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T H E U N M A K I N G OF F A S C I S T AESTHETICS
This page intentionally left blank
 University of Minnesota Press / Minneapolis London

T H E U N M A K I N G OF F A S C I S T AESTHETICS

Kriss Ravetto
Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ravetto, Kriss.
The unmaking of fascist aesthetics / Kriss Ravetto.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3742-3 — ISBN 0-8166-3743-1 (pbk.)
1. Motion pictures—Political aspects. 2. Fascism and motion pictures.
I. Title.
PN1995.9.P6R38 2001
791.43'658—dc21
2001003521

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Acknowledgments
vii

Introduction
1

1. Between Remembering and Surviving

21
2. Feminizing Fascism
53

3. Said: A Fatal Strategy

97
4. Mixing Memory with Desire
149
5. Fammi campa-. Survival without Omerta
187

Conclusion
227

Notes
235
Bibliography
269
Index
285
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

This study is a product of multiple interactions—between me, the films and the
critical thinking that have inspired this work, and the great number of friends and
colleagues who have generously offered their time, encouragement, and criticism.
First, I want to acknowledge my deep respect for the intellectual rigor and
aesthetic acumen of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, and Lina Wertmtiller. I also
wish to profess my enduring appreciation for my friends and mentors whose guidance
and criticism were invaluable. Thanks to Lucia Re, Sande Cohen, Mario Biagioli, Sam
Weber, and Margie Waller for engaging my thinking thoroughly, commenting on the
various versions of the manuscript, and providing me with a model of scholarly excel-
lence. Special thanks to Randy Rutsky, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Teshome Gabriel, Peter
Wollen, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith for reading the book in manuscript and provid-
ing stimulating remarks. I'm very grateful to the readers' reports from the University
of Minnesota Press for their attentive and extremely helpful commentaries. I also want
to thank Beatrice Lewin-Dumin, whose careful reading greatly helped me to revise the
manuscript. Thanks to Doug Armato for his astute suggestions and for seeing this
project through to the end.
My research was markedly facilitated by the generosity of various archives and
institutions: in Rome, Cineteca Nazionale, Istituto Luce, l'Archivio di Stato, and
Biblioteca Nazionale; in New York, MOMA's Film Archive and the New York Public
Library; in Los Angeles, the Getty Center Archive, UCLA Film Archive, and the
Academy of Motion Pictures Archive.
Finally, I am indebted to my family, including all of my dearest friends, for their
love and support. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father.

VII
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

I was made for love

That is my universe

I can't help it

It is my nature

Love's always been my game

Play it how I may

Men cluster to me

Like moths around a flame,

And if their wings burn,

I know I'm not to blame 1

—sung by Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel

How could nazism, which was represented by lamentable, shabby, puritan young men; by

a species of Victorian spinsters, have become everywhere today . . . in all the pornographic

literature of the world, the absolute reference to eroticism? All the shoddiest aspects of the erotic

imagination are now put under the sign of nazism. 2

—Michel Foucault

At the end of the twentieth century, numerous attempts to "settle accounts," "come
to terms with," and "work through" fascism, nazism, and the "Final Solution" have
garnered public attention throughout both the Western media and the West's high
academic circles. For example, recent political and scholarly discourses have demanded
that the nations and peoples who fostered and supported fascism acknowledge their

1
 2 — Introduction

"moral responsibility." This question of responsibility has also become a question of

"financial accountability" wherein industries like the Swiss banking industry, IG Far-
ben, Deustche Bank, Alliance, and Bertelsmann, to name a few, have not only been
accused of profiting from forced labor, the war, and the Holocaust in general, but in
many cases have been required to "pay" restitution to the victims and their families.
The notion of restitution itself has been justifiably problematized—indeed, how can
the victims of forced labor, internment, execution, and the Holocaust be "repaid"?
This insurmountable conflict between demands for responsibility and the impossibil-
ity of providing fair restitution has led some critics to call for "forgiveness" as a means
of resolving such impasses. Whether as calls for "moral responsibility," "restitution,"
or "forgiveness," such mandates require that the events of World War II be histori-
cized. Yet the very historicization and representation of fascism, nazism, and the
"Final Solution" remain ensconced within these contradictory impulses: on the one
hand fascism is historicized, represented as contained within an era—1922—1943 for
Italian fascism, 1933-1945 for German nazism, and 1938-1945 for the "Final Solu-
tion"—and on the other hand it has been dehistoricized, rendered unrepresentable—
an unresolvable or unspeakable horror and atrocity that cannot be overcome, only
commemorated. Similarly, while fascism and nazism are charged with having pro-
moted the most violent, if not atrocious, ideological practices and policies, they are
at the same time considered to have lacked any coherent political and ideological
agendas. That is, rather than being grounded on firm ideological convictions, fascism
and nazism are instead interpreted as politically inconstant: for Walter Benjamin,
fascism did not practice politics but the "aestheticization of politics," and for Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, nazism did not present an original system but a rhetorical per-
formance of myth ("a myth of a myth"). Hence, at the same time cultural critics and
historians treat fascism and nazism as a historical construct divorced from social, ide-
ological, and political systems of postwar Europe and America, these very same intel-
lectuals use fascism and nazism to mark the neutralization of time and history, for
example, "the end of history," "the end of poetry," and the "end of man." Rather than
address the history of fascism or the history of the Western fascist imaginary (the
history of the postwar representation of fascism), the focus of this book will
be to address the politics of history itself. It will concentrate on questions such as
these: If indeed fascism, nazism, and the "Final Solution" can be clearly separated
from the postwar era, why then have they remained at the limits of representation, or
the end of history? Moreover, can myth and aesthetics really be divorced from ide-
ology? The trajectory of this study is, thus, to investigate the historiographical inter-
pretations used to construct and situate the coming and going of volatile historical
subjects.
Many recent scholarly works argue that it may be too complex to historicize
nazism and/or fascism. Nonetheless, countless historians, cultural critics, filmmakers
and television producers continue to disassociate fascism from the present. Fascism
 Introduction — 3

presents a disturbance on the smooth surface of narrative history: for Italian philoso-
pher Benedetto Croce, fascism is an ellipsis; for numerous German historians, a stain
on humanity or, even, an apocalyptic event; and for conservative ideologues, an aber-
ration of the German or Italian identity. Clearly, the question of how fascism is to
be read presents a charged political controversy. For example, debates such as the His-
torikerstreit (historians' conflict in the 1980s over whether nazism and the "Final Solu-
tion" can in fact be represented) no longer simply contest historical facts but dispute
the politicization of such facts (historicism itself). As a consequence, the terrain of
argumentation has shifted from the moral stance of "telling it like it is/was" to the act
of selecting what is appropriate for analysis, thereby challenging the traditional role of
the historian or cultural critic—whether he or she should be a master or a guardian of
the past, a judge or a witness.3 "Telling it as it is" can no longer be considered an unbi-
ased account of the past. Furthermore, historians and cultural critics such as Saul
Friedlander, Zygmunt Bauman, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Francois Lyotard question
if, in fact, the fascist past can be made sense of, worked through, or mastered. If the
events of World War II are unmasterable (they neither pass away nor can be repre-
sented or synthesized), then, as William Spanos asks, how can we "analyze and debate
the ideological origins and the scope of these appalling Nazi practices?"4 In his analy-
sis of the Historikerstreit, Charles Maier argues that there is an inherent contradiction
in the positing of fascism (specifically the "Final Solution") as unspeakable, unmas-
terable, or unrepresentable. He writes: "the suffering [of the victims] is depicted as
ineffable, incommunicable, and yet always to be proclaimed. It is intensely private,
not to be diluted, but simultaneously public so that society will confirm the crimes."5
Interestingly, what is at stake in the representation of fascism and nazism seems
to be outside of histories that restrict themselves to questions of historical context and
analyze the specific content of these historical events. As I will argue throughout, the
real stakes are set by the politics of memory (not just the victims') and the recon-
struction of a legitimate Western European identity and economy in the aftermath of
the war. The aim of historical narratives, in respect to Western identity and economic
crises, is one of containment—a project of deterrence—as much as it is one of ideo-
logical positioning—the reconstruction of a moral ethos. Thus questions have
emerged: What constitutes the event of fascism? What are the criteria for representing
a historical event? And how is this narrative to be plotted if narrative is indeed deter-
minative? The very attempt to narrativize and moralize fascism translates what is per-
ceived as the object of this moral narrative, the event of fascism as a "lived experience,"
into representation, which consequently implicates such moral and political repre-
sentations of fascism in the restaging, stylizing, or aestheticizing of such an event. Rep-
resentations of nazis as alcoholic bureaucrats (e.g., Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List),
homosexual torturers (e.g., Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism and
Roberto Rossellini's Open City [Roma citta apertaj), unmerciful, calculating scientists
who use people as test rats for their human experiments (e.g., Hannah Arendt's
 4 — Introduction

Eichmann in Jerusalem and Ingmar Bergman's The Serpents Egg), or a "stain" on the
face of humanity (Saul Friedlander's Reflections ofNazism) transform the "authentic-
ity" of the event into the theatricality (dramatics) of moral and immoral postures. As
a consequence, the nazi and the fascist have by now acquired generalized attributes of
evil that slip over into different discourses—alluding to questions of gender and sex-
uality, religion, hygiene, decadence. Contemporary theorists and writers of all sorts
use and borrow from other, equally dubious, conventional aesthetic references, such
as the modernists' depiction of man as a machine, Social Darwinists' depictions of
racial and sexual inferiority, the fin-de-siecle portrayal of the femme fatale as an
emblem of decadence and decadent sexuality, Victorian notions of hygiene and fem-
inine mass hysteria. In this respect, the Historikerstreit demonstrated what happens
when the more nazism is represented, the more political its connotation becomes.
At the same time numerous historical, documentary, or cinematic projects aim at
bankrupting ("unmaking") the efficacy of fascist culture in the postwar period, many
histories, documentaries, fiction films, and television series amplify the paradox of
representation—the tension between the unspeakable or intensely singular (personal
or subjective) experiences of fascism and nazism, and the extremely public (media)

In Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914), the reclining diva, Sophonisbe (Italia Almirante Manzin), represents the decadent
and orientalist image of femme fatale circulating at the fin-de-siecle.
 Introduction — 5

obsession with historicizing, aestheticisizing, remembering, commemorating, and in-

terpreting fascism, nazism, and the "Final Solution." In addition, many such repre-
sentations, whether historical, theoretical, or filmic, apply conventional (prefascist)
aesthetic images of evil (sexual perversion, intoxication, madness, disease, decadence,
and impurity) to fascism and nazism as a means of expelling them from the present.
Friedlander observes that the postwar "attraction [to nazism] lay less in any explicit
ideology than in the power of emotions, images, and phantasms."6 However, the
images of perversity, obscenity, inhumanity, and horror that are attributed to fascism,
nazism, and the "Final Solution" cannot be exculpated from ideological discourses;
they are, indeed, fastened to preexisting moral codes and sexual and racial theories
(Darwinism, psychoanalysis, criminology, sexology, and sociology). Therefore, rather
than unmake fascist aesthetics, the result of this retrofashioning of fascism and nazism
(depicting fascism and nazism as decadent, camp, kitsch, sentimental, or aberrant)
attests to the impossibility of disengaging visual and rhetorical constructions from
political, ideological, and moral codes. The argument of this book is that contempo-
rary discourses about fascism are not discontinuous with rhetorical, moral, and visual
analogies. And these analogies, comparisons, emphases, and reductions testify to our
political finagling. In order to represent or keep the past present in our memories—
whether that means to write history, bear witness, or visualize—which most cultural
critics (aside from those on the extreme right) agree we must do, historians, cultural
critics, andfilmmakerscannot avoid rhetorical, moral, and visual analogies if we wish
to represent at all.
The history of fascism offers an interesting case in historical, aesthetic, and
gender politics, drawing on the discourses of impurity and purity and providing only
the appearance of stable absolutes of good and evil. This book examines how the
disquisition of fascism and the "Final Solution," predicated on the notion of unrep-
resentability, is in fact overrepresented in such a way as to belie certain historical and
historiographic shifts. These shifts range from socialist or Marxist politics in neoreal-
ist cinema, psychoanalytic approaches to neodecadent (camp and kitsch) films,
to Pier Paolo Pasolini's radical politics of entropy. The approach of this project is both
interdisciplinary and critical: it is designed to investigate different theoretical, cine-
matic, literary, and historical approaches by calling into question past and current
models of legitimacy that reinstitute stable concepts of morality, sexuality, and iden-
tity from the pre- to the postfascist years; to scrutinize the absolution with which clear
moral judgments regarding fascism and the "Final Solution" have been made, and the
production of images of radical evil, which in the postwar period support such moral
pronouncements. The question is not, however, only one of critiquing the aesthetic
coding of morality, but one of disengaging such moral or equally immoral represen-
tations from fascist moralism itself. That is, it is also a question of exploring fascism's
own complicity with capitalist economic systems and bourgeois social values.71 adopt
Pasolini's relentless critique of fascism as a mode of criticism that proposes that the
gesture of disengagement is itself suspect—that is, discursive and visual disengagement
 6 — Introduction

reveals the postwar intellectual, political, and historical culture's vested interest in sal-
vaging bourgeois moralism, the language of absolute righteousness, and capitalist
institutions from the stain of fascism.
This notion of "stain" or blemish on history and humanity has served as a
point of departure for a series of historical, theoretical, and cinematic accounts of
the events of World War II; it justifies its own moral indignation on the principles of
religious moralism, binary models of good and evil. Ironically, this model often
employs prefascist images and narratives of evil (primarily images of decadence),
images that the fascists labeled bourgeois decadence. Hence there is a certain "mad-
ness" in attributing the very same characteristics of decadence, evil, sexual perversion,
and impurity to the fascists that the fascists once used to demarcate racial, sexual, and
political others. In many postwar fictional and historical accounts, the nazi and the
fascist become the acme of evil, transformed into symbols of violence, impurity, and
immorality; yet these icons are often anachronistically fastened to more generic
images of evil. For example,filmssuch as Luchino Visconti's The Damned (La. cadut
degli Dei, 1969), Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist {l\ conformista, 1970), and Bo
Fosse's Cabaret (1972) present fascism as an amalgam of decadent images, specificall
the image of the femme fatale, the transvestite, the sexual pervert, the Untermensch,r
feminine disease circulating at the turn of the century. While such representations of
fascism feminize and sexualize evil (otherness) as a means of critiquing conventional
gender roles, they cloak what Janet Staiger calls the "reactionary politics of the new
man," who at the turn of the century employed scientific, racial, psychoanalytic, and
anthropological models to justify his superiority over his racial, economic, and sexual
others.8
The fascist deviant represented in the films examined in this book functions
as public spectacle while marking a return to the language of purity. In other words,
the representation of the impure (deviant) is connected to violence performed by
the language of purity. Narratives and analytical models from which postwar artists,
filmmakers, historians, and theorists construct their own narrative and ideological
interpretations reveal de facto encoding of historical events to satisfy present symbolic
roles. These symbols (good, evil, pure, impure, etc.) organize the singularity or speci-
ficity of a historical event, yet they install the event in a transhistorical model (a moral
trying to be a phenomenological model), and to that degree reconstitute a transcen-
dental model. The historic events of World War II have been repeatedly read and
reread in terms of contemporary politics, linking "the event" to transtemporal ques-
tions of morality and responsibility to the past. How can a universal Western model
of moral judgment be designed to reaffirm the present's "responsibility" to historical
subjects when it encourages simplistic (polemical) oppositions? WTiat I question is not
only the morality but also the "purity and simplicity" that Theodor Adorno insists on
in his claim that" [the Jews] are branded as absolute evil by those who are absolute evil,
and are now in fact the chosen race."9 One purpose of this book is to dispute com-
plicity in a binary model that endorses the discourse of absolutes and ensures their
 Introduction — 7

symbolic centrality. This type of simplification, the switching of absolute evil from
the myth of the Jews as "the menace of humanity" {Die Drohung des Untermenjuderi)
to the sadistic nazis, is one of many that promote a Manichean logic of absolutes,
abating or even erasing murkier issues such as the relationship of capital, bourgeois
moralism, and gender politics to fascism. The effacing of such issues allows for an
exculpation of the "lesser of two evils." The Italian fascist regime and the French Vichy
government have been problematized by foregrounding the shift from the spectacle of
fascism to nazism that occurs in French and Italian postfascist, neorealist cinematic
and literary movements, where the depiction of occupying nazis renders the French
and Italians as the victims of war. Thus the Italian and French working classes are recu-
perated from an abject fascist period as the subject of a new historical discourse, the
resistance. This recovery of a legitimate Italian and French national identity, however,
returns to a binary economy, that is, it is constructed in opposition to the image of the
feminized or excessively cruel nazi, as well as the sexually corrupt or ravaged women
(as seen, for instance, in the films Open City (1946), Bitter Rice (Riso amaro, 1949), and
Two Women {La ciociara, i960). Such comparisons do not stop at the "relative evil" of t
Italian fascists or French collaborators, as opposed to the supreme or exceptional evil

Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) produces the infamous icon of Weimar decadence, Lola Lola
(Marlene Dietrich).
 8 — Introduction

of the nazis, but further perpetuate "wishful thinking" by disengaging the abnormal
(exceptional) evil of Hitler from that of his executioners.
Ironically, at the same time the identity of the victim has been sanitized (purified
or cleansed), the victimizer takes on a plethora of characteristics of generic evil, con-
stantly returning to current political events via analogies to fascism or nazism. That is,
the threat of the return of fascism is kept alive by constantly displacing what Zygmunt
Bauman calls the fascist "truth of modernity" onto what the West considers to be less
modern or civilized figures and nations such as Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Serbia, and
Cambodia.10 As a result, fascism and nazism are obsessively historicized and thereby
actually dehistoricized. Although they are metonymically linked to the present
through current atrocities and political leaders, these very leaders and current events
are returned to the past, reinscribed in a predetermined narrative of evil. Similarly, an
identification with the victims of fascism, who maintain a certain cultural (contextual)
specificity, legitimizes more recent victims at the same time it absorbs their meaning
(uniqueness). Auschwitz, as Lyotard argues, has indeed become a model.11 Hence it is
only through identification with the dead and the downtrodden that the scholar,
artist, or cultural critic can resurrect a legitimate subject from which he or she can
speak. Scholarship's implication in the "politics" of representing fascism and nazism
opens onto submerged interconnections of myth and academia's own ideological
legitimation in historical narratives and theories of history. Within these recodings,
the present is inoculated from the past's extension.
Readings that slip over into national, international, and interethnic politics (who
can speak as a victim, who is silenced as a victimizer), and transcendental theories
(promotion of good models, from which we can judge right from wrong, good from
evil, and the pure from the impure), whether cinematic, narrative, or historical, treat
the event of fascism and the "Final Solution" as a model that supports larger concep-
tual or narrative frameworks. Such idealized models allow historians orfilmmakersto
play the part of judge or cultural moralist by speaking not only in the name of the vic-
tims, the downtrodden, and even the witnesses, but also in the name of truth, as a
third party (a disinterested inquiry). This practice of disengagement masks its own
violence, its own desire for purity and moral righteousness at the expense of its
other—even if it is only an intellectual distance. William Spanos observes that such
scholarly acts of disengagement "are inscribed in the [binary] logic that makes the
Nazis the absolutized scapegoat of Occidental humanism and thus exonerates the
latter—especially the English, the French and the Poles—of its complicity in this
event and with racism in general."12 Although models that read nazism and the "Final
Solution" as the product of Western modernism seem to erase "the gray zone" of com-
plicity (relativizing or minimizing the participation of non-nazis), they refuse to sanc-
tion the reconstitution of the Western subject as a form of the Platonic good. With
the complete discrediting of nazism as both the paragon of absolute evil and the "Final
Solution" as the failure (end) of Western humanism (modernism, history, culture),
 Introduction — 9

the only salvageable (legitimate, moral) subjective position emerges as that of victims
and those who represent them, which includes those who guard against any fascist
symptoms.
The discourse of victimization (specifically that of the Holocaust) is, therefore,
also fraught with controversies. Many critical thinkers question the discourse of
singularity as applied to the fascist state, not for insisting on the uniqueness of the
"Final Solution," but for presenting it as only "a Jewish Problem," as well as render-
ing it as the model of modernity; a model against which all other genocides and pub-
lic suffering must be measured. Spanos argues that, "given the insistent reference in
the planning discourse of official Nazism to 'judeobolshevism' as the essential enemy
of Germany, isn't the Nazis' extermination of an untold number of civilian Slavs not
to say other 'inferior' peoples, a part of the discourse of the Holocaust?" {Heidegger
and Criticism, 243). Similarly Maier asks: "Do Armenians and Cambodians also have
a right to publicly funded Holocaust museums ... [we relativize other persecutions]
Biafra was only hunger, Cambodia was only a civil war, the destruction of the Kurds
was not systematic; death in the Gulag lacked national identification marks" {The
Unmasterable Past, 165-66). While Bauman notes the singular nature of the Holo-
caust, "the fact that the Jews had been marked for total destruction," he states, "even
so, the Holocaust was not simply a Jewish problem." Making the "Holocaust the
property of the Jews,... reduce[s] the Holocaust to a private trauma and grievance of
one nation," {Modernity and the Holocaust, ix-x). The battle over who has the right to
speak as a victim, or who is the "purest" victim, determines who has the right to pre-
sent political subjectivity, yet this also, as Omer Bartov points out, "must not be made
into the focus of Jewish existence, for it is a black hole that sucks everything beautiful
and hopeful into its void."13 Within the discourse of uniqueness the act of historizing
(making analogies, establishing a continuous narrative) is equated with relativizing or
neutralizing the non-narrative or radically traumatic experience of the victim. Conse-
quently, it has been argued that such readings reduce not only the Holocaust but
Jewish identity to a private trauma. Moreover, any comparison of the genocide of the
Jews (1940—1945) to that of the Armenians (1894—1896 and 1915—1923), Cambodians
(1971-1972), Rwandans (1995-1996), Native Americans, and others opens itself up to
apologetics and therefore historical relativism—arguments that attempt to depict the
Holocaust as just one event among many. Yet this controversy over relativizing the
Holocaust itself exhibits a series of enigmas: on the one hand, any comparison of other
genocides to the "Final Solution" might relativize its uniqueness, thereby downplay-
ing the true horror of nazi and fascist atrocities; on the other hand, the very insistence
on presenting the "Final Solution" as a radical break in human history obscures the
suffering and uniqueness of victims of other wars and genocides or other victims of
nazism and fascism (Slavs and Gypsies, for instance). Therefore this book questions
the presentation and representation of fascism modeled on Eurocentric generational
classifications in which one's identity is determined by one's relation to the events of
In Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969), Martin von Essenbeck (Helmut Berger) gives a campy performance of
Dietrich in drag as the Reichstag burns.
 Introduction — 11

World War II. For example, Jiirgen Habermas argues that the "period between 1933
and 1945 is the horizon or the point of departure for identification." Hence Habermas
distinguishes generations of German men (and possibly women) on their conscious-
ness of guilt or the lack thereof, locating thefixedimage of Western twentieth-century
history on the "unloading ramp at Auschwitz." And then, in an almost biblical ges-
ture, he turns this identification into an original sin, "a traumatic refusal to pass away
from a moral imperfect past tense that has been burned into our national history."14
It is not only an insistence on clear boundaries and borders that he returns to histori-
cize, but also the empowering and securing of nazism as world historical event—a
symbolic point of departure and, more importantly, an inescapable traumatic point of
rupture—tactics of representation that point to their own political agenda, subse-
quently maintaining the Occident as a negative model—one of failure that dwarfs all
histories, economies, and differences. It is precisely this process of silencing difference
by reducing the discourse to that of binary opposites, failed desires, and identifications
that has led Jean-Francois Lyotard to claim that "one does not dare think out nazism
because it has been beaten down like a mad dog, by a police action, and not in con-
formity with the rules accepted by its adversary's genres of discourse (argumentation
for liberalism, contradiction for Marxism), [therefore,] it has not been refuted" {The
Differend, 106). The very site of this silence is marked by an aura of the forbidden an
thus empowered as what Primo Levi calls "una malattia morale o un vezzo estetico o
un sinistro segnale di complicita" (a moral sickness or an aesthetic veil or a sinister sign
of complicity.)15
In order to highlight and contest ideological or narrativizing projects (memory
politics), this text will apply Nietzsche's genealogical method, a process of uprooting
the origins (motives) of dialectical thinking (conservative, liberal, and leftist) and test-
ing the sanctity of its moral legitimations, especially that of the good model itself.
Accordingly, thefirstchapter begins by situating postwar cinematic representations of
fascism, nazism, and the "Final Solution" in relation to historical, theoretical, and
moral models, shifting (in the second chapter) to cultural and aesthetic references of
these cinematic representations; the last three chapters explore Pier Paolo Pasolini's
Said (1975), Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974), and Lina Wertmiiller's Seven
Beauties (PasquaLino settebellezze, 1976),filmsthat critically work through a series of
historical, theoretical, moral, and aesthetic models. This book sets out to problema-
tize theoretical and cinematic projects that aim at either distancing scholarly, histori-
cal, aesthetic, or political discourse from fascism, nazism, and the "Final Solution" in
order to reaffirm a positive national, subjective identity for the survivors (as in the
case of neorealist cinema), or to submerge criticism of fascism in what Sande Cohen
calls "passive nihilism"—"the logic of affirming the least negative choices"—or what
Nietzsche calls "self-narcotization"—indulging in the aesthetics of excess and the
hedonistic-pessimistic pleasure of failure or cruelty (as in the case of neodecadent
cinema).16 While all of the films of the postwar period addressed in this book con-
demn fascism, each critical mode of representation (neorealism, neodecadentism, and
 12 — Introduction

the films of Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller) expresses its own political and ideo-
logical agenda, even if it is nihilistic or anti-ideological. Neorealism returns to the nar-
rative mode of tragedy, assigning the victim to the role of protagonist in order to
restore legitimate political subjects and national identities in the immediate postwar
period (from 1945 to the early 1950s). Neodecadent cinema, on the other hand, explode
bourgeois moral models by examining the postwar fascination with sexualization and
eroticization of fascism and nazism, that is, popular cultures rendering of fascism and
nazism as sublime. As Andrew Hewitt argues in Political Inversions, neodecadent
constructions of fascism are deeply influenced by the Frankfurt School's "psychopo-
litical writings [wherein sexuality] is pathologized as a potentially fascistic fascination
with the erotics of power, and that fascism, in turn, is presented as a psychosexual
manifestation of homosexual narcissism."17 Instead, Said, The Night Porter, and Seven
Beauties, expose various fascistic economies that extend beyond historical fascism—
reaching into the discourses of victimization, gender difference, capitalism, and bour-
geois moralism.
I question neorealism's curious resuscitation of the binary model of moral posi-
tions (identification with the victims and condemnation of the victimizers), given its
awareness of the failure of such a moral model under fascism. This restitution of moral
positions is reflected in the repetition of prefascist aesthetic codes, in the more
ambiguous positions of the femme fatale and the homosexual (both male and female),
who remain associated with pure evil, even after their exclusion (and even in some
cases extermination) by both fascists and nazis. While such aesthetic codings of evil
clearly mark the neorealists' attempt to distantiate themselves from fascist politics in
the immediate postwar period—presenting the Left as a legitimate (antifascist, moral)
political ideology—the very rehearsal of these aesthetic codes implicates not only
Marxist politics but also realist aesthetics in "fascistic tactics." As the neodecadent cin-
ema of Visconti, Fosse, and Bertolucci suggests, binary thinking necessitates the
"fixing" of a site of "illegitimate sexuality" in order to reinforce or solidify its own con-
cept of legitimacy. Hence neodecadent representations of nazism and fascism, which
arose after the economic boom years in Europe (the late 1950s through mid-1960s),
questioned the Left's ability to sanitize European history and politics by providing the
resistance as an alternative history to that of European fascism. The neodecadent reex-
amination of fascism focused less on political ideology and more on a psychoanalytic
examination of self, particularly the fascist psychosexual self. As a result, depictions of
nazis and fascists were often sexually pathologized. Yet the sexually subversive figure
appearing in many neodecadent representations tended to destabilize unequivocal
ideological and symbolic constructions such as human nature, both "good and evil,"
and national subjects besides the obvious concepts of gender and hierarchical family
and state structures. In this case, the recurrent images of the prefascist and fascist peri-
ods foregrounded the limits of a discourse of purity by manifesting these sexually
ambiguous images as both erotic and repugnant. However, neodecadent cinema itself
Liza Minneili plays the role of Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972), recalling the famous Dietrich posturing as
she sings "Cabaret."
 14 — Introduction

continued to reinscribe the femme fatale in the filmic imaging and reimaging of
fascism and nazism.
Unlike neorealist cinema, neodecadentist cinema projects a pessimistic prognosis
as to whether postwar society can unmake or work through fascism, yet it also resigns
itself to what Nietzsche calls "the voluptuous enjoyment of eternal emptiness, art 'for
its own sake' and 'pure knowledge' as narcotic states of disgust with oneself" (The Will
to Power, § 29). Michel Foucault implies that the condition for eroticizing nazism is
that there remain an uncertain threat, a potential menace that operates as the ultimate
sign of transgressive sexuality. Thus the neodecadent resituating of the nazi as the
locus of subversive sexual attraction and the subsequent equation of nazism with sex-
ual transgression not only conflate sexuality with pure evil and pure violence, but also
reduce sexuality to a narrative of repression, thereby abstracting sexuality and
installing it within the reactionary or "dubious discourse of the symptom," to use the
words of Paul de Man. In his critique of the mechanisms of historical and psychoan-
alytical modes of interpretation, de Man argues that "the analogy with psychoanalysis
underscores the epistemological complexity of the historian's task. Both analyst and
historian point to cognition that, for reasons variously identified as psychological,
epistemological, or in the case of Heidegger, ontological, is not available as an actual
presence and therefore requires a labor of interpretation or of reading prior even to
determining whether it can ever be reached."18 The concern about neodecadentism is
precisely in the mechanism of interpretation and its reading of cognition in relation
to a historical event, thereby giving it reason or making it readable. In relation to
neodecadent cinema, I underline the evasiveness of what is called a symptom, its
adherence to the predetermined logic of failure (the inability to transform because of
its own indulgence in or resignation to the pleasure of displeasure).
What distinguishes films like Said, The Night Porter, and Seven Beauties from The
Damned, Cabaret, and Lili Marleen is that they attempt to disrupt both the feminiz-
ing and moralizing method of historicizing fascism, as well as the reliance on binary
models to ensure the separation between purity and radical evil. Rather than respond
to the failure of the 1968 student protests (against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the
complicity of major European politicalfigureswith fascism and fascist practices, and
the growing discontent over the Left's capitulation to the politics of liberal humanism)
to induce radical change, Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller neither surrender to the
politics of cynicism (passive nihilism) nor relinquish criticism's radical potential to
reevaluate values. Instead, they relentlessly deconstruct binary models and their cul-
tural permutations, neofascism and neocapitalism. While agreeing with the neo-
decadentists that fascism persists in the postwar period in the form of moralism and
the repressive state and economic apparatuses, Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller
genealogically trace the transition of the "old fascism" of Hitler and Mussolini, pred-
icated on the cult of the hero, to "neofascism," which has replaced the hero with the
moral model. They decodify the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini by unearthing the
network or alliance of power under fascism, exposing the inextricable connections
 Introduction — 15

of bourgeois morality, technological modernization, and capitalist socioeconomic

structure plugged into fascist regimes.19 In an attempt to go beyond good and evil,
beyond the fascist system of Mussolini and Hitler, they configure a new strategy of
resistance. However, this resistance does not imply that they dissociate postwar Italy
and Italians from fascist Italy and its intellectuals (nor Germany and Germans from
nazism), as the neorealists did. Rather, they renounce the insidious disassociations
from fascism, since these narrative and historic disengagements turn fascism into an
event (singular and unified) while maintaining its ideological apparatuses—its moral-
ism, its worship of technological weapons of production and destruction, its mod-
ernizing process, its binary economy, and its creation of new evils, new enemies, cold
wars, class wars, and race wars.
Because Cavani and Wertmiiller follow Pasolini's understanding of neofascism
or contemporary society as a networking of repressive forces, capitalism, moralism,
Catholicism, bourgeois culture, and patriarchal hegemony, I read them alongside
Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, since it is in these texts
that fascism is presented not as a political ideology nor a totalitarian organization but
as an agency of desire—a "desiring-machine," a "war machine" that infects every level
of social desire with the desire for repression and abolition. Thus, in an attempt to
disaarm neofascism and to salvage desire (a process of becoming other or different),
Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller scandalize all ideological determinations that they
see conforming to a model of purification. Their films expose the logic of disengage-
ment, revealing the impossibility of recuperating (narrating or historicizing) a "pure
or legitimate historical subject, even that of victims, since this would imply that their
death and suffering can be reabsorbed into historical thinking through some sort of
sacrificial logic. More importantly for Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller, this identifi-
cation would mean that those who speak in the name of the victims would have to dis-
associate themselves radically from the logic (morality) of the system of victimization/
fascism—bourgeois moralism and neocapitalism. Rather than reaffirm this critical
distance, or the comfortable distance of the spectator, they problematize the inter-
secting discourses of nazism and sexuality by returning to the discourse of intimacy—
an imposed intimacy on the victimizer.
Unlike numerous other films made on this subject, Said, The Night Porter, and
Seven Beauties focus on the relationship of the victim and the victimizer, exploring the
implication of the victims with the perpetrators, a participation that Bauman sees
as a "crucial condition [for] the success of [SS] bureaucrats."20 For example, while
Pasolini is primarily concerned with the dehumanizing forces of the perpetrators
(bourgeois fascists/capitalists), their systematic devaluation of moral considerations in
favor of a sadistic rationality of excessive self-indulgence (the rabid consumption of all
otherness), Cavani and Wertmuller examine how the act of seducing as well as being
seduced causes the subject(s) to become other; they focus on the spectacle of seduc-
tion as a product of an enigmatic intimacy between victim and victimizer. In the films
of Cavani and Wertmuller this "dangerous" intimacy transforms the fixed economy of
 16 — Introduction

master/slave (situating the audience as a voyeuristic onlooker) to a more liquid econ-

omy whereby the victim and victimizer repeatedly exchange roles, forcing the audi-
ence to identify with undesirable characters and situations.
Although Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller are equally implicated in the sexual-
ization of the figure of the nazi, as Marguerite Waller puts it, they are "insistently
ambiguous and open, [they] offer too many possible readings of figures, actions,
images and sequences."21 They confuse and constantly transmute the "revival" theater
of fascist sadomasochism where the feminine is forced into two contradictory posi-
tions: one of the victim par excellence, and the other of the absolute sadistic victim-
izer. WTiile Pasolini presents both capitalism and fascism as codependent, antierotic
forms of supreme rationalism (a ferocious force of consumption and contamination),
Cavani estranges the notion of the "pure" victim by reintroducing the eroticism of
masochism, and Wertmiiller replaces the image of the nazi as a sadistic feminized man
with an equally sadistic masculinized woman. These filmmakers attempt to disrupt
the traditionally engendered subject/object relationship, refusing to render their films
knowable or recoverable. That is, they resist cultural cooptation by disappointing the
conventional narrative and aesthetic expectations, exaggerating fascism's antiaesthetic,
if not grotesque, characteristics and its anti-idealistic forces that make it unconsumable.
This treatment of what has otherwise been considered a taboo subject (the
intimacy of the victim/victimizer relationship, the sexualization of nazism, the repre-
sentation of neocapitalism as codependent on neofascism, and the questioning of
legitimate subject positions) has not only caused film critics, historians, and cultural
theorists to renounce these films, labeling them "immoral," "pornographic," and
"depraved," but also to jettison analytical readings. Recently critics have returned to
analyze these films, yet many readings continue to marginalize what they consider
their scandalous rendition of fascism, nazism, and the "Final Solution". The object of
this book is to read these films in terms of radical thinking—that is, to place them
in the tradition of radical criticism that tests the sanctity of all value judgments,
moralisms, and subject positions and does not transpose one ideological model for
another but rather seeks to question the projection of models of interpretation onto
all human experiences and events. This form of radicalism comprises what Jean
Baudrillard calls a fatal strategy: a theory whose strategy is ironic, designed to decon-
struct the institutionalization of transgression—the institutionalization or globaliza-
tion of fascistic desires for repression and abolition. Because Pasolini, Cavani, and
Wertmiiller understand fascism to have permeated every social desire with a fatalistic
desire for repression, consumption, and destruction, they do not provide for a new
subjective identity to emerge from their narratives; rather they call for an implosion
of moral and social values. Their strategy is to mimic the language of fascism itself, to
replicate its gesture of destabilizing the position of subjectivity, which does not allow
for the re-creation of moral positions but in fact confronts them as totalizing dis-
courses. This strategy of radical criticism that seeks to undermine dominant discourses
In Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties (1976), Shirley Staler plays the nazi commandant whom Pasqualino tries to seduce.
 18 — Introduction

leaves no space, not even a critical one, as a viable subjective position. Thus this strat-
egy manifests itself as a lethal antibody, which is no longer designated to restore the
Platonic model of the good to health but to corrupt the simulated, inauthentic repli-
cations of that model in order to expose the radical depravity of its progeny, the sys-
tem of "normal" morals and meaning itself. As a consequence Said, The Night Porter,
and Seven Beauties force spectators to become conscious of the fact that they cannot
interpret the films in terms of traditional Western narratives or histories recording
both gender politics and the Holocaust.
Said, The Night Porter, and Seven Beauties scandalize the politics of identity and
identification, which hinge on the assembling of communities whose pedigree is
either sanctioned or renounced by an appeal to "history." Much has outraged critics
and spectators of these films: first, these three directors' repudiation of a facile identi-
fication with certain types of one-dimensional narratives; second, their exposure of the
couching of politics (sexual, ethnic, national, economic) in historical modes of repre-
sentation; and third, their refusal to participate in what Lyotard calls a "dialectic of
redemption." These moralistic types of narratives can be seen in, for example, the
tragic feminization of victims such as those found in George Stevens's The Diary of
Anne Frank (1959) and Alan Pakulas Sophies Choice (1982); the romantic masculiniz-
ing of antifascists as depicted in Josh Waletzky's Partisans ofVilna (1986) and John
Huston's Victory(1981); the ttragic-romantic nrratives of resistance appearing in
Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo (i960), and the
Taviani brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982); the moralistic antifascism of
Rossellini's Open City (1946) and Michael Verhoeven's The White Rose (1983); the sal-
vageable good (nazi) venture capitalists exemplified in Steven Spielberg's depiction of
Oskar Schindler {Schindler's List, 1993), the good German soldiers as opposed to bad
nazi soldiers in Sam Peckinpah's Steiner (a.k.2.. The Iron Cross, 1977), or the moral Aus-
trian family characterized by Robert Wise in The Sound of Music (1965). At stake
in these righteous, and therefore cathartic, renditions of tragic victims of fascism
and heroic martyrs of the resistance is not only a desire to cleanse the postwar period
of the disease of fascism—to isolate it or contain it—but also a determination of
who will be able to claim the so-called copyrights to historical figures, and for what
political ends.
While resembling, by often citing, previous incarnations of decadence, represen-
tations and interpretations of fascism and nazism, in order to render visible the
ambiguous constructions of sexual politics, Said, Seven Beauties, and The Night Porter
foreground the artificiality of building a moral conscience from the ruins of historical
subjectivity. They reintroduce what Primo Levi calls "gray zones," referring to both the
impossibility of representing authentic sensual experience and the inability to model
historical representations on a discourse of purity, as a form of the tragic-romantic nar-
rative.22 Instead of presenting sexuality as a feminine disease that weakens or afflicts the
pure masculine body, these films undermine the tired metaphors of sexual difference
and call into question the disingenuous binary economy and its symbolic ordering.
 Introduction — 19

Rather than reinstating a cathartic cleansing process, these films disavow the moralis-
tic reading as well as the location of a legitimate subjective position. They point to the
misleading separation of a sense of historical righteousness from the sublime fascina-
tion with evil and moral transgression. It is precisely this erotic fascination with fas-
cism—not only within textual representation but also in the theoretical reflection and
situation of these films—that problematizes the process of abjection as a process of
symbolic separation. Each of the last three chapters here provides an exegesis of key
representations of fascism, uncovering the mechanics of repositing and reimaging of
the historical consciousness of fascism, which are accompanied by a moral conscience.
These films foreground the subjective "presence" of interpretation in each historical
revision and question the construction of a dialectical narrative as a means of perpet-
ual separation of the subject of history from what is considered abject. They scandal-
ize this process of othering (disengaging, abjecting, etc.) by presenting scandal itself as
a political gesture.
In sum, this book is about the impossibility of applying "normal" criticism, "con-
ventional" historical interpretation, and "cathartic" cinematic representations of the
past without engaging in the theatrics of political and moral side-taking. The politi-
cal use of the socially sanctioned role of the good or the pure masks present political
agendas under the guise of history, morality, or value judgments. Hence the aim of my
text is to expose the logic and conjugation of engagement and disengagement—with
the other, with evil, with even the present—as a duplicitous gesture, one that is more
spectacular than critical. In short, the appropriation of victims, the innocent dead, or
a hermetically sealed (detached) intellectual discourse is treated as itself embedded in
a series of cultural, aesthetic, social, ideological, and historical illusions.
This page intentionally left blank
 1. Between Remembering and Surviving

In my opinion the ambiguity of human nature and therefore historical ambiguity is the necessary
point of departure in understanding different obsessions with the past. In fact, it is the analysis
of "ignorance" in response to the events of World War II that may be examined if we are to bet-
ter understand the ignorance allowed during the war, that allowed for the rise of the dictators.
There is a reason to scandalize this Milanese notion of surviving: the world does not want to know!
It does not want go forward only to fall back into this ambiguity My film is not liberating like
some political films. These political films make it easy for the public to identify themselves with
righteous characters: it is interesting to think about how the audience will bring themselves to
identify with my protagonists: they might feel very embarrassed. Is it possible to identify oneself
with an ambiguous character? To recognize oneself in him?1
—Liliana Cavani

"Use me," and this means: There is no me The question of passivity is not the question of
slavery, the question of dependency not the plea to be dominated. There is no dialectic of the
slave, neither Hegel's nor the dialectic of the hysteric according to Lacan, both presupposing the
permutation of roles on the inside of a space of domination. This is all macho bull shit. "Use me":
a statement of vertiginous simplicity, it is not mystical, but materialist. Let me be your surface and
your tissues, you may be my orifices and my palms and my membranes, we could lose ourselves,
leave the power and the squalid justification of the dialectic of redemption.2
—Jean-Frangois Lyotard

Since The Night Porter (1974), Said (1975), and Seven Beauties (1976) were produced
during Europe's volatile and politically unstable "anni di piombo" / "die bleierne Zeit"

21
 22 — Between Remembering and Surviving

("the leaden years," 1972-1980), they enter into the politics of rethinking fascism and
nazism in a period when the issue of remembering (especially memorializing the
Holocaust) was finally beginning to be addressed in Europe, together with a growing
concern over the popularity of neofascist and neonationalist parties and their
deep-seated involvement in covert political actions and organizations. The renewed
interest in the events of World War II set off the "fascist-debate" among primarily
intellectuals of the Left. Yet these debates were embroiled in the factioning of the
Left into splinter groups, stemming, mainly, from the student revolts of 1968. On
account of its participation in the "Great Historical Compromise"—the European
Left's concession to the American- and British-backed Italian center-Right party
the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) in 1946-47, and the German center-Right party the
Christliche Demokratische (CDU)—and a litany of other such compromises, move-
ments such as Rote Arme Fraktion (or Baader-Meinhoff Gruppe), Lotta Continua,
II Manifesto, Brigate Rosse, Collettivi Politici Metropolitani, and Action Directe
argued that the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), the German Sozialdemokratishe
(SPD), and the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF) were not revolutionary enough to
succeed in changing the existing (prototypically fascist) sociopolitical system.3 Thus,
at the same time the radical Left denounced their "fascist fathers," they declared
enmity with the traditional Left (the Italian PCI, the German SPD, the French PCF)
for capitulating to the governance of the DC and its German (the CDU) and French
(the RPF under de Gaulle) equivalents, which they considered to be neofascist and
complying with the armed suppression of the student/worker alliance's political activ-
ities (most notably those of Rote Arme Fraktion or Baader-Meinhoff Gruppe, Lotta
Continua, Autonomia Operaia, and the Brigate Rosse).4 Thus the framework within
which this examination of fascist history opens in Europe is primarily established on
a certain notion of distance, a generational distance for some, and ample time for
emotional detachment for others; and secondarily, an era of pronounced political and
economic crisis, when predominant politicians and intellectuals seemed incapable of
coming to terms with some of the more transgressive cultural shifts, such as student
revolts, the militant movements of the radical Left, the women's movement, and gen-
der and sexual politics.5 The prevailing interest in fascist history unfolded as both a
distant memory and a renewed political threat.
Fascism occupied the unique (if not contradictory) space of a historical past and
a political present. As a result, the debates regarding the meaning of fascism focused
on questions such as, Was fascism a point of departure (can it be relegated to the
absolute past)? or, Is fascism continuous with the present? Films like The Night Porter
and Seven Beauties, and Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965) reflect the shift from
the 1940s and 1950s calls for justice for nazi and fascist war crimes throughout Europe,
the vindication of the dead, and the deification of the martyrs of the resistance—
as seen in many Soviet and Eastern European social-realist, Italian and French
neorealist, and Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s—to the 1960s and 1970s
attempts to "come to terms" with nazism and the "Final Solution"—what the Germans
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 23

call Vergangenheitsbewdltigung, mastering or coming to terms with the past.The Night

Porter, Seven Beauties, and The Pawnbroker attempt to bridge the divergent cultural
and historical perspectives on collective and personal memory by focusing on memory
as both an intermediary and immediate sensation—focusing on the duality of mem-
ory, its simultaneous sense of distance and one of presence. Consequently, these films
reflect the psychological, political, and cultural anxiety produced by such disjunctive
memories. The memories of the survivors depicted in these films challenge historical
narratives that strive to vindicate the dead or romanticize the heroes of resistance: they
present the memory of the living as neither heroic nor coherent, that is, they disavow
such justifications. Primo Levi illustrates the difficulty of justifying or making sense of
the past when he writes that survivors are "deprived the solace of innocenceThe
worst survived, that is, the fittest" (/ Sommersi e i salvati, 687-89). Within these films,
memory is presented, like Freud's theory of trauma, as disrupting narrative and his-
torical identifications rather than providing historical or narrative resolutions. Hence
they reveal the disjuncture between collective (national, historical, narrative) and per-
sonal (singular experience) methods of "coming to terms with the past."

In Bernardo Bertolucci's visually stylized film The Conformist (1970), Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) makes the
roman/fascist salute. This act of conformity will be mirrored in his subsequent condemnation of fascism once the war
has been lost.
 24 — Between Remembering and Surviving

The anxiety caused by "coming to terms with" the fascist past primarily affected
the credibility of the existing political parties that identified themselves as the progeny
of the alleged heroes of the resistance (with the exception, of course, of the Movi-
mento Sociale Italiano [MSI] and other neofascist parties). This revival of defascist-
izzdzione/Entnazifizierung (defascisization/denazification) signaled the demise of
certain cultural convictions relative to the formation of national identities, contempo-
rary politics, and the history of the representation of fascism. While, in 1974, Enrico
Berlinguer (the then-head of the PCI) petitioned for reassembling the "historical"
alliance of the antifascist forces created in the years 1943-1947 in an attempt to cir-
cumvent a permanent shift of Italian politics to the right (as in the case of Chile), the
European Right consistently reacted to entreaties such as defascistizzazione and a need
to remember, or to reassemble, "historical" antifascist coalitions, by stressing their pol-
icy of forgetting and mastering the past. A similar policy can be seen operating in Pres-
ident Ronald Reagan's justification for accompanying German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl when he visited Bitburg in 1986 (the cemetery where so many WafFen-SS troops
were buried). Reagan declared his solidarity with the policy of forgetting at the same
time he articulated a new approach to the question of responsibility, universal victim-
hood. He stated: "I think that there is nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery
where these young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they werefightingin
German uniform, they were drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the
Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps."6
Such comparisons give political credence to "revisionary" historical commentators, for
example, Andreas Hillgruber, who, like Reagan, claims that "ordinary" Wehrmacht
soldiers were "victims" of Russian atrocities.7 Although reactions to the call for
defascistizzazione/Entnazifizierung, by both the Left and the Right, were predictable,
these divergent strategic approaches to "history" emphasized that "history" had
become an essentially politicized construct. Given the political instability of historical
discourse,8 the politics of memory became not only a central concern for leftist intel-
lectuals and artists, but also a political gesture, a challenge to the credibility of exist-
ing political systems (including the Left) that wished to present themselves as both
moral and pure—that is, untarnished by, or at least not responsible for, fascism. Even
in the 1998 election for German chancellor, the new chancellor, Gerhard Schroder,
usurped Kohl's claim to be blessed with a late birth ("die Gnade der spaten Geburt"),
since unlike Kohl he was "truly" born after World War II, which is to say, he cannot
even be associated with the generation of the Hitler youth.
On the other hand, those who advocated a policy of forgetfulness, historiciza-
tion, or mastery of the past (as for instance the leader of the French National Front,
Jean-Marie Le Pen9) were the same individuals and groups who were increasingly
involved in a series of ongoing conspicuous scandals linking "democratic parties" to
neofascist parties, paramilitary groups, and supranational intelligence and secret-
service agencies (for instance, the "Rosa dei Vento"). These and other embarrassing
links problematized the overwhelming desire, on the part of Europeans, to bury
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 25

the past. Critical examinations, which associated the Right's policy of forgetting under
the auspices of "progress" and "democratization," ascribed neocapitalist politics to
neofascist strategies—covert terrorist actions whose sole purpose was to maintain the
hegemony of a capitalist political economy—and linked democratic leaders to neo-
fascist projects—the clandestine reinstallation of neofascist figures within the socio-
political infrastructure. Cinematic representations of fascism registered these cultural
debates in terms of an aesthetic recoding of the representation of fascism. Italian,
French, and German cinema in particular radically broke away from the sentimental
and melodramatic aesthetics of neorealism. As opposed to lauding the resistance, films
such as Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) seriously impaired the "pop-
ular memory" or legend of the French resistance by disclaiming its alleged feats. While
this attack on "popular memory" or national identity caused historians such as Saul
Friedlander to comment that " The Sorrow and the Pity marked a further stage in a
more authentic perception of collaboration and of the resistance," but it enraged critics
like Michel Foucault, who exemplifies the gravity of this debate over representation
when he insists that "it is vital to have possession of this memory, to control it, to
administer it, tell it what it must contain."10 This conflict over how representations
of antifascist resistance movements are to be treated coincides with the aesthetic
shift from the cinema of neorealism, which affirmed a political commitment to anti-
fascism, to what Friedlander calls the "new realism" (authenticity) of The Sorrow
and the Pity, which undermines the accomplishments of the resistance as relatively
insignificant in relation to the numbers of people who did not resist fascism and
nazism. By presenting the people's commitment to the antifascist resistance as both
romanticized and often misleading, films such as The Sorrow and the Pity impede
attempts to identify with the resistance as well as to renew antifascist politics in the
postwar period. In addition, such "authentic," deromanticized representations of the
resistance question the historical legitimacy of postwar European governments—de
Gaulle, De Gasperi, and Adenauer—by representing postwar political institutions as
themselves built on an exaggerated if not mythic alliance to "historical" antifascist
resistance movements. For example, films such as The Sorrow and the Pity contest not
only the historical and political validity of linking postwar European institutions and
governments to antifascist movements (those that predate the end of the war), but also
their appropriation of the rhetoric of the resistance, at least in the case of France and
Italy. This overidentification of postwar governments with antifascist ideology and
resistance movements, according to Ophuls, covers up the more disturbing (anti-
heroic) public and political "passivity," or worse, public desire for fascism.
While nazism and fascism have been read (represented in historical narratives,
fiction, film, and television) within a historical context, the representation of the
"Final Solution" remains part of an ongoing debate as to whether it can be repre-
sented, because of its uniqueness and the problems involved in speaking for the vic-
tims or speaking in the name of the dead. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) illustrates
the enigma surrounding the representation of the victims. While Shoah "documents"
 26 — Between Remembering and Surviving

the testimony of the survivors of the "Final Solution" throughfictionalizedaccounts,

it distinctly refuses to use nazi footage of the concentration camps (often used in
documentaries of the "Final Solution" to evidence the atrocities committed).11 For
Lanzmann, the question of representation goes beyond that offictionalizingthe lives
of the victims and the events of World War II; it is also a question of framing those
events, memories, and victims. He asks if it is possible to make sense of the "Final
Solution" through the eyes (cinematic gaze) of the nazis, the "objective" point of view
of a third party, or even someone, for instance, like Steven Spielberg. As a conse-
quence, the "Final Solution" has often been extricated from the context of nazism
and fascism and treated separately by historians and philosophers of the postwar
period. That is, while historians and cultural critics localize fascism in "the past" (e.g.,
disengaging it from the present), the "Final Solution" is not relegated to a "common
past" but is ascribed to the discourse of experience and memory, which is both past
and present, "uncommon" (radically singular), subject to both change (mutation and
forgetting) and traumatic effects (it does not pass away). What emerges from these
debates is a serious scrutiny of the status and use-value of historical narratives, includ-
ing the influence of the media on popular memory of World War II and the "Final
Solution," since the popular media (film, television, narrative fiction) seems to be one
of the only places where these types of representations converge. However, films such
as Shoah also bear the distinct marks of a transformation in modes of representation
from the emphasis on an "objective history" (as in the case of neorealism) to a sub-
jective testimony or confession. The shift from an objective to subjective point of
view parallels certain trends in the historians' debate over the representations of fas-
cism (1970s) and the 1980s' Historikerstreit over the representation of the Holocaus
concerning what constitutes historical representations given the discrepancies in in-
terpreting evidence and inscribing such controversial themes into representational
narratives.
In his analysis of the shift from "authentic" historical narratives in neorealism
to the authenticity of testimonial discourse, Thomas Elsaesser argues that "while
memory, especially when contrasted with history, has gained in value as a subject of
public interest and interpretation, history has become the very signifier of the inau-
thentic, merely designating what is left when the site of memory has been vacated by
the living."12 Aware of such aesthetic and polemic distinctions between fact and mean-
ing, the films of Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmuller do not attempt to expose the past
as in a factual or documentary historical account, such as Alain Resnais's Night and
Fog (1955) or Marcel Ophuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie
(1988). Instead they investigate the politics of memory as a product of the mass media.
Their cinematic style of narration emphasizes the fictivity of the subject matter; not
only are the mannerisms of the characters reminiscent of certain popular attributes,
but the fragmentation of the narratives and their integration of documentary footage,
dreamlike sequences, opera, or pop music point to their artificiality. By emphasizing
artistic style they analyze more subtle complexities of memory, trauma, and survival—
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 27

not of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust but the non-Jewish survivors, including
victims, collaborators, and fascists. Accordingly, they foreground the artificial devices
involved in representation. Their project is to scrutinize what had previously been
considered the unspeakable or the impossible, what had been reduced to the binary
economy of good and evil.
By inscribing their films within preexisting aesthetic codes (camp, kitsch, S-M,
decadence), Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller reveal that discursive forms of repre-
senting fascism have undergone a series of transformations tantamount to what
Michael Geyer terms, "a kind of secular morality play"—consistent with the racial and
sexual theories of Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordeau, and Otto Weininger. Although,
as Geyer explains, the evil "that resulted from certain ideologies, attitudes and behav-
iors [was to be laid open] in such a way that it could no longer be thought of without
their attending historical consequences; memories were not summoned up by an indi-
vidual and interior process of self-examination, nor were they subjected to a tribunal
of conscience in a culture of guilt. The televised articulation of the past set the indi-
vidual free."13 Because, as Geyer ascertains, the politics of memory took hold through
film and television and therefore implicated no one in particular (other than, perhaps,
figures like Hitler, Mussolini, and Himmler), Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller ques-
tion the production of digestible visualizations of Italy's and Germany's fascist past. By
digestible I mean that protagonists are either heroes, victims (narratives are either
romantic or tragic), or, in the case of Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1974), benign chil-
dren, thus allowing audiences, even in lieu of their own irreconcilable memories of
past events, to identify with the victims, heroes, or adolescents of these televisual or
filmic narratives. Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller investigate the highly politically
charged territory of compliance, compromise, and survival—a territory disliked by
culturally sanctioned factions of both the Left and the Right, since it offers no clear
moral perspective.
Films such as The Damned (La caduta degli dei, 1969), The Conformist (II con-
formista (1970), and The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1978) no
longer documented or dramatized antifascist protagonists. Instead they explore the
territory of "the enemy within"—a subjective or psychological approach to fascism,
challenging older and contemporary representations of fascism and nazism, specifi-
cally neorealist renderings of fascism as a "parenthetical degeneration of progressive
history" or as the product of "the crisis of modernity." These films, along with The
Night Porter and Seven Beauties, investigate issues of class in connection with col-
laboration, sexual perversion, and the fascination or eroticization of nazism and fas-
cism. Furthermore, they problematize notions of singularity (the exceptionality of
the "Final Solution," signaling "the end of history" and "the end of man") by rein-
scribing the "Final Solution" within the context of nazism and fascism as well as
theories of human nature, gender, and sexual politics. Such revisualizations of the
fascist or nazi past contribute to the disavowal of a historical mastery over the past,
depicting the permeation of nazism and fascism into the postwar period. This bleeding
 28 — Between Remembering and Surviving

of ideological or historical boundaries, resonating in narratives such as The Night

Porter and Seven Beauties, points to the ambiguity of discerning what is past from its
effects (the real from the imaginary, the pure from the impure).
While such ambiguities have been interpreted by historians including Omer
Bartov and Saul Friedlander and cultural critics including Bruno Bettelheim and
Pnmo Levi as abusing the experience or memory of the victims, the morally, sexually,
and historically ambiguous images that appear in films like The Damned, The Con-
formistand LiliMarleen eschew endeavors to depict "what really happened," respond-
ing instead to the resurfacing of nazi and fascist images in the postwar period. Hence
these films are more historiographical than "historical." Their aim is not to represent
historical events but to analyze the relationship of official history to representations of
popular culture, concentrating specifically on how this relationship continues to artic-
ulate current political problems as endemic to the system of meaning itself. Thus they
question the "historical correctness" of realist narratives (both historical and cine-
matic) that, as Bartov describes, "set out to prove both the existence of the Holocaust
as an historical event and as one that still lives on in the memories of all who were
involved in it" {Murder in Our Midst, 128). Rather than yield to the conventional or
what has been presented as the "morally responsible" aesthetic style of realism ("telling

Amarcord (1974) visualizes what Federico Fellini called the "prolonged adolescence" of fascism. Here fascism is se
through the "romantic" dreams of a heartbroken schoolboy.
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 29

it like it is"), thesefilmsexplore the complex aesthetic and ideological recodings of fas-
cism appearing in historical, popular, and subcultural accounts. By incorporating and
juxtaposing multiple and often disparate references to other "histories" of fascism
(neorealist, psychohistorical, Marxist, feminist, etc.), these historiographical films
criticize all "historical" projects for participating in the aestheticization of fascism.
Rather than simply exhibiting what Bartov calls a "detached, amoral, nonjudgmental,
complacent, and highly dangerous morbid curiosity about extremity," thesefilmsana-
lyze the cultural obsession with extremity {Murder in Our Midst, 128). By exposing the
intricate networking of images—fascists, nazis, mad scientists, evil doctors who are
likened to femmes fatales, sadists, masochists, homosexuals, and drag queens—films
like Said, The Night Porter, and Seven Beauties reveal how the appearance of such sex-
ual, immoral stereotypes mix aesthetic styles (realist, decadentist, expressionist, mod-
ernist, camp, and kitsch) and thus confound the contexualization of fascism itself. This
hyperreferencing present infilmslike The Damned, The Conformist, Cabaret, Said, and
Seven Beauties demonstrates how fascism and the cultural obsession with fascism tran-
scend both national and historical boundaries, entangling traditional styles and
national myths, placing fascism out of context (out of time), and muddling the ideo-
logical discourses that have been used both to support and condemn it.
While most of the films I address are made by Italian filmmakers I do not con-
sider them to be Italian per se; rather they comprise what I call composite cinema:
they confound notions of context, national cinema, and national history by referring
to intertextual, intercultural, and international images of fascism. For example, they
point to the decontextualization and transfiguration of decadent images and narra-
tives of thefin-de-siecle,Weimar Germany, and the Hollywood dream factory, fascist
aesthetics of both Italian modernism and neoclassicism, the nazi propaganda cinema
of Leni Riefenstahl, and violent cultural and political images of the late sixties.
Because these films seek to address the historiography of fascism (they take the cul-
tural obsession with fascism as their subject), rather than represent histories of fas-
cism (historical specificity), they become much more difficult to locate in terms of
traditional categories. Instead of belonging to a national cinema, these examples of
composite cinema become transnational, referencing German, Italian, French, and
American history, theory, and film: German expressionist and new objectivity cinema
of the 1920s and 1930s; American or Hollywood cinematic style and glamour of the
1940s and 1950s; Italian neorealism; psychoanalytic theory; British modernism; Italian
futurism; French surrealism; French existentialism, and so on. In addition, most of
these films were coproduced by Italian, French, and German or English companies.
This transnational quality is reflected in each directors choice of actors. In The Night
Porter, which wasfilmedin English, Cavani casts two British actors in the leading roles
(Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde) and French, Italian, and German actors in
the supporting roles; in Seven Beauties, shot in both Italian and German, Wertmuller
uses both Italians and Germans in the leading roles (Giancarlo Giannini and Shirley
Stoler); similarly The Damned and Lili Marleen were shot primarily in English then
 30 — Between Remembering and Surviving

dubbed into German and Italian. In these films Visconti and Fassbinder mix German,
English, and Italian actors and German, English, and Italian languages. Moreover,
instead of attempting to focus on moral issues, with the intent of reestablishing
national narratives and national heroes, these films address larger theoretical questions
concerning whether it is possible to contain and thereby unmake fascism and main-
tain prefascist, and even in some cases fascist, moral, racial, and sexual identifications
in the postwar period.
What distinguishes Said, The Night Porter, and Seven Beauties from the films of
Visconti and Fassbinder is that they treat the renewed interest in fascism as continu-
ous with traditional gender, racial, sexual, and even national biases. They focus on
problematizing conventional constructions of sex and gender that are "re-absorbed"
into moral and ideological models vis-a-vis an appeal to history or "pastness." For this
reason, Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller question whether such constructions are an
effect of history or an effect of the aesthetic representations of history. More than any
other films of the 1970s or even films produced in the 1980s and 1990s that often
adopted conventional aesthetic styles and narrative agendas—realistic yet redemptive
"telling it like it is/was," as for instance Markus Imhoof's The Boat is Full (1981),
Agnieszka Hollands Europa, Europa (1990), Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, and

In The Damned, Sturm Abteilung debauchery serves as a sign of the hidden homosexuality of nazi Germany, allegedly
leading up to Die Nacht der Langen Messer (Rohm Putsch), in which SA leader Ernst Rohm, along with one thousand
other SA, were murdered under the direction of Heinrich Himmler.
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 31

Francesco Rosi's 77?^ Truce (La tregua, 1998); or the passive nihilism of stylized
neodecadent cinema in, for example, Francois Truffaut s The Last metro (Le dernier metro,
1980), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lili Marleen, Istvan Szabo's Mephisto (1981), and
Lars Von Trier's Zentropa (1991)—Said, The Night Porter, and Seven Beauties challenge
"historical" frameworks, hierarchies of good and evil, feminization of sexual perver-
sion, the (mis)placing of images of seduction and sexual subversion onto the repres-
sive images of fascism and nazism, and the redemption of "normalized" bourgeois
morality. Thus it is no wonder that, until recently, they have been dismissed as
"morally ambiguous"; as Bartov claims, they "exploit our mean instincts, and seem to
blame us for possessing them" {Murder in Our Midst, 128, my emphasis). Yet in the
process of denouncing these films, Bartov and other critics reveal not only their own
aesthetic bias for realism (historical representation over historiographical questioning
of representation itself) but also their desire to define the historian/cultural critic as
moral authority, someone who can translate complex or ambiguous historical events
into "simplistic, unambiguous images." For this reason, Said, The Night Porter, and
Seven Beauties menace current historical forms of representation, recent debates
including the Historikerstreit, and the questioning of the "moral" agenda of historical
relativism and deconstructive criticism.

History, Relatively Speaking

Because the films of Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller clearly challenge conventional
moral discourses that are fastened to cultural and sexual politics, they excite a
certain moral panic. Dominick LaCapra explains that "when the security and self-
certainty of pure oppositions are placed in doubt, distinctions become more rather
than less important, and their ethical and political bearing is of crucial significance. In
addition, more hangs on certain distinctions than on others."14 Although LaCapra
impugns historical approaches that dismiss critical theory for not addressing how his-
torical research is interpreted, he does not sanction the deconstruction of such moral
categories but instead reaffirms the "centrality" of the distinction between perpetra-
tors and victims in the Holocaust, reading one as evil and the other as innocent ("not
perpetrators or collaborators in any significant sense"). He suggests that "even to com-
pare these distinctions may be symptomatic of a crisis in judgment." 15 Just as the
testimony of the victims of the Holocaust had been silenced for almost thirty years,
the analysis of nazism and fascism is also marked by an aura of foreboding—one must
not "know" fascism or nazism because knowing, in the case of evil, always involves
tasting some forbidden fruit, that is, it is perceived as a process of contamination. Yet
although the "symbolic capital" of surviving, or affiliation with the survivors of the
Holocaust, ordains a certain political credibility (what Bauman calls the position of
sanctity), the association with nazism and fascism performs the exact opposite in terms
of global politics (this does not necessarily hold true for local politics).16 For example,
the prewar writings of Martin Heidegger and the postwar writings of Paul de Man
 32 — Between Remembering and Surviving

have been discredited (in certain intellectual circles, primarily among liberals and neo-
humanists) because of their affiliation with fascism, as well as the nazi party itself, as
in the case of Heidegger.17 This affiliation is read as thoroughly corrosive, sanctioning
not only the condemnation of Heidegger's antihumanist discourse and de Man's decon-
structive mode of analysis—reading fascism and nazism as permeating all of their
work, even the pre- and postwar writings—but more importantly, the condemnation
of their critical frameworks, censuring all theoretical discourses and critical thinking
that contest moral and historical truths. That is, all deconstructive discourses that dis-
pute humanist and historical truths are dismissed as apologetic, revisionist, and, there-
fore, fascist. Because of its seemingly binary or absolute moral classification, "history"
and the appeal to the "history" of World War II creates new moral criteria. History, as
Nietzsche foresaw, has become a surrogate for religion, distinguishing the damned
from the saved. For instance, while Bartov argues that historians "must adjudicate who
was responsible [that is,] the historian cannot escape the responsibility of acting as a
judge in this context," Carlo Ginzburg insinuates that the historian performs the
function of both detective and judge, and LaCapra believes that history should be a
form of catharsis, effectively rendering the historian a therapist.18
Whether as judge or therapist, the historian claims staunch rights to wield
the authority of representation. Historical copyrights, therefore, serve as political
weapons. Because of history's overdetermined political nature, employing historical
narratives demonstrates that historical communities are configured and reconfigured
(confirmed and denied) on the basis of mobile alliances. For example, Josef Stalin has
undergone a series of transformations: from the antidemocratic and antifascist figure-
head of Bolshevism or communism, perceived by Western countries as a vociferous
international threat to interfuse class politics into global politics, to a coconspirator in
the parceling-up of Eastern Europe, to "uncle Joe," a comrade in armsfightingagainst
nazi Germany and fascist Italy during World War II, and finally to a fascist, a
power-hungry expansionist, a dictator, as well as a mass murderer. The embedding of
real (or present) political events in predetermined ideological discourses (conservative
Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, etc.), is identical to, as Sande Cohen criticizes, "a
displacement of thinking through the unstable hierarchy that frames lexia ... These
[discursive] frames are already condensed stories ... [that] establish story pertinence
and deintellectualize other narrative frames.... [And as] pure determinants of narra-
tion, they can be thought of as repressions of semantic contention."19 Cohen points
out that demands for moral frameworks slip over into demands for deintellectualiza-
tion (repression of contention), appeals to simplification, to mediation and interpre-
tation by historians and cultural critics, which are designed to combat ambiguity and
complexity in favor of reifying preordained categorical and moral imperatives.
However, the effect of referencing historical singularities (the uniqueness of each
historical event) and the "subjective" memories of the survivors of the war and the
Holocaust means, as Hayden White's work points out, the creation of certain ambi-
guities. First, the meaning of events themselves remains ambiguous, owing to their
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 33

consignment to a past that is either unreachable, and thus unrepresentable, or only

reachable through memory, which is often embellished with and filtered through
present cultural and political issues. By the same token that events are considered
singular, they also are regarded as unrepresentable in terms of historical discourse (a
narrative that attributes certain ideological meanings to specific events). As White
attests, "the victims of the Holocaust cannot be simply forgotten and put out of mind,
but neither can they be adequately remembered; which is to say, clearly and unam-
biguously identified."2® And second, the significance of the continuing effects on cur-
rent societies and generations that did not experience such events, while attesting to
a certain importance, cannot be clearly measured nor understood. "Among those
effects," White suggests, "must be listed the difficulty felt by present generations of
arriving at some agreement as to their meaningIn other words, what is at issue
here is not the facts of the matter regarding such events but the different possible
meanings that such facts can be construed as bearing."21 The multiplication of "his-
torical interpretations" of fascism, nazism, and the Holocaust only points to the rela-
tivity and political nature of historical discourse. Yet the question of relativity is highly
contested among historians, especially in the historicization of the Holocaust, since
deeply embedded within the discourse of the Holocaust is a question of morality that
has been taken for granted by historians as a common structure: nazism is immoral.
By invoking historical relativism I am not insinuating any practice of "assassinating
the memory of the victims" nor what has often been confused with historical rela-
tivism, the practice of historical revisionism—a denial of the facts, as in the case of the
French "historian" Robert Faurisson.22 What I am concerned with are questions of
responsibility that are inconsistent with models of historical truth.
In reaction to more relativist approaches to the "Final Solution" that do not ques-
tion the "facts" (as would a revisionist) but rather the installing of the "Final Solu-
tion" into Manichean moral and ideological paradigms, historians including Perry
Anderson, Amos Funkenstein, Omer Bartov, and Carlo Ginzburg relegate relativist
approaches such as White's to historical revisionism, which is to say, neofascism. Bar-
tov illustrates this confounding of historical relativism with historical revisionism
when he writes, "relativism lacks commitment to truth and morality and does not
allow choice, it contains an element of cynicism; and while humanity is based on
choice, relativism makes any argument allegedly possible" {Murder in Our Midst, 134).
Here "lack of commitment to truth" skips over the fact that "truth" itself is the very
site of dispute (in addition to human truth and free choice) and slips readings that
point to "truth" as relative to the speaking subject into absolute fictions (validating
any reading). This political gesture, the accusation of relativism as participating in
revisionism, is designed to secure a singular moral paradigm, and more importantly
to secure the credibility of the historical profession against what Anderson describes
as "the reduction of history to rhetoric."23 What is at stake here is not only certain ide-
ological understandings of truth and their moral paradigms but a question of histor-
ical modes of representation.
 34 — Between Remembering and Surviving

Since it is impossible to separate historical events from popular memory, which

has already been deeply influenced by popular culture, for Pasolini, Cavani, and Wert-
miiller there is no authentic history, or cognitive authority (official story). But this
does not imply that they become what Vidal-Niquet calls "assassins of memory,"
because, as Lyotard explains,

Whenever one represents, one inscribes in memory, and this might seem a good
defense against forgetting. It is, I believe, the opposite. Only that which has been
inscribed can, in the current sense of the term, be forgotten, because it could be
effaced. But what is not inscribed, through lack of inscribable surface, of duration
and place for the inscription to be situated, what has no place in the space nor in the
time of domination, in the geography and the diachrony of the self-assured spirit,
because it is not synthesizable—let us say, what is not material for experience because
the forms and formations of experience, be they unconscious, are inapt and inept for
it—cannot be forgotten, does not offer a hold to forgetting, and remains present
"only" as an affection that one cannot even qualify, like a state of death in the life of
the spirit {Heidegger and "the jews", 26).

This process of inscription seems to be accelerated when popular memory is infused

with sexual politics, because the aesthetic linkage of nazism and fascism to sado-
masochism, impurity, degeneration, decadence, femininity, and homosexuality over-
writes the image of the nazi or the fascist with the image of woman and the sexual
deviant. The process of forgetting is also an aesthetic practice whereby the image of
the nazi or fascist is decontextualized from the "official history" and transformed into
various icons of popular culture through a metonymic process. Since the nazi and the
fascist stand for supreme evil, they are embellished with various other "attributes" of
evil. Nazism epitomizes the model of evil at the same time it becomes part of other
discourses—those of sexuality, gender, and aesthetics. This process of metonymy thus
serves a dual purpose, first as a process of dissemination, and second as a process of
dilution/effacement. Nevertheless, "historical" communities as well as "historical" dis-
course have shaped as much as they are shaped by images of history. The common-
place of metonymic linkages of the nazi or the fascist to images of sexual deviance even
in "official" accounts of nazism—as for instance the widely accepted view that the
nazis are antimoral, antibourgeois, and sexually perverse—attests to the reliance of
"official" representation on icons of evil emerging from popular culture. Yet these
images of popular culture do not necessarily stem from official history; rather, they
refer back to popular culture and its aesthetic coding.
Ironically, while the (allegedly objective) history of the "Final Solution" and the
rise of nazism remains irrefutable, the image or visual representation (allegedly sub-
jective) has become the terrain of current critical contention regarding the moral and
ideological implications of nazism and the "Final Solution." Take for example LaCapra,
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 35

who in Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) hesitates to critique the
significance and centrality of cultural paradigms modeled on historical and cultural
representations of the Holocaust, yet in a subsequent article in Critical Inquiry criti-
cizes Lanzmann's Shoah for expressing the presence rather than the pastness of the
trauma of the Holocaust.24 While criticism over the representation of the real becomes
increasingly more difficult—given the reservations about the ability of historical nar-
rative to account mimetically for the events of the past without recoding this pastness
in political terms and the current skepticism regarding the authority of historical dis-
course to speak for the silent and the dead—historical inquiry has shifted focus, from
representations of the real (the creation of a historical narrative) to cultural criticism
of the public image of nazism and fascism manufactured through cinema, television,
and newsreel footage. Thus historians such as Saul Friedlander, LaCapra, and Jiirgen
Habermas explore cultural studies in order to pronounce judgment on whether the
media is faithful to "historical truths" and how the media has psychologically (histor-
ically) affected its viewers.

Justice Deferred
Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller expose a certain type of political correctness that
deters critical inquiry; a historical retrofitting that is codependent on duplicitous
moral imperatives used to displace real political problems concerning the way global
economies, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity are aesthetically coded,
intellectualized, and spun into highly politicized narratives. What I mean by the
displacing of highly politicized issues is that metonymic linkages to nazis, fascists,
Stalinists, victims or survivors of the Holocaust, antifascists and conformists, pure
Aryan women and unhygienic femmes fatales, bourgeois moralists, and sexual per-
verts are used to determine who will die, who will starve, who will be put in their
proper place, and who will be redeemed in places like the Middle East, the former
Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, the Swiss banking industry, blue- and white-
collar workforces, and even suburban households. The politics of reading present
sociopolitical impasses in terms of predetermined "historical events," as well as
historical name-calling (labeling someone a "Hitler," "Duce," "nazi," "fascist," or
evoking "Auschwitz," "concentration camps," "racial or ethnic genocide"), serves first
to distance current predicaments, setting them in the absolute past where they have
already been judged (sanctioned or condemned), and second to install figures like
Saddam Hussein, Bosnian Serbs, Israelis on the West Bank, Iranian fundamentalists,
and so forth, into an ontology of radical evil.25
This gesture of diegetically situating present political events in terms of prepackaged
historical models functions to reduce the reading, and thus meaning, of political/cul-
tural economies to binary models of pure good and absolute evil. As a consequence,
the position of good is purged of evil. And as Etienne Balibar explains, this type of
 36 — Between Remembering and Surviving

humanist model (based on free choice and universal rights of man) "sets itself up as a
diagnosis of the normal and the pathological and ends up echoing the discourse of its
own object, demonizing Nazism which itself demonized its enemies and victims."26
For Balibar, humanism and fascism are not mutually exclusive, since certain forms of
humanism also partake in the suppression of the inhuman (or all too human). For
instance, as Dominick LaCapra argues, historians' casting of Auschwitz as what
Adorno called the "extremity that eludes the concept" and, therefore, the ultimate
challenge to all representation has manifested the "Shoah as 'symbolic capital' by Israel
as well as the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the marked opposition to Israeli
policy."27 Or as William Spanos argues, "the (ab)use of the discourse of the Holocaust
by the state of Israel in its effort to repress the legitimate claims of the Palestinian peo-
ple makes clear, it has also lent itself to onerous political purposes" {Heidegger and
Criticism, 234). On the other hand, evil is deprived of its own history, its own sense of
community (cultural context); it becomes a "stain" on humanity. As Saul Friedlander
elaborates, "Nazism was the damned part of Western civilization, the symbol of evil.
Everything the Nazis had done was condemned, whatever they touched defiled; a
seemingly indelible stain darkened the German past, while preceding centuries were
scrutinized for the origins of this monstrous development" {Reflections on Nazism, 12
Nazism is stripped of all ideology, all humanity, culture, and history in order to
become a permanent prop in the historical clearinghouse of icons of repudiation and
moral malfeasance. Though nazism and fascism not only intersect with but succor
conservative moral, sexual, scientific, technological, and national issues, they stand for
only one thing, evil, while their victims (specifically the genocide of six million Euro-
pean Jews) come to represent the paragon of purity and innocence. In no way am I
suggesting that nazis and fascists be unaccountable for the crimes they committed, yet
I do reproach the binary economy that allows for such practices as demonizing the
nazis or fascists in order to redeem one's identity, beliefs, ideology, and actions as a
lesser evil. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's recollection of the occupation of France by the
nazis (1939—1944) illustrates this reduction of identification to reactionary ultima-
tums: choosing to identify or being identified with the nazis automatically makes one
inhuman, rejecting nazism (albeit a private as opposed to public resistance) equates to
the salvaging of humanity. He posits that the rise of nazism presented Germans with
a dilemma: they had "a choice between their humanism and their government, a
choice by which they would have lost their respect either for themselves or for their
country. [And he resolves this dilemma by deducing that] there was only one solution
to their inner debate: a German victory."28 This ex post facto solution, however, deter-
mines an irrefutable (a priori) alliance with the state whereby all self-identifying
Germans were incidentally enlisted in the state's nationalist, racist, or colonial agenda.
Yet such arguments that disengage humanism from the state's colonial enterprises or
nationalistic politics quell examinations of not only humanism's own moral discourse,
its unanimity with nazism or fascism, but also the production of historical meaning.
Since it is precisely this humanist ethos that will be used to justify the survival of
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 37

people like Merleau-Ponty (to liberate him from the nazi dictum that "no one is inno-
cent"), it must be above suspicion, it must become metahistorical.
The process of making historical subjects safe to identify with (what Bauman calls
the "sanitizing of the Holocaust") for those obsessed with an acute need for purity is
contingent on what Jacques Ranciere calls "the neutralization of the appearance of the
past" that is, the translation of uncertain, unstable, amoral events into an ontological
modality.29 The act of disengaging or extricating one historical subject from another
exposes the dialectic of redemption as a reactionary form of justification, a slippery
process subject to many linguistic tics and twists. Within this dialectical model, the
affirmation of one's own historical community depends on the negation of an other
as the greater evil. It functions as a process of shifting blame, disengaging the subject
from the discourse of power, therefore liberating it from the politics of responsibility
via particular appeals, such as: I may have collaborated but I wasn't a fascist, I may
have been a fascist but I wasn't a nazi, I may have been a nazi but I didn't know about
the "Final Solution," I was just following orders, I am not Hitler (most notably Eich-
mann and Hoss). In response to this logic of deferral, Cavani exclaims, "nessuno vol-
eva sentir parlare di colpa E sempre colpa del funzionario che sta sopra e cosi la
colpa passa di testa in testa fino ad Hitler. Solo Hitler sarebbe dunque colpevole"

Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) passes before a series of neoclassical monuments in The Conformist.
 38 — Between Remembering and Surviving

(nobody wants to talk about responsibility.... It is always the responsibility of the

functionary [the bureaucrat] who was a superior, thus, responsibility is passed from
head to headfinallyreaching Hitler. Therefore, it must only have been Hitler who was
guilty/responsible [The Night Porter, x]). Accordingly, Hitler, Eichmann, Goebbels,
Mussolini, Petain, and Himmler do not have any exchange value; instead they are
deeply embedded within afixedeconomy. These figures have taken on mythological
or epic proportions, they have become out of this world—bestowed with absolute and
resolute evil they become superhuman. Although often situated as radical evil within
the heart of Europe, these mythic figures perform as emblems of extreme otherness,
thus providing the groundwork for a dialectical and moral model or a model of defer-
ral, one that silences responsibility in favor of differences, complexities, and ambigu-
ities yet still plays upon notions of absolutism: absolute evil in this case.
This characterization of Hitler, Mussolini, Eichmann, and others as one-
dimensional or epic antiheroes (if not pure forces of evil), does not, however,
comply with the observation that Auschwitz represented a radical break from Enlight-
enment notions of morality. Many attempts to understand Auschwitz, nazism, and
fascism by postwar intellectuals, historians, andfilmmakerscontinue to rely on strict
binary models of morality, yet at the same time they realize that this binary model
itself has also been used as a means of justification for Eichmann, Mussolini, and
Hitler. Critical thinkers including Hannah Arendt (who maintain Enlightenment
models and morals) are outraged by the fact that Eichmann can quote Kant's human-
ist ideals, defending his "acts of state" (the murder of hundreds of thousands of cap-
tured Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs) at his trial in Jerusalem. It was Eichmann's conviction
of his innocence on the grounds that he was "just following orders"—what Arendt
calls his "uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous
duties"—that damned him "in the eyes of the judges more than anything else."30
More than the failure of Enlightenment or humanist ideals, it is the radical indiffer-
ence to human suffering and the turn toward moral relativism in order to account
for such events and sentiments (or lack thereof) that torments thinkers like Arendt.
What disturbs so many of those who demand justice for nazi atrocities is that justice
(exercising the law) can only be done as a form of corporal punishment. The law can-
not purge the racial, gender, and political theory of the extreme Right. Sande Cohen
argues that "it is doubtful whether Nazism is reducible to criminality, a category of
law.... Notions of criminality are not the issue and signify, in fact, an agenda of nos-
talgia ... Nazism made law irrelevant; it showed law to be an ambiguous formation
within modernity."31 Eichmann's (as many others like him) lack of self-recognition
as an antagonist in narratives or ontologies of radical evil—his inability or unwilling-
ness to express remorse—and his conviction that he acted as a good citizen—abiding
and upholding the law—undermines what Croce called "il senso politico" as predi-
cated on both profound moral intent and noble ideals. Although Eichmann admitted
to the crimes he had committed, he had no guilty conscience; rather, he insistently
referred to his "duty," as other former nazis had insisted on their obligation to the
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 39

"advancement of science." While constructions of responsibility—responsibility to the

law and to the pursuit of scientific knowledge—are absolutely incriminating within
the context of nazi Germany, such appeals to Kant, practical reason, purity, duty, and
high ideals damn, as well as these former nazis, the belief that knowledge, culture,
progress, moral purity, and social consciousness are inherently good or pure in a
Platonic sense.

Questioning the Project of Rehumanizing

No matter how hard postwar intellectuals attempt to salvage "the project of Enlight-
enment," Adorno suggests that these "events made a mockery out of immanence as
endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence," and I
might add they made a mockery out of the postwar legal and ideological discourse
that attempted to keep separate its moral authority from that of the former nazis {Neg-
ative Dialectics, 361). For example, even though Stanley Kramer's film Judgment at
Nuremberg (1961) concludes by presenting the triumph of the moral integrity of the
American legal system, which is faced with political pressure to acquit former-nazi
judges, the postscript to the film undermines this very "judgment." It claims that
by the time the film was made, ten years later, not one of the ninety-nine convicted
former-nazi officials continued to serve his sentence. Judgment at Nuremberg expresses
an internal critique of power politics that answers to the changing political climate,
not to high moral ideals. An effect of eclipsing postwar demands for justice by cold
war politics is the belief that these former nazis got away with murder.32 While the
labeling of nazi and fascist war crimes as "crimes against humanity" (universal) rather
than inhuman acts (singular) serves to reaffirm Western notions of democracy—
human rights that are ensured by a legal system that reaches beyond the illegitimacy
or aberration of the German nation-state under Hitler—the privileging of the secu-
rity of Western capitalism over the desire to avenge these "crimes against humanity"
makes the justice system appear suspect, or at least beholden to political influences
(which also questions the legitimacy of a legal system based on "natural and universal
rights"). Teresa de Lauretis explains that "if Europe had to be rebuilt with the help of
U.S. capitalism to serve as a bastion against Communism, not all ex-fascists and Nazis
could be done away with—certainly not their major support institutions, the bureau-
cracy, the courts, and the church"—and, I might add, the economic infrastructure.33
As a result, Germans came to be considered a part of Western democracy, allies in the
war against Soviet expansion. Yet Judgment at Nuremberg's critical poignancy rests in
its presentation of former-nazi officials and American army and government officials
sharing the same ideological beliefs, antibolshevism, and political strategies, which
Herr Hans (one of the former-nazi judges) explains were also the beliefs of Adolf
Hitler. Thus the American military and the American government are linked to (if not
dependent on) former nazis and even a political agenda put forward by Hitler. This
"judgment" on American politics, of course, can be read as almost apologetic for the
 40 — Between Remembering and Surviving

former nazis, who like the Americans sacrificed justice to power politics. It also sug-
gests that denazification or defascistizzazione was a complete failure.
Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller observe that both good and evil have become
relative terms. Yet it is precisely the notion of moral relativity that causes a crisis of rep-
resentation by calling into question the notion of progress and the grounds for assert-
ing moral law. As Andrew Hewitt writes, "The privative notion of evil in turn creates
a void of meaning, a representational 'numbness'; the lack of a representation is felt as
the lack of any bodily sensation of Auschwitz."34 Many depictions of concentration
camp victims repeat this nazi logic, treating the other (Jewish, Gypsy, Slav, homosex-
ual) as lacking in representation, as dehumanized and faceless. Hence filmmakers like
Steven Spielberg and Roberto Benigni have attempted to resolve this crisis of mean-
ing and identity by returning to the discourse of humanism/relative good (in Spiel-
berg's Schindlers Z/tf and Benigni's Life Is Beautiful {La vita e bella, 1997). Rather than
conform to the traditional representation of the anonymous, dehumanized tragic vic-
tim of the nazi death camps, the protagonist in Life Ls Beautiful, Guido, is humanized
through his sense of humor and his imagination, even if he ultimately ends up with
the nameless dead, while Oskar Schindler is humanized through his guilt and com-
passion for his Jewish laborers. Whereas Schindlers Listhns been lauded for its human-
ist message, Benigni's film has been severely criticized for using humor in its depiction
of the Holocaust. Contrary to Ella Taylor's reading of Benigni's film as "making the
Holocaust more palatable . . . as to convince any naive observer that Auschwitz was a
slightly unsavory boot camp whose minor discomforts could be hurdled with a little
ingenuity and sunny outlook," Life Is Beautiful dots not claim to be historically accu-
rate. It aims rather to confront countless other interpretations of the Holocaust where
the victims simply disappear, leaving the survivors to bear the guilt of living in their
place.35 Unlike Benigni, who returns to humanism as a means of identifying the Jew-
ish victim (and subsequently dehumanizing the Italian fascists and the German nazis),
Pasolini, Cavani, and Wertmiiller choose less politically charged figures, distinctly
non-Jewish characters—Cavani's protagonist is the daughter of a socialist, and Wert-
muller's is an Italian army deserter who is captured and placed in a concentration
camp. Pasolini, on the other hand, chooses to focus on Italian fascists rather than
German nazis. Instead of canonizing humanistic or heroic images of resistance,
such as Rossellini's Manfredi and Francesco or the Taviani brothers' Galvano, which
Millicent Marcus points out are "designed to galvanize a legitimate postwar society,"
Cavani and Wertmiiller debunk such moral allusions by shifting the focus from the
partisans—those who can speak in the name of "duty" and "responsibility" to an
abstract ideal (freedom, democracy, morality)—to the collaborators and the survivors,
more specifically to the interaction of resisters and survivors with fascists, nazis, and
collaborators.36 Unlike Pasolini, who allows his audience to identify only with fascist
perpetrators and their neofascist incarnations (i.e., the position of absolute evil),
Cavani and Wertmiiller create protagonists who are victims (but not pure victims),
collaborators, and perpetrators.
 Between Remembering and Surviving — 41

While maintaining what LaCapra has called "crucial distinctions," identification

with the protagonists of these films is not a question of right and wrong; instead it
involves various levels of incrimination. For instance, Cavani's portrayal of former
nazi SS men draws from such examples as Eichmann, Barbie, and Priebka only to
satirize moral convictions espoused by them. In the process of undermining the self-
proclaimed redemption of these dubious figures, she also implicates psychoanalytic
readings of nazism and the Holocaust that promulgate therapeutic models, designed
to purge the subject of any symptom of guilt. As Hans (one of the former-nazi char-
acters in the film) declares, "We need to defend ourselves, the war is not yet over,
we need to cleanse ourselves so we don't surfer from guilt complexes." These former
nazis perform their own therapeutic process, allowing them to purge themselves of
any sign of guilt that could possibly be used to identify them as blameworthy of par-
ticipating in nazi war crimes. While Cavani personifies former nazis as extremely
synthetic and adaptable—adopting images and discourses of authority or legitimacy—
her characterization of the concentration camp survivor (Lucia) reveals the opposite.
She undermines that very authority or legitimacy, since Lucia's very presence points to
both the hypocritical reestablishment of former nazis to "legitimate" authorial roles
within Austrian society and the continuity of their allegiance to their nazi identities
and ideological beliefs. Cavani constructs the character Lucia from disparate sources:
accounts of Italian socialist women imprisoned by the nazis during World War II, who
express a certain compulsion to return to the past, both physically to the concentra-
tion camp site and hypothetically in terms of memory; and in response to aesthetic
and ambivalent sexually charged images, such as Marlene Dietrich and Helmut Berger
performing Dietrich in The Damned. Thus she fuses the politics of memory with th
aesthetics of nazism and fascism, in an attempt to reveal the radical inconsistencies
of the two forms of representation.37 What Cavani delves into is a more personalized
or internalized politics of memory: while the former nazis want to survive the burden
of the past by distancing themselves and purifying their conscience (as well as the
evidence that links them to the events of the past), the so-called survivors cling to
memory (demanding that we remember), yet this memory compromises their own
survival as well as their own "therapeutic" ridding themselves of the drastic guilt of
being spared.
An examination of the terms of survival is also a central concern for Wertmuller.
Like Cavani, she represents survival as a certain form of "necessary" compromise, even
if the character she uses to express such a compromise (Pasqualino, an aspiring
mafioso) seems to have no real moral conviction. By juxtaposing Pasqualino to more
"noble characters," who die in the name of humanistic values of Western culture,
Wertmuller questions the upholding of these very values in the context of the con-
centration camp. She echoes the thinking of Eli Pfefferkorn, who argues that "in the
death camps, death was never a triumph. What might have elevated the recalcitrant
inmate to the status of martyrdom or heroism in the eyes of his fellow inmates was an
act that supported them in their struggle to get through another day's suffering."38
Another random document with
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 The Project Gutenberg eBook of Chambers's
Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art,
fifth series, no. 143, vol. III, September 25,
1886
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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eBook.

Title: Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and

Art, fifth series, no. 143, vol. III, September 25, 1886

Author: Various

Release date: August 10, 2024 [eBook #74223]

Language: English

Original publication: Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers,

1853

Credits: Susan Skinner, Eric Hutton and the Online Distributed

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAMBERS'S

JOURNAL OF POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART, FIFTH
SERIES, NO. 143, VOL. III, SEPTEMBER 25, 1886 ***
 CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND
ART
 CONTENTS
A YEAR’S POSTAL WORK.
IN ALL SHADES.
REBEL-CATCHING.
BY ORDER OF THE LEAGUE.
THE MONTH: SCIENCE AND ARTS.
A TALE OF TWO KNAVERIES.
OCCASIONAL NOTES.
SOLITUDE.
No. 143.—Vol. III. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1886. Price 1½d.
 A YEAR’S POSTAL WORK.
Government Blue-books, to an ordinary reader, are tedious and
uninteresting enough; but even to the most ordinary of readers, the
annual Report of the Postmaster-general is at once curious and
interesting. Baron von Liebig once affirmed that the commercial
prosperity of a country was to be gauged by the sale of chemicals.
This may or may not be true; but we think the growth of the postal
system in all its multifarious branches—the amount of the deposits in
the savings-banks; the purchase of annuities and life policies; the
amount of money transmitted by means of postal orders; the
correspondence, growing by leaps and bounds, with all parts of the
globe; the countless telegrams—those flashing messengers of joy
and despair, good and ill—and last, but by no means least, the
thousands of millions of letters annually delivered in the United
Kingdom alone—all these are a sure index, not only of the
commercial growth and prosperity of the nation, but also of the
spread of education. A brief résumé of the Postmaster-general’s
Report for the year ending March 31, 1886, may prove interesting to
our readers.
The number of letters delivered in the United Kingdom alone reaches
the astounding total of 1,403,547,900, this being an increase of 3.2
per cent., and giving an average to each person of 38.6. If we add
to this the post-cards, book-packets, circulars, newspapers, and
parcels transmitted by the postal authorities, we have a grand total
of 2,091,183,822, an increase of 4.2 per cent.; and an average to
each person of 57.5. Of this total, 84 per cent. were delivered in
England and Wales (27.4 per cent. being delivered in the London
postal district alone), 9.6 per cent. in Scotland, and 6.4 per cent. in
Ireland. It will be at once seen that the necessary staff for the
successful carrying out of such a colossal undertaking must be on a
like scale; and this is the case, the total number of officers on the
permanent staff being about 51,500, showing an increase during the
past year of 3310. Of this small army 3456 are women. In addition
to these there are, it is estimated, about 45,000 persons of private
occupations, who are employed to assist in carrying on the
operations of the department during a portion of the day. An
increase of business brings a decrease in charge, this again inducing
a fresh increase; thus, it has become possible to reduce the rate of
postage on letters exceeding twelve ounces in weight, from one
penny per ounce to a halfpenny per two ounces; a letter thus
weighing fifteen ounces formerly cost 1s. 3d., whereas it can now be
sent for 5d. The natural result is a large increase in the number of
such letters.
We now come to the latest branch from the parent stem—the parcel
post. It is highly satisfactory to learn that there has been an increase
in the parcels carried of about three and a half millions, giving an
increase in money of £84,000. In England and Wales, 22,198,000
parcels were despatched; in Scotland, 2,690,000; and in Ireland,
1,527,000. The list of provinces and countries to which parcels can
be sent has also been enlarged. We learn that the first despatch of
foreign and colonial parcels took place on the 1st of July 1885; and
by the 1st of January 1886, arrangements had been completed for
the interchange of parcels with twenty-seven different countries. The
total number despatched up to the 31st of March was 71,900, and
the number received, 40,800. The largest business was transacted
with Germany, with which country in six months 46,000 parcels were
exchanged. India shows a business at the rate of 36,000 parcels in
the six months; and the smallest business recorded is one parcel in
three months for the island of Tortola.
An amusing article might very well be written on postal curiosities,
and the authorities might make a most interesting museum of the
various articles committed to their care. This museum, we venture to
suggest to the Postmaster-general, might be thrown open to the
inspection of the public at a small fee, and might help to swell the
receipts of the department. We read that at the commencement of
the parcel post with Belgium, several cages of live birds were
received; but the despatch of live birds being contraband, a veto
was put upon the practice. On other occasions, a live pigeon, a live
fowl, and no fewer than a hundred and fifty live frogs, passed
through the postal hands; while such unpleasant, not to say
aggressive, passengers as wild bees and snakes were transmitted in
numbers apparently ‘too numerous to mention.’ In all these cases
the contents of the parcels were detected and retained; but it is fair
to assume that many other packages containing other curiosities
passed through unchallenged. Among the contents of parcels
received in the Returned Letter Office in Dublin, having been
stopped as contraband, were two hens, eight mice, and two
hedgehogs. One of the hens was an invalid, and in a bad state of
health; and was addressed to a veterinary surgeon in London,
whom, doubtless, she wished to consult. Every possible care was
taken of the interesting invalid, but all efforts were unavailing;—she
died in the office! Let us turn to the brighter side of the picture—the
remaining hen, as also the mice and hedgehogs, were delivered to
their owners ‘safe and sound in wind and limb.’ Possibly the
moribund fowl was sent to the ‘Dead Letter’ Office.
A few amusing incidents which have occurred in the Returned Letter
Office are given in the Report. They are so curious and few, that
they but serve to whet our appetite. The number of returned letters,
&c., received in the office was 12,822,067, an increase of 4.7 per
cent. over the previous year. Of this number, 441,765 were
hopelessly unreturnable, as many as 26,928 being posted without
any address, and of the latter number, 1620 contained in cash and
cheques the astonishing amount of £3733, 17s. 5d. This reveals a
carelessness which is as extraordinary as it is culpable. Should any
letter or package go astray, the department is invariably blamed, and
the honesty of the letter-carriers impugned; but the following
instance shows where the blame should sometimes be laid.
‘Complaint was made last year at Liverpool that a packet containing
a bottle of wine and a box of figs had been duly posted, but not
delivered. Upon further inquiry, the sender ascertained that the
person to whom the packet was intrusted to post, had eaten the figs
and drunk the wine.’ Again, the department was blamed because a
certain letter addressed to ‘Mrs Jones, Newmarket, near Blyth,’ did
not reach its destination. It appeared, however, that no less than
twenty-nine ladies residing at that place, owned that interesting but
by no means uncommon name, and the postal authorities were
unable to decide which was the Mrs Jones. Another letter was
received in Glasgow addressed as follows: ‘Mrs ——, 3 miles from
where the cattle is sold on the Duke of Buccleugh’s ground.’
Two letters were alleged to be missing in Scotland. Inquiry was
made at the address of the first letter, which, being registered, was
undoubtedly delivered; when, after half an hour’s search, it was
discovered amongst an accumulation of twelve months’ letters
heaped upon a desk. The second letter was put into the box at the
correct address; this box was cleared by a charwoman every
Monday. Having failed to notice it one Monday, it lay till the following
Monday. Another charge was more serious. A letter containing a
cheque for a considerable sum of money and duly posted was
missing; the postal authorities were accused of the theft. The charge
was, however, cleared up, and the letter-carrier’s honesty vindicated
in so strange a manner, that we quote the Report itself for authority.
‘It was ultimately found amongst the straw of a kennel, torn into
fragments, but no pieces missing. The postman had duly delivered
the letter, having, at the request of the addressee, pushed it with
others under the front-door; and some puppies had carried it to the
kennel and torn it.’ Moral—Do not be quick to accuse, lest thereby
you condemn the innocent; and be careful to have a proper letter-
box.
Perhaps, to the political economist, the most interesting portion of
the Report is that which deals with the Post-office Savings-bank. It is
highly satisfactory to learn that the business of this department
shows a considerable increase during the year. The total amount due
to depositors on the 31st of December was £47,697,838, an increase
of £2,924,065 over the previous year. In addition to this, the balance
of government stock held by depositors at the close of the year was
£2,452,252; making the total amount due to depositors
£50,150,090, this being distributed over 3,535,650 separate
accounts. The greatest number of deposits made in one day was
48,568, on the 31st of January, amounting to £99,913; but the
largest amount deposited in one day was on the 1st of January, and
amounted to £124,843. The greatest number of withdrawals in one
day, 20,835, amounting to £60,643, was on the 22d of December;
but the largest amount, £66,981, was withdrawn on the 16th of
December. The average amount of each deposit was £2, 6s. 5d.; of
each withdrawal, £5, 15s. 10d. The number of accounts remaining
open at the end of the year is thus divided:
Prop. to Av. balance due to each
Number.
Pop. depositor.
£ s. d.
England and
3,272,701 1 to 8 13 10 8
Wales
Scotland 127,172 1 to 31 7 12 6
Ireland 135,777 1 to 36 17 19 2
The life-insurance business shows an increase during the year of 109
in number, and of £13,003 in amount.
The inland money-order business continues to diminish; this is owing
to the introduction of postal orders, which took place in 1880, since
which date the annual number issued has been decreased by about
six millions. On the other hand, with the colonies, and in both
directions with foreign countries, there has been a ‘satisfactory
increase.’ The Report recommends the use of money orders in
preference to postal orders, in spite of their involving more trouble,
on the ground of the greater security. It appears there is ‘a frequent
or almost universal omission on the part of the public to take so
ordinary a precaution as to fill in the name of the person to whom
the order is payable, and the office at which it should be cashed.’ It
goes on to add that a proposal to reduce the rates will shortly be
under consideration. The orders issued in India and the colonies
show an increase of 29,000 in number, amounting to £18,000; while
the increase in the orders issued on board Her Majesty’s ships is as
many as 67,900, or, in cash, £43,400.
The telegraph department’s figures do not so readily lend
themselves to comparison, as during the last six months the
sixpenny rate has been in force. Comparing the last six months with
the corresponding period in the year 1884-85, we have an increase
of 48 per cent., and a decrease of £40,233 in the revenue; but
against this loss must be placed the sum of £18,214 received on
account of the large additional number of abbreviated telegraph
addresses; this reduces the loss caused by the reduced rate to
£22,019. The increase in the number of local messages in London
alone was no less than 74 per cent. The twenty-seven telephone
exchanges have now 1255 subscribers; and since the 1st of April
1883 we are told that some 1400 miles of line have been laid, for
which some 29,000 miles of wire and £64,000 worth of red fir poles
from Norway have been used. The pneumatic-tube system, too, is
coming still more into use, and a rate of speed has been attained
varying between seventeen and thirty-four miles an hour according
to circumstance.
The gross revenue for the year was £10,278,865; while the gross
expenditure was £7,569,983; the net revenue, therefore, was
£2,708,882, being an increase of £62,584 on the previous year.
New post-offices have been opened in 371 places in the United
Kingdom, and about 860 letter-boxes been added. Not only have Her
Majesty’s lieges had their letters carried and their parcels delivered
with speed and almost unfailing accuracy, but, after all expenses
have been deducted, the postal arrangements have been so
satisfactorily carried out, that the public purse has been swelled by a
profit of over £2,700,000.
 IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER XLVII.
When Mr Dupuy heard from his daughter’s own lips the news of her
engagement to Harry Noel, his wrath at first was absolutely
unbounded; he stormed about the house, and raved and
gesticulated. He refused ever to see Harry Noel again, or to admit of
any proffered explanation, or to suffer Nora to attempt the defence
of her own conduct. He was sure no defence was possible, and he
wasn’t going to listen to one either, whether or not. He even
proposed to kick Harry out of doors forthwith for having thus taken
advantage in the most abominable manner of his very peculiar and
unusual circumstances. Whatever came, he would never dream of
allowing Nora to marry such an extremely ungentlemanly and mean-
spirited fellow.
But Mr Dupuy didn’t sufficiently calculate upon the fact that in this
matter he had another Dupuy to deal with, and that that other
Dupuy had the indomitable family will quite as strongly developed
within her as he himself had. Nora stuck bravely to her point with
the utmost resolution. As long as she was not yet of age, she said,
she would obey her father in all reasonable matters; but as soon as
she was twenty-one, Orange Grove or no Orange Grove, she would
marry Harry Noel outright, so that was the end of it; and having
delivered herself squarely of this profound determination, she said
not a word more upon the subject, but left events to work out their
own course in their own proper and natural fashion.
Now, Mr Dupuy was an obstinate man; but his obstinacy was of that
vehement and demonstrative kind which grows fiercer and fiercer
the more you say to it, but wears itself out, of pure inanition, when
resolutely met by a firm and passive silent opposition. Though she
was no psychologist, Nora had hit quite unconsciously and
spontaneously upon this best possible line of action. She never
attempted to contradict or gainsay her father, whenever he spoke to
her angrily, in one of his passionate outbursts, against Harry Noel;
but she went her own way, quietly and unobtrusively, taking it for
granted always, in a thousand little undemonstrative ways, that it
was her obvious future rôle in life to marry at last her chosen lover.
And as water by continual dropping wears a hole finally in the
hardest stone, so Nora by constant quiet side-hints made her father
gradually understand that she would really have Harry Noel for a
husband, and no other. Bit by bit, Mr Dupuy gave way, sullenly and
grudgingly, convinced in his own mind that the world was being
rapidly turned topsy-turvy, and that it was no use for a plain, solid,
straightforward old gentleman any longer to presume single-handed
upon stemming the ever-increasing flood of revolutionary levelling
sentiment. It was some solace to his soul, as he yielded slowly inch
by inch, to think that if for once in his life he had had to yield, it was
at least to a born Dupuy, and not to any pulpy, weak-minded
outsider whatever.
So in the end, before the steamer was ready to sail, he had been
brought, not indeed to give his consent to Nora’s marriage—for that
was more than any one could reasonably have expected from a man
of his character—but to recognise it somehow in an unofficial
dogged fashion as quite inevitable. After all, the fellow was heir to a
baronetcy, which is always an eminently respectable position; and
his daughter in the end would be Lady Noel; and everybody said the
young man had behaved admirably on the night of the riot; and over
in England—well, over in England it’s positively incredible how little
right and proper feeling people have got upon these important racial
matters.
‘But one thing I will not permit,’ Mr Dupuy said with decisive
curtness. ‘Whether you marry this person Noel, Nora, or whether
you don’t—a question on which it seems, in this new-fangled order
of things that’s coming up nowadays, a father’s feelings are not to
be consulted—you shall not marry him here in Trinidad. I will not
allow the grand old name and fame of the fighting Dupuys of
Orange Grove to be dragged through the mud with any young man
whatsoever, in this island. If you want to marry the man Noel, miss,
you shall marry him in England, where nobody on earth will know
anything at all about it.’
‘Certainly, papa,’ Nora answered most demurely. ‘Mr Noel would
naturally prefer the wedding to take place in London, where his own
family and friends could all be present; and besides, of course there
wouldn’t be time to get one’s things ready either, before we leave
the West Indies.’
When the next steamer was prepared to sail, it carried away a large
contingent of well-known residents from the island of Trinidad. On
the deck, Edward and Marian Hawthorn stood waving their
handkerchiefs energetically to their friends on the wharf, and to the
great body of negroes who had assembled in full force to give a
parting cheer to ‘de black man fren’, Mr Hawtorn.’ Harry Noel, in a
folding cane-chair, sat beside them, still pale and ill, but bowing, it
must be confessed, from time to time a rather ironical bow to his
late assailants, at the cheers, which were really meant, of course, for
his more popular friend and travelling companion. Close by stood
Nora, not sorry in her heart that she was to see the last that day of
the land of her fathers, where she had suffered so terribly and dared
so much. And close by, too, on the seat beside the gunwale, sat Mr
and Mrs Hawthorn the elder, induced at last, by Edward’s earnest
solicitation, to quit Trinidad for the evening of their days, and come
to live hard by his own new home in the mother country. As for Mr
Dupuy, he had no patience with the open way in which that man
Hawthorn was waving his adieux so abominably to his fellow-
conspirators; so, by way of escaping from the unwelcome
demonstration, he was quietly ensconced below in a corner of the
saloon, enjoying a last parting cigar and a brandy cocktail with some
of his old planter cronies, who were going back to shore by-and-by
in the pilot boat. As a body, the little party downstairs were all
agreed that when a man like our friend Dupuy here was positively
driven out of the island by coloured agitators, Trinidad was no longer
a place fit for any gentleman with the slightest self-respect to live in.
The effect of this solemn declaration was only imperceptibly marred
by the well-known fact that it had been announced with equal
profundity of conviction, at intervals of about six months each, by
ten generations of old Trinidad planters, ever since the earliest
foundation of the Spanish colony in that island.
Just two months later, Mr Dupuy was seated alone at his solitary
lunch in the London club to which Harry Noel had temporarily
introduced him as an honorary guest. It was the morning after
Nora’s wedding, and Mr Dupuy was feeling naturally somewhat dull
and lonely in that great unsympathetic world of London. His
attention, however, was suddenly attracted by two young men at a
neighbouring table, one of whom distinctly mentioned in an audible
tone his new son-in-law’s name, ‘Harry Noel.’ The master of Orange
Grove drew himself up stiffly and listened with much curiosity to
such scraps as he could manage to catch of their flippant
conversation.
‘O yes,’ one of them was saying, ‘a very smart affair indeed, I can
tell you. Old Sir Walter down there from Lincolnshire, and half the
smartest people in London at the wedding breakfast. Very fine
fellow, Noel, and comes in to one of the finest estates in the whole
of England. Pretty little woman, too, the bride—nice little girl, with
such winning little baby features.’
‘Ah!’ drawled out the other slowly. ‘Pretty, is she? Ah, really. And
pray, who was she?’
Mr Dupuy’s bosom swelled with not unnatural paternal pride and
pleasure as he anticipated the prompt answer from the wedding
guest: ‘One of the fighting Dupuys of Trinidad.’
But instead of replying in that perfectly reasonable and intelligible
fashion, the young man at the club responded slowly: ‘Well, upon
my word, I don’t exactly know who she was, but somebody colonial,
any way, I’m certain. I fancy from Hong-kong, or Penang, or
Demerara, or somewhere.—No; Trinidad—I remember now—it was
certainly either St Kitts or Trinidad. Oh, Trinidad, of course, for Mrs
Hawthorn, you know—Miss Ord that was—wife of that awfully clever
Cambridge fellow Hawthorn, who’s just been appointed to a
permanent something-or-other-ship at the Colonial Office—Mrs
Hawthorn knew her when she was out there during that nigger row
they’ve just been having; and she pointed me out the bride’s father,
a snuffy-looking old gentleman in the sugar-planting line, over in
those parts, as far as I understood her. Old gentleman looked
horribly out of it among so many smart London people. Horizon
apparently quite limited by rum and sugar.—O yes, it was a great
catch for her, of course, I needn’t tell you; but I understand this was
the whole story of it. She angled for him very cleverly; and, by Jove,
she hooked him at last, and played him well, and now she’s landed
him and fairly cooked him. It appears, he went out there not long
before this insurrection business began, to look after some property
they have in the island, and he stopped with her father, who, I
daresay, was accustomed to dispensing a sort of rough-and-ready
colonial hospitality to all comers, gentle and simple. When the row
came, the snuffy old gentleman in the sugar-planting line, as luck
would have it, was the very first man whose house was attacked—
didn’t pay his niggers regularly, they tell me; and this young lady,
posing herself directly behind poor Noel, compelled him, out of pure
politeness, being a chivalrous sort of man, to fight for her life, and
beat off the niggers single-handed for half an hour or so. Then he
gets cut down, it seems, with an ugly cutlass wound: she falls
fainting upon his body, for all the world like a Surrey melodrama;
Hawthorn rushes in with drawn pistol and strikes an attitude; and
the curtain falls: tableau. At last, Hawthorn manages to disperse the
niggers; and my young lady has the agreeable task of nursing Noel
at her father’s house, through a slow convalescence. Deuced clever,
of course: makes him save her life first, and then she helps to save
his. Has him both ways, you see—devotion and gratitude. So, as I
say, she lands him promptly: and the consequence is, after a proper
interval, this smart affair that came off yesterday over at St
George’s.’
Once more the world reeled visibly before Mr Dupuy’s eyes, and he
rose up from that hospitable club table, leaving his mutton cutlet
and tomato sauce almost untasted. In the heat of the moment, he
was half inclined to go back again immediately to his native Trinidad,
and brave the terrors of vivisection, rather than stop in this
atrocious, new-fangled, upsetting England, where the family honours
of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove were positively reckoned at
less than nothing. He restrained himself, however, with a violent
effort, and still condescends, from summer to summer, fitfully to
inhabit this chilly, damp, and unappreciative island. But it is
noticeable that he talks much less frequently now of the Dupuy
characteristics than he did formerly (the population of Great Britain
being evidently rather bored than otherwise by his constant allusions
to those remarkable idiosyncrasies); and some of his acquaintances
have even observed that since the late baronet’s lamented decease,
a few months since, he has spoken more than once with apparent
pride and delight of ‘my son-in-law, Sir Harry Noel.’
It is a great consolation to Tom Dupuy to this day, whenever
anybody happens casually to mention his cousin Nora in his
presence, that he can rub his hands gently one over the other before
him, and murmur in his own peculiar drawl: ‘I always told you she’d
end at last by marrying some confounded woolly-headed brown
man.’
THE END.
 REBEL-CATCHING.
We were in camp, and our chief was a very distinguished officer of
middle age, who had won his first spurs in the Indian Mutiny, and
had been winning additional spurs ever since. We were a small
party, which perhaps partly accounted for the chief’s
communicativeness, for to induce him to narrate any of his own
experiences under ordinary circumstances was well nigh an
impossibility. Be this as it may, on this occasion he did abate a little
of his habitual reserve, and though he would not even hint at one of
the score of incidents in which his coolness and gallantry had been
almost historical, still, what he did tell us may be of some general
interest. Moreover, to the best of my knowledge—and I can claim
something more than a nodding acquaintance with the literature of
the Sepoy Revolt—the two following stories have never been even
alluded to in print. I am sorry I cannot recollect the exact words in
which they were told; but I will do my best, and will only ask that
any deficiencies in the narrative may be attributed to me, and not to
the anonymous speaker.
‘Talking of catching rebels reminds me that I had a good deal to do
in that line in the Mutiny days. I was only a youngster, not much
more than a boy at the time; but I suppose I was rather zealous and
active, for I was given a small independent command, a troop of
native cavalry and a handful of infantry, and posted near the Nepal
frontier to look out for rebels. This was quite at the fag-end of the
Mutiny; and my chief duty was to catch, if possible, one or two
noted scoundrels who had hitherto escaped, and who, it was
supposed, might try to take refuge in the Nepal valley. Amongst the
objects of my especial solicitude was a subahdar [native officer] who
had taken a prominent part in the massacre of women and children
at Cawnpore. I had full permission to shoot this hound if only I could
catch him; and I waited longingly for some tidings of his
whereabouts. At last, one evening a native arrived at my post, and
declared that the subahdar was lying hid in a village some little
distance off, on the Nepal side of the frontier. I had got my chance,
and I was not going to lose it by delay. Getting together my troop of
cavalry, I made a night-march to the village, and in the very early
morning, before any of the inhabitants were astir, I drew a cordon
round it, and waited. When day broke, I sent a message to the
head-man of the village and explained matters. I called upon him to
deliver up the subahdar, and pointed out that I was master of the
situation. To my disgust, the head-man declared that he could not
give up the subahdar, for the simple reason that he was not in the
village at all. However, my information had been trustworthy, and I
did not like the idea of having had a long and troublesome march for
nothing, so I ordered a search. This was accordingly made, but with
no results except that of putting me into a rather bad temper. Finally,
I said to the head-man that every single inhabitant of the place
should turn out by a given time that day, or I would burn the village
over their heads. The head-man sorrowfully consented; and man,
woman, and child evacuated the huts, after which the troopers
scoured the village in their endeavours to find their man. But not a
sign of him was present, and I began to feel that I had been
befooled. Somewhat sick at heart, I ordered my troopers to stop
searching and to prepare for the return march.
‘As the troopers were trotting up to fall in, one of them happened to
pass a small hut in which was a heap of most innocent-looking but
not very savoury rubbish. Through the doorway the trooper casually
poked his lance at this heap, more for swagger or to show his zeal
than with any hope of making a discovery. Suddenly, up from the
rubbish jumped a scared figure, who was promptly caught and
brought to me. It was the subahdar!’
The speaker went on to say that they made short work of the
scoundrel, who had reddened his foul hands with the blood of
English ladies and children. He had his trial; but the evidence was
conclusive, and mercy was out of the question. The subahdar was
shot; and when one reads the details of the two massacres at
Cawnpore, one is tempted to think that the death was too good for
him. Our chief concluded this episode by noting that he
subsequently had no difficulty in explaining to the Nepalese
authorities his conduct towards the villagers, which had been, to say
the least, somewhat brusque. These authorities looked upon the
matter as rather humorous than otherwise, and certainly not worthy
of serious notice.
‘Another curious thing happened to me,’ continued the chief, ‘during
the time that I was rebel-hunting. One day I caught a criminal with a
very peculiar face, one that I could not help remembering rather
more clearly than I generally remember the countenances of natives.
This particular rebel had done something particularly bad, and had
to be shot without delay. I gave the necessary orders for a firing-
party to be formed, and the execution was duly carried out.
Something prevented me from being actually present on the ground,
but there was a native officer, and my men were presumably to be
trusted. I remember distinctly hearing the volley delivered by the
firing-party, and when I subsequently inquired whether everything
had been all right, it was reported to me that the man was dead.
‘About a fortnight afterwards, a man was brought in to me whose
face seemed strangely familiar. Suddenly it flashed on my mind that
this was the very man whose death-knell I had heard only a few
days ago. Looking at him closely, I said: “How is this? Who are you?
Surely I had you shot a fortnight ago?”
“It is true, sahib,” said the poor wretch. “I am the man your soldiers
caught, and I was brought before your honour, and you ordered me
to be shot. I was taken out, and they stood me on the edge of a
nala [a dried-up watercourse], and fired. Sahib, they hit me; but I
was not dead, and I dropped into the nala and crept away. Your
soldiers never came to look for me, and I escaped. By evil chance, I
have been captured again. But, sahib, do not order me to be shot
again.”
“No,” said I; “I will not do that—not this time, at anyrate. You are
free, and had better make the best use of your legs. But if I catch
you again, I shall really be obliged to have you shot in downright
earnest. Be off, and take care you don’t fall a third time into my
hands.”
‘And he didn’t.’
Our chief commented on the native’s tale of his hairbreadth escape
as being what Yankees would call ‘rather thin.’ He seemed himself to
think that the firing-party had been tampered with, a contingency
which he had, in his subsequent rebel-catching adventures, taken
care to avert.
 BY ORDER OF THE LEAGUE.
CHAPTER III.
Le Gautier was not far wrong in his estimate of Carlo Visci. The game
the former was playing was a dangerous one. He had met the
youthful Genevieve in one of his country excursions, and, struck by
her beauty, conceived the idea of finding some slight amusement in
her society. It was not hard, in that quiet place, with his audacity
and talents, to make himself known to her; nor did the child—for she
was little more—romantic, passionate, her head filled with dreams of
love and devotion, long remain cold to his advances. Friendship soon
ripens into love in the sunny South, where temperaments are
warmer, and the cold restraints of northern society do not exist. The
Frenchman had no sinister intentions when he commenced his little
flirtation—a mere recreation pour passer le temps on his side; but
alas for good intentions; the moth may not approach too near the
flame without scorching its wings. Begun in playfulness, almost
sport, the thing gradually ripened into love—love such as most
women never know, love encountered by keen wit and a knowledge
of the evil side of life. When the story opens, Genevieve had known
Le Gautier for six months—had known him, loved him, and trusted
him.
But Le Gautier was already tired of his broken toy. It was all very
well as a pastime; but the gilded chains were beginning to chafe,
and besides, he had ambitious schemes into which any calculations
of Genevieve never entered. He had been thinking less of dark
passionate eyes lately than of a fair English face, the face of Enid
Charteris; so in his mind he began to revolve how he could best free
himself from the Italian girl, ere commencing his campaign against
the heart and fortune of Sir Geoffrey Charteris’ heiress. Come what
may now, he must file his fetters.
Filled with this virtuous and manly resolution, he set out the
following afternoon for the Villa Mattio. It was Visci’s whim to keep
his sister there, along with a younger sister, a child as yet, little
Lucrece, both under the charge of a sleepy old gouvernante. In spite
of his faults, Visci was a good brother, having too sincere an
affection for his sister to keep her with him among the wild student
spirits he affected, fearing contamination for her mind. And so she
remained in the country; Visci running down from the city to see her,
each time congratulating himself upon the foresight he had
displayed in such an arrangement as this, little thinking he had thus
caused the greatest evil he had to fear.
Le Gautier walked on till the white façade and stucco pillars of the
villa were in sight, and then, striking across a little path leading deep
into a thick shady wood, all carpeted with spring flowers, threw
himself upon the grass to wait. There was a little shrine here by the
side of a tiny stream, with the crucifix and a rude stone image of the
Virgin in a dark niche; evidently a kind of rustic woodland sanctuary.
But Le Gautier did not notice these things as he lay there; and there
was a frown upon his brow, and a thoughtful, determined look upon
his face, which boded ill for some one.
He had not long to wait. Pushing the branches of the trees aside and
coming towards him with eager, elastic step, was a girl. She was tall
and slight; not more than seventeen, in fact, and her dark eyes and
clear-cut features gave promise of great beauty. There was a wistful,
tender smile upon her face as she came forward—a smile tinged
with pain, as she noted the moody face of the man lying there, but
nevertheless a smile which betokened nothing but perfect, trusting,
unutterable love. Le Gautier noted this in his turn, and it did not
tend to increase his equanimity. It is not easy for a man, when he is
going to commit a base action, to preserve his equanimity when met
with perfect confidence by the victim. For a moment she stood
there, looking at him, neither speaking for a brief space.
‘How ridiculously happy you look, Genevieve,’ Le Gautier said
irritably. ‘It is a great compliment to me, but’——
The girl looked at him shyly, as she leant against a tree, the shafts
of light through the leaves playing upon her lustrous coronal of
dusky hair and showing the happy gleam in her eyes. ‘I am always
contented when you are here, Hector,’ she answered softly.
‘And never at any other time, I suppose?’
‘I cannot say that. I have many things to do, but I can always find
time to think of you. I dwell upon you when you are away, and think
what I should do if you were to leave me. Ah, yes, I know you will
not do that; but if you did, I should die.’
Le Gautier groaned inwardly. Time had been when he had dwelt with
pleasure on these outpourings of an innocent heart.
‘You are not one of the dying order of heroines, Genevieve. By no
means. And so you often wonder what you would do if I were to
leave you?’
The girl half started from her reclining position, with her scarlet lips
parted, and a troubled expression on her face. ‘You speak very
strangely to-day, Hector,’ she exclaimed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Precisely what I say. You are anxious to know how you would feel if
I left you. Your curiosity shall be gratified. I am going to leave you.’
‘To leave me! Going away, Hector, and without me?’ Genevieve
wondered vaguely whether she heard the words aright. She started
and pressed her hand to her heart, as if to still its rebellious beating.
Going away? The warmth seemed to have departed from the scene,
the bright light grew dim as gradually the words forced themselves
upon her; and the cold numbness of despair froze her trembling
limbs.
‘Yes, I am going away,’ Le Gautier repeated in a matter-of-fact
manner, but always with his eyes anywhere but on the girl’s face.
‘Indeed, I have no alternative; and as to taking you with me, it is
impossible.’
‘I have dreamt of something like this,’ Genevieve intoned in a low
vague voice, her look seemingly far away. ‘It has been forced upon
me, though I have tried not to think so, that you have been growing
colder day by day. And now you come and tell me that you are going
to leave me! There is no regret in your voice, no sorrow in your face.
You will go away and forget, leaving me here in my sorrow,
mourning for my lost love—leaving me here heartbroken—deceived!’
‘You should go on the stage,’ Le Gautier replied sardonically. ‘Your
talents are wasted here. Let me assure you, Genevieve, speaking as
a man who has had a little experience, that if you can get up a
scene like this upon the boards, there is money in it.’
‘You are cruel!’ the girl cried, dashing her tears away impetuously
—‘you are cruel! What have I done to deserve this from you, Hector?
You wish to leave me; that you will not come back again, my heart
assures me.’
‘Your heart is a prophetic organ, then, caro mio. Now, do look at the
thing in a rational light. I am under the orders of the League; to
disobey is death to me; and to take you with me is impossible. We
must forget all our little flirtations now, for I cannot tell when I may
be in Italy again. Now, be a sensible girl; forget all about
unfortunate me. No one possibly can know; and when the prince
appears, marry him. Be assured that I shall tell no foolish tales.’
Gradually, surely, the blood crept into the girl’s face as she listened
to these mocking words. She drew herself up inch by inch, her eyes
bright and hard, her head thrown back. There was a look of infinite
withering scorn upon her as she spoke, sparing not herself in the
ordeal. ‘And that is the thing I loved!’ she said, each word cold and
clear—‘that is the thing to which I gave all my poor heart! I
understand your words only too well. I am abandoned. But you have
not done with me yet. My turn will come, and then—beware!’
‘A truce to your histrionics,’ Le Gautier cried, all the tiger aroused in
him now, and only too ready to take up the gage thrown down. ‘Do
you think I have no occupation, nothing to dwell upon but romantic
schoolgirls one kills pleasant hours with in roaming about the world!
You knew well enough the thing could not last. I leave for London
to-morrow; so, be sensible, and let us part friends.’
‘Friends!’ she echoed disdainfully. ‘You and I friends! You have made
a woman of me. From this moment, I shall only think of you with
loathing!’
‘Then why think of me at all? It is very hard a man cannot have a
little amusement without such a display of hysterical affection as
this. For goodness’ sake, Genevieve, do be sensible!’
Stung to madness by this cruel taunt, she took one step towards him
and stopped, her whole frame thrilling with speechless, consuming
rage. It would have gone hard with him then, could she have laid
her hand upon a weapon. Then all at once she grew perfectly, rigidly
calm. She stepped to the little sanctuary, and took down the wooden
cross, holding it in her right hand. ‘Before you go, I have a word to
say to you,’ she said between her clenched white teeth. ‘You are a
man; I am a poor defenceless girl. You are endowed with all the
falseness and deceit that flesh is heir to; I am ignorant of the great
world that lies beyond the horizon. You fear no harm from me now;
I shall evoke no arm in my defence; but my time will come. When
you have nearly accomplished your most cherished schemes, when
you have your foot upon the goal of your crowning ambition, when
fortune smiles her brightest upon your endeavours—then I shall
strike! Not till then shall you see or hear of me; but the hour will
come. Beware of it!’
‘Perfection!’ Le Gautier cried. ‘You only want’——
‘Not another word!’ the girl commanded. ‘Now, go!—mean, crawling
hound, base deceiver of innocent girls! Go! and never look upon my
face again; it shall be the worse for you if you do! Go! and forget my
passionate words; but the time will come when they shall come back
to you. Go!’ With steady hand she pointed to the opening in the
wood; and without another word he slunk away, feeling, in spite of
his jaunty air, a miserable, pitiful coward indeed.
As he turned to go, Genevieve watched him down the long avenue
out of sight, and then, sinking on her knees, she sobbed long and
bitterly, so full of her grief and care that she was oblivious to her
surroundings. Her face was deadly pale, her white lips moved
passionately, as she knelt there weeping, half praying, half cursing
herself in her despair.
‘Genevieve!’
The word, uttered in a tone of wonder and alarm, was repeated a
second time before the agitated girl looked up. Salvarini was
standing there, his usually grave face a prey to suspicion and alarm,
a look which did not disguise entirely an expression of tenderness
and affection. Genevieve rose to her feet and wiped away her tears.
It was some moments before she was calm enough to speak to the
wondering man at her side.
‘I have chosen an unfortunate moment for my mission,’ Salvarini
mournfully continued; ‘I am afraid my presence is unwelcome here.
—Genevieve, there is something behind this I do not understand. It
must be beyond an ordinary grief to move you like this.’
‘There are some sorrows we dare not think of,’ Genevieve replied
with an air of utter weariness.—‘Luigi, do not press me now. Some
day, perhaps, I will ask you to help me.’
‘I am afraid a brother is the fittest confidant in a case like this.
Pardon me, if I am wrong; but when I hear you talking to a man—
for his voice came to me—and then I find you in such a plight as
this, I must think.—O Genevieve! my only love, my idol and dream
since I first saw your face, to have given your heart to some one
unworthy of you. What will Carlo say, when he hears of it?’
‘But he must not hear,’ Genevieve whispered, terrified. ‘Luigi, you
have surprised me; but you must keep my secret—I implore you.’
‘I can refuse no words of yours. But one thing you must, nay, shall
do—you must tell me who this man is; you must have an avenger.’
‘Luigi,’ the girl said, laying her hand gently upon his arm, ‘I shall be
my own avenger—that I have sworn by the cross I hold in my hand.
If it is for years, I can wait—and hope.’
‘That is a wrong spirit,’ Salvarini replied sorrowfully. ‘You are mad
just now with your wrongs. Stay here at home, and let me be your
champion. I love you too well to admire such sentiments from you
yet. I shall not press you now; but all time, for good or for evil, I
shall wait for you.’
‘Luigi, you are a good man, far too good for me. Listen! I must
gratify my revenge; till then, all must wait. Things alter; men
change; but when the time comes, and you are still the same, say
“Come to me,” and I shall be by your side.’
‘I shall never change!’ he replied as he touched the outstretched
hand with his lips gently.
Slowly and sadly they walked back towards the house—Genevieve
calm and collected now; Salvarini, mournfully resigned; pity and rage
—pity for the girl, and rage against her deceiver—alternately
supreme in his heart. For some time neither spoke.
‘Will you come in?’ she asked.
‘Not now,’ he replied, feeling instinctively that his presence would
only be an unwelcome restraint. ‘I had a message to bring from
Carlo. He and Sir Geoffrey and Miss Charteris are coming to-morrow.
—And now, remember, if you want a friend, you have one in me.—
Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye, Luigi,’ she said mechanically. ‘You are very good. I shall
remember.’
Strangers coming to-morrow. The words bear on her brain like the
roar of countless hammers. Strangers coming; and how was she to
meet them now, with this wild sense of wrong burning within her
vengeful Italian heart, bruised but not crushed? She walked slowly
up-stairs and sat down in her room, thinking, till the evening light