“In the spring of 1944, Nazi troops massacred hundreds of Italian civilians in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome. After World War II came to an end, however, the German government did little to track down the perpetrators. At the time, both Rome and Bonn were more interested in politics than justice.” Article by Klaus Wiegrefe
(c) DER SPIEGEL, 2012; photo (c) Koch/Bundesarchiv
Photographer Robin Hammond travels to the Roma camps in Italy to document the plight of the people there against the discrimination they face from the rest of the country (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2008-11 > More photos > Article
The author of The Name of the Rose on why it is human to lie, how Berlusconi has used conspiracy theories to stay in power – and Eco’s love/hate relationship with his most famous book. With a link to a review of his recent novel The Cemetery of Prague (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2011
On summer days like this, I sometimes return to Grado, the old Adriatic resort of my childhood. It is still populated by Italian, Austrian and German tourists, and increasingly Hungarians and Czechs, and it smells nicely of pine, sea, foreign cleaning products and Aperol-Spritz. Then I sometimes think of Kakanien, whose ghost is somehow even more tangible here than in Vienna or Prague. At least during the summer.
‘Kakanien’: this is Robert Musil’s word for the ‘k. & k.’ Habsburg monarchy. It sounds a bit anal for Slavic ears, but maybe this was intended, as Joseph Roth claims. Anyway, it is this term by which the author of The Man without Qualities, probably the best novel on this planet, referred in an affectionately ironic way to Austria-Hungary-Bohemia-Moravia-Silesia, including Slovakia, Slavonia, Slovenia, Transylvania, etc. etc.: in a word, the huge land of unlimited impossibilities that perished in 1918.
A semi-colonial state in which a dozen ethnic groups lived side by side and made each other’s lives difficult. Socially and politically disastrous, but culturally fruitful: a twelve-tone waltz under the volcano called World War I, orchestrated by Freud & Co. A ‘prison of peoples’ in the eyes of the ardent nationalists of the time, a ‘powder keg’ for historians, and a Continue reading
delirium clemens 