Edward Said's negotiation between the metropolis and Third World intellectuals in Culture and Imperialism offers a useful concluding paradigm. Said's metropolis is newly but now ineluctably self-divided. As a result of "adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures," opposition has arisen in the modern metropolis, an opposition that emerges out of the precarious coalition of personal mobility and impersonal representativeness: "anti-imperialist intellectual and scholarly work done by writers from the peripheries who have immigrated to or are visiting the metropolis is usually an extension into the metropolis of large-scale mass movements." 39 In one of his many provocations to the established protocols of scholarly disillusionment, Said allows what he calls "the voyage in," the story of how these visitors and immigrants have both integrated themselves into and transformed metropolitan culture, to supply an unexpectedly and incongruously cheerful undertone to the book. The collective Bildungsroman of Third World intellectuals who have come to live and work in the metropolis, repeating in transnational terms the country-to-city journey of the nineteenth-century novel, also works its way into Said's innovative treatment of the novel of disillusionment. In an indirect reply to Franco Moretti's darkly Lukacsian view of the genre, Said appreciatively displays Third World reversals of Heart of Darkness, like Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. Moretti sees the genre dying a modernist death when European men, losing faith in their own projects, have tired of it. 40 Said's insistence on its continuing vitality in the hands of Third World men and women would appear on the contrary to express the intelligent optimism of a stratum or category that is still rising, energetic, confident of its powers. Or if optimism seems too strong, call it by the neologism coined by another great Palestininan writer: "pessoptimism." 41
Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and a co-editor of Social Text. His most recent books are Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Profession-alism, Culture (Verso, 1993) and The Phantom Public Sphere (Minnesota, 1993). The present essay elaborates on ideas first presented in The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below, which was reissued in paper last year by Duke University Press.
1. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1; hereafter abbreviated NN.
2. "Was it, we may ask, historically fortuitous that the classic era of free trade liberalism coincided with that 'nation-making' which Bagehot saw as so central to his century? In other words, did the nation-state have a specific function as such in the process of capitalist development?" (NN, 25). Today the nation-state has lost this function, Hobsbawm says. Thus, "in spite of its evident prominence, nationalism is historically less important" (NN, 181).
3. Wlad Godzich (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1992).
4. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (1928; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1969); Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 176.
5. Spivak writes of the need "to put together the story of the development of a cosmopolitanism that is global, gendered, and dynamic" (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine [New York: Routledge, 1993], 278). Spivak makes this a story of where we come from, how it happens that students of colonial and postcolonial culture are so anxious to identify themselves with an alternative to nationalism. To the surprise of some, cosmopolitanism res here as a word that can be used to identify a "correct" position. In the next paragraph Spivak says, "the last paragraph was grant-proposal talk." Yet the point is surely that the self-abstraction of grant proposal talk can never be wholly abstracted from the self.
6. James Clifford, "Traveling Cultures," in Cultural Studies, ed.Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992).
7. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
8. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New York: Knopf, 1992).
9. Benita Parry, "The Contradictions of Cultural Studies," Transition 53 : 41.
10. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality, and Value," in Literary Theory Today, ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 222, 224.
11. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990); hereafter abbreviated L. Bharati Mukherjee, "Jasmine," in The Middleman and Other Stories (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1988); hereafter abbreviated "J". Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1989); hereafter abbreviated J.
12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 243-61.
13. See Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (London: Verso Press, 1993), chapter 6.
14. It remains an interesting question how much the crossing of national borders does or does not change the nature of rural/urban migration. For domestic migrations, see for example S. A. Radcliffe, "Ethnicity, Patriarchy, and Incorporation into the Nation: Female Migrants as Domestic Workers in Peru," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8 : 379-93.
15. V. S. Naipaul notoriously takes his personal journey from Trinidad to the United Kingdom and up the social ladder as an allegory of the progress of civilization. For this Bildungsroman in miniature, see for example his "Our Universal Civilization," The New York Review of Books, 31 January 1991, 22-25. For a useful warning against the temptations of such narratives, see Kevin Gaines, "Black Americans' Racial Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission': Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 433-55.
16. Spivak, "Poststructuralism, Marginality," 228.
17. See Bruce Robbins, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986; reprint, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
18. Compare with the servant's placement in the midst of her employers' marital troubles in Melanie Sumner, "The Edge of the Sky," The New Yorker, 1 February 1993, 73-84.
19. Rough or violent sex, also a motif in Lucy, in both texts seems to play dangerously with the ambiguity as to whether such violence inescapably calls down upon it an allegory of political domination.
20. The amount of allegorical "give" in a narrative like Jane Eyre is already a difficult question in nineteenth-century Britain: Jane is of course both a re for the middle class and a re for women, and this duplicity is not definitively resolvable into the re of Jane-as-middle-class-woman. If middle-class feminism can take it over, so for example can middle-class radicalism in general, which is of course the dominant form in the university.
21. Here the surprisingly pertinent parallel would be Jane Eyre's other marriage option, St. John Rivers, and the direct role he offers her in imperialism's missionary project.
22. This has always been a problem for the interpretation of class allegory, as suggested by the continuing debate over Richardson's Clarissa.
23. In James Salter's "Foreign Shores," the intrusion of an au pair into the home is made ironically representative of fears of the international sex trade. See James Salter, Dusk and Other Stories (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988).
24. This might be related to the history of monogamy as an Orientalist trope, basic to Western civilization's self-definition or differentiation--as indeed it is in Jane Eyre itself. It is of course a strange trope, given how far from monogamous Western society is or ever was.
25. As with her appreciation for the Gauguin re, here again we have identification with the breaking up of a nuclear family marking the birth of the artist/migrant.
26. Hilton Als, "Don't Worry, Be Happy," The Nation, 18 February 1991, 207-8.
27. For a not entirely unsympathetic class description of the recent Indian diaspora in North America, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London: Verso Press, 1992).
28. Julie Graham, "Fordism/Post-Fordism, Marxism/Post-Marxism: The Second Cultural Divide," Rethinking Marxism 4 (Spring 1991): 39-58.
29. Petite Larousse Illustré, (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1979), "pair."
30. Cynthia Enloe, in the final chapter of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), is extremely insightful on the relation between the history of feminism and the history of domestic work, as well as on the correspondence between racial difference and the hierarchy of childcare workers. According to her scheme, white professional nannies who do no housework are on top; on the bottom are women of color who "are available for household chores as well" and who "are not thought of as professionals." Racially heterogeneous but more often white, au pairs, who see their work "as a short-term job, a way to travel and learn another language before moving on to more serious commitments, are in the middle, and thus partake symbolically in both upper and lower social worlds.
31. It has been argued that feminism itself could come into existence in the West only because middle-class women in the First World, unlike middle-class women in the Third World, did not have access to affordable domestic servants. Thus the relation between Third World au pair and First World feminist professional becomes even more complexly allegorical, and it becomes even less clear that the move to the metropolis is simply a move up. See Martha Gimenez, "The Dialectics of Waged and Unwaged Work," in Work without Wages: Domestic Labor and Self-Employment within Capitalism ed. Jane L. Collins and Martha Gimenez (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 25-46.
32. On transnational childcare workers who pay others to care for children of their own left behind in the Caribbean, see for example Shellee Colen, "'With respect and Feelings': Voices of West Indian Child Care and Domestic Workers in New York City," in Women, Culture and Society: A Reader, ed. Women's Studies Program of Rutgers University (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1985).
33. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973).
34. The quotient of allegorical play or "give" in this narrative, which lends itself to the diverging imaginative agendas of readerships or constituencies that are not composed of Third World au pairs, is not the same as literariness itself, but like literariness it has a history. One can speculate that this quotient may have shifted along with post-Fordism's regime of flexible accumulation or flexible specialization, which is often taken to distinguish a characteristically postmodern from a modernist sense of identity. According to this reasoning, modernism's Fordist refashioning of the producer/consumer self would have given way to less control over a more multiple selfhood, more free to be different and yet also less able to touch or influence the veiled, dispersed forces that continue to constrain it. In this sense, the au pair narrative could be said to offer itself to the hopes and desires of more types of readers, while it also offers each of them less of a vicarious victory: while it persistently equivocates, that is, between the suggestion of an upward movement and the suggestion of a merely lateral movement. How much can be won, what indeed is "winning" about, from the moment when there is no center to occupy?
35. Linda Colley, "Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750-1830," Past and Present 113 : 106.
36. Benjamin Disraeli, "Cyrstal Palace Speech," in Selected Speeches, ed. T. E. Kebbel (London: Longmans, Green and Co.), 534; quoted in Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 32.
37. "This was evidently incompatible with definitions of nations as based on ethnicity, language, or common history" (NN, 33). These theorists saw nationalism as "a phase in human evolution or progress from the small group to the larger...and, in the last instance, to the unified world of the future in which, to quote the superficial and therefore typical G. Lowes Dickinson, 'the barriers of nationality which belong to the infancy of the race will melt and dissolve in the sunshine of science and art'" (NN, 38). See Etienne Balibar, "Is There a 'Neo-Racism'?" in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trqns. Chris Turner (London, Verso Press, 1991), 19, for "evolutionary anthropology" as the prototype of "academic racism."
38. The ladder is of course an unfortunate re here; to be more precise, one should say rather that the question of the non-West's own desiderata is thereby foreclosed.
39. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 244. See my review in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (forthcoming).
40. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso Press, 1987).
41. The reference is to Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist, trans. Salma Khadia Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gaassick (1974; reprint, Los Angeles: Readers International, 1985).
A few words suffice to let the incidents speak for themselves when writing about Marinetti as father, poet, human being, or intimate friend. Marinetti--that was how his friends called him, and my mother, too; papà--an affectionate father, humorous, considerate, and a deeply devoted companion to Beny (Benedetta). Me--Luce, the third daughter. As my father was no longer quite so young, my mother, who was much younger, liked to keep me close by. After his first heart attack he dubbed me his little "nurse."
From the day he passed away, real and unreal accumulate in the effort to rediscover and understand him better, and not just in memory.
He introduced me to a very large world. When I was a little girl he would respond to all of my curious questions. Very simply, he would explain his poetry, Futurism, his philosophical and social principles, and he would read his poems, teaching me the importance of declamation. Taking my hands, he loved to draw sketches of Futurist architecture, which had been prevented from being realized during the ventennio, 1 and thus he taught me the essential importance of line and space, always with his optimistic and enthusiastic desire.
He took extreme pains to appreciate and give guidance to young people who turned to him, not just by encouraging them, but above all by believing in them. From my earliest childhood I would sit and listen to him, enchanted and hypnotized. He possessed a gift for describing every episode and every detail of his adventurous past with such a variety of images that he seemed to be living them right then and there. I came to understand how much he had adored his own mother when, with deep emotion, he recounted the long walks he took together with her on the beaches of Alexandria in front of their house by the sea.
He liked to be by himself near the sea and always selected houses that were remote and isolated, whether on Capri, Levanto, or Elba, perhaps to rediscover the same Mediterranean landscapes and relive his childhood: his mother, his father, his brother Leone, who had died so young. Capri became our special island, and papà termed it "the reclining chair of the Mediterranean." Every time we approached it together on the steamer I could sense by his very words that his poetic vigor was being magically infused with the Mediterranean sun of his childhood, and my childish mind was filled with turbulence, love, poetry, and beauty.
At Capri, when not writing, he amused himself by going down with us to Marina Piccola among the rocks and the sea, watching us dive into the water vibrating with sun and color. In the afternoon, after a brief pause for silence and concentration, he invited me to join him in long walks. It was during one of our last stays on Capri that he came along with me to Mount Tiberio on the back of a donkey. From the top of the mountain, where the rocks plunge directly into the sea, we could view the entire gulf of Naples and the coast of Amalfi, and this colorful triumph of nature provoked the most profound emotions. He talked to me about his campaign for the defense of the natural landscape of Capri in the twenties, and he explained to me the fascinating game played by the rocks, which seem so cruel to me, when they plunge straight into the sweet warm sea--and thus he brought me to understand the dangerous and seductive link between life, good, and evil.
We used to stop in Naples in the interval between the arrival of the ferry and the departure of the train, and we spent a great deal of time in Don Gaspare Casella's bookstore at Largo Castello. Don Gaspare was an intellectual, a collector of manuscripts and autographs, and a publisher. His shop was a meeting place for great minds, a place for intellectual encounters; dropping in at the bookshop-cum-work-shop on any given day, you might see Bontempelli, Bragaglia, Malaparte, Edwin Cerio, or Cangiullo. 2 And every time we stopped in Naples papà seized the opportunity to visit his friend. I used to come along, happy and curious. A social visit could suddenly be transformed into a fencing match: they discussed concepts, plans, and projects, delighting in their debates, and a ferment of ideas would arise and I would listen with fascination, so that every visit became a theater in which the actors were grand yet familiar res.
Our summers were quite long, our winters brief: Capri was an international drawing room, a source of imaginative inspiration, a cenacle of creative, daring minds. Papà loved to swim. Water was the source of life for him, a prenatal poetic analogy; he used to stop and look into the depths of the water with its thousand colors and shades, at once dark and crystalline. He taught me to swim, and to observe the shadings of the water, in order to understand art and life. Thus he taught me to defy the world without hesitation, and at the same time to seize whatever is beautiful in life and exalt it. We would go to places that only he knew how to find, grottos with magical reflections of light, and we would swim among the rocks and eat shellfish and gather seashells and starfish.
When we went back to Rome and our house on Piazza Adriana, which was also the Headquarters of the Futurist Movement, we returned to life at a dynamic pace--travels, telephone calls, Futurists, secretaries, comings and goings. The walls were painted in a variety of colors, and the big sitting rooms overlooked the gardens of Castel S. Angelo, the Tomb of Hadrian. The sun-yellow walls recalled the reflections of the Roman sky and the colors of the nearby houses at sunset. The blue sitting room was furnished with Arab furniture that marked the presence of papà's childhood and house in Alexandria. In the other rooms and halls, Futurist sculptures were our lifelong companions, Futurist paintings rendered the walls dynamic, and together they formed a stage that served as the chorus for visitors and special guests. The presence of the Arab furniture mirrored the spirit of Marinetti even more, in its sublime contrast between past and future, in a deep cultural foundation necessary to actualize a new world of creativity and feeling.
In the part of the house opposite the vast entrance was the lounge that opened into the dining room designed for Marinetti by Enrico Prampolini. From the back of the entrance hall ran a long hallway that served as a library and led to papà's study and the bedrooms. I used to love that hallway: the bookshelves ran all the way up to the ceiling, filled with colorful books suggesting stories that would never end, and I used to climb up the tall ladder in defiance of papà's orders when he was searching for a book. I would follow him from one bookcase to another and amuse myself by pursuing the tiny book-eating insects that were impertinently running from one part of the shelves to another and which papà was always trying to eliminate, even though he also tried to justify them in my eyes by calling them the only really persistent readers!

Towards evening the sitting rooms would fill up with artists, writers, composers, friends, all of them familiar presences for me. My mother would urge me to return to my studies, while I would try to escape from our German housemaid, hiding behind the curtains.
I was born in Rome beneath Boccioni's painting The Soccer Player, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; papà decided to call me Luce, which means "light" in Italian, an unusual name that for him was the symbol of a new era, swifter than sound. First memories? The balcony that overlooked Piazza Adriana, where papà would pause at length in contemplation of Hadrian's tomb and its gardens. He became rather less contemplative when his glance fell upon the Palazzo degli Invalidi, constructed by the architect Piacentini 3 in 1928, and a typical expression of architecture during the ventennio; excitedly he would cite various manifestos and theories of Futurist architecture, showing me designs by Sant'Elia and Marchi and explaining their significance to me. I began to understand what he had struggled for. Later, as if still in pursuit of that magical moment of contemplation, he would sit down in front of the old harmonium brought from Alexandria; he used to love to play and compose, and without a score he would fluently play Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin...precious Chinese vases were sitting atop the large musical instrument while lights, filtered through the great oriental lamps that had inspired the first Futurist manifesto, were playing mysteriously over the inlaid work of the furniture brought from Alexandria; Persian rugs covered the floors, one atop another, creating an atmosphere so different and so intimate that I seemed to be living in a dream world, and even the paintings and sculptures made by cultivated guests would grow respectfully silent and listen. Together we would go back in time.
My mother, a Piedmontese who was reserved and severe, decided that we shouldn't grow up in an atmosphere so continually agitated: our house was open to everyone, and outside the entrance door was a plaque that read: FUTURIST MOVEMENT. So we were registered as day students at the School of the Sacred Heart at the Trinità dei Monti in Rome. I didn't like this decision.
When I took my first Communion, I also had my first important
confrontation with my father. After preparation and retreat prior to
Communion, the "Mothers," for so we called the Sisters, had asked us
to urge our parents to receive the sacrament as well. I didn't yet
know the meaning of "a book on the Index" and even less the meaning
of "excommunication." Coming home that evening, I waited until after
dinner. As usual there were many visitors, and I felt drawn this way and
that about the request of the Mothers. Intuition or fear? Certainly a
problem difficult to resolve, and I felt ill at ease. Papà
was surprised when I asked to speak with him, and looked at me with an
inquisitive expression. Our conversations had always been very natural,
and he clearly intuited that something was disturbing me. As soon as we
were alone in his study, the request came gushing forth out of my mouth,
as if I were extracting something from inside me that was oppressing
me...I noticed that papà was deeply ill at ease, and his
face had turned red...he waited a little while before replying. To me
it seemed an eternity. I was already reproaching myself for having done
what the Mothers had asked. Then he took me by the hand and made me
sit on his knee. He explained to me the significance of being a poet,
he explained to me the significance of imagination and suffering, when
agony and spirituality are united to overflow in analogies that go beyond
the human and beyond the stars...he
recounted the history of Italy to me with its anticlerical struggles,
which did not necessarily mean that one was antireligious. He spoke to
me at length about God. I was angry at the Sisters who had brought me to
this pass, but later I was happy: their mistake was a coarse one, but it
had brought about an unforgettable encounter with papà. I
used to be amused when my father would tell me about the serate
futuriste, or Futurist evenings, identifying the people who
had surrounded him and declaiming his words-in-freedom poems, all
theatricalized by his formidable gifts as a mimic and his extraordinary
voice, modulating words from sonorous to metallic to explosive. I used to
see him on the stages of Italy and abroad, unflappable, lucid, terrifying,
witty, waging battle implacably against whatever was static in all forms
of life, deliberately
involving the spectators in order to dislodge them from intellectual
lethargy: "a revolutionary in black tie." For me, at any rate, it was
far more fascinating and amusing to listen to him than to play little
theatrical games by myself in my room, among the puppets and the furniture
designed by the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla.
From early on I understood that papà had a gift for transforming the difficulties of life into play, into challenge, into happiness. One time, in Bologna, the entire family had come together on the occasion of a Futurist performance that was being given in a private theater attached to the villa of a friend. We were staying at the famous Grand Hotel Baglioni, a place charged with historical associations, one that had traditionally hosted the most celebrated personalities of the time. In the morning when we ordered breakfast, it was apparent that the waiter was deeply moved by the presence of Marinetti, and as he began to bring in the food he had difficulty balancing the two large trays brimming with cups, teapots, coffee, chocolate, brioches, and marmalade. Papà, observing his acrobatic maneuvers, whispered in my ear, "It looks like a Futurist dance!" But as the waiter approached our table his shoe got caught in an impertinent crease in the carpet and, doing a pirouette as he tried to save the trays and their contents, he fell to the floor: an explosion of tea, coffee, cups and glasses, chocolate, brioches...my father was soaked with all these tidbits. There was silence, and a panic-stricken expression on the face of the poor waiter, blushing with embarrassment. Then came an explosion of laughter from my father, who added: "Bravo! Good fellow, you've performed a perfect and very theatrical form of Futurist aviation!" Reassured, the hapless waiter left the room.
After my father had a hernia operation in 1941 we spent the summer at Forte dei Marmi, Viareggio, along the coast of Tuscany, staying in a dependance of the Villa Pellizzi, where the road skirting the sea cut across the space between our garden and the shore. A grove of pine trees alleviated the summer sultriness, and papà often thought back nostalgically to the crags of Capri. He amused himself by visiting the village market once a week. He would stop to observe the carts loaded with so many multicolored straws and the colorful nets that the women would entwine and use as belts. Perhaps in his mind's eye he was still observing the fireworks of Piedigrotta at Naples. The fourteenth of August was my mother's birthday, and that year my father asked me to go with him to help choose a gift. "Not just poems and poetry!" he said, for in fact it was his habit to dedicate poems to her. We came back with purses, lit-tle wallets, hair brushes large and small. Mother 4 was a bit vain, and she would surely love them. But so many! And all alike!  And when he gave them to her she was deeply moved and smiled warmly. A little over a year passed, and then my father had a difficult operation for an ulcer, performed by the magical hand of Dr. Raffaele Bastianelli, a dear friend of papà. When he left the hospital he had to remain immobile in bed, but his vigor was still such that he wanted to continue receiving his friends, poets, writers, musicians, notwithstanding the doctor's firm orders for absolute rest. So the first sitting room was organized as his bedroom, near the entrance, so that he could receive guests without having to move. When not receiving visits he would write, dictating to his secretary or jotting down his thoughts in the tiny notebooks that followed him throughout the course of his life, from trains to battlefields: reflections on his state of mind, notes about meetings, plans, theories, bits of writings, words-in-freedom, scenes for plays, drafts, political opinions, always just at hand in his pocket.
Despite the prohibition of Bastianelli, papà wanted to go as a volunteer to the Russian front in 1942, during the Second World War. So that our thoughts would always be with him, my sisters and I sewed his name on the inside of his personal belongings, adding the word POET (he had requested it). We accompanied him all the way to Verona, where the military transport train was scheduled to depart. It was a torrid day in July, and papà helped to keep up our spirits, despite the sad occasion.
His letters from Russia were brief and affectionate, and always contained a flower that he had gathered on the steppe, always a message of encouragement. He returned in the beginning of 1943 on the last train to leave before the great retreat, looking like a shadow in his large mantle. His first heart attack occurred after a lecture at the Italian Academy.
In the following months his condition worsened. His immense sorrow at seeing Italy divided into two parts weighed heavily on his health and spirits. Doctor Bastianelli suggested trying to find a quieter city.
In October of 1943 we moved to Venice, where we occupied an old palazzo on the Grand Canal. To the left was the Rialto, and opposite us on the other bank were the vegetable and fish markets. We learned that our building had once been occupied by Aretino, the famous comedian, poet, man of letters, and adventurous spirit of the high Renaissance, and papà was highly amused.
His study overlooked the Grand Canal and had a little terrace. He wrote or dictated day and night, without pause. In his poetic imagination the Grand Canal was being transformed and the dimensions of Venice altered. He wrote his last words-in-freedom poem, "A Convention on the Grand Canal": the "slow luxurious vaporetto" became a rapid train; the Rialto became a Nordic railroad station; he gathered together the languid smiles of the Venetian women...and urged Venice to stop lamenting the past and her memories, and to begin to live with hope, as the Futurists did.
Marinetti used to pass many hours on the balcony, intently observing the traffic of the little boats that slowly made their way up the Grand Canal, filled with produce, heading toward the market to unload whatever fruits and vegetables the war still permitted. The winter was cold, humid, hostile. Only a handful of friends came to visit him now. Foodstuffs were scarce, and water, too. The bridge uniting Venice with the mainland had been bombed. By turns we would fill up large bottles with water, after a long wait at one of the small campielli that had a public fountain. Our house was damp and cold because of the lack of heating, the certainly this did nothing to help my father's state of health.
One evening, it must have been very late, papà was correcting his latest writings in his study, while my sisters and I were studying; suddenly there was an insistent ringing of the doorbell, coming from the large door that gave directly onto a narrow street. Under the Portico Dolfin, voices with a foreign accent; forceful knocking--two German officials entered the house and asked for Marinetti. My mother stopped them at the door. Even now I can see papà leaving his study wearing his long full robe. He ordered us to go to our rooms with a gesture and a look. He stepped into the long entrance hall, keeping his hands in his pockets. He exchanged only a few words with the officials...they wanted to search the house, but after a brief discussion my father brusquely showed them the door.
At the end of July 1943 we left Venice, stopping for two months at Salò on the shores of Lake Sirmione, where we stayed until 20 September. The memory of those days is hardly a happy one. Papà was suffering and growing steadily worse. My mother attempted to resolve our logistical problems, but it was an extremely difficult time and there were financial problems. My father had offered various newspapers his collaboration, but his proposals were rejected; he received nothing from the Academy; and his books were no longer being published. He tried to use optimism in order to combat the deep sadness that was increasingly perceptible in his face. Though his health was plainly worsening, he never complained and he continued to work on a number of different projects at the same time, as if intending actually to accelerate the rhythm of his life.
On 19 September my father, mother, and I had to leave Salò for Como, where my sisters were awaiting us. By now my father had to remain lying in bed because he was so tired, and his pulse was far above normal; my mother and I would always be in his room to keep him company. Somebody sounded the bell at the door of the villa; but the gate, which was at the head of the entrance drive, had been left closed and was difficult to climb: it was very high, and the wall that enclosed the substantial garden was surmounted by a crest of cement containing pieces of broken bottles interwoven with barbed wire. The garden, which surrounded the entire house, ended at the back in a little inlet of the lake, with a small dock for boats. The alarmed expressions of my mother and father increased my fear; I understood that something serious was happening. They both approached the entrance door, and an agitated dialogue ensued between the parties on the two sides of the door. My parents asked the visitors their identity; standing farther back from the door, I couldn't understand their reply, except for one word: Open. My mother asked me to telephone a friend of ours, gave me the number, and I went to get help. Papà did not feel well and had to lie down, and I stayed close to him, counting his pulse and keeping track of the increase in his heartbeat. In one hand he was holding a revolver.
Mother went to the phone to make sure that help had really been sent. Outside, beyond the door, there was absolute silence. I managed to quiet papà. The bell rang from the main gate that opened onto the street. The house was separated from the street by a long driveway that was flanked by tall trees. My mother asked me to go and open the gate. I walked down the long dark driveway alone, hearing creaking sounds everywhere, and once again I silently thanked my father for encouraging me to walk around the house in the dark when we lived in Rome, a way to conquer my fears and learn to have a greater "tactile" sensibility. Finally I arrived at the gate and could hear voices...excited voices...then two shots, and I hid in the shrubbery...and at last I heard the password and I opened the gate.
Upon my return, papà seemed much quieter.
At five in the morning, Mr. Hidaka, the Japanese ambassador, came to bid farewell to his friend the poet, and later, with a car and escort furnished by the Japanese embassy, we left the villa, scraping together a few final possessions, especially papà's papers. During the journey my father smiled reassuringly. Late in the afternoon we arrived at Lora, on Lake Como. It had been a long journey, and often we had to stop to take cover in ditches excavated alongside the road to escape the machine-guns of the airplanes. I was happy to see my sisters and for us all to be united once more.
The days weighed on our spirits, and the atmosphere was destructive, obsessive. Papà fought against our gloomy mood with poetry. It was like magic, and we listened to it and loved it. After a pause of a few days we departed for Cadenabbia, also on the lake.
It was in that odd and out-of-the-way place, so rarely visited by my father, that I had the good fortune to discover part of the world of his childhood. In a home that lodged elderly people in a beautiful villa on the lake there lived one of papà's aunts; to me, a child, she seemed to be more than a hundred years old. She was dignified, a bit stiff, affectionate in a limited way once thought suitable for the haute bourgeoisie; she wore a velvet choker at her neck, was delicate, slim, with long and beautiful hands, and with white hair arranged in a chignon at the back of her neck; she seemed a creature from an unreal world. I had never met close or distant relatives of my father, nor had my mother, who was much younger than him. It left a great impression on me when papà hugged this slender woman who called him "Tom."
It was the world of his childhood, of which I had heard him and others speak often, now reappearing for the first time in a strange and tragic context, as if the end were linking back up with the beginning; I was observing papà, who was deeply moved. Egypt and his childhood were returning to him with all their power: his father, his mother, his brother.
After a few days we moved from Cadenabbia to Bellagio, where we stayed in two rooms of the Hotel Splendido, offered by ambassador Hidaka. The machine-gunning from the planes was growing more common, and ferries and steamers would arrive from the lake badly shop up, transformed into collective biers.
I continued my studies in a school on the hill in back of Bellagio, and it was because of an ugly fall on the gravel in one of the many ball games that we played that I came to spend my last days with papà. Mother had to go away, and I was to take on the role of "the little nurse," as father had christened me. For some time already I had been familiar with simple ways of slowing down his accelerated heartbeat. I used to sleep in his room, not far from him. Even when he was sleeping, papà would apparently be creating poems, which he wrote down the next morning. Sometimes at night he would light a lamp to jot down some notes, and if I were awake he would read them aloud to me. I was fascinated, but also afraid that he would become agitated and then tired. He was always seized with great emotion when he would read aloud, especially in the final days when he was correcting his last poem, dedicated to young people. I lived for two final days beside him, days full of affection, tenderness, and love.
A week later he left us forever.
Luce Marinetti, the daughter of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, is a noted researcher and scholar on the history of Futurism. She has promoted conferences, programs, and seminars on Marinetti throughout the world. She collaborated with Christian Zervos on the journal Cahiers d'Art, has written numerous essays on Marinetti, and is curator and advisor to many institutions. She is currently completing a biography of her father.
* The editors have added the following notes to clarify references that might otherwise be obscure.
1. The Italian term ventennio, meaning a period of twenty years, is typically used to refer to the period of Fascism, running from 1922 to 1943; it is retained in italics throughout the translation wherever it appears in the original.
2. Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960): a prolific Italian author, journalist, and composer. After establishing himself as a sober stylist in the manner of Carducci, he was transformed by his war experiences into an advocate of the avant-garde and Futurism. He became a member of the Futurist political party in 1918-19 and from early on an adherent of fascism. In 1926, together with Curzio Malaparte, he founded "900" Cahiers d'Italie et d'Europe, an international quarterly with surrealist tendencies. He was made a member of the Italian Academy in 1930, but in 1938 refused to accept the chair of Italian literature, which had been taken from Arnoldo Momigliano with the imposition of the new racial laws.
Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890-1960) and Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia (1894- ): film directors, stage directors, and theatrical producers. Anton Giulio proposed a theoretical basis for Futurist photography in 1911, though his work aroused resistance from some of the Futurist painters. He directed several films and in 1918 founded an art gallery in Rome that sponsored exhibitions of works by Balla, Boccioni, De Chirico, and the Dadaists, eventually totaling more than 275 shows. In 1922 he founded the Teatro degli Indipendenti, which performed new works by Marinetti, Pirandello, Soffici, Schnitzler, and Apollinaire. He was also a prolific journalist, critic, and reviewer. His brother Carlo Ludovico was an active collaborator in both the gallery and the theater, though he wrote relatively little.
Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957): political activist, journalist, and essayist. After serving in the war, Malaparte became an early member of the Fascist Party; he participated in the March on Rome in 1922, joined with Bontempelli in editing the journal "900" in 1926, then broke with him and created another journal. He was charged with antifascist activity for his book Technique du coup d'etat and sentenced to five years in prison, though released early. He served as a correspondent in World War II and in 1944 wrote Kaputt, a macabre masterpiece, based on his experiences. After the war he wrote several novels.
Edwin Cerio (1875-1960): engineer and essayist. After a successful career as a naval engineer, he returned to his native island of Capri where he became mayor (1920-23) and an active proponent of conservation. He edited a cultural journal called Le pagine dell'isola di Capri (1921-22), which had a slightly Futurist orientation and was open to intellectuals who visited the island. He wrote numerous books about Capri, its history, and its inhabitants and guests, some of them published by the book dealer Casella.
Francesco Cangiullo (1884-1977): Neapolitan painted, writer, and words-in-freedom poet who participated in the Futurist movement from 1914 to 1924.
3. Marcello Piacentini (1881-1960): an architect whose vaguely classicizing style and prominence in the National Union of Architects enabled him to formulate the eclectic and rhetorical stile Littorio (Lictorial Style) that became the "official" party manner after 1932. He is best known for his work as chief architect of the Città Universitaria complex (1932-35), the Esposizione Universale Roma 42 or EUR complex , and for the via della Riconcilizione (1936-50), the broad avenue leading to Saint Peter's. The building referred to here, also known as the Casa Madre dei Mutilati , is rectangular with a facade in tufa and travertine marble, the whole surmounted by a curious belvedere.
4. Here, as well as a few other times later in this essay, Luce Marinetti Barbi refers to her mother as "mammina," an affectionate diminutive of the Italian "mamma," mother.
With Johannes R. Becher the Germans have a gifted and spirited poet whom they have not yet appreciated; neither the poems of his developing period (1912-26) nor the documents of his extraordinary life (1891-1958) have been read enough. Here and there (apart from a few praiseworthy exceptions) 1 people are busy suppressing the memory of his early works as well as his real life story; and thirty years after his death there is still no biography that would show us how the wild young man transformed himself into the Comrade Minister of State who came to censure himself. European literary history has yet to admit that J. R. Becher, the first Communist Minister of Culture in the GDR, in his earlier and poetically most productive years was more thoroughly attracted to the Italian Futurists than any other German poet of the war generation, and enthusiastically seized on Futurist rhetoric, usually considered protofascist in its ideological implications, in the most effective Leninist poems ever written in the German tongue. Becher himself attempts to interpret and bend into shape the years of his youth and early manhood (at the end, he quotes Stalin's essay on language against the poems of his youth); and he is also a victim of the pedantry of a Germanist, which in its exclusive zeal of its interpretive and metatheoretical strivings, on the Left and the Right, has forgotten that poems, especially good ones, are sensual creatures that anarchically pierce the flatness and grayness of our everyday speech.
It is difficult to describe how the idealistic Munich highschool student revolted against his father, the highest judge in the kingdom of Bavaria, and how at age seventeen, in a romantic suicide pact, killed a part-time prostitute and attempted to kill himself (his father rescued him, pleading insanity). He never finished his studies and was repeatedly treated for morphine addiction. Commuting between Munich and Berlin, a bohemian of the gutters, he lived strangely unharmed through the years of the war and his own confusions (he was not called up because his suicide attempt that lacerated his lungs). He longed for salvation by soulful women and beautiful young men, studied the writings of mystical nuns, Gorky, and Lenin, and was readily welcomed in the best salons, or what was left of them. After the war, he made his slow way to the all-forgiving Communist party, the activism of the orthodox functionary (he had his part, together with Georg Lukács, in undoing the Left avant-garde) and exile in Moscow, where he never intervened for anyone accused of treason by the Secret Police. He returned, by special plane of the Soviet Army, to his devastated fatherland; and was later photographed at the massive desk of his ministry, surrounded by joyous schoolgirls who presented bunches of roses to the loyal poet of the new national anthem. It is a German life: strange, unique, and beyond comparison.
Becher's works resist clean divisions, and even Norbert Hopster, in his praiseworthy dissertation, is not altogether happy with his chronicle of its changes and motifs. The two merge, and the literary loyalties, from Richard Dehmel to Walt Whitman and from Rimbaud to Futurism, blur together and transcend the borders of ideological transformations; even in the final Leninist Maschinenrhythmen (Machine rhythms; 1926) Becher works, for the last time, with Futurist ideas and language patterns.
The years 1912-13 and the beginning of the war pushed the schoolboyish admirer of Richard Dehmel and Waldemar Bonsels into radical modernism. In his collection of poems Die Gnade eines Frühlings (The grace of a spring; 1912) he still published neoromantic songs in praise of Mary ("burningly my mouth arms itself / for you, Mary, sweet life"--this, incidentally, also in protest against the Protestant father), 2 or pastoral lyricism ("so childyoung / the air makes me, so soulblossoming"). 3 Already one year later in De Profundis Domine and Verfall und Triumph (Decay and triumph; 1914) the impressionistic and playful elements are gone; the influences of Georg Heym and Jakob van Hoddis, two young expressionists, draw Becher and his poems into urban Berlin, where everything happens in feverish simultaneity. Nightcafés, cinemas, and gigantic train stations are the new sites of experience: "Locomotives! / Steep-faced with the viaducts' momentum of the most rapid whores." 4 He is fascinated by the war, and after paying tribute like so many of his writing contemporaries to the general patriotic enthusiasm with a cycle of sonnets, Becher, who was never a soldier and who later loved to be photographed in the uniform of the Roter Frontkämpferbund, creates his own myth of war; activated masses, brutality, steely, destructive technologies, and mutilated humans or, as he says, "Menschenmüll" (human garbage). 5 War: at first as the possibility of destroying the bourgeois tradition and the tyranny of the fathers; then, a little later, war as the advance of a holy socialist army against the satanic enemies of humanity, and finally the Leninist war as bloody class struggle, in Germany and in the Soviet Union. For a long time, this personal myth of war as "the only true hygiene of the world" 6 is supported by Futurist motifs and rhetoric, 7 at first in the asyntactical parole in libertà and later mainly by Becher's Futuristic analogies, whose intensity and linguistic power far outreaches Marinetti's tests.
A 1915 text published in the Weiße Blätter signals Becher's Futurist rhetoric, as well as the chronic attraction that the technological brutality of modern warfare had for him. Historically, it is not the first signal (that is to be found in the poetry and earlier), but, by emulating the Italian model, has a particularly massive force. Becher calls his text "Vorworte zum Tagebuch italienischen Fähnrichs Georgio Quadro" (Prologues to the diary of the Italian cadet sergeant Georgio Quadro) and refers to the writings of a young Italian officer. The diary was found after Quadro's death in the Austrian trenches at Krn and published in the Berliner Tageblatt on 19 July 1915. 8 Becher sees the experiences of the patriotic officer, previously a civilian employee at a bank, as symbolic of all the young men of Europe who were pushed into the trenches with big words. In hymnic prose he continues the political education of the young Italian and leads him to the brink of political understanding, before the Austrian bomb tears him apart. Becher's realization of the moments in which Quadro takes sweet leave from the world of peach are written according to Futurist rules: "Sweat and tears.  Mother-of-pearl little faces long-oval." 9 The syntax is all but destroyed, with Futurist analogies instead of traditional comparisons. Indeed, Becher uses, or rather invents for himself (the only German example that I know of) the "semaphoric" function of adjectives, as Marinetti had demanded in his manifesto of 11 May 1913. 10 Adjectives follow nouns and refer parenthetically to earlier nouns, bypassing the immediate antecedent. The parole in libertà and their distaste for the verbum finitum (which here sometimes ossifies into a participle) dominate the many passages of the "Prologues" in which Becher confronts the reader with the fragmentation of humans and landscapes: "Exploding Colonel Lazzoni of the Fifth Carabinieri; with turned-out face; on it intestines, teeth, a throat all intertwining." Or: "Fever. Thick air. Lungs tear. Dripping horse-corpse. Arms farmerboys hacked to pieces. Hair, intestines, flesh--: one pulp.... Bloodily backed knife whipped. Ditches chlorinechalkpale filled." 11 Such images return in Becher's poetry almost monotonously for years, but not in the spirit of pacificism; rather, they appear with a zealous conviction that the old war would have to change itself into the new, no less aggressive war against everything old before the total dawn of paradise.
If there were a reliable biography, we would have an answer to the questions of when and how Becher first became acquainted with Futurist texts. After the literary projects of his publisher-friend Heinrich Bachmair had failed (including the journal Die Revolution, where Hugo Ball had published his early hymn on Futurist painting), Becher moved on, like Ball, to the circle of writers around the journal Aktion, and it was the translator Else Hadwiger who inspired him, like Ball, to read the Futurists. A letter dated 18 March 1916 from Becher to the publisher Ernst Sulzbach of Berlin confirms, at any rate, that he has read the Futurists Marinetti and Paolo Buzzi--that is, just those authors whom Hadwiger translated for Sturm and Aktion. 12 Personal issues are of some significance here: after the death of her husband, the Prague symbolist poet Victor Hadwiger who had published a great deal in Aktion, Else Hadwiger did not withdraw from social life. She became sympathetic to increasingly radical ideas, and was also often to be seen in the company of the translator Fritz Max Cahén in cafés and literary assemblies, 13 as well as with the Wilmersdorf publisher R. A. Meyer, who had published her translation of Marinetti in a limited edition. They met in Meyer's apartment at the Bayrischer Platz or in her own spacious flat, at that time not far from the Südwestkorso and Ludwig Meidner's studios (Meidner often stayed with her). Becher, I have no doubt, was closely connected to Hadwiger, regardless of his other liaisons. He sought refuge with her, both literally and spiritually, whenever his Munich exhaustions led him to Berlin. Even later, when the hectic affair of 1914-15 was over, Hadwiger, who had already sacrificed part of her fortune for her husband, went on, together with the Princess Mechthilde Lichnowsky and Katharina Kippenberg, the wife of the Leipzig publisher, to support the morphine-dependent poet-vagabond (Harry Graf Keßler did his share too).
Love poems are not reliable biographical documents, but at least they testify to how certain processes, internal and external, articulate the writer's ability to experience; and in this respect Becher's Berlin poems "Ekstasen der Zärtlichkeit" (Ecstacy of tenderness) and "Ein Ende" (An end), both of them explicitly "dedicated to Frau Else Hadwiger," are revealing. The one can be found in the collection Verbrüderung (Fraternization; 1916) and the other, originally dated 1915, in the collection Päan gegen die Zeit (Paean against the time; 1918). The cycle "Ekstasen der Zärtlichkeit" consists of four pieces introduced by the highly suggestive verses by Alfred Mombert: "You are the one who understands me / and who is reconciled / to my burning crimes." 14 The poet professes an absolute feeling of love; Else is mother, Holy Virgin, lover, "unfolded like a flower" and "protectress"; a world lives in the "mirror" of her "oval nails"; "young men boiling / poured dying themselves over the planks of [her] hips"; and the world speaks only of her: "you are meant by the homecoming of noisy soldiers... / the banners shine your name / you, every cinema's loud poster." 15 In the other poem, "Ein Abschied" (A farewell) 16 is constituted of two pieces: the first is agitated and, in spite of all the Futurist analogies ("Nacht-Ozean" [night-ocean]), an unsettled mixture of realism and confessional hymn; the second is more relaxed, simultaneously classical and lyrical, the stanzaic sound reminiscent of the old Goethe. The first part depicts the scandal of a violent farewell: someone else has gained the favor of the woman ("O woman! Chestnutbrown"), and the writer feels abandoned amid alienation and threats: "blessed was he. Sweet. At home. / Now fly bridges...knives...bombs...!" 17 While lost in the streets, he finds only bragging, naive, and evil words for the past: "the other may seize you--... / powerful marches explode like a gun / Bursting apart your bed's mudlake." 18 The second part is cooler and more collected; the writer has found himself again, speaks words of comfort to himself: "Yes --, now he is drifting again, / only for a short while bound to her." 19 This lover was home to him, but the moment of leavetaking is a new beginning:
always returning into you
home, lost you already.
You lifted us from everything difficult--
and yet we hasten away. 20
Becher's acquaintance with the work of the Futurist Paolo Buzzi is, however, of little significance for the development of his own Futurist leanings. Becher refers to Buzzi's "I reclusi," a little imprecisely, as "Gedichte aus den Städten" (Poems from the cities) in a letter to the publisher Ernst Sulzbach. That choice of wording reveals that this cycle of six poems, whose original title Else Hadwiger had translated in the 7 November 1914 edition of Aktion more precisely as "Das Lied der Eingeschlossenen" (The song of those confined) had impressed upon him--contemporaneously with Heym and Hoddis--the dangerous and demonic nature of the metropolis instead of the aspect he chose to emphasize, at least in his Buzzi imitations: the accentuation of new technology. In his "Reclusi" cycle Buzzi himself, in spite of his personal loyalty to Marinetti, was not so much a Futurist in the sense of the early manifesto as a late or ironic romantic or symbolist; the Futurist element lies exclusively, or almost exclusively (as with the early Marinetti) in the free verse, as it was programmatically cultivated in the journal Poesia, which Buzzi helped found. "Das Lied der Eingeschlossenen" consists of elegiac role poems, in which the victims--the forgotten, those who had been forced from their cities into secrecy--speak in chorus of their sufferings, longings, and hopes "Aus den Klöstern" (From the monasteries), "Aus den Bordellen" (From the brothels), "Aus den Hospitälern" (From the hospitals), "Aus den Gefängnissen" (From the jails), "Aus den Irrenhäusern" (From the mental hospitals), and "Von den Friedhöfen" (From the graveyards). (In Else Hadwiger's translation, part 3 of the Italian cycle, the chorus of the soldiers from the barracks, "Dalle Caserne," is missing.)  23 Futurist elements, in the sense of the ideological and rhetorical demands of the manifestos, are present only at a distance, for example in the anger of the mad: "we have been procreated by the green anger of the innermost organs" (reminiscent of Marinetti's romantic cult of the creative insane in the second manifesto), or the bizarre images in the litany of the dead, who complain about what the living could have done to them: "head over heals they could have thrown us into the sea, / hung on a balloon, let us drift into the blue!" 24
Becher replies with his own poems to Buzzi's "Das Lied der Eingeschlossenen (I reclusi)," but the noteworthy element of his reply is the fact that he contradicts the Futurist poet by being more Futurist. The later poems of the German poet are well ahead of Buzzi's early poetry in their radical quality. Buzzi's thematic accusations are taken up and reshaped by Becher in his poetry collections Verfall und Triumph and Päan gegen die Zeit (for example in the poems "Krankenhaus" [Hospital] and "Bordell" [Bordello]); and I suspect that even poems like "Die Armen" (The poor), "Die Huren" (The whores), and "Aus den Höfen" (From the courtyards) are in accordance with the suggestions by Buzzi. 25 Becher had been acquainted with Hadwiger's Buzzi translation from the beginning, and his own hospital poems (Becher had had his own experiences, in the Landesanstalt Haar, a psychiatric hospital near Munich) demonstrate how he takes up Buzzi's perspective and tone and then emancipates himself from them only a little later. In "Krankenhaus" , especially in the second of the four pieces, he, like Buzzi, lets the sick speak in chorus; Buzzi's soft and melancholy elements are not wholly absent:
We cry ourselves through prison and ether-hall
Towards each other, experiencing sweet closeness,
When we are given the last supper,
we are anointed with oil's soft snow. 26
In the later version of "Krankenhaus" , to which Becher himself applies the term "variation," Buzzi's melancholy and soft irony are destroyed by the dithyramb; the poem no longer speaks for and with the sick, but instead presumes to change their world through the released word: "I enforce their dissolution into wonderful May creatures." 27 The opening of the poem, line one, partly alludes to Buzzi/ Hadwinger's "qui si muore in fila"/"hier stirbt man reihenweise" (here one dies in rows [WIF, 256]) and turns into "hier wälzt sich's frei" (here it wallows itself free [WIF, 329]) in Becher's text, which then goes on to revel in its usual way in horrifying images of pus and blood. The syntax is cryptically reduced: "pointy steel from temples shrinking thunderstorms"; metaphor takes the form of Futuristic analogies: "slime-seaweed," "clip-skeletons," "shepherd-doctors"; and just as the Futurist manifestos demanded, the cities are "overgrown with electric streams." 28 Here Becher is the real Futurist, not Buzzi.
In his later writings, which contain more than one confession about the creative experiments of his youth or, as he puts it, "special Don Quichotteries," 29 Becher the state minister thinks back nostalgically to the readings and contemporaries of his youth and touches on a basic idea of Futurism, which he ascribes to a friend from that period. In his reminiscences of what he calls expressionism (the minister now shies away from the word "Futurism," part of his vocabulary in 1914) and of his early poems, the poetic, if not even ontological, principle of simultaneity plays an important part. Simultaneity and a modern "Weltgefühl" (world sentiment) were the same for him (and for the Futurists), and when he speaks of "Simultanismus" (simultanism) he quotes a term that did not fail to make its impression, even on him. 30 In Sturm Herwarth Walden had published Umberto Boccioni's essay on the "Simultanéité Futuriste" (Futurist simultaneity) (in which the painter claimed the term for the Futurists and against the Frenchman Robert Delaunay), but the later Becher ascribes the demand for simultaneity to his unhappy friend Jakob van Hoddis, who was in the habit of publishing his poems in Sturm in the years 1911-13. Hoddis claimed, the later Becher writes, that "the sense of simultaneity" 31 is already intact in Homer (and therefore not only with the Futurists or their French colleagues, who articulated simultaneità/simultanéité as a modern program?). Becher adds that he and his friends were willing to realize this sense of simultaneity as an "immeasurable world-wideness," 32 as Hoddis had done in his famous two verses of "Weltende" (End of the world) 33 --"the great is mixed in with the small and vice versa, nothing is able to last separately by itself." 34 The call for simultaneity (which also appears in the diary of Georg Heym) 35 withered soon, according to Becher, to a "stencil," and "bureaucratic verse-products were generated, which were mathematically calculated, so that each sentence had to be followed by an antithesis." 36 Whether entirely calculated or not, in Becher's early praxis this simultaneity is often signalled by a strong Bavarian "Derweil" (meanwhile), which connects even the most contradictory events and experiences "in the spirit of an expressionist pantheism." 37 The minister of state does not, however, remember that in a 1923 letter to the editors of the cultural section of the Frankfurter Zeitung in which he attempted to explain his prosody, as a Marxist he connected even the unusual typography of his verses and his idiosyncratic punctuation (as stopsigns against the flow of syntax) with simultaneità. He wrote at that time to the Frankfurter Zeitung that the antisyntactical precautions transform "the consecutive" "with a dialectical manoeuvre into a parallel" and added that the poem thus is put into "the sphere of simultaneity" and indicates "also externally the rapid speed." 38 It is of less significance whether Becher owed this connection of simultaneity and speed, simultaneità and velocità, to Hadwiger or Boccioni, than the fact that, whether he wanted to or not, as a recently converted Leninist and enthusiastic partisan of communism, Becher was a poetic ally of the Futurists.
All arguments for or against Becher's entanglement in Futurism would be farfetched if they could not be supported, as has been demonstrated in detail by Hopster and also partly by Carmine Chiellino, by shared features of thematics and rhetoric and indeed by their integration. 39 Among the expressionists there were many city and war poets, but only a few who were as attracted by modern technology and its destructive, purifying effects as Becher was. With its reduced syntax in which the noun and simultaneity reign, the way in which he describes the metropolis, as simultaneously horrendous and the paradisiacal site of utopian beginnings, and the ideal war, as an at once violent and hopeful destruction of old worlds, is closer to Italian Futurism than any other German poems of the era. No other German poet wrote poems like "Auf ein Maschinengewehr" (To a machine gun) or "Lokomotiven" (The locomotives) simultaneously with "Die neue Syntax" (The new syntax). 40 Had he written in Italian, Becher would have become a towering poet of European Futurism in the years 1913-19 and even later, with his Leninist Maschinenrhythmen . The decisive elements are not so much the movable parts of the Futuristic technology--the racing cars, airplanes, trains, and the complete war arsenals: battleships, torpedoes, shrapnel, the phallic cannons (as in Marinetti's "Schlacht" [Battle] 41 ) and the spewing bayonets--but rather their linguistic presence in a reduced syntax, in "befreiten Worten" (liberated words), in simultanism and in the analogies and analogy chains, which correspond to Marinetti's programmatic demands. Even if Hadwiger and van Hoddis had not related things Futurist to him, Becher would have invented his own Futurism under the irrepressible compulsion of his explosive imagination.
Each of the German authors who grappled with Futurism accentuated in his own texts a different element of the Futurist rhetoric; and while Alfred Döblin dealt mainly with the parole in libertà, and August Stramm and Ball (to simplify things here) dealt with the structure of the syntax, Becher, unlike anyone else, worked with analogies and chains of analogies. In Marinetti's poetic program, which gives precedence to the image over the sentence, the "analogies," a word he derives from Edgar Allan Poe, number among the significant features of the new rhetoric. He explains in the "Technical Manifesto" and in its "Supplement," as they could be read in Sturm in 1912 and 1913, 42 that the modern "aviatische Schnelligkeit" (aviatic speed) of our "Weltkenntnis" (la conoscenza del mondo [knowledge of the world]) demands its correspondence in a speedy metaphoric; no more leisurely comparisons using "as" or "just as," but instead, lightning-like "doublings" that "pull the object into one characteristic word with the image evoked by it," 43 i.e. man-torpedo-boat (uomotorpediniera), woman-gulf (donna-golfo), crowd-surf (folla-risacca), and so on. 44 Marinetti does not hesitate to distinguish between bad, good, and still better analogies; basically an anticlassical concetto (conceit) is hidden in each analogy, and therefore Marinetti demands "Steigerungen" (increases) of the analogies, which for their highest effect bind together "fernstehende" (distant), "verschiedene" (different), and "Feindliche Dinge" (antagonistic things) in such a way that they replace the merely mechanical and threadbare elements of the language with the unexpected, the surprising, and the effective. When a writer compares a fox terrier with a small thoroughbred (Marinetti's example), he has not yet done much to break through the expected; that only happens when he connects the image of the terrier with the agitated bubble of boiling water. Marinetti's sketch is not content with the single analogy (his text "Schlacht" is the first to show that); the whole world is in rapid motion, and therefore the "aufeinanderfolgenden Bewegungen" (successive movements) require a "Kette" (chain) or a "Netz" (net) of analogies, "which one sinks into the sea of the appearances." 45 Nothing would be more desirable, Marinetti says, at least theoretically and without any concern for the reader, than to leave the first members of these chains of the analogy out and to bind together only the second ones in a mysterious poetic text, in pure images.
Becher's endeavor to create word combinations, which were supposed to enable him to intensify the expression and to lessen the necessities of typical syntactical construction, has a long history that begins with his earliest poems, is in danger of solidifying into a rhetorical mannerism in the last years of World War I, and finds its end in the 1926 Maschinenrhythmen. Those special noun constructions using hyphens, which one may call Futuristic analogies, cannot be found before the end of 1912 / the beginning of 1913, that is, before the publication of Marinetti's "Technical Manifesto" and "Supplement" in Sturm. In Die Gnade eines Frühlings, Becher still writes in the neoromantic mode: "the glow of the evening rose" pushes in, "the evening sky plays completely blue, shinysunkenblue," and when he is really adventurous, Becher also imitates Arno Holz's morphological monsters, and the sunbeams sit on the "skyandcloudglowingdowndrinking" backs of the roofs. 46 In Verfall und Triumph, which contains the poems written between December 1912 and November 1913, the sentiment is expunged once and for all; Becher works with frequent noun combinations, which the German language easily tolerates as neologisms, for example "gold-trombones" and "mould-moon," or he connects adverbial and adjectival notions with hyphens: "reeling-crazy," "deathly-shrill," "drunkenclose," in a pattern he will rely on for a long time. 47 The poem "Die Armen" (The poor) constitutes the obvious exception to this pattern, in which we see signs of Becher's future development; we find the first, awkward attempts to form analogies like "civil servant-snout," more effective examples in the call to Christ as "diseasehoard," and anticipations of the future with "brain-beams." 48 Even the first attempt to unite two analogies in a single verse is here: "when smell-seas softly caress our endurer-bodies." 49
Becher's poems written during World War I (published in various volumes and often suppressed) are characterized by the frequent repetition and boldness of the analogies; some are closely related to Marinetti's standard (for example, "shrapnel thicket," 50 "woman-slough," 51 and "human-ant" 52 ), but in Becher's livelier moments and before the process ossifies into a mannerism, they show an unforgettable poetic spontaneity and mysteriousness, as in "nonsense-litany," "tarantula-Christ," and "places-pimples." 53 Sometimes they lock into incredible chains of analogy that are unparalleled in even the most adventurous expressionist poetry of the era: for example, the snow in its "nail-whip-flight," "O forehead-rabble slipping: snow-accord," or the line "trombone-taiphoo-thunderstorm from lip-coasts rage." 54 This all goes far beyond the poems of Marinetti and his friends.
Becher's analogies might be more closely defined by a process that not only observes the basic patterns of his combinations but also helps to separate spontaneity from mannerism. Most noticeable are those forms of the analogies in which the human body or one of its parts forms a semantic element. Statistically, those forms in which the corporeal functions as a basic term predominate, which suggests that Becher very often only feigns analogies by forming composites according to the grammatical rules of the German language (Marinetti does not have this possibility in his languages) and separating them again with a hyphen, as in "torpedo-bodies," "flag-arms" (or "lasso-arms"), "flag-hairs," "hill-hip," "rock-knee," "moss-lips," "forehead-dam," "pulp-head," "drum-belly," or "bayonet-arm." 55 Statistically more frequent than these pseudo-analogies (which twist the possibilities of German morphologies apart and are reminiscent of baroque composites) are those in which the bodily element appears first and massively increases the imagistic power of the analogy through the inversion, for example in "finger-rake," "neck-towers," "lip-ruin," "eyelash-moon," or "muscle-viaducts." 56 A third pattern, one which tends to degenerate into mannerism, can be found when a physiological aspect, such as blood or a secretion, functions semantically as a basic word, for example "pus-moon" (Becher shares Marinetti's dislike of la luna), "excrement-cloud," "blood-night," "pus-fog," and "excrement-cities." 57 My observations are unfair insofar as they tend to focus on repetition rather than the singular, the mannerism rather than the uniqueness; but in the work of a poet, one cannot be defined without the other, and without being aware of what mannerism Becher develops, I cannot be completely clear as to his originality. An analogy like "craziness-salt," found in Maschinenrhythmen, exceeds all statistical analyses, which inevitably find repeated patterns because they are meant to find them; an interpretation of the unrepeated, the unrepeatable, has the larger claim. 58
I intentionally have not quoted from Becher's Maschinenrhythmen , because I think that it belongs to the key texts of the radical Left German literary avantgarde, just as a little later Brecht's Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (St. Joan of the stockyards; 1929-30) does. Becher's collection of poetry was forgotten because it positions itself against traditional ideological prejudices. One knows only too clearly what is Left and what is Right, rhetorically and politically, and one finds oneself disturbed by poems in which a visionary Leninism articulates itself in a poetic idiom in which a tendency toward Futurist themes and rhetoric once more, and for the last time, goes to the extreme of linguistic self-destruction, stammering, feverish, fragmented. These poems, including the violent "Hymne an Lenin" (Hymn to Lenin), read as if possessed, with the class war as the only power of salvation in the world:
downcrazyshone
bayonet-forest. Triumph-laughter was,
Victory-screaming, drinking of the murder-party...cannon-
wheels, skull-crushing, rolled over us,
braided thunder. 59
Huge power stations are made completely present through language as industrial scenery:
Factory squares: fevercurved
landscape: demon-heaps, iron-
blocked, rose up thrown over, as if
corrosively armored, by neon
smoke-coats; by tube-textures
surrounded: cracked fire-faces;
energy-waves; melting ore floods. 60
Finally the triumph of the revolution is realized: "nation-hymns, thousands of years-- / buried, thunder rising from / hell-caves." 61 The only commentary that does justice to this kind of poetry can be found in Antonio Gramsci's remarks on Anatoli Lunatscharsky's speech to the Italian delegates at the Second Communist International (Lunatscharsky had called Marinetti a revolutionary intellectual, and the "philistines of the workers' movement" were horrified). 62 At that time , Gramsci said very clearly that the early Futurists had been defended by "troops of workers" against their enemies, because they "were in their field, culture, revolutionaries." 63 He articulated the thought that the Futurists had anticipated, in their way, the revolution of the proletarian culture (Proletkult):
they had the pure and clear conception that our epoch, the epoch of large industry, of the large workers' city, of the intensive and tumultuous life, required new forms of art, philosophy, customs, language: they had this completely revolutionary, absolutely Marxist conception, when the socialists did not even remotely concern themselves with a similar question. 64
Gramsci will later judge Futurism differently, but his Lunatscharsky commentary explains and positions Becher's remarkable mixture of Leninist dogma and Futurist rhetoric in their own historical moment. In their respective beginnings, Futurism and fascism were not as inseparably linked as the impatient generalizations of later ideological criticism makes out, and it would be productive to ask the question of whether the national anarchism of the early Futurists does not in fact clearly anticipate elementary features of the German national Bolshevism of the Weimar era. 65
Peter Demetz recently retired as Sterling Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has written on modern and contemporary German and European literature, and is now Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
* This piece originally appeared as "Der Futurist Johannes R. Becher" in Peter Demetz, Worte in Freiheit: Der italienische Futurismus und die deutsche literarische Avantgarde (1912-1934) (Words in freedom: Italien Futurism and the German literary avant-garde [1912-1934]) (Munich: Piper, 1990) and appears here, slightly modified, with the kind permission of the publishers.
1. Such as, for example, Norbert Hopster, Das Frühwerk Johannes R. Becher (Bonn: H. Bouvier Verlag, 1969), and Michael Rohrwasser, Der Weg nachoben: J. R. Becher, Politiken des Schreibens (Basel: Roter Stern Verlag, 1980).
2. The original reads: "brennend rüstet sich mein Mund, / dir, Maria, mein süßes Leben...." Johannes R. Becher, Die Gnade eines Frühlings (Berlin, 1912), 19; hereafter abbreviated GF.
3. The original reads: "so kinderjung / macht mich die Luft, so seelenblühend...." (GF, 52-53)
4. The original reads: "Lokomotiven! / Steil ob der Viadukte Schwung der rasendsten Kokotten." Johannes R. Becher, "Lokomotiven," reprinted in Peter Demetz, Worte in Freiheit: Der Italienische Futurismus und die deutsche literarische Avantgarde (1912-1934) (Munich: Piper, 1990), 326; hereafter abbreviated WIF. "Lokomotiven" first appeared in Johannes R. Becher, Päan gegen die Zeit (1914; reprint, Leipzig: K. Wolff, 1918), 49.--TRANS.
5. Johannes R. Becher, (CH CI = CH) 3 AS (Levisite) oder der einzig gerechte Krieg, in Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1968), 10:165.
6. The original reads: "einzigen Hygiene der Welt." The reference is to F. T. Marinetti's 1909 founding manifesto of Futurism. --TRANS.
7. Cf. Hopster, Das Frühwerk Johannes R. Becher, 47.
8. Emil Szomory, "Wie der Kreig mit Italien begann. Aus dem Tagebuch eines italienischen Fähnrichs (Telegramm unseres Spezial-Korrespondenten)," Berliner Tageblatt, 18 July 1915. Excerpted in WIF, 320-21. --TRANS.
9. The original reads: "Schweiß und Tränen. Gärten euch sommerbehirtet, Adria-Blau und Marmor-Wildnis, Gärten: (weichste, zarteste, blumigste) euch Schöpfer im Gram regenbogenfarben geschminkte Mädchen biegen. Perlmutter-Gesichtchen langoval." (WIF, 323) Johannes R. Becher, "Vorworte zum Tagebuch italienischen Fähnrichs Georgio Quadro," excerpted in WIF, 322-25. "Vorworte" first appeared in Die weißen Blätter 10 : 1296-99. --TRANS.
10. F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), 74-75.
11. The original quotes read: "Explodierender Oberst Lazzoni der fünften Karabinieri; ausgestülpten Antilitzes; drauf Därme, Zähne, ein Schlund ineinander sich ringelnd" (WIF, 323); and "Fieber. Stickluft. Lungen zerreißen. Triefender Pferdekadaver. Arme Bauernlümmels zerhackt. Haar, Därme, Hirn, Fleisch--: ein Brei.... Blutig gescheiteltes. Messer gepeitscht. Gräben chlorkalktrüb zugeschüttet." (WIF, 323-24) --TRANS.
12. Hopster, Das Frühwerk Johannes R. Becher, 39.
13. See Roy F. Allen, Literary Life in German Expressionism and the Berlin Circles (Göppingen: A. Kummerle, 1974), 342-45.
14. The original reads: "Du Einzige, / Die mich verstand / Die meine glühenden Verbrechen selig verwand." Johannes R. Becher, "Ekstasen der Zärtlichkeit," in Verbrüderung (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1916), 17-21.
15.  / Du aller Kinos dröhnendes Plakat." Ibid.
16. "Ein Abschied" is one section of the poem "Ein Ende." --TRANS.
17. The original quotes read: "o Weib! Kastanienbräune" and "beseligt war er. Süß. Daheim. / Nun schwirren Brücken...Messer...Bomber...!" Johannes R. Becher, "Ein Ende," in Päan gegen die Zeit, 69-71. Also in Johannes R. Bechner, Ausgewählte Gedichte: 1911-1918, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1965), 352-54.
18. The original reads: "Der Andere mag dich packen--... / Gewaltige Märsche tacken. / Zerschmetternd eures Bettes Morastee." Ibid.
19. The original reads: "Ja--, jetzt treibt er wieder los, / nur für kurz an sie gebunden." Ibid.
20. The original reads:
immer in dich wiederkehrend
Heimat, dich verloren schon.
Du enthobst uns aus dem Schweren--
trotzdem eilen wir davon.
Ibid.
21. The original reads: "reinlich die kleine Zelle, voller Rosen das Gärtlein" (WIF, 255). Paolo Buzzi, "Das Lied der Eingeschlossenen (I reclusi)," reprinted in WIF, 255-58. The poem originally appeared in Die Aktion 4 : 855-58. --TRANS.
22. The original reads: "wir schreiben heim und sticken feine Leinenspitzen..../ ...wissen nicht, weshalb man draußen uns verachtet." (WIF, 256) --TRANS.
23.  (WIF, 256) --TRANS.
24. The original quotes read: "empfangen sind wir von der grünen Wut der innersten Geweide" and "Kopfüber hätten sie ins Meer uns stürzen können, / an einen Luftballon gehängt ins Blaue treiben lassen!" (WIF, 256) --TRANS.
25. "Bordell" originally appeared in Becher, Päan gegen die Zeit, 132. It does not appear in the Gesammelte Werke. "Die Armen" and "Die Huren" both appeared in Johannes R. Becher, Verfall und Triumph (Berlin: Hyperionverlag, 1914), hereafter abbreviated VT, and in the Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 59-64 and 136-41, respectively. "Aus den Höfen" originally appeared in Johannes R. Becher, Das Neue Gedicht (Leipzig: Tusel, 1918), hereafter abbreviated NG, and in the Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 399-400. Das Neue Gedicht was printed in 1917, but only delivered to stores in 1918-19.
26. The original reads:
Wir weinen uns durch Haft und Äthersaal
Einander zu, erlebend süße Nähe,
Wenn man uns reicht das letzte Abendmahl,
uns salbet ein mit Öles weichem Schnee.
(WIF, 329)
Johannes R. Becher, "Krankenhaus" (part 2) excerpted in WIF, 328-29. The emphases are Becher's "Krankenhaus" first appeared in the 3 January 1914 edition of Aktion and appears in the Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 104-7. --TRANS.
27. The original reads: "ich erzwinge jetzt auch noch ihr Aufgehen in Maitiere wunderbar." (WIF, 331) Johannes R. Becher, "Krankenhaus (IV)," reprinted in WIF, 329-31. The poem appears in the Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 360-63. --TRANS.
28. The original quotes read: "Spritz-Strahl aus Schläfen schrumpfende Gewitter" (WIF, 330); "Schleim-Tang" (WIF, 329); "Klipp-Skelette" (WIF, 329); "Hirten-Ärzten" (WIF, 330); and "von elektrischen Schäumen überwuchert." (WIF, 331) --TRANS.
29. The original reads: "spezielle Don Quichotterien." Johannes R. Becher, Verteidigung der Poesie, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Rutten & Loening, 1960), 164.
30. See "[Erinnerungen an Jakob van Hoddis / Simultanismus]" excerpted in WIF, 336-37. The piece originally appeared in Johannes R. Becher, Das poetische Prinzip (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1957), 106-11. --TRANS.
31. The original reads: "Gefühl der Gleichzeitigkeit" (WIF, 336). --TRANS.
32. The original reads: "unermessenen Weltweite" (WIF, 336). --TRANS.
33. The two verses from Hoddis's "Weltende" cited in Becher's text are "Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei, / Und an den Küsten--liest man--steigt die Flut." (WIF, 336) The author has kindly provided Michael Hamburger's translation in German Poetry, 1910-1975 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977): "Steeplejacks fall from roofs and break in two, / And on the coasts--we read--floodwaters rise." --TRANS.
34. The original reads: "Das Große ist dem Kleinen beigemengt und umgekehrt, nichts vermag abgeschlossen für sich zu bestehen." (WIF, 336) --TRANS.
35. "Es ist alles ein Nebeneinander." (It is all side by side.) Georg Heym, 27 July 1910, in Dichtungen und Schriften, vol. 2 (Hamburg: H. Ellerman, 1960), 140.
36. The original quotes read: "Schablone" and "bürokratische Versprodukte entstanden, die geradezu rechnerisch durchgeklügelt waren, indem auf jeden Satz ein Gegensatz folgen mußte" (WIF, 337). --TRANS.
37. The original reads: "im Geiste eines expressionistischen Pantheismus" (WIF, 337). --TRANS.
38. The original reads: "Das Nacheinander wird aufgewirbelt in einem dialektischen Manöver in ein Nebeneinander. Das Gedicht rückt in die Sphäre des Gleichzeitigen. Ein Versuch also, auch äußerlich das Expreßtempo zu markieren." (WIF, 334) Johannes R. Becher, "[Brief an die Feuilletonredaktion der Frankfurter Zeitung]," excerpted in WIF, 334-36. The letter is reprinted in Walter Höllerer, Dokumente zur Poetik, vol. 1 of Theorie der modernen Lyrik (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965), 283-84. --TRANS.
39. Carmine Chiellino, Die Futurismusdebatte (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1978), 175-99.
40. "Auf ein Maschinengewehr" first appeared in Becher, Päan gegen die Zeit, 49. "Die neue Syntax" first appeared in Becher, Verbrüderung, 78. --TRANS.
41. "Schlacht" is an excerpt from Marinetti's "Supplement zum technischen Manifest der Futuristischen Literatur." --TRANS.
42. The German quotes in this and the following paragraph refer to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Der futuristische Literatur. Technisches Manifest," Der Sturm 3 : 194-95 and "Supplement zum technischen Manifest der Futuristischen Literatur," Der Sturm 3 : 279-80. Both are reprinted in WIF, 193-208. --TRANS.
43. The original quotes read: "Verdoppelungen" and "den Gegenstand mit dem von ihm erweckten Bild zu einem kennzeichnenden Wort zusammenziehen." (WIF, 194) --TRANS.
44. The author gives the Italian as well as the German; all four quotes are from F. T. Marinetti, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista," in Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. De Maria, 47. --Trans
45. The original reads: "das man in das Meer der Erscheinungen versenken wird" (WIF, 196).--TRANS.
46. The original quotes read: "das Abendrosenglühen" (GF, 27); "der Abendhimmel spielt ganz blau, glanzblauversenkt" (GF, 27); and "himmelundwolkenglühendniedertrinkenden" (GF, 53).
47. The original quotes read: "Gold-Posaunen" (VT, 15), "Schimmel-Mond" (VT, 21), "taumelndirre" (VT, 33), "tödlich-schrill" (VT, 27), and "trunken-nah" (VT, 28).
48. The original quotes read: "Beamten-Schnauze" (VT, 34), "Siechen-Hort" (VT, 33), and "Gehirn-Gebälke" (VT, 35).
49. The original reads: "da Düfte-Meere unsere Dulder-Körper lind umstreichen" (VT, 36).
50. The original reads: "Schrapnell-Gestrüpp." Johannes R. Becher, An Europa/Neue Gedichte (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1916), 104; hereafter abbreviated ENG.
51. The original reads: "Weib-Pfuhl." Johannes R. Becher, Die Heilige Schar (Leipzig: Tusel, 1918); 21; hereafter abbreviated HS.
52. The original reads: "Mensch-Ameise" (NG, 429).
53. The original quotes read: "Wirrwarr-Litanei" (ENG, 88), "Tarantel-Chrisitus" (ENG, 29), and "Plätze-Pickel" (Becher, Verbrüderung, 25).
54. The original quotes read: "Nagel-Peitschen-Flug" (NG, 181), "O Stirngeröll-Rutsch: Schnee Akkord" (NG, 179), and "Posaun-Taifun-Gewitter von Lipp-Küsten rasen" (NG, 179).
55. The original quotes read: "Torpedo-Leiber" (ENG, 67), "Fahnen-Arme" (HG, 9), "Lasso-Arme" (NG, 463), "Fahnen-Haare" (NG, 473), "Hügel-Hüfte" (NG, 477), "Felsen-Knie" (NG, 477), "Moos-Lippen" (NG, 446), "Stirn-Damm" (NG, 446), "Brei-Kopf" (HS, 14), "Pauken-Bauch" (HS, 67), and "Bajonett-Arm" (NG, 446).
56. The original quotes read: "Finger-Rechen" (HS, 9), "Hals-Türme" (HS, 72), "Lipp-Ruine" (HS, 431), "Wimpern-Mond" (NG, 446), and "Muskel-Viadukte" (NG, 456).
57. The original quotes read: "Eiter-Mond" (ENG, 55), "Kot-Gewölk" (NG, 186), "Blut-Nacht" (NG, 186), "Eiter-Nebel" (NG, 186), and "Kot-Städte" (NG, 155).
58. The original reads: "Irrnis-Salz." Johannes R. Becher, Maschinenrhythmen (Berlin: Die Schmiede, 1926), 33.
59. The original reads:
niederirrefunkelte
Bajonett-Wald. Triumph-Gelächter war,
Sieg-Heulen, Zechen vom Mord-Fest...Geschütz-
Räder, schädelzermalmend, rollten über uns hin,
Geflochtene Donner.
(WIF, 338-39)
Johannes R. Becher, "Hymne an Lenin," reprinted in WIF, 338-40. "Hymne an Lenin" first appeared in Becher, Maschinenrhythmen, 17-20. The ellipsis is Becher's own.--TRANS.
60. The original reads:
Fabrik-Gevierte: fieberkurvige
Landschaft: Dämonen-Klumpen, eisen-
Gequadert, aufquollen, übergeworfen, wie
Ätzend umpanzert, von leuchtgasigen
Rauch-Mänteln; von Röhren-Geflechten
Umstellt; rissige Feuer-Gesichter;
Kraft-Wellen; schmelzende Erz-Fluten.
(WIF, 338)
--TRANS.
61. The original reads: "Völker-Gesänge, jahrtausend- / Verschüttet, aufgewittern aus / Höllen-Höhlen." (WIF, 340) --TRANS.
62. The original reads: "Philister der Arbeiterbewegung." Antonio Gramsci, in Marxismus und Literatur, ed. and trans. Sabine Kebir (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983), 48; hereafter abbreviated G. Cf. Jean Thibaudeau, "Le futurisme dans les écrits de Gramsci," in Marinetti et le futurisme: études, documents, iconographie, ed. Giovanni Lista (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1977), 115-22.
63. The original quotes read: "Arbeitertrupps" and "auf ihrem Gebiet, der Kultur, Revolutionäre" (G, 48).
64.  (G, 49ff.)
The emphases are Gramsci's.
65. German conservatives and nationalists (among them Ernst Niekisch) in their "national anticapitalism" appropriated the most radical ideas of the Bolsheviks in order to attract the soldiers returning from the war--as did, in Italy, the many militant nationalist, anarchist, and Futurist groups, to which both Marinetti and the young Mussolini belonged.
In public Benito Mussolini seldom acknowledged his debts to the cultural movements that had contributed to fascism's formation. In private, however, he was often quite explicit in issuing generous certificates of recognition, especially to the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, chief among them the Futurist movement and the group that been centered around the journal La Voce. His encounter with La Voce, Mussolini confided to his preferred biographer, had been a revelation for him, giving him the certainty that he was a man of destiny, someone "called upon to announce a new age." 1 And with equal generosity il duce spoke of his debts to Futurism: "I formally declare that without Futurism there would never have been a fascist revolution." 2
Even apart from Mussolini's statements, which are hardly negligible in their own right, it is difficult to deny the participation of the avant-garde in the formation of fascist political culture. Collaborators and important readers of La Voce became fascist militants; the principal exponents of Futurism were among the founding fathers of the fascist movement and firmly adhered to the totalitarian regime, actively collaborating in the creation of its culture and the diffusion of its ideology; and some, such as Marinetti and Sironi, remained faithful to Mussolini and fascism into the years of the Republic of Salò. Yet the overt participation of avant-garde culture in the generation and the fortunes of fascism has never sufficed to prevent the rise of a lively debate, begun already in the early 1920s, about the nature of their relation, especially in the case of Futurism. In 1923 Giuseppe Pressolini, for example, denied that there was any ideal connection between Futurism and fascism as it had come to be in power, for Futurism was antitraditionalist, individualist, libertarian, antimoralist, and anti-Catholic, while fascism was classicist, hierarchic, authoritarian, moralist, and Catholic. 3 Benedetto Croce, however, writing in 1924, urged the opposite view: "To anyone with a sense of historical connections, the ideal origins of fascism are to be found in Futurism." 4 And in support of his claim the philosopher listed the Futurist matrices of fascism: the cult of action, the disposition toward violence, the intolerance of dissent, desire for the new, disdain for culture and tradition, and the glorification of youth. Ironically, both Croce and Prezzolini may have been right, and, at the same time, wrong. The same might be said for many others who have continued to discuss this question in more or less the same way, sometimes accentuating the points of convergence or consensus between the two movements, sometimes emphasizing their moments of discrepancy or disagreement. Either interpretation can seem valid if one proceeds, as did Croce and Prezzolini, by isolating a single aspect or a particular moment in the relations between the two movements and using that as a basis for generalization.
Analysis of the relations between fascism and Futurism, however, cannot be limited to collating their doctrinal agreements or to registering, in a sort of parallel history, their record of coalition and conflict. Though certainly useful, ultimately such a procedure proves critically sterile, for in practice it merely leads to the reaffirmation of what was already self-evident to the historical protagonists themselves. We know, after all, that Futurism was not identical with fascism on the historical, cultural, or political levels: any such identification was repeatedly contested by futurists who were neither fascists nor antifascists, and it conflicts with the variety of contradictory political ideologies that were lodged within Futurism both before and after the arrival of fascism in power, contradictions that neither prered nor were ever resolved within the ideology of fascism. But this recognition does not imply that one can sustain the view, urged by apologists of Futurism committed to minimizing its involvement in fascism, that the culture of Futurism was of a kind that differed fundamentally in its values and its myths from fascist political culture. Nor can the collaboration of Futurism and fascism be dismissed with the reductive thesis that Futurist participation in fascism was merely a matter of personal inclination, an historical problem of secondary importance, one to be explained by individual opportunism or ingenuity. For at the origins of that thesis is a presupposition informing debate about the larger problem of the relations between fascism and culture, and especially the problem of fascism's attitude toward modernity and the role of modernist culture in totalitarian politics. Fascism, it was long assumed, possessed neither an ideology nor a culture of its own; it was, instead, a reactionary movement that was fundamentally antimodern, that looked nostalgically to the past and that sought to arrest the process of modernity in order to stop or turn back the movement of modernity. The modernist avant-gardes, it was likewise assumed, differed absolutely in their very essence from the politics of totalitarianism, and on the basis of these assumptions one could explain the widespread participation of important res of Italian culture and the modernist avant-garde in both the movement and the regime of fascism solely by motives of self-interest or political naiveté. Avant-garde intellectuals who became fascists, it was often insisted, did so on the basis of a profound misapprehension of what fascism really was. Yet while personal interest or political misunderstanding can hardly be excluded from among the motivations that informed Futurist participation in fascism, an account formulated in more properly historical terms would need to address other and more important facts: that the encounter between Futurism and fascism occurred in the period of fascism's formation, when nobody would have bet a penny on its success; and that the Futurists' participation in fascism when in power took place with a full awareness of what fascism was, and that the Futurists, though disagreeing with some decisions and some orientations of the regime, never suggested that its totalitarian politics was in conflict with their conception of culture, with their idea of modernity, or with their vision of the destiny of the nation.
More recently, study of the relations between fascism and culture has entered a new stage, one that permits us to examine the cultural, ideological, and political relations between Futurism and fascism from a new perspective. 5 Few scholars now find a fundamental incompatibility between the terms fascism and culture, or fascism and modernity; and whereas twenty years ago it was considered almost blasphemy, at least within the field of Italian historiography, to define fascism as essentially modern, today it has become common to speak of fascism as an "alternative modernism," or to use terms such as "modernist fascism" or "fascist modernism." 6 Studies in this direction have been fruitful and innovative, and increasingly studies of fascist culture have given greater attention to fascism's attitude toward modernity--a theme fun-damental to understanding the very nature of fascism--even if not always with methods or results that appear wholly convincing in relation to the history of the relations between culture and politics in fascism. "Fascist modernism" has been especially studied by literary critics and historians of art, sometimes with notable results, often drawing upon the interpretation of fascism as "the aestheticization of politics" which Benjamin proposed. 7 Yet however suggestive this interpretation, it can also be misleading if it obscures fascism's other important feature, its "politicization of aesthetics," which not only inspired fascism's attitude toward avant-garde culture, but stood at the very origin of the encounter between Futurism and fascism and of the participation of many modernist intellectuals in fascism. Such caution might seem obvious, but it is also necessary if we are to avoid letting emphasis on "the aestheticization of politics" lead to a kind of "aestheticization" of fascism itself, privileging only its literary, aesthetic, and symbolic aspects while losing sight of motivations and matrices that are essentially political in nature. To do so risks trivializing the fundamentally political nature of fascism, its culture, its ideology, and its symbolic universe. Even when studying strictly aesthetic manifestations of fascism, such as its political style, its liturgy for the masses, or its copious symbolic production, all of them characteristic and essential elements in the fascist mode of doing politics, it is important not to lose sight of the political dimension of fascist culture. This does not mean that one should not underestimate the problem of "the aestheticization of politics," as I have argued for some time in urging that fascism's "politics of the spectacle" was the manifestation of a new "aesthetic conception of political life." 8 Nevertheless, the aesthetic dimension cannot be analyzed separately from the totalitarian conception of politics, for it was a consequence of that very conception. The symbolic production of fascism was not an outcome of its ideological incoherence, 9 but the consequential expression of a vision of life and politics specific to a political movement that was simultaneously a new secular religion. 10 Seen from this viewpoint, "the aestheticization of politics" acquires particular significance insofar as it is a manifestation of the sacralization of politics that fascism undertook, a project pursued with the full consensus and active participation of modernist intellectuals and artists, who collaborated enthusiastically in the construction of the symbolic universe of fascist religion. That project, the search for a new form of secular or lay religion for modern Italy, was in turn an important aspect of various attempts to fashion a synthesis between nationalism and modernity which were pursued by the avant-gardes in early twentieth century Italy; and it was in the course of that search that most of the Futurists adhered to fascism from the beginning, viewing it as first a movement, then a regime that was capable of realizing that synthesis by instituting a political religion of the nation and creating an "Italian modernity" that would also be a model for a new European civilization.
Futurist involvement in totalitarian politics, beyond any record of discrepancies and conflicts, originated within fundamental cultural connections that can be better identified if we situate the problem of Futurism's relationship to fascism within the more ample perspective of the problem of the relations between the modernist avant-garde and the cultural origins of fascism. The most important connection concerned attitudes toward "the experience of modernity" as that was perceived, experienced, and interpreted by avant-garde culture and fascism. I will consider only the political side of modernist culture, modernism understood here as a vision of modernity, rather than a sociological understanding of modernization, even though modernization processes (industrialization, scientific discoveries, technologicasl development, urbanization, mass society, globalization of capital, unification of the world) furnish the scenario that stands in the background of our analysis. By political modernism--using the definition of modernism proposed by Marshall Berman--I mean those political ideologies that arose in connection with modernization, ideologies that seek to render human beings capable of mastering the processes of modernization in order not to be overwhelmed by the "vortex of modernity," giving them "the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their own way within the vortex and to make it their own." 11 Futurism and fascism are both, in this sense, manifestations of political modernism that belong to a common cultural terrain. The "conquest of modernity," as we may call the aspiration to have the capacity and the power to master the processes of modernization, did not follow a single path. Political antagonism among the ideal alternatives of modernity has been perhaps one the most disquieting, ambiguous, and tragic features of the twentieth century, Many, and not just the Futurists, have believed that the surest and most rapid path toward the "conquest of modernity" was that proposed by totalitarian movements. Perhaps we can better understand some of the motives for their choice by examining the Futurists.
Fascism, as one scholar has perceptively remarked, represented the "politicization of Italian modernism." 12 Yet in reality, that politicization was already well under way long before the appearance of the fascist political movement, having been initiated by the cultural avant-garde. The affirmation of a cultural militancy that could wield political influence or engage in political action was shared across the spectrum of Italian avant-gardes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Prior to World War I these movements gave birth to a generational revolt, conducted under the banner of the creative role assigned to youth, that involved a radical contestation of parliamentary government, one in which divergent visions of modernity, even though posed as alternatives to one another, were aligned in a common front against rationalist, liberal, and bourgeois modernity. The laboratory of the modernist avant-gardes proposed a series of themes and myths of a new political and artistic culture, motifs that flowed together into fascism after the Great War and contributed to its political culture and its attitude toward modernity. This does not mean, however, that these movements can be defined as protofascist, for from the same terrain of Italian modernist culture in the early twentieth century there also developed other syntheses of the same motifs, different cultural and political movements opposed to fascism.
The avant-garde cultural movements that arose in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Futurism and the groups that coalesced around the reviews Leonardo and La Voce, shared a common note of political nationalism which manifested itself in what I have elsewhere called "the myth of Italianism," a conviction that Italy was destined to have a role as a great protagonist and exercise a civilizing mission in the life of the twentieth century. Toward that end, all these movements believed in the necessity of a radical process of moral, cultural, and political regeneration meant to give birth to a "new Italian." Long before the birth of fascism, Futurism urged the necessity of overcoming the barriers between culture and politics by means of a symbiosis between culture and life, a symbiosis designed to reawaken the intellectual and moral energies of the Italians, to endow them with a new sense of Italianness and spur them to the conquest of new preeminences. Artists and intellectuals were to abandon the privileged isles of aristocratic individualism and immerse themselves in the impetuous flux of modern life in order to become the artificers, the spiritual guides of the New Italy.
The cultural roots of Futurism and fascism intersect in the common terrain of "modernist nationalism." 13 The term, which I have used elsewhere, does not refer to a specific political or cultural movement, but defines a state of mind, a sensibility, a cultural orientation centered on the myth of the nation, a sensibility that we can find in all the avant-garde movements formed in Italy during the fifteen-year period prior to the Great War. What characterized this nationalism was essentially its attitude toward modernity, perceived as a new dimension in human history, within which the nation could grow and expand its power. Modernist nationalism was not conservative, nor did it harbor nostalgia for a pre-industrial world, nor did it dream of turning back the clock of history. Its principal characteristic was the frank acceptance of modern life as an era of irreversible transformations that were affecting society, consciousness, and human sensibility, and that were preparing conditions for the rise of new forms of collective life, a new civilization. Modernist nationalism welcomed modernity as an explosion of human energies and an expansion of life without precedents in history, an enthusiasm that was united with a tragic and activist sense of existence--an "artificial optimism," 14 to use Marinetti's words, that rejected nihilism with an exalted feeling of new plenitude and an affirmation of vitality in the life of those individuals and nations who would fling themselves into the vortex of modernity. For this particular kind of nationalism modernity was an acceleration of the rhythms of time, the invention and multiplication of technical means for the domination and exploitation of nature, an expansion of energies both human and material, an intensification of individual and collective life through struggle, a new sense of the world. In the field of politics, modernity meant a crisis of traditional aristocracies, an epoch of new masses and the rise of new elites, the predominance of collectivities over individuals, renovation of the State, and political and economic expansion. Modernist nationalism opposed neither modernization nor industrialization, processes it rather intended to promote and accelerate in order to furnish the nation with the means to compete within a global economy. Instead it wanted to master and discipline them to consolidate the cohesion of the nation and enable its participation in world politics. To modernize the nation meant not just giving it new instruments of economic and social development, but regenerating it from archaic habits born during the course of centuries of enslavement, furnishing it with a modern consciousness by means of a new culture. What distinguished this nationalism, what made it modernist, was its intention to reconcile intellectual culture, or spiritualismo (spiritualism)--understood here generically as the primacy of culture, ideas, and feelings--with mass industrial society, an intention that aimed at opposing and avoiding the negative effects brought in the wake of modernity, such as materialism, skepticism, hedonistic egoism, egalitarian conformism, etc.--all that modernist nationalism identified with the rationalist and individualistic tradition of the Enlightenment. Toward that end modernist nationalism argued the necessity of accompanying the industrial revolution and modernization with a "revolution of the mind" order to form the sensibility, the character, the conscience of a new Italian who could comprehend and confront the challenges of modern life, who could firmly adhere to the superiority of the mental forces that would assure unity and collective identity to the nation in the face of the development of material and technological forces. To accomplish this mental revolution, modernist nationalism appealed less to reason than to the energy of feelings and emotions; it sought to reactivate the mythopoetic faculties in order to create new and modern myths of the nation--a secular religion of the nation--to oppose the negative consequences and disgregatory effects of the crisis of traditional society. But even though modernist nationalism availed itself of the mythic use of history in order to construct new symbolic and mythic worlds in support of its religion of the nation, it never entertained a fetishistic cult of tradition, never engaged in a nostalgic pursuit of an imaginary past order of harmony and perfection. Instead it participated in the changes of modernity and projected the nation toward the future, doing so with the tragic optimism of a will to power that would affirm itself in struggle and conquest. The instrumental appeal to myths of past grandeur, adopted to spur the renovation of national pride, coexisted in modernist nationalism with new myths of future grandeurs yet to be conquered; likewise, the glorification of the nation's preeminence coexisted with an ambition to create values and principles appropriate to a modern civilization deemed to be universal; and likewise, again, belief in the primacy of intellectual culture coexisted with an exaltation of a realism based on force. For modernist nationalism, war and violence could be necessary instruments for the fulfillment of the conquest of modernity, the regeneration of the nation, and the construction of a new Italian civilization for the modern age.
The confrontation between nationalism and modernity in Italian political culture went back to the origins of a united Italy. From the Risorgimento on, the highest aspiration of the Italian patriots had been to raise Italy to the level of the great modern nation-states, to form a national consciousness that would furnish a feeling of collective identity for the various Italian peoples who, though inhabiting the same peninsula, had remained separated from one another by profound political, social, and cultural differences virtually since the fall of the Roman empire. The founding fathers of a united Italy assigned the new State the task of liberating Italians from the habits of the "old man," of turning them into truly "modern men," as Silvio Spaventa put it. 15 They conceived the conquest of modernity as a process of civilizing the nation under the banner of a nationalism that pursued the ideal of "liberty and progress." Yet this ideal was also understood differently in the two principal movements of the Risorgimento, the liberalism of Cavour and the radicalism of Mazzini. For Mazzini, the conquest of modernity was to occur through a political and mental revolution, with the creation of a Third Italy that Mazzini conceived as a democratic theocracy founded on the faith of a people morally united in a religion of the patria (fatherland); this would be a country that would rapidly take its place in the vanguard of the modern nations and usher in a new era of civilization. Cavour and the liberals, who actually created modern Italy, interpreted the conquest of modernity as the nation's ascent toward conditions of freedom, civic life, and social progress, an ascent conducted under the moderate guide of parliamentary government. The contrast between these ways of interpreting modernity survived the immediate process of unification to become a permanent and defining feature of Italian political culture in the late nineteenth century, becoming more salient as the nation experienced a growing state of disillusionment and dissatisfaction, especially among younger generations who were raised under the liberal regime. For notwithstanding the progress achieved by Italy in the social and economic fields, the conquest of modernity appeared an arduous undertaking for a nation-state constituted so recently, still so uncertain in its identity and unstable in its moral cohesion, while all the while the transformations of modernity were increasing with an accelerating rhythm. In the closing years of the nineteenth century Francesco de Sanctis, the chief educator of a united Italy, entrusted a new generation with the mission of achieving a moral and intellectual reformation that would give Italians a modern national conscience: Italians had
to convert the modern world into our world, studying it, assimilating it, transforming it....The great task of the nineteenth century has come to its end. We are witnessing a new fermentation of ideas, the harbinger of a new order. Already, in this century, we can see the next one forming itself. And this time we must be certain not to find ourselves at the end of the line, or in second place. 16
Italy, at the turn of the century, was once more questioning its destiny as a nation in an era of disturbing changes produced by modernization. Humanity had entered a new stage of modernity; new forms of life and civilization were rising because of the "rapid and immense development of large industry," with its repercussions felt in every class, every society, and every nation, changes that were shattering a "thousand year old equilibrium of the world...not only in economics, but in politics and morals," as the sociologist Mario Morasso wrote in 1905. 17 Morasso was among the most typical representatives of modernist nationalism and he formulated many of the myths of modernolatry that would be echoed in Futurism. With turgid rhetoric but clear-sighted realism, Morasso depicted the principal processes of the enormous transformation that was reshaping society in the age of imperialism. Its effects were felt in every sector of individual and collective life. Modern man was living "in a new world in which unimaginable new forces are unfolding...which have transformed not only the bases of international political life and the moral conduct of individuals, but the entire system of economic relations." Economic relations now had "a preponderant influence over other kinds of relations, over man's feelings and habits, over human nature, over the functions of government; they are creating a new politics and even a new consciousness...." Large-scale industry was having a
profound repercussion...on the course of public and private life, on the control of our sensibility and our activities...human life has emerged from it entirely changed, age-old customs have been destroyed, deep-rooted habits of our soul have been cast aside...and the social order has been overturned to bring it into line with the new future. 18
This was a 'new modernity,' and the predominant reaction to it among Italian modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of unbridled enthusiasm for the new forms of expanding human life. The conquest of modernity now meant assimilating those forms that produced, as Marinetti wrote, "the complete renovation of human sensibility" and a "massive expansion of human sensation":
acceleration of life...love of the new and unexpected...horror at the prospect of living quietly, love of danger and inclination toward a quotidian heroism...destruction of the sense of a beyond and increased value of the individual who wants to live his life...multiplication of human desires and ambitions and a surpassing of their previous boundaries...man multiplied by the machine...love of "records"...a passion for the city, the negation of distances...a new sense of the world...a need to feel oneself at the center, as the judge and motor of the infinite both explored and unexplored. 19
Futurism glorified modern life with a Dionysian exaltation of everything generated by modernity and its continuous explosion of energies, even its most violent and brutal aspects. "For the first time," wrote Boccioni, "we Futurists are giving an example of an enthusiastic human adherence to the form of civilization that is forming itself before our eyes....We are ecstatic in the face of modernity and feel the innovative delirium of our epoch." 20
This feeling of enthusiastic adherence to modernity has often been attributed solely to Futurism. But in reality it was shared by the entire spectrum of avant-garde artists and intellectuals in Italy, even by anti-Futurists, as were many of the Vocians. "To be moderns! To comprehend within oneself the vital forms that are characteristic of out age," proclaimed the Triestine writer Scipio Slataper in La Voce. 21 His exhortation might be considered the symbolic password of modernist nationalism. In the new cultural climate of the early twentieth century, compounded of modernism and nationalism, there was an almost unanimous effort to exhort Italy to enter the "vibrant turbine" of "the great mechanism of modern life." 22 Even nationalists whose cultural formation was essentially classicist, such as Enrico Corradini, founder of the Italian nationalist movement, were obsessed with enthusiasm for the dynamism of modern life. Corradini lauded the
spirit of the new life...greater and more powerful than it has ever been...the beginning of a future still greater and more powerful...the rhythm of life is now extraordinarily violent, as quick as lightning....The spirit, like a global whirlwind that is sweeping ahead the unreflexive multitudes, is the spirit of the new life....[It] overwhelms everything, because we have not yet seen the rise of self-conscious men who are equasl to the new life of the world and stronger than the new forces. Here is the immense tragedy of the present. The epic of the future will consist in the victory of man over the means and forces of life, more formidable than ever. 23
The enthusiasm for modernity was also shared by a young revolutionary socialist, Benito Mussolini: "We feel outselves attracted to a life that is multiplex, harmonious, vertiginous, global." 24 For him, as for the Futurists, the essence of modernity was represented by the speed of time and the pace of change: "The word that epitomizes and renders the unmistakable note of our century is 'movement'....Movement everywhere, and acceleration of the rhythm of life." 25
The groups of the modernist avant-garde in Italy that accepted the primacy of the nation as axiomatic also shared a principal objective, "to reconnect the new expectations for Italian culture with the great economic progress that we have been observing already for some years," as Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini wrote in 1906. 26 Papini and Prezzolini were founders of the journal Leonardo and the extremely young promoters of the first Italian avant-garde of the twentieth century, as well as militants in the recently born movement of nationalism (see MSN, 81-191). The intellectuals who collaborated on La Voce were still more explicit in urging intellectuals to unite themselves with "Lombard industrialists, Genovese shipbuilders, bankers and businessmen of northern Italy," to work together for the "success of the fatherland in the struggle among the nations that are now contesting the world." 27 Yet behind these exhortations, and behind the myth of Italianism that they embodied, there was also a disquieting conflict between faith in the innate virtues of the Italian nation, those virtues that were showing signs of rebirth and prompting the younger generation to wish to reconquer Italy's cultural primacy, and an inferiority complex that younger intellectuals felt when they compared Italy with the more advanced nations of Europe. Giovanni Amendola, the future leader of the anti-fascist opposition, observed in 1905 that Italy "has begun to take great strides and is firmly on the path to wealth, but it will not maintain its position if it does not simultaneously pursue the path of power." 28 Another writer, the future leader of fascism who was then an internationalist socialist, hailed the new Italy he saw before him in 1909; Italy was:
...gradually losing the characteristics of a cemetery. Where lovers once dreamed and nightingales once sang, the factory whistles are now screaming. Italy is pulling ahead in the great stadium where the Nations are running the great Marathon of World supremacy. The heroes are giving way to producers. Having once fought, we now work. The plow is making the earth fecund and the pneumatic drill is gutting the city. Italy is preparing itself to fulfil a major role in a new epoch of human history. 29
Very similar expressions appear in the "Manifesto of Futurist Painters" of 1910:
In the eyes of other countries, Italy is still a land of the dead, a vast Pompeii, white with sepulchres. But Italy is being reborn. Its political resurgence will be followed by a cultural resurgence. In the land inhabited by the illiterate peasant, schools will be set up; in the land where doing nothing in the sun was the only available profession, millions of machines are already roaring; in the land where traditional aesthetics reigned supreme, new flights of artistic inspiration are emerging and dazzling the world with their brilliance. 30
The commitment to militant cultural engagement, which will gradually turn toward politics, is discernible in the avant-gardes from the beginning and derives from a determination to accelerate the process of modernization in Italy, flanking industrialization with the development of a new national culture. The modernization of society and its productive forces was to produce a modernization of culture and sensibility. That could occur only through the collective assimilation of new ideals intended to form the conscience of a 'new Italian' and guide the nation in its 'conquest of modernity.' Alfredo Oriani, a solitary teacher of the younger generation whose works would be numbered among the canonical texts of fascism, warned that, "A Third Italy without an ideal significance in the world would be the most absurd miracle of modern history, a resurrection without life, a reappearance of an apparition that merely passes upon its way." 31
During the years that preceded the Great War the vicissitudes of Italian culture can be interpreted as a competition for the elaboration and affirmation of an ideal of modernity. The principal intellectuals and artists who gave life to the renewal of Italian culture during these years were all engaged in this competition, which soon seepoed into the world of politics. Each proposed an ideal of modernity that was meant to shape the conscience of modern Italians. Giovanni Papini admitted that his greatest ambition was to become "the spiritual guide of younger Italy and the Italy of the future...I would like to be the spiritual reorganizer of this very old race." 32 Prezzolini created La Voce with the intention of achieving the moral and intellectual reformation of Italians, educating them in the cult of a "religion of modern man." 33 Marinetti and the Futurists proposed themselves as the guides of a cultural revolution that would forge the modern Italian, liberating him from all devotion to the cultural heritage of the past and the myth of tradition. The same ambition to shape the Italian of the twentieth century also inspired the cultural engagement of intellectuals who were not part of the avant-garde but who enjoyed prestige and influence among the young. Benedetto Croce, with his vast work as critic, philosopher, and historian, assigned himself the task of forming "a modern Italian conscience that would be European and national." 34 Giovanni Gentile, philosopher and educational theorist, dedicated his work to the task of reforming the character of Italians in order to bring to completion the national revolution of the Risorgimento, forge the spiritual unity of the nation, and once more conduct the Italian nation into the vanguard of modernity. 35
The idea that culture possessed a militant function, that it was intellectual activity that formed the modern conscience of a new Italian, was common to the different movements of the modernist avant-garde. In common also was the conviction that to be modern meant first of all, to say it with Croce, to possess a "culture of the whole man," which, in the consciousness of modern man, was to take over the place left empty by the crisis of traditional religion. 36 Modernity, from this point of view, was understood as an epoch of crisis and of transition from one system of values rooted in the pre-industrial world to another that belonged to a new civilization whose construction would have to be entrusted to modern man's capacity to know how to master his own destiny and shape the future. As Prezzolini wrote:
Modern man lives without the faith of the past and without any faith in the present and often without any faith in a faith of the future. Destined to live in a new civilization, he feels that he has been sacrificed, yet without having any self-awareness of the cause, which might render him great. He feels his own tragedy, yet cannot climb high enough intellectually to turn himself into Fate and master his own dilemma. Whence the sense of dismay, the darkness, the nihilism of so many souls....The individual is no longer supported by those social barriers that separated, but also sustained, that hindered him from rising but also protected him from falling, and every day he finds himself faced with the alternative of becoming either a master of the world or the last rag of flesh that a blind force has seized to sweep the streets. Something great is being born, he senses, but the immense labor is twisting the social body with spasms of pain. 37
The perception of living in a crisis of civilization was fundamental in the experience of modernity for the younger generation. "The collective spirit," wrote Mussolini in 1903, "is not yet entirely formed and is torn between the old and the new, between modern ideals and ancient beliefs." 38 Mixing Marx and Nietzsche, the young revolutionary understood modernity above all as an age of the transmutation of values, a change that would lead, through socialism, to an overcoming of Christian civilization and the advent of a new pagan culture guided by the will to power "which unfolds in the creation of new values, whether moral, artistic, or social," and which
gives a purpose to life....The superman is the symbol, he is the exponent of this anxious and tragic period of crisis that the European consciousness is undergoing in the search for new sources of pleasure, beauty, and the ideal. He is the confirmation of our weakness, but at the same time the hope of our redemption. He is the sunset--and he is also the sunrise. He is above all a hymn to life--to life experienced with all our energies in a continual tension that is striving to something higher, something finer, something more tempting. 39