existence often takes place between borders, when at night they are sent from one frontier post back to another country, and the other way around—and yet they continue to perilously traverse these zones. In Remarque’s novel, the exiled try to come to terms with being caught in the in-between. Despite their misery and the life-threatening situations they face, Remarque allows his characters to experience a love story, thus granting them a certain amount of power over their destiny. Still, they remain the victims, forced to bow to border regimes. Crossing borders requires guerrilla tactics: This may mean crossing rivers at night (as described in Remarque); disguising themselves as border-­ crossing skiers or tourists in alpine areas—as happened during the Nazi era; or obtaining forged passports or identity cards to reach a neighboring country under a false name. In the autobiographical accounts of Lisa Fittko, who helped many artists, writers, and intellectuals to flee from France via the Pyrenees in the 1940s, these and other strategies of border crossing are documented (Fittko 1989). Connecting to the powerlessness of those who were turned away and expelled, I will now examine artistic practices at and on the border with a focus on contemporary works. This is to show that borders continue to present barriers for certain groups— often because of their nationality. Even though the technical facilities for controlling borders have increased considerably through digitalization and biometrics—as have the practices for unauthorized passage that are linked to them—it is still possible to speak of continuities between border experiences in history and in the present.

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Artistic Practices on/with Borders: Francis Alÿs’s Works Beyond Boundaries To this present day, nation-state borders are a means of “mobility control” or “mobility regime” (on both terms see Karakayali 2008, 80, 87), which channel, enable, or prevent immigration. At least in Europe, the Schengen Agreement has led to a shift from nation-state borders to EU external borders, which have become institutions of defense against refugees— Nevad Kermani therefore speaks of the “European border regime” (Kermani 2016, 24–31). Since 2015 the focus in Europe has been on those countries—Italy and Greece—that are regarded as fragile gateways for migrants and refugees at Europe’s external borders (see Kingsley 2016). In the works of the contemporary artist Francis Alÿs, topographical and political border areas in Europe, the USA, the Middle East, and beyond are a constant theme, which he constantly negotiates using artistic means in an actor-centered manner. In his work, Francis Alÿs teases out various methods to free people from their passivity and to provide them with agency. Such agency might be merely temporary, partly imaginative, or even formulated as utopian, but what he nevertheless consistently explores is a break from the conditions of everyday life, from systemic or political regimes and their apparatuses. In doing so, he renounces geographical or topographical constraints. This is of note since political borders may be aligned with particular physical boundaries, such as mountains or rivers. Not always is Alÿs concerned with actual borders—however, practices of collective exertion, of physical engagement, or of confronting obstacles are intended to prompt reflection on the relationship between national borders and human beings. Throughout his works, Alÿs often employs various artistic techniques simultaneously, such as performance and action (such as processions), drawing and photography or video.5 In 1997 Alÿs explored an unusual form of border crossing between Mexico and the USA  (Fig. 1). His project The Loop, for the exhibition inSITE in San Diego and Tijuana, sought to overcome the demarcation line between two neighboring states—one that has taken center stage again in today’s political propaganda. In this work Alÿs took a long hard look at the geographical and political situation at the time. San Diego and 5  For a procession project in New York City see Francis Alÿs. The Modern Procession, Public Art Fund exhibition, 2004.

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Fig. 1  Francis Alÿs, The Loop, Tijuana-San Diego, 1997, Graphic documentation of an action. In order to go from Tijuana to San Diego without crossing the Mexico/US border, I followed a perpendicular route away from the fence and circumnavigated the globe, heading 67° South East, North East, and South East again until I reached my departure point. The project remained free and clear of all critical implications beyond the physical displacement of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist

Tijuana are neighboring cities in the USA and Mexico, respectively. Alÿs began his border crossing in Tijuana and ended in San Diego, but he did not choose the direct route. Instead, he embarked on a five-week-long journey, passing Mexico City, Panama City, Santiago, Auckland, Sydney, Singapore, Bangkok, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Anchorage, Vancouver, and Los Angeles. He thus undertook an elaborate, circular journey, ultimately arriving only a few hundred yards away from where he set out. This short distance, however, represents an unusual border practice, as he had to overcome the delicate divide between the two states without crossing the Mexican-US border directly. This is significant because the troubled border crossing issue between Mexico and the USA

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had been closely monitored well before recent and traumatic political choices made by the USA.6 With The Loop, Alÿs showed that for him, as someone born in Belgium, crossing the border between Mexico and the USA would probably have been unproblematic. But through his intervention, he pointed out the difficulties that this step could entail for others. At the same time, his elaborate journey can be read as a reference to the convoluted and complex routes of historical and contemporary fugitives, determined by obstacles, detours, and odysseys.7 Another artistic work that could be used for comparison here is Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project: in video installations, escape routes are inscribed onto a map by hand, and accompanied by an orally narrated escape story in the form of a voice-over. The camera focuses on the drawing hands while the faces remain invisible. The close-up image (camera perspective) and the long-distance image (map) form a contradictory contrast (Khalili and Berrada 2018, 166). Both Khalili and Alÿs reveal the efforts involved in crossing borders: while Khalili’s protagonists, due to their origins, are in fact dependent on demanding escape routes in order to reach their destination. Alÿs’s detour is not based on immediate necessity, but is instead intended to represent others’ struggles. The detour thus evolves into an artistic practice on and with the border. We could say that “detour” refers to an unwanted, often unintentional, route, involving a longer and usually more complicated journey to the destination. The notion of the “detour,” thus, may offer us new and challenging counter-perspectives on concepts such as “flows,” “routes,” and “circulations,” which are closely linked to theories of globalization and migration. These established and well-known concepts render the movement of people, capital, goods, things, or ideas as linear, direct, and purposeful. A “detour,” however, signals something else—it emphasizes that something like stagnation, delay, waiting, pause, or the unexpected and the surprising are all fundamental to the definition and theorization of globalization processes. At the same time, detour includes movements like meandering, zigzagging, or digression, opening up a temporal dimension 6  For a history of the US-American and Mexican Border see Johnson and Graybill (2010); see also Ganster and Lorey (2016). 7  Examples include the escape route of the artist Hugo Steiner-Prag in the 1930s and 1940s via Sweden to the USA or that of the writer Ellen Auerbach via Palestine and Great Britain to the USA.

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as well as a spatial one, which understands globalization not (only) as a dynamic, interwoven process that is fueled by technical progress—like transport or communication. The logic of the “detour” counteracts the metaphor of growth in that it focuses on delays, circumstances, the entangled, and the unforeseen. About the potential inherent in the concept of detour, and especially the zigzag movement, cultural scholar Petra Löffler writes: Hither and thither—walking in zigzag creates room as it suddenly turns and twists and scatters its vectors. It bypasses territories and unfolds in ambience. The zigzag is allied with coincidence and is as familiar with failure as it is with epiphany. (Löffler 2017, 138–143)

A panorama of possible questions and hypotheses now unfolds, providing new stimuli for our work on globalization processes: How can detours either enable or prevent worldwide entanglements, since coincidences and obstacles may or may not lead to unusual, sometimes less-traveled, pathways? To which innovations have detours led? And which ones have made them impossible? How might the acceptance of the detour as a determining paradigm of globalization change our understanding of migration, flight, exile? To what extent have the arts played a role in giving new shape to detours, and how have the arts helped detours become more visible in the context of a dynamic and immediate understanding of globalization? How can we dissolve the binary conception of migration as movement (and progress) and settlement as stagnation in favor of a more hybrid and interconnected understanding of permanence-in-evanescence? Is it possible to readjust the relationship between space and time via the notion of “detour”? When asking these kinds of questions, we also have to consider whether The Loop merely refers to a particular problem—the crossing of a border or the impossibility of crossing it—or whether it can reinforce agency. Here, we must not only consider the performative, physical act itself as a means of empowering others; it is also the poetic potential and imaginative strength of these and other works that enable and activate agency. I would like to point to this by examining three other Francis Alÿs projects. The Leak (2004) is a re-enactment of a work already performed by Alÿs in Sao Paulo in 1995, this time taking place in Israel. In The Leak, Alÿs walks along the so-called Green Line, the armistice border which separated East and West Jerusalem pre-1967, while carrying a paint can with a

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hole drilled into it. Green acrylic paint leaks out of the can, forming a continuous trace of color that trails the artist’s 24-kilometer-long route. Alÿs alludes to the semantics of the green line within the specific historical and political context of the city, for in 1948 Moshe Dayan used green ink to demarcate the border on a map of Jerusalem. While hand-drawn cartography is a traditional technique of territorial regulation that can give visual expression to claims of power even before they are translated into reality, in his project Alÿs combines the playfulness of painterly dripping techniques with the physical movement of walking.8 Thus, two artistic practices are used to refer to a political event. With his “painted” green line, Alÿs brings to light a demarcation line that ostensibly no longer exists in present-day Jerusalem, but which, nonetheless, still plays an important role in discussions about the fate of the city, touching on themes of division, power, and repression (Ferguson 2007, 101). In his 2004 version of The Leak, Alÿs added the subtitle “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political, and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.” Accordingly, he links his performance with both the poetic and the political and reflects on how a poetic or artistic act can acquire political relevance (Grünenwald 2017, 126).9 On a factual level, Alÿs’s line can be defined as painting—drip painting, to be precise. Continuing this movement of thought, the dribbled green paint reveals borders and their histories. In contrast to political borders and their surveillance instruments, however, Alÿs’s color line appears more 8  Walking, a regular practice for Alÿs, can precede a project. His work Reel-Unreel, realized in 2012 as part of the thirteenth documenta exhibition in Kassel, started with a city walk through Kabul, which Alÿs carried out together with his local cooperation partner Ajmal Maiwandi. Maiwandi writes about his first meeting with the artist: “It wasn’t a meeting, it was more a walk in the city. Two people getting to know each other; sharing experiences and exploring different areas of the city” (Alÿs, Maiwandi, and Viliani 2014, 75). The catalog for the project also contains a map of Kabul with handwritten inscriptions. 9  Here we could refer to the artist Marcel Broodthaers’s work of deletion and overwriting. In 1968, for example, he crossed out the “li” in ink and added an “é” to a political school world map printed in France, a “Carte du Monde Politique.” With this gesture, a “Carte du Monde Politique” became a “Carte du Monde Poétique,” although the political impetus did not disappear, since the deletion is clearly recognizable and can still be seen in the content of the division of the world. Broodthaers’s “Carte du Monde Poètique” inspired the catalog for the exhibition documenta X in Kassel, Germany, by Catherine David, which was entitled Politics-Poetics. On the front cover of the catalog is the lettering “Politics”; behind the “li” shines an obliquely set “e.” In the inner part, this double writing is transcribed as “Politics-Poetics.”

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nonchalant, coincidental, flexible—which is also expressed in the way the artist literally leaks color while walking or strolling (Grünenwald 2017, 128–133). How effective faith, hope, and dreams are as forms of self-­empowerment is articulated in his work When Faith Moves Mountains, which Alÿs carried out in Lima in 2002 (Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception 2010, 127–128; Alÿs and Medina 2005). The artist recruited 500 volunteers equipped with T-shirts and shovels to collectively move a 500-meter-long sand dune by 10 centimeters. This communal act entailed great effort, the actual result of which—the movement of the dune—could not be factually proven. What was important was not the materially tangible quality of the act, but the immaterial belief in being able to move mountains. The community of participants thus overcame the laws of nature. The point here is not so much to refer to a physically comprehensible national border but rather to express how communities can effect change. This idea can be applied to border situations as well: the migratory movements in the summer of 2015, which led the European Union into a “crisis,” consisted of an assemblage of refugees embarking on their journey. By making this argument, I do not intend to evoke the homogenization of migration masses by the media, but rather to emphasize how an individual can become encouraged and empowered by a community of others. The utopian potential of the project becomes clear when it is compared with other artistic actions: in 1966 the Fluxus artist George Brecht suggested exchanging Arctic ice for Antarctic ice. A year later, he proposed relocating the British island closer to the equator in order to improve the climate. And as early as 1928, the artist and geopolitician Hermann Sörgel began working on the idea of damming the water along the Strait of Gibraltar. His Atlantropa project imagined a connection between the continents of Africa and Europe via a drained Mediterranean Sea (Voigt 1998). It is precisely at this narrow part of the strait where Francis Alÿs’s video Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (2008, Fig. 2) sets out: Armed with play boats made of plastic sandals, on August 12, 2008, children from Tarifa in Spain headed into the water to walk toward Africa, while children from Tangier, Morocco, set off from the opposite side of the ocean. Both lines were to meet on the horizon (Alÿs et  al. 2010, 166–167; Smolik 2019, 34). This work is a reflection on childlike fantasies, which cannot be contained by real-life limitations, such as when children imagine being able to fly or communicate with their stuffed animals. Alÿs thus transformed both the children and his project into human

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Fig. 2  Francis Alÿs, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River August 12, 2008, Tangier, Morocco—Tarifa, Spain, Strait of Gibraltar: In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Félix Blume, Ivan Boccara, Abbas Benhim, Fundación Montenmedio Arte, and the kids of Tangier and Tarifa. Video and photographic documentation of an action, 2 video projections, 7 min 44 sec. On August 12, 2008, a line of kids with shoe boats will leave Europe toward Morocco, while a line of kids with shoe boats leave Africa toward Spain. The two lines will meet on the horizon. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Roberto Rubalcava

bridges and mediators. Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River is an allegory at eye level where one side does not consist of an ever-erected barrier against fugitives and the other side is not a mere point of departure to escape across the water (Bell 2017, 36).

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In Bridge/Puente (2006), Alÿs worked along similar bilateral principles: 150 boats from Key West in Florida and Santa Fe in Havana were supposed to form a line meeting on the horizon, forming a bridge (Medina 2007, 105–106). In this way, a contested border space, that is usually only allowed to hold violent escape scenarios, is turned into an imaginary place of connection, exchange, and transfer. Alÿs thus conceptualizes a collaborative practice in order to create a cross-border event. Alÿs’s works demonstrate how topographical, natural, and political borders induce creative acts. They also show how imagination can transform a space of border into a space of possibility. In a similar vein, Mireille Rosello and Stephen F. Wolfe have described the “imaginative power of the border as a productive space” and have asked “how art represents, explores and negotiates border experience” (Rosello and Wolfe 2017, 7).

Thinking of Borders Through Space and Time Whereas some of Francis Alÿs’s projects refer to spatial limitations related to state borders and/or topographical challenges, he also reflects on borders and dis-/connectivity related to time. His wall piece 1943 from 2012 connects the historical exile with the present. It brings together the loose ends (and beginnings) of the biographies of Kurt Schwitters, Giorgio Morandi, Blinky Palermo, and others (Fig. 3). In 1943 Francis Alÿs dedicates himself to this war year from the perspective of art and the divergent experience of European artists: Alÿs’s text reminds us that the year of the war, 1943, had very different meanings for the people mentioned, depending on their age, place of residence, religion, or ethnic origin.10 In his text, Alÿs writes: “I think about Marinetti returning sick from the Russian Front”; “I think about Duchamp playing chess in his New York flat”; “I think about Dali, Ernst and Breton re-united in their New York exiles”; “I think about Beuys flying his Stuka dive-bomber over Crimea”; “I think about Leni Riefenstahl filming Tiefland with extras from concentration camps”; “I think about Blinky Palermo born in the rubbles of Leipzig.”

10  1943 is reproduced in English and Spanish in the exhibition catalog Francis Alÿs. ReelUnreel, Museo Madre, Napoli, 2014.

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Fig. 3  Francis Alÿs, 1943, 2012–Present, printed text. Image courtesy of the artist

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With the anaphora “I think,” the writing/thinking subject places himself in relation to the actors of the text, connecting his own present with the long past. Alÿs’s text interweaves different episodes and stories that do not seem to belong together, that seem even conflicting, mentioning on the one hand filmmaker and photographer Leni Riefenstahl, who was an active protagonist of National Socialism, and the artist Max Ernst, who fled from occupied France to the USA to save his life. Thus, border crossings are implicit in 1943, as different geographies, states, exile places, or places of birth are interconnected. At the same time 1943 is a hybrid between poem and art installation, exhibited at different places, a wandering piece that brings readers in different time zones and geographies into relation to the words written. In this sense 1943 is a transgressive work, reflecting on history/histories as conflicting and close at the same time, showing that what sometimes seems disconnected is interconnected: “Alÿs poetically draws a map of a collapsing Europe, which connects the history of modern art with globally scattered life stories” (The Futureless Memory 2020, n.p.). Francis Alÿs’s projects show how borders provoke artistic strategies, which may include acts of waiting as much as passing, taking a detour, or imagining. While Alÿs reacted to visible and invisible borders in various ways and focused primarily on the communal, Max Lingner explored individuals and singular scenes at the border and in the camp. His drawings from the Gurs internment camp contrast the mode of waiting with moments of artistic documentation. When visualized in this way, the powerlessness of waiting is transformed into an act of resistance.

References Adolphs, Volker, and Marina Abramović. 2007. Gehen, bleiben Bewegung, Körper, Ort in der Kunst der Gegenwart. Bonn: Kunstmuseum. Alÿs, Francis, and Cuauhtémoc Medina. 2005. When Faith Moves Mountains. [Cuando la fe mueve mountañas]. Madrid: Turner. Alÿs, Francis, Klaus Biesenbach, and Mark Godfrey. 2010. Francis Alÿs. A Story of Deception, Exhibition Catalog. London: Tate Modern. Alÿs, Francis, Ajmal Maiwandi, and Andrea Vilani. 2014. Conservation. In Francis Alÿs: Reel-unreel, Exhibition Catalog, 71–82. Napoli: Museo Madre. Arendt, Hannah. (1943) 2007. We Refugees. In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, 264–274. New York: Schocken.

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Bell, Natalie. 2017. Francis Alÿs. In The Restless Earth, Exhibition Catalog, 36. Milano: Fondazione La Trienale di Milano and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Below, Irene. 2017. ‘Wir waren alle in der Hölle.’ Lou Albert-Lasard in Sanary und Gurs. In Fluchtorte-Erinnerungsorte: Sanary-sur-Mer, Les Milles, Marseille, ed. Irene Below et al. 179–195. München: ET+K edition Text+Kritik. Ebbighausen, Rodion. 2010. Das Warten: Ein phänomenologisches Essay, 2010. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann. Ferguson, Russel. 2007. Francis Alÿs: The Politics of Rehearsal. In Francis Alÿs: The Politics of Rehearsal, Exhibition Catalog, Russel Ferguson, 11–115. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum. Feuchtwanger, Lion. 1994. Exil. Frankfurt a. M: Fischer. Fittko, Lisa. 1989. Mein Weg über die Pyrenäen: Erinnerungen 1940–41. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verl. Friebe, Holm. 2013. Die Stein Strategie. Von der Kunst nicht zu handeln. München: Hanser. Ganster, Paul, and David E. Lorey. 2016. The U.S.-Mexican Border Today: Conflict and Cooperation in Historical Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Grünenwald, Ursula. 2017. Francis Alÿs. Die Stadt als Handlungsraum. München: Edition Metzel. Johnson, Benjamin H., and Andrew R.  Graybill, eds. 2010. Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories. Durham: Duke University Press. Karakayali, Serhat. 2008. Gespenster der Migration Zur Genealogie illegaler Einwanderung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Kermani, Navid. 2016. Einbruch der Wirklichkeit: Auf dem Flüchtlingstreck durch Europa. München: C. H. Beck. Khalili, Bouchra, and Omar Berrada. 2018. A Populated Opacity: Conversation. In Blackboard. Bouchra Khalili, Exhibition Catalog, 163–168. Paris: Jeu de Paume. Kingsley, Patrick. 2016. Die neue Odyssee: Eine Geschichte der europäischen Flüchtlingskrise. München: C. H. Beck. Kracauer, Siegfried. (1922) 1990. Die Wartenden. In Schriften, vol. 5,1: Aufsätze 1915–1926, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, 160–170 Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp. Levine, Robert. 2003. Eine Landkarte der Zeit: Wie Kulturen mit Zeit umgehen. München: Piper. Lingner, Max. 1982. Gurs: Bericht und Aufruf: Zeichnungen aus einem französischen Internierungslager 1941. Frankfurt a.M: Röderberg. Löffler, Petra. 2017. Zick-Zack. Bruno Latours Umwege. https:// edoc.hu-­b erlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/19385/11-­L oef fler. pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed 18 October 2021.

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Medina, Cuauhtémoc. 2007. Fable Power. In Francis Alÿs, ed. Cuauhtémoc Medina, et al., 57–108. London: Phaidon. Pikulik, Lothar. 1997. Warten, Erwartung: Eine Lebensform in End- und Übergangszeiten. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. Remarque, Erich Maria. (1941) 2017. Liebe Deinen Nächsten. (1941). Köln: Kiepenheuer and Witsch. Rosello, Mireille, and Stephen F. Wolfe. 2017. Introduction. In Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe, 1–24. New York: Berghahn. Smolik, Noemi. 2019. Fiction as a Witness—Francis Alÿs. In Francis Alÿs: The Private View, Exhibition Catalog, ed. Francis Alÿs et al., 34–38. Leverkusen: Museum Morsbroich. Şölçün, Sargut. 1998. Unerhörter Gang des Wartenden. Dekonstruktive Wendungen in der deutschen Essayistik. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann. The Futureless Memory, Exhibition Brochure. 2020. Kunsthaus Hamburg. https:// kunsthaushamburg.de/wp-­content/uploads/2020/07/Besucherblatt-­The-­ Futureless-­Memory-­DRUCK.pdf. Accessed 24 October 2021. Van Houtem, Henk, and Stephen F. Wolfe. 2017. Waiting. In Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F.  Wolfe, 129–146. New York: Berghahn. Voigt, Wolfgang. 1998. Atlantropa: Weltbauen am Mittelmeer: Ein Architekturtraum der Moderne. Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz. Wagner, Martin. Letter to Walter Gropius, 20 May 1936. Bauhaus-Archiv. Berlin. Walter Gropius Papers, II. Wendland, Jörg. 2017. Das Lager von Bild zu Bild: Narrative Bildserien von Häftlingen aus NS-Zwangslagern. Wein/Köln: Böhlau.

Revolutionary Peripheries: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Cinema of Borgata” Monica Facchini

In a 1964 interview, Pier Paolo Pasolini pointed out that in his film The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) he had no intention of reenacting the life of Christ in a realistic or hagiographic manner. His aim was not just to stage the story of Christ but to depict that story plus 2000 years of Christian tradition, “because it was those 2,000 years of Christian history that have mythicized his biography, which would have otherwise been insignificant as such.”1 Rather than replicating it for the screen, Pasolini 1  Portions of this chapter appeared in Italian in my book Spettacolo della morte e “tecniche del cordoglio” nel cinema degli anni sessanta (Facchini 2017). I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their comments and feedback on my first draft of this chapter and Jacob Klein for his help with revisions. I owe a particular thank-you to Scott Kapuscinski for assisting me with translations from Italian and for his valuable comments and insights on the chapter. Pasolini’s broader comment reads as follows: “I did not want to reconstruct the life of Christ as it really was; instead, I wanted to do the story of Christ plus 2,000 years of Christian tradition, because it was the 2,000 years of Christian history that have mythicized that biography, which would have otherwise been insignificant as such. My film is the life of Christ plus 2,000 years of storytelling about the life of Christ. That was my intention” (Stack 1969, 83).

M. Facchini (*) Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_3

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questioned the myth around the story of Christ and constructed a millenarian tradition in order to offer an alternative story as well as a new image of Christ, whose gracile body and stern demeanor upset and scandalized the Italian bourgeoisie of the time. His Christ did not talk about or to his past, but addressed the present Italian society, challenging its economic, political, and ultimately moral foundations. Pasolini’s approach to the gospels exemplifies his way of making cinema aimed at revisiting past (and present) myths via an artistic representation that would question contemporary social issues. His commentary on The Gospel According to Matthew also illuminates his cinematic approach to a different mythical image: that of Rome, a city whose glorious past and (in)famous present had long been at the center of the work of national and international scholars and artists. Like the story told in the gospels, the story of Rome is inseparable from the multiple real and symbolic layers that formed its geographical and imaginary territory over the course of thousands of years. Rome’s historical and geological stratification—which Freud (1989) famously presented as a metaphor for the different strata comprising human memory—is further complicated by its multiple representations within and outside Italy. The glorious caput mundi of the Roman Empire; the Eternal City led by the spiritual and secular power of the Church; the Italian political and administrative center since the unification of Italy (1871) through the Fascist government (1922–1843) and the modern Italian Republic (1946 to present); the epicenter of the Italian cultural and economic rebirth of the 1960s; the receptacle of modern corruption: all of these images merge (not necessarily harmoniously) in the real and imagined concept of Rome. Well aware of the multifarious perspectives on the city that were cemented in the minds of his audience, Pasolini challenges them, offering a new, marginal, and scandalous layer of the “City of God,”2 one that had been conveniently hidden by successive centers of power throughout history. As was the case with his treatment of the life of Christ, Pasolini is not interested either in contributing to the glorified narration of ancient Rome or in offering a more or less uplifting portrayal of the city’s contemporary  “City of God” (città di Dio) was the phrase Pasolini used for the title of his collection of short stories on Rome: Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome, 1950-1966 (Pasolini 2003a). The book was originally published as Storie della città di Dio: Racconti e cronache romane (1950-1966), edited by Walter Siti (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). 2

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developments. Instead, by focusing on the capital’s forgotten peripheries (the so-called Borgate), he unveils the shortcomings of contemporary economic and political urban centers. Adopting the city margins as privileged sites for observing the new capitalist society of the 1960s, Pasolini denounces what he will refer to as the “anthropological genocide”3 of modern societies; that is, the annihilation of minor cultures in the name of a blind progress and a homologating consumerist ideology. The depiction of Rome’s marginal areas in Pasolini’s early films does not offer nostalgic, aestheticized views of a past that is destined to disappear with the advent of modernity; it rather constitutes his riposte both to earlier cinematic portrayals of the city and to the new Italian society of the “economic boom.” This is particularly evident in Pasolini’s much-debated 1963 short film, La Ricotta, in which the mise en scène of the death of an underdog in the Roman Borgate does not merely exemplify the defeat of his own social, cultural, and geographical reality but stands as proof of the existence of that reality and, as such, of its resistance against the homologation of the dominant center.

The Roman Borgate and Cinema Pasolini’s early films (1961–1963) are often referred to as his “cinema di borgata,” that is, the cinema of Rome’s impoverished peripheries. The term borgata first entered official use during the Fascist period to refer to the city’s peripheral neighborhoods inhabited by impoverished residents displaced from urban centers. Yet the history of these areas of the Roman periphery stems back to the years of Italian unification. When Rome was named the capital of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy in 1871, higher-level ministerial executives and their staff began to move to the city center, forcing its working-class residents to move to the outskirts. At the same time, more bricklayers, masons, construction  Pasolini discussed this topic on many occasions and in various articles, many of which have been collected in Saggi sulla politica e sulla società (Pasolini 1999): “Sfida ai dirigenti della televisione” (290), “Gli italiani non sono più quelli” (307–312), “Il vero fascismo e quindi il vero antifascismo” (313–318), “Ampliamento del ‘bozzetto’ sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia” (325–335), “Il genocidio” (511–517), “L’articolo delle lucciole” (404–412), and “Abiura dalla Trilogia della vita” (599–603). 3

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workers, and public employees were summoned to the capital from all over Italy, and especially from the rural hinterlands and the country’s south, to contribute to the construction of buildings for the new government administration and to the expansion of public services. However, these very workers were not granted access to either, and their relations with the bourgeois functionaries of the new administration—who deemed them “uncouth” (cafoni)—remained uneasy (Insolera 1993, 64).4 After a period of homelessness in the urban center, these public servants would gradually move outside of the city into makeshift shacks. Over a period of thirty years, generations of workers were forced to live in temporary dwellings on the margins of civilian life, without access to essential municipal services such as healthcare or education. Such an imposed societal marginalization could not but leave a residual trauma in the affected population (Insolera 1993, 68). When Fascism rose to power after WWI, the hastily built peripheral blocks and their inhabitants became the symbol of the city’s urban malaise. The resultant effects of living in segregated conditions, deprived of the essential services for a dignified life, were arbitrarily assumed to be the features of the residents of the Roman peripheries, who were perceived by the new central powers as “riotous, illegal, undisciplined, and fearsome in any context,”5 a physical and moral aberration that had no place in the glorious image of Fascist Rome. It was therefore decided that their unsightly shacks had to be moved even farther from the city center. The myth of a new imperial Rome led to the elimination of existing ramshackle buildings from the city center, on the one hand, and to their expansion in the periphery. The Fascist plan to bring Rome’s glorious past back to light called for “remediation” of the central area of the city, which at the time housed buildings severely in disrepair and lacking basic sanitary functionality. In order to unearth the Imperial Forums, the Fascist government ordered the demolition of the dilapidated buildings in a process commonly referred to as Fascist sventramenti (urban gutting) and the relocation of their residents to the outer regions of the urban periphery, where the first official Borgate were established. The official term came into use starting in 1924 when the Fascist government constructed the  All translations in this chapter are my own unless otherwise indicated.  “Relazione per il 1929 a S.E. il principe Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, Governatore di Roma, del delegato ai servizi assistenziali del Governatore, Raffaello Ricci,” in Capitolium, quoted in Insolera (1993, 106). 4 5

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first borgata in the malaria-infested zone of Acilia. As Italo Insolera (1993) explains, the term was understood pejoratively: “A borgata is a subset of a neighborhood: a little piece of a city dropped in the middle of the countryside, which rightly belongs to neither world” (135–160). An inhabited area lacking the structural sufficiency to be properly called a neighborhood, a borgata refers to a rural amalgam arranged in such a way as to prevent administrative or economic development. The “deportees” (Insolera 1993) living in the Borgate once made their living as artisans, but after being displaced to the urban outskirts—far from the city center, where they once worked—they were unable to pursue their craft, which further worsened their own economic conditions and consequently the area itself. Poor social and economic conditions throughout the new Borgate resulted in deteriorating sanitary conditions, and in the course of several months any practical differences between the non-sanctioned temporary shelters and the official Borgate were negligible. In the years following WWII, the Borgate situation continued to worsen: with population density in the capital increasing, many of the peripheral zones faced deteriorating hygienic, structural, and municipal conditions, and their isolation from the city center became even more marked and desperate than in the past. Although in 1947 the municipal planning commission declared the Fascist plan of 1931 surpassed, efforts to improve conditions throughout the Roman periphery between 1947 and 1960 did not meet the projected outcomes. In fact, as Insolera (1993) maintains, the new laws designed to maximize the use of urban space ended up accomplishing the very same Fascist plan of 1931 (203). In some places, conditions were so miserable and inhumane that in 1962, echoing a characterization by Pasolini himself in an essay written only four years earlier (1995, 125), Insolera describes the newly constructed dwellings in the Borghetto delle Terme Gordiana as a “hallucinatory vision of a concentration camp” (1993, 197) and—recalling the words of Antonio Gramsci—as the product of “a creation lacking any trace of love or civility” (ix).6 It was this same “sub-civilian layer” (Insolera 1993, 197), overlooked by institutions and scholars and treated with ineffective paternalism,

6  The original source of the quote is Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere (lettera CCXVII) (Turin: Einaudi, 1949), 255.

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that Pasolini elected to explore and preserve through his novels and poetry and especially through his “cinema of poetry.”7 To be fair, this was not the first time that Italian cinema had taken an interest in the marginalized cultures of Italian society. Already during the post-WWI period, neorealist directors were turning the camera to this world hitherto ignored and disavowed by Fascist reasoning. The approach to cinema sanctioned by the Fascist government had aimed at creating an idyllic image of a contented and prosperous society, thereby emphasizing the traditional importance of fealty to family and state while also keeping an eye on industrial and technological progress. Neorealism instead focused on a “grittier” reality (both in content and in style) that had been kept out of sight and far away from Mussolini’s desired national image. The daily lives and struggles of humanity on the margins of society were now featured on the screen. Consequently, viewers were exposed to a different view of Rome. Instead of celebrations of a glorious past—a past the regime had worked tirelessly to unearth, both metaphorically and literally, to assert the glory of current-day Rome, spectators were now confronted with images of city outskirts ravaged by war and administrative negligence thanks to both past and present governments. The documentary style and the use of dialect in neorealist cinema aimed at representing a more authentic and less glorifying reality had a dual objective: on the one hand, it acted as a form of resistance and liberation from a Fascist ideology; on the other, it introduced a new ideology based on social consciousness and a different ideal of national identity. Over a decade later, the images of a ravaged Roman periphery and the sounds of an even coarser Roman dialect still populated Pasolini’s films in spite of the general fervor among middle-class spectators for the new “economic miracle” (1958–1963) and its promise of a more prosperous and progressive Italy. Although, like the neorealist directors, Pasolini also capitalized on the use of dialect and images of impoverished areas of Rome, his artistic and intellectual approach to these realities was radically 7  In his famous essay of 1965, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’  ” (Pasolini 1988, 167–186), Pasolini theorizes a new way of making cinema that is opposed to the traditional “cinema of prose” of Hollywood and neorealist films. The latter sought to hide cinema’s oneiric nature to offer instead a falsely “objective” perspective on the events presented on the screen. With his “cinema of poetry,” Pasolini intends to bring the dream-like nature of the medium to the forefront and to present the events through a new subjective perspective born from the contamination (or “clash”) between his point of view and that of the characters through what he called the “free indirect point-of-view shot.”

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different from that of his predecessors. On more than one occasion, he asserted his departure from classical or realist approaches to moviemaking, privileging form over content and rejecting the “populist romanticism” of the neorealist portrayal of marginalized groups (Pasolini 1965b, 231). Although the Borgate and their inhabitants are represented in Pasolini’s cinema through a mythical and poetic perspective, there is nothing paternalistic or nationalistic about this portrayal, and in fact the very presence of Borgate and their residents on screen constituted an act of resistance against the bourgeois morality of the time. In these “sub-civilian layers” of society (Insolera) live what Pasolini refers to as the “sub-­proletarians”: jobless individuals who live and act not only outside the logic of the bourgeoisie and capitalism but also against the Marxist dream of a leading working proletariat. Pasolini’s camera exalts their controversial nature and morals through a perspective that is neither that of the bourgeois intellectual nor entirely that of his sub-proletarian protagonists. Instead, his films showcase the clash between these disparate viewpoints, thanks to what Pasolini would refer to as the “free indirect subjective,” the cornerstone of his “cinema of poetry.” Pasolini’s use of dialect in his films becomes a way to distance his cinema not only from the old Fascist morality but also from the naturalistic use of Italian vernaculars in neorealist cinema. Whereas Italian post-WWII cinema focused on a geographical and cultural reality confined to the margins by earlier cinema, its use of dialect was limited to identifying it and injecting an air of authenticity into the films. As in Fascist cinema, however, in neorealist films standard Italian was still preferred, as a more effective way to convey a message of national unity and the image of a reborn Italian community.8 Although dialect in Pasolini’s film is a poetic language compliant with his aesthetic sensibility, it resists external encroachment and is deprived of any nationalistic message of an alleged geographical unity under a bourgeois morality. The world depicted in his films is one 8  An exemplary case can be found in Roberto Rossellini’s film Rome, Open City (1945), and specifically in the dialogue between Pina (Anna Magnani) and her fiancé Francesco (Francesco Grandjaquet) the night before their wedding. Pina, a lower-class Roman woman, speaks dialect for the majority of the film, mostly to convey a lighthearted tone to the dark reality of Rome during WWII. However, when she is alone with Francesco (a Resistance fighter who speaks in standard Italian throughout the entire film), she switches to Italian to discuss the fate of the country and the liberation struggle with him. As Restivo (2002) suggests, “Neorealism can be looked at as just such an attempt to create an imagined community to replace the (equally media-constructed) imagined community of the fascist period” (24–25).

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born of the desolate peripheries, isolated from the urban centers, a world whose very existence is for Pasolini an act of resistance against the new imperative of homologation in the new society of consumers and consumable goods. In Neorealism, the use of dialect and the portrayal of proletarian reality sought to convey new ideals for a nation that had rid itself of the evils of the Fascist regime. To the images of an increased productivity of the new capitalist society, Pasolini responds with a sub-proletariat that refuses to comply the imperatives of productivity and a capitalist work ethic cast as a pillar of moral and social virtue.9 Predictably, this portrait of an “amoral” and “depraved” subaltern class consumed by “instincts” and “sensuality” drew criticism from voices on both the right and the left, which could not accept an image of the proletarian world made of “bitter fatalism” and hopeless “violence and desolation” that would deny the leftist progressive ideals of social change and improvement.10 In addition to the forsaken humanity of Rome’s peripheries—with whom Pasolini identified as a homosexual and a “heretic”11—it was the geographically and culturally marginal spaces they inhabited that attracted his poetic and anthropological eye.12 In a short film titled Pasolini e … la forma della città (Pasolini and … the form of the city), he expresses his bitterness at witnessing the inconsiderate irruptions of modernity within the forms of ancient marginal cities, where a blind progress was imposing its new aesthetics with no respect for their natural settings and existing architecture. The short documentary was filmed in 1973 by Paolo Brunatto13 and was aired on February 7, 1974, for a TV show titled Io e …. Each episode of the show was devoted to a work of art or a monument, presented by an intellectual of the time as a way of denouncing its threatened survival. By choosing Orte, a small town near Rome whose ancient streets and harmonious profile were disrupted by modern blocks

9  On Pasolini’s representation of Rome’s lumpenproletariat as the “aristocracy of labour” that refuses to be integrated into the productive process, see Rohdie (1995, 120–23). 10  See Boarini et al. (1982, 16–20). 11  I use this term in reference to Pasolini’s own definition of his reflections on cinema, literature, and society (1988). 12  On Pasolini as a poet-anthropologist, see Rohdie (1995, 5) and Parussa and Riva (1997, 237–263). 13  As Chiesi (1993) notes, although the director was nominally Paolo Brunatto, it is easy to detect Pasolini’s cinematic style in the framing of some shots and the “pictorial” montage of some scenes (n.p.).

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of concrete, Pasolini compares the understated beauty of the ancient urban center to the most famous works of art of the Italian tradition: But in fact, I’ve chosen to defend this. When I chose as my topic for this program the form and structure and profile of a city, I meant to speak out on behalf of something that is not officially recognized or listed in the books, that nobody stands up for, that was the creation of the people ­themselves, the entire history of a city’s people, of an endless number of nameless individuals, who nevertheless worked within a historical era, which then produced the most perfect fruit, the works of the great artists. That’s what people don’t understand. Anyone you speak with would immediately agree that one should stand up for an artists’ work, or a monument, a church, a bell tower, a bridge, or a ruin whose historical value has been ascertained. But nobody realizes what we must stand up for is this anonymous, nameless past that belongs to the people. (Pasolini and Brunatto 1974, 10’45” - 11’59”)

Pasolini’s interest in the humble surroundings of a small city like Orte, and his strenuous defense of its geographical profile, is deeply connected to the city’s past; that is, to the past of the people who have inhabited it. The advent of fascism first and capitalism later threatened Orte’s territorial and architectural skyline and with it the history and culture of an entire population. And what the Fascist regime failed to achieve through coercive impositions and restrictions, consumerism succeeded in completing: “[Today] the system of government is democratic, but that acculturation, that homogenization that fascism never managed to impose, is easily achieved by today’s ruling power—i.e., consumer society. It destroys the variety of ways of being [realtà particolari] and deprives of reality the different lifestyles [i vari modi di essere uomini] that Italy has produced with great variety throughout history” (Pasolini and Brunatto 1974, 14’51”–15’25”). The disfiguration of the geographical and urban traits of Italian peripheral areas and small towns, thanks to an arbitrary and aggressive urban construction, was just the most apparent sign of the annihilation of social and cultural minorities. Rather than expressing a merely nostalgic attachment to the past, Pasolini’s interest in and defense of marginal environments and cultures served as a lens through which to analyze the new capitalist society and the new forms of “progress” that left little or no space to cultural and geographical realities other than those of the dominant centers.

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It is these dismissed realities at the margins of society that Pasolini (re) presents in his first films, eternalizing them with his cinema of poetry. Pasolini’s early cinematic production is all informed by this vision, but it is especially in his short film La Ricotta (1963) that he explicitly and thoroughly explores this topic through an uncompromising poetic style, the most powerful vehicle of his criticism against the new consumerist culture.

A Subversive Death in La Ricotta La Ricotta constitutes one of the four episodes of RoGoPaG (Pasolini 1963), a film about the impact of modernity on society and humanity. The title of the film is an acronym derived from the names of the directors who contributed the four film episodes: Roberto Rossellini (Virginity), Jean-­ Luc Godard (The New World), Pier Paolo Pasolini (La Ricotta), and Ugo Gregoretti (The Free-Range Chicken). Released in 1963, RoGoPaG was immediately censored and withdrawn from theaters due to alleged offenses against the state religion in Pasolini’s episode. The accusations were spurred by the episode’s defiant association of the Passion of Christ with the trivial death of a sub-proletarian as well as its demystifying reconstruction of two Renaissance paintings depicting Christ’s descent from the cross. After a controversial trial against the director and several cuts to the episode, the collective film was rereleased the following year under the title Let’s Wash Our Brains. From the very opening scenes, Pasolini’s episode reveals its critical meta-cinematic discourse in which the artistic and intellectual views of an aestheticizing director of a film about the Passion come to symbolize a new capitalist bourgeois society that is incapable of conceiving the world outside of itself and imposes its aesthetic and moral parameters on all other realities. Pasolini counters this cinematic and worldview with his own “cinema of poetry.” Unlike the “cinema of prose” of both Hollywood and Italian Neorealism, his cinema does not impose an allegedly objective bourgeois gaze (an aesthetic and moral one) on the world it depicts but instead seeks to bring about a merging—or a “clash,” as Pasolini would put it—between the gaze of the bourgeois director and that of his sub-­ proletarian characters. In La Ricotta, Pasolini’s meta-cinematic discourse goes beyond a mere stylistic polemic: it intends to bring awareness of a too often dismissed reality located outside of the center as well as its “peripheral” worldview.

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The opening sequence of La Ricotta already encapsulates this interplay between Pasolini’s meta-cinematic discourse and his reflections on the geographical and social margins of Rome. As the opening credits scroll, the snappy rhythm of a popular cha-cha song bursts onto a full color scene depicting the set of a film about the Passion of Christ. Film actors and extras are gathered around a table overflowing with untouched food, while a couple of men dances enthusiastically in the foreground. The last frame of this gay sequence is a close-up shot of two blocks of scrumptious ricotta cheese on the lavish table. This final shot sharply contrasts with the close-up shot that opens the following sequence, in which the camera indulges on the suffering face of a man named Stracci, who is performing as an extra in the film and will perform the role of the Good Thief in the crucifixion scene. The abrupt cut from the opening sequence to Stracci’s face marks a brusque transition from a cheerful and careless dance in front of a richly set table to the still images of a starving man sprawled on the ground. The shift in mood and setting is further highlighted by a passage from color to black-and-white and the sudden interruption of the jovial cha-cha. As Stracci breathes ragged breaths while lying under the hot Roman sun, other members of the crew look on with little apparent sympathy, mocking his hunger and even kicking him when he tries to stand up. Following some light banter among the extras playing saints, the camera cuts to a medium shot of the director sitting on his director’s chair engrossed in thought while presiding over his film. Via a quick dolly-out shot, the camera reveals the ruins and rugged terrain of the Roman periphery on which the director insouciantly turns his back. When he finally issues his command to bring up “the crown,” his order echoes through the voices of the assistant director, the cinematographer, and a number of film assistants, to land finally on the emblematic image of two hands lifting a crown of thorns from a cardboard box. The camera indulges for a few seconds on the close-up shot of the raised crown that now seems to rest atop a landscape of the modern buildings surrounding the barren hills of the Roman countryside. The sparse, striking images, together with the narrative and stylistic counterpoints through which the entire film is built, shape Pasolini’s cinematic and political discourse. The color images of the opening credits reveal the set and costumes of the film about the Passion, yet the music of modern cha-chas and the extras’ lighthearted dancing trivialize the film’s sacred subject, revealing its empty beauty as a sterile product of an aesthetic feel devoid of any authentic feeling. It is instead in the black-and-white images of the periphery dismissed by the director that

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true sacredness must be sought—a landscape tortured by a “crown” of concrete buildings representing a homologated and dehumanized modernity. The conflict between a homologating center and a dying periphery is most clearly manifested in the figures of the film’s two protagonists, who represent two worlds that barely acknowledge one another and two (camera) gazes that see different things even when they survey the same reality. The choice of the actors for these roles is particularly eloquent. For the role of the director, Pasolini cast Orson Welles,14 the American director of Citizen Kane (1941) renowned worldwide for his innovative use of the camera, the high quality of his cinematography, and above all his original use of deep focus and long takes.15Welles’s cinematic style could not be farther from Pasolini’s early cinema that, instead, privileges an immobile and frontal camera, the telephoto lens, and a shallow focus, and rejects a realist employment of long takes and sequence shots.16 In La Ricotta, Welles plays himself in the role of the aestheticizing director whose colorful film on Christ’s Passion contrasts with the pictorial chiaroscuro of Pasolini’s own black-and-white film. Stracci, on the other hand, is played by a non-professional actor, Mario Cipriani. Like Welles, Cipriani also plays himself in the film, not just because he, like his character Stracci, was a native of the peripheries, but also because he debuted in a similar role, as a thief, in Pasolini’s very first feature film, Accattone (1961). Stracci/ Cipriani therefore serves as a clear counterpoint to director Welles, 17 representing both the forgotten world of the Roman Borgate and Pasolini’s cinema of poetry. “Ugly as a monkey” but “good as a piece of bread” (Pasolini 1965a, 467), Stracci often falls victim to the cruel jokes of the crew, which he stoically endures. Even when a dog owned by a capricious diva devours his long-awaited lunch, his only reaction is to weep, realizing that even the dog has no respect for him. All his efforts throughout the film are directed toward satisfying what Pasolini calls “his atavistic hunger” (1965a, 467). Captured in fast motion and accompanied by the accelerated cabaletta “Sempre libera degg’io” from Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, Stracci runs  Welles was dubbed in Italian by the writer Giorgio Bassani.  For an analysis of Orson Welles’s life and work, see Beja (1995) and Callow (2015). On Welles’s impact on Italian cinema, see Anile (2006). 16  See Pasolini (1966). 17  Hereafter I will refer to the director of the film-within-the-film as “director Welles,” to distinguish him from Pasolini. 14 15

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up and down the desolate wasteland of the film’s set, desperately searching for food. In contrast, director Welles—constantly seen sitting on his director’s chair—is so immersed in his sublime artistic and philosophical thoughts that any earthly or trivial consideration involving his actors, or even his own person, does not seem to touch him in the least. As Pasolini sarcastically writes in the script: “nun magna” (he doesn’t eat) (1965a, 472). The arrival of a journalist on set is the only event that provokes his indignation, and he reluctantly agrees to answer no more than four questions. During the interview, he declares his indifference toward death and his contempt for Italian society, which he defines as made up of “the most illiterate masses and the most ignorant bourgeoisie in Europe” (Pasolini 2004, 11’45”–11’51”). The director does not even spare the journalist, referring to him an average man, that is, “a monster, a dangerous criminal, conformist, colonialist, racist, slave trader, a mediocrity” (14’25”–14’43”). After expressing his wish that the journalist will die on the set and thereby promote the film upon its release, he turns his chair away as his ultimate act of contempt for the man and his social class. The clumsy and careless reporter walks away and starts wandering around the set. Approaching a cave, he finds Stracci, who manages to sell him the diva’s dog for a thousand lire. With the extorted money, Stracci runs—in a sequence filmed in fast-forward action—to buy an entire wheel of ricotta and hide it in a cave. When he finally voraciously bites into the precious cheese, he is caught by the other cast members, who laugh at what they call the “Stracci show” and contribute more food to his “bestial meal” (Pasolini 1965a, 484). Stracci gorges it all down to the tune of a pitiful Dies Irae that heralds the tragic ending. When everything is ready for the shooting of the film’s final scene in front of the film producers and the Roman press, Stracci, hanging from a cross in his role as the Good Thief, fails to deliver his line, to the general disappointment of the film crew and the bystanders. Only when a crew member discovers that Stracci has died on the cross (ironically of indigestion) does the director seem to come out of his apathy to comment: “Poor Stracci! To croak … he had no other way to remind us that he, too, was alive” (Pasolini 2004, 32’54”–33’01”).18 To be fair, as Marco Dell’Oro (2005) has noted, Stracci actually pronounces his line twice, “but each time it is of no use, because it never happens before the eyes of the director (who decides his life) or in front of  Translation mine.

18

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the camera (which can make his life eternal)” (89). Stracci, indeed, rehearses his line at the request of a hysterical assistant director but never at that of the director, who is subsequently flabbergasted by the extra’s unexpected “strike” (Pasolini 1965a, 487). As Dell’Oro suggests, Stracci does not exist for the director except on the set of his film. However, as I aim to show here, it is precisely in the character’s refusal to exist in that world that his revolution takes place. Through his death-strike, Stracci affirms his existence and subverts the neocapitalist assumptions about production. The subversive message of Stracci’s death on the cross is exemplified by the two contrasting cinematic styles present in the film: Pasolini’s poetic representation of the proletarian’s “Passion” and director Welles’s aestheticizing attempt to re-present the Passion of Christ via two tableaux vivants by Rosso Fiorentino (Deposition, 1521) and by Jacopo da Pontormo (Deposition or The Transport of Christ to the Sepulcher, 1526–1528). On the one hand, the scenes of Stracci’s comical search for food (filmed in fast motion), his “bestial meal,” and, ultimately, his ironic death from indigestion are elevated by the use of what Pasolini would later define as “technical sacredness” (1966, 45) of his cinema, while, on the other, the sacred subject of the two mannerist artworks is trivialized by the clumsy movements and irreverent laughter of their unbecoming performers. Director Welles’s failure in his effort to reproduce the religious paintings in the film exemplifies the artificial and disingenuous interest of bourgeois artists in the religious events they portray as well as the director’s own indifference to the lives of his sub-proletarian extras. The staging of the two tableaux vivants is compromised by several factors: the gracelessness of the film’s extras, who are incapable of reproducing the stillness of the paintings and the gravity of their subject matter; the artlessness of the sound technician, who constantly plays the wrong music (accompanying the sacred scenes with tacky twists and cha-chas instead of Domenico Scarlatti’s religious music); as well as the hoarse voice of the prompter, who recites without pathos the verses of Jacopone da Todi’s famous religious lauda Donna de Paradiso. The artificiality of the tableaux vivants (and, by extension, that of the film-within-the-film) is further conveyed by the use of color in these scenes as a counterpoint to the grainy black-and-white photography of the rest of the film.19 As Pasolini himself would explain during his trial for religious contempt,  With the exception of the opening and closing credits, which are also shot in color.

19

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[the] introduction of the color scenes is a poetic arbitrariness, a movement of stylistic freedom, determined by aesthetic needs—aestheticizing, if you will—that is spectacular. Thus, the world of the film is separated from that of the film shot by the director, almost as if there were no possible communication between the two, as if they were two juxtaposed yet extraneous realities: with a friction, in fact, of spectacular amazement. (Esposito 2015)

The use of color in the film functions as a meta-cinematic reflection contrasting two opposing film styles and objectives. Whereas the bright colors in these scenes illuminate the aestheticizing film of a director in search of the myth of pure pictorial beauty, the main film’s use of black-­ and-­white and chiaroscuro effects constitutes Pasolini’s aesthetic and critical response to an insincere formalist approach to the sacred, unveils the real locus of a more human and earthly Passion at the social and geographical margins of contemporary consumer society. Pasolini’s choice of two sixteenth-century mannerist paintings for his discourse on cinema and his critique of the new capitalist society is particularly relevant in light of the moral instability and the economic and social challenges that characterized Italian society at the time. As Giuliano Briganti (1985) observes in La maniera italiana (Pasolini’s reference text for the tableaux vivants), in those difficult and troubled years . . . different artists linked by common impulses and shared beliefs generated and gave shape to that lucid and disturbing abstractness; that parade of inventions, shrewdness, and oddities; that extraordinary story of extravagant, moody, and introverted temperaments, which together created a unique episode of Italian art that for years has been designated by the term mannerism. (11–12)

According to Briganti, the mannerist artists were moody, bizarre souls, and their art was just as “disturbing” as their historical era. Briganti views Jacopo da Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino as the highest examples of this artistic movement and considers their works the most original and revealing documents of the crisis of Italian society of their time. More specifically, Briganti claims that despite the purity of their colors and shapes and the sacred nature of their subject, the Depositions of these two artists (which he considers their masterpieces) portray a pathos that is anything but Christian and is in fact “diabolical” (25–26).

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Pasolini seemed to share Briganti’s views when he stated during his trial that the irreverent nature of the tableaux vivants is not found in the actors’ outbursts of laughter in the middle of their reenactments but in the “Christ profanely portrayed by Pontormo” (Esposito 2015).Two years later, during a round table on Romanino’s art, Pasolini would reiterate this interpretation, defining mannerism as “unbelieving” and stating that Pontormo and Rosso “deep down were diabolical” (Balducci et al. 1976, 34). On the other hand, on several occasions Pasolini expressed his interest and even love for certain works of mannerist art, citing Pontormo among his most beloved painters along with Giotto and Masaccio.20 His cinematic and pictorial style even led many critics to consider Pasolini himself as a mannerist intellectual and even to see his shadow behind the character of the director in La Ricotta.21 According to Viano (1993), the scene in which director Welles reads one of Pasolini’s poems would indeed confirm this view (106–107). However, when the director explains the poem to the journalist, he distances himself from the author of the verses, referring to him as “the poet.” Furthermore, his approach to the world that is described in the poem does not conform to that of the poet, who proclaims: I am a force from the Past. / Tradition is my only love. / I come from the ruins, churches, / altarpieces, forgotten hamlets / in the Apennines and the foothills of the Alps, / where dwell our brothers. / I walk the Tuscolana Way like a madman, / the Appian Way like a dog without a master. / I behold the twilights, the mornings / over Rome, over Ciociaria, over the world, /like the first acts of post-history, / which I witness, by privilege of birth, / from the utmost edge of some buried / age. Monstrous is the man born / from the bowels of a dead woman. / And I, an adult fetus, wander, / more modern than any modern, / in search of brothers who are no more. (Pasolini 2004)

Having a Marxist director recite these verses seems to reaffirm Pasolini’s belief that “only Marxists love the past: the bourgeois do not like anything” (1996, 233), as evidenced by the poem’s subsequent impact on the journalist. However, the director is also a bourgeois intellectual, and as such his appreciation of the verses is not different from his appreciation of  See Pasolini (1977), 52; as well as “Diario al registratore” in the same volume (145).  See Rumble (1996); Green (1992); Bonitzer (1985); Bonito Oliva (1998); and Moravia (1971). 20 21

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the art of Pontormo and Fiorentino: it is “an ornamental love, or ‘monumental’ love, as Schopenhauer used to say, certainly not real nor capable of a new history” (Pasolini 1996, 234). Director Welles’s love for the past (the ruins, the villages, the brothers who are no more) “monumentalizes” history from the unilateral point of view of a bourgeois who imposes his aestheticizing gaze on any reality in front of him, transforming it into a mere ornament. Unlike the poet—a “force of the past” who comes from the altarpieces in search of his brothers—director Welles only takes an interest in that past, its landscapes, and its people when it serves his aestheticizing dream of a work of art in which, to take an expression voiced by Pasolini in La rabbia, “beauty is just beauty” (Pasolini 1963).22 Director Welles seems to aspire, not to Pasolini’s poetic cinema, but instead to Michelangelo Antonioni’s artistic world, which Pasolini would describe as “regulated by a myth of pure pictorial beauty, which the characters invade, it is true, but adapting themselves to the rules of that beauty, instead of profaning them with their presence” (1988, 179, my emphasis).23 However, unlike Antonioni, whose films always portray a bourgeois culture represented by bourgeois professional actors, director Welles will miserably fail in his attempt to recreate the two mannerist paintings, precisely due to the improper invasion of his sub-proletarian extras, whose presence in the tableaux vivants of the paintings fails to adapt to the rules of their beauty and instead profanes them. What is represented, then, is not so much the “desecration” of the religious values and subject of the paintings, but their artificial beauty and the director’s aestheticizing gaze on them. By focusing on the artificiality and shallowness of a bourgeois approach to art, Pasolini does not only contrast that approach to his own artistic viewpoint but in so doing also provides a first visual hint of the sub-proletarian world’s resistance to the imposition of the bourgeois gaze and culture. Such a vision will find its full expression in the film’s closing scene and will provide the key to understanding the revolutionary nature of Stracci’s death. After Stracci’s animalistic binge, he and the rest of the cast are called back to the set to enact the final Calvary scene in front of a lineup of 22  Interestingly, Pasolini once again cast Giorgio Bassani (the actor who dubbed Welles’s voice in La Ricotta) as the narrator of La Rabbia. 23  Pasolini suggests this aspiration in the script of the film, when he describes the director as “engrossed in his sublime thoughts … Cinema Nuovo, Antonioni” (1965a, 468, emphasis mine).

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producers, divas, and members of the press. Tied to the cross between Jesus and the Evil Thief, Stracci the Good Thief is clearly suffering from the consequences of his gorging. At the request of the assistant director, he rehearses his line with great effort: “When you are in the kingdom of Heaven, remind your Father about me” (“Quando sarai nel regno dei cieli, ricordami al Padre tuo”).24 However, when the director finally calls “Action!” Stracci fails to deliver his line. More in disbelief than upset, the director continues to call “Action!” in front of Stracci’s expressionless face until another crew member eventually climbs the ladder to Stracci’s cross and finds him dead. Amid an embarrassed silence, the director pronounces the aforementioned line: “Poor Stracci! To croak. . . . he had no other way to remind us that he, too, was alive.” In the original version, the director’s last sentence was significantly different: “Poor Stracci! To croak. . . . he had no other way to make the revolution.” Predictably, such a phrase elicited criticism from members of both the right-wing and left-wing intelligentsia at the time, who found the revolutionary nature of Stracci’s death as inappropriate as it was ambiguous. On the one hand, the association of the sub-proletarian Stracci with the sacred figure of Christ for the purpose of a revolutionary discourse was not and could not be acceptable to the Christian Democrat side of the country.25 On the other hand, Marxist critics failed to see what was so revolutionary in Stracci’s death: Stracci, after gorging on ricotta, dies, nailed to the cross. OrsonWelles . . . bored and teasing, comments: “To die was his only way to make the revolution.” Shortly before, he declared to the foolish journalist who interviewed him, clearly mocking him: “For a Marxist like me, death does not exist.” It turns out, it does exist. But as to whether this death is revolutionary, we have some serious doubts. (Casiraghi 1963)

For Ugo Casiraghi, the film critic of the leftist newspaper L’Unità, Stracci’s death on the cross, however undeniable, could not be assumed to be revolutionary; it might rather appear as the ultimate defeat of the sub-­ proletarian antihero (Casiraghi 1963). However, Casiraghi too quickly dismisses the director’s response as “bored and teasing” and does not take into consideration Pasolini’s accusations regarding the indifference to  Translation mine.  See Subini (2009).

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death on the part of Marxists, for whom Welles’s character acts as spokesman in the film. Other scholars acknowledged the revolutionary nature of Stracci’s death, but only through a Catholic reading. Among these, Subini (2010) sees the character’s death on the cross as the final redemption of his existence, which had hitherto transpired “under the banner of the lowest animal instincts” (73). According to Subini, the elimination of the word “revolution” after Pasolini’s court trial deprived Stracci’s death of its revolutionary nature, reducing it to a mere testimony of his earthly existence. However, this interpretation seems to imply a transcendental symbolism to which neither the content nor the technical-stylistic structure of La Ricotta seems to allude and which Pasolini always denied in his interviews. Even Stracci confirms that the conquest of the afterlife is not one of his concerns when, in response to the threat that the film’s “Christ” will not allow him into the Kingdom of Heaven, he replies, “I’d settle for the Kingdom of Earth!” (“Starebbe tanto bene nel Regno de la Terra io!”) (Pasolini 2004, 23’48”–23’50”). In order to understand the subversive (in the word’s literal sense as overturning) nature of Stracci’s death, it is necessary to analyze the views on death that director Welles expresses in his film as well as in his brief interview with the mediocre journalist. As already discussed, his ambition to reproduce “mourning’s brilliance” (Lebensztejn 1990, 42) in the two mannerist paintings of Christ’s Passion reveals his aesthetic approach to death, which transforms it into an artistic object, a static, colorful image. Outside of the artistic world, death has no place in his life—as director Welles starkly expresses during the interview: “As a Marxist, I never give it any thought” (Pasolini 2004, 11’56”–12’01”). As already mentioned, these words voice Pasolini’s long-time accusation against Marxists’ dismissive attitude toward death. Finally, director Welles also voices the capitalistic view on the death (and life) of the workforce when he expresses his wish that the journalist dies on the set of his film: because if you were to drop dead right here, it’d be good publicity for the film’s release. You don’t exist anyway. Capital acknowledges the existence of labor only insofar it serves production. And the producer of my film is the owner of your paper as well. (14’49”–15’05”)

In short, as a formalist artist, the director considers death an aesthetic object to be contemplated in its pure pictorial beauty; as a Marxist, he assumes it is unworthy of his consideration; and from a capitalistic

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perspective, he conceives death as no more than a sensational event to promote his film, since from the viewpoint of Capital the workforce exists only when it benefits production. This tripartite conception of death will subsequently be revolutionized by the “inappropriate” death of Stracci on the cross. In contrast to these views expressed by director Welles, in Pasolini’s life and works death occupies a central role. In fact, for him it is only through death—“a montage of life” (1988, 236–237)—that life acquires a complete, comprehensible, and unequivocal meaning. Thus, Stracci’s death is revolutionary not in terms of a Christian redemption of his life in the other world, but as the affirmation and vindication of his existence in this world. His death therefore poses a challenge to the director, spokesman of both the Marxist dismissal of death and of the capitalist utilitarian view of the life of the workforce. Indeed, Stracci’s death on the one hand forces the Marxist director to acknowledge death, while on the other it reminds him and his films’ producers (or Capital) about Stracci’s existence, made relevant not during his service to production, but in his disruption of that production via “his strike” (1965a, 487). The use of the verb “to remind” in the final sentence uttered by the director (“Poor Stracci! . . . he had no other way to remind us that he, too, was alive”) acquires a particular meaning in this context when compared to the line that Stracci ultimately fails to pronounce: “When you are in the Kingdom of Heaven, remind your Father about me.” Indeed, thanks to Pasolini’s “sacralizing” camera, it is not the Lord of Heaven (Signore) and Holy Father (Padre) who is reminded about Stracci, but instead the “Lords and Masters” of neocapitalist Italy (“i Signori e i Padroni,” in the script), who had sought to obliterate the existence of sub-proletarian cultures. The line that Stracci fails to perform in front of director Welles and the film’s producers finds its realization in Pasolini’s film, in which Stracci will be remembered by the Father/Master (Padre/Padrone) through his revolutionary death-strike. Stracci’s death does not earn him paradise, but restores his place in history and within a society that denied him and his world their very existence. As a representative of his social class and of the tortured geographical margins of the Italian capital, Stracci is a symbol of the transgressive power of social and spatial boundaries. Whereas the film’s opening scenes play with the metaphorical images of a peripheral landscape crowned with the thorny line of modern concrete buildings, the closing scene’s depiction of Stracci’s death aims to reclaim his existence outside of director Welles’s gaze and to resist the homologating forces of the political and

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geographical centers. This is confirmed by the fact that the images of Stracci on the cross—while part of the color film within the film—are not rendered in color but in black and white; as well as by the fact that the camera’s position while shooting Stracci is frontal (and therefore not filmed from director Welles’s perspective) in contrast to its high-angle position when shooting the director, thereby indicating the reappropriation of the gaze by Stracci, who now “looks down at” the director from the cross. The concept of transgression, following its definition by Westphal (2015) as “a nascent overlapping movement that disturbs the dominant equilibrium” (46), is conveyed in Pasolini’s film via a disturbing stillness that rejects the neocapitalist centers’ all-encompassing race toward progress. Pasolini’s representation and mythicization of the Borgate aims at restoring their reality in modern societies, not just by reproducing them on the screen but by moving “from the localization of mythic places to the mythification of proven reality” in order to pursue a “discourse that establishes the space” (Westphal 2015, 80). “Stracci is the Saint,” reads a line from Pasolini’s poem (Pasolini 2003b, 1150), and sacred also is the landscape that he inhabits—a landscape that, as Pasolini claims in the short documentary film Io e . . . la forma della città, “is worth protecting as obstinately and wholeheartedly and uncompromisingly as one champions a great artist’s work” (Pasolini and Brunatto 2012 [1974], 9’52’–10’13”), such as the Italian mannerist art so beloved by director Welles. Pasolini’s poetic representations of the margins and their inhabitants call for a counterhegemonic discourse that sets itself in dialectical opposition to prior portrayals and perceptions (or lack thereof) from the perspective of the hegemonic centers. In so doing, Pasolini returns an image of the Other that is indissolubly connected to its geographical, social, and cultural margination, and defiantly claims its place in history.

References Anile, Alberto. 2006. Orson Welles in Italia. Milan: Il Castoro. Balducci, Ernesto, et  al. 1976. L’arte del Romanino e il nostro tempo: dibattito tenuto a Brescia il 7 settembre 1965  in occasione della mostra di Gerolamo Romanino. Brescia: Grafo. Beja, Morris. 1995. Perspectives on Orson Welles. New York: G.K. Hall.

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Boarini, Vittorio, Pietro Bonfiglioli, and Giorgio Cremonini, eds. 1982. Da Accattone a Salò: 120 scritti sul cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bologna: Edizioni della tipografia Compositori. Bonito Oliva, Achille. 1998. L’ideologia del traditore: Arte, maniera, manierismo. Milan: Electa. Bonitzer, Pascal. 1985. Décadrage: Cinéma et peinture. Paris: Editions de l’Etoile. Briganti, Giuliano. 1985. La maniera italiana (c1961). Florence: Sansoni. Callow, Simon. 2015. Orson Welles. New York: Viking. Casiraghi, Ugo. 1963. Solo Gregoretti ha fatto centro. L’Unità, February 22. Chiesi, Roberto. 1993. Orte: ‘La forma della città’; Un film di Pier Paolo Pasolini e Paolo Brunatto. http://www.centrostudipierpaolopasolinicasarsa.it/pagine-­ corsare/la-vita/roma/il-­caso-­orte-­nel-­docu-­rai-­la-­forma-­della-­citta-1973di-­ppp-­di-­roberto-­chiesi/ Dell’Oro, Marco. 2005. ‘Tutto ferocemente muore’: La messa in scena della morte nei film ‘romani’ di Pasolini. In La fatal quiete: La rappresentazione della morte nel cinema, ed. Carlo Tagliabue and Flavio Vergerio. Turin: Lindau. Esposito, Bruno. 2015. https://pasolinilepaginecorsare.blogspot.com/2015/01/ pasolini-­processo-­la-­ricotta.html?m=0. Facchini, Monica. 2017. Spettacolo della morte e “tecniche del cordoglio” nel cinema degli anni sessanta. Rome: Bulzoni. Freud, Sigmund. 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). New  York: W. W. Norton & Company. Green, Naomi. 1992. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Insolera, Italo. 1993. Roma moderna: Un secolo di storia urbanistica, 1870-1970. Turin: Einaudi. Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude. 1990. Mourning’s Brilliance: Pontormo’s Deposition in the Santa Felicita, Florence, FMR, February. Moravia, Alberto. 1971. Recensione al Decameron. L’Espresso., July 11, http:// www.pasolini.net/cinema_decameron_AM.htm Parussa, Sergio, and Massimo Riva. 1997. L’autore come antropologo: Pier Paolo Pasolini e la morte dell’etnos. Annali d’Italianistica 15: 237–263. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1963. La rabbia. Rome: Raro Video, 2008, DVD. ———. 1964. The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Rome: Arco Film. ———. 1965a. “La Ricotta” (film script) in Alì dagli occhi azzurri. Milan: Garzanti. ———. 1965b. Nota su ‘Le notti’. In Le notti di Cabiria di Federico Fellini, ed. Lino Del Fra. Modena: Cappelli. ———. 1966. Confessioni tecniche. In Uccellacci e uccellini, ed. Giacomo Gambetti. Milan: Garzanti. ———. 1977. Mamma Roma, ovvero, dalla responsabilità individuale alla responsabilità collettiva. In Con Pier Paolo Pasolini, ed. Enrico Magrelli. Rome: Bulzoni.

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———. 1988. Heretical Empiricism. Edited by Louise K. Barnett, Translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1996. Vie Nuove. In Le Belle Bandiere, ed. Gian Carlo Ferretti. Rome: Editori Riuniti. [1962]. ———. 1999. In Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2003a. Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome, 1950-1966. Translated by Marina Harss. New York: Hansel Books. ———. 2003b. Tutte le poesie. In Laude, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2004. La Ricotta, on disc 2 (supplementary disc) of Mamma Roma. Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection. English Subtitles. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, and Paolo Brunatto. 2012 [1974]. Pasolini and the Form of the City: A Documentary by Pasolini and Paolo Brunatto (1974). In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life. Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2012, DVD 4, English subtitles. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Ugo Gregoretti, Roberto Rossellini, and Jean-­Luc Godard. 1963. RoGoPaG. Rome: Arco Film. Restivo, Angelo. 2002. The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rohdie, Sam. 1995. The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rossellini, Roberto, director. 1945. Rome, Open City. Rome: Minerva Film. Rumble, Patrick. 1996. Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stack, Oswald. 1969. Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Subini, Tomaso. 2009. La ricotta. Turin: Lindau. ———. 2010. Il cinema di Pasolini e la morte: tra complesso della mummia e sindrome di Frankenstein. Altre modernità: Rivista di studi letterari e culturali 4: 67–81. Viano, Maurizio. 1993. A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Westphal, Bertrand. 2015. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert J. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Inner Periphery? The Rhine from  Borderland to Interzone Matthew D. Miller

…Laß hin fliehen lieb, laß hin fliessen leit! Laß rinnen den Rein als ander Wasser! Eseldorf! weiser gotling!1

Ever since the demise of the Roman Empire, the ubiquity of ruins and prior processes of ruination have figured prominently across Europe’s political and cultural history. Material or symbolic appropriations of ruins and their purported legacies—for example, Carolus Magnus’s orientation toward Rome in instituting a Holy Roman Empire; Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1  Johann von Tepl (von Saaz), Der Ackermann aus Böhmen [1414], http://www.fh-­augsburg. de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/15Jh/Tepl/tep_tod.html. An English translation of this passage from the Middle High German play reads, “Let your love flow, let flow your suffering, let flow the Rhine, the way of all waters, O wise king of the donkeys,” in von Tepl, Death and the Ploughman, translated by Michael West (London: Methuen, 2002), 20.

M. D. Miller (*) Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_4

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self-declaration as the emperor of the French and his ensuing annexations of Holy Roman imperial territory; and, later, the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty’s putative inheritance of that same imperial legacy during the second German Empire—have often accompanied hegemonic political projects bent on domination.2 In the wake of Europe’s long, war-torn history, the renewed quest for greater cooperation after World War II laid the groundwork for what would become the European Union. Driving that process was an effort to proscribe future international violence on the continent by integrating European states and citizens into the transnational project of their political unification. Although the manner in which this unification project has occurred has elicited much debate—so much so that contemporary critics have challenged the peace narrative’s centrality to the EU’s justification (Guérot 2019, 33)—the horrific calamity of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine once again raises the question as to how long ruins and ruination will prove inseparable from European history. Although the Rhine has figured as a site of French-German reconciliation deemed crucial to western European integration and the prospects of continental unification postwar, in what follows I approach the river as an inner periphery of Europe. To speak of an inner periphery presupposes the supranational context of the EU, whereas the Rhine will appear peripheral only from the national perspectives of countries bordering it. As offshoots of specific (geo)political and cultural constructions, all determinations of what is central and what is peripheral are relative and contingent. Zeroing in on the Rhine as an inner periphery of the EU, my argument proceeds from a conception of this riparian region as a contested borderland to that of a fertile contact zone of transcultural imagination and engagement. Constellating three literary texts from the pre-March period of the nineteenth century—an era of burgeoning nationalism reflected in France and Prussia/Germany’s contestation of their partially shared border during the 1840 Rhine Crisis—this contribution to Spatiality at the Periphery explores how thinking in and with ruins at the river can yield different visions of Europeanization. Victor Hugo’s 1842/5 Le Rhin: Lettres à un ami, Heinrich Heine’s 1844 Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen, and Georg Büchner’s Lenz, posthumously published in 1839, all exhibit strong references to their historical contexts and geographical settings. As captivating 2  Although empire and nation have frequently been opposed in European historical discourse, neither formation has eschewed domination.

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exponents of the relation between literature and space, these works of geographic fiction do not entirely abstain from seeking to conquer ruins or master processes of ruination through politicized cultural work.3 And yet each of these literary encounters with ruins turns less on restabilizing them in direct service to politics than on imbuing traversal ruin-gazing with open, fluid, and imaginative potential. As Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle have written in the introduction to their co-edited volume Ruins of Modernity (2010), “the ruin signals the impending breakdown of meaning and therefore fosters intensive compensatory discursive activity. In its ambivalence and amorphousness, the ruin functions as a uniquely flexible and productive trope for modernity’s self-awareness” (6). Insofar as ruins tend to “emancipate our senses and desires and enable introspection,” as Halle and Schönle put it (8), Hugo, Heine, and Büchner’s literary encounters with ruinous enigmas in the Rhenian borderlands4 prove seminal to reshaping cultural and political narratives surrounding the inner European fault line that each of these writers traverses. Mediating the river and its ruins through multiple semantic registers and elastic temporalities, their trans-Rhenian texts generate curious admixtures of imperial, (inter) national, and social politics on a variegated spectrum. The combined analysis of the three texts advances a multinational cultural historiography of the continent that purveyors of contemporary European studies have regarded as crucial in meeting the need for polyperspectival approaches beyond the constraints and pitfalls of methodological nationalisms (Beichelt et al. 2013, 25–26).

Site Methods Featuring a watershed that connects nine countries, western Europe’s largest riverine artery clearly constitutes an important site of multicultural historiography. Although the Rhine has appeared to entrain the western European interests, energies, and policies that facilitated postwar European integration, its history as contested border and complex interstice presents a spectrum of narrative possibilities. To explain my approach to the river

 On “geographic fiction,” see Westphal (2011, 115).  English allows for both the Germanic adjective Rhenish and the Latinate Rhenian, although the latter term is somewhat less common in contemporary usage. Given the perception of Latin’s national neutrality, I adopt the latter term here. 3 4

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and outline its stakes, this section spells out the terms and methodological considerations underlying the literary analyses that follow. In his pioneering work in European studies, philosopher Étienne Balibar has amply deconstructed the concept of the border, drawing attention to the overdetermination and ubiquity as well as the vacillation and heterogeneity of borders—which can mean very different things to different people. He has called for deconstructing fortress Europe’s internal and external borders as well as redressing the relationship between Europe’s ethnos and demos toward a more inclusive “equaliberal” politics appropriate to the EU’s social challenges (Balibar 2002, 75–86; 2004, 9; 2014). Advancing a reconceptualization of the relationship between center and periphery, his essay “Europe as Borderland” (2009) constitutes a theoretical linchpin of geographically oriented cultural analysis. Mapping out Europe as a political space, Balibar discusses four different and competing patterns, of which the third and fourth are relevant here, insofar as the former pertains to the center-periphery relation analyzed in world-systems theory and the latter to Balibar’s own concept of crossover (“‘overlapping folds,’ or nappes superposées” [200]). The center-periphery relation can be elaborated in geographic terms and wielded to address political-economic relations of power such that, for example, Europe can be conceived in terms of concentric circles constituting a core (the Eurozone countries); other EU countries; and peripheral spaces not in the EU but still related to it economically, culturally, or otherwise (199). Conversely, the conception of crossover builds on Balibar’s grasp of ubiquitous social borders to reformulate center-periphery relations in non-geographic terms. On the notion of crossover, there: is no “center”; there are only “peripheries”. Or, better said, each region of Europe is or could be considered a “center” in its own right, because it is made of overlapping peripheries, each of them open (through “invasions”, “conquests”, “refuges” [sic], “colonizations”, and “postcolonial migrations”, etc.) to influences from all other parts of Europe, and from the whole world. This creates a potential for ethnic and religious conflicts, but also for hybridity and cultural invention. (Balibar 2009, 200)

In light of such manifold inter-permeations, each and any site of “Borderland Europe” will hardly constitute some putatively pure, monocultural identity but will instead contain movements of difference and irreducible heterogeneity. The notion of the Rhine as a borderland or,

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alternatively, as an inner periphery of Europe, is intended here precisely in the sense Balibar outlines. Second, the selection of a river as a site of inquiry derives from the notion that a hydrocentric remapping of Europe—an approach oriented to the continent’s rivers and watersheds and the cultural imaginaries they have entrained—can work productively against and beyond the terracentric national formations that have long afflicted the continent’s lands and their residents.5 Although political borders have frequently been construed in view of the natural geographic determinants of land or water, rivers famously connect as well as divide. As Victor Hugo maintains, the “Rhine, the river which should unite [France and Germany], has been made the stream that divides them” (The Rhine, n.d., 2:201). The naturalization of borders notwithstanding, productive conceptions of the unifying capacities of waterways have pervaded the European cultural imaginary. G. W. F. Hegel’s lectures on The Philosophy of History (1956), for example, referred to “valley plains . . . permeated and watered by great streams” as zones of transition and addressed watersheds in regional, rather than national terms, that is, as “districts occupied by streams” that bring people together more than set them apart (88, 90). And Hegel’s contemporary and erstwhile schoolmate Friedrich Hölderlin generated an entire poetic framework for the renewal of a fluvial Europe through a fanciful remembrance and reactivation of antiquity. Still more pertinent here is Lucien Febvre’s 1935 history of the Rhine (1997), written against the grain of its nationalist appropriations by France or Germany (235), which grasped the river region as a hinge (charnière) of nations and peoples (11): its riparian borderlands, Febvre argued in unfolding the longstanding prenational multicultural mix of a massive north-south and east-west axis of western Europe (146), are not final stops but instead zonal sites of vast connectivity (81)—a claim that would be more appreciated after the impending twentieth-century catastrophe than at the time of his book’s publication. By heuristically prioritizing the continent’s aquatic geography, a hydrocentric approach to European culture can also synergize key features of the geocritical model of literary studies that Bertrand Westphal has set forth in Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011, esp. 111–147). Although 5  In Germanophone Studies, for example, the hydrocentric perspective establishes geocultural areas of inquiry such as the Danube, the Rhine, and the Baltic, which can serve to enhance the understanding of short- and long-term cultural processes against the reification of national formations.

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the Rhine I am examining here concerns only its middle (Hugo), lower (Heine), and upper (Büchner) segments, my focus on the river responds to Westphal’s call to favor place as a first organizational category of inquiry. As an interdisciplinary undertaking, geocriticism is eminently capable of delivering textured and layered cultural studies. What is more, the very contestation of the Rhine as a site of national desire and domination demands the kind of polyperspectival and multilingual analysis that Westphal refers to as multifocal. Providing for a synchronic expansiveness, multifocalization also proves integral to his related appeal to a stratigraphic vision that would reckon with multiple perspectives on a space over historical time (122, 137). Finally, in attending to spatiotemporally complex interstitial contact zones (69) and developing a methodology appropriate to their analysis, Westphal’s exposition of geocriticism can help substantiate Febvre’s account of the Rhine as a living axis of European cultures. Taken together, these three formulations—Balibar’s delineation of borderland and crossover, the hydrocentric approach to European culture, and geocriticism—converge in my  conceptualization of the Rhine as an interzone in the sense Randall Halle (2014) has given this term (1–28). Defining culture as “a fluid, transforming possibility of interaction arising out of the contact of peoples with differing and varying interests,” Halle locates culture’s emergence “in zones; it is that possibility that raises the distinctions between groups of people and changes from generation to generation at such a pace that it undermines institutions and destabilizes rituals” (9; italics omitted). The fact that culture is born of crossover and made in interzones constitutes a theoretical mainspring that is particularly germane to observing riverine interaction. To anticipate, interzonal culture, suppressed by the ascendance of nationalism’s reign over the Rhenian borderlands, constitutes an undercurrent whose resurfacing turns on the character and quality of each riparian country’s orientation to its borders and what lies beyond them—here, France and Germany’s own reckonings with manifold influences within and without.6 The empirical cartography that Febvre (1997) calls for—not of states and dynastic actions, but of  Deftly evoking the special character of the Rhine’s contact zones in key passages of his historical study (e.g., 146, 211), Febvre also pointedly conveys the pressures of (Prussian) Germany’s nationalization of the Rhenian borderlands not only as a drama between region and nation, but also as a struggle between two Germanies. Heine would appreciate such a characterization and likely highlight France’s own inner struggles accordingly. 6

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actually existing Rhenian opinions, thought-systems, and feelings (162; see also 176)—accordingly sets the course, enabling us to discern the “hybridity and cultural invention” that makes the river an interzone.

Borders Dead and Alive From recorded history onward, the Rhine has elicited multifarious figurations ranging from frontier to conduit. It served as the limes of the Roman Empire; it traversed a central region of Carolus Magnus’s Frankish Empire that soon morphed, in the wake of the 843 Treaty of Verdun, into the short-lived but long-remembered kingdom of Lotharingia (see Winder 2019); and it constituted a porous linguistic boundary between Gallo-­ Roman and Germanic idioms. In more modern times, the Rhine was claimed as France’s natural eastern border amid the expansionism of Louis XIV and subsequently that of Napoleon, whose annexations brought the First French Empire to much of the river’s left bank and established the Confederation of the Rhine on its right. The 1815 Treaty of Vienna subsequently decreed the freedom of international navigation on key rivers of Europe7 and for the first time brought the increasingly powerful German state of Prussia to the riverbanks with the establishment of the Rhine Province, which comprised the lands adjacent to the river’s middle segment and part of its lower segments. Although international state boundaries in the riparian region would continue to shift, in the 1840s the remainder of the Lower Rhine flowed through the Kingdom of the Netherlands, whereas the Alpine Rhine remained mostly Swiss, and the river therefore constituted something like an official border only between France and the German confederal state of Baden. Throughout this turbulent history, the view of borderlands as interzones, in the sense outlined above, makes itself felt as a faint, yet palpable current that augurs resolution against a putative destiny of division and destruction.8 But whereas old Hegel or young Hölderlin’s soundings of such a current may appear abstruse, the interdisciplinary practice of geocriticism enables us to set  Napoleon’s rationalizing reorganization of Rhenian political territory in the lead-up to this treaty facilitated Johann Gottfried Tulla’s rectification of the river, as recounted by Blackbourn (2006, 93–101). 8  Febvre (1997) accordingly critiques the pseudo-historiographic concept of destiny for balefully neglecting factors of human intention and action in Le Rhin (62, 74). 7

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into concrete relief the challenges that Hugo, Heine, and Büchner faced in writing the Rhine during the decade leading up to the revolutions of 1848. That decade witnessed extreme symbolizations of the river. Amid German historiography’s construal of a long Germanic durée comprising the entire area, as well as a complex and unstable international situation following the Vienna Treaty, Adolphe Thiers, serving as prime minister of post-Napoleonic France in 1840, began reasserting his country’s claims to the river’s left bank.9 This elicited the reactivation of an equally nationalistic argument from the other side, which claimed that the Rhine was “Germany’s river, not Germany’s boundary”—as the title of Ernst Moritz Arndt’s 1814 pamphlet on the issue had put it during the (anti-)Napoleonic Wars.10 This time, the dispute would spark only a poetic war in the form of a bataille lyrique, albeit one of questionable poetic quality.11 Whereas Europeans had once looked not only to the French Revolution but also to Napoleon’s military advances against the counterrevolutionary coalition as the dawning of greater liberty,12 the semantics of the term liberty swiftly shifted to a new register, as expressed by Nicolaus Becker’s 1840 poem “Der deutsche Rhein,” later set to music, which declared that the river, being “free and German,” was never to be ceded to the French. Liberty was now entirely entwined with national autonomy and nationalism, quixotic and repressive relations in German lands notwithstanding: Georg Herwegh, who pushed back against the French with his own jingoistic “Rheinweinlied,” also noted that the German Rhine could certainly be freer.13 Even the song that would later become Germany’s national anthem, edited in accordance with the exigencies of historical revision in the aftermath of twentieth-century nationalist terror and calamity—Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s geofictional “Lied der Deutschen”—emerged in this context. The missives sent hither 9  Although it falls outside the focus of this chapter, it is worth mentioning that Thiers asserted such claims at precisely the point when France was suffering setbacks in its efforts to wield influence in the Middle East by supporting the Egyptian Mohammed Ali’s attempts to diminish the power of the Ottoman Empire. The inner European conflict ensuing at the Rhine, in other words, appears as an epiphenomenon of the external colonial and imperial struggles of the European countries. 10  For a historical overview of the crisis and an instructively differentiated analysis of the German response, see Brophy (2013). 11  For an overview of the bataille lyrique in question, see Ißler (2019). 12  See Hobsbawm (1977, 87 and passim), as well as Brophy (2007, 307–309). 13  Cited in Febvre (1997, 228).

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and thither included “La Marseillaise de la Paix,” the de-escalating response by Alphonse de Lamartine, to whom Becker had addressed his poem, and Alfred de Musset’s “Le Rhin allemand.” While de Musset would ultimately come around to Lamartine’s pacific Pan-European vision (Ißler 2019, 202–203), his “Rhin allemand” constitutes a more biting piece of satire and foreboding. Calling the Germans back to history—“Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand”—de Musset both underscored the longstanding indeterminacy of the river’s identity and warned against the advancement of territorial claims through “airs bachiques” that would awaken the dead from their bloody sleep.14 With this turn, we enter the phantom landscape of the Rhenian borderlands and the spectral waters in which Hugo and Heine imaginatively tread.

Hugo’s Fraught Phantoms In contrast to those of German exiles Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner, Victor Hugo’s trans-Rhenian excursions were driven less by political exigency than by romantic curiosity. His own exile—an experience that might have yielded a sharper and more differentiated view of the riparian interzone—would transpire later and elsewhere. Like Heine’s wintery German tale, Hugo’s epistolary travelogue Le Rhin, inspired by multiple journeys to the river, is a work that interweaves geographic biography and fiction. Leaving his Parisian center for the alterity of the periphery, Hugo’s border-­ crossing abounds in considerable literary and artistic ruin-gazing of the kind also captured in a number of drawings he later rendered into aquarelles and gouaches.15 Navigating unfamiliar terrain with the help of guides and fantasy, Hugo’s away-from-home encounters with the uncanny setup a dialectic of alienation and appropriation that Wolfgang Matzat (2018) has analyzed in his account of the work in the context of romantic travel literature. Perhaps the single most indicative example of this dialectic concerns Hugo’s de- and re-mystifying approach to the Mouse Tower and town of Bingen in the book’s twentieth letter. In the lead-up to his visit to the site, Hugo relates with great panache a legend concerning the Archbishop of  The poem appears in its entirety in Ißler (2019, 183–184).  See Hermann Mildenberger’s afterword to Victor Hugo, Der Rhein, an abridged version translated into German by Annette Seemann and which reproduces a number of Hugo’s visual works (Hugo 2010, 101–108). 14 15

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Hatto, whose selfish and brutal policies led to the obliteration of the people of Mainz. Faced with the people’s protests against his hoarding of grain in a bad harvest year, Hatto had them incarcerated in a barn and incinerated alive. Scores of mice and rats poured from the scene of carnage and, in an act of legendary justice, descended upon Hatto after he had taken refuge in his insular tower. They devoured him there, leaving his tortured, restless soul to emit a reddish hue in the evening river fog. Hugo, whose parents’ home had contained a picture of the Mouse Tower, was haunted by the tale ever since it had been recounted to him by a German maid. At least that is the reason he gives for visiting the ruinous tower, whose real-life light and sounds turn out to derive from a small forge. Hugo’s elaborate staging of the episode, in which he devotes great literary efforts to set the atmosphere, allure, and mystery of the scene, does not stop at this finding. Returning to his Bingen abode that evening, he ventures out again after dinner, still energized by the river, to climb up to the fortress ruins above Bingen for a nocturnal view. Looking down from the Klopp Castle, he spots light from a precise seven of the town’s windows, which “faithfully reproduced the Great Bear, which was sparkling at that very moment, in the depth of the heavens” (The Rhine, 1:227). The purely contingent occurrence is rendered in all romantic seriousness, as a veritable cosmic emblem of celestial-terrestrial harmony. Although the harmonization is duly marked as artifice—Hugo characterizes the scene as a “mirror of jet,” that is, ink, to reveal it as a piece of writing—the constellational convergence signals an orientation toward natural history, into which Le Rhin will aspire to inscribe European civilization and accommodate its stormy political currents. Although Hugo’s Rhenian excursions are generally bent on poeticizing the prosaic and appropriating alterity through literary acts of home making,16 his thematization of Hatto’s abysmal governance in the Mouse Tower letter reveals how the book’s legendary dimension can also raise political questions. Commentator Hermann Mildenberger (2010) has excavated another layer to Hugo’s twentieth chapter, one that was omitted from Le Rhin but is perhaps indicative of the book’s political unconscious. Mildenberger traces the haunting of the Mouse Tower and its fire to Napoleonic General Lasalle’s order to scorch the northern Spanish 16  This line of inquiry is explored by Matzat (2018), who demonstrates that nature in Le Rhin is neither political nor national, but serves instead as an occasion for imaginative mediations of the uncanny (240).

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town of Torquemada in 1808. Visiting the town on a trip with his mother to see his father, who was serving in Napoleon’s army, the young Victor Hugo suffered an injury while playing among the town’s singed remains (103). While the event may have seared the ruins into Hugo’s early imagination, it also suggests a blind spot on the part of Le Rhin’s author with regard to the casualties of the Napoleonic expansionism that he tends to champion.17 Of additional significance in the twentieth letter is the author’s characteristic excursion to the heights that are so central to the picturesque appeal of the Middle Rhine’s landscape. Although the pull of the river itself features throughout the text, as in Hugo’s eerie boat ride to the tower, the author clearly evinces a predilection for vistas from above. His affinity for a kind of bird’s eye perspective can be related to his tendency toward sweeping historical speculations as well as his adoption of a gaze that turns Rhenian ruins into sites of political predication and attestation. Anticipating the metamorphosis of romantic reveries into conceptual thinking, Hugo’s 1842 preface (Le Rhin 1987) outlines his cosmopolitan contribution to inner European animosity, attributing French characteristics to Rhenian lands; downplaying the hostility of Germans—or just Rhenians?—toward the French; declaring Germany to be France’s “natural ally” (collaboratrice naturelle); and underscoring his own Germanophilia (2, 4–9).18 The international cooperation he has in mind is further spelled out in a conclusion that mixes historical reconstruction, condemnation of the Treaty of Vienna, geopolitical speculation, and a touch of poetry, whereby France and Germany, as alleged head and heart of Europe respectively, would provide the dual key to the continent’s equilibrium (The Rhine, 2:188–190).19 This vision is undergirded by Hugo’s reading of ruins: the Rhine affords the very possibility of seeing “the past . . . in ruin; whereas the future is only inchoately germinating there. To see the past, one need but open a window onto the Rhine; to see the future, one must . . . open a window within” (Le Rhin 4). Although the latter procedure appears to be as supplemental as that of Hugo’s re-mystifying ink discussed above, the two windows on outer and inner spaces remain closely 17  Le Rhin’s Heidelberg letter (The Rhine 2:36–74) stands out as a sensitive documentation of the travesties of war committed by all sides. 18  Translations from sections of Hugo’s text omitted from the English edition are my own. 19  Hugo first articulated his conception of a United States of Europe at a meeting of the International Peace Conference in 1849.

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interrelated in practice, the first frequently occasioning and conditioning the second. A programmatic statement in the fourteenth letter likens the triumph of history over legends and fables to the surfacing of ruins among flowers (The Rhine, 1:139). Yet wherever there is void, that is, an absence of historical certitude—and, we might add, of historico-political evaluation—history and fable remain intertwined in the cultural imaginary. Like the shadows, dreams, and appearances in which Hugo playfully traffics (cf. 1:135), such sticking points may defy final differentiation and demystification. A significant moment of Le Rhin’s strategic ruin-gazing is set in the border town of Aachen, a place steeped in history as the Carolingian center of the Holy Roman Empire and where Hugo zeroes in on Carolus Magnus’s legacy. After detailing the architecture of the oft-renovated cathedral and equating its incomplete and heterogeneous state to that of the erstwhile empire, he proceeds to the imperial gravestone. Having been exhumed and dismembered for relics, the emperor’s body no longer lies in rest there, but Hugo fancifully conjures a restitution of his remains, replete with the reassembled integration of gravestone, sarcophagus, throne, relics, and all the symbols of imperial power. The ninth letter also includes an anecdote about an official visit paid by coalition heads of state to Carolus Magnus’s tomb in 1814, as related to Hugo by the church sexton and instructively detailed by Manfred Beller (2017). Of the Holy Alliance leaders, Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III showed the greatest interest in the tomb—a suggestive observation, given Hugo’s previous satirical treatment of the state of imperial legacies and in light of the Rhenian sexton’s professed multinationality: “However you may view me, sir, I belong to three nations—Prussian by birth [fortuitously due to the installation of Prussia’s Rhine Province], Swiss by profession [in his function as sexton], but French at heart” (The Rhine 1:86; translation modified).20 But exactly what form of political organization might serve as multinational Europe’s vessel? In order to elaborate on Hugo’s handling of this question, two other letters demand scrutiny before we return to the ninth. The thirteenth letter, written from Andernach, contains perhaps the most politically charged of Hugo’s ruin-gazing scenarios. Meandering through the Rhenian landscape, the author stumbles upon a ruinous gravesite at Weißenthurm that 20  Beller’s commentary on this passage illustrates how Hugo anchors France’s claims to the river’s left bank in the hearts of Rhenians themselves.

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monumentalizes none other than the celebrated Napoleonic general Lazare Hoche. The discovery—Hugo stages the episode as a spontaneous finding, which Beller (2017) demystifies21—not only provokes a lamentation on the exterritoriality of France’s fallen but also compels Hugo to ventriloquize the stones, claiming to apprehend a voice stating that “France must recover the Rhine” (The Rhine, 1:127). Is nature losing its Rhenian patois and beginning to speak an imperial language? Are the dead extolled by de Musset in the bataille lyrique being summoned here? The specifics of this nationalizing turn stand in some tension with the more generalizing tone of the subsequent letter. Written at Sankt Goar with considerable verve, the fourteenth letter is dedicated to the Rhine as such. Ambitiously asserting the entwinement of nature and history, Hugo declares his favorite river to be noble, or rather “feudal, republican, imperial; worthy at the same time of France and of Germany” (1:131). Hugo’s Rhine also displays a nearly consummate unifying power, allegorically evoking other world-famous rivers in an appeal to planetary interconnectivity (1:131). What is more, drawing on a reservoir of feudal, republican, imperial, and multinational possibilities, Hugo symbolically likens the river’s geographic course to the trajectory of modern political history tout court: In its windings, in its course, in the midst of all that it traverses, it is, so to speak, the image of civilization to which it has been so useful, and which it will still serve. It flows from Constance to Rotterdam; from the country of eagles to the village of herrings; from the city of popes, of councils, and of emperors to the counter of the merchant and the citizen; from the great Alps themselves to that immense body of water which we term ocean (The Rhine, 1:148, italics omitted), just as humanity itself has descended from lofty, immutable, inaccessible, serene, and radiant ideas to large, mobile, stormy, sober, useful, navigable, dangerous, and unfathomable ideas, which take on, carry, fertilize, and engulf everything. (Le Rhin 109-110)22

From the vertical to the horizontal, from heights to plains, from stasis to dynamism, as well as from “theocracy to democracy” (Le Rhin 110), Hugo’s account of the river’s cascading trajectory clearly ascribes to modern political history a leveling course that is illustrative of his own  Beller notes that it was well known at the time that Hoche was laid to rest elsewhere.  Because the second part of this passage was omitted from the English translation, I have reconstituted the full citation from the French original. 21 22

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republican, even social leanings. And yet Le Rhin also evinces a deeply imperial streak that is accentuated in the central claims of the fourteenth letter. Unable to pass over Hoche’s grave at Weißenthurm without noting Julius Caesar’s first crossing of the Rhine at the same site some 2000 years prior, in sketching the phases of Rhenian history writ large, Hugo lets everything turn on Caesar, “Charlemagne,” and Napoleon, even highlighting, as he does elsewhere, the roughly 1000-year intervals separating these milestones (1:148). Returning to the ninth letter, we can better appreciate how what may have begun in jest in Hugo’s fanciful approach to Carolus Magnus’s tomb is being amalgamated into Le Rhin’s more serious political imaginary. The Aachen letter culminates in a nocturnal apparition of Carolus Magnus himself, who rises as a giant ghost over the city. To what end? Like Hugo’s ruin-gazing generally, the phantom at once connotes play and earnestness, intensifying the ambivalence of the course Le Rhin is steering between empire and democracy. Indeed, the aforementioned imperial-sized intervals are frequently evoked with regard to endings: while Carolus Magnus’s death in 814 is linked to Napoleon’s 1814 defeat (The Rhine, 1:85), even the eternal sleep of the former’s wife Fastrada, who died in 794 and was laid to rest in Mainz’s St. Alban, was disturbed during the 1794 bombardment of the town that destroyed the church (1:276). In conjunction with Hoche’s putative resting site as well as the 1840 reburial of Napoleon highlighted by Beller (2017), Hugo’s Rhine riverscape appears veritably populated by unruly phantoms. Would conciliatory Franco-German cooperation of the kind he envisions somehow lay them to rest? And in what political form would that occur? Although Hugo notes in his conclusion that Europe can and must be defended without the likes of Charlemagne and Napoleon (Le Rhin, 405), they, along with the Caesarian archetype, appear to constitute pivotal forces of Hugo’s Rhenian imaginary at odds with its more narrowly national and supposedly democratic determinants. Indeed, to mark the difference of the second of these historical figures from the French Charlemagne and the German Karl der Große, I have at least opted for his Latin name, which may neutralize the nationalizing impulse but says nothing of Europe’s presumably postimperial future into which ruin-gazing cannot reach with certitude. On a related note, whereas the past inheres in Hugo’s Rhenian ruins, their legibility with regard to the future—as indicated by the author’s extrapolations from the Hoche monument—remains

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contestable. The very same ruinous landscape that Prussia was preserving or restoring as part of a Gothic revival to compensate for the loss of the governmental structures of the Holy Roman Empire and foster the political integration of its new Rhine Province (Plessen 2016, 259–260) compels Hugo to resurrect France’s claims to the entire left Rhenian bank. That a disturbed Hugo races through Cologne “like a barbarian” (The Rhine 1:89) must reflect his premonition of the city’s Prussianization in the form of plans to complete the long-interrupted construction of the cathedral. That project had already been set in motion at the time of Le Rhin’s writing and was visible to Hugo in the form of a crane hovering about the unfinished basilica (1:91). Lamenting the cathedral’s decrepit state and fearing its modernization, he likens it to an incomplete Iliad awaiting its Homers—against whom Hugo’s Prussians presumably fail to measure up (1:91). In addition to Beller’s account of the discrepancies between Le Rhin’s cosmopolitan and national commitments, what stands out here are tensions in Hugo’s account of the river’s imperial past, its national present, and its—postnational, postimperial, democratic?— future. Hugo fails to resolve these issues: Le Rhin reveals the river to be a site of crossover—an interzone—but often still treats it as a borderland in the old sense. And yet it is worth lingering within the ambiguities of this riparian ruin-gazing, which delights as much as it troubles. Le Rhin’s territorializing claims palpably derive from its author’s affirmative orientation toward the emancipatory legacy of the First French Empire. Yet that legacy was already waning into the merely national by the time of Hugo’s Rhine excursions. Although his geopolitical assertions would therefore be read— from Rhenian perspectives, from German perspectives?—as hegemonic in contrast to Heine’s ironic yet critical approach, they present a window on a course of history suspended between possibility and, in view of its longer durée, fatality.23 Had the Rhine been transfigured under the sign of Hugo’s cosmopolitanism—from a river nationalized by Germans or a new border between it and France to an interconnecting charnière—then the continent’s future might very well have proven a more peaceable one than the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War and Europe’s catastrophic twentieth century would allow.

 I borrow from Febvre’s language here (1997, 179).

23

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Rhine Mine Whereas Hugo’s journey from Parisian center to Rhenian periphery represents a movement from a familiar home to a zone of foreign alterity, the trans-Rhenian journey of Heinrich Heine’s Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen follows a similar yet different trajectory, shifting from Paris, a foreign capital the exile Heine made a new home, to locations that had formerly constituted original centers for him.24 Returning to the lands its author had left more than twelve years prior, Heine’s Wintermärchen ventures across the Rhine to witness something like the ruination of his own country,25 a state of affairs that is evoked throughout the epic poem’s twenty-seven chapters.26 Examples of that ruination include the infamous appearance of Carolus Magnus’s magical chamber pot, in which the German future might be read but for its unbearable stench (Heine 1982, 291–293); the stones and paltry verse—in Heine’s excoriation of the bataille lyrique—that “Father Rhine” is barely able to digest into his current (241–242); as well as the wounds inflicted or threatened by the scissors of the Confederal German censor (287 and 294). As this preliminary glimpse of Heine’s ruinographic approach to Germany suggests, the Wintermärchen activates all human senses on its pages, frequently measuring the digestibility and tolerability of German lands through culinary and olfactory as well as haptic and meteorological metaphors.27 In title and text, the winter setting conveys the frozen political relations of a German history that has come to a standstill.28 The second part of Heine’s title raises the question as to what kind of fairy tale could critically address such 24  Although the trek depicted in Wintermärchen differed from the itineraries of Heine’s actual trips to Hamburg in 1843 and 1844 to visit his mother as well as his publisher Julius Campe, many of its stations coincide with those of Heine’s return route to Paris in 1843. See Höhn (2004, 115). For practical purposes, “Heine” and “narrator” will be used interchangeably in my discussion of the text. 25  Heine’s emigration to Paris in the wake of the 1830 July Revolution turned on his estimation of France’s relative advancements as a state as well as the diminished prospects of publishing in the German Confederation, which were curtailed by the 1819 Karlsbad Decrees and the ensuing Six Acts of 1832. Heine was a political refugee of German unfreedom. 26  Demarcating the sections of his poem with Roman numerals, Heine dubs each chapter a caput, a Latin term meaning “head” and standing here for heading or chapter. 27  In so doing, the Wintermärchen augments the kind of “polysensoriality” that Westphal (2011) has highlighted as a key element of literature’s interaction with space (131–136). 28  See Höhn (2004), 116.

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a situation. Trafficking in magic and wish fulfillment fantasies, the genre of the fairy tale risks distracting listeners or readers from the urgent need for reality’s political transformation and compensating for concrete depravation only with imaginary pleasures.29 Moreover, as a previously marginalized expatriate, Heine writes from a perspective of subjection: unlike Hugo, he does not scale any heights, which in any case are absent from the segment of the lower Rhine that he crosses at Cologne on route to Hamburg. Rather, he surveys relations on the ground, with the “plurality of vision” that Edward Said (2000) has ascribed to the optics of exiles (186). In what may make for a greater degree of literary self-reflexivity in comparison to Hugo’s Rhin, Heine’s “versified travel images” (Höhn 2004, 120) politicize the poetic from the outset,30 as the Wintermärchen converts its author’s biographical hardships and frustrated political yearnings into structure and form. Summarizing findings of the relevant scholarship, Höhn characterizes the work’s thematic arrangement in terms of a pendular movement between a periphery consisting of the text’s geographic stations and a center constituted by Heine’s fundamental convictions (120). This poetic structure dovetails with the cartography of the author’s ideological imaginary, in which Paris figures as central (all criticisms of France and the French aside, Heine’s chosen residence still serves as a lodestar of emancipatory aspirations), and his own German homelands prove peripheral. Radiating the cultural duality of Heine’s experience through alacritous exercises of an exilic sensorium, the Wintermärchen’s land- and riverscapes serve as sites of an extensive transgressivity, following Westphal’s (2011) conception of this term: “Transgression corresponds to the crossing of a boundary beyond which stretches a marginal space of freedom. When it becomes a permanent principle, it turns into transgressivity. The transgressive gaze is constantly directed towards an emancipatory horizon in order to see beyond a code and territory that serves as its ‘domain’” (47). Heine’s wandering geographic fiction abounds in literary transgressions as humorous as they are biting. A timely literary-political intervention that plumbs and stretches the discursive registers of its author’s time, the Wintermärchen figures past, present, and future by way of critique and satire, dreams and fantasy, 29   On Heine’s postromantic satirical and political modernization of myth, see Borchmeyer (2017). 30  I lift this formulation from Höhn’s discussion of Heine’s Reisebilder collection (186), which applies equally to Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen.

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ruins and phantoms. Heine stages a plurality of Germanies and a supranational Europe thereby, poetically straddling the Rhenian interzone as a postnational and postimperial space of cultural and political possibility. Poised at the border in the first chapter, Heine experiences an emotional mixture of anticipation, homesickness, frustration, and concern—as well as inspiration for a new song of social-revolutionary departure (232). Surveilled by Prussian border police of the Confederal customs union while harboring contraband in his mind (234), Heine makes his first stop in foreign-familiar territory at Aachen. Noting the misery and self-­ subjugation of the town’s dogs as well as its residents, Heine shows little reverence toward the erstwhile Carolingian emperor and still less toward the Prussians’ appropriation of the imperial legacy, calling on Rhenian marksmen to shoot down the emblematic eagle from Prussia’s coat of arms (235–237). But it is another emperor who will attract Heine’s more scrutinizing attention in later stanzas. In chapters XV–XVII the narrator conducts a lengthy oneiric interlocution with twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich I, whom Germans mythologized as Barbarossa, the sleeping emperor who would one day rise again to restore glory to the empire (or to the nation, in the nineteenth-century version). The legend is introduced ambivalently amid the fairy tales Heine recalls from his nurse in chapter XIV. These feature the “accusing flame” of a solar justice (261) (“Sonne, du klagende Flamme!” [Heine 1971, 606]), a refrain that Heine will seek to redirect: no longer confinable to its poetic encapsulation in fairy tales, justice must be applied to the politics of the author’s present. Notably, the summoning of the old emperor is also preceded by the Wintermärchen’s celebratory memorialization of Napoleon in chapter VIII, in which a nostalgic Heine, eyes welling up upon once again hearing the “vive l’Empereur,” relates Bonaparte’s 1840 reburial and the ceremony’s evocation of France’s “old imperial dream” (Heine 1982, 252) (“imperiale Märchentraum” [Heine 1971, 598]) with which the Germans’ own “Märchentraum” of Barbarossa will now be juxtaposed. Well off the route of the poet’s itinerary, Heine’s imaginary visit to the red-bearded emperor at the latter’s Kyffhäuser mountain dwelling is presented in two coach-bound dream sequences and following remarks delivered in transit. Making his way through the cavernous chambers of the dwelling, Heine encounters an undignified, antiquated, and medieval emperor, who is accompanied by soldiers he pays every hundred years but lacks both horses and motivation to intervene in present-day scenarios. Chapter XVI advances this parody, first demonstrating the emperor’s

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anachronistic irrelevance and then gleefully detailing the institution of the guillotine. Barbarossa grasps and pushes back against the poet’s threat, eliciting the following response from the latter: “Sir Barbarossa!” I cried out loud— “You’re a mythical creation. Go, get some sleep! Without your help We’ll work out our own salvation.” (1982, 269)

Not only does the imperial phantom have no place at the head of any republican aspirations, the black-red-gold-colored flag retroactively ascribed to him and being hoisted by German nationalists appropriating and transmogrifying the republican cause has, for Heine, already worn thin (262, 269). After debunking the attraction of such imagined ruins, Heine redirects his attack toward his German contemporaries, acknowledging that he can only dream of taking on such alleged luminaries directly (269). As Dieter Borchmeyer (2017) has shown, the aggrandizing activation of the Barbarossa legend by these figures forebodes, in Heine’s view, even more treachery than the medieval original (289–294). Having already paid tribute to Napoleon, the Wintermärchen might thus appear to be setting up a critical contrast along familiar national lines. Indeed, given that Heine favorably associated the French leader with a “socially oriented imperial rule,”31 it might follow that he would favor the idea that emancipating Germany from its eighteenth-century shackles could only be achieved, under the historical circumstances, through authoritarian politics and military struggle. Chapter XVI’s rejection of Barbarossa, however, ends on a line—“We need no King [Kaiser] at all” (1982, 269)—that must extend back onto Napoleon himself. An anticipatory proclamation of postimperiality, the phrase “no emperor at all” draws attention to the need for social-revolutionary departure that turns less on any leadership from above than on selfemancipation from below. Such a baseline reading32 certainly squares 31  This phrase renders Höhn’s (2004) “soziales Kaisertum,” an attribute of the First French Empire that both Hugo and Heine appear to have esteemed (118). 32  A cornerstone of the Wintermärchen’s theory and practice, self-emancipation also provides the basis for deciphering its riddles, not least in the infamous “Wolf” chapter XII (“Yes,” wagers the putatively renegade poet to his fellow Germans, “count on me and help yourselves/Then God will help you too”), the most important element of which clearly rests at the couplet’s center (258). The Wintermärchen’s baseline also resonates with Karl Marx’s recurring stipulation that workers emancipate themselves.

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with the epic poem as a whole, which radiates Heine’s practice of fiercely individual Mündigkeit throughout.33 Although the distinction between above and below, heights and plains—and empire vs. emancipation—may appear schematic, the vertical imagery of power very much accords with the symbolic and metaphorical registers of the Wintermärchen’s poetic inventory, the political and social ramifications of which are often asserted through ironic twists that beguile readers and possibly circumvent censors, while not easily disarming them. Heaven and earth, for example, do not merely denote the obfuscatory ideal and materially real realms that are marked at the outset via the juxtaposition of the heavenly lullaby sung to Heine upon his entry into German lands and the better, earthlier counter-song it inspires in him (232). The distinction is also overlaid with vast dreamscapes that differ in function among themselves. As the relevant Heine scholarship has shown, the oneiric register constitutes a crucial and complex element of the Wintermärchen’s poetics (Höhn 2004, 126–267). Generally, Heine scorns German predilections for ideals, reveries, and intellectual freedoms, against which other peoples must make do on flat earth (Heine 1982, 247). Yet while Germans can only be free in their dreams, Heine exploits that oneiric register to stretch the bounds of poetic discourse from night into wakening day. In so doing, the Wintermärchen does not advance ideological demystification by jettisoning the mystified outright, but instead repurposes the supernatural stock of dreams, legends, and fairy tales, and the phantoms inhabiting them, to sound resonant notes of an earth-bound song directed at the concrete rectification of European social relations. A telling refunctionalization of the metaphoric stock in question occurs during Heine’s sojourn at the Rhine in Cologne, which provides the setting for chapters IV–VII. The city disturbs him no less than it did Hugo, but more for reasons of the religious oppression Heine associates with it. With some irony, Heine takes the liberty to praise Protestantism for its role in halting the cathedral’s completion and recommends that the building stay that way, as a ruin and monument to Germany’s power and Protestant mission (1982, 239). Given the segment’s overall trajectory, 33  In the Enlightenment formulation that Immanuel Kant famously gave it, Mündigkeit designated the mature comportment of articulate, thinking subjects who have the courage to use their own understanding as well as the ability to voice and publish the findings thereof. Heine takes liberties with the practice that are not necessarily anticipated in Kant’s rationalistic conception of what Mündigkeit might entail.

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this praise would seem to befit the interruption more than its agent. Heine dreams wildly in Cologne, leading to a two-part dream sequence in chapters VI and VII in which he is visited and then accompanied by a spectral doppelgänger wielding an executioner’s axe (244). Whereas Barbarossa was found to be a hardly serviceable past phantom, the Cologne phantom (“no ghost of the past . . . and . . . not very philosophical” [245; translation modified]) emerges to intervene precisely at the moment when Prussia—amid the millenary celebration of a German Empire (Zantop 1997, 179)—is endeavoring to complete the cathedral’s construction, straddle the emerging nation’s confessional divide, and wield Christianity as an element in its political hegemony. Opposing that closure with iconoclastic revolutionary force, and perhaps presaging the specter that would soon begin to haunt Europe for the next some 150 years,34 the Cologne phantom, acting out the narrator’s own thoughts (245), drives toward the realization of mere dreams, executes the poet’s wishes, and administers justice in response to need. The actions of this pair include taking a Passover-like tour through the Rhenian city (247) as well as demolishing the skeletal remains of the “three holy kings” (248), who are supposedly housed in the Cologne cathedral and who, in Heine’s associative poetics, simultaneously represent the Holy Alliance (240), whose yoke must be removed from all Europe. Notably, the Wintermärchen does not champion its wild, spectral deliverance of justice unambiguously. While dreaming of Cologne’s much-needed correction, Heine notes the possibility of unjust verdicts and acknowledges the deaths of those who will be sacrificed for every life saved during the Passover marking of homes (247–250). Conveying a painful sense of the poet’s uncertainty, culpability, and remorse at his own participation in the destruction, the Wintermärchen testifies remarkably to the costs of any sociostructural transformation. It is in the foreword later appended to the Wintermärchen that Heine lays out the fuller geographic and political repercussions—for borders, nations, and identities—of his poem’s postimperial conception of Europe. With patriotic—peculiar, exemplary, yet solitary—vision, Heine passionately intervenes in the nationalist animosity stoked during the Rhine 34  The Communist Manifesto was published and disseminated in 1848. As Briegleb relates in his editorial commentary to Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen, Heine had asked his young friend Karl Marx to write a foreword to the Wintermärchen that never materialized (Heine 1971, 1025–1026). Höhn (2004) provides an overview of their reciprocally influential relationship (127–131).

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Crisis. Enumerating revolutionary France’s historically groundbreaking achievements in laws, rights, and free institutions, he subordinates his Francophilia to a democratic and supranational ideal of a rational and good humanity, calling on Germans in particular (lest the revolutionary legacy be subjected to ruination?) to complete “le grand œuvre de la Révolution” by advancing universal democracy.35 On such a basis, not only would questions regarding Alsace and Lorraine be resolved, but also nationality—and national antagonisms—as such. And it is this antinational, or postnational, positioning on Heine’s part that enables him to assuage the fears of his countrymen regarding the Rhine’s geopolitical fate by declaring, in the same foreword, that he would never relinquish the Rhine to the French, simply because “the Rhine belongs to me. Yes, to me it belongs through inalienable birthright; of the free Rhine I am the still freer son . . . and I see no reason why the Rhine should belong to anyone else but its natives [Landeskindern]” (Heine 1971, 574).36 Fancifully appropriating the river, Heine not only confirms the demographic principle of human belonging following the juridical model of Jus soli against the claims, intrusions, and determinations of foreign states.37 He also stages himself as the voice and incarnation of the interzonal culture that the Wintermärchen elaborates over the course of its cold journey. Amid such a poetic balancing act on the way to Europe’s however distant social and democratic future, Heine’s desire “to ‘own’ a borderland” (Zantop 1997) between French and German peoples by no means concerned only these nations but, as Susanne Zantop has underscored in her important commentary, also involved Heine’s positionality with regard to Jewish-­ German culture as an assimilated German Jew exiled to France (185). As a quintessential inhabitant of Europe’s interzones, the poet’s identity was 35  According to Höhn (2004), it was due to German censorship that the phrase “Démocratie universelle” appeared only in the French version of the foreword (122). 36  Aaron Kramer’s English translation does not include the foreword. 37  By appealing to the individual rights of a nonnational Rhine’s Landeskinder, Heine also implicitly opposes the genealogical principle of citizenship (Jus sanguinus) that would hold sway over much of modern German history. This being acknowledged, the principle of Jus soli is also not necessarily devoid of nationalist underpinnings and restrictions. Amid the unprecedented levels of transcontinental migration seen in the twenty-first century, citizenship rights can no longer be adequately theorized through categories of territory and descent, but rather stand in need of critical review and reformulation in order to address the demographic realities of nation-states and accommodate the needs of all residents.

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bordered from without, yet the Wintermärchen breaks free of such imposed boundaries from within to hurl its bottled messages into the political currents of its author’s time.

Being Border That poets themselves suffer, and can seek to reconfigure, bordered existences is an odyssey explored in Georg Büchner’s Lenz, a story based on the travails of the migratory eighteenth-century writer Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Büchner’s “case study of an artistic, psychic, and therefore also social, border crosser” presents a haunted and haunting tale of sociopsychic ruination (Hauschild 1993, 499).38 Posthumously published in 1839, Büchner’s story precedes the Rhine Crisis. The task here is neither to force the integration of Lenz into the specifics of its historical circumstances nor to add to the voluminous scholarship by elaborating yet another reading of the work. Rather, it is to show how the interzonal context addressed in the foregoing analyses of Hugo’s Rhin and Heine’s Wintermärchen can yield a productive framework for interpreting Lenz by identifying focal points of its geocritical interpretation and their implications. The following remarks on Büchner’s narrative serve as a conclusion to this chapter and are therefore intended as an outline of further possibilities for the polyperspectival literary study of interzonal space. At the beginning of one of his penetrating essays, Étienne Balibar (2002) cites a line from André Green that reads, “You can be a citizen or you can be stateless, but it is difficult to imagine being a border” (75; italics in original). In the case of Büchner’s Lenz, one is confronted with the tale of a bordered and transgressive poet written by an exiled writer. Both of these figures are exterritorial. Born in 1751 into a German family that had emigrated to the Russian Empire, Lenz hailed from the Baltic region of Livonia, studied for a time in Königsberg, relocated to Strasbourg, sojourned at numerous towns in German lands, and passed away in Moscow in 1792 under little-known circumstances. Büchner’s story 38  I cite from biographer Jan-Christoph Hauschild’s (1993) description of Lenz in his chapter on Büchner’s Strasbourg exile. Although Hauschild notes that medical specialists have confirmed the documentation of Lenz’s illness as a case of schizophrenic psychosis (509), Richard Borgards (2015) has advocated addressing it in the historical terms of delusion, melancholy, and mania current to Büchner’s era (66).

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concerns Lenz’s stay at Waldersbach in Alsace under the care of Protestant minister and social reformer J. F. Oberlin. Büchner himself was born in 1813 in the Confederal German Grand Duchy of Hessen. The nineteenth-­ century poet and revolutionary began his medical studies in Strasbourg, but was required by Hessian law to complete them at the University of Gießen, He moved to Gießen only to flee westward again, ending up spending most of his short adult life in exile in France and then Switzerland. Büchner’s own trans-Rhenian path thus recapitulates that of his tale’s protagonist. Two passages from Büchner’s letters provide telling commentary on his cross-border transits. The first regards his journey from Strasbourg to Gießen in 1834: “Since crossing the Rhine Bridge, I feel devastated within, not a single emotion surfaces within me. I am an automaton, bereft of soul” (Büchner 1997, 289); and the second pertains to his westward flight back to Strasbourg the following year, which was necessitated by his involvement in publishing the 1834 revolutionary manifesto Der hessische Landbote (The Hessian Courier): “Since I crossed the border, I’m in high spirits. . . . It’s a great blessing to be freed from the constant, secret fear of arrest and of other forms of persecution that tormented me in Darmstadt” (Büchner 1986, 269). Although the significance and value of national and political difference that Büchner attests to in these commentaries would unfortunately not prove as fortuitous for the prerevolutionary subject Lenz,39 Büchner’s own exilic location surely played a role in his decision to turn to the Lenz material, which he began working on that same year, a decision that was also spurred by Karl Gutzkow’s encouragement for him to take on the stranded poet in light of the Strasbourg connection (Büchner 1997, 339).40 Given the German Confederation’s banning of the Deutsche Revue journal in which the story was to appear, Büchner’s work would itself end up stranded, remaining a fragment through to his untimely death in 1837. Büchner’s familiarity with the Alsatian region, his previous treks through the Vosges mountains, and his probable visit to Waldersbach41 all 39  That open borders are themselves hardly of determinate qualitative value has become a recurring insight of critical European studies, not least given debates as to the equity of EU’s internal common market. For an insightful approach that helps guard against the idealization and fetishization of border transcendence in the EU, see Schiffauer (2013, 109–116). 40  A promoter and supporter of Büchner’s literary endeavors, the same Gutzkow had prevented the publication of Heine’s poetry in 1838, as mentioned by Sammons (1979, 276). 41  In his editorial commentary included in the Suhrkamp edition of Lenz (Büchner 1998), Burghard Dedner postulates that Büchner’s visit to the town in the summer of 1835 served as a basis for the specificity of the text’s interaction with the spatial locale (57).

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serve to provide Lenz with a highly developed referential register. At the same time, the young writer’s scintillating literary modulation of Lenz’s hikes serves to convey and accentuate the protagonist’s psychic disturbance.42 A dream unto himself (Büchner 1986, 141), or convinced that the whole world is a dream (142), Lenz proves veritably haunted by phantoms (142), mental scissions (157), and internal conflicts (Zerrissenheit throughout) that are barely offset by the sense of solace and the feeling of being-at-home that occasionally assuaged him in the Steintal/Le Ban de la Roche while under Oberlin’s care.43 To be sure, Büchner’s writing of space adopts intense, self-reflexive, and experimental forms that have captivated the attention of literary scholars in their analyses of this proto-­ modernist author. From Lenz’s lack of fatigue, his irritation at not being able to walk on his head (139), to his mental antics—such as turning houses upside-down and dressing and undressing people in his imagination (157)—Lenz presents a wide and wild range of variously focalized acrobatics, transgressions, and distortions. Storming up and down the Vosges, Lenz and Lenz’s disturbed perambulations are as compulsively aberrant as they are epistemologically driven. In search of perspectives on reconnecting with human society as well as escaping from it, Lenz exudes a fierce realism that Lenz himself champions in the story’s famous conversation about art (146–148). Faced with the prospect of returning to the distant plains of his former home, Lenz cries out: “Go home? Go mad there? You know I can’t stand it anywhere but here, in this area; if I couldn’t go up a mountain and see the countryside . . . I’d go mad!” (148), a passage similar to a line in one of Büchner’s letters sent from Gießen (259). Where Heine’s view across the plains proves unbearable, yet Hugo’s view from above unavailable, Lenz’s predicament makes for an unsettled multidirectional scansion that relentlessly oscillates between delusion and defiance, pain and rest. In Andrew Webber’s (2017) analysis, from which I take the term scansion, Büchner’s textual entwinement of Lenz’s unstable mental state and the dramatic Vosgesian landscape constitutes a case of “psycho-­ topography”: “beset by the incapacity to take the proper measure of the 42  Hauschild (1993) has noted that the text’s depictions of Lenz’s Vosges correspond more to the higher southern part of the mountain range than the vicinity around Waldersbach (505–506). 43  See the Suhrkamp edition’s editorial note regarding heimlich and its variants as key to the entire story of the homeless and placeless protagonist (Büchner 1998, 537).

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terrain in which he finds himself and so to place identity in territory in any adequate fashion,” Lenz “is placed in a particular territorial scenography, only to be marked out as an extraterritorial identity” (251). Webber draws out the polysensoriality of the text and closely analyzes the poetic details of its chrono-topographical and hodological dimensions, but it is equally tempting—in light of Webber’s own references to Boden [territory] and Erde [earth] (245, 259) as well as Balibar’s (2002) account of individuals’ internalizations of their assigned nationalities (78)—to advance a politically oriented interpretation of Lenz focused on the bordered, transgressive subject in the Rhenian borderland of Alsace. Such an approach, which risks anachronistic and even normative claims, might grasp Lenz’s predicament in terms of his marginalization from a national space in which he was barely integrated. But whereas an entire dimension of Lenz’s personal difficulties surely concerned the cultural—that is, his impeded literary success as a professional author—Büchner’s rendering of the critical turn of Lenz’s health registers the protagonist’s condition at prenational, that is, individual psychic and somatic levels, thereby underscoring the possible irrelevance of Hugo’s preoccupation with geopolitical alignments and alliances to actually existing Rhenian individuals as well as the limits of the “self-emancipation” boldly touted by Heine in the Wintermärchen.44 Insofar as Lenz’s transgressions of geographic, behavioral, and psychic boundaries prove more symptomatic than ameliorative, the problems he faces clearly demand medical and social diagnosis and redress. Although any national clarification of the borderland would unlikely provide aid to the imperiled subject, the elective affinity (Hauschild 1993, 505) between Lenz’s multifold boundary transgressions as a suffering poet and maladjusted border crosser and Büchner’s own exilic predicament while composing the tale nonetheless points to an infrequently tapped but politically significant dimension of Lenz’s interpretation. In the constellation now in place—with Hugo scaling middle Rhenian heights to craft an intervention into Europe’s geopolitical trajectory; and Heine traversing the lower plains of the Rhenian watershed to denounce political and social relations in German lands and sound a transitional and revolutionary song of a better earthly life—Büchner’s account of an extreme case of interzonal disturbance in Alsace appears driven by a 44  Borgards (2015) associates Goethe’s characterization of Büchner’s poet with the pitfalls of the Enlightenment model of Mündigkeit insofar as it entails the “compulsion of having to direct oneself”—which is one of the challenges Lenz faces (56).

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productively materialist orientation. Against the poetically transfigured concerns of his Rhenian contemporaries, his unadorned approach attends to a borderline crisis at the level of personal suffering. This is made particularly evident in one of Lenz’s outbursts toward Oberlin, who in his capacity as spiritual caretaker (Seelsorger) tends to rely on a religious framework of interpretation and response that compounds Lenz’s malady.45 When Oberlin tries to assuage Lenz’s masochistic tendency to manage his psychic deterioration by inflicting self-harm, the latter looks up at the pastor with an expression of relentless suffering and declares, “if I were almighty [i.e. like God], you see, if I were, and I couldn’t bear this suffering, I would save [retten], save, I just want nothing but peace [Ruhe], peace, just a little peace and to be able to sleep” (Büchner 1986, 158). Although Oberlin holds Lenz’s ideas to be blasphemous, the latter’s alliterative repetitions of retten and Ruhe dovetail with what is perhaps the deepest and most fierce current of Büchner’s materialist poetics, namely the focus on pain and its amelioration. In Büchner’s drama Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) what remains after the self-aggrandizing ideologies of the French revolution have worn thin is Thomas Payne’s claim that the “smallest twinge of pain—and may it stir only in a tiny atom—makes a rent in Creation from top to bottom” (Büchner 1986, 96) as well as Lucile’s apperception, in the wake of the execution of Danton and her husband Desmoulins, that everything should live, “everything, the little fly there, the bird. Why not he? The stream of life ought to stop short if that one drop were spilled. The earth ought to be wounded from that blow” (121). Such memorable appeals align with Lenz’s quest—in art and life—for a “possibility of existence [Daseins]” (146), that is, the possibility of Überleben (survival) against mere Hinleben (living on), the bleak and already almost lifeless verb with which Lenz concludes (159).46 In the case of the German-Livonian poet, the possibility of survival attaches to the prospects of healing. In sounding such forms of resistance and unvanquished aspiration, Büchner’s Lenz attunes the human sensorium to an existential baseline that must lie at the crux of all culture, art, and politics. In the text’s insistence on this baseline, the interzonal tale from an already exilic poet of the pre-March period stands as a benchmark for any political project of a postimperial and postnational Europe: in its depiction of  On this point, see Dedner’s commentary in Büchner (1998, 51).  See also Dedner’s note regarding Büchner’s resistance to the source documents of his story, which ascribed suicidal tendencies to Lenz (Büchner 1998, 154). 45 46

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human peril in the interzone, Büchner’s Lenz reveals the fundamental existential concerns that politics must take up and cannot neglect. From here, Lenz connects to contemporary European challenges amid the vaster multiculture emerging from the perilous transcontinental migrations of the twenty-first century, at which point geocriticism confronts geopolitics. Furnishing its narrative from the Rhenian interzone with an existential and materialist baseline of human need, Büchner’s Lenz reveals that the democratic character of the new Europe—in the guise of the European Union or some other multinational vessel—will turn on its ability to generate policies that can address social challenges without contributing to further ruination. In so doing, the new continent would well pay heed to the most penetrating and forward-thinking legacies flowing through its interzonal pasts.

References Balibar, Étienne. 2002. What is a Border? In Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner, 75–86. New York: Verso. ———. 2004. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Translated by James Swenson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. Europe as Borderland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2): 190–215. ———. 2014. Equaliberty: Political Essays. Translated by James Ingram. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beichelt, Timm, et al. 2013. Einleitung: Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Europastudien. In Europa-Studien: Eine Einführung, ed. Timm Beichelt et al., 2nd ed., 9–33. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Beller, Manfred. 2017. Victor Hugo’s Le Rhin: French National Perspectives on a European River. In The Rhine: National Tensions, Romantic Visions, ed. Manfred Beller and J.Th. (Joep) Leerssen, 1–13. Boston, MA: Brill. https:// doi-­org.exlibris.colgate.edu/10.1163/9789004344068_003. Blackbourn, David. 2006. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. New York: W. W. Norton. Borchmeyer, Dieter. 2017. Heinrich Heines parodistische Demontage der ‘deutschen Mythologie.’. In Was ist deutsch? Die Suche einer Nation nach sich selbst, 280–295. Berlin: Rowohlt. Borgards, Richard. 2015. Lenz. In Büchner-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung, ed. Richard Borgards and Harald Neumeyer, 51–70. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag. Brophy, James M. 2007. Popular Culture in the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2013. The Rhine Crisis of 1840 and German Nationalism: Chauvinism, Skepticism, and Regional Reception. The Journal of Modern History 85 (1): 1–35. Büchner, Georg. 1986. Complete Works and Letters. Translated by Henry J.  Schmidt. Edited by Walter Hinderer and Henry J.  Schmidt. New  York: Continuum. ———. 1997. In Werke und Briefe. ed. Karl Pörnbacher, et al. [1988]. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. ———. 1998. In Lenz, ed. Burghard Dedner. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Febvre, Lucien. 1997. In Le Rhin: Histoire, mythes et réalités, ed. Peter Schöttler. Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin. Guérot, Ulrike. 2019. Warum Europa eine Republik werden muss: Eine politische Utopie. 3rd ed. Munich: Piper Verlag. Halle, Randall. 2014. The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hauschild, Jan-Christoph. 1993. Georg Büchner: Biographie. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler. Hegel, G. W. F. 1956. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications. Heine, Heinrich. 1971. Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen. In Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, vol. 4, 571–644. Munich: Hanser Verlag. ———. 1982. Germany: A Winter’s Tale. In Poetry and Prose, trans. Aaron Kramer. ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holum, 213–297. New York: Continuum. Hell, Julia, and Andreas Schönle, eds. 2010. Ruins of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1977. The Age of Revolution 1789-1848. London: Abacus. Höhn, Gerhard. 2004. Heine-Handbuch: Zeit, Person, Werk. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler. Hugo, Victor. 1987. Le Rhin: Lettres à un ami. In Œuvres Complètes: Voyages, ed. Claude Gély. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont. ———. 2010. Der Rhein. Translated by Annette Seemann. Berlin: Insel. ———. n.d. The Rhine. 2 vols. Boston: Estes and Lauriat. Ißler, Roland Alexander. 2019. Europas Strom, aber nicht Europas Grenze: Zur Genese einer europäischen Sicht auf den Rhein zwischen Rheinromantik und deutsch-französischer Rheinkrise. In Der Rhein  – Le Rhin: Im deutsch-­ französischen Perspektivenwechsel/Regards croisés franco-allemands, ed. Willi Jung and Michel Lichtlé, 161–204. Bonn: Bonn University Press. Matzat, Wolfgang. 2018. Verfremdung und Aneignung in Victor Hugos Le Rhin: Reisebericht zwischen Realität und Imagination. In Der Rhein—Le Rhin: Im deutsch-französischen Perspektivenwechsel—Regards croisés franco-allemands, ed. Willi Jung and Michel Lichtlé, 233–243. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht and Bonn University Press.

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Mildenberger, Hermann. 2010. “Nachwort.” In Victor Hugo, Der Rhein, trans. Annette Seemann, 101–108. Berlin: Insel. Plessen, Marie-Louise. 2016. Vater Rhein. In Der Rhein: Eine europäische Flussbiographie, ed. Marie-Lousie von Plessen, 252–269. New  York: Prestel Verlag. Said, Edward W. 2000. Reflections on Exile. In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 173–186. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sammons, Jeffrey L. 1979. Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schiffauer, Werner. 2013. Grenzen im Neuen Europa. In Europa-Studien: Eine Einführung, ed. Timm Beichelt et  al., 2nd ed., 109–116. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Tepl (Saaz), Johann von 2002. Death and the Ploughman. Translated by Michael West. London: Methuen. ———. n.d. Der Ackermann aus Böhmen [1414]. Biblioteca Augustiana, http:// www.fh-­a ugsburg.de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/15Jh/Tepl/ tep_tod.html. Webber, Andrew. 2017. Charting Extraterritorial Identity in the Opening of Lenz. In Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Robert Gillet, Ernest Schonfield, and Daniel Steuer, 244–260. Boston: Brill. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Winder, Simon. 2019. Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Zantop, Susanne. 1997. 1844—After a self-imposed exile in Paris, Heinrich Heine writes Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen. In Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996, ed. Sander L.  Gilman and Jack Zipes, 178–185. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Enrico Pea and the Awareness of Never-­Ending Detachment (Alexandria, Egypt 1896–1914) Stefano Giannini

There is no /place /on earth /where I / can settle down Giuseppe Ungaretti, Wanderer

Nunziata—the Malavoglia family’s young female friend in Giovanni Verga’s celebrated 1881 novel I Malavoglia (translated as The House by the Medlar Tree)—did not view Alexandria with a benevolent eye. Her father had just abandoned her to try his luck in the Egyptian city, never to return home again (Verga 1983, 21). Readers of Verga’s masterpiece never learn the fate of Nunziata’s father, but given Alexandria’s growing economic and cultural relevance toward the end of the nineteenth century, one

S. Giannini (*) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_5

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imagines he might have found some kind of economic prosperity.1 History tells us that Alexandria attracted many Italians shortly before and after the formation of the new Italian state in 1861. The first of these Italian immigrants were political exiles who had fled their homeland due to their activities against the rulers of the Italian states. They were followed by economic immigrants drawn mainly to work on the Suez Canal. Finally, after the 1898 political reactionary crackdown, additional Italian exiles (socialists and anarchists) moved to Alexandria fleeing persecution and seeking to build their lives on the southeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.2

A Soon-to-Be Writer Arrives in Alexandria Although my broader research looks at the notion of exile and its relationship with a center/periphery spatial and political opposition, in this chapter I focus my investigation on Enrico Pea (1881–1958) and his memoir Vita in Egitto (Life in Egypt), published in Italy in 1949. Along with Nunziata’s father and thousands of other immigrants, Pea also found welcome in Alexandria. He left Seravezza, Italy, at the age of fifteen in 1896 and arrived in Alexandria seeking work. At such a young age, he did not have any particular professional skills. He worked odd jobs, as a household servant (an experience revisited in his Il servitore del diavolo3), a foundry worker, a mechanic, and eventually as a merchant, selling goods between Alexandria and Tuscany. In 1914, he and his family left Alexandria and returned to Italy. After his arrival in Egypt, Pea became a writer thanks to the encouragement of his friend Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), a young but already promising man of letters (Re 2003, 180–183 et passim). Pea has long been considered an unconventional figure in Italian literature, in part due also to his transformation from atheist anarchist to religious man in his adulthood. His work elicited strong interest among several critics and writers but never reached a large audience of readers. The Egypt he observed between 1896 and 1914 was formally still a 1  Similar references about the wealth one could accumulate in Egypt are found in Enrico Castelnuovo’s 1908 novel, I Moncalvo (2019, 21). 2  Egyptian khedivés (Ottoman viceroys) embarked on several important infrastructure projects that attracted workers from Egypt and abroad: “a railway network, a canal system, an extensive urban building program, the Aswan reservoirs, and the Suez Canal” (Carminati 2017, 132). 3  Pea, Il servitore del diavolo (Milan: Treves, 1931), included in Pea 2008. For Pea’s bibliography cf. Tuccini, 2012.

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­ rovince of the Ottoman Empire albeit under British military control, but p it had independence ambitions and was increasingly attracting international economic interests. In this heterogeneous political and social environment, Pea stands out for his understanding of the interactions between the European centers of power and a large multi-ethnic city on the periphery of Europe. Alexandria was predominantly an Arab city yet with powerful Western European traits, combining a strong anarchist presence with influential capitalist enterprises (Abulafia 2011, 589–592; Carminati 2017, 127–153). Among the European powers, Italy also played a role in the Alexandrian political scene, seeking to establish a sphere of influence in Egypt largely due to the high number of Italian residents. A consequence of Pea’s human and artistic experience is the insight his work provides into the dynamics between the multiple nations, languages, and cultural identities that he witnessed over the course of his many years working in Egypt and his reflections as a resident of Alexandria. Mary Louise Pratt’s work (2008) on the influence of travel writing and the transculturation it triggers in metropolitan centers of power4 continues to be applicable for examining the European knowledge that was disseminated about Alexandria, even in the case of writings, like Pea’s, that exceed the travel genre.5 His work undermines the notion that all-too-­ powerful European centers successfully shaped the political and cultural understanding of the peripheries they identified as such. Pea’s writings reveal the fault lines of European states that failed to understand not only how their peripheries were changing but also how those peripheries were in turn influencing “the center.” Pea’s representation of life in Alexandria resists the portrayal, prevalent in his time, of the ideal periphery as a place that will be bent to mirror the center so as to satisfy the internal consumption of cultural information. Pea’s Alexandria is not a tamed place but an ebullient one, a city whose cultural diversity strives to affirm itself in the face of colonial power. For example, Pea notes that the Alexandrian branch of a Greek bank that employed one of the characters of Vita in Egitto was considered to be no less important than the bank’s Athenian 4  Pratt identifies these late nineteenth-century centers of power with the northern European countries. 5  The many Italian travelers/writers who have written about this sought-after destination include Annie Vivanti, Terra di Cleopatra (Milan: Mondadori, 1925); Giuseppe Ungaretti, Quaderno egiziano, in Vita d’un uomo; Il deserto e dopo: Prose di viaggio e saggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1961) (cf. n. 12); and G.B. Angioletti and Piero Bigongiari, Testimone in Egitto (Florence: Il Fiorino, 1958).

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headquarters.6 In fact, the character’s Greek friends view Alexandria as the second capital of Greece. The scenario is further complicated by the fact that Pea was from Italy and not from the European power that controlled Egypt. Ideologically distant from any notion of holding power over Egyptians, Pea problematizes the lives of Alexandria’s residents by questioning colonial authority, nationalities, border crossings, and the cultural and political problems afflicting marginal lives.

A Unique Periphery End-of-the-century Alexandria was on the political and economic agenda of many European states, as attested by the long and detailed 1929 entry “Alessandria d’Egitto” in the Italian Encyclopedia.7 It was officially a city of the Ottoman Empire, but in fact the whole of modern-day Egypt was increasingly strengthening its efforts to escape Ottoman control.8 Alexandria was a unique place within the Mediterranean Basin: far from Europe in common parlance,9 yet it was close enough that wealthier Alexandrian families left Egypt every summer to sojourn in cities like Paris and Venice as well as renowned spa towns like Montecatini or Vichy (Pea 1995, 18). 6  “La banca dove Nicola Zografo era impiegato, aveva la sede in Atene, ma la succursale di Alessandria non era da meno della sede centrale, per importanza di affari. Non per nulla Alessandria viene considerate dagli attuali Elleni come seconda capitale della Grecia. Non c’è Greco, si può dire, che almeno una volta in vita sua non abbia visitata la città del grande Alessandro” (Pea 1995, 23) [The headquarters of the bank that employed Nicola Zografo was in Athens, but the Alexandria branch was no less important. Not for nothing was Alexandria considered by the modern Greeks as the second Greek capital. There are no Greeks, it could be said, who have not visited the city of Alexander the Great at least once on in their lifetimes]. 7  Alessandria d’Egitto, Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, ad vocem. The entry, written in 1929, consists of a detailed description of classical and modern Alexandria. It contains demographic data, information about the arrival and departure of immigrants, and descriptions of the city and its neighborhoods as well as its industry, commerce, and economic activity. 8  In 1841, the Sultan agreed to a khedivial government of Egypt. Muhammad Ali Pacha (1769–1849), who served as khedivé of Egypt between 1805 and 1848 had the right to bestow succession upon his descendants. 9  As it was for the Malavoglia family: “Once ‘Ntoni Malavoglia, while knocking about the village, had met two young men who had shipped out from Riposto a few years before to seek their fortunes and had returned from Trieste, or Alexandria in Egypt or, anyway, some far-off place, and were spending money hand over fist in the tavern, even more money than Compare Naso or Master Cipolla” (Verga 1983, 162).

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Alexandria was capable of negotiating its existence as a large city simultaneously on the edge of Europe10 and just outside of it—a spur of the Orient jutting westward. In short, Alexandria could be called a sui generis contact zone. As Pratt (2008) observes, contact zone is not a colonial frontier term that stresses the point of view of colonialist expansion, but refers to a space that “shifts the center of gravity and the point of view. It invokes the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect” (8). Such a space provides an opening for subjugated groups to shape their identity. Bertrand Westphal (2011) defines this space as the “center of the periphery” or “a contact zone between the center that dissipates and a periphery that affirms (69). If a contact zone emphasizes attempts toward reciprocal interaction between colonizers and the colonized, Alexandria was a city where multiple sides coexisted and interacted, succeeding as well as failing in the efforts to understand one another. Alexandria is sui generis because in addition to the British who controlled it, other groups played significant roles: a French population, with its cultural prestige; multiple non-Arab immigrant communities (Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, Syrians, Armenians, Maltese, Cypriots, Jews, Russians, Turks, Maghribis) that lived in precarious economic and social conditions and often mixed with Arab Alexandrians; and the large majority of Arab Alexandrians residents themselves. With such a mosaic of ethnicities, Alexandria became a prominent example of a city marked by multiple interactions between, and sometimes clashes over, notions of nationality and citizenship. Commenting on early anti-colonial resistance and cross-nationalist interaction, Elleke Boehmer (2002) notes that “different ideas of resistance might be picked up and developed in cross-border contact zones (like the metropolis), or reinflected and reinforced by being moved across borders and then adapted to local contexts.” She also points out “the extent to which a liberatory politics represented a cross-hatching of different, often syncretized traditions” (19). These characterizations could certainly be applied to the Italian residents of Alexandrian and their numerous political affiliations and cultural traditions. Their number kept growing, reaching, according to various estimates, between 35,000 and 50,000 residents by the 1930s, second in size only to the city’s Greek population (Tignor 1984, 254; Amicucci 2000, 81–94). Within this large ethnic 10  During antiquity, the city was known as Alexandrea ad Aegyptum; that is, “a city toward Egypt,” or an extension of Europe into Egypt. See Hanley (2017), 37.

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agglomeration, the Italian residents played significant economic roles11 and heavily influenced the urban environment with their architectural work (Awad 2008, 111–264). However, the Italian residents were far from comprising a uniform group. In fact, their seeming homogeneity included starkly different social, economic, and political orientations. Italians were often divided by their political affiliations, which ranged from anarchist and socialist to moderate bourgeoisie and mason; as well as by economic means, with a substantial number of them employed in low-­ paying jobs (Re 2008, 113). It is crucial to keep in mind the transitional historical and spatial realities that influenced the notions of nation and citizenship in a “contact zone” such as Alexandria at the end of the nineteenth century. What governed Alexandrians’ understanding of nation and citizenship was not the notions developed by European countries, but the customs of a quasi-­ independent Egypt that was still officially part of the Ottoman Empire, a vast area whose capital city Constantinople granted flexibility to the exercise of local power. Unlike the British who controlled Egypt, other Alexandrian expatriate communities—especially the Italians—showed a remarkable ability to absorb and adapt to local customs while preserving the distinct mores of their countries of origin (Gorman 2015, 138–141). Ultimately, the Alexandria experienced by Pea embodied what Iain Chambers describes as the essence of the modern city: In its everyday details, its mixed histories, languages and cultures, its elaborate evidence of global tendencies and local distinctions, the figure of the city, as both a real and an imaginary place, apparently provides a ready map for reading, interpretation and comprehension. (Chambers 1994, 92)

It follows that this map, the logical tool for navigating a city, seems good only for initial reconnoitering: it helps us move effectively around streets, blocks, and neighborhoods but—as Chambers warns—this preliminary orientation “hardly exhausts the reality in which we find ourselves”:

11   In his detailed travel account El desastre, Mexican educator and politician José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) observes while visiting Egypt in 1926–1927 that in Alexandria “el comercio y los negocios están en manos de italianos o de judíos nacionalizados ingleses” [commerce and businesses are controlled by Italians or British naturalized Jews] (Vasconcelos 1938, 700).

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For a city’s denuded streets, buildings, bridges, monuments, squares and roads are also the contested sites of historical memory and provide the contexts, cultures, stories, languages, experiences, desires and hopes that course through the urban body. (92)

Pea’s Alexandria is an ideal scenario for testing Chamber’s intuition. The Alexandria-born Ungaretti long accused the city of possessing a peculiar yet infallible power to erase both its history and space. According to him, it was impossible to represent his city of birth, which he describes as submerged by the sun while its ancient port was submerged by the depth of the sea. Blinding light and the darkness of the deep waters make the representation of Alexandria an impossible, never-ending process (Ungaretti 1975, 203–204). It seems obvious that Alexandria shares the destiny of other cities that have become literary cities.12 We know a literary Alexandria like we know literary Dublin, Florence, Lisbon, Paris, Trieste, or Venice, thanks to the eyes of the many writers who drew their own maps to chart these “multiform, heterotopic, diasporic” places (Chambers 1994, 93). In Vita in Egitto, Pea tells a story that slips itself between the streets, buildings, and neighborhoods of Alexandria, a story that lays out 12  Brought to international prominence by a sustained economic boom since the end of the nineteenth century, Alexandria soon became known and exalted throughout the Western hemisphere thanks to a Western literature that straddled the genres of fiction and travel guide. E.M. Forster wrote Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922), a widely successful travel manual that relied less on maps than on textual descriptions that brought together history, customs, and observations about the old and present-day city. Evaristo Breccia published his successful Alexandrea ad Aegyptum (1914) to illustrate the attractiveness of the classical and modern city. Lawrence Durrell’s celebrated Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960) was of course set in Alexandria. The immense art of Alexandrian poet Constantin Kavafy (1863–1933) provided an insider view of Alexandria from a son of the city. Shortly after, Ungaretti followed suit, writing about Alexandria in his poetry and later in his Quaderno egiziano (1931), a travel narrative he wrote as a follow-up to his 1931 journey back to the city of his birth. Fausta Cialente (1898–1994) devoted short stories and novels to the decades she spent in Alexandria and Cairo. See Evaristo Breccia, Alexandrea ad Aegyptum: Guide de la ville ancienne et moderne et du Musée Gréco-Romain (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1914 [in French] and 1922 [in English]); E.M.  Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide (London: Whitehead, Morris, 1922); Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandrian Quartet (London: Faber & Faber, 1962); Giuseppe Ungaretti, Quaderno egiziano, in Vita d’un uomo: Il deserto e dopo; prose di viaggio e saggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1961); Fausta Cialente, “Pamela o la bella estate,” Occidente 13, no. 12 (1935): 97-126, Cortile a Cleopatra (Milan: Corticelli, 1936), and Ballata levantina (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962). For a detailed account of the many authors who contributed to the birth of literary Alexandria, see Westphal 2005, 63–84; Halim 2013.

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no travel guide and does not even precisely recount a linear plot. Neither fiction nor history, Vita in Egitto retraces Pea’s memory of a seemingly uneventful life, but this memory also captures a strident voice on colonialism. By presenting unexpected and sometimes contradictory interpretations of city life, Pea provides the context for its understanding. To convey his interpretation, he employs memory at full circle, in a dialectic between remembering and forgetting, thereby revealing an Alexandria that tries to hide itself, a city that is not an obvious colonial space that meekly follows dictates from the centers of power. His Alexandria eventually reveals its complexity thanks to the singular and multiple views of its marginal residents: exiles and immigrants who invigorate an antagonistic cultural discourse.

The Crisis of Modernity As an immigrant in a foreign country, Pea’s allogeneous points of view on adaptation to a new culture, and new customs, languages, and laws, constituted a provocation at a time when the colonial effort was strengthening its grip over the African continent.13 Pea’s designation as an economic immigrant bears scrutiny, insofar as binary choices risk leaving out crucial insights. The designation is correct, but not complete. One must first examine into the exile vs. migrant opposition: an exile is someone forced to leave their country because of political or religious differences, war, or other grave adversities, whereas a migrant is one who leaves their country without being forced to do so and who is capable of returning. The issue, however, cannot be resolved in such clear-cut terms. There are individuals whose expulsions are combined with a voluntary decision to leave, or those who leave on an entirely voluntary basis as an expression of protest. There are also cases of migrations provoked by economic necessities that over time turn into experiences of exile or, more commonly, of self-exile. This latter case would more aptly apply to Pea. His intellectual and emotional journey began when he was a teenager and culminated in his growing awareness of an existential unease that surfaced during his many 13  I am adopting Westphal’s definition of allogeneous as the point of view that exists in between the endogenous (autochthonic vision of space) and the exogenous (the point of view of the traveler, which includes exoticism) points of view of any observers in relation to their space of reference (in this case, Alexandria). An allogeneous point of view “is characteristic of those who have settled into a place, becoming familiar with it, but still remaining foreigners in the eyes of the indigenous population” (Westphal 2011, 128).

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years in Alexandria and then sharpened during his later years in Italy. Romano Luperini’s discussion of modern exiles fits Pea’s experience. Luperini discusses the fragile trajectory of intellectual exiles, as exemplified in the breathtaking opening of a poem by Pea’s friend Ungaretti: “He was called /Mohammed Sheab//Descendant/of emirs of nomads/suicide/ for he no longer had/a homeland” (Ungaretti 1975, 11). Ungaretti chiseled a formidable manifesto of the malaise of rootlessness afflicting modernity, by bringing to the fore the pain of his Egyptian friend Sheab, a young man whose experience of this rootlessness came to an end in a small apartment in Paris (Luperini 2013, 39–46).14 Pea did not follow Sheab’s path, but he experienced his pain. For Pea, exile eventually becomes an internal disquiet that configures an awareness of the perpetual search for a home that will never be found. Can his decision to leave Italy in search of a different life, in his eagerness to leave behind hardships and perhaps the recent wounds of a stressful life, be considered exile? Is Pea an economic migrant or a self-exile? Within his experience, the two concepts overlap across time. Claudio Guillén, a Spanish exile who was part of the 1939 destierro [exile] provoked by the Spanish Civil War, identifies two models, rooted in classical times, for the definition of exile (Guillén 1998). The first comes from Plutarch, who disputes the idea that exile must trigger a sense of malaise in human beings. Although exiles will experience the pain of detachment from family and friends, Plutarch writes, the absence of political strife and opportunities for otium [repose] and a new freedom make up for that pain (32). The second model is provided by Ovid, the figure par excellence of the exile who suffers unquenchable pain due to separation. In opposition to the cynic-stoic attitude favored by Plutarch, Ovid’s position gives voice to the lamentation, nostalgia, and protest of writers who live in exile and engage with their experiences away from home (36). As Guillén observes, many variations and nuances fill in the gulf between these two extreme models. According to him, however, what remains constant in the experiences of exiled subjects is the existential impossibility of escaping their condition of exile. As a result, the “sun of the exiles” always shines on them: fueled by the internalization of the loss of one’s primeval home, 14  Prior to Sheab’s tragic death, Pea had welcomed the younger Ungaretti into his group of anarchists that gathered in his warehouse known as the Baracca Rossa. Ungaretti, destined to a luminous career as poet, soon started encouraging Pea’s forays into literature. The two remained friends for life.

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they are instilled with a modicum of wisdom and a healthy mistrust for the immanent (96). Pea’s experience of hardship could be described as a variation of Guillén’s subtle analysis.

A Fragment of the Italian Diaspora Torn between Plutarch’s and Ovid’s models, Pea wrote with a critical distance that was the unique product of his time and space. He wrote Vita in Egitto between the end of the 1930s and the mid-1940s upon his return to Italy, where he also reflected on experiences that transformed an inchoate accumulation of Alexandrian images into a cognizance of the crisis of modernity.15 Pea had written his first literary works from exile (poems, fables, and short stories), but it was back in Italy, where he wrote about his life in Alexandria as a young man. His Vita in Egitto, after mishaps that delayed its completion (the first draft was destroyed in an air raid over Viareggio in 1943 [Somigli 2002, 248]), was published in 1949. To further complicate the scenario, it is crucial to stress that Vita in Egitto could not fail to absorb the tragic events that followed Pea’s departure from Alexandria: the largely failed attempt of the fascist regime to fascistize the Alexandrian-Italian community, as well as the trials of World War II. Since the late nineteenth century, the Italian state had attempted to strengthen its relationship with Egyptian-Italians, a trend that gained momentum with the advent of fascism.16 However, the large and diverse Italian community in Egypt had always shown a firm attachment to local customs and alliances and demonstrated an ability to navigate external political overreach.17 Freemasons and anarchists, to varying degrees, 15  In a letter from Pea to Franco Antonicelli dated January 31, 1939, Pea informs his friend that he is already working on his memoir: “Caro Antonicelli, grazie del vostro ricordo. Salutate per me Somarè e Linati. Non posso promettere nulla per subito. Anche per quel che riguarda la Vita in Egitto è cosa che dovrebbe aver seguito e quel che ho fatto fin qui è poco. Ma non sarò sordo al vostro affettuoso invito e vedrò e scriverò” (Pea 1939) [Dear Antonicelli, thank you for your thoughts. Please give my best to Somarè and Linati. I cannot promise anything in the short term. Also with regard to Life in Egypt, it’s something that needs to be attended to, as what I’ve done so far is not much. But I am not indifferent to your affectionate invitation and will see to it and write to you.] 16  The fascist regime started by supporting Italian schools and newspapers (Petricioli 1997, 179–191) and eventually attempted to organize groups akin to paramilitary corps among Italian residents (Petricioli 2007, 372–374). 17  For a discussion of the relationship between Alexandrian identity and allegiance to Italy, see Lazarev (1992), 92–109. For a similar discussion about relations to the Greeks of Alexandria, see also Trimi and Yannakakis (1992), 81–87.

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opposed direct attempts from Rome to influence and control them through the Capitulations, a complex set of laws stemming from Ottoman rule that allowed citizens of European countries to be tried in accordance with laws of their home countries for crimes perpetrated in Egypt.18 Pea’s Vita in Egitto is a remarkable embodiment of an attitude that balances love and nostalgia for Italy with an embrace of the values of this Italian community outside of Italy that was steeped in a multicultural environment, accustomed to diversity, and wary of states and borders. Overall, Pea’s text testifies to the nature of the Italian residents of Alexandria, who should be understood not as a colony but as members of a diaspora, as theorized by Donna Gabaccia (2008). According to Gabaccia, Italian migration constituted many diasporas, because Italy was born only in 1861 out of many smaller states. Her understanding of the term diaspora broadens the term’s original definition based on the dispersion of Jews in antiquity. Although not forced to abandon their country for reasons of war or laws, many Italians departed due to dismal economic prospects. Gabaccia argues that thanks to the vicissitudes of the formation of the Italian state, the migration of Italians away from Italy was not associated with ideas of nationalism, although that certainly changed with the advent of fascist rule (3). If Italian authors who wrote about their experiences abroad gave little space to nationalism, readers still experienced nostalgia for their paese. Unburdened by notions linked to nationalism, an author like Pea, imbued with anarchist ideals intertwined with religious fervor, plotted a path forward that identified elements of supranationalism in order to question the new, all-too-powerful Western states. He accomplished this goal by mingling together elements of anarchism, socialism, and religion.

18  The Capitulations were introduced during the sixteenth century to guarantee protections to certain categories of subjects and non-Ottoman individuals. Over the centuries, this system changed, depriving the Egyptian courts of their power to try non-Egyptians. European countries used the Capitulations to exert control over their citizens outside their state jurisdictions (Hanley 2017, 11–15).  For the presence of Freemasonry in Egypt, cf. Locci, 2014.

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The Multi-ethnic City The adjective cosmopolitan, which is often associated with Alexandria, must be used with caution, because it can fallaciously convey a sense of extensive and homogeneous cultural refinement and social harmony that does not correspond to the reality. Alexandria was a very large city— already approaching a million residents in Pea’s time—with considerable numbers of non-Arab residents. Yet these non-Arab residents never exceeded 20 percent of the total population. Some Arab residents achieved levels of wealth similar to those of many European residents, although many more did not. The same goes for the European residents: not all of them found good economic fortunes, and in fact the majority of them lived economically marginal lives. While acknowledging the accumulation of wealth in many European residents, Pea lamented the city’s socioeconomic discrepancies, citing as an example the frequent travels to Europe of a privileged few, as opposed to the fellah (peasants), who were chained to the land: Soltanto i poveri restavano in Egitto, al torrido dell’estate, e gli indigeni, e quelli che lavorano la terra e non la posseggono: i fellah, che sono poi i veri artefici del benessere di questa cosmopolita popolazione che infesta le due grandi città: Cairo e Alessandria. (Pea 1995, 18) [In the scorching summer, only the poor remained in Egypt, and the indigenous, and those who till the land and do not own it: the fellahs. They are, in fact, the true makers of the wealth of this cosmopolitan population that infests the two large cities: Cairo and Alexandria.]

Warning against facile vocabulary generalizations that trample over factors of space and social class, Will Hanley (2017) notes that the “colonialist fantasy of elite, cosmopolitan Alexandria was limited to the few thousands of Europeans who spoke French” (166). Underscoring the danger of overlooking factors like nationality, religion, and ethnicity, Hanley describes a vulgar cosmopolitanism in Alexandria that he defines as “low, unrefined, plain, common, ordinary” that went largely unnoticed in standard media organs of the time (“books, newspapers, letters and memoirs” [31]) but represented the majority of everyday interactions among the city’s numerous communities, which were historically positioned as liminal neighborhoods in service of the central area (33–37).

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Pea’s Vita in Egitto unsettled readers who expected to see reinforced stereotypes about the near east as an exotic space. The book’s portrayal of the everyday social interactions of Alexandrians diverges from the elitist scenarios showcased in the memoirs denounced by Hanley. Pea’s Alexandria is a beautiful city that also contains misery that he makes no attempt to hide. He describes the neighborhoods along the coastline dotted by villas, hotels, and golf and tennis courts, contrasting them with the more common, impoverished areas. He writes about the city’s upper classes and foreign visitors taking touristic visits to the latter areas: Zona di altre classi: non di noi operai, ché in quanto a salire è difficile. . . . Scendono quaggiù a introgolarsi per la spregiudicatezza di una notte. I  forestieri. Per dire poi di avere tutto veduto e tutto vissuto. Passano dunque dalla via di Pipicco anche coppie vestite alla gran moda di Parigi, e si confondono appena scantonata la strada, al popolo cosmopolita in baldoria. (Pea 1995, 66) [An area for other social classes: not for us laborers, because climbing {the class ladder} is difficult. . . . They descend down here, to experience immorality for one night. The foreigners. So that later on they can say they saw and lived through everything. Even couples dressed up like in a Parisian fashion show pass through Pipicco’s street and, just around the corner, they mingle again with the reveling cosmopolitan crowd.]

His Alexandria has many faces and internal borders, which Pea is not afraid to reveal: A sinistra della spianata invece, oltre la via ferrata, è il quartiere di Moharam-­ Bey. Quartiere povero, di Ebrei, di Arabi e di Europei lavoratori alla periferia della città. (Pea 1995, 52) [On the left of the esplanade, beyond the railway, there is the Moharam-Bey neighborhood. It’s a poor neighborhood, with Jews, Arabs, and European workers on the outskirts of the city.]

The neighborhood of Moharam-Bey is situated further south of the shore, beyond the railways and close to an urban clearing where an unexpected cosmopolitan crowd gathers to attend a public execution (Pea 1995, 49–59). This is the neighborhood where Pea first came in contact

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with his early political ideals shortly after his arrival in Alexandria.19 The narrator conveys contrasting feelings that underline the sharp divisions of a city balancing between colonial habits and murmurs of discontent that will prevail only after the end of World War II: Né tutta è nera, del resto, (la memoria mi avverte) la vita di quando ero in Egitto, ché, pure, cose e avvenimenti belli e umani, tentarono, non di rado, insinuarsi. . . . Ma là, il più, era su bitume e zolfo . . . che andavo camminando nelle vie della scellerata città che per civile e moderna intende soltanto far lisce le strade d’asfalto. (Pea 1995, 61)20 [Not all is dark, after all (my memory cautions me), of my life when I was in Egypt, because beautiful and human things and events did not infrequently seek to insert themselves {into my life}. . . . But over there, the majority {of these memories} were of its bitumen and sulfur . . . that I walked over on the streets of that wicked city, which understands civility and modernity only as smooth asphalt roads.]

Human beings’ yearning for a better life papers over the memories of those who were able to avoid the miserable neighborhoods, as Pea understands human desires and ambitions. And yet a call for social justice remains at the heart of his writing. His belief in justice was strengthened 19  “In questo sobborgo ebbi il primo contatto anarchico, appena arrivato in Egitto. . . . Da Pilade ebbi la prima lezione sulla ‘società futura.’ Fui chiamato: ‘simpatizzante’ che è il primo grado (anche l’anarchia ha i suoi gradi), ‘compagno’ lo sarei diventato più tardi” [In this suburb I had my first contact with anarchy, fresh upon my arrival in Egypt. . . . From Pilade I received my first lesson on ‘the future society.’ I was named a ‘sympathizer,’ which defines the entry level (anarchy also has its hierarchy). I would be named a ‘comrade’ later on] (Pea 1995, 53). 20  Cf.: “La città di Alessandro però non è tutta così. Anzi è Bellissima e quasi ovunque pulita. È lì che è stata messa in prigione la fortuna. I quartieri nuovi dei signori hanno strade alberate e larghe levigate da asfalto rosso. Noi, siamo all’altro polo: nel quartiere bastardo, l’infimo, più giù è difficile andare: Arabi, Italiani, Greci ed altre dodici razze miscuglio di miseria internazionale. Appena qualcuno può, evade: si trasferisce più in là, e si vergogna poi a ripassare sul terriccio del nostro stradino malgrado sia un po’ ripulito da che ci ha picchiato il vaiuolo.” [The city of Alexander, however, is not always as such. In fact, it is beautiful and clean almost everywhere. It’s there that fortune was locked in. The new neighborhoods of the rich boast wide, tree-lined streets, smoothed in red asphalt. Us, we are on the opposite side: in the bastard neighborhood, the lowest. It’s difficult to sink lower: Arabs, Italians, Greeks, and twelve more races, a jumble of international misery. As soon as possible, people escape: they move a bit farther away and feel shame at walking back on the gravel of our tiny street, even though it is now a bit cleaner after the last bout of smallpox.] (Pea 1940, 13)

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by his experiences in a city that had become a magnet for anarchists, the majority of whom were from Italy although also from France, Russia, Lebanon, Syria, and Bulgaria.21 The Egyptian authorities tolerated their presence, and the young Pea joined their ranks (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, 117). Indeed, he became one of their lead organizers.

Pea’s Baracca Rossa at the Center of the Periphery On the second floor of his commercial business building on Hamman el-­ Zahab street, close to the harbor, Pea owned the so-called Baracca Rossa (“The Red Barrack,” in the sense of a humble abode), a structure with red-painted walls that Pea initially used as a business warehouse. Likely built after 1903, the Baracca Rossa no longer exists, and yet it was immortalized in Ungaretti’s memories as a youth in Egypt (Ungaretti 1959, 28). The Baracca Rossa soon became a gathering point for anarchists, socialists, atheists, revolutionaries, and politicians, people from all creeds and nationalities who used it as a classroom and political fight club. Pea describes the Baracca Rossa as a place malfamata per la gente scomunicata e sovversiva che da tutte le parti del mondo ivi si dava convegno con i propositi ribelli alla società e a Dio. . . . Di quella Baracca Rossa io ero il fondatore e il padrone. Ma non la comunanza di quelle idee rivoltose: le risse sociali di questo torbido mondo, furono polo di attrazione tra me e Ungaretti. . . . Da allora partecipammo alle dispute e alle risse in quell’inferno di più lingue che era la Baracca Rossa, stando all’opposizione sempre per sfogo di gioventù. (Pea 1995, 170-171) [infamous for the excommunicated and subversive people from all parts of the world who gathered there with rebellious intentions against society and God. . . . Of that Baracca Rossa, I was the founder and the owner. But it was not the commonality of those rebellious ideas that attracted me and Ungaretti to each other, but the social brawls of that murky world. . . . From then on, we participated in the disputes and the brawls of the multilingual inferno that the Baracca Rossa was, always as contrarians, to let off the steam of youth.] 21  See Khuri-Makdisi (2010), 131–132 et passim, for the preeminent role Alexandria played in attracting and developing anarchist networks.

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In Vita in Egitto, Pea discusses the freedom he enjoyed in Alexandria— in contrast with the political climate in Italy—to express a dissenting voice on colonialism, offering an initial reflection on the idea of the homeland: “la convivenza internazionale in questa Babele d’Egitto m’aveva convinto dell’inutilità e del danno delle patrie” (Pea 1995, 8) [living together in this international Babel of Egypt had convinced me of the uselessness and harm of one’s homeland]. His voice provides a critical perspective on these concepts, which he was poised to scrutinize ahead of times. An example of this scrutiny comes in Pea’s description of his young friend Pipicco, an irregular guest at Pea’s warehouse. Pipicco does not share the ideas of the Baracca regulars, being close to his fervently Catholic mother. Yet, he is another symbol of Alexandria’s multicultural atmosphere that impregnates Pea’s pages. His mother is a Spaniard, while his father is Italian from Empoli. Pipicco states that has no traits from his father, not even subversive political ideas, yet he confesses that if he had to swear, he would swear in Italian, not in Spanish. The young, frail, and naïve Pipicco is, according to Pea, the embodiment of an Alexandrian multi-ethnic and tolerant society that has a different understanding of nationalities and borders: Dell’Italia, Pipicco non sa nulla. Né della Spagna. È nato qui. Allevato alle scuole degli “ignorantelli” che non dicono messa. . . . Pipicco manca di nazionalità. È figlio del paese. E non ha malizia. (Pea 1995, 65) [Pipicco knows nothing about Italy, nor Spain. He was born here, educated at the school of the “ignorant” who do not say mass. . . . Pipicco lacks a nationality. He is a son of the country. And has no malice.]

Issues of determination of nationalities proliferated in Alexandria, as shown, for example, by the many “questioni di nazionalità” dossiers prepared by the Italian Consulate, which reflected the fact that consular authorities had to follow individual cases in order to establish the appropriate court jurisdiction for individuals in accordance with their nationalities (Correspondence 1927). Alexandria was rife with “category distinctions and colonial ironies: European-born foreigners were distinguished from those born within empire (such as the Maltese, Algerians, and Tunisians), rich from poor, and foreigners from locals. The historical record contains numerous examples of double nationality, uncertain nationality, absence of nationality, misread nationality, and so on” (Hanley

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2017, 18). The Italian Consul expressed his wariness of statistics, because “although there were about 28,000 Italians in Alexandria, not all of these were Italian in the real sense,” while there was another sizeable category who, as he put it, had “nothing Italian other than citizenship. There are Italian Armenians, Syrian and Palestinian Italians, Jewish Levantine Italians, and no one knows how in the past they obtained their Italian citizenship.” (Petricioli 1997, 187; Re 2003, 173)

Religion, Politics, and Social Justice Vita in Egitto seems to possess the power to reconcile Pea’s two dimensions that were mentioned here earlier, anarchist and religious man, traits he would reconsider during his final years when he came to terms with what he considered the excesses of his past. During his formative years at the Baracca Rossa, Pea also became acquainted with Pietro Vasai (Florence 1866–1916), a leading figure of the anarchist movement. Repeatedly incarcerated in Italy, France, and Spain, Vasai arrived in Alexandria in 1898, where he was arrested again, victim of a conspiracy organized by the Italian secret services.22 An indefatigable promoter of anarchist ideals, upon his release he joined fellow Alexandrian anarchists, union organizers, and socialists. Vasai’s actions and initiatives were archived mainly in the criminal records of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then at the Ministry of Justice. Yet, Pea focuses more on Vasai’s private life than on his problems with the Egyptian and consular authorities. Pea recalls that Vasai thought of Egypt as the country “più libero che avesse trovato nel suo lungo peregrinare” [the freest {country} he had ever found over the course of his long peregrinations] (Pea 1995, 166). Pea captures traits of Vasai that show a mixture of generosity, Christian charity, and untiring loyalty to a political ideal. Shortly after his release, Vasai helped found the Società Internazionale di Soccorso d’Urgenza ai Malati” (International Society for the Urgent 22  Vasai was arrested after being falsely accused as a co-conspirator in the detonation of a bomb on the occasion of the 1898 official visit of Germany’s Kaiser William II to Egypt. He and other twelve anarchists were tried and cleared of the accusation. The fake terroristic attack had, in fact, been orchestrated by the Italian secret services, not with the intention of detonating a bomb but in order to frame the anarchists. Under the Capitulations, Vasai was convicted with other co-conspirators “per il reato di stampa e diffusione di manifesti sediziosi” [for the illegal printing and distribution of seditious materials] (Paonessa 2017, 407). On Vasai’s activities in Alexandria, see also Khuri-Makdisi (2010), 117–120.

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Care of the Ill) along with fellow anarchists Francesco Cini, Roberto D’Angiò, Joseph Rosenthal, and Giovanni Tesi to respond to a cholera epidemic that broke out in Alexandria in 1902. A professional typographer, Vasai directed La Libera Tribuna: Organo internazionale per l’emancipazione del proletariato, a bilingual Italian-French weekly magazine published in Alexandria in 1901. He also cofounded another weekly, L’Operaio, the longest running of the Italian periodicals in Egypt, which reached its readers with the slogan “Non tutti italiani, né tutti di una razza” [not all Italian, not even of one race] (Paonessa 2017, 413). In 1913, Vasai published L’Unione: Organo di tutti i lavoratori d’Egitto, the ideal successor of L’Operaio, which was also printed in Italian and French. Vasai occupies a preponderant amount of space in Pea’s memoir. Pea saw in Vasai a contradiction of feelings and ideals that fueled his interest in the Florentine anarchist: Non smetterei più di dire. E di Vasai poi mi piacerebbe discorrere dell’altro, anche per riconoscenza del bene e del male che da lui ho appreso. (Pea 1995, 148) [I’d never stop talking. And I would like to discuss more about Vasai, also to express my gratitude for the good and the evil I learned from him.]

Combining ideals of social justice with religious fervor, Pea tells stories about Vasai that cast him the role of a kind of secular sainthood, even depicting him as a Jesus-like figure who accepts unto himself the sins of humankind, as, for example, when Vasai is misidentified and charged as another person but does not protest. Pea reports the interrogation: —Siete voi, il nominato Pasquale Villa? —Sarà un disgraziato come me—pensò Vasai, e rispose: Ma che ho fatto? —Che cosa avete fatto lo saprete. Intanto venite con noi. E poi davanti al giudice stette sulle negative dei fatti. Ma la condanna venne come sempre. E quando fu scoperto il vero Villa, la pena era già stata scontata a metà. Ma il giudice allora lo trattenne, per false generalità. (Pea 1995, 148) [“Are you the one known as Pasquale Villa?” “This must be a poor wretch like me,” Vasai thought, and he replied: “What did I do?” “You’ll find out soon what you did. In the meantime, follow us.”

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Later, in front of the judge, he denied having done anything. But the sentencing came as usual. And when the real Villa was identified, Vasai’s sentence was already half served. But the judge then detained him for providing false information.]

Due to Vasai’s kindness and generosity, Pea describes him as a “santo diavolo” [holy devil] (Pea 1995, 157). When Vasai welcomes the ailing young Adila to his home, he grows flowers for her. To protect the flowers, which are planted in pots on the windowsills of their humble apartment, he opens the windows and stretches out his palms filled with breadcrumbs: “Se non metto il pane per becchime, i passerotti raspano nelle cassette e beccano i chicchi che ho seminato in quella poca terra stamani.” Gli uccelli che stavano in attesa sui tetti dirimpetto, avevano già spiccato il volo e si erano posati sulla finestra. E beccavano senza paura tra le mani di Vasai. (Pea 1995, 158) [“If I don’t put out the bird food, the sparrows will dig around in the planters and peck the seeds that I planted in that small amount of soil just this morning.” The birds that were waiting on the roofs across the street had already flown off and landed on the windowsill. And they would peck from Vasai’s hands without fear.]

For Pea, Vasai’s actions recall the image of Saint Francis interacting with the birds in the same way. He tells his friend, “Ti conoscono, San Francesco” (Pea 1995, 158) [They know you, Saint Francis]. Pea aims to juxtapose Vasai’s anarchist soul and his Christian-like traits, portraying a different image of a man whom government and police officers in Europe and Egypt viewed as a highly dangerous individual but whom Pea saw as a poet and a kind, generous man who was in love with Adila. In the pages of Vita in Egitto Vasai’s anarchist and Christian attributes coalesce and are difficult to classify between ideals of equality, solidarity, and secular religiosity23; however, Pea highlights the generosity of a human being who lives 23  Vasai was not immune to the growing sentiment of “proletarian nationalism” in ideological contradiction with internationalism. See Paonessa (2017), 424; Gabaccia (2000), 106-128. For a discussion of the disputed preeminence of the notion of “patria” see Guillén (2018), 63–79.

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in terror of being forced to leave his young, common-law spouse Adila. If he is expelled back to Italy, the two of them will never be able to see each other again because un’indigena non può nemmeno (anche trovato il modo di aiutarla con i soldi) avere il passaporto per conto suo. Avrebbe dovuto lasciarla. (166) [an indigenous {woman} cannot even get her own passport (even if one found a way to help her with the money). He would have to leave her.]

Aware of his terminal illness—tuberculosis—Vasai also does not truly believe the doctor who tells him that he can be away from Adila “per qualche mesetto” [for a few months]. In the blink of an eye, his Alexandria could suddenly become a far-off periphery, as far away as one’s final destination in life, as Verga (1983) put it in describing the poor protagonists in the scene depicting the final goodbyes in Malavoglia.24 Vasai does not refrain from adopting a bitter irony in expressing his predicament: Ecco, —diceva—ho praticato il libero amore per tutta la vita, e adesso, se voglio stare in pace con la mia coscienza, e portare con me per il mondo la compagna che mi sono scelto, debbo ricorrere al timbro del matrimonio, al regio Consolato, come un borghesetto qualunque. (167) [“Here,” he used to say, “I have practiced free love all my life, and now if I want to be at peace with my conscience and take with me around the world the companion I have chosen for myself, I have to resort to the formal stamp of matrimony, at the Royal Consulate, like any petit bourgeois.”]

Vita in Egitto powerfully communicates Pea’s reflections on exile, the periphery, and the ability and inability to cross borders, a haptic expression of the power of countries. By criticizing a nascent yet growing control over people’s movements, Pea also questions the linear constructs enforced by colonial authorities that set limits on Adila’s and Pipicco’s freedom of movement.

24  “But Master ‘Ntoni had gone on a long journey, farther away than Trieste and Alexandria in Egypt, that journey from which no one ever returns” (254).

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Memory for Understanding a City Pea tackles these momentous issues, not through systematic thinking but by revisiting episodes that are not linked to each other in immediate succession. Vita in Egitto is a memoir that does not follow any chronological succession of events. For Pea, memory consists as much of remembering as of forgetting, a notion that results in a literary text with the power to subvert traditional points of view, to provoke. His reflections on memory are striking: Questi ricordi non procedono per ordine. Tra un ricordo e l’altro, vi sono tralasciati tanti pezzi di vita che la memoria, ora, via via salta. . . . Ecco che anche le date si confondono e non ha valore l’ordine degli anni. . . . Poco importa che un fatto sia prima o dopo avvenuto: in quello spazio sta contenuto come le pennellate in un quadro: aria, montagne, erbe e persone, fatte e rifatte, forse nel giro di anni, dalla incontentabilità del pittore. Né quel che è escluso dal paesaggio reale. Né quel che è stato aggiunto al modello: direi inventato. Posposto. Modificato, adattato nello spazio, ora limitato dalla cornice. (Pea 1995, 60–61) [These memories do not proceed in order. Between one memory and another so many pieces of life are omitted that memory now jumps bit by bit. . . . Even such that the dates are confused and the order of the years has no value. . . . It matters little whether an event occurred before or after; it is held in that space like brushstrokes of a painting: air, mountains, meadows and people, made and remade, perhaps within the passage of years, by the painter’s insatiableness. Not what is excluded from the true landscape, nor what has been added to the illustration: I would say invented. Placed after. Modified, adapted in the space, now bound by the frame.]

Vasai, the Baracca Rossa revolutionaries, Pipicco, and many other characters mingle in the pages of Vita in Egitto. They meet, disappear, and resurface again in multiple combinations that make it difficult for a reader to find a continuous thread. Yet, the disparate elements of the narrative— Vasai’s nostalgia for Florence, the friend who struggles against states and borders, a novel reading of the Bible—all coalesce as elements that rekindle Pea’s desire to see his home in Seravezza. Pea’s reading of the Bible is particularly interesting, insofar as it brings to the fore the role of languages as instruments of national (and not nationalistic) aggregation. His sense of the uselessness of the concept of

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“patria” fails to withstand the force of other feelings that the Bible triggers in him. In reading his edition of the Giovanni Diodati translation of the Bible (which was rejected by the Catholic Church as heretical),25 he senses the call of his native country in Diodati’s language, and by the end of Vita in Egitto, he will give voice to his own doubts and his nostalgia for Italy. Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Bernardo Soares states unequivocally that his language is his homeland (Pessoa 1982, 17). Pea never wrote in two or more languages like Pessoa did, or like many exile writers have done, but he did inhabit his native language like a homeland. The more he reads the Bible in Diodati’s translation, the more this reading, instead of alleviating his nostalgia, widens the tear of detachment within him. Pea realizes that this wound marks a surfacing of the fabric of innate realities deep within him, which are called forth by the specific character of the Italian used by the Biblical translator with whom he shared a Lucchese background and idiolect.26 I identify in Vita in Egitto the moment in which Pea begins to express the depth of his art with greater self-awareness. At the same time, this artistic self-awareness helps him to revisit his moral and political beliefs and to achieve, as an old man, a syncretic equilibrium between the beliefs he held as a young man and those he now holds. Eventually, generosity and understanding take over from his previous ideological positions. The young anarchist and atheist becomes a devout Christian toward the end of his life, as he reflects back to reconsider and appreciate the many facets that comprise human beings. In 1914, filled with nostalgia, Pea and his family left Alexandria and settled permanently in Italy. But there he was beset with new qualms: Ammaestramenti. Delusioni, e anche qualche certezza intravista. Sfumata. Nuovamente invocata, oggi che più di ieri sto in bilico su molti dubbi. E

25  Giovanni Diodati (1576–1649) was a Genevan theologian born in Lucca, close to Pea’s hometown. His 1607 translation of the Bible to Italian was appreciated for its linguistic style. 26  Nostalgia was often present in Pea’s manuscripts. He wrote: “Nella primavera del 1914, dall’Egitto dove vivevo, mi misi in viaggio con la mia famiglia per venire a passare in Versilia qualche mese. || Questi viaggi in Italia li facevo ogni tanto a sfogo della nostalgia di cui ho sempre sofferto, e, credetemi, la nostalgia è una gran malattia.” (Pea, undated manuscript) [In the spring of 1914, I started my journey with my family from Egypt, where I lived, to spend a few months in Versilia. || I took these trips to Italy every once in a while, as an outlet to my nostalgia, which I’ve always suffered from, and, believe me, nostalgia is a bad disease.]

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non mi è dato da tanti affrancarmi, senza l’aiuto, nemmeno so di chi. (Pea 1995, 155) [Teachings. Disappointments, and also some glimpses of certainties. Blurred. Invoked anew, today more than yesterday I am hovering over many doubts. And I can’t liberate myself, without help, I don’t even know who could.]

Vita in Egitto is the memoir in which Pea embraces his entire life and weave together his own two souls: the anarchic atheist and the religious man, two sides that can coexist only in a literary text. In another of his later writings, the aging Pea contemplates and reevaluates his life after his return to Italy: Ritornando alla vita d’allora adesso che sono vecchio e ho vissuto tante esperienze, rifaccio il tempo passato a ritroso e mi avvedo del poco profitto che ho ricavato passando dalla strada alla ordinata società. (Pea 1953, 643) [As I return to my life in those days, now that I am old and have lived so many experiences, I walk back through time, and I realize how little I have profited by going from the street to orderly society.]

Sun and Sea Always Accompany the Exile Edward Said (2000) warned that to be a European in the Orient meant to be permanently separated from the surrounding society and in a privileged position. Said’s stance is very close to Albert Memmi’s reflections in The Colonizer and the Colonized, a book published in 1957 and in which the Tunisian writer discusses the notion of the benevolent colonialist. Memmi’s reflections might lead us to ask whether Pea was colonizer, a benevolent colonial, or a colonized subject. A colonizer would be someone of European descent who settles overseas in order to take economic and social advantage of the local residents and their resources. According to Memmi, a European who settles in a colony not ruled by his or her own country’s government—as was the case with Pea—is not a colonizer but a colonial. Despite his definition of the latter as “a benevolent European who does not have the colonizer’s attitude toward the colonized” (Memmi 1965, 10), he goes on to claim that such a figure does not actually exist, because it is impossible for a colonial, to avoid the colonizer’s attitude, insofar as their European origin always distances them from the inferior

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status of native residents (68). The only way to bring this imbalance of power to an end is for the European to leave. The Italians who settled in Alexandria, despite their subaltern role vis-à-vis the British and French colonizers, fit Memmi’s definition of colonials, but due to their shared commonality of origin, religion, and customs with the colonizers, they partook of the benefits enjoyed by the colonizers against the colonized. As a matter of fact, the anarchist societies in Alexandria did not push back against this reality, because many of them feared that the Arab population could be easily manipulated and therefore become weapons used by the capitalists to fight for workers’ rights. For the anarchists, workers seems to be a word that characterized only workers of European background (Paonessa 2017, 426–427). However, in Pea’s Vita in Egitto the opposition colonizer/colonized is problematized, and the web of social and cultural relations that characterized Alexandria is depicted with more complexity. Lucia Re (2008) warns that “many Italian immigrants in Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were destitute and belonged to a subaltern social group that had more in common with the indigent natives than with the French and British colonial elites” (113). In his book Il servitore del diavolo Pea writes about the discrimination and humiliation the young Italian protagonist was subjected to as a household servant, describing neighborhoods where only Arabs, Italians, and Greeks lived in poverty (Pea 1995, 66). The Europeans are foreigners: “Gli Europei sono forestieri, turisti curiosi, tutto vogliono portarsi via nei ricordi, anche il ventre in convulsione delle ballerine nere” (87) [Europeans are foreigners, curious tourists who want to take everything back home with them in their memories, even the convulsed bellies of the black belly-dancers]. But these images did not represent the life of the country where he lived: Ma questa non è la vita del paese. Questo non è il popolo nei suoi costumi. . . . Il popolo io lo conosco bene: è quello che lavora nei campi da secoli. Che lavora con me al porto, all’officina, dentro la caldaia. Ed è come me, oppresso da un’ingiustizia sociale. (88) [But this isn’t the life of this country. These aren’t the customs of its people. . . . I know the populace well: they are the ones who have worked in fields for centuries. They are the people who work with me at the harbor, at the factory, inside the {ship} furnace. They are like me, oppressed by social injustice.]

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In Vita in Egitto Pea elaborates on the shared concerns of destitute Italians and Arab Alexandrians alike. When he left Alexandria, it was perhaps in part because he realized, well before Memmi’s groundbreaking book, that the benevolent colonialist cannot exist. In Vita in Egitto readers find a commonality of feelings that brings together individuals rejected by the upper echelons of societies. It is difficult to establish whether Pea can embody the figure of the colonial (who exists only on paper, according to Memmi), but certainly his memoir and his actions are enlightening examples of the importance of building bridges across the shores of the Mediterranean Sea based on the need for reciprocal understanding. Vita in Egitto plays a crucial role as a literary reflection on issues of race, colonialism, diversity, and memory. At the end of Vita in Egitto, as sunset approaches and Pea is on the boat about to leave Alexandria for Italy, he reflects: Eppure non si può partire a occhi asciutti. Sarà forse, maggiormente, perché le ancore sono state levate quando il sole declinava. .... E quell’ora della giornata che agli uomini, più delle altre misura l’esilio: tutto può pesare aggravando la sincerità delle nostre mal simulate emozioni. (Pea 1995, 178) [Yet, one cannot leave without tears. It might be, perhaps, mostly because the anchor was being lifted as the sun was setting. .... And that time of the day, more than any other, men measure exile: everything can be distressing, exacerbating the sincerity of our poorly simulated emotions.]

This image recalls the ancient and modern pain of exiles who traveled under the sun, over the seas, and through the waterways of the Alexandrian harbor that followed the old boulevards of its buried port. Pea’s Alexandrian friends described the port as dangerous for all vessels entering and leaving, yet inescapable (Pea 1995, 179). In his memoir, Pea returns to the precarious conditions of his early life experience to reminisce on the bitterness and pain of the experience of the wayfarer who has become an exile. Guillén reminds his readers that “brilla una y otra vez el sol de los desterrados” [The sun of the exiles never stops

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shining] (Guillén 1998, 94). So, too, would the sun shine on the day after Pea’s departure, when his steamship reached the middle of the Mediterranean Sea on its way to his paese. Although the pain is clear, what remains ambiguous is its source: Pea is an exile, but from which country? The essence of exile is the perception of an unavoidable out-of-placeness that haunts a life of continuous loss. Bill Ashcroft (2002) writes that diasporic writers bring with them a formidable power to transform postcolonial paradigms. They understand that by engaging with the dominant cultures they can disrupt them, but then such writers must also be willing to come to terms with their own cultures. By expanding their conceptual borders, they both investigate and suggest ideas for new identities and a new home (28–32). “Horizontality,” as Ashcroft defines it, is the problematization of “imperial and global boundaries” (31) that has the power to free the subjectivity of diasporic writers: unconstrained by borders, these writers can look everywhere toward a liberating horizon. However, even in this regard Pea remains an eccentric figure, insofar as the cultural and social traits of Alexandrian life as he experienced it were characterized by the same nationalistic environments that were propelling Europe, and the entire world, toward the acute suffering of successive global wars. Thus, written toward the end and shortly after World War II, Vita in Egitto suggests a horizon of more limited possibilities, with an exit route that leads toward the inescapable destiny of persisting, continually moving, in a world that offers no permanent place. As Pea hears the mass that is delivered on the steamship that is taking the immigrants to Italy, he writes: E quando l’officiante si rivolse: aperse le braccia e disse: “Ite, missa est.” E gli emigranti si levarono in piedi, mi avvidi che anch’io avevo poggiato i ginocchi sulla sedia messa lì a bella posta in quel modo, dal marinaio, alle cui parole, poc’anzi avevo provato superbia, confusione, sdegno. (Pea 1995, 190) [And when the officiant turned {to address the crowd}, he opened his arms and said: “Ite, missa est.” And the emigrants stood to their feet. I realized that I, too, had knelt on the chair that the sailor had put there on purpose; the same sailor whose words had provoked in me, just moments before, arrogance, confusion, disdain.]

The condition of the perpetual traveler who must stand up after a brief respite (a mass) has no end. Pea’s condition as an exile will remain in force regardless of the place he occupies on the horizon.

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Luperini, Romano. 2013. L'intellettuale in esilio. In Tramonto e resistenza della critica, 39–46. Macerata: Quodlibet. Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: Orion Press. Paonessa, Costantino. 2017. Anarchismo e colonialismo: gli anarchici italiani in Egitto (1860-1914). Studi Storici 58 (2): 401–427. Pea, Papers. 1939. Correspondence between Enrico Pea and Franco Antonicelli. EL. 1 (postcard). Fondazione Primo Conti, Fiesole, Italy. Pea, Enrico. 1940. Il trenino dei sassi. Florence: Vallecchi. ———. 1953. La figlioccia e altre donne. Florence: Sansoni. ———. 1995. Vita in Egitto, Edited by Enrico Lorenzetti. Florence: Ponte alle Grazie. ———. 2008. Il romanzo di Moscardino. Rome: Elliot Edizioni. Pea, Papers. Undated manuscript. EP.  Ms. 30. Fondazione Primo Conti, Fiesole, Italy. Pessoa, Fernando. 1982. Livro do Desassossego. Vol. 1. Lisbon: Atica. Petricioli, Marta. 1997. Italian Schools in Egypt. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24 (2): 179–191. ———. 2007. Oltre il mito: L'Egitto degli italiani (1917-1947). Milan: Bruno Mondadori. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2008. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Re, Lucia. 2003. Alexandria Revisited: Colonialism and the Egyptian Works of Enrico Pea and Giuseppe Ungaretti. In A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo, 163–196. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2008. Painting, Politics and Eroticism in Fausta Cialente’s Egyptian Narratives. Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics 8: 105–140. Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile. In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 173–186. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Somigli, Luca. 2002. Enrico Pea (29 October 1881—11 August 1958). In Italian Prose Writers, 1900-1945, Edited by Luca Somigli and Rocco Capozzi, 240-250, vol. 264 of Gale Literature: Dictionary of Literary Biography, https://www. gale.com/c/literature-­dictionary-­of-­literary-­biography. Accessed 25 July 2021. Tignor, Robert. 1984. State, Private Enterprise and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918-1952. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Trimi, Katerina, and Ilios Yannakakis. 1992. Les Grecs: la ‘parikia’ d’Alexandrie. In Alexandrie 1860-1960; Un modèle éphémère de convivialité: Communautés et identité cosmopolite, ed. Robert Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis, 92–109. Paris: Autrement. Tuccini, Giona. 2012. Enrico Pea: Bibliografia completa (1910-2010) e nuovi saggi critici. Pontedera: Bibliografia e Informazione.

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Ungaretti, Giuseppe. 1959. Ricordo di Pea. L’approdo letterario 8: 28–31. ———. 1975. Selected Poems., Translated by A. Mandelbaum. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2002. Selected Poems, Translated by Andrew Frisardi. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vasconcelos, José. 1938. El desastre. Mexico City: Botas Ediciones. Verga, Giovanni. 1983. The House by the Medlar Tree., Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Berkeley: University of California Press. Westphal, Bertrand. 2005. L’oeil de la Méditerranée: Une odyssée littéraire. La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube. ———. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

From Mexico to Madrid: Thirdspace in Concha Méndez’s Poemas: Sombras y sueños Kathryn Everly

Ni pájaros de muerte, ni máquina de muerte, ni cobarde invasión han de poder contigo, inmensa triunfadora. Concha Méndez, “España,” 1937 Thirdspace must always be kept radically open (and yes, openly radical) for its interpretive insights and strategic power to be grasped and practiced. Edward Soja, Thirdspace

In Memorias habladas, memorias armadas [Spoken Memories, Armed Memories], poet Concha Méndez Concha recalls longing to travel as she would watch the ships come to port in the northern Spanish city of San Sebastian on the Bay of Biscay where her family spent the summers of her youth. Later in the book, she reflects somewhat cynically on this memory: “Quién nos diría que después, obligados por la guerra, saldríamos para

K. Everly (*) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_6

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siempre” [Who would have thought that later on, forced by war, we would leave forever] (Ulacia Altolaguirre 2018, 61). This memory of a memory provides a key to understanding Méndez’s poetic self: she is always looking outward, defining the self in specific spaces (as opposed to internal contemplation), yet at the same time yearns to return, to belong, to recognize herself in the other. These two seemingly disparate approaches, adventure and belonging, define in part Méndez’s literary production as a young vanguard poet caught in the inevitable surge of emigrants fleeing the violence and chaos of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and resulting brutal dictatorship. In this chapter, the analysis focuses on the duality of the poetic self in Méndez’s poetry and how the conceptualization of space and time permits the poetic voice to break both geographical and ontological boundaries. Drawing on the ideas of “thirdspace,” articulated by Edward Soja, I look at the poetic space as a conflation of place and time; namely, Madrid in the 1930s and Mexico (Méndez’s home in exile) in the 1940s. Méndez’s book Poemas: Sombray y sueños [Poems: Shadows and Dreams] is a collection of poems she wrote between 1937 and 1944 that traces her movement from Europe to Latin and Central America. In some cases, she includes the name of the city where she composed the poem as a kind of geographical signature that allows the reader to trace her movement and connect her impressions to a specific place and time. Even though she does not include Madrid as a place of composition at the end of any poem, the abundance of references to urban landmarks such as bridges and rivers clearly locates several of the poems in the Spanish capital. Other locations include Buenos Aires, Brussels, Mexico, and London. In this way she provides a literary road map to her early travels, forced flight from Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and eventual settling in Mexico. The poems reveal a constant yearning to belong juxtaposed with a strong desire to be free and explore other spaces, geographical as well as ontological. The result is a textual space that embraces the fluidity of Soja’s idea of a thirdspace, understood as a “creative combination” of the brick-­ and-­mortar city and the poet’s “imagined world” (Soja 1996, 6). Soja’s radical thirdspace brings together marginalized perspectives of geographical locations and a nostalgia for recognizable places, or in other words the estranged and the familiar. Poetry is the space where Méndez’s longing for Madrid and belonging to Mexico fuse together in an ever-shifting linguistic experiment that vacillates between hope and despair. Concha Méndez Cuesta was born in Madrid in 1898 to an upper middle-­class family that granted her access to a privileged education at a

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secular French school and summer vacations along the northern coast of Spain. Her early exposure to language study planted an intellectual seed that grew and flourished and led her, later as a young woman, to receive a degree in Spanish pedagogy from the Center of Historical Studies, an achievement she had to hide from her family as she was not expected or encouraged to continue her studies (Valender 2001, 16). It was also during this time that she traded the teas and dances of the madrileñan bourgeois for lectures and tertulias in crowded cafés with the rising stars of the Generation of 1927, or the Silver Age of Spanish Literature, including Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Salvador Dalí. Méndez was an important member of this group, working with Alberti on her budding poetry career and publishing two collections: Inquietudes (Curiosities) in 1926 and Surtidor (Source) in 1928.1 Méndez spent time in London teaching Spanish and later sailed to Buenos Aires in 1929 where she published her third book of poetry, Canciones de mar y tierra (Songs of Sea and Land), with illustrations by Norah Borges, sister of Jorge Luis Borges. For a young woman to leave her home, disappoint her family, travel alone, and work to sustain her poetic career was quite remarkable at the time. To illustrate the drastic effect of her actions, Méndez recalls how when she left for England her parents destroyed a portrait of her painted by her equally gifted friend Maruja Mallo: “lo que no me pudieron hacer a mí, se lo hicieron al cuadro: lo acuchillaron” (Ulacia 2018, 62) [what they couldn’t do to me they did to the painting: they stabbed it with a knife]. After two years in Argentina, Méndez returned to Madrid, “convertida en una escritora bastante conocida” (Balló 2016, 95) [transformed into a well-known writer], where she married fellow poet Manuel Altolaguirre in a civil ceremony. The couple ran a small printing press, publishing the influential poetry journal Héroe (Hero) before they moved to London, where their daughter, Isabel Paloma, was born, and they published another literary journal, 1616. Soon after, the Spanish Civil War broke out and changed the course of their lives forever. Méndez left immediately for France and spent the next year with her daughter living with friends in Paris, London, Oxford, and Brussels, eventually reuniting with her husband in Barcelona. The young family made their way to Paris, where Paul Éluard helped them gain passage to Cuba in 1939. Eventually settling in  Méndez had a romantic relationship with the famed surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel for seven years, and she credits him with introducing her to both Lorca and Dalí, his two colleagues from the student residence in Madrid. 1

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Mexico with her family, Méndez published two more books of poetry: Poemas: Sombras y sueños (Poems: Shadows and Dreams) and Villancicos (Carols), which reveal the difficulties of a multilayered isolation and exile, compounded by the dissolution of her marriage and tragic death of her ex-husband in an automobile accident. After thirty years in exile, Méndez returned to Madrid in 1966 to visit her family home, where several of her siblings still resided. She describes the visit as a “return to the unknown” (Valender 2001, 22) that left a deep impression of estrangement on her. She did return to Spain twice, but after an accident that left her with a broken leg during her last trip, she immediately returned to Mexico to recover and never went back. She died in Coyoacán in 1986. Sadly, almost forty years of dictatorship in Spain silenced the women poets of the Spanish vanguard with strict Catholic dogma that functioned as a tool of political oppression, while preaching female domesticity and maternity in lieu of independence and mobility. Méndez fell victim to the systematic erasure of women’s voices and was forgotten as a poet, printer, and vanguard icon. Despite the international recognition that many male writers of her generation, such as Alberti, Cernuda, or Lorca, enjoyed while living in exile, the vanguard women writers were disassociated with the movement and relegated to the sidelines, known only as the wives or muses of their male counterparts.2 Her granddaughter recalls that countless visitors to the house in Mexico asked Méndez about Lorca, Luis Cernuda, or Altolaguirre, but she admits, “No recuerdo que fuera nadie a preguntarle quien era ella” (Ulacia 2018, 16) [I don’t remember anyone asking her who she was]. Méndez’s early poetry celebrates the mobility and independence of the New Woman International—the flapper or garçon, sporting a short skirt and bob haircut—who sought liberation from the ideal of true womanhood, the bondage of marriage and self-sacrifice, the denial of achievement through career and work outside the home, and, above all, sexual subordination and submission. It was even liberation from the notion that sexuality and gender were unambiguous givens. (Otto and Rocco 2011, ix)

2  Another case in point is María Teresa León (married to Rafael Alberti), who was an accomplished dramatist and poet before and during the war. Her memoirs, Memoria de la melancolía (1970), echo much of the frustration Méndez experienced as a woman exile.

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The presence of the New Woman International was truly a transnational phenomenon, seen in advertising, film, photography, and fashion. Not only was the beginning of the twentieth century a moment of female emancipation from the corset, long hair, and long skirt, but also from the metaphorical straitjacket of homebound duties tied to marriage and child-­ rearing. Camaraderie and solidarity around political issues and intellectual freedom cemented what Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles describes as a new group consciousness that their male contemporaries considered strange, “una irrupción en el mundo masculino de la cultura y la autoría” (2011, 14) [an irruption into the masculine world of culture and authorship]. Méndez was encouraged to pursue her writing by her contemporaries, both men and women, and enjoyed early success with her early publications, Inquietudes and Surtidor. Many critics have contributed to a healthy body of theoretical criticism on Méndez, based on studying her life and poetry in exile (Bellver 1993; Capdevila-Agüelles 2011); nautical symbolism and feminine sexuality in her early poems (González-Allende 2010; Vives 2016; Wilco 1997); the New Woman International and eroticism in her work (Everly 2019); and analyses of her memoirs (Leggott 2005; Dinverno 2003), while James Valender (1995) and Catherine Bellver (2008) have edited anthologies of her poems with introductory essays on her life and work. Few studies focus solely on her later work or specifically on the conceptualization of Spain as motherland through the lens of exile. Critics have pointed out the themes of female liberation and mobility and the importance of the sea as metaphor in Méndez’s early work: for Iker González-Allende Méndez’s sea represents not only the desire for freedom but also fluid feminine identity, both sexual and existential (González-Allende 2010, 94). Anna Vives relates the sea in Méndez to “la plenitud vital, el movimiento, la aventura, la verdad y la libertad” [the fullness of life, movement, adventure, truth, and liberty] (Vives 2016, 963). However, the poetry Méndez wrote in exile reflects a much more philosophical questioning of self and complicates notions of freedom and adventure with a nostalgic longing for a fully conceptualized idea of place. In Poemas: Sombras y sueños, written between 1937 and 1944, Méndez embarks on a new poetic journey that takes her from the romanticized idealization of physical and emotion freedom—evident in her previous poetry—to a complex reimagining of home. Themes of exile, isolation, and loneliness are always rooted in concrete, detailed articulations of her homeland through specific geographical and literary landmarks. The

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poetic voice moves seamlessly from the Madrid of her youth to speculations about the future, her daughter’s future, and the underlying estrangement from the past reinforced by decades in exile. The poetic space—the writing, reading, and interpretation of the poems—becomes, as Edward Soja suggests, a “creative combination” (1996, 6) of real-­world Madrid and Méndez’s imagined renderings and memories of her beloved city. The creative thirdspace is therefore just as “real” or concrete as the buildings in Madrid, primarily because it is more accessible through poetic language that cites geographical landmarks, yet always through a deep-rooted nostalgia that is dependent on time and circumstance. Soja emphasizes the importance of time and circumstance in relation to place that sheds light on the “rebalanced trialectics of spatiality-historicality-­ sociality” (1996, 10). These three main components of the thirdspace come together in her poetry: the verses move across space from Mexico to Spain and back, as well as through time from the 1920s up to her present-­day exiled existence (in the poems of the 1940s), and all the while explore her positionality within a patriarchal social structure that limits, or at least defines, her experience in the world. In this way, Méndez’s poetry opens up interpretive possibilities that simultaneously draw on her exceptional lived experience as a solitary female traveler and later as an exile, as a woman marginalized within both early-century bourgeois family life and the radical vanguard artistic movement, and as a creative force establishing through poetic language the ever-evolving notion of a city (Madrid), both continually lost and found.

Places and Spaces of Exile Poemas: Sombras y sueños is dedicated to “mis amigos de México y a mi Isabel Paloma” (Bellver 1993, 217) [my friends from Mexico and to my Isabel Paloma], effectively linking the Americas and Europe through individuals representing her life in exile (her friends) and her family in Spain (her daughter, Isabel Paloma). This transatlantic reach in the dedication is important to note as it reflects the multiplicity present throughout the collection, defining Méndez’s position of belonging, yearning, acceptance, and restlessness within her exile community. Exile as a state of uncertainty, as a subject-position always in limbo, allowed her to write about emptiness and fill it with words, images, descriptions, and impressions of her past that emphasize her marginality as an exile, a woman, a single mother, a forgotten poet.

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Two aspects stand out in the poems about Madrid: people and places. In reimagining the city through poetic language, Méndez relies not on her imagination alone, but on the creative ability to incorporate specific time and place in verse form. Poetic language is perhaps the ideal manifestation of a thirdspace as the form allows the comingling of the specific and the ambiguous through more complex linguistic organization compared to prose. The poetic form, including variations of versification, rhyme, rhythm, and meter, encourages the reader to contemplate language usage, to read slowly and repeatedly, thus building images piece by piece, word by word, sound by sound. Bertrand Westphal affirms: “We always return to literature and the mimetic arts in our explorations because, somewhere between reality and fiction, the one and the other know how to bring out the hidden potentialities of space-time without reducing them to stasis” (2011, 73). In Méndez’s poetry the city is vibrant and alive, as are the people who lived and worked there: her poems combine testimony and adoration to create a holistic impression of Madrid as it was in the past and as she remembers it in the present. In “Noche de Madrid” (Night in Madrid; Bellver 2008, 220–221),3 for example, the poetic voice situates the reader specifically in the first verse— “Puente de Carlos tercero” (Charles III bridge)—and continues to address the city: “Desde este Puente te miro, / toda encendida de luces / verbena de San Isidro” [From this Bridge I watch you / all lit up / festival of San Isidro].4 She goes on to personify the Manzanares River—“tan pequeño / que no dejó de ser niño” [so small / that it never stopped being a child]— and elaborates the passage of time that flows like the river in the poem, describing the guitars she remembers that sound like “una gran caracola / o tiempo que ya se ha ido” [a large conch shell / or time that has already passed]. Yet the poem concludes with the timelessness of imagination, and she closes her eyes and declares: “Y sigo en el Puente, sola, / a que vuelva de otro siglo” [ And I am still on the Bridge, alone, / to which I return from another century]. Méndez makes an effort here to complicate notions of time and memory by disrupting linear, chronological models; instead, time is a twisting spiral, a river that continually moves but never 3  All poems cited are from the Poesía completa (Complete Works), edited by Catherine Bellver. I will indicate page numbers for each poem instead of cited verses to facilitate reading. All translations to English are my own, and I have focused on content rather than rhyme and meter. 4  San Isidro is the patron saint of Madrid.

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ages and throws the poetic subject back to the memory of a summer festival in Madrid and then, compounding the link between personal and national memory, further back through the centuries to a bridge named after an eighteenth-century king. She returns to the specificity of place, represented by the bridge, from another country and another century, crossing the immeasurable distance from her adopted land to her imagined homeland. Mexico is never mentioned in the poem, yet it lingers as the backdrop, as the catalyst for the described time travel, and exacerbates the temporal distance described in the poem with a very real geographical separation that seems as far as a century is long. In the poem written in 1944 that immediately follows “Night in Madrid,” Méndez recalls an afternoon in a park in “la ciudad lejana” (221) [the far away city], referring to Mexico City, where the poetic voice experiences a Proustian return to her past through the overwhelming scent of roses: El ala de un recuerdo aleteaba . . . ¡Ah, sí, ya sé!... ¡Perfume de unas rosas! . . . ¡Otro país! . . . !El mío! . . !Ya llegaba a comprender por qué! . . . ¡Era en sus brazos donde un perfume igual yo respiraba! (221) [The wing of a memory fluttered . . . Ah, yes, I know! . . . The perfume of roses! . . . Another country! . . . Mine! . . . I began to understand why! . . . It was in his arms where a similar scent I breathed in!]

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These verses trace the movement from a park in Mexico to a rose garden in Spain, but more importantly they mark the mental process, spurred by the senses, of collapsing time and space into a poetic instance. Through the scent of roses, the poetic voice is transported not only back in time but also across the Atlantic to “another country,” which she realizes, as if in a dream, is hers. Thus, longing and belonging are realized through specific poetic language that reveals the process of recognizing oneself as other. The longing for her native land is compounded by the longing for the arms of her lover in an image that conveys the sense of comfort and protection (belonging) warranted by the lover’s embrace, the scent of roses enveloping the couple, and the return to familiarity, in contrast to the “far away” park in Mexico. The irony of the verses lies in the fact that the poetic voice is physically in the park when suddenly the scent overtakes her, invoking a sense of longing for her country, and transports her to an imagined place of belonging that feels more familiar than her immediate surroundings.

People and Personification People and memory populate the texts in Poemas: Sombras y sueños. The ghostly presence of many great Spanish poets contributes to the shadows and dreams of the poetic voice’s longing for place. As an exile and woman writer almost forgotten in her home country and never recognized as a poet in Mexico, Méndez faces a double marginalization in the canon of Spanish poetry. However, as Angela Ingram explains, exiled writers’ estrangement from the center “frees them to dissect oppressive institutions, of which the family and fascism are but the two most obvious tools” (1989, 6). This freedom to dismantle oppressive systems that, beyond family and fascism, include religion, the literary canon, gender, and sexuality is manifested in the poetry that confronts marginalization by placing the poetic voice squarely within literary tradition. Her reliance on this intertextuality not only shows her gratitude toward her predecessors, but also vindicates her own poetry as worthy of the same canonical attention. Méndez inserts herself into literary history by directly comparing herself to great poets: she dedicates her poems to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Antonio Machado, and Rosalía De Castro while imitating their style. She directly addresses the great Galician nineteenth-century poet De Castro by comparing their situation of exile and anguish in the verses “¡Juntas hemos de llorar / en tu jardín, Rosalía!” (228) [Together we should cry /

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in your garden, Rosalía!]. She uses the sonnet to pay homage to Bécquer, the Romantic poet well known for the verse form, and mentions Antonio Machado in a poem dedicated to Federico García Lorca that is a long list of famous names. This untitled poem begins with the verse “De altos sueños y anchas luces” (233) [From lofty dreams and wide lights], indicating the reverence and respect the poet feels for Lorca, and by extension for poetry in general. The poetic voice recalls Lorca’s visits to “mi casa” (my house) with the same friends as always and continues to list the names of poets, ranging from the Spanish vanguard to the great Francisco de Quevedo from the Spanish Golden Age. Notably, Méndez includes the names of women poets in the verse, thus inserting women into the literary canon and directly associating herself with what has been considered literary “greatness.” The poetic thirdspace provides a very real account of Spanish literary history yet allows the poet to manipulate from the margins the male dominance of the canon.5 Méndez gives voice to the specific female suffering of her exile, as evidenced in the poems dedicated to her daughter and in the extensive final section of the book, which is dedicated to the memory of her deceased mother. However, as we have seen, the intimate connection between the poet and her homeland, specifically Madrid and the concrete sites of memory, is developed as a particular and very personal experience. As I will show, the personification of the Manzanares River, which flows through Madrid, leads the poet to assert her own exile experience as representative of the state of the nation. The poem opens with the apostrophe “Manzanares !quién te vio!” (234) [Manzanares, I wish I could see you!], dramatically emphasizing the overwhelming emotion of longing for a glimpse of the river, a synecdoche for Madrid and for Spain. She describes the river as if from a story or fairytale, but abruptly shifts the tone to represent current events and her own reality: “hoy con la guerra, más chico / todo enfangado y sangriento. . . (. . .) Te salió un sol de tragedia; / fuego volcó sobre ti” [today with the war, smaller / all muddy and bloody. . . (. . .) A tragic sun rose over you / fire poured down on you]. The river suffers the same tragic fate as the Spanish people who fled the bombings and destruction in Madrid during the war, yet the river is immobile and unable to escape its fate. The image of the 5  Méndez also includes in the list of poets Rosa Chacel, another exiled woman writer from the Spanish vanguard; Teresa de Ávila, sixteenth-century mystic poet; and the aforementioned Rosalía De Castro, nineteenth-century Romantic poet.

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river suffering the ravages of war is especially poignant as Méndez has established her personal connection with the movement of water as the flowing of time and memory. The Manzanares river is a static geographical landmark that cuts through the city, yet at the same time is constantly moving, its waters slowly redefining the riverbed and moving through the land. When the poetic voice claims, “Y el Madrid que tú servías, / ya no es el mismo Madrid” [And the Madrid that you served / is no longer the same Madrid], the sentiment directed toward the river, personified as “you,” can be read as a reference to the exiled state of many Spanish people. This reference to a changing Madrid also brings to mind the robust intellectual activity of the vanguard women before the war who initiated the opening up of public spaces for literary, philosophical, and feminist inquiry, such as the Lyceum Club, founded by María de Maeztu in 1926 and defined by Mercedes Gómez-Blesa as the Spanish “room of one’s own” (2019, 574).6 This space served a certain sector of bourgeois feminism and was emblematic of the emancipatory politics of pre-war Spain and later of absolute repression when such spaces were abolished during and after the war. The Madrid that the river no longer “serves” is the Madrid that has turned hostile to Spanish intellectualism, specifically to feminist evolution. As seen in previous poems, the places in and around Madrid are the focal points in the poetic remembrance of things past. Personal relationships as well as national tragedy co-exist in and around the monuments, bridges, and rivers surrounding the city. Within the literary universe created through poetic language, the very real thirdspace brings together monument and memory: the people and places in the poetry remain vividly alive, every reading allowing the reader to feel, and ultimately understand, the role of personal experience in the creation of time and place. The next time I see the Charles the III bridge or the Manzanares River, I most certainly will remember how these places were evoked in Méndez’s poetry and what they meant to her imagination living in exile in Mexico— in this way the literary thirdspace becomes more immediate and impactful, for the reader as much as for the writer, than the geographical reality of the first space. Considering place from a geocritical perspective embraces the notion of difference in terms of the constitution of subjectivity as well as the possible 6  Gómez-Blesa alludes to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which indicates that women need financial independence and freedom in order to write.

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manifestations of the other. Méndez expresses a particular relationship to specific places in Madrid in her poetry, yet the interconnectedness with the exile experience of other Spaniards, and other exiled people in general, defines her focus on the tangible places in her memory. In other words, the subject’s displacement will lead her back to the specific reference, regardless of what that reference may be. Exiled communities thrive not on their similarities but rather on their diversity of experiences and ties to the homeland that generate “the subversive and enriching potential of the concept of community, as seen from the perspective of heterogeneity and distance, and not from homogeneity and fused adhesions” (Sabadell-­ Nieto and Segarra 2014, 10). The gender difference, manifested in poems dedicated to motherhood and mothering,7 inscribed in Méndez’s poetry separates her work from her generation’s male-dominant canon of exile poetry (Cernuda, Alberti, Salinas).8 The last part of Poemas: Sombras y sueños shifts from an outward search for meaning in concrete places to a meditation on female relationships, specifically the matrilineal connections between mother and daughter. Méndez describes this familial and more personal turn as a survival method in the face of the rupture and chaos of exile. She writes about feeling exiled from herself, annihilated, and soulless, but quickly affirms: “Pero me miro adentro, estoy intacta, / mi paisaje interior me pertenece” (247) [But I look inside, I am intact, / my interior landscape belongs to me]. “Paisaje,” or landscape, functions as a bridge between the outer world or the geographical references of the first part of the collection and the inner, imaginary terrain of imagination and emotion. It is within this inner landscape that Méndez culls the essence of her relationship with her homeland, or perhaps more appropriately, her motherland. The focus on the female emphasizes what Soja describes as 7  Motherhood is understood as giving birth, and mothering as caring for something or someone; motherhood is strictly female while mothering is genderless. 8  Luis Cernuda (1902–1963), a lifelong friend of Méndez who lived with her in Mexico, left Spain in 1938 and never returned. Perhaps the only openly gay poet of his generation, Cernuda embraces themes of male sexuality, desire, love, and exile in his poetry. Rafael Alberti (1902–1999), a lifelong member of the Spanish Communist Party and husband to poet and writer María Teresa León, lived in Argentina and Italy before returning to Spain in 1977 after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Alberti’s poetry celebrates the sea, youth, and in his mature works, the emptiness of exile and modernity. Pedro Salinas (1891–1951) moved to the United States in 1936 and worked at various universities before taking a permanent job at Johns Hopkins University in 1940. Perhaps the most optimistic of the vanguard poets, Salinas writes on themes of exile and love, famously stating that it is “useless” poetry that makes life worthwhile.

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counter-hegemonic politics that use “difference as a basis for community, identity, and struggle against the existing power relations at their source” (1996, 89). Therefore, just as Méndez inserts herself into the poem listing the great Spanish writers, in this last section she finds a poetic vindication in the voice of motherhood and mothering. Catherine Bellver writes somewhat controversially that Méndez’s poetry confirms the perspective that men and women approach existence and reality in different ways and that women, in life as well as in their written works, “ponen énfasis en las interrelaciones personales antes que en los enlaces politicos o históricos” (Bellver 2001, 204) [emphasize personal relationships rather than political or historical ties]. It may seem that Méndez does privilege the personal in the second part of Poemas: Sombras y sueños, but, as evidenced in this analysis, the personal is always connected to the political: personal memory and nostalgia are closely linked to specific historical sites, and the very relationships described are imbued with deeply political tones. Méndez was a feminist: she fought for her right to be independent, to write, to travel, and to pertain to a rich literary national history. By including her daughter and her mother in her poetry of exile, she gives voice to the experience of women who are silenced and forgotten as in her own case, and points to the sometimes-devastating impact the historical and political can inflict upon an individual. It also seems important to resist reading poetry or any literary fiction as a cloaked autobiography. The intimate poems dedicated to her daughter, Isabel Paloma, and to her deceased mother branch out much farther from personal struggle into a universal questioning of the marginalized, displaced subject. Even though the entire book is dedicated to her friends in Mexico and to her daughter, several poems speak directly to the mother– daughter bond, made stronger with Méndez and Altolaguirre’s divorce in 1944. Méndez titles the section “Camino nuevo,” which can be translated as new way, new path, or new journey, suggesting that, once again, she must strike out on her own and forge ahead through her writing, just as she did when she left her family in Spain to travel to England, to Argentina, and later fleeing war-torn Europe. She begins the first poem speaking directly to the path, a common trope used to give the poetic voice first-­ person subjectivity: “Te tengo frente a mí, camino nuevo” (250) [I have you in front of me, new path], yet “Sola no estoy, que un ángel me acompaña. /Apenas tiene el ángel nueve años (. . .) Tu novena primavera / entrará, niña, sin padre” (550–551) [I am not alone, an angel is with me / an angel barely nine years old (. . .) Your ninth spring / will arrive, little

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girl, without father]. The separation of mundane experience, the path and the journey, from the celestial presence of the guardian angel/daughter is made explicit in the verse “Un páramo es la tierra en donde piso” (250) [A wasteland is the ground on which I tread]. The daunting present reality of emptiness is juxtaposed with a hopeful optimism that the poetic voice acknowledges in the child/angel: “Te salvará la inocencia (. . .) y vendrán más primaveras” (251) [innocence will save you (. . .) more springtimes will come]. By projecting a hopeful future of salvation, the poetic voice conflates the past, present, and future within the poetic space. The hope for the future that is invested in the daughter is set against a backdrop of political and personal exile in these poems: the painful nostalgia of Madrid reappears in the lament for the Castilian mountain range “¡Qué lejos está la Sierra / mi Sierra de Guadarrama!” (253) [How far away is the Sierra / my Sierra de Guadarrama!] and the isolation resulting from her broken marriage emerges in the verses “ (. . .) voy entre malas nubes / por un mundo indiferente” (256) [I go among evil clouds / through an indifferent world]. Despite the overwhelming loneliness and despair of these verses, the child emerges repeatedly as a companion rather than a responsibility, and her presence not only promises a hopeful future but also a reconciliation between a bitter exiled existence and the lost homeland. Speaking directly to the mountains surrounding Madrid, the poetic voice claims: “¡Volveré a verte algún día / mi Sierra de Guadarrama! / Conmigo irán unos ojos / nuevos, de clara mirada / y unos tiernos piececitos / que mi existencia engendrara . . .” (253–254) [I will see you again one day / mi Sierra de Guadarrama! / With me will go new eyes / with clear vision / and tender little feet / that my existence engendered . . .]. The new eyes and little feet suggest that a new generation of displaced Spaniards will return to Europe from abroad without the burden of the war experience and be able to see and understand the beauty of the Madrid imagined within the poetic thirdspace. Even for the offspring of the exiled, the construction of place in the literary work creates a certain expectation of a location never seen, but certainly experienced through the memories, words, and musings of first-generation exiles. The thirteen poems comprising the final section of the book depict themes of universal motherhood and are dedicated “A mi madre” (260) [To my mother]. Méndez received notice of her mother’s death while in Mexico and, despite the often tense and difficult relationship Méndez had with her family, she was deeply affected by the news. These poems stand

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in stark contest to the more optimistic tone of the previous poems and link the individual mother’s death to the demise of Spain as a nation, once again intertwining the personal and political. The first poem in the series links the individual to the universal by stating “Se es hijo de muchas madres / y se es hijo de milenios” (261) [One is the child of many mothers / and one is the child of millenniums]. In this way, matrilineal heritage is celebrated as defining the individual, and furthermore, by universalizing the mother/child bond, the verses suggest that the death of Méndez’s mother symbolizes the genealogical link to the motherland, Spain. In the same vein, the poetic voice confirms “(. . .) yo no puedo llorar / tantas pérdidas a un tiempo . . .” (261) [I can’t mourn / so many losses at once], indicating the direct connection between the loss of the mother, the loss of a motherland, and the loss of time. Furthermore, the capitalization within the verses of the terms “Madre” and Universo” (“Te siento Madre a ti del Universo, / ahora que ya no eres sino sombra” (261) [I feel you as Universal Mother / now that you are nothing but shadow] equates motherhood with universality as a ubiquitous yet ghostly presence, much like the looming nostalgia of the homeland that is always present but never tangible. It is only in the poetry that the specific place or person can be fully realized and reimagined. Just as place is reimagined in Méndez’s verses, her mother is also reimagined in a combination of the individual person and the universal ideal of motherhood that in effect creates a “thirdperson” or very real and extensively articulated concept of Mother. Death in these poems is not formulated as a final resting place or final journey to a distant shore, but rather, in keeping with the exiled mindset of wandering, longing, and continuous yearning, death initiates another stage of uncertainty. The final poem is a series of questions posing the possible state of existence or non-existence of the deceased, yet the tone and language reflect the exiled state. “¿Dónde te has ido a soñar (. . .)?” (267) [Where have you gone to dream?] poses the question of place to the deceased and, as seen in the previous poetry, place is fundamental to Méndez’s conceptualization of movement and exile. Méndez imagines the afterlife in her poetry as an enveloping light or perhaps as empty darkness through which the dead “vaya en el tiempo vagando” (267) [go wandering through time] or even perhaps a celestial place “por donde andarás” [through which you will walk]. The language of aimless searching, the constant wandering and wondering (indicated by the interrogation) about the stateless existence, is key to the relationship between death and exile.

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With the loss of the metaphorical anchor of both homeland and mother, the poetic voice is left to recreate the lived space and, in the present case, imagine a future incarnated in the offspring that will eventually bridge both the literal physical displacement of exile by traveling from Mexico to Spain, and the generational gap by evidencing the matrilineal inheritance of motherhood and motherland. While a homeland refers to a place delineated by borders, customs, and language imbued with a sense of belonging, Méndez’s motherland places the person, the mother, at the center of her conceptualization of comfort and security. The rupture of her own family life, first from her family in Spain and then as a result of her divorce from Altolaguirre and his subsequent death, is evident in her poetry, which seeks to reconstruct within the thirdspace a fluid, intergenerational, and overlapping maternal space that shifts and changes as her female subjects move through place and time. Poemas: Sombras y sueños, more than a book of poetry, is a testimony of how the literary imagination creates places and people, molding experience into a permanent, tangible artifact. The poetic thirdspace renders a vibrant, vanguard intellectual literary scene in historic Madrid, which in turn is a place of memory and at the same time a lost paradise. The literary awareness of the text crosses boundaries of time and place, locating the Spanish capital at the center of both personal and national anguish. In this way, Madrid as the geographical center of Spain can also be considered a geographical center of the poet’s experience, even when she is living in Mexico. The poet’s literary imagination casts a new light on the Spanish city, often the centerpiece of literary works, illuminating gender-related positionality from the margins. “Literature tends to record what history and public memory often forget. Furthermore, it can narrate both obliquely and allegorically, thereby preserving what can be censored and encouraging interpretation and commentary in the public sphere” (Seyhan 2001, 12). Méndez’s insistence on writing herself into the vanguard group as well as her focus on mothering and motherhood contribute to a rewriting of the overwhelmingly patriarchal literary canon and the resulting literary memory of Spanish cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. Her writings, and those of many other Spanish women exiles of the same period, fundamentally changed the literary landscape of early twentiethcentury Spanish literature. Méndez writes eloquently about how her daughter gave her new life and opened the doors of the future: “y yo sentí que vivía / en ti y en mí. Y el futuro / abrió una Puerta ese día” (252) [and I felt that I lived / in me and in you. And the future / opened a Door

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that day]. The same can be said of Méndez’s poetic exploration of Spain. The poetic rendering of Madrid from the point of view of the exile in Mexico opens up so many possibilities for future analysis and exploration of how the literary text redefines geographical conceptualizations of place. Thirdspace privileges a multiplicity of perspectives and leads readers to question how others (specifically women exiles) imagine Madrid in particular, or Spain in general, in their writings.

References Balló, Tània. 2016. Las simsombrero. Sin ella, la historia no está completa. Espasa. Bellver, Catherine G. 1993. Exile and the Female Experience in the Poetry of Concha Méndez. Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, 18, 2: 27–42. ———. 2001. Los exilios y las sombras en la poesía de Concha Méndez. In Valender, 193–206. ———. ed. 2008. Poesía Completa by Concha Méndez. Centro Cultural Generación del 27. Capdevila-Argüelles, Nuria. 2011. Autobiografía y autoría de mujer en el exilio. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 17 (1): 5–16. https://doi. org/10.1080/13260219.2011.579881. Dinverno, Melissa. 2003. Gendered Geographies: Remapping the Space of the Woman Intellectual in Concha Méndez’s Memorias habladas, memorias armadas. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 37: 49–74. Everly, Kathryn. 2019. La mujer nueva y el erotismo en la poesía de Concha Méndez. In La llama y la flecha. Ideología y documento histórico en la poesía española contemporánea, ed. Juan José Lanz and Natalia Vara, Renacimiento, 73–91. Gómez-Blesa, Mercedes. 2019. Modernas y vanguardistas. Las mujeres-faro de la Edad de Plata. Ediciones Huso. González-Allende, Iker. 2010. Cartografías urbanas y marítimas: género y modernismo en Concha Méndez. Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 35 (1): 89–116. Ingram, Angela. 1989. Introduction. In Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, University of North Carolina Press, 1–15. Leggott, Sarah. 2005. The Woman Writer in 1920s Spain: Countering the Canon in Concha Méndez’s ‘Memorias habladas, memorias armadas.’  Hispanic Journal 26: 91–105. León, María Teresa. 1970. Memoria de la melancolía. Renacimiento. Méndez, Concha. 2008. Poesía Completa, ed. Catherine Bellver, Centro Cultural Generación del 27.

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Otto, Elizabeth, and Vanessa Rocco, eds. 2011. The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s. University of Michigan Press. Sabadell-Nieto, Joana, and Marta Segarra, eds. 2014. Differences in Common. Gender, Vulnerability and Community. Rodopi. Seyhan, Azade. 2001. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton University Press. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-­ Imagined Places. Blackwell Publishers. Ulacia Altolaguirre, Paloma. 2018. Concha Méndez. Memorias habladas, memorias armadas, Renacimiento. Valender, James. 1995. Poemas (1926–1986). Hiperión. ———. ed. 2001. Una mujer moderna. Concha Méndez en su mundo (1898–1986). Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes. Vives, Anna. 2016. Heterotopía y género en los poemas del mar de Concha Méndez. Bulletin of Spanish Studies 93 (6): 947–964. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14753820.2016.1180833. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr., Palgrave Macmillan. Wilcox, John. 1997. Women Poets of Spain, 1860–1990. University of Illinois Press.

Toward the Periphery of Europe: Erich Maria Remarque’s Novel The Night in Lisbon Karina von Tippelskirch

Der Blick auf Lissabon zeigte mir den Hafen. Er wird der letzte gewesen sein, wenn Europa zurückbleibt. Er erschien mir unbegreiflich schön. Eine verlorene Geliebte ist nicht schöner. (Heinrich Mann)1

After the fall of France and the armistice on June 22, 1940, Germany controlled all harbors on the coastline stretching from occupied Poland to Southern France. Lisbon then became one of the last resorts for refugees hoping to leave Europe and escape from persecution by fascist regimes,  Mann, Zeitalter, 448. Mann’s memoir has not been translated into English. A rendering of the quote would read: “The look at Lisbon showed me the harbor. It will become the last one, when Europe is left behind. It appeared to me incomprehensibly beautiful. A lost love is not more beautiful.” Translations from German originals into English are mine, if not otherwise indicated. Quotes from Remarque’s novel in German originate from Remarque, Die Nacht von Lissabon; English quotes are from the American translation, Remarque, The Night in Lisbon. 1

K. von Tippelskirch (*) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_7

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first and foremost Nazi Germany. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum “More than  1200 ships carrying nearly 111,000 Jewish refugees arrived in New York between March 1938, … , and October 1941”.2 While the majority of refugees aspired to leave by ship, with the United States as the most frequently desired destination, only a few could afford a flight with the luxurious Pan American Clipper, the Boeing 314 waterplane, making twice-weekly transatlantic flights to New York. Christine Heine-Teixeira’s comprehensive discussion of Lisbon as place of passage and refuge lists the names of seventy-nine writers who either departed from Lisbon or stayed there in exile.3 In the fall of 1941, 4000 refugees were officially registered in Lisbon, waiting for their departure; another approximately 4000 refugees without legal documents tried desperately to obtain the needed documents to leave and immigrate to other countries.4 But even if the prospective travelers had all necessary papers such as valid passports, visas, and the two affidavits that the United States required, ship tickets were expensive and increasingly scarce. With people lined up and standing for hours in front of the American consulate and the offices of international aid organizations, the hopes of many refugees diminished the longer they stayed in the city. From June 1940 to 1942, Lisbon turned into a “Wartesaal”, a “waiting room”, a term which both, German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and Italian author  Angela Bianchini, used to describe the port city.5 This is the place and time in which Erich Maria Remarque’s novel The Night in Lisbon is set. The worldwide success of Remarque’s World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) made the author famous, and because of the 2  A striking visualization of the number of ships leaving Europe with refugees between March 1938 and October 1941 can be viewed on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibition Americans and the Holocaust, https://exhibitions.ushmm. org/Americans-and-the-holocaust/main. To watch the video, scroll down to “Refugee Ships at Sea.” 3  See Heine-Teixeira, “Wartesaal Lissabon,” 477–481. 4  Schaaf, Fluchtpunkt Lissabon, 355. 5  Lion Feuchtwanger’s three novels on the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent exile are known under the title Wartesaal-Trilogie (Waiting room trilogy); they are: Erfolg. Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz (Success: Three Years in the Life of a Province, 1930); Die Geschwister Oppermann (The Oppermanns, 1933); and Exil (1940). See also the discussion of Feuchtwanger’s Wartesaal trilogy in relation to the concept of waiting in Burcu Dogramaci’s contribution to this anthology. In The Edge of Europe (Capo d’Europa, 1991), a novella by Angela Bianchini set in Lisbon in 1941, the author also speaks of the city as “a waiting room.” Bianchini, The Edge of Europe, 35. I would like to thank my colleague and co-editor of this volume, Stefano Giannini, for bringing Bianchini’s book to my attention.

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book’s critique of nationalism and war, he became simultaneously a prime target for Germany’s nationalist Right and Hitler’s Brownshirts. Already in 1931, Remarque acquired a villa near Ascona and subsequently transferred most of his assets and an extensive art collection to Switzerland. On May 10, 1933, four years after its publication, All Quiet on the Western Front and other books by Remarque were burned by the Nazis. By that time, the author, like many antifascist writers, had sought refuge abroad. Yet the ire that the author’s pacifism and critical stance toward National Socialism drew did not stop at the borders of Germany. Even after his escape, Remarque was followed by the Nazis. An ally of Hermann Göring, State Secretary Paul Körner, visited him in Switzerland in 1935 and asked him to return to Germany, an invitation that Remarque declined.6 In 1938, the writer was stripped of his German Citizenship. After he left Europe and immigrated to the United States, the Nazis took revenge on his family. His sister Elfriede Scholz was denounced and sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof, the so-called People’s Court, for alleged defeatism. She was beheaded in Plötzensee on December 16, 1943, in retaliation against her brother. Court President Robert Freisler said to her during the proceedings: “Ihr Bruder ist uns leider entwischt, Sie aber werden uns nicht entwischen.”7 (Your brother unfortunately escaped us; you however will not escape from us.) There is little doubt that the author would have faced a similar fate had the Nazis gotten hold of him. Remarque learned about his sister’s murder only after the end of the war.

Transit Places Die Nacht von Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon, 1962) is the last work that was published during the author’s lifetime. The title alludes to the novel’s temporal and geographical setting, but by reversing the notion of Lisbon as a city of light, it refers to both the nocturnal time span during which the story is told and to that political period when the darkness of fascism fell over Europe. Geographically situated at what the Italian writer Angela Bianchini calls the “Edge of Europe”,8 Lisbon was not a destination where 6  For these details and a chronology of his life, see the short biography in dates at the end of Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque, 85. 7  Letter from Claire Lehmkuhl to Erich Maria Remarque, May 25, 1948. In Glunz and Schneider, Elfriede Scholz, geb. Remarque, 149, quoted in von Sternburg, “Als wäre alles das letzte Mal,” 317 and note 96. 8  Bianchini, The Edge of Europe; see note 5.

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refugees intended to stay but a place that they reached only to leave it as soon as possible. Portugal maintained a fragile neutrality during World War II. Refugees with a transit visa could enter the country, but they were expected to move on within a short period of time.9 This paradoxical situation and the reasons that had forced them to come to Lisbon set the refugees apart from the inhabitants who called the city their home. It also distinguished them sharply from others for whom the city was a transit place, among them foreign aid workers who tried to rescue refugees, or tourists who frequented the same restaurants as the émigrés. In one scene of the novel, they are juxtaposed to each other to illuminate the discrepancy between those who desperately want to leave and an American tourist who asks her husband, “Darling, why do we have to go back? . . . If we could only stay here! I don’t feel a bit like going back to America!”10 (20). Depending on who lives there or who passes through, at what historical time and under which conditions, any place can become a place of transit. In his study of literary transit places, chiefly railroads, hotels, ports, and airports, Lars Wilhelmer asserts that transit places cannot be categorically differentiated from other places. “Just as spaces are only generated through action, it is also the use that determines the transitoriality of a place.”11 (So wie Räume erst im Handeln generiert werden, entscheidet auch erst die Nutzung über das Transitorische eines Ortes.) The Night in Lisbon begins at a prominent literary transit place, the harbor, which is the steady point of reference in the framing story of the novel but plays hardly any role within the main story.12 The complex narratological structure of The Night in Lisbon employs a main and a framing narrative with two male protagonists who tell the story in hindsight, but at different times and from different perspectives, as Brian Murdoch demonstrates in his investigation of Remarque’s novels.13 Both narrators are refugees from Nazi Germany and  For the situation of refugees in Portugal after the French armistice with Germany on June 22, 1940, see Schaaf, Fluchtpunkt Lissabon, 39–46. 10  Page numbers in parentheses following citations in English refer to: Remarque, The Night in Lisbon. Page numbers in parentheses following citations in German refer to Remarque, Die Nacht von Lissabon. 11  Wilhelmer, Transit-Orte, 33. 12  Ibid., 226. Wilhelmer provides a list of references to the harbor throughout the novel’s framework narrative. 13  Murdoch, The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque, 130. Helga Schreckenberger describes The Night in Lisbon as Remarque’s most complex narrative work. Schreckenberger, “‘Durchkommen ist alles,’” 35. 9

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their flight across Europe has brought them to Lisbon, where they meet over the course of one night and the following morning. The first-person narrator who opens the novel without any prologue and introduction declares, “I stared at the ship” (3). He is “one of the fugitives to whom justice, freedom, and tolerance meant more than home and livelihood” (4). Like the majority of refugees, he remains anonymous. Although the past tense of the brief opening sentence indicates that the narrator is looking back at the past, there is no clue from which temporal or spatial distance this moment is revisited. The reader learns that the time was 1942 and that the ship was anchored in Lisbon, by then “the gate to America” (4).14 The first narrator continues and recalls how he went that afternoon to a casino, in a last desperate attempt to gamble and win the funds for the ship passage for himself and his wife, Ruth. But instead of winning he lost all but six dollars of the money the couple had left, and with it the hope that they would ever make it to America. At this nadir, another man approaches the first narrator. Over the ensuing exchange, the man reveals two tickets for the vessel that is waiting to depart for New York. The stranger then makes a proposal so astounding that his counterpart cannot believe it is true. He offers him the two tickets without pay, saying that he does not need them anymore. All he is asking is that he does not have to spend the night alone. Although the first narrator is filled with doubt, he agrees, and the men leave the harbor and go looking for a place where they can sit down. When the two protagonists find a restaurant overlooking the city from above, the first narrator keeps his eyes fixed on the harbor and the ship. The man with the tickets who will be the main narrator begins to tell his story and he explains why he needs the presence of another person: Ich begreife jetzt noch nicht, wie alles kam. Deshalb muß ich mit jemand darüber reden. Wenn ich mit jemand darüber rede, wird es noch einmal da sein. Es wird mir dann ganz klar werden. Und es wird bleiben. (16)

14  Remarque uses “America” indiscriminately as a reference to the United States, although ships could also have left for Canada or countries in South America. I follow this use in my chapter, because the term “America” was, at the time in which the novel is set, a symbol of hope and safety for many of the refugees who aspired to reach the United States.

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I still don’t understand how it all came about. That’s why I have to talk to somebody now. I don’t know anyone here. But if I tell somebody about it, it will come back. It will become clear in my mind. And it will stay. (10)15

This reasoning reminds the reader that telling stories is a way of making sense of what happened, and that it is an attempt to preserve the past. The man, now the main narrator, entrusts his story to a stranger, a fellow refugee. He hopes that this stranger can retain it better than himself. Hans Wagener identifies the motivation for the narration as of primary importance for the novel. The main narrator is concerned that the story will be falsified by his memory and that it will get lost as a result.16 The first narrator who listens to the main narrative cannot be part of the story; otherwise, he too would have an interest in changing what is unpleasant or even unbearable. The second narrator, also a refugee from Nazi Germany, goes by the name of Josef Schwarz. He explains that this is not his real name, which is never explicitly mentioned in the novel, though a careful reader can elicit that it is Josef Baumann.17 He took on the name Josef Schwarz from yet another refugee who died in exile and who left his passport and other belongings to him. Both men’s given name is Josef and later we read that this is also the first narrator’s given name. They all are exiles, each of them having fled to France, and the two narrators discover that they stayed during the same time in Paris and later were interned, “when the war broke out. Like everyone else” (9). The story of the refugees is as old as the biblical tale of Josef in Egypt, which inspired Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers,18 and at the same time it has become “the destiny

15  I corrected the English translation by omitting “to me” from the fourth sentence. In the German original, Schwarz only speaks of “it will come back.” The English translation reads “it will come back to me,” which is misleading, because it suggests that it will then stay with him, Schwarz. That is not what happens, and it is also not Schwarz’s intention; he wants to fix the story in the mind of the listener, thinking that there “it will stay.” 16  Wagener, Understanding Erich Maria Remarque, 104. 17  The surname of his wife is “Baumann,” and he speaks of himself as “Josef” when meeting an old friend in his hometown Osnabrück. See also Schneider, “Käfig,” 367. 18  The German editions of the novels were published between 1933 and 1943, with the first two volumes still coming out in Germany and the other two in Austria and Stockholm while Mann was himself an exile. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, New  York: A. Knopf, 1934.

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of twentieth-century man.”19 As Brian Murdoch points out, Remarque’s exile novels frequently employ name changes and forged passports; in The Night in Lisbon it is a central motif.20 The changing names symbolize the increasingly unstable and fluid identities of those who are forced to flee from one country to another and whose lives are ruptured in exile. Although each refugee’s experience is unique, in the public eye refugees are often mistaken to be a homogenous group. On the other hand, there are experiences that emigrants share, though in varying degrees, such as the decentering of their existence when people are forced from the centers of their own lives toward the societal and geographical periphery. Although many exiles from Nazi persecution took temporary refuge in urban centers such as Paris, Lisbon, London, or New York, their existences there often remained marginal. Only a few renowned artists, writers, scientists, and other highly recognized exiles were able to rebuild lives and careers that could somehow measure up to what they had to leave behind; yet it would never fully compensate for the loss of home and familiarity, of native languages and the sense of belonging, and of those who stayed back, many of them murdered in the Holocaust or dying during the war.21 Remarque addresses the paradox between the uniqueness of each refugee and the mass migration that erases individuality when he writes about how “die erzwungene Völkerwanderung, von den unzähligen einzelnen Herren Schwarz in Deutschland bis zur Verschiebung ganzer Provinzen in Russland” (111) (the forced migration of innumerable [individual] Schwarzes from Germany and the displacement of whole populations in Russia are part of twentieth-century civilization [82]).22 19  Maxwell Geismar’s review of The Night in Lisbon from the New York Times is quoted in Tims, Erich Maria Remarque, 195. 20  Murdoch, The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque, 131. In addition to numerous intertextual references to Remarque’s own works, there are many parallels between The Night in Lisbon and Anna Seghers’s seminal exile novel Transit. See Wilhelmer, Transit-Orte, 219–223, and Wagener, Understanding Erich Maria Remarque, 101–104. 21  That this experience was also shared by the few writers who were famous enough to have no financial worries in exile—among them Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann, and Erich Maria Remarque—is the focus of Helga Schreckenberger’s essay “Erich Maria Remarque im amerikanischen Exil.” Schreckenberger corrects the common notion that Remarque had an easy, nearly carefree, life in exile, a notion that had more to do with his refusal to engage in the political controversies of his time beyond his literary works than with his real situation. 22  Italics for emphasis and inserted square brackets are mine.

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The novel’s main narrative, Schwarz’s individual, unique story, simultaneously echoes the collective fate of all refugees—and here Remarque expands beyond Schwarz’s nationality and indicates that displaced people from other countries, for example Russia, share similar experiences. Consequently, Schwarz’s passport will not stay with the main narrator, and also not with the first narrator who receives it next. At the very end of the novel, the passport is passed on to yet another refugee, this time “to a Russian who had fled across the border—a new wave of refugees had begun” (244). The story that Schwarz tells is part of a meta-narrative of flight that neither began nor will end with the rise of fascism and that, as we know, continues to this day. Schwarz’s story begins in Paris in 1938, in the months before the Munich Agreement. “Die Agonie der Angst. . . . Es würde Krieg geben, und die Deutschen würden kommen und mich abholen. . . . Es war die Zeit der Selbstmorde” (17–18). (My fear had exhausted itself. . . . There would be war and the Germans would come and get me. . . . That was the time of the suicide wave [11]). Remarque’s novel accurately describes some developments between the summer of 1938 and that of 1942 and how the changing situation impacted exiles like the two fictional narrators.23 The atmosphere in Paris often changed with shifting circumstances. After the Munich Agreement, in the fall of 1938, there was a general sense of relief among refugees. However, in spring 1939, when it became clear that the appeasement policy toward Hitler had failed, war was again on the horizon. At that time Schwarz has what he calls the “Emigrantenkoller” (16–17), an emotional breakdown resulting in irrational actions. Against all reason, he decides to go back to his hometown Osnabrück, to see his wife, Helen. The couple had separated five years before, after Schwarz was imprisoned in a concentration camp. Later the reader also learns that prior to that he had been a newspaper editor; like many journalists, he became one of the first victims of the Nazi regime. It is not important that Schwarz does not know if Helen divorced him and that he cannot be sure if she has another partner. All he wants is clarity by seeing her one more time. When he talks about his decision “to go 23  Schwarz’s story is in part based on the life of Remarque’s close friend Hans Habe, who fled with his wife from France via Lisbon to New York. Tims, Erich Maria Remarque, 197. Another seed for the novel was planted in the 1930s, when the author met an emigrant in Paris who decided to go back to Nazi Germany, “at least for one day,” to see a woman “he would otherwise never see again.” Ibid., 196.

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back,” Schwarz comments that in hindsight it makes no sense, but that at the time it was different. “Ich musste sie sehen. Es schien mir vollkommen logisch” (26). (I had to see her. To me that seemed perfectly logical [18]). From this passage it is evident how the approach of war erodes the laws of logic. Schwarz’s decisions are no longer based on rational thinking. He knows that entering Nazi Germany puts him in danger of renewed internment and possible death—but so will the war. “Der Krieg musste kommen. . . . Ich wollte hinüber. Was nachher kam, wusste ich nicht. Es war auch gleichgültig. Wenn der Krieg kam, war ich ohnehin verloren. Ich konnte geradesogut das Verrückte tun” (27). (Every day it became clearer that war was inevitable. . . . I decided to go back. What would happen afterward I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. If war came, I was lost in any case. I might as well do this insane thing [18].) That wars dissolve social, political, and personal boundaries and orders, that they can unleash otherwise-­inhibited behavior and madness, was something the author of All Quiet on the Western Front was acutely aware of. Remarque had witnessed it in the Great War, and he observed it again in the years before and after the Nazis came to power. Like Schwarz, Remarque often dreamed in exile that he would return to Nazi Germany.24

Crossing Borders: Transgressions and Transformations The Night in Lisbon is the first novel in which Remarque explicitly mentions his native town, Osnabrück, and he uses the names of many other actual places including squares, streets, and churches in the city.25 Schwarz’s journey to Osnabrück takes him from Paris to Zurich and from there to the Swiss border town Oberriet. Since its annexation in 1938, Austria had become part of Germany, and therefore the Austrian border is the last one Schwarz needs to pass. He does not dare to use his forged passport again and decides to cross the border illicitly—in German: “schwarz.” This reference to his name is lost in the English translation, which renders it as “unofficially” (19), while in German the adjective “schwarz” refers to the color black as well as to that which is illicit or illegal. This homonymy is hardly coincidental, since Remarque often employs speaking names in his 24  Remarque talks about this recurring nightmare in an interview with a Swiss journalist, quoted in Tims, Erich Maria Remarque, 196. 25  See Wagener, Understanding Erich Maria Remarque, 101.

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writing, and he underscores the double meaning when Schwarz at a later point tells his wife, “Ich bin schwarz über die Grenze gekommen” (64). (I crossed the border illegally [46]). His name is synonymous with the illegality in which he lives. In his narrative, he details the arrests that he endured by the police of several countries and how he was repeatedly deported from France to Switzerland, and jailed there, only to sneak back into France afterwards; but this time, Schwarz moves in the opposite direction, toward Germany. As he approaches the Rhine River, which constitutes the border between Switzerland and German-annexed Austria, the narrative departs from its former realism; the river and its crossing induce a mystical experience.26 Ich werde diese Nacht nie vergessen. Ich war meiner selbst voll bewußt, alle meine Sinne waren weit offen, ich war auf alles gefaßt, aber ganz ohne Angst. Mir war, als ginge ich über eine hohe Brücke, von einer Seite meines Lebens auf die andere, und ich wußte, daß diese Brücke sich hinter mir auflösen würde, und daß ich nie zurückkehren könne. Ich ging von der Vernunft in das Gefühl, von der Sicherheit in das Abenteuer, vom Rationalen in den Traum. Ich war vollkommen einsam, aber dieses Mal war die Einsamkeit ohne Qual; sie hatte fast etwas Mystisches. Ich kam an den Rhein, der an dieser Stelle noch jung und nicht sehr breit ist. Ich zog mich aus und machte ein Bündel aus meinen Kleidern, um sie über den Kopf halten zu können. Es war ein sonderbares Gefühl, als ich nackt in das Wasser tauchte. Es war schwarz und sehr kühl und fremd, als tauchte ich in den Fluss Lethe, um Vergessenheit zu trinken. Auch daß ich nackt hindurch musste, schien mir ein Symbol zu sein, als ließe ich alles hinter mir. (32) I shall never forget that night. I was alert in every fiber, all my senses were wide awake, I was prepared for anything, but utterly without fear. I felt as though I were crossing a high bridge from one side of my life to the other, and I knew that the bridge would fade away behind me like silvery smoke and that I’d never be able to return. I was passing from reason to feeling, from security to adventure, from rationality to dream. I was utterly alone, but this time my solitude was not a torment; there was something mystical about it. 26  The Rhine has inspired many important artistic and literary explorations and representations; see the discussion of the Rhine as European inner periphery in Matthew Miller’s contribution to this anthology.

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I came to the Rhine, which is young at that spot and not very wide. I undressed and made a bundle of my clothes, so as to hold them over my head. It was a weird feeling when I slipped naked into the water. It was black and very cool and strange. I felt I was plunging into the River Lethe to drink forgetfulness. It struck me as symbolic that I had to pass though it naked, as though leaving everything behind me. (22)

The blend of surrealist images reminiscent of dreams, Greek mythology, and the protagonist’s nakedness when he immerses himself in the “young” Rhine River is highly symbolic, as the narrator directly points out. Yet the references are not coherent; they produce paradoxes. Lethe, the mythical river of oblivion, cannot be reconciled with the first sentence of the passage in which the protagonist says that he will never forget this night. The illegal crossing from neutral Switzerland into Nazi-occupied Austria is envisioned as a bridge that connects the two sides, but after he traverses it, the bridge disappears. Likening the actual river to Lethe removes the passage into Austria from its current geographical and political context, and as a result, it becomes timeless. Both places, the Rhine as well as the envisioned evanescent bridge, can be seen as transit places with characteristics that Wilhelmer outlines. They are dynamic and linear, oriented for passing through them; as places in-between, they are also “entgrenzend,” boundary dissolving. Schwarz’s geopolitical location is no longer in Switzerland and not yet in Austria/Germany; his state of mind is in transition from the realm of reason to that of feeling. Lastly, transit places are fleeting, and Wilhelmer reveals the linguistic relation between the German words “Flucht” (flight) and “Flüchtigkeit” (fleetingness).27 The representation of Schwarz’s passage alludes to multiple spaces, the real border river, the fictional river Lethe, and the imagined bridge, which from a geocritical perspective form a heterogeneous space.28 Moreover, the passage also constitutes a transgression since Schwarz moves illegally from one country into another—and against all reason, he goes back to a dangerous place. This transgression leads to a permanent transformation of the protagonist who will “never [be] able to return” (22). Later, when he is interned in France during the war, Schwarz sometimes remembers this night, “when I left a safe foreign country to go back to my dangerous  Wilhelmer, Transit-Orte, 35–40. The italics for emphasis are mine.  See Bertrand Westphal’s discussion of Henry Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and his repudiation of the uniformity of space. Geocriticism, 38. 27 28

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homeland, and crossed through the Rhine as if it were a stream of destiny, a narrow strip of moonlit life” (155). After Schwarz arrives in Austria, he takes the train to Munich to get away from the “dangerous border zone” (23) and to acclimatize to a country that he fled five years ago. Over lunch at a traditional Bavarian restaurant that is popular with locals and tourists, he realizes how much everything has changed. When he reads German newspapers, the former journalist is appalled at how “abominable, packed with bloodthirsty, arrogant lies” they are. “This had become their daily fare; it seemed just as natural to them as their beer. . . . I suddenly felt lonelier than I ever had in a foreign country” (25). His native country is now more alien than the countries in which he stayed in exile, Switzerland, Italy, and France, although all of them treated him and other refugees with hostility. Schwarz then continues his journey to his—and Remarque’s—hometown, Osnabrück. As he watches from the train window the passing landscape that still looks as it did in his childhood and at the beginning of his and Helen’s relationship, he remembers that he once loved it as he loved his hometown. “I felt that I was crossing the border only now. Up until then, the people and things, even in my native land, had been strangers to me; but now every tree began to speak” (30). The return to the familiar and to the region of his origin reconnects Schwarz with himself and in a metaphorical sense with the vernacular of his home place. Parts of his former self had been paralyzed and petrified, “paralysiert und versteinert” (43), in exile. The return to Osnabrück and the subsequent reencounter with his wife dissolve his stasis. While waiting for Helen on a bridge, he is again in a state of in-betweenness—no longer in exile and yet without having arrived at his former home—and for “a timeless moment” (53) (für einen Augenblick, der ohne Zeit war [74]), he has another mystical experience and becomes one with all that surrounds him, the water under him and the bridge on which he is standing. Although this unity does not last for long, it interrupts the progression of time and brings it briefly to a standstill. Schwarz, however, is not tricked into a nostalgia that would let him think his Odyssey could end in a return to his birthplace and to himself, “daß ich heimkehren könne, getrost, nach einem langen Irrweg, um wieder ich selbst zu sein” (75) (that I could go home with an easy heart after a long and aimless journey, to be myself again” [54]). Equally impossible is a reunion with Helen, whom Josef (at this time still Josef Baumann) left behind when he fled Germany. After the couple returns to the apartment

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where they once lived together, they navigate a difficult interior territory. Schwarz is unable to answer Helen’s repeated question as to why he came back. When he asks her if she divorced him, she answers no, adding that it was not on his account but to annoy her family who staunchly supports the regime. Although the place they inhabited together appears almost unchanged, Schwarz describes himself several times as on the threshold of his home—another place of in-betweenness like that in which he lives in exile: Die vielen Nächte zwischen den Grenzen, die grauenhafte Langeweile des Daseins, das nur um etwas Essen und ein paar Stunden Schlaf kämpfen darf, die Maulwurfsexistenz unter Grund – sie versanken ohne Spur, während ich hier auf der Schwelle meiner Wohnung stand. Ich hatte zwar Bankrott gemacht, aber ich brauchte keine Schulden zu übernehmen. Ich war frei. Das Ich dieser Jahre hatte Selbstmord begangen, als ich die Grenze überschritt. Es war keine Rückkehr. Ich war tot, ein anderes Ich lebte, und es lebte von geschenkter Zeit. Keine Verantwortung war mehr da. (81–82) The nights in the no man’s land between borders, the cruel boredom of a life spent fighting for a little food and a few hours of sleep, the underground existence of a mole—all this fell away from me as I stood here on the threshold of my home. I was bankrupt, but at least I had no debts. I was free. This was not a return. The self of those years had committed suicide when I crossed the border. It was dead. Another self was alive, and it was a gift, involving no responsibility.29 (59)

Schwarz’s return to Osnabrück lets him recognize it as a place to which, despite all familiarity, he cannot ever return. Thus, the hometown turns into another transit place on his route that will eventually lead to Lisbon. Likewise, the couple comes together, but it is not a reunion. They have both changed profoundly during their separation, and they begin a new relationship on different terms, accepting that they cannot return to the past. This allows them to do away with old behaviors, petty jealousies, and possessive-aggressive patterns. They see each other as they could not before and find a new love that is honest though not easy. Helen consequently decides to go into exile with Josef, with whom, as she observes, she no longer shares the same surname. Before they unite, Schwarz tells her that his existence has become that of a “rolling stone” (63), “[das]  The emphasis indicated by the italics is mine.

29

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eines Kugel-Daseins. . . . Meines. Eines, das nirgendwo bleiben kann; das sich nie ansiedeln darf: immer im Rollen bleiben muß. Das Dasein des Emigranten. Das Dasein des indischen Bettelmönches. Das Dasein des modernen Menschen” (87). (Like me. A man who can’t stop anywhere, who can never settle down. The existence of a refugee. Or a Buddhist mendicant monk. Or modern man [63]). When Schwarz likens his exilic existence to the condition of modern man, Helen responds, “That doesn’t sound too bad. . . . Better than bourgeois stagnation” (63). It soon becomes obvious that her decision to leave Nazi Germany is not solely based on her love for her husband. It is also a repudiation of her familial ties to the oppressive and brutal fascist system that she loathes as she does the old bourgeois order that preceded it.

Toward the Periphery This last part of a geocritical reading of Remarque’s The Night in Lisbon focuses on the fragmentation and heterogeneity of time within the novel. Bertrand Westphal describes a spatiotemporal revolution that took place around 1945 because of the historical developments during World War II that possibly took off even earlier with the beginning of the Great War in 1914. The result of this revolution was a crisis of the structuring concepts of time and place, and with them the vision of history.30 “The fragmented view of time has decisively affected the image of space as well. . . . It leads to the multiplication of the unitarity and therefore to the plurality, causing transition from homogeneity to heterogeneity.”31 Remarque’s novel employs a multitude of times. As previously mentioned, it takes place on three temporal levels, the first one being the night in Lisbon, in June 1942,32 providing the framework narrative. It contains the main narrative, told by Josef Schwarz, that spans from summer 1939 to the meeting of the framework narrator and the main narrator in Lisbon, at which point the two temporal levels merge. The third and last temporal level is introduced at the very end of the book when the framework narrator reveals that he has retold the story from a significant distance in time, years after the  Westphal, Geocriticism, 12–13.  Ibid., 14–15. 32  Because of references to a festival, Wilhelmer suggests dating it to June 13 to 14, when Lisbon’s municipal holiday is celebrated in honor of St Anthony, the city’s patron saint. Wilhelmer, Transit-Orte, 223–224 and note 205. 30 31

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war.33 By then, the framework narrator has returned to Europe. In addition to this elaborate temporal composition, there are frequent references to actual historical events, such as the German victory over France, the occupation of the country, and the consequences for the emigrants. Parallel to this “external time,” there exists an “experienced time” for the protagonists, especially the two lovers, Schwarz and Helen. This time often takes the form of metaphor and it describes the internal state in which the protagonists live in exile. Historical time and exilic time are often not synchronous. Helen and Schwarz leave Germany on separate routes. When they come together again in Zürich, Schwarz has the feeling that he is meeting a new woman, and he loves her. Helen’s transgression—her border crossing constitutes a defection from her family and from Germany—also transforms her: “The past had lost its power to hem her in. For her too, the poison of time had evaporated when she crossed the border” (110). At first, it seems as if they can escape the grip of time. “It was a strange situation, but it strengthened our feeling that time had been turned back for us” (111). However, Helen is suddenly summoned to the German consulate for a check of her passport, and the couple is reminded of the fragility of their existence. They suspect that Helen’s Nazi brother, Sturmbannführer Georg Jürgens, has been tracking her because he is furious about his sister’s departure from Germany. Instead of going to the consulate, the couple leaves Zurich and takes refuge in Ascona, in southern Switzerland.34 There, they can blend in with the many tourists who seem to have nothing on their minds but pleasures, swimming, and sunbathing. But the carefree atmosphere is deceiving; it is a different kind of stasis, one that tries to hold on to a peaceful time in the face of the looming catastrophe of war. Schwarz and Helen feel the growing risk of staying and they decide to 33  Schneider dates 1960 as the year of the narration; see the appendix of Remarque, Die Nacht von Lissabon, 366, and the chronology of events, 357. 34  Here, Remarque draws on his familiarity with places he knew from his exile in the region around Ascona. Schwarz and Helen’s last dinner before leaving Switzerland takes place in the village of Ronco, where the writer stayed from 1931 to 1939. Remarque repeatedly visited Paris and he left France on March 18, 1939, traveling on the Queen Mary to the United States. Different from the protagonists of his novel, he had no problems with his immigration papers. The Night in Lisbon, although informed by the author’s experiences with National Socialism and exile, is not a fictionalized account of the author’s flight from Europe. For information on Remarque’s immigration to the United States, see von Sternburg, “Als wäre alles,” 277–284.

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trade Switzerland and its dangerously efficient registration system for France, which is larger and less orderly. They arrive in Paris in July and “were human beings until September, 1939” (121). For two months, they escape again from the world outside, “living in eternity,” “brimful of feeling,” with “no room for time,” “on another shore, beyond time” (122–123). Their love shields and removes them from the actual political situation. They are disconnected from the onslaught of the news, the “extras, troop movements, emergency sessions of the Chamber”; they are “living in eternity,” which seems an especially peculiar existence for a former journalist (122). When Schwarz speaks about this brief period of happiness, the first-time narrator gets bored by what he calls Schwarz’s “caprice with eternity.”35 It leaves him cold and he becomes impatient—for him, time is running out; he wants to return to the hotel and to his wife as soon as Schwarz finishes his story, and then take the ship to America as quickly as he can. Schwarz is quite literally “on another shore,” his only interest being to preserve his memories of life with Helen. “I want it to stand still like a marble statue. . . . Can I leave it to the ravages of time? I know it will fade even in my mind, it will be distorted and falsified, unless I can protect it and set it up outside of me” (123). Schwarz repeatedly describes separations between his and Helen’s existence and the world outside of them, a heterogeneity of space and time that cannot be sustained for long. The sudden intrusion of Helen’s brother Georg is a brutal reminder that even in pre-war France the couple is not outside of the reach of the Nazis. Georg is obsessed with returning his sister to her family and to Germany, and he embodies the dictatorship Helen and Schwarz are trying to escape. Before he leaves again, Georg reminds them, “The situation is serious. . . . There’s going to be war” (127). The temporal distance between the couple’s retreats and actual time on the outside dwindles and ceases to exist with the outbreak of the war. In September 1939, Schwarz and Helen are rounded up together with other Germans in Paris—refugees and Nazis alike—as enemy aliens. At this point, temporal references all but disappear from the narrative. Time has caught up with Schwarz and Helen, who still tries to conceal that she has cancer although the disease now progresses more noticeably. 35  The English translation of the novel speaks of “Schwarz’s fantasies about eternity” (123), which is not quite the same as the more random and impulsive “caprice” he has with eternity in the German original.

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Instead of external events it is now Helen’s illness that symbolizes the vanishing time the lovers have left. Before they are separated and sent to different camps, Helen manages to visit Schwarz at the police station Salle Lépin, an infamous holding station in Paris for refugees from Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain before they were sent to French internment camps or German concentration camps.36 In the basement where Schwarz and others are held for the night, the  “bourgeois order” resurfaces, a theme that was introduced with Helen’s decision to become an exile, this time in a bitterly ironic take on “Civilization.” Helen brings a basket that contains two bottles of cognac and a pâté to the police station, and she somehow bribes her way to her husband. When Schwarz takes “an enormous gulp” of cognac, she comments: “I even have a glass. . . . It’s my tribute to Civilization” (143). The conditions in the French police station are representative of the breakdown of civilization that immediately followed France’s war declaration. “The life and welfare of the individual counted for nothing. People had ceased to be human beings—they were classified according to military criteria as soldiers, fit for military service, unfit for military service, and enemies” (141). The theme of civilization’s decline is further emphasized when Helen produces the pâté, which the patron of the hotel gave them as a gift—a humane gesture—and she comments, with her characteristic irony, “I’ve got forks and a knife. I say it again: Vive la Civilization!” (144). Her toast and the meal are set against the basement’s darkness and the heaps of coal next to which the prisoners spend the night. After a brief detention in Paris, Schwarz and the other men are transferred to the infamous internment camp Le Vernet, where they are detained together with Spanish antifascists who fled to France after Franco’s victory earlier in 1939. Helen is interned in Rieucros, which was turned into a women’s camp after France’s declaration of war with Germany. In the fall of 1940, Schwarz escapes from Le Vernet and makes his way to Rieucros. Helen has little hope that they will get far without documents and at first does not want to leave. But once she knows that the Germans will soon take over the camp and that her brother Georg might find and return her to Germany, she agrees to flee. 36  Among those detained at Salle Lépin were writers such as Gustav Regler and Arthur Koestler (who were both in Spain during the Civil War). Koestler describes the condition at the police station and in the camp Le Vernet in his novel Scum of the Earth. See Cate-Arries, Spanish Culture Behind Barbed Wire, 120.

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The brutality and violence of the German occupation and the war rapidly dissolve old boundaries of social norms and human behavior. A French innkeeper tries to capitalize on the growing lawlessness. He wants to keep Schwarz’s and Helen’s few belongings, knowing that they cannot call the police. A young German sergeant comes to their rescue, assuming they are fellow Germans, an impression Helen supports by using strong Nazi language about “die deutsche Frau” (262–265), declaring “A German woman does not lie!”—which is what she does to an extent that is comical. Helen’s is the voice of irony, while Schwarz’s is that of disillusionment. After they have regained their possessions, the German sergeant says that things like stealing from your patrons don’t happen in Germany, because “We have order.” With this, he parts, and Schwarz looks after him, “Order, I thought. With torture, bullets in the neck, and mass murder.” He would prefer “a million petty crooks like that café owner” over this kind of “order” (197). The Nazi henchmen, among them Sturmbannführer Georg Jürgens, Helen’s brother, torture and murder their victims; the French police do not resist but collaborate; some policemen also mistreat refugees. “In those days we were everybody’s game. The French gendarmes hunted us down in a misdirected passion for law and order. The Gestapo tried to poke its nose into the camps . . . You never knew who might pick you up, and every morning we said good-bye as if for the last time” (173). When Josef Schwarz is arrested, he falls into the hands of Georg and another Nazi torturer, and both men take turns in torturing Schwarz. In order to save his and Helen’s life, he concocts a scheme in which he offers to betray Helen so that she will turn away from him and return to Germany—something she would never do if Georg tried to force her or if he killed Schwarz. This logic convinces Georg, who drives with Schwarz to Helen. But on the way, Schwarz murders Georg with a razor blade that was hidden in his pants’ hem. After he disposes of the dead body, Schwarz uses Georg’s car and documents to escape with Helen from Marseilles. As an antifascist refugee, Schwarz was constantly mistreated. As a representative of Nazi Germany—France’s official enemy—he is saluted, treated with politeness, and has no problems obtaining a transit visa for Helen (Georg had one in his passport) or for a refugee boy whom Helen saves because of the life they have taken by killing her brother Georg. “You’ve got to be a murderer, I thought bitterly, to be treated with respect” (231). The couple and the boy cross the Spanish border and drive to Portugal without any incident of the sort that Schwarz constantly fears.

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The border crossing from France to Spain is an anticlimax after the other borders that Schwarz has crossed. He wants to experience happiness, but instead he feels empty (235). There are no happy endings in this tale about a destroyed world, and paradox becomes the dominant paradigm. As Schwarz himself points out, “We are living in an age of paradoxes. To preserve peace, we wage war” (197). Another paradox is that of the rescued Jewish boy, whose family was murdered in Germany; he stays with an uncle in Lisbon, and the uncle hates him, but the boy still feels lucky that it is a relative and not the Nazis who mistreat him. Once Helen knows that her husband is safe and he has obtained the visa and tickets for the passage to America, she takes her own life. She leaves no final note, and it is up to Schwarz to make sense of their story—the other factor motivating his narration. Over the course of the night following Helen’s suicide, Schwarz and the first narrator are forced to change locations whenever one of the venues closes. They move down from the restaurant with the view over Lisbon to a Russian night club, and toward morning they end up at the bar of a brothel. This search for a temporary refuge mirrors the perpetual movements and the social descent of refugees during their flight.37 The places of the framework narration—the harbor, the restaurants, bars, and hotels where the protagonists and their wives stay—and the places in the main narrative are stations on a flight route. On all three temporal levels of the narrative, representing past, present, and future, exiles exist in a space in which all places are transit places. The route through them is forced and shaped by circumstances that can undergo profound changes within a short time—such as over the course of one night in Lisbon. When Schwarz finishes his story, it is morning, and he implores his counterpart with a cascade of short exclamations: Vergessen Sie es nicht! Jemand muß es halten! Es soll nicht fort sein! Wir sind nur noch zwei. Bei mir ist es nicht sicher. Es soll nicht sterben. Es soll weiterleben. Bei Ihnen ist es sicher. . . . Aber mein Gedächtnis wird die Erinnerung zu zerstören versuchen. Es wird sie zerkauen, zerkleinern, fälschen, bis sie zum Überleben geeignet und nicht mehr gefährlich ist. Schon in einigen Wochen könnte ich Ihnen das nicht mehr erzählen, was ich ihnen heute erzählt habe. (321)

 Schreckenberger, “‘Durchkommen ist alles,’” 35.

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Don’t forget that. Someone has to hold it. It mustn’t die. There are only two of us. It’s not safe with me. But it mustn’t die. It’s got to go on living. With you it’s safe. . . . But my mind will try to destroy the memory, chew it to bits, reduce it, falsify it, domesticate it, make it into something I can go on living with. Even a few weeks from now, I’d be unable to tell you what I’ve told you today. (239)

From his perspective, it makes sense that Schwarz offered the tickets to a man whom he just met, rescuing him (and his wife) with documents he no longer needs. Since his main objective is securing Helen’s and his life stories, Schwarz depends on the impartial stranger as much as the anonymous stranger depends on him. The transfer of the story from one narrator to the other is sealed when the two men exchange their passports. With this symbolic transaction, the trajectories of their lives change, they leave their former identities (and names) behind, and they depart in radically different directions. The main narrator, until now Joseph Schwarz (II), will use the passport he just received from the framework narrator to return to France. He is determined to enlist in the Foreign Legion and use his life to fight against his former torturers. The Legion requires no passports and has no interest in the pasts of those who join; he therefore will become as anonymous as the framework narrator has been throughout the novel. The framework narrator becomes the next Josef Schwarz (III). He and his wife, Ruth, will depart the next day for the United States. But their miraculous rescue also does not produce the happy ending that it seems to promise. Ruth leaves her husband within a few months after their arrival in America. In an ironic twist of their story, because their passports are in different names, they must remarry to obtain a legal divorce. When the framework narrator reveals at the end of the novel that he has told the entire story in hindsight, the wish of his former namesake is fulfilled. Moreover, in America the framework narrator develops an interest in painting, just like the two other refugees with whom he is connected by the same name and passport. He has become a part of their story, a living legacy. Did he rescue the story as the previous Josef Schwarz intended? Is it flawless, untouched by an impartial listener who is an equally impeccable keeper of the story? A remark by the framework narrator in the last paragraph of the novel undermines this very possibility. He speaks about his return to Europe after the war. There, after some problems, he establishes his real identity. Then he travels to Osnabrück in search of Schwarz, but

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he cannot recall Schwarz’s real name. This indication of memory’s fallibility shows that Schwarz’s counterpart cannot possibly keep the story as it was told to him in Lisbon. Yet, in another paradox, the task he was charged with has been fulfilled. “Someone has to hold it,” said Josef Schwarz II before he disappeared. In the end, there are no longer two; there is only one narrator left. It appears that the reader who just received the story has taken the place of the witness and is now tasked to be memory’s keeper.

References “Americans and the Holocaust,” Accessed April 26, 2022. Website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/ Americans-­and-­the-­holocaust/main Bianchini, Angela. 2000. The Edge of Europe. Translated by Angela M. Jeannet and David Castronuovo. With an afterword by Angela M.  Jeannet. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press Glunz, Claudia, and Thomas F.  Schneider, eds. 1997. Elfriede Scholz, geb. Remarque. Im Namen des deutschen Volkes. Dokumente einer justiziellen Ermordung. Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch. Heine-Teixeira, Christine. 2001. Wartesaal Lissabon 1940–1941. In Deutsche Exilliteratur Seit 1933, vol. 3, pt. 3, ed. John M.  Spalek, Joseph Strelka, and Sandra H. Hawrylchak, 441–481. Bern: Francke. Mann, Heinrich. 1974. Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt. Düsseldorf: Claassen. Murdoch, Brian. 2006. The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque. Sparks of Life. Rochester: Camden House. Remarque, Erich Maria. 1961. The Night in Lisbon. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. ———. 2017. Die Nacht von Lissabon. Roman. In der Fassung der Erstausgabe mit Anhang und einem Nachwort herausgegeben von Thomas F. Schneider. (1962) Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Schaaf, Dierk Ludwig. 2018. Fluchtpunkt Lissabon. Wie Helfer in Frankreich Tausende vor Hitler retteten. Bonn: Dietz. Schneider, Thomas F. 2001. Erich Maria Remarque—Kurzbiografie in Daten. In Erich Maria Remarque, 79–92. München: Edition Text + Kritik. ———. 2017. Käfig aus goldenen Tränen. Zu Remarque, Erich Marias Die Nacht von Lissabon. In Die Nacht von Lissabon. Roman. In der Fassung der Erstausgabe mit Anhang und einem Nachwort herausgegeben von Thomas F. Schneider, ed. Erich Maria Remarque, 361–380. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Schreckenberger, Helga. 1998. Remarque, Erich Maria im amerikanischen Exil. In Remarque, Erich Maria: Leben, Werk und weltweite Wirkung. Erich-Maria-­ Remarque-Jahrbuch 8, ed. Thomas F. Schneider, 251–266. Osnabrück: Rasch.

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———. 2001. ‘Durchkommen ist alles.’ Physischer und psychischer Existenzkampf in Remarque, Erich Marias Exil-Romanen. In Erich Maria Remarque, 30–41. München: Edition Text + Kritik. von Sternburg, Wilhelm. 2009. “Als wäre alles das letzte Mal.” Erich Maria Remarque. Eine Biografie. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Tims, Hilton. 2003. Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic. New York: Carol and Graf Publishers. Wagener, Hans. 1991. Understanding Erich Maria Remarque. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr., New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilhelmer, Lars. 2015. Transit-Orte in der Literatur: Eisenbahn – Hotel – Hafen – Flughafen. Bielefeld: Transkript Verlag.

Najat El Hachmi: Away from Patriarchy, Hijab, and Cultural Relativism Cristián H. Ricci

Bestselling author Najat El Hachmi made her literary debut with the autobiography Jo també sóc Catalana [I am Catalan, Too] (2004), and later published L’últim patriarca [The Last Patriarch] (2008), for which she received the coveted Ramon Llull literary prize for Catalan literature. A decade later, El Hachmi published a feminist essay, Siempre han hablado por nosotras [They Have Always Spoken for Us Women] (2019), and more recently was awarded the Nadal Prize, the oldest and one of the most prestigious Spanish literary recognitions, for her latest novel El lunes nos querrán [They Will Love Us on Monday] (2021). As I have addressed El

C. H. Ricci (*) University of California, Merced, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_8

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Hachmi’s previous publications in academic books and articles,1 the purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on her last two works in order to disclose the foundations of a unique form of feminist account that problematizes the identity challenges faced by Muslim North African women in Europe. In this sense, El Hachmi’s narrative can be analyzed through two critical perspectives. The first is her attempt to improve the social situation of her fellow Muslim North African counterparts, motivated in part by the stimulus produced by a writing process that allows her to analyze cultures from a liminal space. Thus, the margins become sites of multiple resistance and understanding that El Hachmi proudly cultivates as spaces where radically new fragmented subjectivities are produced. The second perspective is the transformation of issues that generate uneasiness in daily life (religion, injustice, violence, patriarchy) into objects of irony in such a way that provides relief for this condition of discomfort. Of the aforementioned issues, there is one that I consider the most important, which is El Hachmi’s relationship with Islam and feminism. I will use the latter as a common thread throughout this chapter, because it represents the most significant node of identity conflict in her narrative. The argument of El Hachmi’s work revolves around two axes of denunciation: (1) Islam as a structural social system that enforces patriarchy and (2) identity rhetoric and cultural relativism as the main contributors to backsliding in the fight for women’s rights. 1  See Ricci, ¡Hay moros en la costa! and New Voices of Muslim North Africans. It is also worth mentioning that there are three other Amazigh-Catalan authors with a strong record of publications. Although El Hachmi’s work has been frequently studied, the work of these other authors has received considerably less attention: Saïd El Kadaoui, who published his first literary essay in 2008, Límites y fronteras [Limits and Borders], and his most recent work in 2020, Radical(es); Laila Karrouch, who published an autobiography in 2004, De Nador a Vic [From Nador to Vic], and a novel in 2021, Que Al⋅là em perdoni [May Allah Forgive Me]; and Jamila al-Hassani, who published La lluita de la dona bereber [The Struggle of the Berber Woman] in 2013, and La sultana justiciera [The Avenging Sultana] in 2017. Like El Hachmi, all three of these writers were born between 1975 and 1979 in the geographic and cultural region of the Riff, in northern Morocco, and are Amazigh (Berber) descents who have lived in Catalonia since their childhoods. Moreover, four new Amazigh-Catalan authors born in the Riff have published their first works of fiction and autobiographies in the last two years. These include Youssef Maimouni, with his novels Cuando los montes caminen [When the Mountains Walk] (2021), and Nadie salva a las rosas [Nobody Saves the Roses] (2023); rapper Imane Raissali (“Miss Raisa”) with her autobiography Porque me da la gana [Because I Want To] (2022); Safia El Aaddam, with her novel Hija de inmigrantes [Daughter of Immigrants] (2022); and Karima Ziali with her novel Una oración sin Dios [A Prayer Without God] (2023).

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In the 1960s, Assia Djebar maintained, “Just as Islamic civilization declined . . . due to the stifling of the spirit of liberty in the interpretation of the sacred writings, so the condition of women deteriorated because her place in society was determined too rigidly, according to the latter [the interpretation], rather than the spirit of the Koran” (1961, 33). Likewise, in 2004 the Moroccan anthropologist and psychiatrist Ghita El Khayat stated that the Arab woman is a “denigrated and hidden being,” who does not possess her own means to either self-analyze or create, or in other words, to compose basic operations of self-expression or speak on behalf of others (2004, 8).2 Ultimately, El Khayat conjectured that the unfortunate situation of Arab women in the world was not viewed by men as a relevant problem, and furthermore that the actual state of women would not be clarified within or outside the Arab Muslim world until the consciousness of the problem was achieved in female circles (2004, 8–9). In 2015, Mona Eltahawy observed, “Only we can rescue ourselves. . . . The battles over women’s bodies can only be won by a revolution of the mind” (2015, 28, 30). It is precisely this call for raised awareness among women in the Muslim world where Najat El Hachmi’s novelistic and essayistic labor intervenes: she rigorously criticizes the supposed equality between the sexes, which in her view has been mistakenly attributed to the Koran, and she consequently considers structural misogyny and animosity toward women as constitutive and immovable characteristics of Islam (El Hachmi 2019, 37).3 This structural misogyny reveals itself in diverse practices, such as that of establishing marriage and maternity as the only possible destiny for women; designating women as the vessels of honor for the entire family; and subjecting their bodies to the service and pleasure of men. Moreover, it disrupts or prohibits education programs for girls and  Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish and Catalan to English are my own.  To the recurring question about how misogyny in Islam differs from that of Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism, El Hachmi offers, in both texts analyzed in this essay, a clear response based on the dualism between universal feminism and multiculturalism. This topic has been addressed by prominent Western and non-Western scholars. Among the latter, El Hachmi’s stance coincides with that of Susan Moller Okin in “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” (1997). Although the powerful drive to control women—and to blame them for men’s difficulty controlling their own sexual impulses—has been softened considerably in the more progressive versions of the three monotheistic religions, the drive remains strong in their more orthodox or fundamentalist interpretations. As we shall see throughout this chapter, discrimination against women and control over their freedom is specifically a benchmark of Islam, insofar as it looks to the past for guidelines or rules about how to live in the contemporary world. 2 3

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subjects women to constant acts of violence, scorn, and segregation based on words from the Prophet Muhammad as compiled in the Hadiths (El Hachmi 2019, 39–43, 55, 59). In the novel El lunes nos querrán the main character states, “Mahoma había dicho que en el infierno había más mujeres que hombres por ser nosotras unas fornicadoras provocadoras, amigas del demonio” [Muhammad had said that in hell there are more women than men, because we are provocative fornicators, friends of the devil] (El Hachmi 2021, 50). Coincidentally, Eltahawy observes that the proselytism of Wahhabi/Salafist movements exacerbates the demonization of women: “The obsession with controlling women and our bodies stems from the suspicion that, without restraints, women are just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability” (2019, 10).4 Since the publication of her autobiography in 2004 and her novel L’últim patriarca in 2008, El Hachmi has called for Muslim women (particularly from the Moroccan-Amazigh Riff region) to have greater independence without completely renouncing their cultural roots. On this path, whether in her more recent essay Siempre han hablado por nosotras (2019) or in her novel El lunes nos querrán (2021), the negotiating sketch in her earlier texts is transformed into an activist agenda, thereby exposing her to the risk of being branded as a proselyting Western Euro-American feminist. Nevertheless, insofar as El Hachmi considers the violation of North African women’s rights to be a universal phenomenon (2019, 18),5 her militancy, like that of other feminists of similar origin, is explicitly concomitant with the work of some “white Western feminists” (17, 20). As Eltahawy declares, “Patriarchy is universal. Feminism must be just as universal. I also want feminism to be led by the nonwhite and the queer, who don’t have the luxury of fighting only misogyny” (2020, 5, emphasis in original). In her essay Siempre han hablado por nosotras, El Hachmi rejects the monolithic and homogenizing portrayal of Muslim women as passive 4  See also the chapter “El cuerpo velado: Arabia coloniza cabezas” in Mimunt Hamido Yahia (2021). 5  “Pues no, mujer, no es así, seas musulmana, negra, gitana o cualquier otra cosa, lamento decirte que tu enemiga no es la mujer blanca occidental. Tus enemigos son el patriarcado, que te maltrata, el polígamo … el jefe que te paga un sueldo más bajo …, el padre …, el hermano …, el marido” [But no, women, it’s not like that, whether you’re Muslim, black, gypsy, or anything else, I’m sorry to tell you that your enemy is not the Western white women. Your enemies are the patriarchy that abuses you, polygamy . . . the boss who pays you low wages . . . the father . . . , brother . . . , husband] (El Hachmi 2019, 108-09).

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victims—that is, without agency—within the patriarchal systems in which they live. Writing outside of the “protective environment [of] fiction” (2019, 13) and without ignoring the differences between women who inhabit dissimilar contexts and geographies of oppression, El Hachmi’s essay addresses the historical, cultural, and individual determinants of Muslim male chauvinism and the way in which feminist theories have apparently continued to positively transform the lives of Muslim women. In particular, the author warns of the dangers of abandoning feminism in favor of other causes, whether political, cultural, or religious. These other causes include decolonial feminism and its “dangerous friendships” (2019, 7) between leftist relativists and Wahhabism/Salafism that specifically bear down on Islamic feminism.6 In this same vein, Algerian writer Wassyla Tamzali considers unacceptable the stream of feminist thought directed, accepted, sustained, and reinforced through Islamic discourse by postcolonial and postmodern studies (2010, Loc. 341 of 2675). Furthermore, Tamzali reiterates that giving a feminist label to acts of identity recovery, religious renovation, the learning of Islamic rules, or moral-religious protests—under the pretext that women have led them—is to reduce feminist thought to female actions and empty it of its contents, despite the positive outcomes the actions in question might achieve (Tamzali 2010, Loc. 791 of 2675). Therefore, the creation of compartments within feminism itself, as is the case with the category “Islamic feminism,” responds instead to an internal dispute over representativeness. If the objective is always the same—to fight against the systematic violation of women’s rights—and even though the struggle is articulated differently in each area, why should the adjective Islamic be added to the word “feminism”? El Hachmi is in favor of reinterpreting the Koran in terms of gender, as this revision can 6  Although El Hachmi does not provide a broad explanation of “decolonial feminism” or cite a referent author in her essay, it is clear that she aims to criticize third wave feminisms that have been directed toward a reactive defense of Islam as compatible with liberal feminist projects in the context of a response to Islamophobic discourses. In short, from El Hachmi’s point of view, it is impossible to carry out a decolonial project, based on Islamic tradition, that allows a rethinking of a fully emancipatory project. Wahhabi is a label given to those who follow the reformist teachings of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The Wahhabis are always referred to as Salafists, a term they prefer. As a rule, all Wahhabis are Salafists, although not all Salafists are Wahhabis. The term Salafism did not become associated with the Wahhabi creed until the 1970s. It was not until the early twentieth century that the Wahhabis began to refer to themselves as Salafists.

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help many Muslim women reconcile feminism with their ideas at the individual level. However, she criticizes Islamic feminism for its inoperability when it comes to denouncing the political and religious patriarchy in which many Muslim women live, as well as for its insistence on claiming Islam as a fundamental fact of women’s identity (2019, 102). This criticism also encompasses decolonial feminism: La teoría es la misma. . . . Covierten la religión de Mahoma en un hecho esencial. Según ellas, las mujeres somos esencialmente musulmanas, como si lo hubiéramos sido desde siempre y como si la vida antes de la colonización hubiera sido fantástica y maravillosa. . . . Ya no es suficiente con ser feministas sin más, hay que añadirle un adjetivo a la cosa. [The theory is the same. . . . They make Muhammad’s religion an essential fact. According to them, women are essentially Muslim, as if we had always been Muslim and as if life before colonization had been fantastic and wonderful. . . . It is no longer enough to be feminists; we must add an adjective to it] (El Hachmi 2019, 110-111).

El Hachmi’s intention to illustrate the multiple traps and forms of discrimination that women suffer is evident in Siempre han hablado por nosotras, which serves as a primer for her fictional work that immediately follows, El lunes nos querrán. At this point, it is worth mentioning that El Hachmi frequently uses an autobiographic style in her work. By blurring the boundaries between fiction and scholarly writing, and between story and history, she succeeds in connecting her theoretical thought with an Amazigh/Moroccan, predominantly female, tradition of storytelling.7 Along the same lines, French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani further explains the need to recover the “authorship of the story” about Muslim women among the worthy heiresses of Scheherazade, particularly in the Maghreb. In Slimani’s words, women will need to find a way to influence a culture that is held captive by religious leaders and patriarchy. By expressing themselves, by talking about themselves, they wield one of the most powerful weapons against hate: words (2018, 16). Accordingly, El Hachmi’s El lunes nos querrán is a novel that deals with oppression, the 7  I gather this thought from Raja Rhouni’s study of Fatima Mernissi’s Secular and Islamic Feminist Critiques (138-140). I also wish to acknowledge the reference in Rhouni’s scholarship to Ieme van der Poel’s Republic of Cousins: New Literary Voices of the Moroccan Diaspora (forthcoming from Liverpool University Press).

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reification of women, and racism, and in which religion and dignity take on a dominant role; freedom ends even in one’s home; and male chauvinism is the underlying foundation for all decision-making. Written in the second person, the novel is an extensive letter written by the protagonist to her best friend, whose name she never reveals. It narrates the story of a young Maghrebian girl who lives in a marginal neighborhood on the outskirts of Barcelona where many practicing Muslims follow the religious and cultural norms of the Amazigh community from the Riff region. It is important to frame the novel in specific Barcelona neighborhoods in the course of interpreting El Hachmi’s narrative project because doing so allows the reader to relate the protagonist’s marginalization (and that of other female voices in the novel) to the cultural space where she lives: on the margins of urban life, on the margins of Catalan/Spanish society, and within Islam. That cultural space alludes to the instability and nomadic nature of second-generation immigrants, factors that the novel presents as negative characteristics of subjects in constant transition between the center (Europe/Barcelona) and the margin (North Africa/the Riff), and between adopted and inherited cultural patterns (modernity vs. “backwardness”). The teenage girl, no longer a child, finds herself constantly under watch as she physically matures. Her father and local community, primarily women from her small town, deem it necessary to adhere to certain traditions in order to “stop her in her steps” (El Hachmi 2021, 22) and ensure that “she stays on the straight and narrow” (El Hachmi 2021, 7). This surveillance inhibits all her impulses and generates feelings of guilt and shame that are difficult for her to overcome. Referred to as hachouma (embarrassment) in Arabic, these emotions of guilt and shame will later become a barrier in the protagonist’s progression toward freedom. Such an upbringing, in the opinion of Houda Lemjir, makes even “mujeres intelectualmente brillantes sientan vergüenza de su cuerpo y de sus deseos” [intellectually bright women feel embarrassed about their body and desires] (qtd. in El Kadaoui 2020, 123). Following the introduction to El lunes nos querrán, the epigraph reads: “A las valientes que se salieron del camino recto para ser libres. Aunque doliera” [To the brave women who left the straight and narrow to become free. Despite the pain] (El Hachmi 2021, 7). The first part of the novel focuses on the protagonist’s life between the ages of seventeen and eighteen, a period during which she marries, leaves the paternal home, and begins her university career. Every Monday—start of the academic and

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work week—the protagonist and her best friend resolve to “ser buenas” [be good], “como tenemos que ser y no como somos” [the way we have to be and not like who we really are] (El Hachmi 2021, 8). To “be good” means that the protagonist—troubled by the effects of a pronounced identity disorder throughout much of the novel—must adapt to the customs of the hostland, the Western world, and modernity, “as prescribed by cinema and television, love songs and fashion magazines” (El Hachmi 2021, 8). In other circles, she must also be a good Muslim, daughter, and mother, “as God commands,” “obeying all the rules with exactness” (El Hachmi 2021, 8). In this context, Nawar al-Hassan observes that Muslim women’s bodies are a battlefield of the postcolonial struggle between capitalist forces that pressure women to be more sexual and seductive, and traditionalist ones that force them to be asexual, conservative, and prudish (2004, 527-28). In her essay, El Hachmi very eloquently explains the facts: facing the phenomenon of late modernity and constantly subjected to obsessions over physical appearance, Muslim women in Europe are “submitting themselves to two simultaneous structures of patriarchy: the Western aesthetic dictatorship and the Islamist Hijab” (2019, 91). The subjugation to multiple identities to which El Hachmi refers is particularly apparent among young immigrants, as studied by psychologist and Amazigh-Catalan writer Saïd El Kadaoui and philosophers Rosi Braidotti, Celia Amorós, and Mohammad Affaya, among others. Affaya observes that to take on the challenge of identity is almost an obsessive pretext for falling into the trap of converting the self into a prisoner of what it is not and of what it does not have (1997, 35). Later in this chapter, I will further discuss with analyze this notion of falling into identity traps when I discuss women’s imitation of Afro culture in the novel. The problem is that the Other—both European modernity and radical Islam—has forced the younger generation of immigrants to deeply interiorize guilt and shame, resulting in a paradoxical synthesis between the obsession over identity and the absolute desire to imitate the Other (Amorós 2013, Loc. 164 of 5358). This amalgam of fear, guilt, shame, and obsession is apparent in the protagonist’s rejection of being considered a “mora ignota” [unknown Moor] or for her desire to “parecer lo menos mora possible” [appear as less Moorish as possible] (El Hachmi 2021, 115). With the intention of “being good and modern,” to “tear through the veils,” and “to rip the patio curtain to shreds” (El Hachmi 2021, 11, 51), the protagonist and her best friend subject themselves to starvation (anorexia), brutal exercises, and body mutilations. Their goal is to be slender and keep from “looking so ruined” (8), like the “fat,” “old” women

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from their parents’ dry, rough home town across the Strait of Gibraltar (10, 28): “Mi cuerpo no era otra cosa que un enemigo a abatir” [My body was nothing more than an enemy to be toppled] (25). Saïd El Kadaoui observes that the suffering due to estrangement makes people capable of committing real atrocities, with the sole intention of feeling that they belong to a place, an idea, a group (2020, 49). Discriminatory ideas, such as conceiving sexuality in an exclusively binary way or adhering to a strict conceptualization of the native/foreign binary, generate intense psychological suffering that can result in acute psychological imbalances that can even take the form of aggressive rage and self-mutilation (El Kadaoui 2020, 51). The protagonist’s subjugation to the hardships imposed by European modernity leads her to express doubts: “And what if freedom didn’t exist, and we’ve only escaped one oppressive world to arrive in another with new forms of domination?” (El Hachmi 2021, 12). Hence, what follows is the account of a young woman who will attempt to be herself at any cost, adapting to and molding herself into identities that offer support and control. However, her headstrong drive for emancipation will eventually lead her to absolute solitude and grim alienation. She and her friend begin to sculpt gazes from both sides of the Strait into their bodies, reflecting aesthetic, cultural, and religious factors. Although dieting is for “white, rich, and glamorous” girls, it is the price—of “independence”—they must pay in order to be “considered real women,” even though it means going through life “on the edge of starvation” (2021, 27). This part of the narration occurs in the 1990s, when “the regression that now forces single girls to cover their hair had not arrived” (El Hachmi 2021, 30). As noted in El Hachmi’s essay, when a large group of immigrants from North Africa arrived in Catalonia and various European countries during the 1980s and 1990s, some Muslim women decided to overstep and attempt, in El Hachmi’s terms, to “rasgar las cortinas del patio” [rip the patio curtains to shreds] (2019, 25).8 Amazigh women 8  These curtains refer to those used in the middle of the patio and which follow North Africans far beyond the frontiers that separate men and women. Noise, hustle and bustle, shouting, voices in the air, and a scene that awaits the arrival of the dancers and musicians on the masculine side. Silence, hidings, modesty, bowed heads and lost gazes on the female side (El Hachmi 2019, 25–30). Starting in 1985, coinciding with the reactivation of the Spanish economy, a new wave of Moroccan immigrants emigrated to Catalonia. This wave intensified from 1987 and seemed to reach its peak in 1990, coinciding with the Gulf War. The immigrants in question no longer intended to go on to France or the Netherlands; their destination was Catalonia or other autonomous communities of Spain.

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went out into the streets and worked hard, received a formal education in schools and universities, and were able to achieve economic independence. However, the emergence in the Persian Gulf of the most fundamentalist Islamic trends— “a type of National-Islamism”—coincided precisely with these global migratory movements and their effects on women (2019, 53–57, 63). Consequently, the religious shift imposed changes on women in particular, in the form of old and new pressures—those that North Africans were “dragging” from their traditions of origin along with the new (Islamic) currents (2019, 69). Mimunt Hamido Yahia, a social activist from the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla, makes a strong analogy between Franco’s Spain National Catholicism’s rancid denial of the female body and the brakes now being applied to the “sexual liberation of the Maghreb” (Hamido Yahia 2021, 20) that started during the 1970s and 1980s: “the arrival of the Hijab cut off our escape route: suddenly, everything our mothers had forced upon us with hateful obligations and under the threat of beatings and extortion was converted into the object of desire by our neighbors and cousins” (Hamido Yahia 2021, 21). In the novel, modern preachers reindoctrinate the women: “Sé la reina de tu hogar, les decían, no te vendas por nada, no te prostituyas enseñando el pelo o haciendo trabajos indignos, impropios de una reina” [Be the queen of your home, they told them, don’t sell yourself for nothing, don’t prostitute yourself by showing your hair or doing work that is beneath you, inappropriate for a queen] (El Hachmi 2021, 96). The neighborhood religious panopticon is overseen by women who are “demasiado ocupadas criticándose las unas a las otras, formando ellas mismas parte de lo que nos asfixiaba” [too busy criticizing each other while constituting part of what was choking us] (2021, 65). It is as if the entire neighborhood were co-owner of and responsible for women’s hymens, as Hamido Yahia (2021, 23) puts it. Nevertheless, determined to be modern “and fit (in) better” (2021, 15), many girls living on the outskirts of Barcelona in the low-ceilinged apartments inhabited by a low-income and largely immigrant population refused to give up their demands. In fact, many embraced African American role models (among other models of modern life) who during the late 1990s projected a “joyful negritude” in television series, music videos, and public announcements—in contrast to the “unknown Moors,” who were only portrayed “en la mierda de reportajes aburridos

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de La 2” [in shitty, boring shows transmitted on Channel 2] (2021, 15).9 In Siempre han hablado por nosotras, El Hachmi correctly explains the real reason why some European Muslim girls sought to explicitly copy Afro-­ American models: the “Afro” represents a need to give visibility to something that comes from birth and works to the detriment of religion and the Hijab, which represents precisely the opposite, the covering up of something one was not born with (2019, 113). In this regard, over the last three decades, Euro-American culture has accounted for many changes in the lifestyles of Amazigh immigrant women in Catalonia, who are lowly placed in the scheme of things compared with their male counterparts. The more nationalistic the surrounding culture becomes, the more immigrants are also pushed toward issues of identity, ethnicity, and belonging. Estranged from the history of their parents’ country of origin and unable to identify sufficiently with their place of birth, some of these women—as El Hachmi also illustrates in La filla estrangera [The Foreign Daughter] (2015) and Mare de llet i mel [Mother of Milk and Honey] (2018)—bring to the fore not only issues of fashion and aesthetics but also their concerns about female emancipation and the status of women in society, and some fall prey to radical Islam (see Ricci 2019, 55-67). One of the most prevalent elements of the first part of the novel—following the model successfully used by the author in L’últim patriarca [The Last Patriarch]—is the protagonist’s unique academic success and her promising future as an up-and-coming professional writer. Given that her parents and neighbors are functionally illiterate and believe in moral correction through written texts, the protagonist combines the outrage she feels when seeing her body in the mirror with her reaction to the erotic novels she reads. These books feed her imagination during repeated orgasms while at the same time allowing her to conceptualize how the world of ink and paper corresponds to love, sex, and real-life freedom. Meanwhile, abandoning her body to fiction enables the young protagonist to escape the obscurantism in the suburbs in which she finds herself submerged, and to avoid the fear she had been taught regarding “harassment” and the “devastating consequences” of “provoking desire in men” (El Hachmi 2021, 20). Along these same lines, and insofar as getting a job is “a man’s thing” (2021, 30), the protagonist and other modern girls 9  TVE 2 or “La 2” is a part of Spanish Public Radio Television. Its programming focuses on cultural spaces in the service of the public, with more of an emphasis on minority views compared to its sister channel “La 1.”

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featured in the novel sign up for hairstyling courses, work in bars that serve alcohol, get their driver’s licenses, and start their own businesses. They even dare to establish cooperatives to encourage other women from the neighborhood who lack their own income; all of this in order to become “owners of their own destiny” (2021, 95). As the young girls gain ground in their plan for emancipation, their parents begin to impose restrictions that subject them to tradition, “treating them as infants, more so than when they were truly young,” forbidding them from leaving home or working at “dishonest jobs” (2021, 32).10 The protagonist’s own drive for freedom repeatedly clashes with the will of other adults in her hostland, as high school teachers and mentors seek to persuade her to pursue a technical and service career. At the same time, these mentors also meet with her parents to convince them of the value of education. In this sense, as in other novels by El Hachmi, fiction is nothing more than the sketch of autobiographical portraits of the author. In Siempre han hablado por nosotras, she confesses that a female high school principal, who did not fall into cultural relativism, saved her from “digging her own tomb while embracing the prison of Islamism,” despite the risk of being labeled a “white, Western feminist who wants to manipulate women from other origins” (2019, 67). If in L’últim patriarca [The Last Patriarch] emancipation and revenge against paternal authority is rooted in sex (an open exhibition of anal sex between the narrator and her uncle while in the presence of her father— whom she will forever silence after the “spectacle”), in El lunes nos querrán there will be redemption through the act of writing.11 Tired of “being a slave” (El Hachmi 2021, 42), the grand narratives, like the ones she 10  Eltahawy corroborates the practice of treating women like children in the Arab-Muslim world: “grown women are treated like children their entire lives, made to obtain the permission of a male guardian to do the most basic things. . . . Infantilized beyond belief, they cannot travel, open a bank account, apply for a job, or even get medical treatment without a man’s stamp of approval” (2019, 6–7). 11  In El lunes nos querrán, one of the protagonist’s friends, Sam (Samira), who lives an open life and does not hide her exuberant personality, is the only one who is not afraid of the main character’s father. She looks him directly in the eyes, talks to him as an equal, and makes jokes about him. The relationship between Sam and the father could be understood as a kind of extension or continuation of the narrator from L’últim patriarca. Sam’s use of her female body (like the narrator’s use of her body in L’últim patriarca) has the effect of eroding patriarchal power, insofar as that body—with its indomitable sexuality, its irreducible strength of individual sovereignty—constitutes a force for political, economic, and religious debate, and possesses the ability to subvert, pervert, and intensify social exchanges.

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read in erotic books imagining herself as the protagonist, will facilitate the discovery of her own voice: “me propuse escribir. . . . [L]legué a la conclusión que esa era una buena forma de subvertir sus normas [las del padre]” [I set out to write. . . I came to the conclusion that this was a good way to subvert his values (her father’s)] (2021, 43). Writing will allow the protagonist to liberate the interior energy that impelled her to live life in the fast lane and escape the asphyxiating surroundings that rejected her. If a woman’s act of writing has been considered a transgression against ­authority and masculinity, this act also allows the author to move past the guilt complex that originates from the same transgression and to overcome her fear and embarrassment. If outside of her fiction the “temptation of Islam” and her father’s rejection follow within reach of the author, “ese momento de crisis [de identidad] [l]e sirvió para empezar a escribir” [that moment of crisis (of identity) allowed her to begin to write] (2019, 75). In this regard, Fedwa Māltı̣ ̄ Dūǧlās’ focus on the relationship between the female body and storytelling via the image of Scheherazade is insightful: There is an explosive relationship [between] sexuality, the body, and [a]woman’s voice in the Arabo-Islamic sphere …. Shahrazad demonstrates to her literary cousins and descendants that an intimate relationship must be created between writing and the body…. [She is] a sexual being, who manipulates discourse (and men) through her body. It is the latter that permits her to speak, as male violence is met with her sexuality, articulated through her body and words. At the same time, Shahrazad uses narrative to redirect desire and, hence, sexuality. (Mālṭı ̄ Dūǧlās 1991, 5, 6, 11)

Mālṭī Dūǧlās’ observation sets the tone for explaining the audacity with which the protagonist will place her homoerotic sexual desire on Sam (Samira), her Riffian friend whose constant objective is to imitate black women and exploit her eroticism, often in ways that are “obscene” and sometimes “brazen” (El Hachmi 2021, 48). In doing so, she distances herself from erotic readings to reflect on the reality of her sexual aspirations and own writing. Subsequently, she will see the living image of “the forbidden” in her best friend and will begin to feel “loved for the first time” (2021, 51). This episode coincides with her friend’s courtship with

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Saíd, a boy with an open mind who in turn immediately introduces the protagonist to his friend Yamal, whom she will ultimately marry.12 The protagonist thus transitions from “unknown Moor” to recognized writer while experiencing motherhood, divorce, and the exploration of male and female bodies. Her story about a Moroccan girl who loses her virginity is awarded a literary prize, a type of recognition that can be interpreted as proof of her integration while at the same time also generating skepticism. One of her peers, a male Catalan competitor for the prize, considers it impossible and unworthy that a Moroccan girl should have such command of “su lengua—dijo ‘mi’ lengua—mejor que él” [his tongue—he said ‘my’ tongue—better than him] (El Hachmi 2021, 97). Here, El Hachmi hints at the first literary prize she herself was awarded while still an adolescent, and the disbelieving reaction of Catalans: una jove marroquina guanya un premi en català. . . . I en aquella bogeria d’entrevistes a la televisió i trucades de gent que no coneixia de res, en el fons sentia que el que menys importava era que jo escrivia, ser d’on era passava per davant de si tenia talent o no. (El Hachmi 2004, 43-44)13 [a young Moroccan girl wins a prize in Catalan. . . . And in all that madness of TV interviews and phone calls from people I didn’t know at all made me feel that what mattered the least was what I wrote. What mattered was my origin, regardless of whether I was talented].

With the publication of her story, the protagonist spends less and less time in her “natural space,” the home, as she proceeds to attend conferences that require her to travel from one city to the next. She is transformed into a “cultural host” of sorts, as her name appears in the media, as she is cited in news reports, and as she reveals her face in public. Wassyla Tamzali refers to this type of “multicultural activity” as a common practice in today’s Europe: the prevailing tendency in the type of cultural events 12  A wide variety of male personalities are portrayed in the novel: from the religious and castrating figure of the protagonist’s father to that of her future husband. On the other hand, her best friend’s father is a modern man who confronts the mosque’s imam for getting involved in women’s affairs in the neighborhood and embarrassing them (El Hachmi 2021, 53). This episode is identical to an actual situation mentioned by the author in Siempre han hablado por nosotras (El Hachmi 2019, 71). 13  Ironically, the synopsis on the cover of Jo també sóc Catalana recommends the reading of El Hachmi’s autobiography, which it describes as written “amb un català impecable i ric en matisos” [in a flawless Catalan rich in nuances] (n.p.).

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and media shows that the protagonist begins to frequent—those focused on women immigrants—is to frame the debate as an interrogation about religion and culture instead of exploring problems related to integration and access to rights in the countries in which immigrants live (Tamzali 2010, Loc. 545 of 2675). Muslims subsequently accuse the young protagonist of portraying them as “savages and backward people,” which leads to further racism (El Hachmi 2021, 97). At the same time, she is misunderstood by Catalans who, as also recounted in Jo també sóc Catalana, are more interested in “her story” than in her writing: “El público quería algo más exótico, no quería saber nada de una pobreza tan cercana, les fascinaba más la que venía del desierto” [The crowd wanted something more exotic, and didn’t want to hear about anything to do with a poverty so close to home; they were more fascinated with the person who came from the desert] (2021, 98). What is worse, they invite her to “hablar sobre el Islam, imames o teólogos, como si fuéramos predicadores del canal por satélite” [talk about Islam, imams, and theologians, as if we were preachers on a satellite television channel] (99). During local roundtable discussions, where topics such as convivencia [coexistence] are prevalent, the protagonist is forced to debate several women from the neighborhood on the topic of the “kindness of Islam,” a scenario that supports Mona Eltahawy’s thesis: “When women fight, only men benefit” (2015, 18).14 The debate audience ends up siding with the advocates regarding the protective role of religion as it pertains to women, because “that is the reality they wanted to hear” (El Hachmi 2021, 99). For this reason, in her essay, El Hachmi forcefully challenges the idea that only Muslim women can talk about certain topics such as Islam and the Hijab. For the author, such an attitude contributes to silencing criticism and has a collateral effect: it once again leaves Muslim women “alone in the tribe” (2019, 123). In reality, the underlying conflict is markedly partisan in nature: in the face of xenophobia and racism from right-wing extremists, the left exploits the continued visibility of certain identitarian elements in order to portray itself as more inclusive and tolerant (123–125). According to El Hachmi, Islamism is exploiting the left’s feelings of guilt in order to expand (126) while using opposition to Islamophobia and imperialism to achieve the left’s overt collusion 14  Convivencia refers to the “coexistence” of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in medieval Spain and by extension the cultural interaction and exchange fostered by such proximity.

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(128–129): “la izquierda presuntamente laica . . . a la caza del voto musulmán” [the presumably secular left . . . (is) on the hunt for the Muslim vote], which is “the equivalent of right-wing extremists” (73, emphasis in the original). This reflection by El Hachmi is similar to an observation made by Eltahawy in Headscarves and Hymens: “If the right wing is driven by covert racism, the left sometimes suffers from an implicit racism through which it usurps my right to determine what I can and cannot say. . . . Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith” (2015, 27–28).15 The dynamic in question becomes exacerbated within the geographic confines of Catalonia, where the urban space—a “thirdspace,” to use Edward Soja’s (1996) term— allows these two political positions to collide. This collision can be resolved through writing. Following Soja’s reasoning, whereas traditional political projects focus on a single non-spatial dualism (racism/Islamophobia vs. multiculturalism) to the exclusion of other binaries, El Hachmi employs her writing to focus on marginality (Muslim women left “alone in the tribe”), conceiving it as a space of radical openness, “a context from which to build communities of resistance and renewal that cross boundaries and recross binaries of race, gender, class, and all oppressively Othering categories” (Soja 1996, 84). The second part of El lunes nos querrán begins with the protagonist’s life after her marriage, which is temporarily liberating and transforms her into a happy woman, now out of hiding and distant from the strictures of constant vigilance from women in the neighborhood (El Hachmi 2021, 113). Her immediate objective consists of securing full-time employment and attending university, as she seeks to disguise everything that makes her a foreigner and tries to appear “as less a Moor as possible” (115). However, the life she has chosen soon begins to seem less and less like what she had imagined and becomes even more difficult when she finds 15  In her book No nos taparán [They Shall Not Cover Us], Mimunt Hamido Yahia arrives at similar conclusions: “Una buena parte de la izquierda, tras décadas de lucha por la laicidad, se dedica a cortejar a ese mismo Islam rigorista en aras de una mal entendida ‘diversidad’, y promueve activamente el velo y, con él, todo un conjunto de actitudes del patriarcado fundamentalista” [After decades fighting for secularity, a significant part of the left seeks to curry favor with the same rigorous Islam in favor of a misunderstood ‘diversity,’ and actively promotes the Hijab, and along with it, a series of attitudes from the fundamentalist patriarchy] (Hamido 2021, 3).

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herself bearing the responsibility of raising a child as a single mother. Immersed in a swarm of contradictions and lies, cut off from the aspirations of freedom and independence that she had dreamt and actively defended, the protagonist begins her “tale of the Hijab” (122). In doing so, she becomes like the narrator in L’últim patriarca: one of those girls who veil and unveil themselves upon entering and leaving the neighborhood, splitting and adapting themselves to the demands of the people surrounding them— “a bunch of hypocrites” (122), “imposters everywhere” (123). In this regard, Mona Eltahawy speaks to the subjugation that women of Islamic origin have suffered for the last three decades, as they cover themselves with the Hijab (or choose not to do so) in response to public bullying, identity issues, and parental pressure and in a context where “modern” Wahhabi/Salafist trends once again play a fundamental role (2015, 34–36). Therefore, “the act of wearing the Hijab is far from simple. It is burdened with meanings: oppressed woman, pure woman, conservative woman, strong woman, asexual woman, uptight woman, liberated woman” (Eltahawy 2015, 35). Exiled Iranian writer Chahdortt Djavann speaks to one dimension of this issue by claiming that requiring women to wear the Hijab should be considered an act of physical, social, and sexual mistreatment. The Hijab is the flag of Islamism, “the yellow star of the female condition” (qtd. in Tamzali 2010, Loc 532 of 2675). On the other hand, as Homa Hoodfar notes, “Many veiled Muslim women employ the veil as an instrument of mediation between Muslim minority cultures and host cultures,” as was the case in Canada during the 1990s, when women “used the veil and reference to Islam to resist cultural practices such as arranged marriages or to continue their education away from home without alienating their parents and communities” (1997, 273). When it seems that the narrative of El lunes nos querrán has gone back to square one thanks to the “blackmail of belonging” (El Hachmi 2019, 47) and the daughter’s repetition of her mother’s story, the selfless protagonist goes in search of Islam’s roots in order to understand the relationship between the Prophet Muhammad and women in the foundational texts, only to discover that the Koran says nothing about the need to cover

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oneself and states only “Hide your ornaments” (El Hachmi 2021, 124).16 Once she has completed this inquiry, she begins to spend more time with her idealist peers at the university. She meets Javier, a literature professor who will become her lover, and in a context of mutual consent she once again begins to stray from gender stereotypes. However, with regard to childcare, the young mother rejects the ideas of Western feminists who prefer working as supermarket cashiers than staying at home with their children (138). As she conducts her new life, the protagonist must contend not only with her crying baby, her body aches, and “the widening of her hips,” but also with the obligatory reading and writing tasks that come with an academic career: “Hasta en eso contradije a las feministas que había leído, que decían que dar el pecho era una servidumbre, que esclavizaba” [Even there, I contradicted the feminists I had read, who said that breastfeeding was servitude, that it was enslaving] (139). To this, she adds: “¿Por qué ninguna de las feministas que había leído me había hablado de ese llanto [del bebé]” [Why didn’t any of the feminists I had read tell me about the [baby’s] sobbing?] (147). It should be pointed out that ever since the publication of Jo també sóc Catalana in 2004, El Hachmi has responded with irony to Western feminists who are interested in “liberating” migrant women from their submission to domestic roles while they themselves are subjugated to what Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi, Fatima calls “the tyranny of size 40” (qtd. in El Hachmi 2019, 90). Consequently, the narrator will delve into the deconstruction of the negative collective imaginary of cultures on both sides of the Strait. While criticizing the cultural resistance of Amazigh women, she also reflects on Catalan/European women who are too sure of themselves, too dominating—yet also consciously or unconsciously suppressed by their own economic and sentimental dependency on men or

16  For more information about the different readings of the Hadiths (a collection of Islamic “traditions” composed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad) that deal with the veil, see The Veil and the Male Elite and Beyond the Veil by Fatima Mernissi, and Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed. The chapter “Black Veil, White Flag” in Mona Eltahawy’s Headscarves and Hymens (2015) provides a good synopsis of different feminist interpretations of the veil’s use.

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other women (Ricci 2010, 83).17 In this sense, I borrow Raja Rhouni’s interpretation of Fatima Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West (2010, 131–147) to observe that El Hachmi uses a double-sided critique to shed light on how Amazigh women target Western myths about the domestic space/harem and about harem women. The critique in question consists of an exercise of demystification: with her feminist viewpoint, El Hachmi ventures into the realm of Amazigh women on both sides of the Strait, unearthing minor stories about women who manage to seize power even from within the secluded spaces of their homes. In the process, El Hachmi attempts to counter both local and Western fantasies about submissive Muslim women. Foregrounding women’s agency, her autobiographical and semiautobiographical accounts comprise an attempt to decenter feminism from its supposedly Western location and origin and to instead locate it in Amazigh culture, even within the confines of the domestic space. At the point in the novel where the protagonist finds herself questioning aspects of Western feminism, a Riffianized Arabic word, rmuncar, is used in the text (El Hachmi 2021, 140). The term can be translated— from the Arabic al monkar—as “going against customs and good 17  In Jo també sóc Catalana, El Hachmi assesses community life among Amazigh women in the Riff: “Ningú els havia dit encara que estàvem oprimides pel poder patriarcal, ningú els havia parlat de la revolució feminista occidental i que s’havien d’alliberar de la seva suposada esclavitud, de tanta opressió. I tot i això eren relativament felices” [No one had told them that they were oppressed by patriarchal power; no one had told them about the Western feminist revolution and that they should be freed from their supposed slavery, from such oppression. And yet they were relatively happy] (2004, 146-47). And later she adds: “El model occidental d’emancipació femenina era una decepció darrere l’altra. . . . [S]olien tenir l’ àvia que ho feia tot mentre les filles s’encarregaven de complir amb el seu paper de dones treballadores, o bé tenien dona de fer feines... ¿Eren aquelles dones les que havien evolucionat cap a un model d’igualtat home i dona? . . . [E]l paternalisme de l’europea la impulsa a alliberar tota dona musulmana que li passi per devant… No sé què més havia de fer per complir amb el deure de ser prou alliberada: treure’m els sostenidors i cremar-los al mig de la plaça, deixant que la gravetat fes el seu fet? Aquí no hi arribo… en tinc prou amb estudiar una carrera, fer malabarismes per compaginar feina i maternitat, escriure i aquestes coses que són gaire simbòliques, però que, tan i fa, són les importantes” [The Western model of emancipation was a disappointment. . . . They had a grandmother taking care of everything while their daughters were doing housekeeping, or they had a maid. . . . Were those the same women who had evolved toward a more egalitarian gender model? . . . The paternalism of the European woman drives her to free every Muslim woman she meets. . . . I didn’t know what else I had to do in order to fulfill the duty of being a free woman. Did I have to take off my bras and burn them in the middle of the square, letting gravity do its magic? That’s not for me. . . . I have enough with a college career while keeping up with work, motherhood, and writing; all those things that are very symbolic but that, at least for me, are the important] (161–162).

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manners,” or “doing something indecent, reprehensible, or corrupt.” The word seems to characterize the events that mark the remainder of the narrative. With the onset of motherhood, the young protagonist ceases to write, yet little by little she begins to feel “the pain” of what she has given up (143) and subsequently resolves to return to her writing, with the intention of not being one of those “exotic Moors” (145) who filled their stories with primitive violence that fascinated Western readers. Far removed from such narratives, as well as from the imaginaries of the Hispano-­ Moroccan War (1859–1860), the French and Spanish Protectorates in Morocco (1912–1956), or Francisco Franco’s “murderous Moors” of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the fledgling writer now begins to compose stories that reflect her surroundings and deal with issues such as oppressive husbands (both Muslim and non-Muslim), male chauvinism, and racism. The stories are concerned with the complexities of growing up in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Barcelona and the multiple oppressions that torment women’s bodies and lives. The protagonist’s first rmuncar story describes moving downtown with her friend, away from the gossip and control of her family and compatriots. The second deals with her rejection of the idealistic image of Western women and their success stories, such as their ability to reconcile professional life with family (148). The more the protagonist writes, the more the pages of her manuscript seem to multiply on their own. She describes love as a ruse to which only women like those of her mother’s generation would submit (156); conversely, words like “self-defense,” “shield,” and “vengeance” proliferate on her pages (157). Her militant activism—in favor of Palestine, against globalization and domestic violence—comes to fruition in her literary labor. Although she used to wear the Hijab to visit her parents’ house, her scarf now lies abandoned on the train tracks; she will never cover herself with it again. Due in part to the protagonist’s disappointment with “the false tolerance practiced by some on the left” (El Hachmi 2021, 163) and her disillusionment with the comparative literature classes she takes, “the myth of the university as the highest exponent of knowledge and its dissemination vanishes” (180). This reflection from the protagonist points back to El Hachmi’s own autobiographical reflections. In my view, it was El Hachmi’s own disillusionment with universities, coupled with her previous reflections on the emptiness, omissions, distortions, and contradictions of white/European feminism, that compelled her to write Siempre han hablado por nosotras. In this sense, her essay, like work by other

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Afro-­European authors, reflects a demand in both Europe and North America—supported by prestigious publishers such as Penguin, Beacon, FSG, Cabaret Voltaire, and Destino—for autobiographical essays written by fiction writers, journalists, and activists (à la Gloria Anzaldúa) that deal with matters related to identity, sexuality, and religious minorities. There is a market for writing “beyond the desk of a theorist,” as Afro-European author Johny Pitts puts it. That is, there is a demand for writing generated outside of the academic research context where essays and books are “written or cited more often by wealthy, educated white scholars than the people being written about and couched in a standoffish academic vernacular” (Pitts 2019, 4). The young author-protagonist in El lunes nos querrán occasionally ignores her boyfriend Javier, using her professor/lover only as a sexual toy. It is not until a viewing of a film about two girls from a Parisian banlieue that the protagonist finally reveals her name—Naíma—for the first time, after which she arranges a ménage à trois with Javier and her best friend. To the beat of music sung by Algerian Rachid Taha, whose lyrics deal with migrants and the displaced, Naíma and her friend shout: “A los padres y a los hermanos y a los maridos y a los predicadores . . . ¡que os jodan a todos!” [To all parents, brothers, husbands, and preachers . . . fuck you all!] (El Hachmi 2021, 183). The fact that she has finally revealed her name, and has freely chosen to be a polyamorist signals a disruption in the novel. Coincidently, the scene in which the two young women shout to Taha’s music presents several of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls proposed by Mona Eltahawy in her fight for the total eradication of patriarchy. Naíma and her best friend combine anger and profanity to resist, disrupt, and defy patriarchy, thereby unleashing the “power of expressing and insisting on desire, sex on [their] own terms; expressing sexuality outside the teachings of heteronormativity in order to generate chaos and liberation that deeply threatens patriarchy” (Eltahawy 2020, 12). After this intimate experience, Naíma vows to not be fooled again by the idealization of a past that just because it was her own does not mean it was good (El Hachmi 2021, 185). Neither will she be carried away by the superficial pedantry of Javier, who disguises his lack of understanding of life’s profound truths by using elevated terms that mean absolutely nothing (185). Naíma will also distance herself from her best friend, with whom she wanted to maintain a strictly lesbian relationship: “te habría dicho que te quería y que también quería que tú me amaras” [I would have told you that I loved you and that I also wanted you to love me]

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(188). I interpret this silence/disruption through the lens of the claim that lesbianism “cannot exist” in Islam as long as “the nameless does not exist” (Slimani 2018, 20). Only those who decide to leave the “ghetto” can live with love and have a healthy sexual life, but “las que se quedan, las que callan, tendrán que sufrir un matrimonio que disimule su ‘defecto’ o ser la tía que cuidará siempre de sus mayores” [those who stay, those who go silent, will have to suffer a marriage that disguises their ‘defect,’ or be the aunt who will always care for her elders] (Hamido Yahia 2021, 42)18. The tragic death of the protagonist’s friend, who is run over while out exercising on her bicycle, provokes Naíma to curse the “useless appearance” that the two of them had devised for over a decade: “maldita la idea del sacrificio y la velocidad y tener que hacer más, siempre más, y más” [damn the idea of sacrifice, speed, and having to do more, always more, and more] (El Hachmi 2021, 190). Her rage reflects disillusionment with what Saïd El Kadaoui describes as the idealization of the modern/ European Other: as that other face of disdain, “so inconsistent, so weak that any bad experience can become the greatest of storms” (2020, 64). Naíma’s “guilt” over having brought a child into the world who will end up condemned to growing up without a father, grandparents, or relatives of any kind will constitute the ultimate rmuncar: disaster, calamity, and sin. Determined to resolve her trauma and insecurities, Naíma consults with a psychiatrist, and “profound, ancestral wounds” (El Hachmi 2021, 193) come to the fore. Even though she had liberated herself from the oppressions of her original culture, she never discovered how to shake off the masochism that allowed her mother to survive. Does the novel’s tragic ending signify the destruction of the freedom project that the protagonist dreamed of? Undeniably, the answer is a resolute No. By putting her anger and helplessness in writing, in a letter for her deceased friend, Naíma confirms that the motivation for her story was not cultural clash, lack of integration, or the stress of living between two worlds: “Lo único que queríamos era ser amadas. Tal como éramos, sin más. Sin tener que 18  For this chapter, I have limited my references to lesbianism and Islam in Morocco and Europe to the books by Slimani and Hamido Yahia. For a more detailed analysis, see Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle’s Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. (Simon and Schuster, 2010); Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle’s Living out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. (NYU Press, 2014); Samar Habib’s Islam and Homosexuality. (ABC-CLIO, 2010); and the special issue “Lesbians, Sexuality, and Islam” of the Journal of Lesbian Studies (Vol 16, Issue 4, 2012).

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recortarnos ni adaptarnos ni someternos. Ni tapadas ni hambrientas ni perforadas por mil agujas. . . . Solo con nuestros cuerpos. . . , con nuestras emociones y heridas, las cicatrizadas y las abiertas” [All we wanted was to be loved. Just as we were, nothing else. Without having to trim ourselves, adapt, or submit. Neither covered, nor hungry, nor stuck with a thousand needles . . . Only with our bodies …, with our emotions and wounds, those with scars and those that remain open] (194–195). “Despite the pain,” we had read in the epigraph of the novel, and although even after seventeen years as a professional writer, Najat El Hachmi’s “hands tremble with fear of being punished” (2019, 13), her creative and essayistic work remains unbiased. Writing about these themes, and breaking the silence against violence, oppression, and injustice, does not make Najat El Hachmi (or her character Naíma) any braver, because in the end, “she does it to survive” (2019, 14). In this work of writing as a form of survival, the fragmented text has characteristics that promote the reader’s intellectual capacity to decipher the social message and moral drama of the victim (the author herself, the protagonist Naíma, and her tragically deceased best friend). Off-center writing starts from the female body as a locus of enunciation and resistance to power. Likewise, this writing promotes an approach to a language that explores the limits of pain, madness, and sexuality in such a way that is out of step with “civilized” canonical models proposed by tradition. The feminist writing of Najat El Hachmi therefore stands as a hallmark of all those groups whose position in the face of dominant cultures and religions continues to bear the symbols of a crisis. This is how lesbianism and deterritorialization overturn four basic principles: patriarchy, binary sexuality, the strictures of religious dogma, and cultural relativism. The ultimate message of El Hachmi’s novel is that freedoms of all sorts must be talked about in a society (and its institutions) that aims to control female and social bodies. As a rallying cry, and out of a desire to support future studies about Maghrebian women who write in different languages on the Iberian Peninsula, I conclude this chapter with a series of reflections from an activist I previously referred to, who works in spaces far from the academic world—those spaces championed by Johny Pitts in his accomplished essay and by Naíma in the novel. In No nos taparán [They Shall Not Cover Us], chef and social militant Mimunt Hamido Yahia observes that Islamic women in Europe see themselves increasingly trapped in webs of vigilant fundamentalism that force them to use “trickery” and “lying” with their families and neighbors in order to avoid “bodily punishment” and

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safeguard their “honor, virtue, and decency” (2021, 23). Like Hamido, Najat El Hachmi notes that parents urgently need to reevaluate their roles in order to understand to what extent they should be victims of a belief system that prevents them from fully enjoying their daughters’ love and confidence. In her latest fictional and essayistic works, the author calls for greater visibility of the discrimination and control that is exercised by the patriarchy over all women, to a greater or lesser degree, in all cultures. Particularly harmful to women are those ideas that come from the “new sect, European Islam” or “petroIslam” (Hamido Yahia 2021, 19, my emphasis) that demand women’s submission by appealing to manipulated versions of the Koran and recycled traditions from remote places. Based on control over sexual practices and bodies, this form of discrimination has solid cultural roots that generate constant vigilance over women in public and private spheres by fathers, brothers, and husbands, and with the complicity of women of all ages. Young women are particularly susceptible to these influences, Hamido notes, describing them as “tan abducidas, tan adoctrinadas, tan resentidas con un ‘Occidente’ que jamás abandonarían pero al que culpan de su pérdida de ‘identidad’, que ni se les pasa por la cabeza que ellas podrían rebelarse contra las normas patriarcales y seguir siendo creyentes” [so gullible, so indoctrinated, so resentful toward a ‘West’ they would never leave but which they blame for the loss of their ‘identity,’ that it will never occur to them that they could rebel against the patriarchal norms and continue to be believers] (2021, 55). With these words by Hamido, we return to the beginning of this chapter. Just as human rights are universal, so too is the feminism claimed by Najat El Hachmi (as well as by the other women intellectuals and fictional characters I have cited). It is a secular feminism that insists that neither religion, nor patriarchy, nor the Western way of life can dictate the lives and freedoms of Muslim women.

References Affaya, Mohammed Nour Eddine. 1997. Lo intercultural o el señuelo de la identidad. Revista CIDOB d’afers internacionals 36: 23–38. w.cidob.org/es/ articulos/revista_cidob_d_afers_internacionals/lo_intercultural_o_el_ senuelo_de_la_identidad. Amorós, Celia. 2013. Vetas de Ilustración. Reflexiones sobre feminismo e Islam. Madrid: Cátedra. Djavann, Chahdortt. 2004. Abajo el velo. Barcelona: El Aleph.

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Djebar, Assia. 1961. Women of Islam. Translated by Jean MacGibbon. London: Andre Deutsch. El Hachmi, Najat. 2004. Jo també sóc Catalana. Barcelona: Columna. ———. 2019. Siempre han hablado por nosotras. Barcelona: Destino. ———. 2021. El lunes nos querrán. Barcelona: Destino. El Kadaoui, Saïd. 2020. Radical(es): Una reflexión sobre la identidad. Barcelona: Catedral. El Khayat, Guita. 2004. La mujer en el mundo árabe. Translated by Ana Sedano Ruiz. Barcelona: Icaria. Eltahawy, Mona. 2015. Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ———. 2020. The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. Dublin: Tramp Press. Hamido Yahia, Mimunt. 2021. No nos taparán. Madrid: Akal. al-Hassan Golley, Nawar. 2004. Is Feminism Relevant to Arab Women? Third World Quarterly 25 (3): 521–536. Hoodfar, Homa. 1997. The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: Veiling Practices and Muslim Women. In The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe, David Lloyd, Stanley Fish, and Fredric Jameson, 248–279. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mālṭı ̄ Dūǧlās, Fedwa. 1991. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Okin, Susan Moller. 1997. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Boston Review [n.p.], https://bostonreview.net/forum/susan-­moller-­Okin-­multiculuralism-­ bad-­women/. Pitts, Johny. 2019. Afropean. London: Penguin. Rhouni, Raja. 2010. Secular and Islamic Feminist Critiques in the Work of Fatima Mernissi. London: Brill. Ricci, Cristián H. 2010. L’últim patriarca de Najat El Hachmi y el forjamiento de la identidad Amazigh-Catalana. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11 (1): 71–91. ———. 2014. ¡Hay moros en la costa! Literatura marroquí fronteriza en castellano y catalán. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. ———. 2019. New Voices of Muslim North-African Migrants in Europe. London: Brill. Slimani, Leila. 2018. Sexo y mentiras: La vida sexual en Marruecos. Madrid: Cabaret Voltaire. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-­ Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Tamzali, Wassyla. 2010. El burka como excusa. Barcelona: Saga. Kindle Edition.

Doctor Möbius, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Line Bertrand Westphal

1. All lines are not created equal. Some are more symbolic than others, more dangerous. I remember the main scene from a film by the great Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991). The action, which is minimal, takes place near a border post in the north of Greece, next to the city of Florina. Kurdish and Albanian refugees are crammed together along with refugees from other nationalities, well before the “crisis” responsible for the situation today. The landscape is dreary. It has snowed and rained, and the trees are sad; everything is gray. A river serves as the demarcation line between two Balkan countries, Greece and the former Yugoslavia, in the vicinity of what would one day become North Macedonia. There is one point that links the two countries, closed off by a white line: the border of the border, the border squared. Armed guards are stationed on both sides. One officer advances to the white line. He lifts a leg, like a stork whose suspended step he

B. Westphal (*) Université de Limoges, Limoges, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_9

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imitates. He soberly exclaims: “If I make a step, I am elsewhere or I am dead.” Dying for having crossed a white line on a bridge covered with puddles of water? Dying for having breached hostile territory? In another, more recent film, A Twelve-Year Night (2018), Uruguayan director Álvaro Brechner tells of the revolting imprisonment of three men during the fascist dictatorship. One of them is José Mujica, the future president of the Republic. The three compañeros undergo constant psychological and physical torture. The torturers do not stop pressuring them. The prisoners are isolated, but, in the cell of another of the three men, Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, a line is drawn, and he is forbidden to cross it under the threat of more punishment. The white line that delimits one of the angles is a later example of a squared border, the view of which feeds anguish, yet, etymologically speaking, it is also angustia, a Latin word that means tightening, confinement, and, in the worst case, a feeling of choking. Let’s stay a moment between Uruguay and Brazil—although, rest assured, in more decent conditions. I can’t resist the urge to cite yet another line, a final one. Eduardo Galeano, who is well known for his book on soccer and the political state of our planet, has also suffered the pangs of the Uruguayan dictatorship. He was even forced into exile. When he returned to Montevideo, he witnessed the reconstruction of his country, which according to The Economist is today a more successful democracy than—shall we choose at random—the United States and France.1 Let me say that for someone like myself, who read the newspapers back in the 1970s and 1980s, this evolution is truly extraordinary. Who would have thought that after three or four decades, a country that harbored political refugees would be perceived as less democratic than the one that provoked their exile? At the same time, what a surprising lesson in optimism for the former victims, what a great honor to their resistance, given how desperate the situation must have seemed to them at the time. In Patas arriba: La escuela del mundo al revés (1998), a title translated as Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, Galeano refutes traditional polarities, such as those that privilege the north over the south, 1  I am referring to the most recent (2021) annual Democracy Index, calculated by The Economist. According to the index, Uruguay ranks fifteenth in the world, and is a member of the twenty “full democracies.” France and the United States are twenty-fourth and twenty-­ fifth, respectively, and are considered “flawed democracies,” the former having dropped out of the “full democracies” category in 2014 and the latter in 2015.

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because, he writes, these terms “designate the repartition of the world cake and do not always coincide with geography.”2 The north, the south. . . . Does all of this hold up? Not necessarily. As proof, he cites the soccer games that take place at the Milton Stadium Souza Corrêa in Macapá, Brazil, near the mouth of the Amazon River. In reality, this little stadium that holds 10,000spectators is also known as Zerão, the “Great Zero,” because the line of the Equator cuts the playing field—la cancha, as one says so nicely in South America—exactly in half. The teams change hemispheres at every half time. Sometimes a goal is scored from one hemisphere to the other. Imagine the soccer ball crossing the world, that is to say, flying the forty-five meters between the line in the middle of the field and the box of the arquero, or the goalie.3 But this act, equivalent to a Hail Mary pass in American football, is superfluous. Once we are moving between hemispheres, we can score a goal from nearby. What a great challenge to globalization and the proliferation of lines! What a great scoff at globalitario (“globalitarian”), a portmanteau word that the late Eduardo Galeano attributes to Ignacio Ramonet.4 And let us say it: history never stops having a good time. In Brechner’s film, when Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro heads toward the prison exit, he acts as if he is juggling an imaginary soccer ball, to the applause of his fellow inmates. Unmistakably, soccer carries all sorts of messages.

2  “…designan el reparto de la Torta mundial, y no siempre coinciden con la geografía.” Eduardo Galeano, Patas arriba: La escuela del mundo al revés (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2017 [1998]), 26. Translated to English by Mark Fried as Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-­ Glass World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). 3  Diego González, “Chutar desde Croacia y marcar gol en Bosnia: Estadios de fútbol en dos países,” Fronteras, Jan. 22, 2018, https://fronterasblog.com/2018/01/22/chutar-­ desde-­croacia-y-marcar-gol-en-bosnia-estadios-de-futbol-en-dos-paises/, posted Jan. 22, 2018, consulted Aug. 19, 2019. In addition to the equator-straddling Macapá stadium, the author of the post also discusses the FK Partizan Kostajnica stadium, whose field overlaps the Croatian and Bosnian borders. Using good documentation, the author also refers to the El Arenal stadium, which is divided between Guatemala and Belize, as well as the recent border conflict between Argentinians and Bolivians over a modest football field (with no turf) in San José de Pocitos, a neighborhood of Yacui in Bolivia, where part of the stands, intended for thirty tightly packed in people, was built on Argentinian territory, just above the border line. 4  Galeano, Patas arriba, 159.

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2. What is a line? According to Euclid, a line is a length without a width— from a mental perspective, because that which has no width has no materiality. According to others, the line is what links together points. A priori, a point does not cover more materiality than a length without width. However, aligning points implies a criterion, a selection, and therefore, a resolution. To align points is to undertake the act of giving form to the formless. It transforms open space into a place, or any place, in the measure that it tends toward a finished definition, and will inevitably end up by closing in on itself. The perfect definition is that which has integrated all the rhetorical final touches. By its nature, a line blocks. It qualifies a surface. In geometry, it would be a circle, square, or trapezium, or something else too complex to be designated in a simple way. In geography— or, more generally, in the case of human habitats, or just habitats, period—it would be a territory. So, what is territory? The answer is easy: it’s the surface that unfolds below a line projected by individuals whose goal is to live together under its shelter. Territory is first of all a space to fall back on, and which we try to lock up. In fact, in its anthropocentric version, the planet generates a whole other typology of lines, the political impact of which varies on a case-by-­ case basis. Some are rather symbolic. I gave an example earlier: meridians and parallels. These, however, are the vectors of multiple connotations: north vs. south, west vs. east. . . . Such connotations are often negative, and they are sometimes disputed, starting with those who are victims of the discrimination they establish. How, indeed, can we escape from the “meridian cage”? In the recent past, I have evoked several attempts at “inversed maps” that position the south in the place of the traditional (or conventional) north. Other lines are yet more tangible and translate an identity attraction. These are, of course, national borders, but there are still others, which insofar as they combine geography and sociology are less explicit. Whatever the case may be, territory is the contents of a line that surfaces. Therefore, there are those who fall below this line and those who move beyond it. The former are supposed to be familiar; the latter are condemned to being . . . others, and, for many, they remain so. According to this binary vision, the boundary line is a secant line: it cuts the surface of the world in two. There is a dreamed me and a familiar us that only exist in opposition to the spectral them, out of bounds, objects of a distant fantasy, relegated to the other side of the line, striping the

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map, beyond the pagus, which is both the country and the village. This vision is attached to the traditional territory that emanates from a viscerally sedentary society. Is it adapted to our time? No, of course not. It has lost its sense, if ever it had any, because nothing has truly been binary at any moment of history. Somehow, this vision has survived on its own, simply to perpetuate an artifice of territorial thought. It is ready to affirm itself through force and conflict. Everyone knows a (too) famous essay entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.5 In my opinion, the author, Samuel Huntington, is both wrong and right. He is wrong because world civilizations are not destined to clash—and for that matter, even the term civilization is problematic: it gives me the impression of crystalizing the societal credo of a territory that is curling up upon itself. Yet Huntington is also right: from the moment that we adopt such a narrow vision of territory, the medium-term consequences can be nothing other than violent, even explosive, adversatives. What should we think about all of this, then? What should we do? Long ago, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offered up a striking solution that we all know: make something dynamic of territory, something that never remains inside itself and that opens up to an alternative, barring the very possibility of an identity envisaged in the singular. For Deleuze and Guattari, a territory is not essentially territorial. It deterritorializes non-­ stop. The territory changes, and it reterritorializes itself, in order to deterritorialize itself again. In truth, this perception of space and of place is at the base of geocritical thought, to which I have consecrated my efforts for many years. Other metaphors are conceivable. They introduce a distinct approach. Indeed, could it be possible that territory would not have to risk modification over time to evolve, as it does in the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, whose process has something profoundly dialectical about it? Could it be conceivable that each territory, even contemporary to itself, contains within it the other, and, by the same token, superimposes the two poles that are supposed to be irremediably disjointed—that is to say, the familiar and the distant? In short, could the world adopt the same characteristics as the Macapá soccer stadium and stop resembling other playing fields, the tragic ones like Theo Angelopoulos’s blocked bridge and Álvaro Brechner’s outlined prison cell? 5  Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

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3. I strongly doubt that Doctor August Ferdinand Möbius would have appreciated soccer. He died a bit early, in 1868. At that time, soccer had just barely been standardized in England. Möbius would have perhaps made the link between his strip and the green rectangle that fascinates spectators across the entire globe today, but nothing could be less sure.6 To me, the Möbius strip refers instead to the very physical lines that are borders. I think we all have in mind a representation of the Möbius strip. So much the better, because it would be difficult for me to propose a mathematical definition. In our increasingly complex world, not only do the borders between national territories raise questions, but also the deep divisions characterizing the field of our scientific and epistemological knowledge. Thus, it is not necessarily easy to establish a formal link between literature and topology. Fortunately, we still have metaphors! When I think of the Möbius strip, I immediately think of the image of a belt that someone would put through the loops of his or her pants. This routine operation does not present any major difficulties. However, after thinking about it, it leads to at least two options. Either the belt remains well in line with the loops, as one would expect, or the belt twists. In the latter case, we might be annoyed, but at least we can console ourselves with an aesthetic observation: we have made a basic Möbius strip. This simple manipulation leads to two further observations. The first, shared by all, is that a correctly threaded belt has two sides that are never in contact, one exterior, the other interior. On the other hand, when the belt twists, the inside and the outside alternate. The latter observation is as succinct as it is brutal: it is the circle that constitutes the norm, and not the Möbius strip. This is true for our example of the belt and frequently in a more general context as well. Obviously, the Möbius strip is not the only example of this fascinating proximity between simple (or simplified) representations and complex (yet stimulating) representations of what mediates contacts between interior and exterior and, in this case, across border lines. As I have just remarked, the mysteries of topology are almost unfathomable to me, but 6  There are writers who easily associate literature with mathematics, and even with topology. Among them, we can include David Foster Wallace and his extraordinary stories involving tennis, as well as Québécois writer Georges Desmeules, whose Le projet Syracuse (The Syracuse Project) (Quebec: L’Instant même 2008) offers a story of espionage against a background of baseball and football.

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there are figures other than the Möbius strip. I don’t dare mention Klein’s bottle, which is an even more complex projection. In any case, figures demonstrating topology are more than helpful for understanding the actual complexity of our world, where lines sometimes become far too material. These considerations could find other abstract expressions. For example, what figurations of power would be circular? I see at least two: one is the crown, and the other, which I borrow from Giorgio Agamben, is the aureole. I will not develop this point here. Suffice it to say that a crown, placed on the head of a king, resembles the symbolic projection of the border of the sovereign state over which this same king reigns. There is, moreover, a carnivalesque, or epiphanic, staging of this equivalence. In France, there is a tradition associated with the Epiphany, the Jour des Rois. On January 6, children and their parents eat a galette (king cake) topped with a golden cardboard crown. A fève (a porcelain bean) is carefully hidden in the galette, which is divided into equal parts. Everyone chooses his or her portion of the cake, and whoever pulls the fève will have the right to place the paper crown on his or her head. Usually, this parodic coronation ends up with a burst of laughter, and very quickly the winner gets rid of the crown to go play another game. In real life (in other words, during the remaining 364 days of the year), things work out according to a quite different schedule. We do not like to part with the crown; we do not like to get rid of our own vision of the territory and its border, circular, sovereign, and closed. From this point of view, I must point out that many nations that are actual democracies on paper adopt a symbolic monarchical vision. Again, essentialism, monological discourse, and unilaterality are the trademarks of anything that refers to boundary lines when they are meant to be set in stone and wires. As for the aureole, Giorgio Agamben gives a description of it in La comunità che viene, a 1990 essay (translated to English as The Coming Community, 1993), luminous like so many of this Italian philosopher’s essays. Let me say, in a nutshell, that for Agamben the aureole, or halo, is the figure that translates the way in which being is led to express the entirety of its nature, the “end of the end” of its essence (ultimità).7 Whereas the crown marks a sharp limit, the aureole unfolds further, beyond the individual whose head it girds. The crown, like the boundary it subsumes beneath it, casts nothing but its own shadow, while the halo is radiant. In Agamben’s logic, the halo embodies a spiritual and 7

 Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008 [1990]), 47.

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cultural openness, at the very place where the Other and the Same are still able to meet, understand each other, and dialogue. The Möbius strip takes us yet further. As has been recalled, devising a Möbius strip does certainly require more effort than thinking of a crown, but let us dare to believe that, despite it all, intellectual challenges still have their rightful place. This question sets a challenge, indeed: to rethink the limits of a place, a territory, no longer in the form of a hermetic border (limes), but in the form of a threshold (limen) that we could cross from both sides, because both the front and the back would be taken into account. For Agamben, these figures are mainly useful to explore the public-­private connection (the sphere of intimacy) and, on a tragic note, the relationship between the state of nature and the state of exception (in his essays consecrated to the Holocaust). The reasoning placed under the aegis of August Ferdinand Möbius and his strip is no pure abstraction. It is terribly concrete. For a long time, it has been at the very core of my geocritical effort. Still unformulated, it underlay my first studies of the perception and representation of Mediterranean places, as in L’Œil de la Méditerranée (The Eye of the Mediterranean).8 It helps to structure the observation of world literature and the multiple circulations between authors and works. In the intermedial register, which is gradually gaining importance in my work, this same reasoning is the basis of the examination of artistic cartography or street art, which will be discussed a little later in this chapter. It seems to me that there is a very close link between the topological figure conceived by Dr Möbius and the theory of thirdspace, which began to emerge during the 1990s, shortly before geocriticism started. It is probably not necessary here to go back to the definition of thirdspace. It is sufficient to say that it sits at the crossroads of human and cultural geographies, postcolonial and gender studies, and literary production stricto sensu. In all cases, it lays down the principle (1) that the line drawn by the border cannot constitute an impassable limit and (2) that, taking this assumption into account, there cannot be two cultures on each side of a political border (A and B) that are impermeable to each other. Of course, the promoters of thirdspace theory do not deny the evidence of the geopolitical situation that characterizes the specific areas around the border. However, they try to extract something positive from it, namely that if A 8  See Bertrand Westphal, L’Œil de la Méditerranée (La Tour-d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2005).

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and B are not hermetic, it is also not enough to simply add them up to draw a mental map (cultural, literary, etc.) of the border area. Indeed, A and B are not content to add to each other, but instead they multiply to give birth to an original culture, a culture C characteristic of the thirdspace. In explaining this, we are accustomed to commenting on the border between the United States and Mexico. However, this vision also recalls the zone that Claudio Magris, a Triestean intellectual, a man from the border between Italy, Slovenia, and, a little further away, Austria, has long attributed to the Mitteleuropean space, which unfolds on both sides of the Danube. We know that, for Magris, the Danubian cultures produced a “literature squared,”9 which in his case is another way of saying that it is subject to strong processes of intertextuality. All of these representations have one thing in common. Because they are distrustful of the binary nature that one would attribute to the two sides of the line, they try to go beyond. At the very least, they raise thought to the power of two: what I think here, what you think over there, what we can think anew together, whether we resolutely engage in this speculation or not, and regardless of the political dividing lines. We are, then, very close to the Möbius strip model, and no doubt we are even closer to that of the Klein bottle, which integrates the third dimension. If here the image of the crown would embody fairly conservative readings of border geography, the image of the aureole would itself not be enough to testify to the extreme richness of the emergences, because while projecting itself from a distance, it continues to convey the same, even in an attenuated, non-confrontational form. Is there indeed a significant difference in nature between the halo and a drop shadow? Another essence? In 2021, the Muvim, that is, the Museo Valenciano de la Ilustración y la Modernidad, organized an exhibition entitled, in Valencian, Es pot xafar la línia (You Can Cross the Line). Given such a title, we will hardly be surprised that several of the highlighted works returned to the theme of borders and lines. Among them was a painting representing Dante Alighieri, signed David Marote.10 On a gray background, a thick black line crosses the middle of the canvas horizontally. 9  Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris, Trieste: Un’identità di frontiera (Turin: Einaudi, 1987 [1982]), 190. 10  David Marote, about whom little information is available, was one of the students of the graphic art master’s program of the UPV (Universitat Politècnica de València) who exhibited their works alongside more established artists.

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Above the line, three-quarter, a colorless Dante portrayed from behind turns around as if trying to establish eye contact with the spectator. However, his body seems to weigh down the line, which deforms beneath him. Indeed, one gets the impression that where Dante stands the line takes on the upside-down funnel shape of his inferno. Below the line, we see the reflection of the poet—an evanescent reflection, that of a silhouette that gradually unravels. David Marote’s work is titled Infierno: disolución. Is it regret that is expressed through this uncontrolled projection? Is the individual condemned to dissolve into nothingness beyond the limit of the body? Here, it is. The difference between the shadow and the halo lies in the perception that we have of the projection, somewhere between hope and despair. But both are homogeneous in their nature. In contrast, the thirdspace is heterogeneous, or creolized, as Édouard Glissant might have said. Although to my knowledge he never actually used the latter term, its spirit was perfectly captured in his project of an archipelago all-world (tout-­ monde archipélisé11). Of course, we evolve here in a topological cultural space where the very notions of interior and exterior are destined to be erased. However, faced with the sad reality of walls, barriers, and barbed wire fences, which stiffen the line and ossify the concrete landscape, there is only one solution left: to ensure that the belt twists and that the interior and exterior end up merging or, failing that, alternating in a third dimension that literature, cinema, plastic arts, dance, and so on are capable of expressing, even inspiring. We come back to the splendid demonstration a contrario that Theo Angelopoulos offered us in The Suspended Step of the Stork. In a space configured by the Möbius strip, I believe that two key words emerge, which refer to the paraphernalia necessary to undertake the trip, namely defamiliarization and resonance. The first of these words refers partly to a scientific practice as well as to an ontological attitude. From the moment you play with the lines, you have to agree to pass from one side to the other by adopting an attitude suited to the exercise, which requires a certain sense of balance. On this subject, I regularly mention the works of Bernard Gilroy, who is notably the author of The Black Atlantic (1993), and of Rosi Braidotti, whose essays on feminism (Nomadic Subjects, 1994)

11   See, for instance, Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde: Poétique IV (Paris, Gallimard, 1997).

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and posthumanism (The Posthuman, 2013) are well known.12 Because of their interest in a planet considered in all its extension, both are constantly confronted with a macroscopic culture where diversity is expressed according to a wide range of points of view. In short, they strive to implement what in geocritical vocabulary translates into multifocalization. Of course, this entails a constant effort of defamiliarization, the famous ostranenie of Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian formalists. In practice, defamiliarization presupposes that one puts oneself in phase with an alter-native culture— following the innovative spelling of Jacques Derrida—and takes a step back from one’s own culture, which, in a postcolonial (or even neohumanist) dynamic will no longer be considered universal and overarching, because it goes without saying that a homogenizing universalism is no longer appropriate in an environment governed by the topological rules formulated by August Ferdinand Möbius. We could even go further and consider that the only form of universalism conceivable, in a theoretical way at least, would be that which would extend the thirdspace to the point of transforming it into a planetary space, into a space of all possibilities, of all interbreeding—into a space of pure transgression, to continue to resort to geocritical vocabulary. Alas, as long as there are walls, and as long as the asymmetries between the various parts of the world are as glaring as they are today, the obstacles to that goal will remain daunting, even insurmountable. However, nothing prevents us from working on it, at a time when benevolent teleologies (synonymous with utopias?) seem to be stored in the archives of history. I had pointed to another keyword that seems fundamental to me if we want to start loving the quirky lines imagined by topologists. This is resonance. Indeed, I believe that the constitution of a large-scale thirdspace presupposes a meditation whose stake would once again be constructive, whereas the theoretical effort has mainly focused—and this is also true for geocriticism—on the deconstruction of the false certainties of so-called majority groups. For me, this reflection remains to be deepened, but it is quite high on my agenda. Of course, others have already undertaken it from various angles. Among them is Hartmut Rosa, through whom the

12  Bernard Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011 [1996]) and The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013).

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word resonance entered the vocabulary of the social sciences.13 For Rosa, as previously for David Harvey (postmodern spatio-temporal compression) and for Paul Virilio (dromological drift), the world is going too fast.14 It inexorably pushes the individual toward a crisis. To escape this catastrophic situation, it is necessary, according to Rosa, to resonate with oneself. However, in order to achieve this result, it is desirable, even necessary, to resonate with others—and these “others” are intended to be planetary. It seems to me that such an approach is quite compatible with the world conceived as a Möbius strip.

4. In a way, studying the Möbius strip explains what inscribes the individual in a process of transgressivity, in the geocritical and therefore essentially spatial sense of the term. Literature explores this dimension with great regularity. It also has the ability to express its evolution with a reactivity not available to other sources of representation of reality. It is in this aspect that literature is invaluable for understanding the world. Let’s take one example, among many others. A few years ago, I visited Stockholm after several decades of absence. This return was particularly pleasant for me, because I had once defended a doctoral thesis on Sven Delblanc, a Swedish writer. At that time, I had remained with a fairly traditional vision of the literature of this country and, in particular, of its treatment of the theme of the diaspora. While I was conducting my doctoral research, the focus of literature, and particularly cinema, was still the phenomenon of massive emigration of Scandinavians to the United States and Canada. For instance, between 1949 and 1959, Vilhelm Moberg published a series of four novels that would go down in history. The Emigrants Series tells the story of several villagers from Småland, who are too poor to keep their farms or their meager goods, and who emigrate to Manitoba.15 Jan Troell, a Swedish film director, adapted the first and the third books to two films, both of them headlined by actors Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow: The  Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2016).  See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1990); and Paul Virilio, La pensée exposée: Textes et entretiens (Arles: Actes Sud, 2012). 15  The tetralogy is composed of Utvandrarna (1949) (translated to English as The Emigrants, 1951), Invandrarna (1952) (Unto a Good Land, 1954), Nybbygarna (1956) (The Settlers, 1961), and Sista brevet till Sverige (1959) (The Last Letter Home, 1961). 13

14

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Emigrants (Utvandrarna, 1971) and The New Land (Nybyggarna, 1972). Incidentally, Sven Delblanc was himself born in Manitoba, in 1931. His Swedish parents emigrated to Canada just prior to his birth. As a child, he settled back in Sweden with his mother while his father stayed in Manitoba. But let’s return to the stay in Stockholm that I barely mentioned. While visiting a bookstore, I came across two books by Theodor Kallifatides, namely Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster (literally: A New Country outside My Window, 2001) and Ännu ett liv (literally: Still A Life, 2017).16 I had discovered this writer while preparing my thesis, or even earlier, because his novels were in the library of the university I was attending. In Sweden, he was considered one of the first representatives of so-called immigration literature. After leaving Greece, he had settled in Stockholm when he was studying, and he quickly learned Swedish, becoming a leading poet and novelist. Since the defense of my thesis in the late 1980s, Swedish writers and writers from immigrant backgrounds have offered local literature many of its most significant works. For instance, during my visit to the bookstore, I bought En storm kom från paradiset (2012), in which author Johannes Anyuru, born in Borås, near Gothenburg, in 1979, evokes the figure of his father who, after studying in Athens, became a fighter pilot in the Ugandan air force and then a political refugee.17 Theodor Kallifatides has accumulated a very long experience with what circulation between cultures means. He knows perfectly well that this mobility engages human beings down to their deepest recesses and that it largely determines his own work of creation. Undeniably, Kallifatides has become a privileged witness of the process I described in the previous section. He tested every aspect of it. Borders and other lines no longer hold any secrets for him, nor do halos or shadows. In his 2001 Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster he notes that, through his adherence to a system, the individual is cut in two, between an interior and an exterior, and is thereby exposed to a form of alienation.18 From there, the mediation of literature becomes fundamental for Kallifatides. In his 2017 Ännu ett liv, he notices 16  Theodor Kallifatides. Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster (Stockholm: Bonniers Pocket, 2018 [2001]), and Ännu ett liv (Stockholm: Bonniers Pocket, 2017). The latter work was translated to English by Marlaine Delargy as Another Life: On Memory, Language, Love, and the Passage of Time (New York: Other Press, 2018). 17  Johannes Anyuru, En storm kom från paradiset (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012), translated to English by Rachel Willson-Broyles as A Storm Blew in from Paradise (London: World Editions, 2015). 18  Kallifatides, Ett nytt land, 134.

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that it is no longer possible for him to give absolute priority to the use of the Swedish language. Navigating between regret and rejection is dramatic for everyone. It might be even more so for a writer who has invested in a non-native language for a good half-century but for whom the mother tongue continues to pulse to the rhythm of his heartbeat. In many respects, the situation experienced by Kallifatides is that of writers evolving in a context of diglossia. The relationship to language expresses here the relationship to a plural culture where both sides of a borderline are activated simultaneously. Indeed, it is not just Kallifatides. In the single act of Coser y cantar (To Sew and to Sing, 1981), one of her best-known plays, Dolores Prida, who moved to New York at the age of eighteen after growing up in Cuba, transforms the different components of her being into characters: Ella and She. The two engage in very lively exchanges, verging on a verbal duel. Yet, is it really a dialogue? Wouldn’t it instead be the expression of an interior monologue—that of Prida, that of Kallifatides, that of so many others? I did not know Dolores Prida; I discovered her existence while reading Santiago Posteguillo’s El séptimo círculo del infierno: Escritores malditos, escritoras olvidadas (The Seventh Circle of Hell: Cursed Men Writers, Forgotten Women Writers, 2017). Here is the interpretation this Spanish academic gives of the play: “Neither Ella nor She can impose themselves on the other character because, quite simply, there are times when one is neither one thing nor the opposite, but both at the same time. . . . And that is Prida’s message, her great legacy: they must continue existing, with both cultures coexisting without one imposing itself on the other. But the message does not permeate in many places where lack of culture (incultura) overlaps with intolerance. Languages ​​are for communication, not for division.”19 As soon as we are confined on one and only one side of the line, nostalgia is necessarily on the lookout. As for Kallifatides, after a period of crisis that prompted him to interrupt his novelistic activity, he decided to resume writing, but in Greek. In this way, he became a Swedish plus Greek writer, or rather a Swedish per Greek writer. On a side note, I happened to be in 19  “Ni Ella ni She pueden imponerse sobre el otro personaje porque, sencillamente, hay veces en que uno no es ni una cosa ni la contraria, sino las dos a un mismo tiempo. . . . Y ése es el mensaje de Prida, su gran legado: han de seguir existiendo, coexistiendo las dos culturas sin imponer una a la otra. Pero el mensaje no permea en muchos sitios donde la incultura cabalga a lomos de intolerancia. Los idiomas son para comunicarse, no para dividir.” Santiago Posteguillo, El séptimo círculo del infierno: Escritores malditos, escritoras olvidadas (Barcelona: Planeta, 2017; Booket, 2019), 184.

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Spain recently, where in perusing the shelves of another bookstore, I found Posteguillo’s collection of short essays but also Kallifatides’s Ännu ett liv translated into Spanish from the Greek as Otra vida por vivir (literally: Another Life to Live). I first believed that this was the only Kallifatides book translated into Spanish. That is not the case, but the few other translated titles are almost always translated from Greek.20 Admittedly, it often happens that the author translates himself from Swedish into Greek, but it may be that for the average Spanish reader, Kallifatides is seen as a writer of the Greek language. On another side note, the English translation of Ännu ett liv—from Swedish—was given the slightly imprecise title Another Life (2018), whereas the title Still A Life could have been chosen instead. I believe I have demonstrated why this title does not entirely convince me. Kallifatides does not want to pave another way or another life. He wants to experience what remains of his life to discover its potential and bring out a new dimension of his being, which allows him to fully blossom. It is understood that the situation of Theodor Kallifatides, even if it were summed up in the single aspect of diglossia, is not exceptional. Far from it. Once again: that situation is characteristic of many writers or filmmakers; it is characteristic of a part of humanity today, of which only a tiny minority expresses itself through the pages of a novel, the lines of a poem, or the images of a film. This is why it seems so important to me that literature, cinema, and so on offer innovative metaphors or, better still, reading patterns that help lead to a deeper understanding of the issues of our diasporic era, which is always stimulating and so complex.

5. There has been a lot of talk about Europe in this chapter. Often, like Gertrude Stein’s rose that is a rose is a rose, Europe is supposed to be Europe that is Europe. Why is this so? Well, “because it is so.” We can agree that this reasoning is a bit shallow, as Kallifatides splendidly shows us. Moreover, it is not just Europe that is concerned, even though Europe is a type of complicated identity sphinx. In fact, the lines, which are 20  Selma Ancira has translated three of Kallifatides’s works from Greek to Spanish: Mödrar och söner (2007), translated as Madres e hijos (Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020); Det gångna är inte en dröm (2010), translated as Lo pasado no es un sueño (Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2021); Ännu ett liv, translated as Otra vida por vivir (Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2019). Neila García Salgado has translated Slaget om Troja (2018) into Spanish from Swedish: El asedio de Troya (Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020).

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supposed to simplify everything, are everywhere, “because you just need lines.” Now, again, the lines are also the one that runs through the cell described to us in Álvaro Brechner’s film,21 or the one that cuts across Theo Angelopoulos’s bridge, or even, much less dramatically, the line of the Equator that traverses the football field of Macapá. A final, albeit double, example comes to my mind. It concerns street art, which is a true mirror of the urbanized societies of the twenty-first century. Indeed, two “European” wall paintings have struck me a lot in recent years. One is in Valencia, the other in Lisbon. Both portray a modern-day Europa. In the first, Escif, one of Spain’s best-known urban artists, installs Europa on a stool. She plays the harp, or the lyre (Fig. 1). The scene seems peaceful; culture is in the spotlight. A closer look reveals that the strings of the harp are barbed wire. Is it possible to conceive lines as other than dangerous when they refer to the idea of border? I discovered the second painting in a square located in the Mouraria neighborhood in Lisbon, signed by Andrea Tarli, an artist from Ascoli Piceno, Italy (Fig. 2). The painting was from 2016 and represented a young woman posted behind a brick wall under construction. A modern-day Europa again? A wall builder? Or perhaps a wall demolisher? Actually, she is brandishing a trowel. The wall displays the colors of Europe. On the sunglasses worn by Europa, I could see the reflection of makeshift boats on the sea. They transported migrants as best they could, all doomed to come up against a final barrier: the one between the sea and Europe, a territory curled up behind its lines, whose hospitality is decidedly not a cardinal virtue. An anonymous and more than probably racist hand had tagged Andrea Tarli’s work with the word fora (out). In a topological environment where Dr Möbius would have his say, there would no longer be any fora. There would simply be a space of contact with the world, with the real world, a threshold that would be able to bring to fruition the full potential that our planet has.

21  Now, as I’m watching Brechner’s film in the light of literary history and the story of Kallifatides—who is not the worst off among exiled or expatriate writers—the case of Jusuf Vrioni comes to my mind. After spending a good dozen years in one of the terrible Albanian jails during the era of Enver Hoxa, Vrioni was released, but under one condition: that he translate into French the writings of the dictator and the novels of Kadaré, the reading of which was still tolerated by the regime during the 1960s. Vrioni complied. The General of the Dead Army (1963), Kadaré’s first novel, was published in French in 1970, but without the name of a translator. We imagine quite well (or quite badly) that a line crossed the room where Vrioni translated in the dark and in anonymity.

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Fig. 1  “Europa” by Escif

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Fig. 2  Untitled by Andrea Tarli

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ara, Angelo and Claudio Magris. 1987 (1982). Trieste: Un’identità di frontiera. Turin: Einaudi. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011 [1996]. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Democracy Index 2020. Economist Intelligence Unit, https://www.eiu.com/ topic/democracy-­index. Accessed 29 December 2021. Galeano, Eduardo. 2017 (1998). Patas arriba: La escuela del mundo al revés. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Gilroy, Bernard. 1995. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Traité du Tout-Monde: Poétique IV. Paris: Gallimard. González, Diego. 2018. Chutar desde Croacia y marcar gol en Bosnia: Estadios de fútbol en dos países. Fronteras, Jan. 22, 2018, https://fronterasblog.

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com/2018/01/22/chutar-­desde-­croacia-­y-­marcar-­gol-­en-­bosnia-­estadios-­de-­ futbol-­en-­dos-­paises/. Accessed 19 August 2019. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kallifatides, Theodor. 2017. Ännu ett liv. Stockholm: Bonniers Pocket. ———. 2018 (2001). Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster. Stockholm: Bonniers Pocket. Rosa, Hartmut. 2016. Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Virilio, Paul. 2012. La pensée exposée: Textes et entretiens. Arles: Actes Sud. Westphal, Bertrand. 2005. L'Œil de la Méditerranée. La Tour-d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube.

Index1

A Aachen, 74 Abulafia, David, 89 Adolphs, Volker, 14 Adorno, Theodor, 2, 10, 11 Affaya, Mohammad, 164 Africa, 25 Agamben, Giorgio, 10, 189, 189n7, 190 Ahmed, Leila, 174n16 Alberti, Rafael, 119, 120, 120n2, 128, 128n8 Albert-Lasard, Lou, 18n4 Alessandria, 90, 90n6, 90n7, 98 Alexandria, 7, 87–112, 90n6, 90n7, 90n9, 92n11, 93n12, 94n13, 96n17, 101n21, 103n22, 106n24 Ali, Mohammed, 64n9 All Quiet on at the Western Front, 136, 143

Alsace, 78 Altolaguirre, Manuel, 119, 120, 129, 132 Alÿs, Francis, 4, 5, 14, 20–29, 24n8, 27n10 Amazigh-Catalan, 158n1, 164 Amazigh/Moroccan, 158n1, 162, 163, 165, 167, 174, 175, 175n17 America, 138, 139, 139n14, 150, 153, 154 American, 136 Amicucci, Davide, 91 Amorós, Celia, 164 Anchorage, 21 Andernach, 68 Angelopoulos, Theo, 10, 183, 187, 192, 198 Angioletti, G.B., 89n5 Antonicelli, Franco, 96n15 Anyuru, Johannes, 195

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Everly et al. (eds.), Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8

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INDEX

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 177 Ara, Angelo, 191n9 Arabic, 163, 175 Arendt, Hannah, 18 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 64 Ascona, 137, 149, 149n34 Ashcroft, Bill, 112 Auckland, 21 Auerbach, Ellen, 22n7 Austria, 16, 143–146 Awad, Mohamed, 92 B Bachmann, Ingeborg, 3 Baden, 16 Balducci, Ernesto, 48 Balibar, Étienne, 4, 6, 60–62, 79, 82 Baltic, 61n5 Bangkok, 21 Barbarossa, 74, 75, 77 Barcelona, 163, 166, 176 Bassani, Giorgio, 44n14, 49n22 Becker, Nicolaus, 64, 65 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 125, 126 Beichelt, Timm, 59 Belgium, 22 Bell, Natalie, 26 Beller, Manfred, 68–71, 68n20, 69n21 Bellver, Catherine, G., 121–123, 123n3, 129 Below, Irene, 17, 18n4 Berrada, Omar, 22 Beuys, 27 Bianchini, Angela, 136n5, 137 Bigongiari, Piero, 89n5 Bingen, 65, 66 Blackbourn, David, 63n7 Boehmer, Elleke, 91 Bonaparte, 74 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 73n29, 75

Border, 1–7, 9, 10, 13–29, 58–65, 71, 74, 77, 79–84, 80n39, 90, 91, 97, 99, 102, 107, 112, 132, 137, 142–149, 152, 153, 183, 184, 185n3, 186, 188–191, 195, 198 Borderland, 57–84, 62n6 Border zone, 146 Borgards, Richard, 79n38, 82n44 Borgate, 35–42, 44, 53 Borges, Luis, 119 Borges, Norah, 119 Boundaries, 143, 145, 152 Braidotti, Rosi, 164, 192, 193n12 Brazil, 185 Breccia, Evaristo, 93n12 Brechner, Álvaro, 10, 184, 185, 187, 198 Brecht, George, 25 Breton, 27 Briegleb, 77n34 Briganti, Giuliano, 47, 48 Brophy, James M., 64n10, 64n12 Brunatto, Paolo, 40, 40n13, 41, 53 Büchner, Georg, 6, 58, 59, 62, 64, 65, 79–84, 79n38, 81n43 Bulgaria, 101 Buñuel, Luis, 119n1 C Caesar, Julius, 70 Campe, Julius, 72n24 Canada, 139n14, 194, 195 Capdevila-Argüelles, Nuria, 121 Carminati, Lucia, 88n2, 89 Casiraghi, Ugo, 50 Castelnuovo, Enrico, 88n1 Catalan, 4, 9, 157, 159n2, 163, 170, 170n13, 171, 174 Center, 1–11 Cernuda, Luis, 120, 128, 128n8 Chacel, Rosa, 126n5

 INDEX 

Chambers, Iain, 92, 93 Charlemagne, 70 Chiesi, Roberto, 40n13 Cialente, Fausta, 93n12 Cini, 104 Citizenship, 19, 137 Civil War, 151n36 Civilization, 151 Cologne, 71, 73, 77 Colonialism, 94, 102, 111 Concentration camp, 142 Constantinople, 92 Contact zone, 58, 62, 62n6, 91, 92 Convivencia, 171, 171n14 Crimea, 27 Crossings, 13–29 Cuba, 196 D Dali, 27 Dalí, Salvador, 119, 119n1 D’Angiò, Roberto, 104 Dante Alighieri, 191, 192 Danube, 61n5 Darmstadt, 80 De Castro, Rosalía, 125, 126n5 de Musset, Alfred, 65, 69 Dedner, Burghard, 80n41, 83n45, 83n46 Delblanc, Sven, 194, 195 Deleuze, Gilles, 187 Dell’Oro, Marco, 45, 46 Derrida, Jacques, 193 Desmeules, Georges, 188n6 Diaspora, 96–97, 194 Die Nacht von Lissabon, 137 Dinverno, Melissa, 121 Diodati, Giovanni, 108, 108n25 Djavann, Chahdortt, 173 Djebar, Assia, 159 Dogramaci, Burcu, 4, 5

205

Duchamp, 27 Dūǧlās, Fedwa Mālṭı ̄, 169 Durrell, Lawrence, 93n12 Dyan, Moshe, 24 E Ebbighausen, Rodion, 15, 16 The Edge of Europe, 136n5, 137 Egypt, 7, 87–112, 88n1, 91n10, 92n11 El Hachmi, Najat, 4, 9, 157–180 El Kadaoui, Saïd, 158n1, 163–165, 178 El Khayat, Ghita, 159 El lunes nos querrán, 157, 160, 162, 163, 168, 168n11, 172, 177 Eltahawy, Mona, 159, 160, 168n10, 171–173, 174n16, 177 Éluard, Paul, 119 Emigration, 194 Equator, 10 Erich Maria Remarque, 141n19 Ernst, 27 Escape, 13–29, 22n7, 137 Escif, 198 Esposito, Bruno, 47, 48 Euclid, 186 Europa, 198 Europe, 2, 4, 6–11, 29, 57–61, 63, 67, 67n19, 68, 70, 71, 74, 77, 78, 82–84, 91, 135n1, 136n2, 149, 149n34, 154, 197, 198 European, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 144n26 Europeanization, 6 Everly, Kathryn, 8, 121 Exile/exiled, 2–9, 13–29, 65, 79n38, 80, 88, 94–96, 111, 112, 118, 120–133, 120n2, 126n5, 128n8, 146, 147, 149n34, 184

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INDEX

F Facchini, Monica, 5, 6, 33n1 Fallersleben, Hoffmann von, 64 Fastrada, 70 Febvre, Lucien, 61, 62, 62n6, 63n8, 64n13, 71n23 Feminism, 9, 127, 158, 159n3, 160–162, 161n6, 175, 176, 180, 192 Feminist, 127, 129, 157, 158, 160–162, 161n6, 168, 174, 174n16, 175, 175n17, 179 Ferguson, Russel, 24 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 15, 136n5 Fittko, Lisa, 19 Flight, 142, 145, 149n34 Forster, E.M., 93n12 France, 17, 18, 58, 61–64, 62n6, 64n9, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 78, 80, 101, 103, 144–146, 149, 149n34, 153, 154, 184 Frank Partnoy, 15n1 Freisler, Robert, 137 Freud, Sigmund, 34 Friebe, Holm, 15n1 Friedrich I, 74 G Gabaccia, Donna, 97, 105n23 Galeano, Eduardo, 10, 184, 185, 185n2, 185n4 Ganster, Paul, 22n6 Generation of 1927, 119 Geocritical, 61, 79, 127, 148, 187, 190, 193, 194 Geocritical perspective, 145 Geocriticism, 4, 6, 61–63, 84, 190, 193 Germany, 16, 58, 61, 62, 62n6, 64, 67, 69, 72, 75, 76, 143–146, 149, 151–153

Giannini, Stefano, 7 Gießen, 80, 81 Gilroy, Bernard, 192, 193n12 Glissant, Édouard, 192, 192n11 Godard, Jean-Luc, 42 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 82n44 Gómez-Blesa, Mercedes, 127, 127n6 González, Diego, 185n3 González-Allende, Iker, 121 Göring, Hermann, 137 Gorman, Anthony, 92 Graybill, Andrew R., 22n6 Great Britain, 22n7 Greece, 20, 90, 195 Green, André, 79 Gregoretti, Ugo, 42 Grünenwald, Ursula, 24, 25 Guattari, Félix, 187 Guérot, Ulrike, 58 Guillén, Claudio, 95, 96, 105n23, 111, 112 Gurs, 14–19, 17n2, 18n4, 29 Gutzkow, Karl, 80, 80n40 H Hadiths, 160, 174n16 Halle, Randall, 6, 59, 62 Hamburg, 72n24, 73 Hamido Yahia, Mimunt, 160n4, 166, 172n15, 178–180 Hanley, Will, 91n10, 97n18, 98, 99, 102 Harvey, David, 194, 194n14 al-Hassan, Nawar, 164 al-Hassani, Jamila, 158n1 Hatto, 66 Hauschild, Jan-Christoph, 79, 79n38, 81n42, 82 Hegel, G. W. F., 61, 63 Heine, Heinrich, 6, 58, 59, 62, 62n6, 64, 65, 71–79, 72n24, 72n25,

 INDEX 

72n26, 73n29, 73n30, 75n31, 76n33, 77n34, 78n37, 80n40, 81, 82 Heine-Teixeira, Christine, 136n3 Hell, Julia, 59 Herwegh, Georg, 64 Hessen, 80 Heterogeneity, 150 Hijab, 157–180 Hitler, Adolf, 142 Hobsbawm, Eric, 64n12 Hoche, Lazare, 69, 69n21, 70 Höhn, Gerhard, 72n24, 72n28, 73, 73n30, 75n31, 76, 77n34, 78n35 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 61, 63 Hong Kong, 21 Hoodfar, Homa, 173 Hugo, Victor, 6, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64–73, 65n15, 67n18, 67n19, 68n20, 75n31, 76, 79, 81, 82 Huntington, Samuel P., 187, 187n5 I Ißler, Roland Alexander, 64n11, 65, 65n14 Identities, 154 Immigration, 195 Ingram, Angela, 125 Insolera, Italo, 36, 36n5, 37, 39 Internment, 14, 16, 18, 29 Intertextuality, 125 Interzone, 57–84 Islam, 9, 158, 159, 159n3, 161n6, 162–164, 167, 169, 171, 172n15, 173, 178 Islamic, 159, 161, 161n6, 162, 166, 173, 174n16, 179 Islamism, 168, 171, 173 Islamist, 164

207

Islamophobia, 171, 172 Israel, 23 Istanbul, 15 Italy, 20, 88–90, 95–97, 101–103, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 146 J Jerusalem, 23, 24 Jo també sóc Catalana, 157, 170n13, 171, 175n17 Johnson, Benjamin H., 22n6 Josef in Egypt, 140 Joseph and His Brothers, 140 K Kabul, 24n8 Kallifatides, Theodor, 195–197, 195n16, 195n18, 197n20, 198n21 Kant, Immanuel, 76n33 Karakayali, Serhat, 20 Karl der Große, 70 Karrouch, Laila, 158n1 Kassel, 24n8 Kavafy, Constantin, 93n12 Kermani, Nevad, 20 Khalili, Bouchra, 22 Khedivés, 88n2, 90n8 Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham, 101, 101n21, 103n22 Kingsley, Patrick, 20 Klein bottle, 189, 191 Koestler, Arthur, 151n36 Königsberg, 79 Koran, 159, 161, 173, 180 Körner, Paul, 137 Kracauer, Siegfried, 15 Kyffhäuser, 74

208 

INDEX

L La cancha, 185 La filla estrangera, 167 La Ricotta, 35, 42–53 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 65 Lasalle, 66 Lazarev, Anouchka, 96n17 Le Vernet, 151, 151n36 Lebanon, 101 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude, 51 Leggott, Sarah, 121 Lemjir, Houda, 163 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold, 79 León, María Teresa, 120n2, 128n8 Lethe, 145 Levine, Robert, 15 Life in Egypt, 88 Lima, 25 Lingner, 16 Lingner, Max, 4, 5, 16–18, 17n2, 17n3, 29 Lisbon, 9, 135–139, 135n1, 136n5, 141, 142n23, 147, 148, 148n32, 153, 155 Livonia, 79 Löffler, Petra, 23 London, 141 Lorca, Federico García, 119, 119n1, 120, 126 Lorey, David E., 22n6 Lorraine, 78 Los Angeles, 21 Lotharingia, 63 Louis XIV, 63 Lucamante, Stefania, 1 L’últim patriarca, 157, 160, 167, 168, 168n11, 173 Luperini, Romano, 95 Lyceum Club, 127

M Machado, Antonio, 126 Madrid, 8, 117–133, 119n1, 123n4 Magnus, Carolus, 57, 63, 68, 70, 72 Magris, Claudio, 191, 191n9 Mainz, 66, 70 Maiwandi, Ajmal, 24n8 Mallo, Maruja, 119 Mālṭı ̄ Dūǧlās, Fedwa, 169 Mann, Heinrich, 135, 135n1 Mann, Thomas, 140 Mare de llet i mel, 167 María de Maeztu, 127 Marinetti, 27 Marote, David, 191, 192 Marseilles, 152 Marx, Karl, 75n32, 77n34 Matzat, Wolfgang, 65, 66n16 Medina, Cuauhtémoc, 25, 27 Mediterranean, 90 Memmi, Albert, 109–111 Méndez, Concha, 4, 8, 117–133, 119n1, 120n2, 126n5, 128n8 Mernissi, Fatima, 162n7, 175 Mexico City, 8, 20–22, 117–133, 128n8 Migrations, 2, 4, 5, 7, 14, 22, 23, 25, 60, 84, 94, 97, 141 Mildenberger, Hermann, 65n15, 66 Miller, Matthew, 4, 6 Misogyny, 159, 159n3, 160 Moberg, Vilhelm, 194 Möbius, August Ferdinand, 188, 190, 193 Möbius strip, 188–192, 194, 198 Montecatini, 90 Montevideo, 184 Morandi, Giorgio, 27 Moroccan, 159, 165n8, 170, 174 Moroccan-Amazigh Riff, 160

 INDEX 

Morocco, 25, 158n1, 176 Moscow, 79 Mother, 122, 126, 128–132 Motherhood, 128–132, 128n7 Mothering, 128, 128n7, 129, 132 Motherland, 121, 128, 131, 132 Muhammad Ali Pacha, 90n8 Mujica, José, 184 Multifocalization, 193 Munich, 146 Munich Agreement, 142 Muslim, 9, 159–165, 160n5, 171–173, 171n14, 175, 175n17, 176, 180 Musset, Alfred de, 65 N Napoleon Bonaparte, 57, 63, 63n7, 67, 70, 74, 75 National Socialism, 149n34 Nazi, 9 Neorealist films, 38n7 New Woman International, 120, 121 New York, 20n5, 139, 141 The Night in Lisbon, 8, 135–155 Night in Madrid, 124 North Africa, 4, 9 North America, 4, 8 O Oberlin, J. F., 80, 81 Oberriet, 143 Okin, Susan Moller, 159n3 Orient, 91 Osnabrück, 142, 143, 146, 147, 154 Otto, Elizabeth, 120 Ottoman Empire, 89, 90, 92 Ovid, 95, 96

209

P Palatinate, 16 Palermo, Blinky, 27 Palestine, 22n7 Panama City, 21 Paonessa, Costantino, 103n22, 104, 105n23, 110 Paradox, 153, 155 Paris, 19, 72n24, 72n25, 90, 141–143, 149n34, 150, 151 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 5, 6, 33–53 Passage, 145 Passport, 149, 154 Pea, Enrico, 4, 7, 87–112, 88n3, 90n6, 96n15, 100n19, 100n20, 108n26 Periphery, 1–11, 33–53, 57–84, 88–94, 101–103, 106, 135–155, 144n26 Pessoa, Fernando, 108 Petricioli, Marta, 96n16, 103 Pikulik, Lothar, 15 Pitts, Johny, 177, 179 Place of transit, 138 Plessen, Marie-Louise, 71 Plötzensee, 137 Plutarch, 95, 96 Poemas: Sombras y sueños, 117, 118, 120–122, 125, 128, 129, 132 Portugal, 138, 138n9, 152 Posteguillo, Santiago, 196, 197 Prague, 19 Pratt, Mary Louise, 89, 89n4, 91 Prida, Dolores, 196 Prussia, 58, 63, 68, 71, 74, 77 Prussian, 58 Q Quevedo, 126

210 

INDEX

R Rangoon, 21 Re, Lucia, 92, 110 Refugees, 136n2, 137, 138n9, 139n14, 152, 153 Regler, Gustav, 151n36 Remarque, Erich Maria, 8, 9, 19, 136, 137, 141–143, 141n21, 146, 148 Restivo, Angelo, 39n8 Rhein, 64 Rhine, 6, 57–84, 61n5, 62n6, 64n9, 78n37, 144n26, 145, 146 Rhine River, 144, 145 Rhouni, Raja, 162n7, 175 Ricci, Cristián H., 9, 167, 175 Ricoeur, Paul, 3 Riefenstahl, Leni, 27 Rieucros, 151 Riff, 158n1, 163, 175n17 River Lethe, 145 Rmuncar, 175, 176, 178 Rocco, Vanessa, 120 Roman Empire, 63 Rome, 34–36, 34n2, 38, 39n8, 40, 40n9, 43, 48, 57 Ronco, 149n34 Rosa, Hartmut, 193, 194, 194n13 Rosello, Mireille, 27 Rosenthal, Joseph, 104 Rossellini, Roberto, 39n8, 42 Russia, 101, 141, 142 S Saarland, 16 Sabadell-Nieto, Joana, 128 Said, Edward, 73, 109 Salafists, 161n6 Salinas, Pedro, 128, 128n8 Salle Lépin, 151, 151n36 Sammons, Jeffrey L., 80n40 San Diego, 20, 21

Sankt Goar, 69 Santiago, 21 Sao Paulo, 23 Schiffauer, Werner, 80n39 Schneider, Thomas F., 137n6, 149n33 Scholz, Elfriede, 137 Schönle, Andreas, 59 Schreckenberger, Helga, 138n13, 141n21 Schwitters, Kurt, 27 Second World War, 16 Segarra, Marta, 128 Seghers, Anna, 141n20 Self-exile, 94 Seoul, 21 Seyhan, Azade, 132 Shanghai, 21 Shklovsky, Viktor, 193 Siempre han hablado por nosotras, 157, 160, 162, 167, 168, 170n12, 176 Singapore, 21 Slimani, Leila, 162, 178 Smolik, Noemi, 25 Soja, Edward, 8, 118, 122, 128, 129, 172 Şölçün, Sargut, 15 Somigli, Luca, 96 Sörge, Hermann, 25 South America, 139n14 Space, 13, 15, 16, 23, 27–29, 59–62, 67, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82, 91, 94, 94n13, 99, 118, 122–125, 127, 130, 132, 138, 150, 186, 187, 191–193, 198 Space-time, 123 Spain, 17, 25, 102, 103, 151n36, 153, 197, 198 Spanish Civil War, 118, 119 Spatial, 15, 17, 23, 27 Spatiality, 122 Stack, Oswald, 33n1 Stein, Gertrude, 197

 INDEX 

Steiner-Prag, Hugo, 22n7 Steintal/Le Ban de la Roche, 81 Strait, 165, 174, 175 Strasbourg, 79, 79n38, 80 Street art, 190, 198 Subini, Tomaso, 51 Sweden, 22n7, 195 Switzerland, 144–146, 149, 149n34, 150 Sydney, 21 Syria, 101 T Taha, Rachid, 177 Tamzali, Wassyla, 161, 171, 173 Tangier, 25 Tarifa, 25 Tarli, Andrea, 198 Tepl, Johann von, 57 Teresa de Ávila, 126n5 Tesi, Giovanni, 104 Theresienstadt, 16 Thiers, Adolphe, 64 Thirdspace, 2, 8, 10, 117–133, 172, 190–193 Threshold, 190 Tignor, Robert, 91 Tijuana, 20, 21 Tims, Hilton, 141n19, 143n24 Tippelskirch, Karina von, 14 Torquemada, 67 Transformations, 143–148 Transgression, 143–148 Transit places, 137–143, 145, 147, 153 Trimi, Katerina, 96n17 Tulla, Johann Gottfried, 63n7 Turkey, 15

211

U Ukraine, 58 Ulacia Altolaguirre, Paloma, 119, 120 Ullmann, Liv, 194 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 88, 89n5, 93, 93n12, 95, 95n14, 101 United States, 136, 139n14, 149n34, 154, 184, 194 USA, 20–22, 22n7 V Valender, James, 120, 121 Van Houtem, Henk, 15 Vancouver, 21 Vasai, Pietro, 103–107, 103n22, 105n23 Vasconcelos, José, 92n11 Venice, 90 Verga, Giovanni, 87 Viano, Maurizio, 48 Vichy, 90 Vienna, 19 Virilio, Paul, 194, 194n14 Visa, 152 Vita in Egitto, 88, 89, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107–112 Vivanti, Annie, 89n5 Vives, Anna, 121 Voigt, Wolfgang, 25 von Sydow, Max, 194 von Tippelskirch, Karina, 8, 9 Vosges, 80, 81 W Wagener, Hans, 140 Wagner, Martin, 15 Wahhabi/Salafist, 160, 161n6, 173

212 

INDEX

Waiting, 13–29 Waiting room, 14, 15, 136 Waldersbach, 80, 81n42 Wallace, David Foster, 188n6 Wartens, 15 Wartesaal, 15, 136, 136n5 Webber, Andrew, 81, 82 Weißenthurm, 68, 70 Welles, Orson, 44–46, 44n14, 44n15, 44n17, 48–53, 49n22 Wendland, Jörg, 16 Westphal, Bertrand, 3, 4, 8–10, 53, 59n3, 61, 62, 72n27, 73, 91, 93n12, 94n13, 123, 148, 190n8 Wilcox, John, 121 Wilhelm III, Friedrich, 68

Wilhelmer, Lars, 9, 138, 138n12, 145, 148n32 Winder, Simon, 63 Wolfe, Stephen F., 15, 27 Woolf, Virginia, 127n6 World War II, 3, 7, 11, 37, 39, 39n8, 58, 96, 138, 148 WWI, 36, 38 Y Yannakakis, Ilios, 96n17 Z Zantop, Susanne, 77, 78 Zürich, 143, 149