Reflections of a stormy petrel

I was listening to the Pope's last Angelus, and I found myself smiling when he greeted the Poles in their own language (as he did with the other main languages). I found myself thinking that there would be a special pleasure for citizens of Poland to hear a German addressing them in their own language. The recent history of the two countries has been a crescendo of mutual hatred, ending in the massacre of one-fourth of the Polish population, followed by the expulsion of millions of Germans under circumstances of terrible brutality.

But then I realized that really I could say the same for myself. When I grew in Milan, vicious prejudice against Germans was a living reality. And it's not just a matter of Nazi and torture jokes; it was a matter of real racial prejudice, with Germans being not only oppressive and homicidal, the designated enemy, but idiotic and foul-smelling too. Their Italian was uniformly terrible and expressed a basic stupidity. A German officer reaching an area flooded by its defenders is bewildered - his maps don't show any lakes there. (Germans, you see, are too stupid to understand the concept of wartime flooding.) One gag had a goat (the smelly animal par excellence) escape the company of a German: it couldn't stand the smell.

This is more than the inheritance of one, even two, world wars, and as a matter of fact it is rather better explained by much older events; it is, in fact, likely enough to be typically Milanese, and I might never have encountered it in such a virulent form if I had grown up, like my parents, in Rome. For Milan and Venice, along with surrounding areas, were the only parts of Italy to be under the direct government of the hated, German-speaking Empire of Austria from 1815 to 1859. Now, to call the hygienic twentieth-century German, even in his most murderous guise, evil-smelling, is clearly nonsense: even their mass murders were carried out with great attention to cleanliness - that was the meaning of the immediate mass destruction of murdered bodies in ovens, before they had the time to spread disease. But an evil smell was in fact a feature of the Austrian occupation troops, mostly not even German themselves, in the eighteen hundreds. In spite of their resplendent white uniforms, they had a bad habit of stiffening their martial moustaches with tallow, and apparently the result could be really stifling at close quarters. Milanese jokers seem to have needed no more than a mention of tallow or of smell to get a laugh.

This ethnic cliche' might have died out if the break with Austria after 1859 had been clean and swift; alas, it was neither, ended up trapping considerable Italian minorities behind a permanent frontier, and made sure that the hatred between the two countries lasted until the final Italian vengeance of 1918 and the annihilation of the Austrian Empire. Obviously, under such circumstances, the Milanese were not going to forget the evil smell of "German" troops for the mere reason that they were no longer around to be oppressive. Then there was the poisoned alliance of 1940-1943, the nightmarish occupation that followed, the savage partisan revolt of the last two years of war, the German massacres, all centred on Milan; and if ethnic hatred had ever had a chance to go out of style, that must have settled it. In a Milanese folk-song from the immediate post-war period, German soldiers are called "black rats":
...poeu su in muntagna a ciapà i ratt:
negher Todesch de la Wermacht,
mi fan morire domaa a pensagh!
"...then we took to the mountains, to do some rat-catching -
Black German rats from the Wehrmacht,
Makes me feel ill just thinking of them!"

These were the memories I grew up with. To people like me, and I would say to a huge amount of Europeans from all kinds of parts of the Continent, to welcome the German nation back to the world of civilized people must have been at least as much a dislocation as for Americans of the southern States to accept equal rights for their darker skinned fellow citizens; harder, if anything, because American blacks and whites at least spoke the same language, and, when the worst came to the worst, could sing the same songs. I know that, for a long time - even after a German hospital effectively saved my brother's life - I could not relate to Germans or to Germany without a certain sense of doubt and alienness. I speak German, I have been to Germany and Austria, I have German and Austrian friends, I warmly admire at least one German woman as a genius...

...but I think I can say honestly that I have never completely lost that sense of doubt and alienness until I first saw and heard Pope Benedict with my own eyes. One of the things this wonderful man immediately does is disarm ethnic hatred. He is so obviously kindly, so obviously open, so obviously everyone's beloved old uncle or father figure, that you can't help but take him as he is and love him for what he is. I like to think I am speaking for many others when I say that, to me, this gentle, tired old university professor is a living human token of peace and respect between nations.

Before World War One was won, there was a long and grim period during which Germans and Austrians, having destroyed Russia, threw everything they had against Italy, France and Britain, hoping to destroy them in turn. After a catastrophic defeat on the river Isonzo, called the battle of Caporetto, the remains of the Italian Army retreated to the river Piave and the huge mountain Monte Grappa, and stopped there, resolute to hold that line or die trying. A Neapolitan popular musician, E.A.Mario, wrote the song that spoke for those men, "The Legend of the Piave," which immediately became a kind of second national anthem:


(The singer is Mario himself.)

25 years later, the glory and purpose of the Piave and Mt.Grappa had mutated into an abyss of disgrace, treachery and beggary. Italy was shattered, occupied by enemy armies, and starving. Having entered the war on the wrong side through a mean and disgusting calculation of advantages, it had to break out of one disastrous alliance without being able to expect any sympathy from the other side.
The city of Naples rebelled against occupying German forces on September 28, 1943. After four days of ferocious fighting, the Germans were forced to withdraw, and the Allies walked into Italy's largest city without having to fire a shot. However, Naples, at the centre of a war zone and a devastated economy, soon found itself close to starvation, while full of comparatively well-paid American and allied troops. I’m sure you can see what came next. There was not much violence of any sort – except for a Moroccan unit that made itself notorious across Italy – but plenty of what one might call commercial exchange.
The daughters of middle-class families, clean, elegant, polite and pretty, were very popular with servicemen. Also, they had no colour prejudice – before the war, Italian colonists in Ethiopia had infuriated Mussolini, who was a genuine racist, by associating happily with local girls – and I have the impression that black American servicemen were delighted with the opportunity to buy the “services” of these segnorine. The whole matter was terribly painful to the girls and their families, and as the situation improved they did their best to pretend it never happened; but they were not allowed to. These well-brought-up young ladies did not have the “professional habits” which allow regular prostitutes to avoid pregnancies, and when the inevitable baby boom took place, many of the children turned out to be of an unexpected colour. I don’t think anything much happened – people just wanted to get the whole thing over with, and Naples is a seaport and has always been full of people of every sort anyway – but, this still being Naples, they wrote a song about it.



And what is the punch-line? That the author of the music was the very same E.A.Mario again.

Seventy years ago today, Charles De Gaulle, two-star general and junior French Minister for Defence, made his historic broadcast from London, calling for France not to surrender.

De Gaulle's position was feeble at best. Neither as an officer nor as a minister did he have anything more than junior authority; he was little known (mainly as the author of an intelligent book about tank warfare) and had no political standing whatever. The way he parlayed this hand, weak almost to nonexistence, into a position as military and political leader, allied commander, and eventually father of his nation, is one of the wonders of that tremendous stretch of history.

It is a commonplace (mostly an Anglo-American one) that the French did not seriously start resisting until the tide of war had clearly started going the other way. Well, and if that is so, so what? Individuals and families do not, unless they are mad or suicidal, set out to go to war on their own. The fact that the French ruling class as a whole, exhausted by twenty years of economic crisis, social conflict, and three-sided external cold war against Germany, Italy AND Britain (whose policy until 1938 was consistently pro-German and anti-French), just folded, and eventually walked quietly into the camp of the enemy, meant that the range of action of individuals was very limited. At first, anyone who wanted to continue the war against the Germans would have had to do so against the government, the police, and pretty much the whole establishment. To organize a nationwide movement without the support of at least a part of the establishment is hard enough in free countries; in a country that was the favoured resting place of a ruthless occupier, and in which a fraction of the establishment was busy taking vengeance for their own private humiliations in the days of the Popular Front, it would be even harder. Most people who dreamed of it would give up in despair, or run into traitors and Germans before they had the opportunity to do anything serious.

De Gaulle, however, was right, instinctively right, on one matter that transcended all this: the French did not really want a peace with Germany. They swallowed it because they could see no way out; but their deeper desire - except for the fraction which sincerely identified with Petain's fascism and enthusiastically chased down Jews and political enemies - was for Germany to be somehow, however unimaginable it might seem, driven back.

The speech was barely noticed in England; a few days later, De Gaulle was annoyed to find that it had not even been recorded by BBC technicians. But it made an immediate impression in France. I have read a touching story. In one of the enormous columns of refugees fleeing the Paris area ahead of the advancing Wehrmacht, a commotion suddenly arose. A young priest who was with the refugees started telling everyone that a French general in London had made a speech saying that France must not surrender. The name was mentioned, and an elderly lady who was with them suddenly burst out crying: "Monsieur le Cure'," she sobbed, "that is my son!" It was indeed Madame De Gaulle senior, and she was fortunate enough to die peacefully a month later, before the Gestapo or the new French government had become aware of her existence.

From that moment, that little known general with the towering body and the enormous nose, a gift to caricaturists, became the focus of all the unspoken hopes of the majority of the French. He had done a very brave thing: practically without men, without authority, without a political position or a following, he had put himself forward as the face of everything in France that still hoped or dreamed of continued fight and victory. He had painted a target on his own back, and if the Germans had won he would have been lucky to have died by firing squad as a soldier instead of being strangled with piano wire. And he knew it. If he was notoriously prickly, even insufferable, it was because he had, every day and in every condition, to be the embodiment of his country; to stand for soldiers and administration, industries and people, colonies and values, and demand the treatment and position of a full-fledged allied government.

In another situation, this could have been described as delusion or megalomania; as it proved, it was far-sightedness. De Gaulle had understood that, whatever thread of formal legitimacy might tie the government of Vichy to the pre-war Republic, and whatever residual ties of loyalty held soldiers and people to it, it had essentially delegitimated itself, by making itself the servile tool of its own enemies. Roosevelt, partly misled by his idiot ambassador to Vichy, and partly out of dislike for the arrogant minor aristocrat, did everything in his power to destroy De Gaulle's position - and all his plots and plans simply broke down, not just on the professional soldier's unexpected political skills, but above all on the undoubted fact that De Gaulle was the chosen leader of every Frenchman who would side with the allies. As soon as the Allies entered French territory, the Vichy government institutions simply crumpled, the locals reorganized the administration and started recruiting soldiers in De Gaulle's name. There was nothing anyone could do about it.

Just as De Gaulle's prickly attitude rested not on delusion but on a clear political need to be perceived and treated as the head of an allied country, so his original gamble rested not on heedless courage, but on a correct evaluation of factors. The rest of the French ruling classes, exhausted by twenty years of restless pressure, could only focus on the collapse of their domestic defences: but De Gaulle could see, and correctly said, that this was not just a French war, but a world war, and other powers would inevitably be drawn in before the end. No doubt this attitude also suited his own personality, just as defiance and endurance suited Churchill's; but both men did what they did not to satisfy some inner need, but because they could clearly see the future direction of events, in a way that lesser minds could not. It was not just because of their moral courage, but because of their rational insight, that they shared in the glory of having resisted and defeated evil, and in the name of fathers of their countries and leaders of free men.

...who loves to post about food, and once or twice has more or less asked me to. Well, I do not have much to say about food except that I enjoy it; but recently I have made myself what my parents used to call "wartime fish", and I thought, perhaps JD might like to know about this.

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