From la Favilla to Claudio Magris: Trieste’s European Identity

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses Claudio Magris’s concept of Mitteleuropa—which is central to his view of Europe—by situating it within the context of Triestine cultural history. It first presents the reflections on Europe formulated by the early generations of journalists in La Favilla, the newspaper founded in Trieste in 1836. This is followed by a discussion of the cultural and political writings of Scipio Slataper (1888–1915) and Giani Stuparich (1891–1961). Like Magris these journalists and writers assumed the role of public intellectuals and reflected on three pivotal periods in the history of Trieste by focusing on the question of cosmopolitanism (La Favilla), political and national identity (Slataper), and the feasibility of a European project after World War II (Stuparich). Against the prevailing totalizing nationalist vision, these writers explored the possibility of a non-national political identity based on a cultural notion of Europeanism. The different views of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Triestine journalists and writers of the idea of Europe, of Trieste as a border city, and of European identity, are illuminated by Magris’s own theoretical elaborations on borders, on Europe, and on Mitteleuropa, which further highlight their historical and conceptual intricacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Europe
• national identity
• Claudio Magris
• Scipio Slataper
• Giani Stuparich
• Mitteleuropa
• Pacifico Valussi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 57.

^2. Smid, European Vistas, 153.

^3. Magris, Utopia e disincanto, 51–65.

^4. Parmegiani, “Remembering War,” 91.

^5. Angelo Ara delineates the political and historical development of the city from 1719, when Charles VI proclaimed Trieste and Fiume free ports, to the Osimo Treaty of 1975, which formalized the border between Italy and Yugoslavia.

^6. Trieste, which was part of the Austrian empire since 1382, was annexed to Italy only at the end of World War I. At the end of the Second World War, the city and its hinterland were divided into two zones (A and B) controlled by the Allied forces and Yugoslavia. It was only with the London Memorandum of 1954 that Trieste was returned to Italy.

^7. Ara and Magris, Trieste: Un’identità di frontiera, 192.

^8. Ibid., 193.

^9. Ibid., 5.

^10. Ibid., 5–6. On the development of the term, see also Pizzi, City in Search of an Author, 48–55.

^11. In Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris, for instance, wrote an intellectual memoir of Trieste, which falls into a nostalgic mythical representation of the city of the belle époque, populated by beautiful cafes, promenades, elegant women, where even the “vivacious,” “colorful,” and “polyglot” proletariat were part of the fabric of this “well-ordered city” (63 and 47). The riots, strikes, diseases, and poverty that plagued Trieste’s proletariat during the heyday of Habsburg Trieste find no place in her romanticized view of the city.

^12. Magris, Utopia e disincanto, 63. Magris here quotes the famous dictum from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

^13. Ibid., 61.

^14. Ibid., 59.

^15. Magris, “Scrittura e le frontiere,” 68.

^16. Magris, Quale Totalità, 69–70.

^17. Magris, “Mitteleuropa di Arduino Agnelli,” 7.

^18. Ara and Magris, Trieste: Un'identità di frontiera, 200.

^19. Magris, “Mitteleuropa di Arduino Agnelli,” 10.

^20. Agnelli, Genesi dell'idea di Mitteleuropa, 101–6.

^21. Magris, “Mitteleuropa di Arduino Agnelli,” 10.

^22. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 54.

^23. Magris, “Mitteleuropa: Reality and Myth,” 147.

^24. Ibid.

^25. Valussi, “Storie municipali,” 378.

^26. Reill, Nationalists, 96–97.

^27. Dante, Paradise, in The Divine Comedy, 1.34.

^28. G., “Poesia del commercio,” 77.

^29. Lo Giudice, Karl Ludwig von Bruck, 155.

^30. Agnelli, Genesi Mitteleuropa, 100.

^31. Ibid., 24.

^32. Reill, Nationalists, 96.

^33. Magris, Infinito, 26–27.

^34. Valussi, “Bibliografia,” 30.

^35. Valussi, “L’Istria,” 287.

^36. Ibid.

^37. Reill, Nationalists, 95–97.

^38. P. and K., “Studi sugli slavi: storia,” 122.

^39. P. and K., “Studi sugli slavi: etnografia,” 97–104.

^40. Ivichievich, “Letter da Macarsca,” 105.

^41. Valussi, “Gallofagi e Gallomani,” 305–7.

^42. Magris and Giossi, “Europa dei diritti.” https://www.confinionline.it/detail.aspx?prog=53717.

^43. Pireddu, “On the Threshold,” 334.

^44. Valussi, “Cosmopoliti e Municipali,” 83.

^45. Ibid., 85.

^46. Magris, Itaca, 47–48.

^47. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 11.

^48. Valussi, “Cosmopoliti e Municipali,” 84.

^49. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 33.

^50. Valussi, “Il silenzio de’ grand’uomini,” 472, 473.

^51. Slataper, My Karst and My City, 168, 157.

^52. Ibid., 168.

^53. See Pappalardo, Modernism in Trieste, 18–19.

^54. Slataper, My Karst and My City, 77–78.

^55. Magris, “Mitteleuropa: Reality and Myth,” 150.

^56. Stuparich, Trieste Nei Miei Ricordi, 60.

^57. Stuparich, Scipio Slataper, 24.

^58. Stuparich, Trieste Nei Miei Ricordi, 61.

^59. Slataper, Scritti politici, 350–51.

^60. Stuparich, La Nazione Cèca [The Czech nation], 24. See also Stuparich, Trieste Nei Miei Ricordi, 56.

^61. Senardi, “L’incancellabile diritto,” 71.

^62. See Stuparich, Un porto tra mille e mille, 93–94.

^63. During the Fascist period he published Colloqui con mio fratello (1925), Guerra del ’15 (1931), the novel Ritorneranno (1941), and collections of short stories and novellas. He also edited Slataper’s writings and wrote the first monograph on him. See also Senardi, “L’incancellabile diritto.”

^64. In Italy and Its Eastern Border, Marina Cattaruzza describes the complexity of the political situation: “Italian and Slovenian nationalists and the Communists exerted great pressure on the population: each group claimed to enjoy the consensus of the majority among the inhabitants of the area in contention. However, those expressions of consensus were first and foremost the outcome of the enormous organizational effort by several organizations, each with its own orientation, which aimed to control the situation and mobilize the population” (289).

^65. Stuparich, Un porto tra mille e mille, 70.

^66. Ibid., 72.

^67. Ibid., 121.

^68. Ibid.

^69. See Hametz, Making Trieste Italian, 23–28.

^70. Stuparich, “Due inediti,” 167. In his letter he also sought the government’s financial support for the new journal he planned to launch.

^71. See also Maier, Saggi sulla Letteratura Triestina, 257–59.

^72. Stuparich, Piccolo Cabotaggio, 5.

^73. Magris, Journeying, 11–12.

^74. Ibid., 11.

^75. Magris, Utopia e disincanto, 240.

^76. Stuparich, Piccolo Cabotaggio, 9–11. Hereafter page numbers are cited in the text.

^77. Magris, Utopia e disincanto, 61.

^78. Ibid., 157–61.

^79. Magris, “Romanzo e Conoscenza,” 48.

^80. Magris., Utopia e disincanto, 11.

^81. Magris, “La speranza.” https://www.corriere.it/19_giugno_26/milanesiana-2019-claudio-magris-28-giugno-piccolo-teatro-6fcfb7b0-982f-11e9-ab34-56b2d57d687f.shtml.

^82. Ibid.

Additional information

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Elena Coda

Elena Coda, PhD, teaches Italian and Comparative Literature at Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA. Her research interests include Triestine literature, modernism, modern and postmodern landscapes in literature, and essayistic narrative. Her most recent publication is the edited volume My Karst and My City and Other Writings by Scipio Slataper, co-translated with Nicholas Benson (University of Toronto Press, 2020); her other publications include Scipio Slataper (Palumbo Editore, 2007), Balleriniana, co-edited with Beppe Cavatorta (Montanari Editore, 2010), and Revisioning Terrorism, co-edited with Ben Lawton (Purdue University Press, 2016).