Lazio/Roma: Anne Frank takes the field at Olympic Stadium

In a recent post about an afternoon spent in Val Melaina and Serpentara, I included the above photograph, of a piece of graffiti by a supporter of the Lazio soccer team linking Roma fans with Jews.  At the time, I thought it was just another example--and a simplistic one at that--of the anti-Semitism that appears regularly on Rome's walls.  I was wrong--wrong to see it as simple.


The posting coincided with a widely-reported story (featured in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and of course in the Italian and European press): During a recent soccer game in Olympic Stadium--where the Roma and Lazio teams play on alternate Sundays--Lazio fans left

postcard-size stickers displaying an iconic image of Anne Frank, but  wearing a Roma jersey (above right).  Like the Serpentara graffiti I published, the idea behind the stickers was to associate the Roma club and its fans with Jews, suggesting a mutual insult.
 
From there things get more complex.  It seems that the city's Jewish community has historically leaned toward support of the A.S. Roma team.  In fact, as a Roman friend wrote us about the Val Malaina post, "Roman wealthy Jews in 1927 were part of the founders and initial supporters of the new team."  But it is also true that A.S. Roma's fans have at times taken an anti-Semitic stance, writing "Anne Frank roots for Lazio" on city walls, according to the New York Times.  Even so, that's a false equivalency.  In one infamous display at a game against Roma 2001, Lazio fans displayed a banner reading, "Auschwitz is your homeland/The Ovens are Your Homes." 

It didn't take long for soccer officialdom to speak out against the Anne Frank postcards.  The Lazio

club president, Claudio Lotito, laid a wreath of white and blue flowers (the team's colors) at the Rome synagogue on the Tiber (the city's chief Rabbi called it a "publicity stunt"; the wreath was soon seen

floating in the river).  Lazio players (above) showed up for practice wearing shirts with Anne Frank's picture and below, the words "No all' antisemitismo."  New Anna Frank stickers appeared, this time with the words "Siamo Tutti Anna Frank" (we are all Anne Frank). Around the league, team captains held copies of Primo Levi's holocaust memoir while others listened to readings from Frank's diary. 

There are all sorts of conclusions to be drawn.  I have only two thoughts.  First, this won't be the last time that Anne Frank plays a part in a soccer drama.  Second, a simple piece of graffiti may have a complex context.

Bill

Links to RST posts dealing with anti-Semitism--in soccer and on the walls of Rome:
WWII writer Czeslaw Milosz.
On the "myth of the good Italian."
Rome walls and neo-Fascist iconography.
Death of Gabriele Sandri, a Lazio fan.

Freud in Rome (I): All Roads Lead to Rome--but not for Freud

RST has always taken an interest in how people experience Rome, whether famous writers such as John Cheever and Ralph Ellison or today's tourists.  It's not an easy city to visit, to understand, or to make one's own.  And no one had more trouble with Rome than the eminent psychologist Sigmund Freud.  This two-part post looks at Freud's complex relationship to the Eternal City.  

It's not hard to imagine Sigmund Freud as the consummate egghead/intellectual, toiling away year after year in his Viennese study, reading and writing, analyzing patients.  That's all true. But Freud's self-image was strikingly different.  "One would hardly know to look at me," he wrote in an early letter to his fiancée, but already in school I was always a bold man of the opposition, was always where one could avow an extreme and, as a rule, had to atone for it."  A close friend and colleague once told him, Freud wrote, that "he had found out that there was hidden in me, beneath the cover of shyness, an immoderately bold and fearless person.  I have always believed this, and simply never dared to tell anyone."  

Freud

Bold and fearless?  In some ways, yes.  After all, he had invented a new and controversial discipline, psychoanalysis, and spent much of his life laboring to convince unbelievers of its truth and value.  He had done so, moreover, as a Jew.  It was a troubled identity to carry in the era of the Dreyfus Affair, and he had carried it forthrightly and proudly.  At age 80, he confirmed a life of defiance in a note to a colleague:  "I have always held faithfully to our people, and never pretended to be anything but what I am: A Jew from Moravia whose parents come from Austrian Galicia."  Even the Nazis didn't scare him--though he was naïve in the matter;  in 1937, when a French analyst suggested he leave Vienna, Freud was cavalier: "The Nazis?  I'm not afraid of them.  Help me rather to combat my true enemy." (More below on the "true enemy".)

Bold, fearless, courageous.  Yet there was one thing, one place really, that Freud feared: Rome.  On its face the fear seems absurd, and it takes on additional resonance when considered in the context of Freud's hobbies (the word doesn't do justice) and interests.

Lake Trasimeno

Psychology, of course, absorbed the great
share of his time and energies, but beyond his life work he was not without other pursuits. As a youth, Freud studied Latin and Greek and read extensively in the literature of antiquity, reveling in the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, and, yes, Rome.  Over a lifetime he accumulated a substantial collection of objects from antiquity, statuettes and fragments, that he kept in his office and on his desk.  He had, he wrote the novelist Stefan Zweig late in life, made many sacrifices in assembling his collection, adding, with more than a little exaggeration, that he had "actually...read more archaeology than psychology."

It is all the more remarkable, then, that he did not set foot in Rome until 1901, when he was 45 years old.  He got to Italy before then, more than once--Vienna was not that far away, after all, and he loved Italy--but none of the itineraries took him to Rome. He toured Venice, Pisa, Livorno, Siena, Rapallo, Gorizia, Florence, Verona, Ravenna, and other cities--he even made plans to visit Naples while bypassing Rome--and at one point reached Lake Trasimeno, only 50 miles from Rome, only to turn back.  During all this he regularly fantasized about meeting his dear friend and correspondent Wilhelm Fliess in Rome--at Easter, for a conference, on a trip together.  In 1898 he revealed to Fliess that he was studying the typography of Rome, adding that "the yearning [for Rome] becomes ever more tormenting."

He even dreamed about Rome (convenient, as he had begun to write a book about dreams). Indeed, when the "dream book" was published in 1900 and 1901 as The Interpretation of Dreams, it contained accounts of five Freud dreams, all "based on a longing to visit Rome."  In one, he was looking out the window of a train at the Tiber and Ponte Sant'Angelo, only to have the train pull away before he could set foot on Roman soil.  In another, he actually got to Rome but was "disappointed to find that the scenery was far from being of an urban character."  In still another, also set in Rome, he discovered that Rome was full of German posters, a sign, he thought, that it might be uncomfortable to be a German speaker in Rome.

Freud was very much self-aware: "Since I have been studying the unconscious," he wrote

Freud (l) and Fliess (r)

Fliess rather smugly in 1897, "I have become so interesting to myself."  And he knew that his anxieties about Rome were excessive.  "My longing for Rome is, by the way [love that "by the way" ed.], deeply neurotic."

What was going on?  Why was Freud so fearful of entering Rome?  One avenue to answering that question lies in the full story, as interpreted by Freud, of that bizarre turnaround at Lake Trasimeno, with Rome just hours away.  As Freud knew well, the lake was the scene of a great battle in the Punic Wars, in which Hannibal's troops annihilated a substantial segment of the Roman army.  Then, and later, it seemed as if Hannibal would enter and take Rome, but--like the younger Freud--he did not.  "I had actually been following in Hannibal's footsteps," Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams.  "Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone had expected him in Rome."  But there was more to Freud's interpretation than a simple comparison.  As Freud revealed, more than once, Hannibal had been a boyhood hero of the analyst--and he remained a hero in eyes of the older man--for three reasons.

First, Hannibal was a Semite, not quite the same as a Jew, but a status that linked him in

Freud's eyes with the ancient Hebrews and, through them, with modern Jewry--and we have seen how important this identification was for Freud.  Becoming conscious as a youth of "what it meant to belong to an alien race," "the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem."

Second, the Catholic connection.  Of course, there were no Catholics, and no Catholic Church, when Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217 BC.  But for Freud's "youthful mind," Rome was synonymous with the Catholic Church.  Hence "Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church."  For Freud the man, the Catholic Church remained the enemy.  When Freud dismissed the Nazi threat and sought help with "my true enemy," he was referring to the Catholic Church.

The third reason for Hannibal's importance, and for Freud's reluctance to visit Rome, also involves religion, but it also involves Freud's father.  As a youth of 10 or 12, as Freud tells the story, his father had told him of an event that had occurred when he--his father--was a young man.  While walking on the street with a new fur cap, a "Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: Jew! get off the pavement."  When the younger Freud asked his father what he had done, his father had replied:  "I went into the roadway and picked up my cap."  It was a traumatic moment for the boy.  "This struck me," Freud wrote, "as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy [Sigmund] by the hand.  I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans.  Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my fantasies."

It seems clear then, that Freud identified powerfully with Hannibal.  To deepen and fulfill that identification, Freud could appreciate Hannibal's victory but was also obliged, for a time at least, to replicate and share the general's failure to breach and conquer Rome.

In the next installment: what Freud found in Rome, and some thoughts about his fraught relationship to the Eternal City.

Bill

The Complete Letters of Sigmund Feud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), contains numerous references to Freud's Rome fears.  The Interpretation of Dreams, parts  I and II (volumes IV and V in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmumd Freud, James Strachey, ed. and translator, 1900, 1901 (London: the Hogarth Press, 1953, 1954) are very valuable.  Also important are Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988); Letters of Sigmund Freud, selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960); Peter M. Newton, Freud: from Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995); Ellen Oliensis, Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jonathan Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), a fascinating, readable book that got me started on this topic.

Italy, Rome, and the Deportation of the Jews: Some Thoughts

The little girls at right, Fiorella and Luciana Anticoli,
 were among those sent to Auschwitz from Rome
 in October 1943

In our first Rome book, Rome the Second Time, we told the tragic story of Rome’s Jews, thousands of whom were rounded up and more than a thousand deported to German concentration camps in October 1943, never to return.  

When we wrote about the event in 2009, there was a plaque on a wall at the Tiburtina Station, remembering the day when Jews were loaded on the trains; it was on one of RST's itineraries. With the recent remodeling of the station, the plaque has disappeared, and with it one more piece of evidence that Italian--and Roman--Jews were among the victims of the Holocaust. 

The plaque - now gone - at Tiburtina Station in Rome

We were reminded of the absence of that plaque a few weeks ago, at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust--a bunker-like building on the western edge of Pan Pacific Park—where we had gone to hear Guri Schwarz, a professor at the University of Pisa and visiting professor at UCLA, talk about “The ‘Myth of the Good Italian’: Origins and Evolution.”  Schwartz described the larger myth as a series of denials, including the specific denial that Italians had some responsibility for the Holocaust.  

His talk focused on how and why that specific myth developed and spread.  One cause was the German/Italian dichotomy: the "bad" German and the "good" Italian.  Between 1943 (when Italy left the war) and 1947 (when the Paris peace treaty was ratified), Italy used this dichotomy to make the country look better, and hence to protect Italian national interests--essentially, to convince the Allied powers that Italy, even as a defeated country, deserved decent treatment under the peace accords.  In 1945, for example, Italian foreign minster Carlo Forza claimed the Germans were "bad" because they had come to Christianity 1000 years later than the Italians.  Upholders of the myth also claimed that Italy was "good" because, unlike Germany, which had a large Protestant population, it was a solidly Catholic country.

Prof. Guri Schwartz, speaking recently at the Los Angeles
Museum of the Holocaust

In addition, the “myth of the good Italian" helped Italians cope with their  disturbing history of Fascism--in essence, by denying it--and it was comforting in a more general way, as evidence that “Western Civilization” (closely identified with Italy's history) had not entirely succumbed under the pressure of totalitarianism. 

With respect to the Holocaust, the myth of the good Italian incorporated several ideas, all of them, according to Schwarz, essentially false: that anti-semitism had no roots in Italy; that the Italian racial laws of 1938 were rejected by the general population, and not implemented; that such anti-semitism as existed in Italy during the war was imitative of German anti-semitism; that in areas of Italian occupation (the Balkans, Greece, Southern France), the Jews were protected; and that deportation of Italian Jews was resisted by Italians. 

Surprisingly, even Italian Jews came to the support of the myth of the good Italian in the postwar years.  They did so, according to Schwarz, because the Jews that remained wanted and needed to re-integrate into Italian society, and re-integration required building bridges to neighbors, even if they had once been Fascists.  Moreover, as the war ended, tens of thousands of displaced Jews flowed through Italy on their way to Palestine, and Italy’s Jews wanted Italian authorities to support the movement of those persons. 

Stazione Tiburtina, where Rome's Jews boarded trains
 for Auschwitz

Schwarz did not say much about what actually happened to Italy’s Jews, though he did comment on that in the discussion that followed his talk.  He argued that after 1943, when Germany occupied the northern 2/3 of the Italian peninsula, Italian authorities assisted the Germans in rounding up and deporting Jews.  About 6,000 of Italy’s estimated 25,000 Jews were arrested, deported, and killed.  


Of those 6,000, Schwarz cited evidence evidence that one half were deported as a result of the efforts of Italians, or of Italians and Germans working together.  Schwarz also emphasized that Italy’s 1938 racial laws, aimed at Jews, were widely and thoroughly enforced, which indicates that Italians were not the reluctant anti-semites that the myth of the good Italian would suggest.  

These are very complex issues that have vexed historians for generations.  It is often pointed out that Italy’s history in dealing with Jews in this period is one of Europe’s best; the percentage of Italian Jews deported to the killing camps was one of the lowest in Europe--at 16% much better than France, for example—even though Italy was German-occupied for almost as long as the southern zone of France.  Writing in the March 6, 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books  (“Jews: How Vichy Made it Worse”), Robert Paxton argues, in contrast to Schwarz, that Italian police cooperation in deportation was “desultory.”  “To be sure,” he continues, “some Italian Fascist militiamen helped the Nazis hunt down Jews; it was they who arrested Primo Levi, for example, on December 13, 1943.  But the public largely refused to help them, and much of the administration dragged its feet.”  Paxton notes, too, that French views on the Jews were influenced to a considerable degree by anxiety over a great wave of foreign Jews that entered the country during the war—something that did not occur in Italy. 

There’s more to be said, of course.  Having become in thrall to another recent Los Angeles speaker, Alain De Botton, who believes deeply in the importance of humanism to civilized values, we would add only that Italy’s experience with art, music, and culture are deeper than any other nation’s, and this link held strong even under Fascism, when the Mussolini regime celebrated the arts—while the Nazis did

  

In 2010 and 2011, Rome embedded over 100 gold, 10cm square stones ("pietri d'inciampo," or "stumbling blocks) in Rome's streets, in remembrance of Jews, Roma, and others who died in the Holocaust.  The artist is German.  

their best to bury them.  It seems likely to us that some Italian Jews—possibly very many—survived because large numbers of Italians, even under Fascism, and even while supporting Mussolini's regime, remained decent and humane.  Guri Schwarz has made us aware that the "good Italian(s)" were not as good as we imagined, or hoped. But perhaps they were "better" than most.

Bill  

Fashion and Fascism: The Sordid Story of Dior's John Galliano

John Galliano

We were intrigued by Rhonda Garelick's op-ed piece in the March 7 New York Times on the unsavory conduct of John Galliano, Dior's weird and notorious creative director, who had been fired from his $5 million post a few days earlier for saying awful things in a Paris bar, La Perle.  On one occasion--unfortunately for Galliano, caught on a cellphone--he told a nearby woman "I love Hitler" and added, "People like you would be dead.  Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f....... gassed."  In another bar rant, it was "Dirty Jewish face, you should be dead," followed by a critique of the woman's body and attire: "Your boots are of the lowest quality, your thighs are of the lowest quality.  You are so ugly I don't want to see you.  I am John Galliano!"

 A poster of Mussolini with the "right" sort of Italian
 woman: plain, with child, humbly dressed

Garelick takes the next step, connecting Galliano's vitriol to fascism's use of the fashion industry during the Vichy years of the 1940s, when French fashion fell under the sway of the Nazis and became a servant of Nazi and Vichy propaganda.  "Our role," said one Vichy designer, "is to give France the face of serenity.  The more elegant Frenchwomen are, the more our country will show the world that we are not afraid."  Many French designers for women bought into Aryan ideals of youth, beauty, physical fitness and physical perfection--defined as blue eyes, blond hair, and "sharp-angled features"--that today, Garelick notes, can still be found in the work of Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.  For Garelick, Galliano is a version of the "fascist demagogue of yore," using the simplest of measures--what one wears, how one looks, whether one is defined as attractive or not--to exclude and, in his fantasy, kill. 

At left, the Fascist ideal of womahood.  At right, the threatening
 woman: thin, dissolute, fashionable.  1931

The Italian experience is similar and different.  Italian fascism was deeply concerned about women's bodies and dress, but more fearful than their French counterparts about the sexualized women's body, women's physical fitness, and high fashion.  Concerned about "scandalous" dress, Mussolini's Fascists created a National Committee for Cleaning Up Fashion (1927-), which for two years worried about things like the skirt lengths of small-town girls.  Unlike the French, fascism in Italy by-and-large rejected women who were too thin or pale, while valuing the "authentic woman," dedicated above all else to maternity, with her rounded figure and peasant costume ("in a narrow womb/the chick is doomed").  The Duce's Fascists were gung-ho about muscles and manliness and men's physical fitness, but exercise for women was another matter: no skimpy uniforms, no athleticism (the Olympics an exception), no male sports like soccer, nothing that might encourage lesbian relationships.


Properly uniformed, but dangerously
emancipated.  Siena, 1943 



Fashion posed a particular problem for Italian fascism.  During the early years of the Mussolini regime--through about 1933--high fashion was encouraged, but only for the country's social elite.  In these years, there were fashion shows at the Excelsior and Grand Hotels in Rome, and in the Rose Casino of the Borghese Gardens, and even--in 1933--the first Permanent National Fashion Exposition in Turin--all of this applauded as an expression of the nation's elite--that is, the Fascists.  By 1935 the tide had turned, and in 1938, as war approached, Mussolini launched an anti-bourgeois "reform of custom" that reviled luxury and top-down fashion and trumpeted the virtues of having as many women as possible in rough-wool uniforms (photo right) or, at least, wide skirts and shawls. 



So, for Mussolini's Fascists, as for Dior's Galliano, fashion was a way to define who had value and who did not.  In the 1930s, that decision could have unthinkable consequences.  Today, probably not--just John Galliano, a little drunk and struggling with his own Jewish heritage, raving in a bar. 

Special thanks to Victoria De Grazia, for material drawn from her outstanding book (cover photo above right), How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (University of California Press, 1992). 

Bill