The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe

Epilogue: Birthing Italy

Epilogue Birthing Italy In the last chapter, the Italy that emerged as a byproduct of the substitutions so essential for its continuing spell converged with Mussolini’s Italy. The oppression of the real or historical Italy, whether it be the one that Seume witnessed or the one that was repressed under fascism, recalled the strategies necessary to sustain the illusory Italy that granted Goethe his rebirth. In his afterlife Goethe kept showing up at all the wrong places or at all the wrong times. Carossa’s Italian sketches bear witness to Goethe’s untimely appearances. We need only recall Goethe’s miscalculation at Vesuvius to note how Carossa’s miscalculation at the Casa di Goethe in Rome rearticulates a key aspect of Goethe’s journey with an unintended effect. By definition, there is also something that cannot be calculated when things are miscalculated. Heine’s detour was the clearest evidence of that, and by attending to the repressive character of Goethe’s journey, Heine picked up on the repression of the real or historical Italy, the one disfigured by foreign occupation and the one disfigured, at least tropologically, by Goethe’s and Winckelmann’s logic of substitution. Such logic ensued from a reimagining of origins; this not only allowed Goethe to supersede his father but also was coeval with Winckelmann’s obliteration of the feminine. That is why Bachmann’s poem, “The First-Born Land,” is so important. Not because it can be read as representative of her relationship to Italy 1 but rather because it 223 EPILOGUE 224 represents perhaps the biggest miscalculation of all, namely, the mother or the voice of the mother returning unexpectedly to claim the land of Goethe’s rebirth as her own firstborn. In other words, fathers are not what should have disturbed Goethe upon his arrival in the “capital of the world.” The purpose of this epilogue is to engage in a renewed reading of Bachmann’s poem to see if, in fact, it disrupts the logic of substitution that found its most disturbing formulations in Thomas Mann. Throughout her work Bachmann renders the connection between fathers and fascism overt. What I noted as a convergence in the last chapter is explicit in her work, which can be read as an attempt to recover a voice that is properly hers, not one that is merely ventriloquized by totalitarian figures. 2 In reading “The First-Born Land” to detect a reclamation of that voice, I am aware that the nature of that voice, its intonations and nuances, are too complex to be taken up here. I pursue something of its character in an epilogue because it restores a dimension , a feminine one, to those journeys that were disfigured by substitution . This study ends then with a consideration of what might recapture the lost promise of the Italian journey. The first stanza immediately transfers the deed of ownership to the poet or the lyrical “I” of the poem. Equating the destination of her movement south with her firstborn land signals a reunion, even a familial one. It inserts the lyrical “I” into the family of journeyers to Italy who preceded her. Moreover, this transfer of ownership, marked by the change from the definite article of the title to the possessive pronoun of the opening phrase, is the consequence of her own movements south. She participates in the tradition whereby Italy becomes the destination of the traveler’s imagination. Italy had always already structured Germany ’s and Austria’s understanding of itself. Her transfer from the north transforms the land into a mirror of her imaginary, as evidenced by the poem’s imagery, which with few exceptions does little to situate the land in the south. 3 The land’s new disposition does one other thing; it eventually allows for recognition of its mother. Italy is no longer simply the land of “il Papa.” Certain is that orphaning her firstborn—to move to the land she must have been separated from it—has left the land “naked and destitute (nackt und verarmt),” disfigured by substitutions that exiled the mother. Her return seems thus to be under the sign of those who preceded her. But there is also a movement counterpoised to the one indicated by decay and poverty. The city and its fortress are submerged up EPILOGUE 225 to their waists in the sea (bis zum Gürtel im Meer). The city has either...