K New Dangerous Liaisons L

MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY

Studies in Historical Cultures
General Editors: Jörn Rüsen, Alon Confino, and Allan Megill
Volume 1
Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate
Edited by Jörn Rüsen
Volume 2
Identities: Time, Difference, and Boundaries
Edited by Heidrun Friese
Volume 3
Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness
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Volume 4
Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds
Edited by Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger
Volume 5
History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation
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Volume 6
The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany’s Path toward the New Economy and the
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Werner Abelshauser
Volume 7
Meaning and Representation in History
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Volume 8
Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age
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Time and History: The Variety of Cultures
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Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in an
Intercultural Context
Edited by Mamadou Diawara, Bernard Lategan, and Jörn Rüsen
Volume 13
New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert
 NEW DANGEROUS LIAISONS
Discourses on Europe and Love
in the Twentieth Century

Edited by
Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert

Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford
 First published in 2010 by

Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2010 Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of
criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any infor-
mation storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written
permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

New dangerous liaisons : discourses on Europe and love in the twentieth century
/ edited by Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Making sense of history ; v. 13)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84545-736-5 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Love—Europe—History—20th century. 2. Europe—Civilization—20th
century. 3. National characteristics, European. I. Passerini, Luisa. II. Ellena,
Liliana. III. Geppert, Alexander C. T., 1970-
GT2630.N49 2010
306.7094’0904—dc22
2010013225

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN 1-978-84545-736-5 hardback

 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
Luisa Passerini

Part I. Historicising Love: Points de Repère/Points of Reference

Chapter 1. Love and Religion: Comparative Comments 21

Jack Goody

Chapter 2. The Rule of Love: The History of Western Romantic Love

in Comparative Perspective 33
William M. Reddy

Chapter 3. Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of

Mass Participation in Twentieth Century European Contexts 58
Alf Lüdtke

Chapter 4. Overseas Europeans: Whiteness and the Impossible

Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 75
Liliana Ellena

Chapter 5. ‘Window to Europe’: The Social and Cinematic

Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 95
Almira Ousmanova

Part II. Public and Private Loves

Chapter 6. Love in the Time of Revolution: The Polish Poets

of Café Ziemian;ska 117
Marci Shore
vi Contents

Chapter 7. Love, Marriage and Divorce: American and European

Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 137
Alexis Schwarzenbach

Chapter 8. ‘Dear Adolf !’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 158

Alexander C.T. Geppert

Chapter 9. Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation

in the Revista de Occidente, 1926–1936 178
Alison Sinclair

Chapter 10. Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love

in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s 197
Jo Labanyi

Part III. European Borders and Cultural Differences

in Love Relations

Chapter 11. Between Europe and the Atlantic: The Melancholy Paths
of Lusotropicalism 215
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

Chapter 12. The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality

in the Weimar Republic 233
Sandra Mass

Chapter 13. Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein:

Love in the Time of War 251
Svetlana Slapšak

Chapter 14. Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair

with Islam 269
Ruth Mas

Contributors 289

Select Bibliography 294

Index 301
 Figures

Figure 7.1 King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Sibenik,

August 1936 139

Figure 8.1 Love Letters to Adolf Hitler, 1938–1945 163

 Acknowledgments

The present collection of essays is the final product of the international research
project ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’ that was undertaken at the Kul-
turwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) in Essen, Germany, thanks to the Research
Prize of the Land of Nordrhein-Westfalen awarded to Luisa Passerini.
Within the general framework of the project, directed by Luisa Passerini,
core members of the research group Liliana Ellena, Alexander C.T. Geppert, Jo
Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova and Alison Seaton Sinclair developed
their own individual projects. Guests of the project were invited for periods
of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences were
organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various
countries. Papers presented by Jack Goody, William Reddy, Alf Lüdtke, Marci
Shore, Alexis Schwarzenbach, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Svetlana Slapšak
and Sandra Mass form the basis of essays collected in this volume.
We would like first and foremost to thank all of the members of the Kul-
turwissenschaftliches Institut, particularly Jörn Rüsen for his unstinting [!!] sup-
port and Norbert Jegelka for his continual help. We would like to express our
gratitude to the whole staff of the KWI for their assistance and, in particular,
the staff of the Library, represented by Gesine Worm and Brigitte Blockhaus,
whose efficiency and kindness we had many occasions to appreciate.
We are also very grateful to the consultants of the project, Lutz Nietham-
mer and Hartmut Kaelble, for their encouraging and useful remarks on vari-
ous occasions, as well as to those colleagues who participated in our workshops
and conferences and commented on our work: among them, Luisa Accati,
Sally Alexander, Giulia Barrera, Sabine Broeck, Caroline Brunner, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Josep Lluìs Mateo Dieste, Etienne François, Dana Heller, Danièle
Hervieu-Leger, Christian Klesse, Nicola Mai, Christoph Miething, Laura
Mulvey, Elke Reinhardt-Becker, Jutta Scherrer, Claudia Schmölders, Maurizio
Vaudagna and Sarah Wright.
x Acknowledgments

An invaluable opportunity this research provided was the privilege of

hosting junior and senior colleagues from across Europe for both short and
long stays. Work by serveral of these scholars is represented in this collection,
while some writings by others have already been, or will be, published together
with ours in the future. We would like to list here the names of those whose
work does not appear in this collection, thanking them warmly for sharing our
research and letting us share theirs: Caroline Arni, Marcella Filippa, Wladi-
mir Fischer, Costantin Iordachi, Yvonne Rieker, Susanne Terwey and Ilona
Tomova.

The Editors
 Introduction

LUISA PASSERINI

New ‘Dangerous’ Links

The project ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’, held at the Kulturwis-

senschaftliches Institut, Essen, was intended to study the complex connection
that has existed during the last two and a half centuries between the sense of
belonging to Europe, on the one hand, and the concepts of courtly and ro-
mantic love, on the other. Since the Enlightenment, the claim was put forward
that the sense of belonging to Europe was characterised by a type of love con-
sidered unique to the relationships between the genders in this continent and
to the type of civilisation developed in Europe in the modern era. The senti-
ment, originating from the courtly love sung by the Provençal troubadours,
was treated as if it evolved – seamlessly – into the feeling exalted by romanti-
cism. Among its characteristics were the insurmountable distances between the
lovers and most often a destiny of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, even in the
case of reciprocated love.
The claim that this type of love was exclusively European informed the
dominant discourses on Europeanness and on love starting in the last decades
of the eighteenth century and then fully developing in the second half of the
nineteenth. Some of its assumptions, found in political and literary essays but
also in fictional and artistic works, were that heterosexual relationships involv-
ing a high degree of sentiment and an appreciation of the woman were not
possible in relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans, since those
could include only sexuality. Love in inter-racial relationships was considered
particularly impossible, and therefore doomed to a disastrous end. However, this
claim has been disputed in the second half of the twentieth century by those
philosophers and anthropologists who argue that these types of love can be
found in all cultures and in all epochs. Nevertheless, questions about the very

Notes for this section begin on page 18.

2 Luisa Passerini

prominent place that love has been given in the European self-representations
from the Enlightenment onward remain. This love, stemming from private and
personal spheres, was given a public function and used as a distinctive charac-
teristic of one civilisation (European) over others (originally African and Asian,
and later on in the US). The intent of our research has been to criticise all
forms of exclusive Eurocentrism in this field, but while doing so also to pro-
duce hypotheses about the historical role of these emotions in the European
sense of belonging and to consider these ‘other’ histories as a basis for a non-
Eurocentric understanding of new possible forms of European belonging.
The novel by Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos, from which
comes the metaphor used for the title of this book, was written between 1779
and 1781 and published in 1782, at the beginning of the age during which the
connection between the discourses on Europe and love was constructed, and
then gradually became one of the pillars of European superiority in the symbolic
domain. In this epistolary novel, two libertines who are also lovers, the Marquise
de Merteuil and the Viscount of Valmont, engage in an intrigue aimed at ob-
taining revenge for the infidelity (toward the Marquise) of a count who should
now marry a relative of hers, Cécile de Volanges, a young woman just out of the
convent, who however is in love with the young Danceny.1 At the end, the com-
plicity between the two libertines-lovers breaks and they betray each other. One
dangerous liaison, writes Cécile’s mother, is enough to generate a chain of many
tragic misfortunes. But, as the Marquise had already written to Danceny, there
are dangers for the libertines as well, if their liaisons become known.
Les liaisons dangereuses is useful to illustrate the main figurations of the
amorous subject (in the Barthian sense of figures) within the tradition of the
European love discourse: the courtly couple (Tristan and Isolde); Don Juan;
and the woman renouncing a reciprocated passion, such as the protagonists of
La princesse de Clèves by Mme de La Fayette (1678) and Julie in the Nouvelle
Héloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761). Originally, all of the three figures are
dangerous for orderly society and challenge power relationships in it: a fusion
love leading to death; a lover (usually, but not necessarily, male) that deceives
his many beloved; a lover (usually, but not necessarily, a woman) that decides
to give up a love that is fully reciprocated, for reasons that vary between the
‘repos’ chosen by Mme de Clèves and Julie’s idea of loyalty. It is historically
significant that the ways of subtracting oneself from the tyranny of love by Don
Juan and by Clèves-Julie are opposite in gender attribution, as the erotic excess
is attributed to the man and the withdrawal from passion is attributed to the
woman. The novel may also be used to study the parallels between the conquest
of lovers and the conquest of colonies.
No doubt, all three figures were formulated in Eurocentric terms and can
have other formulations. For instance, a variety of similar figures exists in Asian
literature: the first is represented, for instance, by the Persian tale of Leyla and
Majnun by Nezami, the second by the Japanese novel on Prince Genji by Lady
 Introduction 3

Murasaki and the third by the many gods and goddesses in Hindou mythology
that at a certain stage of their lives withdraw in order to save a love (a theme
brought up to date, for instance, by the character Gopal in the novel A Matter
of Time by Shashi Deshpande). Future research should indeed compare such
similar figurations in different cultural traditions.
In the European tradition, the three figurations are connected between
themselves. The first two are parallel and symmetrical (Don Juan is often re-
duced to the opposite of, or interpreted as a rebellion to, Tristan, while Clèves-
Julie is a reaction to both). Therefore, there is no chance that Liaisons is, precisely
like Don Quixote, the parody of a chivalry novel, as Michel Butor has noticed;
in this novel, libertinage imitates and mocks chivalrous love and its warlike
language, and the language of courtly love is largely used. The Liaisons can be
seen as a summary of the three figurations, alternating Don Juan (Valmont and
the minor character Prevan, and above all its feminine version, the Marquise de
Merteuil) and Tristan (Danceny), with Mme Tourvel, who in the first part of
the story looks somewhat like a ‘sister’ of Rousseau’s Julie.
There are other and more in-depth reasons, besides this general one, for
borrowing the title by Laclos. A first one is that it indicates relationships that
are dangerous for the oppressive aspects of the existing social and cultural order.
Less ambitiously, we have been working with the aim of creating new links in
the field of cultural history and cultural studies, links trying to innovate and
discard the Eurocentric order in the symbolic field and to produce a critique of
a cultural Fortress Europe that in various forms reappears today in the debate
about the ‘Christian European roots’ and the cultural role of migrants on the
continent. Some of our already published collective work offers examples of
new dangerous liaisons or of old liaisons understood in a new sense. Such are
the analyses of ‘simultaneous’ or double love in the debates on love, modernity
and feminism in the German speaking areas of Europe during the first part
of the twentieth century;2 of the ‘cultural love affair’ consisting in the literary
fascination with Russia that was experienced in Spain during the three first
decades of the same century;3 and of the symbiotic relationship with Africa as
incarnated by homoerotic and homosexual links between Spanish and Moroc-
can men.4 While these examples mostly concern intra-European relationships,
dangerous liaisons have been explored in our research also for what concerns
external relationships, equally constitutive of Europeanness. Such are the ques-
tion of miscegenation between Africans and Europeans,5 and the relationship
between Europe and Islam in the field of love.6
However, the Liaisons represents a source of inspiration in a further and
deeper sense. Its narration establishes an order that transgresses the existing
social order. But the subjects of transgression, the libertines, transgress the new
order that they establish as well, starting with the libertine who falls in love with
the devout lady. Thus the conflict between the two orders results, with a pes-
simistic ending, in the victory of conventional and hypocritical morality. The
4 Luisa Passerini

final order can only be that of the narration, including the virtuoso conclusion
by which the novel destroys its own construction and puts an end to itself. In
such a textual perspective, it is the reader that is put in danger by reading about
dangerous ways of loving and that is left with no clear option: rationalist and
materialistic theories about love such as those held by the protagonist Merteuil
lead her to self-destruction, because they do not respect the reasons of the
heart; but on the other hand, the reasons of love lead Tourvel also to renuncia-
tion and sacrifice and finally to death.
This is a second level of suggestion for our research: to put in danger/in
question both the subject of the socio-historical disciplines and some rules of
these disciplines. In this sense, the first and pivotal dangerous liaison is the con-
nection between Europe and love, which leads to establish new connections
between the disciplinary traditions of political philosophy, on the one hand,
and those of literature, psychology and cultural studies, on the other. Some
of our previous work as well as the present collection can be seen as examples
of such inter- or intra-disciplinary contaminations. We have indeed benefited
from contributions from intellectual and cultural history, anthropology, film
studies, philosophy and area studies.

Historicising Love: Points de repère/Points of Reference

The structure of this collection has been thought of as a way of breaking tra-
ditional classifications, such as those that separate colonial history from the
history of European identity, which divide too harshly the internal from the
external of the continent. The present construction tries to show the links be-
tween these two dimensions of the construction of Europeanness. Moreover,
its articulation privileges two theoretical knots, public/private and cultural bor-
ders, because these are considered as cultural and political priorities in the pres-
ent post-colonial situation.
The first two essays of this collection, respectively by Jack Goody and Wil-
liam Reddy, establish a tension – a risky liaison – between two different posi-
tions that I want to put in a dialectical relationship. The whole collection will
find its context in the space created by such tension. The essays that follow the
first two are meant to construct an itinerary representing the crucial conceptual
elements in the link between Europe and love. One does not need to share all
of the views expressed by the authors – and in fact I do not – in order to recog-
nise that their writings converge to create/support a construction in which
they act as pieces of a mosaic. Each step will therefore present a different type
of ‘danger’ and novelty. We will indeed find more specific dangerous liaisons as
we go on, as examples or enlargements of the one between Europe and love.
The position taken by Jack Goody has the merit of criticising the Euro-
centrism implicit in many studies on love. Therefore, his attitude is a starting
 Introduction 5

point for our research, in as far as it warns us against any temptation to re-
peat the ‘theft of history’ that Europeans have done by appropriating romantic
love as exclusive to their own culture. Important points of Goody’s warning
are the recognition of the specificity of European Christianity and its debts
toward Judaism and Islam. Within his critical framework, Goody insists that
love, equality and freedom are fundamental features of the ethical teaching of
Islam (with a particular attention to Turkey), as is a concern for the individual.
This obliges anybody who takes these points seriously to give up the claim to
a general European exclusivity of such values and, more relevantly, to look for
the historical particularities in which love has been lived and configured in
the European context. This is in its turn contextualised by Goody in a global
setting, where differences between European culture and the cultures of other
continents cannot be taken for granted, as historiography has often done. The
attention to African societies, such as the LoDagaa of northern Ghana, allows
Goody to perform a double operation: implicitly criticising the universalism
claimed by Europe and yet appealing to a shared repertory of humanity, which
gives way to innumerable variations on the same themes. By considering a
wide range of cultures in all times, Goody shows the weakness of the thesis ac-
cording to which the free choice of partner has become idealised globally over
the past century, being often identified with love and with modernisation. In
his view, there is nothing to suggest that such a type of love is absent from the
so-called simpler cultures or from ancient Egypt or from Hindu society. His
firmly empirical approach proceeding by accumulation of details allows us to
see the common and the different in transcultural relations. Thus, he relativises
the claim by Europeans to have ‘invented’ the courtly and romantic forms
of love (Goody takes the stand, in the century-old debate on the origins of
Provençal poetry, that the notion of courtly love was derived from the Islamic
culture of Spain), and is ready to give up such claim, thus displaying the novelty
that there can be a European specificity without being exclusive and hierarchi-
cal, capable of experiencing certain types of love in its own way without deny-
ing a similar experience to others.
In the 1960s, a partially similar position taken by some scholars such as
Francis Newman denied any specificity of the European courtly love, including
the very term. In this way, the critique of Eurocentrism went so far as to take
away precious elements that can allow those who want to consider themselves
as Europeans not only to feel that they share a certain cultural repertoire, but
also to recognise the relevance of the historical interchange with others. In-
deed, recognising the specificity of European forms of love cannot be done
without recognising their derivations from other continents. Throwing away
anything labelled as European would be equivalent to avoiding the patient
work necessary to understand the long process of osmosis and syncretism that
constructed ‘Europe’ out of exchanges with Asia, Africa and other parts of the
world. Goody’s essay stops short of the danger of losing those forms of love,
6 Luisa Passerini

because it does not dissolve them into a presumed universalism, but it insists
on their historicity, and precisely on the ‘reflexivity of the written word’, that
produces romantic love.
Appropriately, William Reddy intervenes at this point with an attentive
consideration of the specificity of the Western tradition of romantic love in
comparative perspective. For him, the thesis of the universality and naturality
of love is based on a terminological confusion; he acknowledges ‘(some) com-
mon features’ of romantic love, but he insists on the centrality of reciprocity
and exclusivity in Western ideas about love partnerships. He observes that ‘ro-
mantic love’, which in this tradition started as courtly love, involves reciprocal
feeling and exclusivity, but that the prevalence given to this type of feeling is
a relatively recent phenomenon. However, he provides an impressive excursus
for it, a useful platform for our collection, on the ways of understanding love,
from the troubadours, Dante and Petrarch, through the iconography of the
unicorn, and the philosophies of Kant and Cousin, to present lesbian’s and gay’s
movements for full marriage rights, bringing examples from poetry, iconogra-
phy and literature. Reddy notices that since the Middle Ages, love had become
more and more an emotion connected with marriage, although the fact that it
was the foundation of marriage to the exclusion of other considerations came
to be widely accepted only with the Enlightenment, in the last decades of
the eighteenth century. The cultural process thus envisaged developed in the
nineteenth century and was interrupted by the First World War, after which the
new media of film and radio marketed stories about romantic love which often
led to marriage, to a widely extended audience. On the basis of this historical
overview, Reddy argues that love’s peculiar accommodation with regulation
turns to a unique Western distinction between love and lust, a distinction that
no other cultural tradition applies to the understanding of emotional connec-
tions between sexual partners. Thus, Reddy takes a very different stand from
Goody’s, as he claims that the romantic love complex is historically unusual, in
breaking with sexuality at the same time as embracing it. However, I would say
that only by taking into account the general claim by Goody, of the possibility
that a basic emotion of love can appear in many cultures, can we safely – i.e.,
without falling into Eurocentrism – not only accept Reddy’s approach and vin-
dicate romantic love to the modernised West, but also introduce the limitation
of regulatory thinking, which dates back to the Middle Ages.
Reddy sets this story in comparison with elements from Japan and India,
showing the different meanings of ‘passion’ in Murasaki Shibiku’s Tale of Genji
(eleventh century), and in the Gitagovinda (twelfth century). His conclusion is
that the rule of love in many Western countries today is a peculiar and rather
recent configuration of some traditional Western ingredients. Romantic love,
he argues, continues to stand in contrast to lust, and to include spiritual expec-
tations that can be realised only through a sexual partnership. In some areas of
the world, such as South Asia and northeast Brazil, romantic love is regarded as
 Introduction 7

an innovation of modernity, but in the West it is considered as an old and natu-

ral thing. Reddy concludes with a plea to historicise our own time: if love is
our inheritance, modernity is not such a secular age as it claims to be. Thus, he
converges with Goody’s criticism of a narrow and Eurocentric concept of mo-
dernity, and interprets love as a secularised form of religion or spirituality.
Another piece of the historical and theoretical puzzle that is emerging
is added by Alf Lüdtke, with the articulation of the links between public and
private loves in the European tradition. His analysis allows us to see that the
specificity of the forms of love experienced in Europe is not at all based on an
anthropological or even cultural difference generating a particular way of lov-
ing, but it largely depends on the European contexts of power (statehood) and
work. His argument is confined to the twentieth century, while the two first
essays are set in a longue durée perspective. Thus, it operates as a transition to the
rest of the volume, dedicated to this century. Lüdtke pays attention to some
central features of this period, such as the relationships between the masses’ af-
fections – in the very processes of massification – and the power of the state, a
theme crucial for understanding the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that
characterised the century. He too insists on the historicity of cultural codes
of love, or ‘modulations’ as he calls the interconnected ones that reinforced
each other in the twentieth century: sentimental love between spouses; love
for ‘father-state’; and attachment for one’s task in work. The originality of
Lüdtke’s approach is to consider this interconnectedness, and thus to overcome
the dichotomy between public and private. He refers to Reddy in pointing out
that the singling out of specific feelings misses their specificities and thus the
meanings of feelings, because they never appear in isolation, and at any one
time there will be a variety of feelings for individual actors and groups. Lüdtke
applies his hypotheses to a specific geohistorical area, Germany, and to specific
sources, such as letters by soldiers, which are very relevant for exploring the
means of the acceptance of power, even extremely oppressive power, a point
that will reappear later on in the collection. This approach dispels illusions on
the natural good feelings of the masses and discovers usually invisible liaisons
between individual and collective emotions.
The construction of the dyad Europe-love that is slowly emerging refers
not just to the internal history of Europe. Liliana Ellena provides a case study
vividly illustrating the fact that the discourse on love at the heart of European
modernity cannot be charted just within Europe, because it was the product
of continuous exchanges with the rest of the world and particularly with the
colonies. The chosen case is that of an Italian journalist and writer, Arnaldo
Cipolla, who wrote between 1907 and 1938. In many of his novels and short
stories, the encounter between a ‘European’ man and an African woman is
depicted as an allegorical representation of the colonial opposition between
European violence and Africa equated with nature, which is often presented
as female and threatening for the ‘male’ and decadent Western civilisation. The
8 Luisa Passerini

novels are set in Belgian and French Congo, an overcharged colonial space that
stands for ‘Central Africa’, considered as the anti-Europe par excellence, and
at the same time is represented as one of the elements in contrast with which
Europe defines itself. They show the peculiarity of Italian Fascist colonialism,
but also the shared heritage of whiteness and Europeanness in the colonial
situation. Both Europe and love emerge, on the one hand, as abstract forms,
and, on the other, as normative meanings, not only for Africans, but also for
Italians, sometimes portrayed as too close to each other for attitudes and skin
colour. The lability of the self-definition as European and capable of romantic
love therefore appears fully in the colonial situation, where the white subject is
at the same time shown in its weakness – in competition between nationalities
and constantly in danger of losing himself – and affirmed as powerful and virile.
Its inconsistency can be overcome by no inner strength, but only by contrast,
opposition and superiority stated on the basis of weapons. This essay establishes
another dangerous liaison: between the self-definition of Europe and its violent
impositions on others; between the creation of an empty self and the creation
of a projected other. Again, this theme will be picked up in the subsequent
sections of the collection.
And finally, to conclude this first section, we find the deep division within
Europe itself, i.e., East and West. Almira Ousmanova deals with a cinematic
representation of the experience of post-Soviet subjects marked by the col-
lapse of the socialist economic and political system. This essay can be seen not
only as a study of a dangerous liaison between Russia and a Western Europe as
represented by Paris, but also as a contamination between visual studies and the
history of the reciprocal political representations of various parts of Europe. In
her approach, love in a metaphorical sense (for Paris, for Europe, for culture)
is interrelated and interwoven with the more literal meanings of love, linking
the narrative conventions of the love story with the symbolic meanings of the
filmic text. Here too we have a case study, the analysis of the film Window to
Europe (a Russian expression to indicate relationships with the West), directed
by Yurij Mamin in 1993, which narrates a story of instant transfer from St. Pe-
tersburg to Paris through a magic window; the transfer results into a dangerous
liaison, the love story between a French woman and a Russian man. This time
it is Europe that appears in the shape of a charming woman, an embodiment
of ideal femininity, ‘the personification of a dream shared by both Soviet men
and women’, while Europe is a place where utopia and romantic love continue
to live. Difficulties in communication between the lovers metaphorise difficul-
ties of cultural relationships between countries: is Russia still in some ways a
part of Europe, as so much of its cultural heritage witnesses? Or does it foster
a separate identification, in which pride and rancour testify a more complex
relationship, a plea on the part of Russia for fuller recognition from ‘Europe’?
In both cases, are not the two subjects definable only on the basis of their recip-
rocal and conflictual relationship through the ages? And why cannot a double
 Introduction 9

sense of belonging, to Russia and to Europe as a whole, be established as it

happens in other countries? What emerges clearly is that the memory of the
communist past no less than that of older relationships shapes present cultural
attitudes much more that it has appeared in the media during the last decade,
and this should be taken into account when posing the question of European-
ness regarding Russia. The choice of this case study – using a filmic text7 – for
studying such questions proves advantageous in many ways, such as showing
that deep emotional aspects are involved in the contested link, although no
final answer is provided. We are left wondering about what can a Europe with-
out its Eastern part be, a cultural and political space that seems to have been
accepted by many on the basis of the assumption that the Eastern part cannot
enter the European Union. Whatever the outcome of the debate on the East-
ern boundary of Europe, I see it as a reason for keeping the gap between the
European Union and Europe wide open.8
At the end of the first section, we can summarise that the points of ref-
erence of the collection are the following: 1) the dyad Europe/love must be
considered in the double perspective of deconstructing Eurocentrism and, at
the same time, recognising the historical specificity of European forms of love;
2) a central aspect of these forms is the varying distinction between public and
private; 3) the construction of Europeanness cannot be separated from the con-
sideration of the colonial past; and, 4) cultural borders affect deeply the cultural
sense of European belonging within love relationships.

Public and Private Loves

The issue of public/private could not be absent from this collection: the ques-
tion ‘Europe and love’ can be seen as a specification of the more general ques-
tion of the intertwining between the two. This has already emerged in the
first section, and it becomes the focus of the second one. The second section
explores what could be defined as a historical typology of the relationships
between Europe understood as public and love considered as private. It does so
by taking into consideration the interwar period, a particularly significant time
for the study of our topic. It is in the period between the wars and particularly
in its second decade when huge changes appear in the relationships between
the public and private love, which will have a repercussion on the second half
of the century. The three first essays of section two allow us to compare such
changes in very different situations: in the revolutionary situation in Poland, in
the democratic framework of Great Britain and under the dictatorial regime of
Nazism in Germany.
Against the background of a climate of revolutionary hopes, Marci Shore
analyses in rich detail the life of the generation of Polish futurist poets born
at the fin-de-siècle, the first to come of age in independent Poland. They were
10 Luisa Passerini

cosmopolitan (many were ‘non-Jewish Jews’), and polyglot, being versed in

Russian, German and French, and nourished in European literature from many
epochs and countries, from St Augustin to Machiavelli to Proust. They united
public and private in an inextricable knot, as their loves were love itself, poetry,
Poland and the Revolution. For the poets of Café Ziemian;ska in Warsaw, the
Revolution was only secondarily dialectical materialism; more importantly, it
was the fulfilment of their European cosmopolitanism, and, above all, it was
romantic love. Shore portrays their life and fantasies in the cafés and cabarets
of Warsaw starting from the early 1920s through the 1930s to the 1960s, their
multiple relationships with other European countries through the work of art-
ists such as Marinetti, Mayakovsky, and their romances. Some extraordinary
figures of women and men emerge against this background, living their expe-
riences to the extreme, with great passion brought to the scene of sexual love
as well as of to the scene of the political party. While their hopes to collapse
public and private loves in a single engagement failed under the pressures of a
public sphere dominated by Stalinism, their experiences leave a vivid testimony
of such utopia. They succeeded in keeping alive, even under Stalinist totali-
tarianism, a space for private language and intimacy. ‘Europe’ was a point of
reference in such efforts, not as a model, but quite to the contrary as an heri-
tage beyond which they wanted to go, as an avant-garde capable of overcom-
ing the destiny of degeneration and the death of European civilisation. Their
tragic ending was to be ‘destroyed by Marxism’, by the choices they made to
embrace Marxism: some were killed and some committed suicide, while some
survived in exile with bitter feelings. For them, living the revolution in their
daily life was self-actualisation through self-annihilation, the consummation of
subjectivity through its abandonment and the transcendence and the fulfilment
of both their Polishness and their Europeanness.
Alexis Schwarzenbach chooses an ideal case to study attitudes toward love
in Europe and the United States, focussing on the reactions to the abdication
of Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson, a US divorcee, in Decem-
ber 1936. The case became famous, stirring a world-wide press campaign and
mobilising public opinion. In this picture, a prevailing silence in Britain is
compared with the ‘sympathetic understanding’ in the United States and with
an attitude of ‘restraint’ in the rest of Europe, from Switzerland to the Scandi-
navian countries. The story was generally presented as a romantic love in which
the feelings of the protagonists should have prevailed despite all obstacles. How-
ever, what most interests us is the opposition established in the great majority
of the free press in Europe’s democracies, between romantic love considered as
a progressive or a disruptive social force, on the one hand, and social and politi-
cal stability, on the other. This explains why left-wing and liberal newspapers
had a more favourable view of the story than the conservative media. While the
local press in Britain showed anti-US prejudices and some rancour to the king
for not having ‘found some sweet British girl’, the very numerous letters to the
 Introduction 11

king made such prejudices much more explicit. Thousands of such letters were
indeed written during the abdication crisis, which show a remarkable cross-
section of public opinion from all classes. The letters are interesting also because
they display two concepts of masculinity, one stipulating that good masculine
behaviour should have put duty above love, and the other on the contrary con-
sidering that such a behaviour was fulfilling the pursuit of personal happiness.
The two concepts belonged to different generations, the former being held by
the late-Victorian generation (Edward’s father) and the latter by the generation
coeval with Edward himself.
Schwarzenbach concludes that two love stories were at stake in the public
debate: that between Edward and Wallis Simpson on the one hand, and on
the other, that between the people and the king, which finds its context in
the general history of European monarchies. The link between the monar-
chies and their subjects included a deep sense of mutual love and a legendary
aura, so that Edward represented a ‘fairy prince’ in the true sense of the word.
Schwarzenbach rightly observes that three years after the event, in 1939, Denis
de Rougemont published his book L’amour et l’Occident, in which he saw the
European attitude toward love as beginning to risk the imitation of the one
that he believed was prevalent in the United States, where the high-rate of
divorce was coupled with a Hollywood-styled romance as the only basis for
getting married. We should add that Rougemont also coupled the type of
romantic love leading to a fusion between the lovers with the attitude of adora-
tion by followers toward Hitler, while he saw similarities between the type of
love presiding to conjugal marriage and the type of union present in federal
democracies. In this light, it is significant for our purposes that both Edward
VIII and Mrs. Simpson were known to have good relationships with the Nazis,
from the German ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop, to Hitler himself.
Although Schwarzenbach has not found evidence for these political sides of the
abdication, they certainly fall into place in the interpretative frame proposed
by Rougemont.
Rougemont’s hypothesis about the link between Europe and love is also
pertinent to the other essay in the present collection using private letters to
the powerful – Alexander Geppert’s analysis of love letters to Hitler. Geppert
takes into consideration such 64 letters, out of a huge number ranging in the
many thousands. We already knew that in the dictatorial regimes between the
wars, the private sphere was forcibly drawn into and under the public, so that
all moments of the lifecycle of the masses were ‘nationalised’, from birth to
death. However, while we know of the Nazi and Fascist use of women’s capac-
ity to give birth as well as to be part of the labour force in peace and war tasks,
we cannot help being struck by the phenomenon of collapsing together of
intimate and public that these letters display. They are written in the jargon of
love, and as with all love letters, they use affectionate little words, transforming
the name of the beloved into childish forms thanks to diminutives and sweet
12 Luisa Passerini

adjectives, but they also insist on the patriotism of the writers and assume as a
starting point the position of power of the object of love, Hitler. What we are
called to witness is the inextricability of public and private emotions, to the
point of considering the distinction impossible, in a sort of total regression to
a single elementary language and to a desire of fusion not only between two
human beings, but also between the individual and the collective, be it called
fatherland or supreme head. Rougemont had precisely noticed, in his acute
analysis of a mass gathering to listen to Hitler’s speech, that the kind of total
participation of the people in the crowd was that of a new cult, in an attitude
of adoration and ecstatic fusion.
Two lines of interpretation are proposed. One is that the communication
revealed by the letters is only apparently one-way, while actually it is already a
reply to the overwhelming penetration of Hitler’s words through propaganda
and mass media; this established a contamination of languages, reflecting the
colonisation of everyday (and every night, if we think of the influence of the
Third Reich on dreams) life. The other line of research is a comparative reflec-
tion on the links between the dictators and their peoples. The example of-
fered by Geppert is that of Italy and Mussolini, who used to receive thousands
of private letters. While both the Fascist and the Nazi dictators established a
special office for dealing with the letters, thus entertaining direct relationships
with the writers, the attitude of the Italian regime was much more paternalistic
than the German one. Moreover, Geppert notices a difference already in the
type of letters sent: in the case of Mussolini, the letters seem to display a much
lesser degree of eroticisation, since his figure is portrayed more as a fatherly
(and sometimes even motherly) one than like that of a lover. We know now
that a gossipy legend was constructed on Mussolini’s virility and extra-marital
affairs, but it was probably not accessible to the large masses from faraway parts
of the country. In any case, his image was presented as always accompanied by
concrete female figures, his mother, wife and daughter (who, by the way, was
at a certain point in time responsible for the secretariat that took care of the
letters), besides the image of the imagined matron representing Italy. On the
contrary, Hitler was always a single figure, whose constant female companion
was allegorical, i.e., Germany. He was portrayed as a lonely man, the unique
one, who could nourish the wildest fantasies and promise to fulfil them at both
the public and the private levels.
The next case in the section on public and private concerns Spain and it is
composed of two studies, one centered on the inter-European (Sinclair) and the
other on the extra-European perspective (Labanyi), that complement each other
and converge to construct a double case study. Spain is a particularly interesting
and significant example – very relevant for our research – because of its complex
nature as a European country: a Southern and Mediterranean country like Italy
and Greece, but also the initiator of an early and wide colonial empire; a coun-
try claiming its full and paradigmatic Europeanness and yet at the same time
 Introduction 13

often uncertain of being recognised as European, on the contrary considering

itself as a periphery, or a banlieusarde in the terms used by Salvador de Madariaga.
Its case study allows us to see other variations on the theme of Europe and love,
with particular reference to the category of gender, which here, while we have
already seen it appearing in other essays, becomes central.
Alison Sinclair, under a title borrowed from Doris Lessing, studies one
aspect of the Revista de Occidente, which was founded in 1923 and was directed
by José Ortega y Gasset, who was central in promoting Spain’s cultural relations
with Europe. The major contribution of the journal in the period 1923–1936
was to bring Spain into a relationship with ideas of civilisation, specifically those
of European civilisation. Those years cover two different periods in Spanish
politics: the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the Second Republic, which,
however, do not differ sharply for what concerns the topic under discussion,
gender relations. The articles hosted by the Revista de Occidente in this period
include authors such as the German sociologist Georg Simmel, the scientists
Gregorio Marañón and Gustavo Pittaluga, both champions of eugenics, and
the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Through the analysis of the themes touched
by these authors, which range from Don Juan to the emancipation of women,
Sinclair traces a line of argument that unites the Europeanness of Spain and an
essentialist view of gender differences. She interprets this view as an ‘imaginary
of consolation’ for the anxiety and social unrest predominant in Spain at the
time. The articles of the Revista de Occidente are seen as a sign of the desire to
participate in European modernity, and are understood as a masculine model
accompanied by a nostalgia for its opposite. A defensive discourse about mo-
dernity was thus developed precisely in connection with the increased contacts
with Europe, which embodied it.
In a pendant essay, Jo Labanyi examines the myth of Don Juan between the
1920s and the 1930s as treated by three Spanish intellectuals of different politi-
cal attitudes: Ramiro de Maeztu, whose positions were equivalent to those of
Action Française, the liberal humanist Salvador de Madariaga and the Fascist
Ernesto Giménez Caballero. Don Juan, defined as one of the European myths
par excellence because its theme connects, in its numerous variants, many dif-
ferent parts of Europe, is aptly chosen as an indicator of positions toward the
Europeanness of Spain. Maeztu saw Don Juan as the embodiment of hedonistic
individualism, understanding him as the outcome of modern humanism and
rejecting him in favour of Don Quixote’s chivalric notion of altruistic service,
a metaphor for an alliance with the European Catholic right that would allow
Europe to confront the hegemony of the United States, while the Spanish leg-
acy should allow Spanish America to do the same. Giménez Caballero set Don
Juan in dialogue with Petrarch’s Laura, thus proposing him as the charismatic
leader of a Spanish-Italian fascist alliance, and considering him as an embodi-
ment of both the cultural miscegenation of West and East and the mixing of
races in Spanish America. Madariaga also treated Don Juan as the incarnation
14 Luisa Passerini

of European individualism and imperial conquest, and rejected him as a sexual

predator, as the unacceptable face of European imperialism, while romantic
love represented the fusion of races in Spain and Spanish America. All three
writers used the trope of love, which they considered as specifically European,
to position Spain in relation to Europe as well as to the Americas. For all three,
Spanish culture and history offered models for rethinking Europe.
The case of Spain shows that a crucial aspect in the processes concern-
ing public and private loves in the interwar period was the change in gender
relations. The redefinition of gender roles and imagery invested in not only
concrete men and women, but also in the symbolic level for what concerned
cultural understanding of masculine and feminine, in the course of being deeply
modified by the emancipation of women and the crisis of masculinity.
In this section, the nexus of Europe and love has proved useful in exploring
the relationship between public and private love and its transformations in the
interwar period. It has shown that it was particularly in this field that the pro-
cesses of publicisation of the private and of the penetration of the public into
the private were happening. The use of our central dangerous liaison has made
visible various elements: not only the private sphere, but also the most intimate
one – situated in the bedroom and in the boudoir, invoked by the Marquis de
Sade as the site of the final step of the revolution – was at stake in the moving
of boundaries affecting the public and the private in reciprocal interpenetra-
tion, and suggests directions of research for comparative studies. This interpen-
etration constituted an overall similarity, in spite of the important variations
introduced by national and political features. Although these processes took up
extreme characteristics in situations either of violent social and cultural unrest,
such as a revolution, or of totalitarian oppression, they were at work even in
democratic countries. In fact, the political situation accentuated the impact of
economic forces that were already going in that direction. Similar processes
took on a psycho-pathological nature in totalitarian regimes, while in demo-
cratic situations the collapse between public and private was more restrained, so
that the two were never flattened together, and the emotional implications of
the collapse were less restrictive of individual spaces and were more manageable
by common people in their daily lives.

European Borders and Cultural Differences in Love Relations

The topic of the third section of this book translates the general theme of the
book into the conflicts articulated in terms of territory and political borders.
Essays in this section refer either to borders, which are considered traditionally
as peripheries of Europe (Portugal and the Balkans), or to the issue centre/
periphery within two crucial European nation states, such as Germany and
France. In this perspective, these essays share a positionality that, starting from
 Introduction 15

an allegedly marginal situation, transforms itself into a novel point of view re-
considering the historical dynamics between supposed centres and peripheries.
Such historical dynamics evidences different tropes of love and sexuality and
includes the emergence of various forms of longing for a different Europe, thus
showing the topic of the second section in a new light. Methodologically, the
essays share the effort to combine various categories of cultural difference, be
they gender, race, ethnicity and/or location.
The section is opened by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro’s longue durée view
of Portugal’s colonialism: its alleged role of mediator between worlds finds
an adequate exemplification in romantic love that is understood as capable of
creating mediations at a universal level. The excursus starts with The Lusiads
by Camões, for whom love is the ultimate purpose of the human quest. Then
the author goes on to use as a case study Jornada de África by Manuel Alegre,
a novel on the colonial wars, which evokes a new version of Barbara, the be-
loved black slave celebrated by Camões, in love with a rebellious officer of the
Portuguese colonial army; the woman, ‘free, but colonised by love’, is signifi-
cantly an Angolan member of the MPLA, the movement for the liberation of
Angola from the colonial rule. Calafate Ribeiro points out that the mediation
operated by Portugal is based on the combination of a peripheral geographic
position, since it is the head of the first European empire. During the period
of the 1950s to the 1970s, this same peripheral position allowed Portugal to be
the last European empire. The colonial wars, to which this peripheral condi-
tion led Portugal and its empire, sought to defend the fiction that Portugal was
a centre, but these wars also initiated the journey back to the metropolis and to
Europe. In this frame, the image of Barbara – a metaphor of a conquered Af-
rica and of Portuguese love for the continent – still represents the ambivalences
of Portugal between the memory of the empire, with its roots in the South
Atlantic, and a European future. Calafate Ribeiro’s essay implies the need of a
re-elaboration that this suspended and drifting double sense of belonging will
require, in a process in which the destiny of love and gender relations appears
particularly undecided. This state of indecision finds an echo in the present
situation, in which Europe is suspended between accepting the new multiple
forms of subjectivity that inhabit it, thanks to the processes of post-coloniality,
and its dressing itself once more as a fortress in the cultural field.
Sandra Mass focuses on three case studies concerning the border territories
of the Weimar Republic: the Rhineland of the campaign against ‘Black Hor-
ror’, i.e., the stationing of African colonial soldiers in the territory under French
occupation; the Eastern border, which German Freikorps defended against the
Red Army and the Baltic nationalists; and the African colonies. Mass shows
how sexuality was used not only as a metaphor of the wounds inflicted on the
nation, but also more directly to illustrate the analogy between the nation seen
as a body and the individual body. The first case, love relationships between
German women and French African soldiers, became the target of a campaign
16 Luisa Passerini

that pointed out the unity of Europe and the white race endangered by France;
the relationship being German and being white included the belief of belong-
ing to the community of the ‘white race’, sharing a common European heri-
tage and presumably sharing a superior civilisation. In the second case, German
soldiers were seen as threatened by Communist women, on which they would
exercise bloody and sadistic revenge. In the third, the violence of colonisation
was transformed into the ‘ardent love’ for the second Heimat, Africa. Here
again, as we already saw in the essay by Ellena, Africa is presented as nature,
the maternal earth characterised as both virginal and violent. And again, the
individual and the collective are collapsed in defining the European subject as
the male colonial hero. In the picture drawn by Mass, gender and race appear
closely interwoven, and love shows its connections with sexuality, but also with
pain and death. The dark sides of both Europe and love emerge once more in
a sinister way, connecting the internal history of Germany with the history of
its borders.
Gender is central also in Svetlana Slapšak’s essay, which theorises on love as
one of the civic activities pertaining to collective identity and citizenship. The
author considers love as one of the fields of public discourse and activity that
can oppose war and be interpreted as reducing the immeasurable dimension of
war compared to any other human activity. Slapšak takes her inspiration from
antiquity, mentioning Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in the context of the opposition
to the Iraq war in 2003, and analyses the philosophy of love in three women’s
works: Anica Savic; Rebac (born in 1894 in Novi Sad), Olga Freidenberg (born
in 1890 from a Russian Jewish family) and Edith Stein (born in 1891 into a Bres-
lau Jewish family); all three women were active during the Second World War.
Slapšak maintains that in the case of the first two, they have been treated as out-
siders in academia on the basis of gender instigated censorship, while in fact there
is much European about them and their work. For instance, in Anica Savic; Re-
bac’s approach to what she calls ‘pre-platonic erotology’, it is a distancing her-
self from the Platonic tradition that evidences her Europeanness ex negativo, as a
desire to go beyond it and explore and enlarge the sources of the philosophical
discourse on love. Slapšak also sees a shared context for all three women in the
historical model of intellectual closure (monasteries, universities, salons) and in
multilingualism; far from saying that these are unique European features, she
refers to the European historical versions of such worldwide phenomena. For
all three women studied by Slapšak, love is neither a symbol of hope nor a form
of escapism; rather, it is a proposal for a public civic attitude, affecting upon
and originating from public life, against any romanticising of love in its Western
bourgeois sense. What allows Slapšak to take this approach is a position that she
defines as ‘feminist practice’ and that connects the author of the essay and the
women she studies, although in very different historical situations. This essay is
a good indicator of how the central and Eastern areas of Europe – considered
peripheral for a long time – can become crucial in order to create new connec-
 Introduction 17

tions. The three women never met and possibly never even heard of each other.
Thus, it is a gaze from the present, which is rooted in the same geopolitical
areas those women belonged to that puts them together, constructing a point
of convergence equivalent to a hazardous and illuminating liaison.
The essay by Ruth Mas concludes this section and the whole book by
focussing on a burning issue for today’s Europe: the place of Islam in Euro-
peanness. Mas addresses the issue through the analysis of a case study of the
mixed marriage of a Franco-Maghrebian woman, as done by the psychoanalyst
Fethi Benslama. The case study considers gender and generational differences,
countering fixed and naturalised borders between communities and cultures. It
reverses the usual relationship, which sees love as a private emotion displaced
within the political domain, by showing how colonial legacies embodied by
notions of inter-cultural love and sexuality work on individual subjectivity by
doubling experiences of trauma and exile. Mas criticises both the colonialist
notion of métissage and that of mixed marriage as a solution of racism and of
women’s subordination, and sees Benslama’s discussion of métissage as prob-
lematising the ‘liberating’ potential of mixed unions and showing the feminine
subject as situated in a complex web of power relations to which she is subjected.
Mas concludes that Benslama has allowed for an understanding of Islamic sub-
jectivity that disrupts the hegemony of the French nation state and deconstructs
the oppositions of Islam/West and of all monolithic conceptions of Islam, pro-
ducing a plural vision of the relationships between Islam and liberalism. What
appears at the same time, however, are the limits to the possibilities for the
Franco-Maghrebi Muslim feminine subjects to find resources for imagining
an ethic that respects dissent; deconstructing the traditional way of conceiv-
ing métissage opens new ways, but it leaves deliberately suspended the crucial
question of repositioning the feminine Muslim subject. We can only hope that
painstaking analytical efforts, such as the one exemplified in this essay, can con-
tribute to opening the way to configurations of subjectivity and emotionality,
both collective and individual, that will allow new ways of being European and
Muslim women at the same time to occur.
The section highlights how the tension between love and sexuality under-
pinning romantic love has informed forms of political imagined community.
The case studies discussed by Calafate Ribeiro and Mas highlight the embrac-
ing movement of love between self and other and the violent reduction of dif-
ference to abstract oneness, while the German case studied by Mass implies that
women’s bodies and sexuality are the material ground on which the borders of
the nation are naturalised and controlled. This perspective adds further elements
to the intertwining between the private and public spheres by questioning the
gender hierarchy grounded in the European (male) love subject. The dangerous
links between love and the political domain gives particular relevance to the
feminist critique of romantic love suggested by Slapšak, which entails both a
de-naturalisation of love and a refusal of its ‘imaginary of consolation’, already
18 Luisa Passerini

pointed out by Alison Sinclair, by rooting love and the labour of love within
practices of public responsibility.
The final section of the collection presents – because of its closeness to
some crucial problems of the present, such as those linked with racial and cul-
tural differences in Europe today – some pessimistic undertones. Love, sharing
the dark sides of European history, appears as a battlefield involving power
inequalities that cannot be solved. Not only Europe, but also Europeanness
appear divided between the senses of belonging to various areas such as East/
West and North/South and between the identifications with different com-
munities. Europeanness seems still to be configured – culturally speaking – as a
defensive fortress in many instances. The historical study of the nexus between
Europe and love can help us in recovering the utopian hope of a united and
not exclusive Europe and of a love conjugating passion and respect. By being
aware of the dangers that the liaison between Europe and love can imply in an
essentialist and Eurocentric perspective, we can discern the value of the actions
and thoughts of individuals and groups that had the emotional capacity to con-
trast their own communities and to envisage new hazardous liaisons between
personal and collective emotions.

Notes

1. The plan of the libertines is that Valmont, already involved in the seduction of the virtu-
ous and devout Mme Tourvel, should seduce Cécile before her marriage. Valmont succeeds in
the double seduction, falls himself in love with the devout lady, but interrupts this relationship
because of the influence of Madame de Merteuil. The ending is tragic: Mme Tourvel dies in de-
spair in a convent and Cécile, after an abortion, enters a convent as well. The Marquise, disfigured
by smallpox, is abandoned by everybody and the Viscount dies in a duel with Danceny, who had
been in his turn seduced by the Marquise.
2. Caroline Arni, ‘Simultaneous Love. An Argument on Love, Modernity and the Feminist
Subject at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, European Review of History 11, no. 2 (Summer
2004), Special Issue: Europe and Love – L’Europe et l’amour, 185–205.
3. Alison Sinclair, ‘Spain’s Love Affair with Russia. The Attraction of Exotic (Br)Others’,
ibid., 207–224.
4. Susan Martin-Marquez, ‘Performing Masculinity in the Moroccan Theatre. Virility, Sexu-
ality and Spanish Military Culture from the African War to the Civil War’, ibid., 225–240.
5. Liliana Ellena, ‘Political Imagination, Sexuality and Love in the Eurafrican Debate’, ibid.,
241–272.
6. Ruth Mas, ‘Love as Difference. The Politics of Love in the Thought of Malek Chebel’,
ibid., 273–301.
7. Although this is the only example of filmic studies appearing in the present collection, the
research project devoted much attention to the role of films as sources, which will be the subject
of Europe and Love in Cinema, eds Luisa Passerini, Jo Labanyi, Karen Diehl (Bristol: Intellect,
forthcoming).
8. This question, as well as the problem of the historical division of Europe into East and
West, will not be thematised in this collection. It is at the centre of other projects that I have
directed in the past few years (such as the one presented in the book Women Migrants from East
to West. Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe, eds Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon,
Ioanna Laliotou and Enrica Capussotti [Oxford: Berghahn, 2007]).
 Part I

HISTORICISING LOVE
POINTS DE REPÈRE/POINTS OF REFERENCE
 CHAPTER 1

Love and Religion

Comparative Comments

JACK GOODY

The topic of love is not the domain of one discipline alone, but of a more gen-
eral debate, by sociologists, historians and psychologists as well as by anthropol-
ogists. The anthropological perspective is essential, even for the past, because it
deals with other cultures, especially so called pre-industrial ones. Nobody can
judge the singularity of the institutions of one culture or one ‘stage’ without
looking at others. That is most important in dealing with love, as, in my view,
Europeans, scholars and citizens alike have been guilty of a ‘theft of history’ in
appropriating love, particularly romantic love, for their own and denying the
same experience to others. I refer here to the claim by scholars who see the
possibility of such experience as being uniquely associated with the process of
modernisation1 or with the history of Europe.2
I want to address the notion of secular love and religion in a comparative
way, concentrating upon the question of the rapprochement between earthly
and divine love, and the problem of the use of the same or different terms.
First, I will briefly look at the articulation of these questions in European
Christianity, and then I will turn to one culture roughly equivalent to that of
Europe at least before the Renaissance, namely, Islam, and especially Turkey, as
well as to one much simpler society, the LoDagaa of northern Ghana, where
I carried out fieldwork. The reason for giving so much attention to the situa-
tion in earlier Turkey is that, as I have earlier suggested,3 part at least of the idea
of courtly love, the notion of the troubadours, was derived from the Islamic
culture of Spain – the frontier of which was much more permeable than many
cultural historians of Europe, devoted to the singularity of their own culture,
would allow. At the best, they held and expressed parallel views. This suggestion

Notes for this section begin on page 31.

22 Jack Goody

derives not only from some of the better-informed historians of Andalusia,4 but
also from a fascinating account of Islamic influences on the work of Dante, by
Asin Palacios.5 There, he notes that Islam influenced the court in Sicily and the
songs of the troubadours in the north. It is for this reason that I have turned to
Turkey, which is often seen by Europeans as an example of the static despotism
of Asia. It was, in fact, very far from that.6
The notion of secular love is tied up in European thought not only with
that of fraternity and love of one’s fellow man, but also more closely, especially
regarding sexual love, with that of freedom (freedom of choice of partner, ro-
mantic love) and of individualisation (individual choice as preferred to family
choice). These ideas are dear to Western ideologies, which see them as marking
off Western Christianity from other creeds.
In Christianity, love is often seen as an intrinsic part of a complex of re-
ligious ideas and practices. The love of God (given and received), the love of
man, the love of women – all are drawn together by the use of this one word,
which implies a common element, but a variety of forms. The Hebrew bible
uses the same word for the love of God, of fellow men or of fellow women.
Hence, the rabbis could interpret the apparently erotic Song of Songs as the
love of God for Israel, an interpretation that Christians later transfer into the
love of Christ for his people. The first three chapters of Hosea show a similar
identification, which later Protestants would say show confusion. However,
there does seem to be a difference in Hebrew between love (‘ohebh) and desire
(shawq). When God curses Eve, he says that her ‘desire’ (shawq) shall be for
Adam, not that she shall ‘love’ (‘ohebh) him. The Song of Songs, a series of
secular love poems, was only included in the canon because Rabbi Aqivah (first
century CE) decided to read it allegorically, but there is nothing in the text
itself to suggest an allegorical reading.7
It seems doubtful if many other societies include those two forms in one
overall category in quite the same way as European Christianity. Or should we
say in some branches of European Christianity? Because in many contexts, the
two activities, even if given the same name, are diametrically opposed. In the
Roman Catholic church, the priests are forbidden married love (as well as, of
course, unmarried intercourse), though we know that many find that difficult,
whereas they are enjoined to enter into the mutual love of God as well as into
eternal amity (fraternity) to all mankind and indeed to all of God’s creation. But
the opposition becomes particularly acute in the dualistic versions of the Chris-
tian faith (as of others) where a sharp line is drawn between this world and the
next, between evil and earthly on the one hand, and good and spiritual, on the
other. To be ‘perfect’ among the Cathars of the twelfth century – and all have
to aim for this – carnal love has to be renounced as one of the things of this
world that is completely antithetical to the spiritual, to God, to the religious
life. As a result, they renounce the world, the flesh and the devil. That path
leads to renunciation, even for the laity. Nor was it an ideal confined to them.
 Love and Religion: Comparative Comments 23

Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy’s new religion of love led to the abandon-
ing of his family and renouncing earthly ties, including the earthly love of his
wife and thirteen children. Here the shift was not so much between earthly and
divine love, as between carnal and fraternal love (though inspired by Christian
teaching). The two main forms of spiritual and earthly love are distinguished by
the Greeks as eros (that is, erotic, sexual) and agape (fraternal or social).
As we know from Caroline Bynum’s studies of medieval women mystics,
sometimes, but not always, the two aspects of love, the spiritual and the sensual,
become very much intertwined.8 In the words of the thirteenth-century mystic,
Hadewijch, who wrote of her union with Christ, ‘after that he came himself to
me, took me entirely in his arms and pressed me to him; and all my members
felt his in full felicity.’9 This concern with the flesh is linked to the idea that
Christ had a human as well as a divine nature, the invisible God made visible.
Renunciation of the flesh, of earthly love, is associated with other priest-
hoods, especially in monastic religions such as Buddhism, for reasons that sit
comfortably with the differentiation of the universe, however mildly, into
the material and the spiritual. That differentiation may take on an extreme
Manichean dimension or may simply offer an extension of the quasi-universal
dichotomy into body and mind, spirit and soul. However, not all religions de-
mand renunciation in the same way, although most place some restrictions on
sex in relation to religious activities, such as abstention before prayer.
In Hindu India, the rapprochement between love and religion is much
closer than in the religions of the Near East. Whereas the representation of hu-
man love would be forbidden in any Christian church, not to speak of Jewish
and Islamic contexts where all figurative representation would be taboo, that is
far from the case in India, as we see in the temples of Khajuraho and in many
others.10
Let me now turn to the question of freedom of choice and its relation to
love and religion. It seems clear to me that the union of man and woman, or
man and man, or woman and woman, involves attraction and indeed some-
thing that one could reasonably call love, congruent or conjugal love, even if
not ‘romantic love’. A division is often drawn by family historians between ar-
ranged marriages and love marriages. Arranged marriages are those organised
by the senior generations of the family or specified in the kinship calculus, for
example, that a man should marry his mother’s brother’s daughter. Love mar-
riages involve free choice for the prospective partners and the notion is deeply
embedded in Western culture – though not altogether absent from others. The
idea of consensus was especially favoured by the Church, in opposition to the
practice of some families.
There is a difference between ‘love’ as a means of choosing a partner, in
courtship and dalliance (which is the narrower sense in which Europeans of-
ten use the term11), and love as an attribute of a sexual relationship following
marriage. Love of a kind is almost always emergent in the latter cases simply
24 Jack Goody

because the continued intimacy of the sexual relationship gives rise to cathexis,
or to positive emotions of attraction and attachment. Emotions develop in the
course of the union. There is also asexual love, called by a different name in
many societies, for one’s children, or one’s parents or one’s siblings, although the
sexual implications, albeit forbidden, may always arise. One variety is known
as Platonic love. When the Renaissance writer, Rycaut, discusses the Turks, he
sees the Platonic love that developed in the course of education in male insti-
tutions as having been transformed from physical desire, as being thoroughly
commendable and a step toward that perfect love of God.12
If we think of the wider meanings of the word ‘love’, it seems curious that
we use it when the choice of partner is made by the couple, but not when we
refer to one made by the parents, who are assumed to be active in their own
interests rather than in those of their children (which could amount to their
‘love’ of their children). Parents do, of course, take into account family con-
cerns, which seem altogether necessary if all will be living in the same house or
even in the vicinity. But the parents will usually be thinking of their child and
his or her preferences. If they do not, then in those many parts of the world in
which divorce is permitted, a break-up may soon follow. Or they may not see
the grandchildren they desire; the marriage may prove to be less fertile, as Wolf
and Huang have shown in the case of ‘incoming daughter-in-law marriages’ in
China, where a girl is brought up from a young age with her future spouse.13
Or they may alienate their son or daughter. In any case, it is generally recog-
nised that a union that is at first arranged, can, and usually does, develop into
one of mutual attraction and devotion that deserves to be called love, at least
‘congruent’14 or ‘companionate’ love.15 However, the free choice of a partner
in modern society has become idealised globally over the past century and is
often identified with love and with modernisation. If so, it is a more fleeting
emotion than many have thought, since freedom means not only to engage,
but also to change, to divorce, meaning the end of intimacy. However, it seems
confusing to identify love with the freedom of choice and to deny the presence
of love in other regimes, even though the western model has already become
dominant ideologically, largely through the dominance of the global media and
their appeal to youth.16
The notion of love has a long history, especially in relation to religion. The
identification of love for a woman and love for one’s country or for one’s God
was common in the Old Testament, especially in that sensuous biblical book,
Hosea, as well as in the Song of Songs, which was given such a uniquely spiri-
tual interpretation in later Judaism and Christianity. And yet the Jewish identi-
fication continued. In the poetry of Ibn Gabiral (1021–1057), much influenced
by Islamic models, the love poetry also has the dimension of cosmic love, of
the privileged relation between Israel and her God.17 Zafrani writes that ‘the
compositions remain ambiguous, whether they are liturgical or profane, so that
one cannot say if it relates to mystical love or to the relation with someone
 Love and Religion: Comparative Comments 25

closer, a disciple or a friend’.18 It should be noted that while Jewish poetry

in the Maghreb was always basically religious, Arab poetry was often profane,
even erotic.19 Indeed, the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, denounces
the use of poetry and especially of song, often sung by slave-girls and accom-
panied by wine.20 It was this Arab tradition that was so important in ‘modernis-
ing’ medieval Europe.
The other notion I want to discuss in relation to love is individualism, the
individualism involved in the freedom of choice. This is often equated with the
absence of family ties. But that is not what actors’ experience. Children may
depart relatively early from their natal household in a spatial sense, but soon
after they do so, they establish strong bonds with others, a lover, a spouse, and
subsequently with their own children; at the same time, they maintain ties
over distance (interrupted by visits and frequent communication by letters,
telephone and email) with their parents and with their siblings. Indeed, it has
been suggested that a fission of this kind may strengthen closer attachments.
That view does not appear to be consistent with the widespread idea of the
isolated individual in Europe making his way against the world, in the manner
of Robinson Crusoe or other mythical heroes of Europe. This inconsistency
is totally apparent, for example, in the notion that our economy is about indi-
vidual entrepreneurs, which is contradicted by the very important role played
by family firms.21
One of the most disturbing myths of the West is that the values of our
‘Judaeo-Christian’ civilisation are to be distinguished from the East in general
and from Islam in particular. However, Islam has the same roots as Judaism and
Christianity and has many of the same values. If we are thinking of the level
of religious ideology, then it has recently been pointed out by Yalman22 that
love, equality and freedom are fundamental features of the ethical teaching of
Islam, as is a concern for the individual. Therefore, I give particular attention to
Yalman’s work, because it contradicts widespread stereotypes on Islam.
The recognition of the role of love in Islamic cultures is important first
of all because many Europeans see love and charity as inextricably linked to
Western, Christian culture, or, in the case of love, as evolving from the twelfth-
century troubadours or as characteristic of their conjugal family, even as a feature
of our modernisation.23 It is nothing of the sort; indeed, not only were devel-
opments in Languedoc in the twelfth century possibly influenced by Islamic
writers such as Ibn Hazm working in Spain, but also the subject was of wide
interest in the Muslim world, both in secular and religious contexts. In Sufism,
emphasis on love was particularly marked. One Sufi master wrote, ‘I am neither
Christian, Jew nor Muslim… love is my religion’.24
Yalman writes of these sects:
The interest in love as a social doctrine can be said to arise with the mystic tarikats
very early in Islam. There is much talk of the heart: love in this sense is a danger-
ous, even subversive, doctrine. Thus are the tarikats regarded to this day in many
26 Jack Goody

places. The love of men for God, and for each other, has a Dionysian quality
difficult for authorities to control. Such irrepressible and all-consuming love is
expressed in highly emotive rituals – the passion plays of the Shi’a, or the ritual
chanting (dhikr) of the various dervish orders, or the sema (whirling ritual) of the
Mevlevis, and, in all cases, it is reported that the effect of the communal ritual is
the submerging of the individual in an “ocean of love” in his group. The degree
to which the Middle East, at least, was susceptible to such ideas can be understood
from the fact that Divine love (tasawuj) is the largest and most persistent subject in
the poetry and music of the Ottoman, Persian, and indeed Mughal Empires.25

The metaphor of love, the love of men for God and for each other, also has
political implications. It denies, of course, the machine-like quality that well-
run societies sometimes come to exhibit. Love as a consuming passion would set
aside formalities and undermine social barriers. It would erode the privileges of
those small, closed groups that often run the important institutions of society,
and insist that hierarchical structures, built up with such care and dependent
upon people keeping their places and doing their duties, be brought down.
It would insist that men be equal to each other, that they dissolve the barri-
ers separating them and unite with one another in a sense of community and
identity and become one with each other and with God.
The close intertwining of secular and divine love runs very deep in the life
of the mystic poet Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, in whose name one of the most
famous of the brotherhoods (tarikat), the Mevlevi, was founded after his death
in 1273. A revolution took place in his life in Konya, when he met a man called
Shems-i Tabrizi (Shemüddin, the ‘sun’ of Tabriz). The circumstances of their
meeting are obscure but according to one account, Shems apparently grabbed
the bridle and stopped Mevlana’s horse in the middle of the street. Mevlana
was stunned by Shems and his alien way of life; he went through a period of
total ecstasy and fell instantly in love with him. The two stayed in conversation
for ‘forty days’, but Mevlana’s absence troubled the outside world. Shems then
departed, an act that gave rise to a most extraordinary outpouring of lyric po-
etry on the subjects of love and separation. They were briefly reunited but the
mob again rioted and again Shems departed. But for Mevlana, the world had
changed: ‘now his life has meaning, predicated upon Divine love. He composes
vast quantities of deeply moving poetry on the allegory of love’.26 Shems, Yal-
man notes, ‘is turned into the master symbol of Divine love between man and
God and between man and Man’. Once again, there is ambiguity between the
two, and homoerotic love is celebrated by a great poet in the Arabic language.
Islam seems to be one religion that does not put a strong regulatory hand
on human sexuality, since one of the hadiths declares that every time a man has
sexual intercourse, he undertakes a work of charity. Among Arabs, the ritu-
ally appropriate remark in initiating sex relations with one’s wife was: ‘I seek
refuge in God from the accursed Satan; in the name of God, the beneficent,
the merciful’.27 The ambivalence attaches to male sexuality, but Adam requires
an Eve, so that there is something here of sex (and love) that we have seen
 Love and Religion: Comparative Comments 27

elsewhere, although unions approved by God seem to be opposed to Satan’s

version. The duality between good and evil remains, but approved sex falls on
the opposite side compared with the Cathars. Intercourse could be carrying
out the service of God. However, the total situation is more complicated, since
Islam also harks back to the story of Adam and Eve, and there is an obvious
aspect of ambivalence about unauthorised sex. That ambivalence exists very
widely in human societies, in some of which sex is forbidden between close
kin (as in Christianity), in others encouraged (as in Islam). I have extended this
discussion to the realm of sex. While love and sex cannot be identified, neither
in most cases can they be separated. Although some forms of love as ‘platonic
love’, love of fellow man, love of God, even self-love, exclude sexuality, in the
majority of cases, ‘making love’ with the other sex is an aspect of love.
Doubts or qualifications about love, even married love, are part of Chris-
tian beliefs, embodied in the words of Christ and of his disciple Paul, as well
as from the merit that Catholicism awards to the cloister, a renunciation that
invokes also the celibacy of both males and females. The insistence on renun-
ciation for all clergy is to be found in others of the great world religions; that
is reinforced in the wider belief, almost approaching the Manichean, that the
opposition between the spiritual and the material brought the physical aspects
of love close to evil, to ‘the world, flesh and the Devil’, for earthly love was
usually considered to belong with the latter.
Qualms about earthly love do not begin with written religions, though
some have argued from the story of Adam and Eve, so widely proclaimed on
Romanesque churches, that it is the Judaeo-Christian tradition (as it is often
called, omitting Islam from the company) that confers feelings of guilt on the
sexual act, a feeling that God forced upon the first humans whose breach of
the taboo meant they were excluded from Paradise. However, Indian religion
as well, though much more explicit about the sexual act in temple sculpture,
not only in certain ways encourages its renunciation, but also sees that act as
‘polluting’, as bringing dirt and impurity, at least immaterial, upon the par-
ticipants. Such ambivalence is not confined to the written or so-called ethical
religions. That is made clear from the various taboos that surround sex in many
oral cultures. One example comes from the recitations embodied in the rites
of the Bagre society among the LoDagaa of northern Ghana. A passage in a
version that I published as The Third Bagre: A Myth Revisited can only be inter-
preted I believe, by attributing similar beliefs, at least in embryo, to this oral
culture on whose religion the Near East can have had no real influence. In the
Black Bagre (the second of the two parts), recited at the settlement of Gomble,
the original man and woman begin by building their house with the help of
God.28 He provides them with the material to make mats and they lie down to
sleep. At that point, God traces a circle of ashes around them, presumably to
see if they move. They do so and have intercourse with one another. But the
aftermath is somewhat unexpected:
28 Jack Goody

And God, it was he

with all his wonders,
came down suddenly,
went and asked the woman.
The woman replied,
don’t ask me.
Go and ask the man.
He asked the man,
who became ashamed
and he bent his head.
You know that,
that’s how it is,
the woman spoiled the man.
And they also said
the man spoiled the woman.
And then God
became angry
and went up
and they blamed each other.
Two days later
the woman became pregnant.

Even in this simple, hoe agriculture society, with a purely local religion, an
element of shame is attributed to the sexual act, for which God is seen as ulti-
mately responsible.
Looking at love in a more general context, there is in my view little or
nothing to suggest that such an emotion is absent from simpler cultures. It is
true, as I have argued elsewhere, that emotions may receive a greater elaboration
in written cultures, in particular in love letters, in which by definition the cor-
respondents are distant from one another. This very distance may be a significant
component of what we call ‘romantic love’. I have suggested, as have others, that
we find such expression in Ancient Egypt, even in letters between brothers and
sisters, who were of course possible sexual partners. The same is to be found in
early Chinese love poems, again often between distant partners. But coming
closer to home, you find it also in Islamic cultures, in which personal relation-
ships have often been seen by the West as providing a complete contrast.
That parallelism is also apparent in the relationship between love and equal-
ity. The anthropologist Yalman sees equality as a ‘fundamental aspect’ of the
‘culture of Islam’. Certainly, it is ‘translated’ into practice in the notion of open
access to opportunities for people and the absence of a group (a priesthood)
with privileged access to divine truths. But that does not mean there is no in-
equality among Islamic peoples: ‘In practice, inferiority and superiority are as
much a part of daily Islamic experience as any other’.29 Yalman draws a general
contrast between a highly idealised formula between equality and love in Islam,
on the one hand, and hierarchy and renunciation in India, on the other. The
contrast is between his description of Islam and that of Dumont’s on hierarchy
and renunciation in Hinduism,30 ‘an almost mirror-image comparison of two
 Love and Religion: Comparative Comments 29

religious world-views that have intermingled with bitter intimacy for more
than a thousand years on the Indian sub-continent’.31 According to Dumont,
renunciation, ascetic self-denial, was the religious dimension of hierarchy, al-
lowing for some liberation and permitting ‘the specially gifted individuals to
escape from the strict crucible of caste’.32 But then Yalman on the one hand
recognises that equality has not always been achieved by Islamic states and, on
the other hand, he quotes a comment on the presence of bakhti in India, in
which those who have fallen from twice-born status might be brought to better
condition.33 In other words, hierarchy could be breached. Equally he refers to
the great Hindu tradition of love, of the gopis for Krishna, and he might well
have referred to the fine body of Sanskrit love poetry. He sees this as a ‘point of
profound contact in Hindu and Muslim devotionalism’, going on to claim that
in the Hindu case it is only a minor theme of a great civilisation.34
I suggest that we need to modify the stark contrast that Yalman draws be-
tween these aspects of love in the religious ideologies by taking into account
the similar ties, especially regarding love, that accompany them. From the Af-
rican standpoint, both the Islamic society of Turkey and the Hindu society of
India are representative of the late Bronze Age cultures of Eurasia, which are
heavily stratified. However, those forms of stratification may be qualified by
the religious ideologies. Islam does something to loosen and even oppose the
secular stratification, which for the most part is based on unequal access to
land, always ploughed, sometimes irrigated; there is charity from the better-off,
sometimes the revolt of the poor, but no effective redistribution. In India, the
secular hierarchy is to some extent supported by the religious ideology, but not
entirely since it is the written priesthood who conduct the religious rites, as
in Islam, and who are considered to stand on top of the hierarchy. The secular
rulers follow. Nevertheless, the class divide is modified by charity, as in Islam,
by acts of giving, as when in a Congress-dominated village in Gujarat, I saw
the harijan, formerly the untouchables, queuing up to obtain the whey left-
over from the yoghurt-making activities of the ‘peasant’ Patels. More signifi-
cant, however, are aspects of religion, Bakhti and Krishna-worship displaying
egalitarian characteristics. And there has always been the outright opposition of
others, the long tradition of Indian atheistic thought, which included Dalit (‘un-
touchable’) opposition to the caste system in which they found themselves at
the bottom of the pile. That opposition was typified in Pune by the nineteenth-
century activities of Mahatma Phule, who founded a primary girl’s school, and
by the work of Dr. Ambedkhar, leader of the harijan under Mahatma Gandhi,
who drafted the Indian constitution to include positive discrimination, but
eventually led his group away from Hinduism and into Buddhism. Buddhism
and Jainism had both grown out of Hinduism and involved rejecting the caste
system. That is why Ambedkhar successfully led the former untouchables to
Buddhism, an Indian religion that had little following in that country and
therefore fewer political implications.
30 Jack Goody

Yalman also elaborates the concept of freedom in Turkish Islam. The Eng-
lishman, Sir Adolphus Slade, who served as an officer under the Ottoman Navy
in the 1820s, wrote: ‘Hitherto the Osmanley has enjoyed by custom some of
the dearest privileges of free men, for which Christian nations have so long
struggled.’ He paid a very limited land tax, no tithes, needed no passport, en-
countered no customs nor police; ‘from the lowest origins he might aspire with-
out presumption to the rank of pasha’. He compares the freedom, ‘the capacity
of realising his wildest wishes’, to the achievements of the French revolution.35
There are many other practical significances of this concept. You could make a
slave a Muslim but you could not make a Muslim a slave. Equally, a new con-
vert, as with the Albanian dervishes, could rise to the highest offices in the land,
bar that of Sultan.
As Yalman explains, the notion of freedom is connected to that of equality.
The ‘high ideals of Islam’, he notes ‘do turn around the principle that there are
no privileged persons in Islam, or rather that a person’s worth depends upon
the morality of his/her intentions, behaviour and piety. This may lead to the
gates of heaven, but even in the worldly kingdoms, all people, once converted
to the belief of Islam – i.e., having “surrendered” (teslim) to the will of God –
must be given an equal chance to rise in society. Hence the promise of Islam,
for instance, to Black Muslims in America and oppressed peoples elsewhere’.36
Like love and equality, the notion of freedom was present in Hindu society,
even if not always prominent in Brahmin religion, just as the practice and to
some extent the ideology of hierarchy existed in Islam. These contrary tenden-
cies are mirrors of each other within each society; the religious ideologies do
display contrasts, but if they are considered in a wider ideological frame, we
find both trends present in the two societies.
How and why? Because both societies, being dependent upon advanced
agriculture and its commercial and artisanal concomitants, were heavily strati-
fied from a socio-economic point of view as well as having both political strati-
fication and religious-educational stratification in relation to the written word
and to the holy scriptures more generally. But stratification is often seen as
contrary to what are virtually pan-human notions of equality among humans
(e.g., among siblings, among brothers and sisters), which run as a counter-cur-
rent in stratified societies, and are based on the idea of distributive justice. From
the standpoint of the family, it is based on relations between siblings (‘all men
are brothers’) or between partners rather than between parents (prototypically
fathers) and children.37 One set involves inequality, the other equality, and both
are built into social relationships from the family outward. Both involve love,
one fraternal or sororal love as well as ‘sexual’ love, which is between equals,
a lateral relationship. The other involves parental love, and its complement,
which is hierarchical, between unequals. The imposition of hierarchy by the
father or parent is countered by claims to equality on behalf of the brothers
or siblings. These claims may dominate the lifestyles of a person or of a com-
 Love and Religion: Comparative Comments 31

munity, or they may constitute a point of reference that does not prevent one
continuing to act in a rapacious or consumerist manner. We are well acquainted
with these ideological-behavioural-centred conflicts in our own daily lives,
as when we decry the pollution that cars contribute to the environment and
jump into our Nissan to go down to the supermarket (which we decry as hav-
ing taken over the small, personalised shops). There are conflicts as well within
these close relationships of ‘love’, which are often forgotten in the glow of
romance. There is the strife between brothers; or, the hatred that may follow
the end of conjugal intimacy. Love has to be considered in the context of hate,
attraction in that of repulsion.
The examples discussed here suggest that while love and the associated
‘virtues’ of equality and freedom are often seen by Westerners as basically Euro-
pean – part of that continent’s cultural heritage enabling it to move forward to
modernisation in front of the rest of the world – this idea is built on unsteady
foundations. These attributes are found in different forms in other societies,
and not just in advanced literate ones, although there the ideologies are more
developed, especially in poetry. It is the greater reflexivity of the written word,
wherever it is found, that produces not only love, but also romantic love.

Notes

1. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 1991).
2. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York: Princeton University Press,
1956; Georges Duby, Féodalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
3. Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
4. See, for example, the volume edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, The Legacy of Muslim Spain
(Leiden: Brill, 1992).
5. Miguel Asin Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy (London: Murray, 1926).
6. Halil I Ænalcik with Donald Quartaert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire,
1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
7. I am grateful to Jessica Bloom for this comment, and to Andrew Macintosh and to the
writings of Nur Yalman.
8. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
9. Mother Columba Hart edition quoted in Janet Martin Soskice, ‘Sight and Vision in Me-
dieval Christian Thought’, in Vision in Context. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, eds
Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1996), 29–43, here 38.
10. Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 210f.
11. E.g., William Josiah Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free Press,
1963).
12. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), 122.
13. Arthur P. Wolf and Chien-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).
14. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.
32 Jack Goody

15. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost. England Before the Industrial Age (London: Meth-
uen, 1971).
16. This attitude has sometimes been described as an ‘earthly religion’. The phrase may serve
as a metaphor, but it is analytically confusing, since religious concepts refer to the other world.
17. Haïm Zafrani, Juifs d’Andalousie et du Maghreb (Paris: Maisonneuve Larose, 1996), 109.
18. Ibid., ‘Compositions restent ambiguës, qu’elles soient liturgiques ou profanes, donc on ne peut dire
s’il s’agit d’amour mystique, ou de la relation avec un être plus proche, le disciple ou l’ami.’
19. Ibid., 134.
20. Ibid., 136.
21. Goody, The East in the West, 192f.
22. Nur O. Yalman, ‘Further Observations on Love (or Equality)’, in Cultural Horizons, ed.
Jayne L. Warner (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001).
23. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.
24. Zafrani, Juifs d’Andalousie et du Maghreb, 159.
25. Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 272.
26. Ibid., 275.
27. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns, 141.
28. Jack Goody and S.W.D.K. (Kum) Gandah, The Third Bagre. A Myth Revisited (Durham:
Carolina Academic Press, 2003).
29. Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 271.
30. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus.The Caste System and its Implications (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1980).
31. Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 270.
32. Ibid.
33. Thomas J. Hopkins, ‘The social teaching of the Bhagavata Purana’, in Krishna. Myths,
Rites and Attitudes, ed. Milton B. Singer (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1966), quoted in
Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 277.
34. Ibid., 278.
35. Quoted in ibid., 271.
36. Yalman, ‘Further Observations’, 271.
37. See Juliet Mitchell, Siblings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
 CHAPTER 2

The Rule of Love

The History of Western Romantic Love
in Comparative Perspective

WILLIAM M. REDDY

Sociologists have paid close attention to the remarkable post-war ‘triumph’ of

love in the Western industrialised countries.1 But love has received relatively
little explicit attention in other fields – and this at a time when scholarly work
on ‘genders’, ‘sexualities’ and ‘desire’ has gained unquestioned academic le-
gitimacy. In critical theory, in literary and historical research, in theoretical
formulations concerning culture, discourse, agency and performance, love has
come up, but usually only tangentially. Even when love is a central issue of their
work, authors in these fields prefer to highlight their concern with sexuality
or desire.2
This selective focus on genders, sexualities and desire is not just the prod-
uct of recent fashion in the academy. The ultimate origins of this preference
must be sought much further back, in a peculiar historical accommodation first
worked out in the Middle Ages, between romantic love, on the one hand, and
the sexual regulation imposed by family and religion, on the other. This essay
argues that love’s peculiar accommodation with regulation turns on a unique
Western distinction between love and ‘lust’. No other cultural tradition applies
such a distinction to the understanding of emotional connections between sex-
ual partners. Two alternative ways of conceptualising and practising love – from
the Hindu and Japanese traditions – will be discussed below, as points of con-
trast. But many other traditions could have been brought forward, for example,
the Muslim, Polynesian or Indonesian traditions. The evidence is overwhelm-
ing. As Anthony Giddens has put it, ‘[i]n (Western) romantic love attachments,
the element of sublime love tends to predominate over that of sexual ardour.
Notes for this section begin on page 52.
34 William M. Reddy

The importance of this point can hardly be overstressed. The romantic love
complex is in this respect as historically unusual as traits Max Weber found
combined in the protestant ethic. Love breaks with sexuality while embracing
it.’3 Sociologists and psychologists frequently note that Western romantic love,
as currently practised, may be overburdened with significance, and inadequate
to the role it has been assigned in modern societies. But this highly significant
role cannot be separated from love’s structural position as, at once, lust’s op-
posite, and the force that sanctifies lust and integrates it into the social order.
Better understanding of the emergence and history of this structure is therefore
urgently required.

The Triumph of Love

Since the Second World War, the role of romantic love in a number of indus-
trialised Western countries has been steadily expanding; love has ‘triumphed’ as
never before, according sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, becoming a kind of
‘earthly religion’, as the German sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim have
put it.4 ‘Family success’, through romantic love, ‘is the highest aspiration of the
French’, remarks Hervieu-Léger: ‘Incontestably, it counts more today, in terms
of the role in the construction of the self which it is supposed to play, than it
has ever counted in history.’5 As pornography becomes more widely available,
and the line between obscene and acceptable fades, as the divorce rate climbs
inexorably above 50 per cent in many countries, interest in lasting love partner-
ships nonetheless remains curiously robust. Marriage rates have recovered from
a low in the mid 1990s and in many countries the rates are stable or on the rise.
The number of unmarried co-resident couples is also increasing; and many of
these unmarried couples are ‘starting families’ together.6 Lesbians and gays jus-
tify the current international movement for full marriage rights on the grounds
that same-sex couples love in the same manner as heterosexual ones. ‘Same-
sex couples face all of the same challenges and joys that heterosexual couples
do – but we’re left navigating through them without the protections marriage
provides’, said Michael Adams, Director of Education and Public Affairs at
Lambda Legal Defense Fund, in an 15 October 2003 news release announcing
a new counselling forum, ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Couple’.7
Celebrations of marriage – often after years of cohabitation – take the
form of elaborate, personalised rituals, recycling many traditional features and
featuring extremely up-to-date vows.8 The constant exploration of marriage
in popular culture and public concern over the agony of divorce – these and
other aspects of the present landscape attest to the continuing centrality of love
partnerships. The rule of love has such an unchallenged sway over many minds
that we can hardly grasp its omnipresence. Many of us see the problems it cre-
ates as the problems of freedom, of the human condition. We rejoice when ho-
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 35

mosexual, bisexual and transsexual couples, or when couples of differing ethnic

and racial backgrounds are freed to come together and struggle as we do – in
private, without public insult or discrimination – over the hopes of love.
This prevalent concept (or, should I say ‘practise’, or ‘emotion’ – it is all of
these9 ) of romantic love serves in many industrialised Western countries as the
sole legitimate grounds for founding families and the principal form of a bond
giving structure to the private sphere. A former Archbishop of Canterbury
recently recommended that the Prince of Wales marry his long-term partner,
Camilla Parker Bowles. ‘He is the heir to the throne and he loves her; the
natural thing is that they should get married’, said Lord Carey.10 Yet, until very
recently, this ‘natural thing’ was in fact forbidden by the Church of England’s
rules regarding remarriage of divorced persons. Love’s ‘natural’ reign is actually
a highly peculiar, local, and – in its current configuration – relatively recent
phenomenon.
The idea that romantic love is natural and universal – a widely held belief,
defended by some psychologists and anthropologists – seems to be based in part
on a confusion about terms. Love in English is a very vague term. The term ro-
mantic is added to allow one to refer to that emotion that accompanies attempts
to initiate an enduring sexual partnership and/or the emotion that accompa-
nies and motivates such an enduring partnership. However, romantic love is also
the only available English term to refer to the specific emotion Westerners feel
when they pursue or sustain sexual partnerships.
Almost always, one or more features of Western romantic love will turn up
in non-western cultural arenas. But identification of (some) common features
does not warrant the conclusion that romantic love is universal. Such a leap
obscures the highly specific role that romantic love is playing in some present-
day societies. One ethnographer of Nigeria, for example, who was arguing for
the universality of romantic love, reported that a man became fascinated, even
obsessed, with his third wife the moment he saw her. Although he already had
two wives, he said, ‘I told her I wanted to marry her. She said she had nothing
to say about that, and directed me to her parents.’ He immediately went to ne-
gotiate with the parents, and soon married her.11 Whatever this man’s emotion
was, to equate it with ‘romantic love’ as practised in certain Western industri-
alised countries is to ignore the centrality of reciprocal feeling and of exclusivity
in Western ideas about love partnerships. The two meanings of ‘romantic love’
must not be blurred together in a way that allows this kind of mistake to go
unnoticed.

The Medieval Accommodation of Love and Sexual Regulation

The failure of the scholarly community to understand romantic love’s odd West-
ern structure seems to reflect a peculiar Western accommodation between love
36 William M. Reddy

practices and regulatory thinking. Long ago, in effect, lovers and regulators
agreed to ignore each other. This accommodation was beginning to take shape
by about the year 1200 CE, and was fully developed by the fourteenth century.
It developed, that is, along with the new form of romantic love that has come
to be called ‘courtly love’. Courtly love was startlingly different from earlier
sexual practices in a number of ways. For the ancient Romans, love was a pas-
time of idle moments and any man who became preoccupied with it obviously
lacked virtue; a man’s undue concern with sexual partners – male or female
– detracted from his capacity to engage in those political and military duties
that distinguished him as a citizen.12 Proper sexual partners were of lower rank.
They did what they were told, and swooning over them was unnecessary and
unseemly.13 But, from early in the twelfth century, the European warrior elite
adopted the new courtly love ideal with amazing rapidity and thoroughness.14
Courtly love was perfectly compatible with political duty and military prow-
ess – it was even likely to enhance one’s military effectiveness. Courageous,
quick-tempered knights provided the clinching proof of their virtue by loving
gracious women of higher, not lower, rank than themselves. This new kind of
love entailed not just adoration for, but also obedience to, the higher ranked
woman, and extreme concern for her reputation, especially in cases where the
love was reciprocated through an adulterous relationship.15 Eminent medieval-
ists such as Maurice Keen and Peter Dinzelbacher are of the opinion that such
relationships were quite common.16 When women chose to return the senti-
ment of devotion, they insisted on their lover’s homage, submission and discre-
tion. For both men and women, courtly love was a transcendent experience.
This adulterous love transformed one’s sense of self and offered fulfilment; God
was widely assumed to approve and to aid lovers. Prayers invoking God’s aid
were a frequent feature of troubadour, trouvère and Minnesänger lyrics all across
Europe.
This spiritualised sensuality can be seen in mature form in a song by Gi-
raut de Borneil, ‘Reis glorïos, verais lums e clartatz’. Giraut de Borneil, active
between 1190 and 1240, was known as the master troubadour for his technical
virtuosity in an art whose forms were becoming increasingly fixed. ‘Reis glo-
rïos’ is an ‘aube’ or ‘dawn’ song. In this popular genre, the singer calls out to his
companion, to warn him that dawn has come. The singer has been set as guard
to watch over the place – a bedroom, a garden – where two lovers have met in
secret. He must protect them from discovery by a jealous husband. In Giraut
de Borneil’s version, the singer’s cries are like an austere hymn.
1. Reis glorïos, verais lums e clartatz Glorious king, truth and light most true
Deus poderos, senher, si a vos platz, Powerful God, my Lord, I beg of you
Al meu companh siatz fizels aiuda To be a faithful aid to my companion
Qu’eu non lo vi, pois la noitz fon Whom I have not seen since night has
venguda; fallen;
Et ades sera l’alba. And soon it will be dawn.
… …
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 37

3. Bel companho, en chantan vos apel:
Non dormetz plus, qu’en aug
chantar l’auzel
Que vai queren lo iorn per lo
boscatge;
Et ai paor quel gilos vos assatge;
Et ades sera l’alba
Fair companion, singing I call to you:
Sleep no more, I hear the lark sing,
who
Searching for light beneath the
branches flies;
And I fear lest the jealous one take you
by surprise;
And soon it will be dawn.17

In this song, illicit love is a holy quest; God’s help is requested with no sense of
incongruity. The assistance of a loyal friend (the singer) is offered with a deep
sense of duty and admiration. The mournful repetition of ‘And soon it will be
dawn’ at the end of each stanza gives rise to a growing sense of anxiety as the
song continues, the sun rises and the danger of discovery increases. The aube
genre celebrates risk, bravery, vigilance: qualities belonging to the warrior, and
underscoring love’s new status as an integral part of the warrior’s noble calling.
How was this extraordinary set of practices so widely adopted without
falling afoul of the regulatory apparatus of the medieval church? Courtly love
was first expressed in songs and soon elaborated, as part of the code of chivalry,
in long narrative poems. By the end of the thirteenth century, it was being
celebrated in illustrations and tapestries, on household furnishings such as jew-
ellery boxes, mirrors and combs, on coats of arms and in heraldic mottos and
tournament rituals. It became a dominant theme of vernacular literature from
Sicily to Denmark, Iberia to England.
However, only one effort was made to write up a kind of explicit manual of
love: Andreas Capellanus’s famous De Amore, written around 1180. This work,
written probably by a protégé of Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of
Aquitaine, consists of a series of dialogues examining love’s nature and the best
way to win a lover. These are followed by an additional discussion of the sinful-
ness of love. The work also contains the only known description of a ‘court of
love’, where noble ladies meet to pass judgment on questions of love. In such
a court of love, Andreas reports, Marie de Champagne gave the following suc-
cinct verdict: ‘We declare and confirm that love cannot exist between two mar-
ried people.’18 Because of its peculiar structure, scholars have hotly debated the
true meaning of the work. But it seems safe to say that it contained ideas about
love that were widely accepted at the time, whatever Andreas Capellanus’ own
position may have been.19 This treatise, due to its persistent popularity in the
thirteenth century, eventually attracted the condemnation of the church in
1277. As this condemnation made perfectly clear, when formulated as an ex-
plicit doctrine, courtly love was heresy.20
Love’s continued centrality in the medieval period therefore depended on
the avoidance of explicit normative recommendations. Love was praised only
in the realms of (what we would now call) literature and art; its acolytes per-
formed certain of their rites in strict secrecy, and others only after dinner or
at tournaments (which were also condemned but tacitly tolerated), far from
38 William M. Reddy

churches and universities. In their writings and rituals, courtly lovers pretended
to see no contradiction between Christian virtue and adulterous devotion to a
beloved. This strategy of ‘open concealment’ was typical of the whole uneasy
accommodation between Christian teaching and the ever-more elaborate ethos
of the warrior elite. Courtly love resembled Christian love in a number of re-
spects. Both courtly love and Christian asceticism required self-denial, and of-
ten heroic self-denial. Just as Christian theology pitted the love of God against
the body and its passions,21 so courtly lovers often depicted their own devotion
to the beloved as the fruit of (and as inspiration for) strict self-discipline.
By various forms of disguise, courtly love was able to survive, then, even
flourish. Dante, in the Purgatorio (1314), for example, transformed his beloved
Beatrice into a messenger of divine forgiveness. In Canto XXXI, her stun-
ning beauty shows through semi-transparent veils, as she lectures him about his
tendency to forget her for less virtuous women. When she sees his remorse,
Beatrice cries out, ‘Hold me! Hold me!’22 She crosses the river Lethe and draws
him into the waters of forgetfulness up to his neck. ‘The fair lady opened her
arms, clasped my head, and dipped me where I must needs swallow of the
water; then drew me forth.’23 Dante is then required to gaze into her eyes,
whence once Love’s arrows came to pierce him. Burning with desire for her,
he is taught that what he desires is only a distant reflection of spiritual inti-
macy.24 Thus, concupiscence, condemned by theologians as the worst pitfall of
the soul, is quietly rehabilitated by Dante as the best kind of sin, because it can
lead on to appreciation of divine companionship. Likewise Petrarch claimed he
fell in love with his Laura on Good Friday; and, years later, on Good Friday
she died. This connection between sexual love and divine passion was regarded
by some as blasphemous.25 Petrarch, it is true, constantly warned his readers
that he regarded his love of Laura to be a weakness, not an alternate form of
devotion, as it often appeared – a weakness because he could not see beyond
Laura to the God whose beauty she only echoed. He thus kept love, just barely,
within the bounds of the sinful, despite the transcendent tone of all of his de-
scriptions of this emotion. Benjamin Boysen states, ‘The identification of Laura
with Christ serves (aside from the purely amorous and hyperbolic rhetoric) to
nominate her status as an omnipotent Other, who reigns over life and death.’
Petrarch did not hesitate to compare Laura with the divine:
Per divina bellezza indarno mira Who seeks for divine beauty seeks in vain
chi gli occhi de costei giamai non if he has not yet looked upon those eyes
vide, and seen
come soavemente ella gli gira; how tenderly she makes them move;
non sa come Amor sana et come he does not know how love can heal and
ancide kill
(Petrarch, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 159.9–12)26

Sinful, perhaps, but Petrarch’s love was no bodily appetite, no mere concu-
piscence. Perhaps hyperbolic rhetoric, so consistently deployed as it was in the
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 39

Middle Ages, adds up to something more than mere hyperbole. There is noth-
ing that compares with it, either in Ovid’s praises of cupid or in Augustine’s
denunciations of concupiscence.
Another striking instance of open concealment can be found in the col-
lection of thirteenth-century motets that has come down to us in the so-called
Montpellier Codex. Love themes curiously juxtaposed with sacred ones domi-
nate in these early examples of polyphony. Each voice, in these pieces, sings a
different lyric; up to three different lyrics may be sung simultaneously. Under-
standing the words is, for the most part, difficult at best. Most of these motets
take a familiar sacred hymn as their point of departure; its melody is hummed
in the background. Secular love lyrics, sometimes openly anti-Christian, are
sung in harmony at higher pitches. In motet 311 of the Montpellier Codex, for
example, the lower voice sings a man’s praises for his beloved’s grace, goodness
and beauty. He forgets all sorrow when his love for her envelopes him; he prays
to God that he may be able to continue the sweet labour of his love. In intricate
harmonies, the upper voice of motet 311 expresses a woman’s conviction that
she ought to love her beloved, for he has surely deserved it; he has willingly
obeyed her, setting aside his pride; he is joyful, handsome and proper; ‘God,
I use my love well in giving it to him!’ Here we have morality, duty, beauty,
joy, obedience, God’s assistance – all of these religious notions expressed as part
of a dyadic sexual tie and set to music in harmony with a well known sacred
melody, ‘Et Sperabit’. On one page of the Montpellier Codex, reproduced in
the catalogue of a recent exhibition of medieval art, the illustrators graphically
displayed the juxtaposition of sacred and amorous themes by presenting two
saints at the top of the page, and a flirtatious game of ‘frog’ at the bottom.27
A number of jewellery boxes have also survived from the late thirteenth
century through to the fourteenth century, which display images of courting
couples on the outside of the cover, and images of the Blessed Virgin on the
inside. This juxtaposition suggests, without openly stating it, a parallel between
love and the sacred in much the same way as the curious construction of the
motet, the illustrations of the Montpellier Codex or the quasi-sacred beauty of
Beatrice or Laura.28
The iconography of the unicorn reflects a similar unspoken accommoda-
tion of spiritualised emotional attachment and Christian transcendence. This
animal, legend had it, could only be captured by a virgin. Enthralled by her
beauty, he places his front hooves in her lap. Hunters can then successfully
strike or kill him.29 Thus, the unicorn could be read as a symbol of Christ, sub-
mitting to the Virgin birth and to the crucifixion, or to the loving chivalrous
knight, whose devotion to a beloved can trump his intrepid prowess.30
The unicorn symbol gained in popularity in the thirteenth century, and
continued to be popular up until the end of the Middle Ages.31 By the early
fourteenth century, the unicorn is found frequently in marginal illustrations of
illuminated manuscripts and as a decorative motif for small boxes and clasps.32
40 William M. Reddy

In the fifteenth century, the unicorn became even more prominent in chivalric
symbolism. One of the famous tourneying brotherhoods of Germany of that
period was called the Brotherhood of the Unicorn (others were named for
the falcon and for the fish).33 When the knight Jacques de Lalaing issued his
famous ‘Fountain of Tears’ challenge in 1450, he invited opponents to come
to Chalon-sur-Saône, where they found a pavilion with an image of Our Lady
above it. In front of the pavilion was a maiden with a dress stained with tears
and a unicorn with three shields suspended from its neck, also stained with
tears. The shields were white, violet and black. The challenger touched the
white shield with his lance if he wished to fight with the axe, violet if with the
sword, black if with the lance. Challengers brought to the ground by the axe
agreed to wear, as a penalty, a golden chain until they found a lady with the key
to unlock it. The story behind this elaborate representation was not made clear.
However, as Maurice Keen notes, the unicorn suggested purity or chastity, and
‘[i]t is clear … that (the maiden) was to be understood to be comforted and up-
held by the prowess of her champion.’34 That such an elaborate ritual of com-
bat could have been staged at all, without arousing clerical suspicions of heresy
or devil worship, is in itself remarkable.
The unicorn images most famous in the present day are undoubtedly those
of two late fifteenth-century tapestry series, one held by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York (at the Cloisters exhibit), usually called ‘The
Unicorn Tapestries’, the other called ‘The Lady of the Unicorn’, on display at
the Musée national du Moyen Age in Paris. The first of these seems intended
as an allegory of Christ’s passion, as Adolfo Cavallo has suggested.35 But it in-
cludes two tapestries that apparently derive from another series, in which the
unicorn was treated as a symbol of courtly love. One of these, the ‘Unicorn in
Captivity’, showing a unicorn with multiple wounds trapped within a circular
fence, has become one of the most widely reproduced images of medieval art.
The mere fact that this courtly love image was for so long confounded with a
series presenting an allegory of the Passion shows how deep the ambiguities of
the unicorn symbol went.
‘The Lady of the Unicorn’ has, in a similar fashion, plagued scholars with
its allusiveness and its ambiguity. There is general agreement that the first five
tapestries in the series represent the five senses. In each, a richly dressed woman
holds or touches something emblematic of a sense: a flower for smell, a small
pipe organ for hearing. In each tapestry, a lion and a unicorn are present, usu-
ally standing on either side of the woman, bearing shields and banners. In the
piece that represents vision, the unicorn gazes in rapt admiration at the lady, his
face reflected in a mirror she holds before him.
The sixth tapestry in the series is quite different. The damsel holds a heavy
necklace in her hands; she is either putting it on or taking it off. Her assistant
holds a jewellery box in which the necklace is stored. Behind the woman an
elaborately embroidered field tent has been pitched, and she stands as if ready
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 41

to enter it. The tent is decorated with fleurs de lis, with golden teardrops (or
candle flames) and with an embroidered device over the entrance: A mon seul
desir (To my only desire). J.-P. Boudet has noted that this motto echoes a line
of a courtly love song by Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465):
De leal cueur, content de joye, Of loyal heart, content with joy
Ma maitresse, mon seul desir, My mistress, my only desire,
Plus qu’oncqes vous vueil server, More than any other, I wish to serve you
En quelque place que je soye. No matter where I am.36

Thus the theme of the tapestries seems to be a renunciation of the senses in

favour of love; but the tent the lady prepares to enter is empty – is it love of
God or of a man? By the adroit use of allegory, Boudet concludes, this worldly
aesthetic ‘covers its tracks, completely transforming … the edifying schema of
… senses that inspired it’.37
Another intriguing example of the surreptitious celebration of spiritualised
love is the spread of the cult of Saint Valentine in England from the late four-
teenth century onward. Henry Ansgar Kelly argues that the cult found its ori-
gins in the poetry of Chaucer, who, in the Parliament of Fowls, spoke of Saint
Valentine’s day as the feast day of love among birds. Kelly speculates that the
Saint Valentine in question was the one whose feast was celebrated on May 1
in Genoa, and that the identity of the saint was later confused with another
Saint Valentine, better known in England, whose feast day was 14 February.38
Whatever the exact origin, by the fifteenth century, the exchange of notes be-
tween lovers had become a well-known practice in England, and at least some
in France were imitating the practice.39 Like the unicorn, the jewellery boxes
that juxtaposed madonnas and lovers, and the thirteenth-century motet, so the
valentine greeting carried on a typical medieval strategy of silently associating
courtly love with religious devotion.

Concupiscentia: Love’s Dark Partner

Just as courtly love was kept out of the limelight of doctrinal attention, so
church and state, educational institutions, law courts and patriarchal authori-
ties, from the twelfth century onward, conspired to pretend that courtly love
did not exist. In the same years that the new love doctrine was being de-
veloped in literature, music and art, theologians such as Peter Lombard and
Thomas Aquinas spoke only of concupiscentia, that is, of what came to be known
in English as lust.40 Concupiscence was a mere physical appetite like hunger;
yielding to concupiscence was a vice like avarice. To the theologians, giving
in to concupiscence was a sin, no matter what the motive or pretext. Church
leaders warned that, even within marriage, enjoyment of sexual pleasure was
sinful.41 Clothing concupiscence in the language of courtly love was a transpar-
ent self-deception that required no special comment from theology. Writers,
42 William M. Reddy

singers and lovers might extol love’s power to transform life and to sanctify it;
as long as they did not make doctrinal statements along these lines, theologians
could dismiss their delusions without comment. A widely used collection of
sermons drawn up in the late thirteenth century, for example, offers numerous
reflections on the proper comportment of husband and wife.42 But the sermons
made no mention whatsoever of love; love is neither praised nor condemned.
Husband and wife owed each other fidelitas (fidelity), temporantia et honestas
(temperance and honesty), adiutorium (mutual help) and educatio filiorum (edu-
cation of children). They also owed each other dilectio – a Latin term better
translated as ‘familial affection’ than as ‘love’.
Expressions of courtly love and theological condemnations of concupis-
cence were soon joined by another genre of reflection on love, a popular genre
(like the courtly love literature), but one that reinforced the theological view of
things. As early as 1200, a kind of popular narrative became widespread, the so-
called fabliaux, which presented a new formulation of the ribald, of the bawdy,
that was in perfect tune with the theology of concupiscence. Fabliaux authors
offered, for example, a humorous critique of courtly love that purported to
expose its hypocritical character (in a manner of which theologians would have
thoroughly approved).
In an anonymous early thirteenth-century fabliau called The Knight of the
Vermilion Robe (Le chevalier à la robe vermeille), for example, we learn the story
of a knight ‘above reproach’ who won the favour of a lady, the wife of a rich
vavaseur (a lower-ranking noble) who lived a few miles away.43 When the vava-
seur goes to town on legal business, his wife seizes the occasion to send for her
lover. The knight prepares to visit her in his full feudal splendour. He puts on
his fine vermilion robe and his golden spurs, mounts his best horse, sets on his
shoulder the hawk he has raised himself and brings his two well-trained hunt-
ing dogs. Arriving at her dwelling, he ties up his mount and leaves the hawk
and the dogs outside. Hearing him, the lady disrobes and gets naked into bed.
When he prepares to join her there, she insists he also must undress ‘so that the
pleasure will be greater’ (por avoir plus plesant delit). He leaves his spurs, robe
and other clothes at the foot of the bed. ‘There he is, slipping under the sheets:
she takes him in her arms. I do not want to make allusion to other joy, other
pleasure; I think that those who understand me know what I mean. Both of
them gleefully made that pleasure that lovers make when they play together.’44
However, the husband comes home unexpectedly, and the lover must hide
under the bed. Seeing the horse, the dogs, the vermillion robe, the husband be-
comes suspicious and enraged. But his wife assures him, ‘these are gifts from my
brother; did you not see him leaving as you came up?’ The husband relents; he
is delighted with these rich gifts. His wife then invites him to join her in bed,
and induces him to make love, giving him twice as many kisses and caresses
as usual. Finally he falls asleep, and the lover takes this chance to get out from
under the bed and away, taking all of his things with him. When the husband
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 43

awakens and demands to know what has happened to his rich gifts, his wife
teases him for having an odd dream. ‘Who would want a used robe, anyway?’
she asks. ‘A man of your stature and wealth must order new, whatever kind of
robe or horse he thinks he needs.’
Such stories were humorous, typically, in two ways. The audience is in-
vited to laugh at the self-deception of the protagonists and also to laugh at their
resourcefulness in eluding detection. In Le chevalier à la robe vermeille, the lady is
so anxious for pleasure that she is in bed with her clothes off before the knight
has even reached her door; her first remark is to urge him to join her quickly.
There they ‘gleefully made that pleasure that lovers make when they play to-
gether’. This way of describing love-making can be compared with Chrétien
de Troyes’s Chevalier de la Charette, where Lancelot literally worships at Guine-
vere’s bed before joining her there.45 The author of the fabliaux underscores his
point by the redundant use of synonyms for sensual satisfaction: ‘plus plesant
delit’ (more pleasant delight), ‘firent liemant tel deduit’ (gleefully make such plea-
sure). Fabliaux writers were lenient in their approach to lust, but fundamentally
agreed with theologians that lust was the real motivator of lovers, however
much they dressed up their relation in the signs of chivalrous devotion.
This kind of story had a rich future before it. It is best known to modern
readers in the sophisticated rewritings provided by Boccaccio and Chaucer. But
debunking love in this way – in the fashion typical of the fabliaux, that is, by
revealing it as lust in hypocritical clothing – only served to establish explicitly
a distinction between love and lust that was implicit in the mutual silence that
courtly lovers and theologians maintained with respect to each other.46 Courtly
love had a dark partner, lust, born simultaneously with it.47 To theologians,
they were the same; to popular satire, love served only as a cover for lust. To
courtly lovers, the distinction was painfully clear; their devotion to the beloved
and their self-abnegation recalled the ascetic’s selfless devotion to God.48 Their
love was heroic, not self-serving or libidinous.

The Stages of Love’s Conquest

Since the middle ages, love has undergone a profound transformation; it has
become the emotion of marriage. But love’s conquest of marriage did not oc-
cur overnight. The transformation was slow, sometimes imperceptible, involv-
ing a number of distinct stages. Even in the Middle Ages, love within marriage
was not excluded in principle, despite Marie de Champagne’s famous dic-
tum, as reported by Andreas Capellanus, that love was necessarily adulterous.
As John Baldwin has pointed out, some romances ended with happily married
couples.49 The hope that real married couples would find love (at least after
the ceremony) was often expressed through wedding gifts.50 It was simply that,
because most marriages were arranged by parents, love was usually absent. By
44 William M. Reddy

the medieval love ideal, a loving couple, if circumstance allowed it, would of
course elect to marry each other. But for the acolytes of courtly love, devotion
to the beloved legitimated adultery when necessary.
The Reformation brought a dramatic shift in norms (as well as in prac-
tice for some). Luther’s rejection of ‘works’ entailed a severe downgrading of
self-denial in all of its forms, especially in the form of chastity. The dissolution
of monasteries and a rehabilitation of the marital estate went hand in hand.
According to Steven Ozment, the reformers taught that mutual affection and
companionship between spouses, coupled with mutual respect and trust, pro-
vided a framework within which ‘physical attraction and emotional love’ could
play a limited beneficial role.51 Ozment lumps love and lust together in this
phrase because that is how his sources construed the matter. Isabel Hull sum-
marises Reformation changes as follows:
(T)he reformers revalued marriage as the moral crucible tempering human (sex-
ual) nature into godliness and civic responsibility. The upward valuation of mar-
riage and marital sex shortened the list of sexual misdeeds to those more suitable
to external regulation, and the reformers’ moral fervour impelled them to press
for real enforcement. Out of this atmosphere and on Reformation institutions the
absolutist states built the foundations of secular regulation.52

Luther taught that men and women were not capable of resisting sexual temp-
tation; therefore, as Paul had urged, they had better find sexual release in mar-
riage. Calvin taught that the capacity for sexual joy was ‘a sign of God’s goodness
and infinite sweetness’.53 The reformers dramatically reversed the Church’s
prior teaching on sexual pleasure, but they continued to amalgamate love and
lust as manifestations of a human appetite that, if not disciplined, easily became
sinful. Heroic devotion to a beloved was no different from paying prostitutes, if
it occurred outside of marriage. In Catholic regions in the seventeenth century,
although marriage was given new stature as a vocation, the warnings against the
debilitating effects of original sin were reiterated with new zeal.54
Thus, in both Protestant and Catholic lands, secular authorities were en-
couraged to discipline sexual behaviour as never before. Such discipline in the
state’s hands usually entailed an increase in the power of the parents over marital
choice as well. As a result, for many, if not most, love continued to play little
or no role in the choice of marriage partners and, simultaneously, extramarital
relationships were now fitfully, unevenly, but often savagely repressed. Adul-
tery might result in the death penalty; premarital sex could lead to steep fines,
public humiliation, jail or forced labour. Elopement was often treated as the
equivalent of rape.55 Ironically, these severe penalties were so rarely inflicted
in practice that large pockets of de facto tolerance remained, and increased
with time. Simultaneously, among the ruling elite, there is evidence of a loss
of faith in courtly love’s salvific powers, as well as of a concomitant increase in
the number of extramarital liaisons among those influenced by the standards
of Italian Renaissance court life.56 In short, courtly love was replaced in many
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 45

court circles by what came to be called ‘gallantry’ – a less intense, less enduring
bond. The idea of gallantry included a presumption that flowery protestations
of love were hypocritical or self-serving.
The idea that love, as opposed to lust, ought to provide the foundation of
marriage – to the exclusion of parental estimations of suitability, respectability
or upright character – came to be widely accepted only with the Enlighten-
ment. By the end of the eighteenth century, few moralists were prepared to
defend the old practice of arranged marriages, even though many parents con-
tinued to select mates for their children through the nineteenth century and
into the twentieth. The dramatic transformation of norms (with practices lag-
ging significantly behind) began in the late seventeenth century with the suc-
cess of novels, plays and magazines that trumpeted the advantages of true love
in marriage over parental choice and over extramarital adventures.57 Fiction,
medical teaching and the new scientific conception of natural law all conspired
in this re-conception of love.
If natural law governed the heavens and the earth, as Newton had shown,
then it must also govern human behaviour. Just as gravity held the planets in
orbit as if by design, so sexual desire moved individuals to come together, form
families and perpetuate the species. If carried to an extreme, desire became
disruptive. Some eighteenth-century writers recycled the old term passion (in
German Leidenschaft) as a label for this natural drive when it became disrup-
tively strong.58 In any case, the ‘rake’, or ‘Don Juan’ was a danger to himself and
to others.59 If moderated, either by nature or by self-discipline, sexual desire
became ‘love’, a ‘sentiment’ (as opposed to ‘passion’ in some writers’ terminol-
ogy, or a benevolent ‘passion’ in the view of others60) that was a fundamen-
tal spur to altruism and virtuous behaviour.61 Samuel Richardson’s bestselling
novel Pamela (1740) became a kind of paradigm of love’s power to moralise the
wicked. In this lengthy, lachrymose story, a young serving girl resists her rak-
ish master’s advances with such persistence and virtue that she finally converts
him. A happy marriage follows. We find many of the ingredients of courtly
love in this story, but strangely repositioned. It is the lowly (read: natural, un-
spoiled) serving girl, not a higher ranked lady, who inspires her lover (after his
conversion) to become a better man. The love they share, in the end, bridges
the enormous social gap, just as in medieval romance; but in this case it leads
to legitimate marriage, not adultery. Thus, modern ‘romantic love’ was born of
an attempt to rethink traditional ideas (derived from medieval courtly love) in
the light of a new secular vision of human nature.
Like entrepreneurship or political participation, romantic love required in-
dividual rights and individual autonomy to flourish. Up until the outbreak of
the French Revolution, the right to love was an integral part of rights talk.62
But revulsion at the Revolution’s excesses led to a much-reduced idea of the
proper scope of rights. The early nineteenth century saw religious revivals and a
resurgence of pessimism about human nature and the power of reason. Norms
46 William M. Reddy

were widely reformulated without reliance on a ‘natural’ and moralising sen-

timent of love. Kant was a leader in this movement, as was Victor Cousin in
France. In the vast area where it was applied, the Napoleonic Code reinstated
parental authority over children up to the age of twenty-five. But the ideals of
the eighteenth century were not forgotten; they lived on in novels, plays and
operas. We find the ideal of love in marriage widely embraced in memoirs,
autobiographies and private correspondence in the nineteenth century.63
A gradual movement toward acceptance of this ideal seemed to be under-
way, but was interrupted by the First World War, which at first greatly acceler-
ated both the trend toward greater equality for women, and another, much
debated trend toward acceptance of premarital sexual activity.64 Fascist move-
ments spawned in the War’s aftermath preached a return to traditional restraint,
however. The new media of film and radio marketed stories about romantic
love (often leading to marriage) to a vastly expanded audience. Amidst the in-
stability and new possibilities, love retained a vitality that is hard to explain in
purely ideological terms.65
By the beginning of the post-war period, salaried employment had taken
on a new centrality in determining social status. This change – the rise of the
new ‘white collar’ middle class – did more than any legal reform to loosen
the strings of parental authority over marital choice. Education and individual
character determined income more than ever before, and a good salary en-
abled men (for the most part, but later women as well) to choose a life partner
without reliance on the advice or consent of others, as well as to dissolve such
a partnership without fearing loss of status. Thus marriage became a central
‘consumer’ choice; and a wedding industry developed to endow this choice
with all of the magic of which capitalist ingenuity was capable.66 The period
of political dissent in the 1960s and 1970s brought brave experiments in ‘free
love’, ‘open marriages’ and communal living. But these did not endure. No one
would have predicted in 1970 – about the time of the rise of new-wave femi-
nism and the gay and lesbian rights movement – that, thirty-five years later, so
many men and women would continue to regard marriage as central to success
in life, or that gays and lesbians would be clamouring for the right to marry.
Love remains heroic. But the heroism that lovers exhibit today is often de-
picted in relation to their own psychological limitations. Lancelot jousted with
Meleagant to liberate Guinevere. Modern lovers usually struggle with them-
selves. Richardson’s Mr. B. (in his 1740 bestseller, Pamela) is both Pamela’s cap-
tor and her eventual devoted liberator. In the movie As Good as It Gets (1997),
Melvin Udall (played by Jack Nicholson) offers the following statement as his
most compelling complement to Carol Connelly, the waitress he has fallen in
love with (played by Helen Hunt): ‘You make me want to be a better man.’
Nicholson’s character proves his devotion by struggling to overcome his obses-
sive-compulsive disorder, and by displaying generosity toward those in need.
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 47

Such fictions offer a powerful counterpoint to a certain pessimism about

human nature that has prevailed since the early nineteenth century. This pessi-
mism has its own fictional embodiments in the works of, for example, Thomas
Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Milan Kundera, Phillip Roth, Eric Romer or Fré-
déric Beigbeder. In combination, this range of love stories (the optimistic ones
and the pessimistic ones) offers a map on which individuals can locate them-
selves, formulate hopes and determine how well they are doing. Freud casts
a long shadow across this present-day terrain of love outcomes. His doctrine
of infantile sexuality shocked contemporaries. He persuaded many that re-
pressed drives could be sublimated into socially useful and altruistic channels.
This thesis undercut love, however, rendering it a mere cover for lust, much as
the fabliaux writers had done. Not love, but healthy sexual activity and psycho-
logical compatibility with partners were the keys to a satisfactory life. Margaret
Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) was a landmark in the development of
such views. Popular magazines such as Esquire, Playboy and Cosmopolitan have
disseminated them. Peter Stearns has traced their continuing influence.67 As in
the nineteenth century, so in the twentieth, although in a very different way,
much expert opinion has remained sceptical, if not hostile, to love. Its post-war
triumph is all the more remarkable. Doubtless the structural reasons for this
triumph, much discussed among sociologists, have been important. But they
may not be the whole story. No one attempting to evaluate this phenomenon
should allow themselves to be inadvertently influenced by the long, culturally
deep, current of pessimism about sexuality stretching from medieval theolo-
gians and fabliaux writers down to Freud, Fitzgerald and Roth. As the next
section discusses, the extraordinary impact of Foucault on present-day scholar-
ship about gender and sexuality has been more of a hindrance than a help in
this respect.

The Theorisation of Love and Lust as ‘Desire’

When, in 1976, Michel Foucault began to examine the history of sexuality, he

took as his starting point a reversal of Freud’s ‘repressive hypothesis’, insisting
that sexuality and sexual desire were not natural, but constructions of regula-
tion itself.68 However useful as a critical tool for examining the history of sexual
regulation, this starting point helped ensure that the spiritualised eroticism of
Western romantic love – and its silent, defining polarity with lust – would
remain in the shadow among those who followed Foucault’s lead. During the
subsequent decades of all-important new theoretical reflection on genders and
sexualities, ‘desire’ became the watchword, the umbrella term for both love
and lust, concepts that, in Western history, have been, in actuality, highly dif-
ferentiated, and even polar opposites of each other.69 The opposition itself was
48 William M. Reddy

occluded from view, and has hardly been noticed, in the outpouring of theory
and research that has followed. As Eve Sedgwick has recently remarked,
The post-Romantic “power/knowledge” regime that Foucault analyzes, the one
that structures and propagates the repressive hypothesis, follows the Freudian un-
derstanding that one physiological drive – sexuality, libido, desire – is the ultimate
source, and hence in Foucault’s word is seen to embody the “truth,” of human
motivation, identity, and emotion. In my own first book on sexuality, for example,
I drew on this modern consensus in explaining the term “male homosocial desire”
… “in a way analogous to the psychoanalytic use of ‘libido’” … Reducing affect to
drive in this way permits a diagrammatic sharpness of thought that may, however,
be too impoverishing in qualitative terms.70

One side-effect of this blindness to the distinctive character of romantic

love is the current odd scene, in which explicit sexual behaviour enjoys an
unprecedented tolerance, while the old love-lust dualism, first expressed in
twelfth-century romances and fabliaux, lives on. Cable television channels and
mass-market magazines fill up with nudity and near nudity; but the gyrating or
carefully posed bodies seldom express affection for each other. We have rejected
the age-old regulatory strictures against sexual expression, but we have not yet
even raised the question of the love-lust distinction to the level of critical re-
flection. We know little of its origins, its meanings, its validity, its power.
In the film Pretty Woman (1990), for example, Vivian Ward, played by Julia
Roberts, forswears her life as a prostitute after experiencing love for a client,
Edward Lewis, played by Richard Gere. Gere’s character, likewise, changes his
mind about the prostitute that he originally hired to be his escort in a sar-
donic gesture of protest against the hypocritical world of business in which he
worked. In the end, he decides to quit his career as a corporate raider, to join a
shipbuilding business with real products and to pursue a love relationship with
Ward. At the close of the film, he comes to her apartment building like a knight
in shining armour. He arrives to rescue her, standing, with his head through the
sunroof of a white limousine, holding up his umbrella like a lance. He escorts
her from her window down the fire escape, as if saving a damsel from a castle
tower. The film questions the shame associated with prostitution; the point is
made explicitly in a conversation between the two lovers. ‘You and I are such
similar creatures’, remarks Edward, ‘we both screw people for money’. But this
critique of shame is not paired with any commentary on the peculiar Western
configuration of spiritualised love – that configuration is taken as a given, and
provides the ‘fairy tale’, as they themselves call it, by which the characters save
themselves, and each other, from the self-defeating domain of lust.

Points of Comparison

To explore the peculiar spiritualised eroticism that is Western romantic love, let
us briefly compare it with two other examples of spiritualised eroticism: first,
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 49

that of Heian Japan, taking as a point of departure Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of

Genji of about 1020 CE; and, second, that of the Hindu tradition, taking as
a point of departure Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, a Sanskrit text written in Bengal
around the year 1180. In neither of these settings does one find a dualism that
parallels the West’s peculiar love-lust distinction.
The Tale of Genji is the tale of a young man’s long series of amorous adven-
tures, set in the exquisitely refined context of the imperial court.71 Genji is the
son of the emperor by a low-ranking concubine; he is handsome, wealthy and
habituated to privilege. But his political standing is hampered by his mother’s
lack of influence. What he does is therefore of relatively little political weight.
In his numerous amorous adventures, Genji does not pursue lustful satisfaction
at the expense of personal feeling. He is, in a word, no Don Juan. He longs
for a kind of highly refined compassionate indulgence from the women who
attract him, and he longs to provide the same to them. He searches for the
same thing in every relationship. It is true that there is tension between his
partners’ desire for exclusivity and his own wandering eye. But this tension is
not conceptualised as pitting appetite against mutual fidelity, lust against love.
This tension arises as a side effect of Genji’s youthful lack of wisdom. Inexpe-
rienced and, yes, arrogant, the author suggests, Genji may be forgiven for his
insistent belief that a new adventure might bring him closer to a release from
‘desire’. But the desire Genji seeks release from is conceived in the Buddhist
sense, not as concupiscence or drive, but as intention itself, the wellspring of all
of this-worldly action.72 Genji does not yet realise in practice what he has been
taught all of his life, that all desire in this world is doomed to frustration. (No
exception is made for inspired love versus appetitive sex, or faithful love versus
casual love.) His connections with women are uplifting – they do provide some
relief from frustration – but only just insofar as the pair offer each other a kind
of consolation, an echo of heavenly release, by their own refined exchanges of
affection. The prevailing notion of refinement in imperial circles was, in fact,
highly spiritual in nature. The Buddhist heaven of the Heian period was noth-
ing if not refined; its gods and goddesses were conceived as improved versions of
Heian emperors and courtiers, and their temples were constructed on the same
principles, and according to the same Sanskrit texts, as the palaces of Kyoto.73
The authorial voice, likewise, sounds the note of indulgence and compassion
toward Genji, the same sentiments that inspire so many of his companions,
servants and lovers.74
This approach to sexuality continues to inflect Japanese practices long af-
ter Genji was composed. Sheldon Garon, for example, reports that Japanese
prostitutes in the early twentieth century saw an average of 1.2 clients per day,
when French prostitutes of the same period saw four to eight. ‘Compared to
ordinary prostitutes in many other societies’, Garon remarks, ‘licensed prosti-
tutes in Japan apparently spent more time eating, drinking, and flirting with
clients’.75 In the 1930s, the Japanese Parliament protected the ‘beautiful tradi-
50 William M. Reddy

tion’ of legalised prostitution, even as Tokyo police cracked down on the new
nightclubs of the Ginza district where, it was feared, romantic love might flour-
ish. In Japanese hostess clubs today, as Anne Allison has shown, businessmen are
offered a release from stress through refined sexual joking, praise and flirting.76
Sexual intercourse is not necessary to the type of release, or consolation, that
is pursued in these luxurious clubs. The relationship between marriage and
sexually explicit socialising in the lives of present-day corporate employees is
complex, sometimes riddled with tension; but it resists reduction to any simple
love-lust dichotomy.
The twelfth-century Sanskrit Gitagovinda draws on a number of tradi-
tions to depict an intense and exclusive dyadic love between Krishna and the
cowherd girl Radha. The myth of the god Krishna’s erotic play with gopi or
cowherds – who dropped their normal duties and abandoned husbands and
families to pursue him across the fields – had long been a popular feature of
north Indian devotionalism. But, before Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, no authorita-
tive text had singled out one gopi as Krishna’s favourite or explored the emo-
tions of their relationship in depth. In the Gitagovinda, Krishna and Radha’s
love is extramarital, in line with the tradition, but it is also secret. Radha suffers
longing and resentment when Krishna is unfaithful to her. In the end, Krishna
longs just as deeply for her, however – and the idea of Krishna’s love suffering
is a strikingly new element in the story. Finally, they are united in a secret tryst
by the secluded bank of a river. There are striking parallels, therefore, between
Jayadeva’s text and the troubadour love songs of Europe of the same era, as
Lee Siegel has pointed out.77 However, the differences are as important as the
similarities. Radha, a simple cowherd, is nonetheless of divine stature herself;
the Gitagovinda depicts a mythical or transcendent world, not the world where
courtly love affairs were understood to occur – which was in the first instance
the everyday world of the court. Both Sanskrit aesthetic theory and bhakti
theology insist on the difference between everyday particular emotions, called
bhava, and the refined, generalised moods created by poetry, drama or ritual,
called rasa, literally nectar or extract.78 This distinction parallels the Greek dis-
tinction between passion and reason. Rasa generalises in the same way that rea-
son does. Rasa is not about particular persons but divine suprapersonal verities,
just as reason is the tool by which Westerners suppose that they abstract gener-
alised types and conditions from specific circumstances. The passion that unites
Krishna and Radha is a form of rasa. It is therefore a mistake to call it ‘passion’,
insofar as the Western concept of passion has to do with the appetites, affects
or obsessions of specific persons locked into this-worldly action settings, that
is, to what in Sanskrit are called bhava. Rasa is no delusion; it is a heightened
form of cognition, a means of apprehending a higher reality.79 When Krishna
and Radha are united in love, therefore, they are doing something no worldly
couple can do. The love celebrated by troubadours and romance writers in
Europe, by contrast, was a love between two specific persons – however exem-
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 51

plary, high-ranking or legendary they might be. Imitation by other real persons
was not ruled out, it was implicitly encouraged. But the Hindu spiritualised
love known as srngara rasa is an important ingredient of the whole tradition; it
is the theological doctrine behind many of the classical dance rituals, such as
those studied by Frédérique Marglin at the temple of Jagannatha, and it stands
in opposition to all extra-religious sexual partnerships, from prostitution to
marriage.80 The ritual dancers of earlier periods, as Marglin has noted, were
not allowed to marry or have children; to do so would have involved them too
much in the particulars of this world. But they were not required to be chaste.
They were allowed temporary liaisons with priests and aristocrats of their own
temple complexes. Because these liaisons remained temporary, they did not be-
come personal, and therefore could partake of that universalised erotic mood or
rasa that was the dancers’ business to understand and promote.81 British invad-
ers of the early nineteenth century were quick to categorise such ritual dancers
as ‘temple prostitutes’.82 But ‘prostitute’ and ‘lover’ are both the wrong words
for them. Hindu sexual feeling was neither love nor lust.

Conclusion

Careful examination of these and other non-western contexts shows that the
rule of love in many present-day Western countries is a peculiar and rather re-
cent reconfiguration of some traditional Western ingredients. Western romantic
love is particularly unusual insofar as love continues to stand in contrast to lust.
It continues to include spiritual expectations that can be realised only in and
through a sexual partnership. It is no longer entirely invisible to regulatory in-
stitutions, insofar as consent is now a defining feature of legal sexual relations
and insofar as psychological and religious norms now designate love as the core
emotion of a proper marriage and of the fulfilling life of a couple.83
A great deal has been said by psychologists and sociologists, in self-help
literature and popular fiction, about the extraordinary difficulty of conforming
to the rule of love in its modern form.84 One must pursue one’s own career in
life and care for one’s own needs and manage one’s own growth, but in a way
that allows a stable place for the partner at one’s side. One must idealise the
partner, but in a special limited way that is safe from disillusionment.
This is no place to examine the knotty question whether, or how, the rule of
love ought to be opposed or modified. Yet certain ironies of the present scene
are worthy of remark. In many venues today, such as South Asia or Northeast
Brazil, romantic love is regarded as an innovation of modernity, or an import
from the industrialised West, a new, and often a naughty, self-indulgent and
self-centred kind of emotion.85 But in those places where its rule is currently
unchallenged, love is regarded as an old thing, a natural thing, and the pur-
suit of love is seen as a kind of quixotic venture, that goes against the grain of
52 William M. Reddy

modern instrumental rationality. This sense of agelessness finds expression in

the elaborate ceremonies in which marriages and other sexual partnerships are
publicly acknowledged. Agelessness is linked to naturalness, to some degree,
but also to the prestige of venerability.86 Love is our inheritance. Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim’s phrase ‘earthly religion’ is more, I think, than just an ironic
tag; they have gotten it right.
This recognition should, at the very least, stimulate a reconsideration of
modernity’s claim to be a secular age. There are numerous parallels, for ex-
ample, between the experiences reported by early modern Christian mystics
and devotional experts, on the one hand, and those reported by participants in
present-day love partnerships, on the other.87 In both, disciplined rehearsal of
normative emotions, often with the help of guidebooks, or aids in establishing
a relationship (with lover or with God). In both, the relationship itself has ups
and downs, moments of elation and of despair, of contentment, of boredom. In
both, the relationship is expected to grow with time, allowing the devotee to
follow a career of love, leading upwards toward closer, ultimately selfless, union
with the beloved. In both, the love relationship exists for its own sake, and is
supposed to be inherently fulfilling. Some day in the future, historians may re-
gard the present with the same wonder that we regard the age of Teresa of Avila
or John Donne – as a period in which human possibilities were unnecessarily
constricted by a peculiar set of expectations.

Notes

1. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy. Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern So-
cieties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, la fin d’un
monde (Paris: Bayard, 2003), 191; Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Das ganz normale
Chaos der Liebe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); Bernadette Bawin-Legros, Le nouvel ordre
sentimental (Paris: Payot, 2003); Serge Chaumier, La déliaison amoureuse. De la fusion romantique au
désir d’indépendance (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999).
2. See, for example, G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jane Fishburne Collier,
From Duty to Desire. Remaking Families in a Spanish Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997); David Konstan, Sexual Symmetry. Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
3. Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy, 40.
4. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, 191; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Chaos der Liebe.
5. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, 191.
6. Michelle Conlin, ‘Unmarried America’, Business Week, 20 October 2003, and Hervieu-
Léger, Catholicisme.
7. ‘We’ve brought together some fantastic lesbian and gay couples’, Adams continued, ‘who
are kind enough to lend their relationship experience to their heterosexual peers. These couples
have made it through all of the same problems married couples face, but without the same support
systems.’ See ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Couple’, a counselling forum supported for a time in the
USA by Lambda Legal Defense Fund, at http://www.lambdalegal.org/cgi-bin/iowa/qa.html.
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 53

8. Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Cinderella Dreams. The Allure of the Lavish Wedding
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Céline Lison, ‘Mariages en France. Voyage au
coeur d’un renouveau’, National Geographic France, June 2002: 2–19; Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme.
9. On the social shaping of emotions, see William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. A
Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
10. Quote from a report by the BBC World Service, 2 June 2004 (emphasis added).
11. Leonard Plotnicov, ‘Love, Lust and Found in Nigeria’, in Romantic Passion. A Universal
Experience?, ed. William Jankowiak (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 128–140, here
134.
12. Pierre Grimal, L’amour à Rome (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1988); Paul Veyne, La société
romaine (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men,Women, and Sexual Renuncia-
tion in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Konstan, Sexual Symmetry.
See also the useful anthology Roman Sexualities, eds Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
13. David M. Halperin, ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?’ History and Theory 28 (1989):
257–274. This disapproval of emotional intensity toward sexual partners continued despite the
challenge that was raised against it by the elegiac poets of the end of the Republic and the first
years of the Empire. These poets were as opposed to traditional military virtues as they were to
the traditional disinterest in emotional attachments to sexual partners; in this respect, they differed
sharply from the troubadours of the twelfth century. See, especially, the essays collected in Hallett
and Skinner, Roman Sexualities.
14. Some useful titles include: Reto R. Bezzola, Les origins et la formation de la littérature
courtoise en occident, part II, vol. 2: La société féodale et la transformation de la literature de cour (Paris:
Champion, 1960); Henri-Irénée Marrou, Les troubadours (Paris: Seuil, 1971); Rita Lejeune, Lit-
térature et société occitane au Moyen Âge (Liège: Marche Romane, 1979); Maurice Keen, Chivalry
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Inven-
tion of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Frances L. Decker,
‘Gottfried’s Tristan and the Minnesang. The Relationship between the Illicit Couple and Courtly
Society’, The German Quarterly 55 (1982): 64–79; Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Sozial- und Mentalitäts-
geschichte der Liebe in Mittelalter’, in Minne ist ein swaerez Spil. Neue Untersuchungen zum Min-
nesang und zur Geschichte der Liebe im Mittelalter, ed. Ulrich Müller (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1986),
75–110; John Baldwin, The Language of Sex. Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994).
15. Decker, ‘Gottfried’s Tristan and the Minnesang’; Don A. Monson, ‘The Troubadour’s
Lady Reconsidered Again’, Speculum 70 (1995): 255–274.
16. Each provides examples that have come to light; see Keen, Chivalry, 19–21; Dinzel-
bacher, ‘Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Liebe’, 82.
17. Translation by Kenneth Koch, from the liner notes of Troubadour and Trouvère Songs. Music
of the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Lyrichord Early Music Series CD LEMS 8001, 1994).
18. Baldwin, Language of Sex, 65; June Hall Martin McCash argues that such a court of love
may well have been held; see her ‘Marie de Champagne and Eleanor of Aquitaine. A Relationship
Reexamined’, Speculum 54 (1979): 698–711.
19. This manual displays as much familiarity with Ovid as with the troubadours; its ex-
act teaching has been subject to much controversy, precisely because the author attempted to
cover himself by anticipating theological objections. Baldwin, Language of Sex; John C. Moore,
‘“Courtly Love”. A Problem of Terminology’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 621–632;
Michael Calabrese, ‘Ovid and the Female Voice in the “De Amore” and the “Letters” of Abelard
and Heloise’, Modern Philology 95 (1997): 1–26; Don A. Monson, ‘Andreas Capellanus and the
Problem of Irony’, Speculum 63 (1988): 539–572.
20. Alain Libera lists the doctrines extracted from the work that were regarded as heretical;
see his Penser le Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 189f.
21. Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au Moyen Age (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); see also
Brown, Body and Society.
54 William M. Reddy

22. Purgatorio, Canto XXXI, line 93. English translation from Dante Alighieri, The Divine
Comedy (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), 380.
23. La bella donna ne le braccia aprissi;
abbracciommi la testa e mi sommerse
ove convenne ch’io l’acqua inghiottissi.
Indi mi tolse…
(Purgatorio, Canto XXI, lines 100–103. Ibid., 381).
24. Kevin Brownlee emphasises the striking contrast between Dido in the Aeneid and Dan-
te’s beloved Beatrice, in ‘Dante, Beatrice, and the Two Departures from Dido’, Modern Language
Notes 108 (1993): 1–14; see also Richard Abrams, ‘Illicit Pleasures. Dante among the Sensualists
(Purgatorio XXVI)’, Modern Language Notes 100 (1985): 1–41.
25. Benjamin Boysen, ‘Crucified in the Mirror of Love. On Petrarch’s Ambivalent Con-
ception of Love in Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta’, Orbis Literarum 58 (2003): 163–188; Boysen
indicates that Ugo Foscolo, for one, condemned this parallelism, see 170.
26. Ibid.
27. In this game involving a group of men and women, one is chosen to be the frog; she
must cover her eyes and then guess the identity of the person who touches her, while the other
players make confusing noises and gestures. See France, Réunion des musées nationaux, L’art au
temps des rois maudits. Philippe le Bel et ses fils, 1285–1328 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux,
1998), fig. 171, 262–264.
28. Several examples are discussed in John Cherry, ‘The Talbot Casket and Related Late
Medieval Leather Caskets’, Archaeologia 107 (1982): 131–140. There are also a number of ex-
amples at the Musée national du Moyen Age, Paris; for a reproduction of one, see Alain Erlande-
Brandenburg, Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, and Dany Sandron, Guide des collections. Musée national du
Moyen Age,Thermes de Cluny (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 53: Coffret, Pays Bas,
fin du XIVe siècle. See also Madelein H. Caviness, ‘Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a
Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed’, Speculum 68 (1993): 333–362, reproduction on 339, for
another example.
29. See the most widely used source of this unicorn lore, the Physiologus, a second century
CE translation into Latin of a Greek original. An English version of this source is available: Physi-
ologus (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); on the unicorn, see 51.
30. For further discussion of unicorn iconography, see Adolfo Salvatore Cavallo, The Unicorn
Tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998).
31. The Reformation put an end to its popularity, by foreclosing ambiguity. Protestant sects
became suspicious of elaborate iconography; and the Council of Trent explicitly condemned the
use of the unicorn to symbolise Christ. Cavallo, Unicorn Tapestries, 27.
32. For discussion of several examples, see Caviness, ‘Patron or Matron’; and Cherry, ‘Talbot
Casket’. See also the front panel of a casket (French, early fourteenth century) at the Cleveland
Museum of Art, containing scenes of the fountain of youth, the capture of the unicorn, lovers and
the god of love (cupid) – as seen on the Amico Library database, at http://eureka.rlg.org/cgi-bin/
zgate2.orig. Good examples may also be viewed on line at the British Library Images Online, site:
http://ibs001.colo.firstnet.net.uk/britishlibrary/index.jsp, search term ‘unicorn’. British Library
examples include (1) a marginal illustration in the Percy Psalter (ca 1280), at beginning of Psalm
38, unicorn dying from wounds with horn in the lap of a virgin; (2) armed knights wounding
a unicorn whose hooves are in the lap of a virgin, from Dicta Chrysostomi (northern France, ca
1280); (3) an image of Humility (virgin standing on a unicorn) in Frère Laurent, La Somme le Roy,
Paris, end of thirteenth century.
33. Keen, Chivalry, 186–187.
34. Ibid., 203; on this whole episode, 201–204.
35. Cavallo, Unicorn Tapestries.
36. Cited in Jean-Patrice Boudet, La Dame à la licorne (Toulouse: Le Pérégrinateur, no date)
– a brochure prepared for the Musée National du Moyen Âge.
37. Jean-Patrice Boudet, ‘Jean Gerson et la Dame à la licorne’, in Religion et société urbaine
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 55

au Moyen Âge, eds Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne,
2000), 551–563, quote at 561.
38. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucer and the Cult of Saint Valentine (Leiden: Brill, 1986); see
also Jack B. Oruch, ‘St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February’, Speculum 56 (1983): 534–
565.
39. Harry F. Williams, ‘The French Valentine’, Modern Language Notes 67 (1952): 292–295
– who notes that Valentine greetings were simply one form of a more prevalent courtly genre,
the salut d’amour.
40. Georges Minois, Les origines du mal. Une histoire du péché originel (Paris: Fayard, 2002),
89f.
41. Baldwin, Language of Sex, 116–127.
42. This compilation, by the Dominican friar Peregrinus, is examined in Rüdiger Schnell,
‘The Discourse on Marriage in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 73 (1998): 771–786.
43. Anatole de Montaiglon, ed., Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles,
6 vols. (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1872–1890), III: 35–45.
44. Maintenant est el lit entrez;
Ele le prist entre ses braz,
D’autre joie, d’autre solaz
Ne vous quier fere menssion,
Quar cil qui ont entencion,
Doivent bien savoir que ce monte;
Por ce ne vueil fere lonc conte,
Mès andui firent liemant
Tel deduit com font li amant
En ce qu’il se jouent ensamble.
(Ibid., 37).
45. Et puis vint au lit la reïne,
Si l’aoire et se li ancline,
Car an nul cors saint ne croit tant,
Et la reïne li estant
Ses braz ancontre, si l’anbrace,
Estroit pres de son piz le lace …
(Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier de la charrette, ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Librairie Générale
Française, 1992), 322, lines 4652–4656; emphasis added).
46. In this sense, Baldwin’s remark that romance and fabliau are ‘in symbiosis’ is both right
and crucial, in Language of Sex, 40.
47. Interestingly, David Konstan argues that the ancients had no concept equivalent to lust;
see his Sexual Symmetry.
48. In Marie de France’s late twelfth-century lai, ‘Eliduc’, for example, the two lovers, after
many years together, enter the cloister, without any suggestion of incongruity; quite the contrary,
it is a logical end to lives of devotion.
49. Baldwin, Language of Sex, 63–78.
50. Cherry, ‘Talbot Casket’; Caviness, ‘Patron or Matron’.
51. Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled. Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 59–61.
52. Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 17.
53. Quoted ibid., 20.
54. Minois, Origines, 137–161.
55. Hull, Sexuality State, and Civil Society, 53–106; Danielle Haas-Dubosc, Ravie et enlevée. De
l’enlèvement des femmes comme stratégie matrimoniale au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999).
56. See Lucien Febvre’s discussion of Marguerite de Navarre in Amour sacré, amour profane
(Paris: Gallimard, 1944); also Benedetta Craveri, L’âge de la conversation (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).
56 William M. Reddy

57. See Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies. Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and Ancients Against Moderns. Culture Wars and the Mak-
ing of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); David M. Turner, Fashioning
Adultery. Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002); Dorothée Sturkenboom, Spectators van hartstocht. Sekse en emotionele cultuur in de achttiende
eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998).
58. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 140, 239–240; Frank Baasner, Der Begriff ‘sensi-
bilité’ im 18. Jahrhundert. Aufstieg und Niedergang eines Ideals (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1988), 50, 54,
73, 80f, 154.
59. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 38–44, 237.
60. Simone Balayé, Madame de Staël. Lumières et liberté (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), 68.
61. According to Hull, ‘The sexual drive was celebrated as the motor of society and the
mark of the independent, adult, productive citizen. Self-preservation and the sexual drive (Trieb)
were the two most basic urges motivating human activity.’ The sexual drive, Hull continues,
was credited as source of: ‘original sociability (the result of sexual attraction), energy resulting in
productivity and creativity (partly an analogy to reproduction, partly an extension of the drive for
pleasure, for which sexual pleasure stood as the first and most basic example), and independence
and freedom (an at once biological and social analogy: sexual capacity occurred only with biologi-
cal maturity and legitimate sexual relations, that is, marriage, emancipated one from the tutelage
of childhood).’ Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 238, 239.
62. James F. Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1980); Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 232f.
63. On the early nineteenth century, see, for greater detail, Reddy, Navigation of Feeling,
211–256.
64. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes. Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France,
1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
65. Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics Between the Wars
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); Francesca M. Cancian, Love in America. Gender and
Self-Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
66. Otnes and Pleck, Cinderella Dreams.
67. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool. Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New
York: New York University Press, 1994).
68. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard,
1976).
69. Judith Butler, ‘Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures’, Theory, Culture and Society 16 (1999):
11–20.
70. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003), 17–18; quoting from Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men. English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 2.
71. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1976).
72. John R. Wallace, ‘Tarrying with the Negative. Aesthetic Vision in Murasaki and
Mishima’, Monumenta Nipponica 52 (1997): 181–199; Margaret H. Childs, ‘The Value of Vulner-
ability. Sexual Coercion and the Nature of Love in the Japanese Court Literature’, Journal of Asian
Studies 58 (1999): 1059–1079.
73. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, ‘The Phoenix Hall at Uji and the Symmetries of Replica-
tion’, Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 647–672.
74. Childs, ‘Value of Vulnerability’.
75. Sheldon Garon, ‘The World’s Oldest Debate? Prostitution and the State in Imperial
Japan, 1900–1945’, American Historical Review 98 (1993): 710–732, quote at 716.
76. Anne Allison, Nightwork. Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess
Club (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
77. Lee Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love in Indian Traditions as Exemplified in the
Gîtagovinda of Jayadeva (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).
 The Rule of Love:The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective 57

78. Siegel provides a detailed discussion of this distinction in Sacred and Profane Dimensions,
42–59; see also Edward C. Dimock et al., The Literatures of India. An Introduction (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1974); Arjun Appadurai, ‘Topographies of the Self. Praise and Emotion in
Hindu India’, in Language and the Politics of Emotion, eds Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 92–112; Frédérique Apffel Marglin, ‘Refining
the Body. Transformative Emotion in Ritual Dance’, in Divine Passions. The Social Construction of
Emotions in India, ed. Owen Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 212–236.
79. According to Siegel, ‘Rasa as both an aesthetic and a devotional term (as well as a physi-
ological term) provides the link between the profane and sacred dimensions and between the
literary and religious traditions.’ Sacred and Profane Dimensions, 42. Here, we see the stark contrast
with the European tradition – in the idea of a physiological, that is, a sexual response that can link
sacred and profane. If there is any equivalent in the medieval Christian context, it is the tears of
the repentant ascetic; see Nagy, Le don des larmes.
80. Contrasting rati (everyday sexual love) and srngara rasa (spiritual eroticism), Siegel
remarks,
Rati is the basic emotion which in literature crystallizes into the aesthetic experience of
love the srngara-rasa. It is the feeling of love that Radha experiences in relation to Krishna;
the rasika’s potential for that feeling enables him to empathize with Radha (or Krishna) and
through that empathy to experience rasa as a literary connoisseur or as a Vaisnava devotee
or as both. The rasika’s own experience of love, or rati, enables him to perceive the rasa
in the literary or devotional work and thereby to move from the immanent delight of his
own experience, Radha’s or Krishna’s experience, to the transcendent joy of the universal
experience. The aesthetic theory of universalization and the bhakti-rasa theology sanctify,
give meaning and significance to the rati which as an individual, emotional, sexual experi-
ence perpetuates entanglement in the empirical world, the world of pain and pleasure, but
which through art and/or devotion is a means of transcendence – the profane is trans-
formed into he sacred by the poetic and/or devotional act.
(Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions, 58).
81. ‘The devadasis (ritual dancers) embodying the female aspect of divine sovereignty are
considered in most contexts to be living embodiments of the goddess Lakshmi, the consort of
Lord Jagannatha. As such, the devadasis can have sexual relations with all the men who share in the
sovereignty of their divine husband, the ultimate sovereign. In these relations, the devadasis transfer
to men the auspiciousness of Lakshmi.’ Marglin, ‘Refining the Body’, 216.
82. George D. Bearce, British Attitudes Towards India, 1784–1858 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1961), 85; Kunal M. Parker, ‘“A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes”. Anglo-Indian Legal
Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls, 1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998): 559–633.
83. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, 185–212.
84. This point is emphasised by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Chaos der Liebe; they also provide
many citations of US and European literature. See also Bawin-Legros, Le nouvel ordre sentimental.
85. Laura M. Ahearn, Invitations to Love. Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Jyoti Puri, ‘Reading Romance Novels in Postcolo-
nial India’, Gender and Society 11 (1997): 434–452; Linda-Anne Rebhun, The Heart is Unknown
Country. Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999).
86. Otnes and Pleck, Cinderella Dreams.
87. Kate Narveson, ‘Sudden Passion, Godly Affection. The Problem of Emotional Au-
thenticity in Early Stuart Devotional Writing’, and Elena Carrera, ‘The Role of the Emotions in
Sixteenth-Century Spanish Spirituality. Affective Hermeneutics’, papers delivered to a conference
entitled, ‘Emotions in Early Modern Europe and Colonial North America’, German Historical
Institute, Washington, DC, 7–10 November 2002.
 CHAPTER 3

Love of State – Affection for Authority

Politics of Mass Participation
in Twentieth Century European Contexts

ALF LÜDTKE

What feelings drive people to long for or, at least, to welcome domination and
those who dominate?1 How might we re-configure notions of mass politics so
as to make them more sensitive for the expression of the political practices of
the many? In other words, what would a notion of the political look like that
conceives of mass groups who act as agents – to produce, not just rule, acts of
domination including such awesome manifestations as Nazism and the Second
World War?

Domination: Practice without Feelings?

Analyses of modernity take a strong focus on those designs and efforts that ‘or-
der’ things and people alike. Among others, and not withstanding fundamental
differences between them, both Karl Marx and Max Weber have emphasised
the overpowering dynamics of such ordering processes. Both conceived of
processes as being driven or, at least, justified by claims of ‘rationalisation’.
Disenchantment with anything but the ‘cool’ pursuit of one’s interest would
be its inevitable result.2
According to this view, the ‘many’ had no option but to comply.3 Ac-
cordingly, the institutionalisation of the state turned on the exercise of power
and its disciplinary practices. This held whether it was the ruling classes or the
seemingly anonymous necessities of rationalisation or even ‘the market’ that
exerted power: both were understood to be responding to the ultimate threat
Notes for this section begin on page 71.
 Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation 59

or application of brute force against violators. Thus, the experience (and hence
expectation) of being forcibly subdued led the ‘dominated’ to accept their lot.
Max Weber, however, did not view the dominated as being totally passive.
Although he did not emphasise it, he did hint at the importance of the active
contributions made by the ‘dominated’ themselves. This was because only their
‘compliance’ (Fügsamkeit) would allow for and, hence, guarantee domination.
The very wording indicates a possible alternative: that one might not bow and
‘make oneself suitable’ to the demands of the dominant. At any rate, the term
fügsam or ‘suitable’ is set against its alternative: that ‘the many’ do not bow and
make themselves ‘suitable’ to the demands of the dominant. Weber’s point is
based on the assumption that in the first instance, people tend to follow reasons
and their feelings of unwillingness to comply.
It was only in the context of the 1930s that Ernst Cassirer highlighted the
way in which the feelings of people were fundamental for politics in general
and for the emergence of the modern state in particular.4 It was the positive
feelings of the many that ‘made’ the state. In this way, claims made by states or
their agents for material and moral contributions from their citizens relied on
their positive feelings toward the state in the first place. According to Cassirer,
these feelings that were so urgently demanded by the state were stimulated or
sustained in rituals. We should take into account the fact that by the time he put
this view forward, Cassirer had fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to the USA.
He thus operated inevitably in a field of forces as much shaped by New Deal
democracy as by Fascism and Stalinism. Cassirer, however, did not focus his
analysis of either of these. On the contrary, he was interested in understanding
the dynamics of mass support for a modern state that provided individuals with
the means of connecting with the common weal. In so doing, he cut across dis-
tinctions between democracy and dictatorship that were both well established
and morally charged. It was from here that he turned to ‘myth’ and a logic that
undercut the dichotomy of rationality versus emotionality.
At virtually the same time, another refugee from Nazism turned to the field
of the emotions and their role in the recent disasters of politics. At the end of
his essay on the work of art in the Middle Ages, Walter Benjamin addressed the
principal characteristics of German Fascism. While the Fascists ‘denied people
their rights’, they nonetheless ‘granted them their expression’.5 Thus, Benja-
min set the ‘expression’ of feelings against the assertion of rights or interests.
For him, this was striking evidence of the lack of substance of any claim made
by German Fascism that it would allow participation in the state.
But how could it be otherwise? The writings of Cassirer, Benjamin’s con-
temporary, allude to a possible alternative and floats the idea that notions of
political participation may have been fundamentally curtailed by a prevailing
notion of modernity, according to which participation would have been driven
by disenchantment and rationalisation, so that the ‘emotional’ was cancelled
out.
60 Alf Lüdtke

Contrary to the account offered by Benjamin, it is possible that ‘the many’

may have found that Nazism provided an opening up of the specific context
in which they lived, not the least in terms of the expression and articulation
of emotions they found within themselves and others. Among these feelings I
consider the love of state and the love of authority to be prominent. Specific
contexts and more general situations that allowed for the open if not the pub-
lic display of these feelings might as a result be experienced as simultaneously
revolutionary and liberating. In the following chapter, I will trace the longue
durée of symbolic forms and relate them to short-term situational practices. My
aim is to track as closely as possible how actual feelings and their ‘energising’
dimensions are produced.

Cultural Codes of ‘Love’

‘Love’ refers to cultural codes that have been produced and reproduced within
concrete historical settings and times. In the first half of the twentieth century,
the code of love equated this feeling with an intense personal attachment to
another person and concern for his or her well being, not withstanding possible
risk or loss. This notion or rather this projection or imagination of ‘love’ oper-
ated across the generations so that long-term and short-term formulations of
love came into contact with one another. I shall consider three variant concepts
of love that emerged independently, but which in the context of the twentieth
century can be seen to be mutually reinforcing.

1. Sentimental love between spouses as it originated in the eighteenth cen-

tury in France in the households of aristocratic families, and even more
so, in bourgeois households. ‘Sentimental love’ meant having feelings
and it alluded to relations between equals. It was this particular aspect
that fuelled political statements and activities in the later eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries.6 This social and political aspect has to be
kept in mind when the attractions and dynamics of feelings and emo-
tions are discussed. In the context of this essay, however, I will focus on
feelings and relations that exist between those who are not equal (or
those who are rendered unequal by others).
2. The ‘Father state’ in its dual form of violent intervention and pedagogi-
cal regulation. This process gained momentum, albeit unevenly, dur-
ing the eighteenth century under the title of ‘police’. It reached an
intense form in France and subsequently in other European states and
territories.7
3. Attachment to one’s task – and the pursuit of this task in and through
work.
 Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation 61

The ‘Father State’

The notion and practices of state developed in German territories in two direc-
tions – and both were intricately interconnected in eighteenth-century settings.
The first one emphasised provisions of ‘security’ while the other focussed
on the improvement and well being of the very same subject. Images and
guidelines for practice portrayed the prince metaphorically as a ‘father’, thus
drawing on the ideas of creator and guarantor for survival and – more than this,
for a ‘good life’. In other words, justified by this general claim and purpose,
the main task of the state and its agents was to police people.8 Moreover, this
dual focus determined the emotional demands and longings of most subjects.
Of course, the intensity of these demands or hopes varied tremendously over
time, between social groups and, not least, distinctions according to life cycle,
age (or generation) and gender.
The image of ‘father’, whether as projection or metaphor, resonated in sev-
eral arenas. Its usage in the arena of religion was well established. In the context
of the religious wars and of confessional strife in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, God as ‘father’ had been invoked time and again. This ‘Almighty’
provided grace as ‘He’ handed down punishment and demanded contrition for
worldly sins and impropriety against ‘His Unity’ of love and might.
Princely authority claimed participation in this divine right. The claim
resonated with the notion of the King’s two bodies, which was widely held in late
medieval and early modern contexts.9 Accordingly, the king simultaneously did
exist in two entities, one representing divine grace while the other embodied
worldly might – both united by and in the flesh of the lord of the land. Thus,
while the physical body would perish, the divine body remained untouched
and intact. Protestant reformation did not abandon this way of thinking. At
least in Central Europe, the office of lord of the church (now protestant) was
combined with the office of the lord of the realm (as count, duke or king) in
the person of the prince. By way of reciprocation subjects demanded provisions
for their well being or, at least, survival in times of war or epidemics. In the
wake of grave turmoil, as intensified during the Thirty Years War, people obvi-
ously became more ready to accept measures for containing deviants, including
the threat to terminate the latter’s worldly existence by execution.10 This threat
was bolstered by an ongoing practice to rely primarily on corporeal, but also
on capital punishment.11
The prince and his agents (police agents or school teachers or – as was
the case in many continental states in Europe – pastors) presented a ‘fatherly’
profile in yet another and even more everyday way: the Hausvater (Father of the
house) referred to his household as the ganzes Haus (the entire house) and was
eager to ‘correct’ those who had been given into his care and custody. Cor-
rection meant enforced improvement, and its execution not only impinged on
people’s everyday lives, but also connected with them in an intricate manner.
62 Alf Lüdtke

This was expressed through violence and a wide range of symbolic and material
sanctions or gratifications. It was a system of stick and carrot.12
Of course, the ‘children’ obeyed the ‘father state’ not only metaphorically,
but also in their everyday practices while retaining a certain stubbornness or
self-will (or Eigensinn). In many instances, this combined with various forms of
acceptance of, if not devotion to, the state. Both acceptance and devotion were
put to the test, however, in times of war. It is important therefore to trace the
sentiments that were in play and that arguably impelled young men and their
female partners to join war efforts and to put their lives on the line.
It is worth scrutinizing the emergence of this particular figuration of
statehood more closely in order not revert to those unilinear notions of state-
making that informed the rather unreflecting modernisation theories of the
1960s and 1970s.13 For the purposes of this essay, I will confine my attention
to the twentieth century. My focus is on the impact of states of emergency on
people and on their forms of (self-)mobilisation. The First and Second World
Wars are thus central to the discussion. But under dictatorial regimes such as
Bolshevism or the different Fascisms of Italy and Germany, it was the case that
people did more than merely accept or loyally fulfil their obligations. On the
contrary, irrespective of factors of social class, gender and age difference, the
vast majority of the population in such states did not ‘shy away’ from their ob-
ligations and even ‘pitched in’ with energy and commitment.14 It is the intensity
of their action that is noteworthy here. Individuals as well as civil associations
or institutions of state and community (including, of course, the rank and file
members of these institutions) demonstrated their support for and good feel-
ings toward the authorities by reporting on what they estimated to be possibly
or actually harmful action to the ‘good cause’. In other words, they informed
on neighbours, colleagues or friends and passed on their ‘knowledge’ either to
their superiors on the spot or to the agents of a special institution, whether in
the neighbourhood or further away.15
In the 1930s, reports or ‘denunciations’ became abundant, particularly to
the Gestapo. Local branch representatives complained over and over again about
receiving reports that were too many and too trivial. As a result, they even
sought ways of making the public less eager, asking them to be more careful
or to abstain from making such reports altogether. For the agents of the police
it was too often the case that purely ‘private’ motives blurred what they were
looking for in terms of ‘political’ contestation or an alert to possible danger.
In the reports submitted to them, they found that to a large extent (accounts
vary between 30 and 60 per cent) that quarrels between neighbours or within
households of families dominated.16
Nonetheless, the practice of composing and submitting these reports indi-
cates that those who did so experienced feelings or longings for the state. One
of their longings was bound up with the keeping or restoration of ‘order’. What
people called for was a greater equality in sharing the burden of war. This was
 Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation 63

obtained whether it was the case of someone who seemed to be evading mili-
tary service ‘at the front’ (which we can see in cases from Vienna and archives
of letters to the police during the First World War, authored primarily by wives
of draftees or by female neighbours), or similar cases during the Second World
War. The claim was that those who withheld resources or cheated in activities
where their neighbours or others claimed that they themselves were ‘pitch-
ing in’ should be punished. What we can see here is the surfacing of a specific
‘moral economy of the masses’.
It is more difficult to get a sense of how far these practices were inspired
not only by the longing to participate in the common cause, but also to show
one’s affection to either the Kaiser or (in many ways a rather different proposi-
tion) to the Führer, who had risen to that position from humble beginnings.
We need then to consider other practices as well. Denunciations are a
prime arena of activities indicating forms of trust in or attachment to author-
ity and its agents. In the case of the Nazi rule, we have the example of low-
level participation in the activities of the several hundred thousand Blockwarte
(neighbourhood watch), who kept their eyes open and reported on what they
saw and considered meaningful for those ‘higher up’, occasionally also ‘peeping
in’ or intruding into their neighbour’s privacy.17
In addition to this, the range and popularity of periodic conspicuous dem-
onstrations of Volksgemeinschaft deserve more serious attention than scholars
have paid them so far. For instance, it is interesting to see how the Eintopf-
sonntag18 is recalled in oral histories with signs of embarrassment but also with
fondness. My reading of this is that the mixture of embarrassment and disbelief
in these recollections speaks of something that was stronger than an enforced or
grudging acceptance of these ceremonial events. One could view in a similar
way the sacrifice of wedding rings as gifts to the nation that was organised on
a large scale in Fascist Italy in 1935/36.19

The Work and Emotions of being German

The claims to feel love for authority resonated – on yet another plane – with
an imaginary of German work that consisted in visions of its unmatched excel-
lence. Prior to 1914, this took the form, for example, of images of German-
built steamships as they won the Blue Ribbon crossing the Atlantic; there was
also the case of battleships built to demonstrate the superiority of ‘German
craftsmanship’, thus contesting the British claim for superiority on the high
seas. In like manner, the arrival of electric lighting for German cities stimu-
lated emotions of pride as did the Zeppelin craze. During the First World War,
military gear dominated this field of the imaginary completely: submarines
torpedoing war- and merchant-ships alike, artillery bombarding Paris from an
immense distance, or the Dicke Bertha, which was a high calibre howitzer ca-
pable of breaking through almost any armour (the nickname was a reference
to the Krupp family, who controlled a world-famous industrial and armament
64 Alf Lüdtke

complex in Germany). These guns and ships demonstrated to friends and foes
alike that ‘German quality work’ was perfectly suited for both tools of peace-
time and the most destructive of weapons.
Photographs and stories praising these accomplishments circulated in news-
papers or illustrated reviews, while film clips that were shown throughout the
country may have similarly fuelled feelings of pride. At the same time, however,
such food for sentiments did not actually feed the townsmen (and women),
who increasingly suffered hunger due to the shortage (since early 1915) of ba-
sic foodstuffs (when, for instance, hogs had to be slaughtered on a large scale),
not to mention the ‘cabbage winter’ of 1916/17. Letters from the home front
amply show bitterness and occasionally rage among ‘the many’ who had to
cope with privation.20
Yet such emotions of bitterness or rage did not totally dominate. Letters to
and from wives, parents or fiancées still attested to feelings of stolidly keeping
one’s ground, and some even expressed pride. People might grumble or curse
the Kaiser or ‘those above’, but at the same time, they expressed confidence in
the belief that it was possible to cope with hard times on one’s own. Whatever
these feelings, they were expressed in a contained manner. In public settings they
remained subdued, while figuring prominently in semi-public settings, such as
chatting in the hallway, or in exchanges between relatives or among loved ones.
The focus was not on spectacular events, and what mattered were gestures and
symbolic signs and actions. In other words, what counted was the fact that let-
ters were written and sent, usually accompanied (and thus augmented) by a
package of homemade cookies, hand-knitted stockings or a cake, in order to
provide a taste, feeling or smell that was particularly cherished by the addressee.
This practice bore a resemblance to the way that people engaged in other arenas
in their everyday lives. The point of resemblance was in the intense direction of
skill toward taking care of a task – in this case the task of caring for one’s rela-
tionships – that resembled work elsewhere, or the care and effort taken to oper-
ate (machine) tools in a factory or, for that matter, to harvest potatoes. These
activities also had some level of resemblance to the handling of a machine gun in
the trenches or participation in a storm troop assault. Regardless of the different
settings involved, what mattered was engagement with and devotion to one’s
task that provided the impetus for practices of work in any of these arenas.21
It was clear that, from the late nineteenth century, people from different
milieus, classes and even generations had increasingly referred to ‘German
quality work’.22 Its advocates aimed at promulgating the idea that there was a
competitive edge to German industrial products, and at this time such claims
went against the better knowledge of most experts. Nonetheless, working peo-
ple were ready to accept such claims because they were able to interpret the
propaganda as containing the recognition of the sweat, toil and labour they
invested every day in work. Why should they then protest if a wider public
finally began to view the skill of workers and their attachment to their job or
 Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation 65

‘honour’ in a new light? And why should they not press for this idea and the
foundational images associated with it to be extended to encompass the whole
range of work practices and work experiences, reaching beyond the factory
floor or the coal-mine to refer also to ‘female’ tasks such as nursing the sick or
washing and repairing clothes?

‘German Quality Work’:The Engagement With Work

After the end of the First World War, a major arena in which feelings of un-
certainty about individual futures and the future of the German nation was no
longer available: the realm of the military and of warfare. But already in 1919,
journalists pointed to a possible alternative: work would now be the only field
where it would be possible to fight the enemy and re-establish the ‘honour’ of
the individual and the nation. The emphasis on work appealed to many Ger-
mans, right across the divides of class and politics. If after the war it seemed as if
there was nothing left, the option seemed to be to direct all energy and devo-
tion toward ‘doing a good job’ and thus to develop and manufacture products
that would outclass those of the country’s competitors, especially from the
‘enemy nations’. Although Germany had lost the war, by shifting its energies
to this new battleground, the field of work, the German nation would be able
to secure a second chance.23 The feeling involved in this gained momentum
because the national cause would now supersede party affiliation and politi-
cal groupings. Aspirations to regain lost territory (in both literal and figurative
terms) came into evidence, for example, during the French occupation of the
Ruhr in 1923. At this point, masses of German workers (including socialist
and communist revolutionaries of 1918) and their families rallied to defend the
‘fatherland’ against what they saw as encroaching barbarians, who in this case
were Welsche (French), or ‘frog-eaters’, and especially their African troops.24
In the years that followed, wide-ranging shifts in the labour policies ad-
opted by management directly affected certain segments of the labour force.
Mass production in the electrical manufacturing industry, for example, lowered
demand for skilled work and workers. The result was that union officials and
observers as well as those directly concerned protested against this downgrad-
ing of skills. At the same time, however, semi-qualified jobs were increasingly
offered, with the result that the unskilled worker had new opportunities.25
These changes, however, at least in some segments of industry (rather less so
in agriculture, and following a different rhythm in each industry) came to feed
notions of work that revolved around the ‘honour’ of the worker and the qual-
ity of what he produced, as well as of the processes by which the product was
brought into being. Notions of the ‘honour of work’ and of the specific ‘qual-
ity’ that producers claimed for their products and their work called up feelings
within the worker. Accordingly, the written word, but more especially pictures,
represented an imaginary that emphasised muscular males who displayed bodily
strength and dexterous determination at the point of production.26
66 Alf Lüdtke

In the 1920s, however, politicians across the board took the view that
emotions could only be regarded as aberrant and fatal. Political action had
to be ‘reasonable’ and, thus, needed to be cleansed of that messy irrationality
provided by feelings. Representatives of the political left in particular consid-
ered that the politics they strove for was solely informed by people’s ‘interests’
and their rational calculations about action. According to this view, it was the
economics of cash that would powerfully predetermine notions of the political
among the members of workers’ organisations (both socialist and Christian).
Thus, a fundamental criterion for grasping properly the interest of the indi-
vidual and, even more so, of the collective interest was the issue of income or
wage. But one of the unspoken assumptions of this model of rational man was
the power of the cultural claims and emotional bonds that were symbolised in
and by ‘German quality work’.
The range of such notions – and the direct connection that people made
between their practice at work and their sense of ‘Germanness’ – surfaced even
more strongly when the context did not provide that respect to which ‘qual-
ity workers’ felt accustomed. An account from the margins shows how the
self-definitions of people as German quality workers took precedence even
over their affiliation to groups of fellow communists. This is particularly the
case of several thousand skilled workers who migrated from Germany to the
Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and many of whom saw job
opportunities open up while the economy at home slumped. Yet an appreciable
number of these migrants were, of course, primarily driven by their commit-
ment to socialism and communism. Nonetheless, the letters that a number of
them sent to the Moscow German language daily newspaper Deutsche Zentral-
Zeitung revealed how they felt rejected by their hosts and perceived their hosts’
disgust at the migrants.27 The accounts penned by the latter testify not only to
their individual dislike of the new environment in general, but, even more, also
to the feelings of increased bitterness triggered by the denial of respect that was
demonstrated by their Russian mates and superiors alike for the way that they
carried out their job.
One of these German workers in the USSR, Fritz Loew, wrote on 30
March 1933 to the editors of the Zentral-Zeitung. He told an appalling story of
continuous harassment or, at least, of improper treatment by superiors and fel-
low workers alike. Suffering from hunger, he had nonetheless, as he reported
it, proposed improvements. Those in charge of a factory that was building lo-
comotives, for example, had turned down his proposal to construct a cart for
transporting heavy objects. The cart that he proposed placed the object’s weight
on the axle and the wheels of this cart; by contrast, existing carts put all of the
weight on the arms of the man who manoeuvred it.
As Loew put it, Russian co-workers and especially those who called them-
selves technicians or engineers had ignored if not actually belittled his proposal.
 Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation 67

How could a ‘simple worker’ claim to have better ideas than themselves? Loew
added:
Our proposals are not inventions that come out of thin air; on the contrary, they
are firmly grounded in practical experience gained in Germany. The others (the
Russians, A.L.) do not come to us to ask for explanations or advice. They would
consider that to do so would be dishonourable (‘man hält dies unter seiner Würde’).

Bitterness mixed with anger spread among many of these Germans. In the end,
a considerable number of them returned to Germany, most of them doing so
after the Nazis had seized power.

Fascism: ‘The Masses can Express Themselves’

Timothy Mason has shown how workers stubbornly persisted in their pursuit
of securing higher wages during the armament boom of the late 1930s.28 They
employed the methods for fighting piece-rates, including techniques of in-
dustrial sabotage, that they had been developing and using for decades. And
yet statements of contemporary observers from the illegal Social Democratic
parties present a different account of workers’ practices outside of the shop
floor: ‘The masses (i.e., the proletarian masses, A.L.) remain quiet and accept
everything.’29
It was not, however, just the attraction of enjoying new powers that lulled
into acquiescence those who were liable to cry out and revolt, that is, the pro-
letariat. The range of symbolic and material gratifications the Nazi authorities
offered allowed for hidden or even public expression of feelings of satisfaction
(if not happiness) among ‘common people’ in Germany.30 The longing to be
now ‘respected as a working man and, thus, as a human being’ could be satis-
fied, at least occasionally.
Such practices could resonate with other encounters, such as the one a
French intellectual reported from 1935/36 in his diary. Denis de Rougemont,
thirty years of age (and making his living as a language teacher), attended a
Nazi rally on 11 March 1936 in a local assembly hall:
A floodlight focuses on a small man in brown clothes who appears at the entrance
(of the meeting hall) ecstatically smiling. 40,000 people, 40,000 arms rose in one
single movement. Slowly the man advances saluting the masses in slow movements
like a bishop while the shouts of the people roar like thunder.31

The observer observes the people around him: ‘They are standing upright and
shout rhythmically and in a chorus, their eyes being fixated on this lighted dot
in the distance, on this face smiling while many are in tears watching him.’ Re-
counting his own feelings, de Rougemont emphasises his ‘awe’, and he seems
still to tremble from ‘being overwhelmed’ and ‘physically overpowered’. The
event he is witnessing appears to him as a ‘sacred ceremony’ exercising force
68 Alf Lüdtke

that he (so he notes) feels stronger than the collective body of tight bodies sur-
rounding him. And as for these bodies, looking around he finds himself among
ordinary people: ‘workers, labour service men, young girls and women from
working class background’.
Other recollections and reports on the 1930s allude to similar feelings –
at least indirectly. In accounts produced after the event, such feelings and their
articulations tended to be silenced, or figured as being politically embarrass-
ing and morally disgraceful. The women interviewed by Margarete Doerr
still mention feelings of ‘shame’ about behaviour ‘then’ while recalling such
past situations, although some of them do recall experiencing irritation at the
time.32 In the 1930s, however, their response was different and they went on
to cooperate with or to support those in power: as they recollected it, they felt
they could not stand the anxiety of being disconnected from what they felt was
an ‘embracing whole’.

Engaging in the Work of Destruction:

Satisfaction and Pleasure?

Melita Maschmann, born in Berlin in 1918 and brought up in a middle-

bourgeois family, worked from 1938 as an employee with the ‘association of
girls’ (BDM, the obligatory organisation for young women). In the late 1950s,
she recalled how she had fallen enthusiastically for the Nazi cause. She had
thought, she said, of ‘the Germans’ as being involved in a military struggle, and
herself as an active participant driven by a mix of self-sacrifice and self-indul-
gence. Speaking of this in the late 1950s, she diagnosed ‘devotion’ (Hingabe)
as being a highly charged ‘sweet feeling’ that drove her to ever higher levels of
commitment and work until the very end of Nazi rule. It was this feeling that
made her cleanse her mind immediately of perceptions of the brutality perpe-
trated against the Jews that she observed on 10 November 1938 in the streets
of Berlin.33 She recalled similar feelings from her activities as leader of a work
camp in occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943. She explicitly notes the mixture of
‘cold distance’ and unwavering contempt that she felt for the members of the
occupied territory whenever she had to deal with them directly, for instance,
when handing out punishments for overstepping the rules of the camp and the
occupation.
Letters from soldiers have become an important source of exploring how
Nazism, and its waging of war, was accepted by most Germans. Of particular
interest are those letters written by draftees or volunteer soldiers who had
worked in manufacturing industries before joining the military. Many of these
former employees wrote to their previous companies thanking them for oc-
casional parcels, especially at holidays like Christmas. Moreover, some of these
soldiers even wrote regularly to the company or to some former colleague at
 Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation 69

the company, obviously treating the person of the company as a kind of a par-
ent or foster relative.34
To explore this I draw on letters of workers and soldiers from Leipzig and
Chemnitz, respectively. The soldiers stated explicitly that there were striking
similarities between industrial workers and military service or military work.
In other words, they felt in a specific way more ‘at home’ with many of their
comrades who had been recruited from other backgrounds. In a letter from
June 1943, a sergeant speaks of the flight he had made some days before, when
they passed over Warsaw en route. He wrote: ‘We flew several rounds over
Warsaw, and recognised with enormous satisfaction the total destruction of the
Jewish living quarters. Here our troops have done a truly great job.’35
Clearly the role of the military entails being prepared to kill, and when it
comes to battle, the danger of being killed is as imminent as is the possibility
that one might kill or wound others. The emotions involved in these situ-
ations were rarely addressed directly in the letters that soldiers sent home.36
Indeed, some of them displayed a specific sort of humour when it came to the
ever-present dangers of soldiering. In September 1944, for instance, a soldier
stationed at the homefront not far from his hometown, the city of Chemnitz,
was shot at by an allied airplane. The bullet missed him by just a few meters.
In a letter some days later, he dryly commented that it was not necessary to be
very far away in order to be killed in war (his reference being to the distance
between home and those comrades who were serving a long way away, such
as soldiers in Russia or even Italy). In the same letter, the author gave details
about a hunt for ‘Russians’ who were obviously escaped Ostarbeiter, and then
expressed joy at seeing how these escapees trembled upon being caught.37
Other previous employees of the same company sent letters. A young
woman, who had been conscripted (dienstverpflichtet), worked as a secretary since
the spring of 1943 to an officer of the ordinance corps in the Generalgouverne-
ment, the part of Poland that had not been incorporated into the Reich but
designated as a colony and which was, in fact, the site of the Holocaust. Her
superior, who in his civilian job had been in the same Chemnitz-based com-
pany that she had worked in, was killed by a bandit or a partisan in February
of 1944. She writes of her horror and sorrow and concludes: ‘His death causes
a lot of extra work although we got a new person to take over his job but this
one has to get used to things … Nevertheless I enjoy my task (Einsatz) a great
deal, and I am almost ready to say that I do not want to come home now. In-
deed, all is fine.’38

Concluding Remarks

The emergence of modernity may have transformed emotionality but it did

not erase it. What is required therefore are explorations of the specific ways
70 Alf Lüdtke

in which feelings were experienced and symbolised, but also how they might
have been silenced or suppressed.
‘Emotionology’, the term coined by the Stearnses, denotes an approach
that has pioneered such investigation in history.39 The two authors focus on
‘emotional standards’ as favoured by social groups in their respective settings or
conjunctures. Resulting studies reconstructed classifications of feelings from a
wide variety of textual documents. However, this emphasis on the social con-
struction of emotions left out the very dynamics of feelings operating ‘beyond’
any text.
William Reddy has pointed out that articulations of emotions may be dif-
ferent from other genres of voicing one’s state of mind or calling for action.
Accordingly, such articulations work as ‘emotives’. That is to say: terms denot-
ing specific feelings not only register but actively and instantaneously evoke or
shape these very feelings.40 In addition, it becomes obvious that singling out a
certain feeling (like ‘jealousy’, as Peter Stearns did in one of his studies) misses
the specifics of feelings: They never appear in isolation. Contextualization
needs to include the fact that at any one time individuals experience a variety
of feelings whether people do operate as singles or participate in group action.
Yet, the issue is not merely the presence and impact of feelings; at the same
time their transformation needs scrutiny. At least certain terms have undergone
dramatic changes as to both their meaning and their emotional charge. The
German term Weib (woman) is a case in point: from the sixteenth to the early
nineteenth centuries Weib did refer to a woman in good standing; the term also
transmitted a strong emotional charge. Nowadays, however, pejorative con-
notations have wiped out that previous meaning; they also have lost much of
their emotional charge.
Similarly, we might ask which feelings and emotions were not only indi-
cated but, perhaps, triggered by terms such as Abreibung (thrashing) or Bomb-
enstimmung (joyful mood) that were held to be indicative for pro-Nazi views
among friends and foes alike.41 Or what about German soldiers at the Eastern
front during World War II who mentioned der Russe or, more colloquially, der
Russki (the Russian) over and over again in their letters to families or friends at
home? What were the feelings that grounded and contextualized such a term?
And how did the emotional charge alter as the war unfolded for both those
who used the term and those on its receiving end? Furthermore, is it possible
to track two distinct but related threads of resonances connected to Russe or
Russki? One would run along a spectrum that went from contempt to fear of
the enemy (yet even include respect or admiration); the second would show
peaks and troughs of the emotional charge as feelings became more intense, less
intense, and, then, more intense again.
Neither the presence of feelings nor the shifting intensity of their emo-
tional charge are ‘given’ properties of the words (or signs) the people of the
past employed in their (inter-)actions. Thus historians’ efforts to reconstruct
 Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation 71

past feelings are not only hampered by both distance and difference between
‘us’ and ‘them’. Even more, the limits of present day awareness may blind and
deafen researchers to the very feelings people experienced in the past.

Notes

1. I prefer the term ‘feelings’ because it emphasises the sensual dimension, while ‘emo-
tions’ seem to stress the cultural codes that transform feelings into meaning. At any rate, I do not
consider the two terms mutually exclusive, but rather that they allude to different facets of the
same issue, ‘thing’, and practice. Still, the term emotion seems to focus specifically on registers of
perceiving but also theorising; thus, emotions address feelings in theoretical refraction.
2. Karl Marx referred to practices of work in different ways. This included terms that alluded
to ‘living labour’ and concomitantly to the ‘fire of labour’. See Karl Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1
(Berlin: Dietz, 1965 (1867/1890)), 198, 445. In the case of Max Weber, it was particular religious
motives and ‘ethics’ that drove or might have equally hindered people from working. In this case,
however, ‘ethics’ entailed a sense of calculation, so that it was the cognitive rather than the emo-
tional dimension that was in play. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(London: Routledge, 1992 (1904/1905)), 13–38, 102–125.
3. The ‘many’ refers to those who operate or perceive themselves as being not on the
‘heights of command’, but below, beyond or outside of them. My intention in using this term is
to avoid the often-misleading connotations of ‘the masses’ or of those terms intended to denote
‘ordinary’ people according to classifications of social rank or function. Moreover, the term ‘the
many’ also alludes to the fact that even groups that are strongly cohesive are made up of individu-
als who come together, and operate, and ‘stand’ together.
4. Ernst Cassirer, Der Mythus des Staates. Philosophische Grundlagen politischen Verhaltens (Frank-
furt am Main: Fischer, 1985 (1949)), 234, 346–360. See esp. 377 on the ‘power of the imagina-
tion’ that ‘moves big masses nowadays’.
5. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in Gesam-
melte Schriften, vols. 1/2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974 (1935)), 431–469, here 467.
6. William M. Reddy, ‘Sentimentalism and its Erasure. The Role of Emotions in the Era of
the French Revolution’, Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 109–152.
7. Achim Landwehr, Policey im Alltag. Die Implementation frühneuzeitlicher Policeyordnungen in
Leonberg (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000); Georg Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung in
Paris. Zur Entstehung und Duchsetzung von Normen im städtischen Alltag des Ancien Régime (1697–
1715) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2004); Alf Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 1815–1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
8. Herfried Münkler, Im Namen des Staates. Die Begründung der Staatsraison in der frühen Neu-
zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987).
9. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 1981); and for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Peter Burke, The Fabrication
of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
10. See Pieter Spierenburg, ed., The Emergence of Carceral Institutions. Prisons, Galleys and
Lunatic Asylums 1550–1900 (Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit, 1984). The perspective pursued
here resonates with but also is different from Michel Foucault’s emphasis on the change of power
from direct physical enforcement to means which ‘produce’ compliance by a combination of the
‘arrangement of bodies, surfaces, lights and gazes’ and the practices of minutely (self-)disciplining
everyone’s body, thus constituting a disciplinary mode and, more generally, a ‘microphysics of
power’. Cf. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 203,
140.
72 Alf Lüdtke

11. Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
12. Alf Lüdtke, ‘“Sicherheit” und “Wohlfahrt”’, in “Sicherheit” und “Wohlfahrt”. Polizei, Ge-
sellschaft und Herrschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Lüdtke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1992), 7–33, esp. 12–22; Lüdtke, ‘Gewalt des Staates – Liebe zum Staat. Annäherungen an ein
politisches Gefühl der Neuzeit’, in Rationalitäten der Gewalt. Staatliche Neuordnungen vom 19. bis
zum 21. Jahrhundert, eds Susanne Krasmann and Jürgen Martschukat, (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007),
197–213..
13. Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1975); Peter B. Evans, ed., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985). In contrast, Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State
(London: New Left Books, 1974) overcomes such matrix by pursuing two different and long-
standing historical trajectories for Continental Europe.
14. See also the comparison of these to a rather different setting, i.e., the US New Deal by
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Entfernte Verwandtschaft. Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus, New Deal, 1933–
1939 (Munich: Hanser, 2005).
15. Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society. Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); see also the more sceptical stance of Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror.The
Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
16. Bernward Dörner, ‘Alltagsterror und Denunziation’, in Alltagskultur, Subjektivität und
Geschichte. Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte, ed. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Münster:
Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1994), 254–271, 263.
17. Hans Mommsen and Dieter Obst, ‘Die Reaktion der deutschen Bevölkerung auf
die Verfolgung der Juden 1933–1943’, in Herrschaftsalltag im Dritten Reich. Studien und Texte,
ed. Hans Mommsen (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1988), 374–426; Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann,
‘Der “Blockwart”. Die unteren Parteifunktionäre im nationalsozialistischen Terror- und Über-
wachungsapparat’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 48 (2000): 575–602.
18. Eintopfsonntag meant the nationwide sharing of a simple meal not during weekdays,
but on a Sunday. This conspicuous action (or rather this campaign) was widely advertised in the
media of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and is – albeit shyly – recalled in oral history interviews I
undertook during the summer of 1985 with retired machine construction workers of Henschel
Company at Kassel. These men had been teenagers or were in their early twenties around 1938.
Most of them, with a chuckle, but in some detail mused about the mixture of indignation and
relief, if not mild pleasure they related to the respective stew – or to their efforts to avoid it. The
tapes are kept in my research archive at the former Max-Planck-Institute for History, Göttingen.
19. Petra Terhoeven, Liebespfand fürs Vaterland. Krieg, Geschlecht und faschistische Nation in der
italienischen Gold- und Eheringsammlung 1935/36 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2003).
20. Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning. Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I in Berlin
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); “Zieh’ Dich warm an!” Soldatenpost
und Heimatbriefe aus zwei Weltkriegen. Chronik einer Familie, ed. Frank Schumann (Berlin: Neues
Leben, 1989).
21. Even reports of those who, like Dominik Richert, finally deserted in the midst of the
disintegration of the German army from the spring of 1918 onward, refer to feelings of satis-
faction if not joy in relation to both soldiering and warfaring – feelings they had experienced
before deserting. See Dominik Richert, Beste Gelegenheit zum Sterben. Meine Erlebnisse im Kriege
1914–1918 (Munich: Knesebeck & Schuler, 1989); on the army’s disintegration after the spring
of 1918 see Wilhelm Deist, ‘Verdeckter Militärstreik im Kriegsjahr 1918’, in Der Krieg des kleinen
Mannes. Eine Militärgeschichte von unten, ed. Wolfram Wette (Munich: Piper, 1992), 146–167. On
resonances between warfare and industrial work see Alf Lüdtke, ‘War as Work’, in No Man’s Land
of Violence. Extreme Wars in the 20th Century, eds Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (Göttingen:
Wallstein, 2006), 127–151.
22. The emphasis here was on both products and the process of production. Contrasting
with the way that the trademark ‘Made in Germany’ was forced upon German manufacturers
 Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation 73

by British competitors, who were trying to stigmatise (what were presumed to be) inferior Ger-
man products, the emphasis on ‘German quality work’ aimed at appropriating the trademark
and turning it into a symbol of pride of superiority; see Sydney Pollard, ‘“Made in Germany”.
Die Angst vor der deutschen Konkurrenz im spätviktorianischen England’, Technikgeschichte 53
(1987): 183–195.
23. Hermann Pankow, Vom Felde der Arbeit. Eine Auswahl von Erzählungen, Schilderungen,
Gedichten und Urteilen aus Heimat und Fremde (Leipzig: Dürr, 1920).
24. See on the emotional furore of the anti-Bolshevik Freicorps but also of military activists
of the ‘Red Army of the Ruhr’ 1919/1920 Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 2 vols. (Reinbek
bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980) (English: Male Phantasies). For the continuation, or, more pre-
cisely, revitalisation of such emotions during the occupation of the Ruhr area by Allied troops
and, in turn, German resistance in most of 1923, see Michael Ruck, Die Freien Gewerkschaf-
ten im Ruhrkampf 1923 (Cologne: Bund, Verlag, 1986); and Gerd Krüger, ‘Straffreie Selbstjus-
tiz. Öffentliche Denunzierung im Ruhrgebiet, 1923–1926’, Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen
SOWI 27 (1998): 119–125.
25. See for this Alf Lüdtke, ‘“Deutsche Qualitätsarbeit”, “Spielereien” am Arbeitsplatz und
“fliehen” aus der Fabrik. Industrielle Arbeitsprozesse und Arbeiterverhalten in den 1920er Jahren.
Aspekte eines offenen Forschungsfeldes’, in Arbeiterkulturen zwischen Alltag und Politik. Beiträge zum
europäischen Vergleich in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Friedhelm Boll (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1986),
155–199, here esp. 159–167.
26. As for photography, not only publishers and journalists, but also authors increasingly
used visual media, which in itself was turning into an icon of modernity. It is clear that depictions
of fuming smoke stacks and shining machinery or their polished products closely resonated with
the imagery of industry at the same time that was being publicised and employed in the US, in
France or, for that matter, in the Soviet Union.
27. See GARF, Moscow, Fonds 5451, Holdings of Trade Unions, Inventory 39, file 100
(Deutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung, Moscow), 42–42a. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Viktorija Tjashel-
nikova and Dr. Sergey Zhuravlev (both in Moscow) for directing me to this material.
28. Timothy W. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, ed. Jane Caplan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), on the containment of the working class in Nazi Germany,
231–273; Timothy W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich. Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft
(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1977).
29. Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Sopade, 1934–1940, vol.
4: 1937 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1980), 1239.
30. On the range of these efforts of Nazi agencies addressing industrial workers, see Alf
Lüdtke, ‘What remained from the “Fiery Red Glow”?’, in The History of Everyday Life. Reconstruct-
ing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Lüdtke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1995), 198–251; as to a village context see Werner Freitag, Spenge 1900–1950. Lebenswelten in einer
ländlich-industriellen Dorfgesellschaft (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1988).
31. Denis de Rougemont, Journal aus Deutschland 1935–1936 (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1998),
62–66.
32. Margarete Doerr, “Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat…”. Frauenerfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg
und den Jahren danach, vol. 3: Das Verhältnis zum Nationalsozialismus und zum Krieg (Frankfurt am
Main: Campus, 1998), 193–381.
33. Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered. A Dossier on My Former Self (New York: Abelard-
Schuman, 1965), 56.
34. See my Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den
Faschismus (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1993), 406–410.
35. Sergeant Herbert H., 16 June 1943, Sächsiches Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Sack, No. 353, 46.
36. This is discussed in Klaus Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten – nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegser-
lebnis – Kriegserfahrung, 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998); Martin Humburg, Das Gesicht
des Krieges. Feldpostbriefe von Wehrmachtssoldaten aus der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Opladen: West-
deutscher Verlag, 1998).
74 Alf Lüdtke

37. SaechsStA Chemnitz, Guenter und Haussner, 260/261, 27 September 1944.

38. Ibid., 12 February 1944.
39. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, ‘Emotionology. Clarifying the History of Emo-
tions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985), 813–836; Peter N.
Stearns, Jealousy. The Evolution of an Emotion in American History, New York: New York University
Press, 1989.
40. Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; cf. fn. 6.
41. See the scrupulous collection and nuanced reading of such terms by the eye- and ear-
witness, the philologist Victor Klemperer who had been expelled from university in 1935 and
persecuted but managed to survive. See his account: Lingua Tertii Imperii. Notizbuch eines Philologen,
19th edn (Leipzig: Reclam, 2001 (1946)).
 CHAPTER 4

Overseas Europeans
Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance
in Interwar Italy

LILIANA ELLENA

Introduction

The set of discourses connecting love with modernity has intersected the po-
sitioning of Europe over other cultures in various ways. Scholars in the field of
cultural history and anthropology have underscored the connection between
the canonisation of courtly love and the Eurocentric presuppositions that ful-
filled the age of imperialism, criticising the assumption that romantic love was
unique to European civilisation.1 Other connections may be found in the nine-
teenth century shift from discourses on ars amatoria to scientia sexualis in the
field of social sciences. Caroline Arni has remarked, for example, how, at the
end of the century, part of the relevance of the traditional axis of inter-Euro-
pean comparison that shaped the long tradition of treatises on love in Europe
had been lost, while attention was increasingly turned toward pre-modern so-
cieties understood both in time and in space as ‘primitive societies’.2 The work
of Paolo Mantegazza, one of the founders of Italian anthropology, is quite
significant in that respect. In contrast with the first two volumes of his Trilo-
gia dell’amore, the last volume was devoted to sketching a huge history of the
love relations of the human race, and was largely based on cross-cultural and
ethnographical comparison. Later on, the entire work (1872–1885) became to
be internationally considered as an early model of modern sexology and was
translated as the Trilogy of sex.3
These remarks suggest that the casting of the discourse on love at the heart
of the making of Europe’s modernity is an historical process that cannot be
Notes for this section begin on page 91.
76 Liliana Ellena

charted in Europe alone. Many of its assumptions were based, at least partially,
on discursive and practical forms of knowledge shaped by colonial experience
and concerns. By looking at the debate on Europe and love from this perspec-
tive, I will discuss in the following pages two constitutive dimensions of it.
The first lies in the prominent public function given to the sphere of inti-
mate relationships. The vocabulary of ‘love’ pervading political representations
of imperial rule and intercultural encounter declined within multiple discursive
formations, which range from passion and desire to affection and family ties.4
The second dimension concerns the unstable relationship between definitions
of sexuality and emotions and how the boundaries between them have been
historically and culturally defined. As William Reddy argues in his contribu-
tion to this book, the polarity between love and lust, albeit deeply informing
European conceptions of love as a peculiar form of spiritualised eroticism, has
been given little scrutiny. However, there may be no other field in which such
dualism has been overtly dislocated and reaffirmed as much as the colonial
encounter. The inscription of sexuality within the language of race, whether
culturally or biologically defined, offered the basis for a racialisation of this par-
adigm, while exotic and colonial literature has largely contributed to the dis-
semination and popularisation of these stereotypes to a wider audience. Alain
Ruscio’s survey on French production brilliantly unveils how the ubiquity of
the trope of love in colonial literature has little to do with notions of passion
and emotions usually associated with romance. It is a literature de l’échec which
denies any romantic fulfilment.5
To look at the intersection between these two dimensions is pivotal in
order to avoid the trap inscribed within colonial discourse itself. As Ann Laura
Stoler has argued, the recurrent concerns with sexuality and intimacy were not
merely metaphoric of sets of power and domination, but they point out the
management of sexuality as a defining feature of the making of racial bound-
aries across the colonial divide.6 In order to trace the crossroads of these two
dimensions, I will focus on a case study based on the multiple and shifting nar-
ratives of love in Arnaldo Cipolla’s travel and fiction writings. Cipolla’s texts,
written between 1907 and 1938, cut across different genres in the field of high-
brow and popular culture, covering a phase in which the connection between
Europeanness and colonialism acquired a peculiar political relevance in Italy.
In the early 1920s, Cipolla, a journalist, became the champion of a hybrid
genre that could be called the geopolitical romance, in which geography and
sexuality are narrated in terms of racial recovery vis-à-vis the post-war crisis of
Europe. By recalling and popularising the nineteenth century heroic represen-
tation of European discovery and exploration, Cipolla made the encounter of
pleasurable sexualities the very site in which the superiority of modern societ-
ies and of ‘European love’ is asserted and made evident through cultural and
ethnographic comparisons. More specifically, I shall refer to his writings on
the Belgian Congo, which underwent significant changes under pressure from
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 77

the Italian Fascist Regime’s official vision of colonial Africa. In the first part of
this essay, I will sketch out the genealogy of the specific connection between
virility, intimacy and colonialism through the comparison between fiction and
travel writings. The endless reworking of Cipolla’s texts highlights around the
term ‘European’ a field of tensions addressing not only anxieties and dangers
arising from inter-racial sexual contacts, but also even more so the anxieties
and dangers arising with regard to different experiences of colonial rule. In
this context, stereotyped representations of colonial love became the ground
on which tensions surrounding conflicting definitions of European civilisation
were shaped, not so much by the need to govern colonial subjects, but to carve
out ‘the domestic subject of Euroimperialism’.7

Overseas Europeans: A Euro-African Romance in Congo

In 1907, Arnaldo Cipolla started a dazzling career as a special correspondent

that brought him to be the first journalist to travel twice to Ethiopia before the
First World War. Already in 1915, the futurist leader Marinetti, addressed him
as ‘the most audacious Africanist writer and tireless revealer of exotic landscapes
and people’ and as such more suited to glorify the futurist mobilisation against
traditionalism than ‘all the pedantic and bad professors of Italy’.8 The mid-
career novel, L’Airone, published in 1920,9 marks Arnaldo Cipolla’s first attempt
at fiction writing and constitutes the first volume of the African trilogy pub-
lished between 1920 and 1923.10 The novel is set in Banzi, a colonial outpost in
Congo, and develops around the encounter/clash between European civilisa-
tion and African indigenous populations, dramatised through the love/sexual
relationship between the protagonist, Evans, a European settler, and Mosila, his
lover from a remote forest village.
The narration opens in a typical Conradian fashion. During a shooting
party on a pirogue, the protagonist recalls his own expedition toward the inte-
rior regions of Congo, inspired by the ‘romantic’ dream of conquest, through a
sexual metaphor: ‘Your fantasy kindled by the fever throbbing at your temples,
tells you vaguely that despite the terrible things happening around you … you
will arrive at the presence of a virginity, of a frailty that will be sweet to violate
with boundless gentleness’ (42). The dream turns into a violent sexual relation-
ship when Mosila offers herself to the ‘white man’ as a token of peace in order to
save her people from extermination. From the beginning, Evans is presented as
a man who has lost control over his own reactions and feelings. The protagonist
embodies the ‘hyperbolical exoticism of the European’, vis-à-vis the ‘boundless
uniformity of the equatorial land’ (20). The distance from civilisation and the
European community allows the protagonist to absorb indigenous’ culture and
instincts, which are eventually turned against his civilised nature, predisposing
him to a mental breakdown and moral degeneration, ‘causing him to slowly
78 Liliana Ellena

forget the tastes and morality of his civilised nature, being overwhelmed by the
rule of instincts that the violent land and primitive man were imposing upon
him’ (14). Mosila, the virgin worshipped by the Bantu, on the contrary, is the
symbol of the deepest traditions of authentic Africa, ‘the personification of the
free peoples, hidden in the forest, who are unaware of the whites’ cruel face’
(30). Beautiful and semi-divine, she decides to use her seductiveness in order
to control and satisfy the white’s endless desire for conquest. Her intent is to
transform the colonisers into tame beings, like ‘wild beasts exhausted besides
their females’ (70).
The narration intermingles literary and widespread Eurocentric stereo-
types, such as the connection between travel and delirium, or the image of sav-
age anthropophagy. The violent and aggressive language, when not explicitly
pornographic, that the novel uses to express sexuality starkly recalls the futurist
language of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first novel Mafarka le futuriste and its
quest for action and intensity of stimulation.11 In the case of Cipolla’s novel,
however, the European protagonist’s sadism is not the outcome of his male and
racial superiority, but is the very symptom of his weakness. The obsessive con-
cern for Evan’s sexual habits, who constantly tries to avoid the overwhelming
physical closeness with Mosila, including ‘in the hour of love, so short-lived
for him’, is contrasted with the sexual power of the native warrior with whom
she is in love and his ars amatoria. The mixture of sexual envy and admiration
for the Labia quickly turns into hate for Mosila: ‘I hate you because you have
offered me all pleasures and because the ones that I can give you, instead of
appeasing you, only stir up new ones that I cannot satisfy’ (80–81). By closely
linking European violence and madness to the sexuality of natives, the text of-
fers the readers the spectacle of difference and at the same time signals a lack
of colonial authority. The attention is indeed focussed on the attitude of the
European and the excess of his rule.
While the first part of the novel is characterised by the subjective point
of view of the European and his delirious self-reflection, the second is marked
by the reversal of the power relationship between Evans and Mosila, when the
colonial camp is hit by the sleeping sickness. Mosila, who foresees the destruc-
tion of the camp, tries to convince Evans, on behalf of all indigenous people,
to leave the village and follow them into the forest’s interior. Evans’ violence,
unleashed by what he perceives as Mosila’s betrayal, marks the beginning of
his repentance, which only intensifies when he finds pearls, tissues and guns
returned to him: ‘the contempt the semi-civilised threw at the white men’s
feet, the violent return of goods received as the price for their submission to
the work, for the end of their savage condition’ (213). He recognises his error
in having silenced his original and instinctive conviction that ‘the primitive
human creature is gentle and good’, following ‘the bloody path of the great
deceivers of unknown equatorial populations’ and becoming a partisan to a
‘mistake which would cost humanity the frenzied disappearance of inferior
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 79

populations’ (218). Once Mosila has left him to join her people, the sexual at-
traction and repulsion felt by Evans turns into love and into the impossibility of
living without her. Finally, when some Europeans arrive to help Evans but can
no longer find him, Cipolla suggests in the novel’s closing lines that the Euro-
pean followed Mosila’s invitation to leave the ‘whites’ forever, joining her and
her people in the remote region’s ‘place of delight and forgiveness, surrounded
by the forest which is the limit of the world’ (247).
The symbolism of ‘sleeping sickness’ not only stands for the utter failure of
colonialism, to which it is explicitly connected, but evokes the discourse on the
extinction of primitive races: ‘Believe me’, declares the doctor going to rescue
Evans ‘in order to save the Equatorial races there is nothing but the total evacu-
ation by Europe from Central Africa, and its inhabitants’ throwback to the
original conditions’ (232). This idea, spread within the social Darwinist circles
in the second half of the nineteenth century, was revived by the debate on
colonial atrocities in Congo. The Baron Giuseppe Nisco, a judge of the Court
of Appeal at Boma who took part in the Committee of Inquiry appointed by
King Leopold, considered in 1904 the black race ‘decrepit’, never able since
its appearance on the earth to get up from the lowest form of barbarism and
doomed to disappear, leaving room for being replaced in Central Africa by a
new race, which he explicitly identified with the Italian one.12 Whether in the
version of sentimental racism or in that more aggressive version advanced by
Nisco, the extinction discourse evoked the opposition between modernity and
primitivism through the racially constructed idea of fitted and unfitted popula-
tions toward material progress and economic development.13 The novel’s con-
clusion, the European being destroyed by Africa or gone native, suggested the
apparently opposite but actually functional idea that a certain type of European
colonialism had exhausted its role in Africa. It signalled not only the defeat of
the mission to universalise the European civilisation to other cultures, but also
signalled the defeat of the endangered moral ground on which its superiority
was rooted.
If the book’s incipit and subject echoes Heart of Darkness – that would be
translated into Italian some years later – Cipolla’s life does it even more. He
spent the years between 1904 and 1907 in the Congo Free State, first as an army
officer and later as a colonial administrator. In 1907, after returning to Italy,
he published his collected letters, which opened for him a successful career as
an international reporter for the leading Italian newspapers.14 The book met
the echoes of the international debate on the colonial atrocities made by the
Congo Free State, owned personally by King Leopold, which led in 1908 to
the Belgian State taking over the colony. In Italy, the debate found a sensitive
ground in connection with the role played by Italian officers and settlers in
Congo, representing, in the years recorded as the ‘Italians epoch’ (1903–1909),
the second nationality (after the Belgians) among the non-indigenous popula-
tion in Congo.15 Public and political emphasis was given to the endangered
80 Liliana Ellena

status of Italian officers, mostly enrolled there immediately after the Adowa
defeat in 1896, after some reports claimed they were subjected to foreign of-
ficers with lower rank, or even set between Belgian petty officers and black
sergeants.16 The ambivalent positioning of Italians in Congo met the anxieties
both over the marginalisation of Italy among European powers and over the
army and national prestige already undermined by the recent defeat by Afri-
can troops. Furthermore, the resounding of the Anglo-Belgian debate can be
traced in the negative outcomes of a number of reports ordered by the Italian
government to verify the possibility of economic and commercial penetration
and of Italian migration to Congo.17 In 1906, under pressure from European
public opinion over Leopold and the simultaneous concern for the treatment
of Italian officers in the Belgian army, the Italian government withdrew from
previous agreements, which allowed Italian soldiers to carry out their service in
Congo. The daily Il Corriere della Sera was one of the most active in denouncing
the genocidal exploitation of the indigenous population by Leopold in Congo
and supported Congo’s annexation to Belgium. This is most likely the reason
that the newspaper hired Arnaldo Cipolla.
Cipolla explicitly refers to his experience in Congo in the novel’s note to
the reader, where, by arguing against the artificiality of exotic literature writ-
ten without leaving Europe, he claims the protagonist’s ‘tragic adventure’ to be
for most part true, Evans being his ‘unknown predecessor in a remote colonial
station along the equatorial rivers’ (5). Yet, the identification of the novel’s
protagonist is left very vague, often denoted simply as ‘the European’, however,
his name and the reference to the white man with ‘red hair’ seem rather to
suggest a Northern European nationality. This remark raises the question of
the connection between fiction and autobiographical writing, and in particular
how the novel’s fiction re-figures in the early 1920s Cipolla’s previous experi-
ence in Central Africa. The question of what it meant to be a ‘European’ in
Congo represented, indeed, one of the main focuses of the published letters, as
a field riddled with contradictions vis-à-vis both indigenous people and Euro-
peans from different nationalities. The widespread trope in colonial literature,
which posits Europeanness as something to be discovered and acknowledged
mainly outside European borders,18 was combined with a subjacent concern
of tensions among the Europeans themselves, as connected to different ways
of implementing Congo Free State’s system of economic exploitation. Led to
believe he would have been ‘the leader of a civilised expedition’, Cipolla found
himself at the head of ‘a column of men reduced to slaves’.19 In this context,
the attempt to enforce the European civil code on an indigenous population
is considered a further violence brought by a mistaken evaluation of the rela-
tionship between Europeans and natives. Ethnographic remarks and personal
observations were advanced to support the argument that the contact with the
indigenous populations required a ‘revolution in the moral field’ calling for the
eradication of the belief that ‘the savages’ soul could feel, “I would not say the
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 81

same compassions as ours, but at least the seeds of them’.20 It is precisely within
this argument, in which the question of transcendence and moral concerns
played a crucial role, that the position of women comes into play as the signifier
of the boundary between civilisation and barbarism. Cipolla invoked the wide-
spread belief that in indigenous languages, ‘to will’ and ‘to love’ were expressed
through the same word – a point made also by others Italian observers of Congo
indigenous populations. ‘Love does not exist if not as mere sexual coupling:
kissing is not used, nor appreciated’, wrote Primo Cantale, while Libero Acerbi
considered ‘love and, its natural outcome, jealousy’ as ‘little felt by the Congo-
lese’ for whose women it is indifferent to belong to one or another man.21 Ci-
polla assumed the absence of the conception of love as what caused colonised
populations to be unable to understand the institution of modern European
marriage. But even more crucially, he stated that only in Congo had he realised
that the modern conception of marriage was a very recent acquisition in the
history of humanity. Hundreds of years had been required ‘before the awareness
of women’s rights could manifest itself in man’s soul, and, as a result marriage’.22
The superiority of European men to their ‘savage’ counterparts rests with their
acknowledgement of women as their equal companions, sanctioned by the in-
stitution of monogamous marriage. To force indigenous soldiers recruited into
the Force Publique to marry, as the Leopoldian government was doing, is criti-
cised as a vain effort given their inability to understand ‘that the married woman
is very different from those the indigenous buy and sell, in that she has the same
rights as the man, that she is his own only as a consequence of her own will, sol-
emnly affirmed before him’.23 It is in this context, where Cipolla is celebrating
a wedding, that Sonisia, one among the few natives named in his letters, briefly
appears for the first time. ‘Stark naked’, she asks him, ‘nothing less than to be-
come, we would say, my Congolese half, one of my wives, since she imagined
that I, being a white mokungi (chief), would have at least a dozen’.24
In 1917, then years later, the material presented in Dal Congo was rewritten.
The content, no longer in epistolary form, was narrated in a more descriptive
and captivating style. Even if many episodes and valuations remained relatively
unchanged, it is significant that the main changes related to the section dealing
with indigenous women. The few pages from 1907 were rewritten into a new
chapter aimed at allowing the reader to penetrate ‘the tastes of the feminine
refinement of the cannibals’.25 Sonisia reappears here not as the savage of the
1907 text, since an ‘abyss’ has been drawn ‘between her and her bestial sisters
from Aruvimi’.26 Referring to her as ‘my companion’, Cipolla claims to have
been initiated into the deepest and most concealed aspects of native customs:
‘Nothing like intimacy with these mild and docile creatures could prove to be
of more help for the European in Congo.’27
The new version hints at the displacement of Cipolla’s personal experi-
ence within the code of literary invention and narrative that the novel would
bring about. This move was dictated by his personal literary ambition28 and was
82 Liliana Ellena

fostered by post-war feelings of nationalistic resentment. If Mosila’s character in

1920 owes much to the different versions of Sonisia throughout his travelogues,
then the narrative structure of the novel subverts the representation offered in
the travelogues by inventing a dichotomised and fantasised opposition between
an unrestrained African sexuality and a decadent European civilisation, charac-
terised by corruption and death drives. The travelogues and the fiction play out
the polarisation between love and sexuality in a quite significant way. In the
first case, the conjugal conception of love explains the attraction felt by African
women toward European men (but not the other way around), as an eman-
cipator promise of respect, freedom and fidelity. In the second case, on the
contrary, African sexuality as identified with women stands out in opposition
to an emasculated Europe. In this specific narrative, ‘the European’ becomes
a highly unstable signifier. The love allegory points out to the degeneration of
European civilisation, which brings about material and technological progress
at the expenses of moral standards and envisages the fall of Europe or at least
its decline.
While Heart of Darkness became the founding text of an ambivalent Euro-
pean rhetoric on colonial violence based on the ‘unspeakable horror’, Cipolla’s
novel can be connected to a corpus of popular literature production that spread
all over Europe and the United States and was less sophisticated from a liter-
ary point of view but was much interesting. Susanne Gehrmann has remarked
how the high mediatisation of the ingredients of the colonial violence in the
public sphere were often exploited by these texts in order to stir up the imagi-
nation of the popular public through aesthetics of horror highly eroticised.29
Without undermining the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise, this discourse
reproduced the racist identification of Central Africa as the Anti-Europe and
simultaneously cast the question of standards of European morality at the centre
of the international scene. The need to reaffirm the European moral superior-
ity and the legitimacy of white rule became a transnational concern where
the universalising claims of European ideology were contrasted with specific
attitudes both nationally and culturally rooted.30
Cipolla remarked that the novel, rather than a celebration of his European
precursor, was meant to ‘pay a modest homage to the primitive men who had
been my companions and my consolation during exile’ by letting them tell
their ‘ineffable tragedy’ (5). Here, ‘exile’ meant not simply his personal isola-
tion in colonial Congo, but more broadly the exclusion and self-exclusion of
liberal Italy from overseas expansion. In 1921, Cipolla resentfully recalled in
an autobiographical article how his early military career during the ‘sad years
after Adowa’ was marked by ‘the obsession to try to take part in the few over-
seas ventures where the humiliated Italy was forced to send its soldiers’,31 and
in his later memoirs, he would recurrently evoke his self-image of a ‘restless
young’32 at unease in the restricted domestic horizons of Liberal Italy, who
knew by heart the journeys of Henry Morton Stanley and Vittorio Bottego.33
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 83

In the context of the early 1920s, the themes of the anti-Leopoldian campaign
resounded in the nationalist feelings raised by the Versailles Treaty and fed by
the myth of Italian ‘mutilated victory’. After the carnage of the European war,
forms of cultural pessimism, which imbued positivistic scientific and political
thought, were revived around the theme of the sunset of civilisation, denounc-
ing the alienation of the grey, standardised and bourgeois post-war Europe. By
connecting the Italian ‘exile’ with colonial expansion and the indigenous trag-
edy, the novel embodies a specific version of the ‘anti-conquest discourse’, as
defined by Mary Louise Pratt in terms of a strategy of representation, ‘whereby
European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same mo-
ment as they assert European hegemony’.34 The love allegory, without under-
mining the boundaries between civilisation and primitivism, played out the
‘repulsive appeal’35 of Africa against the Imperial European powers by mobilising
the love for the lost Africa. The nostalgic mourning of the colonial dream was
conveyed through forms of nationalist celebration that, despite the condem-
nation for the atrocities committed in Congo, would support other colonial
projects and politics no less overtly racist and violent.

Toward a White Colonial Romance

After fascism’s rise to power, Congo lost any strategic interest in the colonial
public debate. The question of the connection between colonialism and com-
peting definitions of European civilisation became, however, a key political
issue. The imperial fate of Italy and its predestination to Africa were not only
crucial to the Fascist vision of modernity, as part of the plan to unify and regen-
erate the nation, but as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has remarked, were also coupled with
larger geopolitical plans to remake Europe.36 The rhetoric of the opposition
between the old plutocratic colonialism and the new ‘spiritual’ one provided
the ground on which the Fascist civilising mission, rooted in the Roman impe-
rial past, was doomed not so much to save the Old Europe, but to remould it.
The reshaping of Cipolla’s travel writings did not end with the 1920 novel.
The subject, on the contrary, was bound to reappear over and over in his later
writings until his death in 1938. The success of the African trilogy earned him
the label of the Italian Kipling and probably encouraged him to further exploit
the genre.37 Exotic landscapes as backgrounds for love romances became his
specialty, and resulted in a 1926 collection of short stories, previously published
in newspapers, entitled Il cuore dei continenti (The Heart of the Continents).38 In
particular, the dangerous ‘European’ pattern of colonialism, previously identi-
fied with Leopoldian rule, became now increasingly associated with France and
explicitly connected with the question of love and inter-racial relationships.
In the first novel, which shared the same setting as L’Airone, the character of
Lucia, a young French woman who asks for help in returning to Europe, is
84 Liliana Ellena

contrasted with the figure of her father, an ‘indigenised’, who ‘cannot conceive
of a life different from those of the Sango’. In the second novel, a similar con-
tempt for the hypocrisy of French ‘liberal’ colonialism is cast around an inter-
racial marriage, by representing the colonial administrator ready to welcome
the ‘WWI coloured combatant’, who is forced to face instead a black ‘who
took over a rosy daughter of France’.39 The following year, a new collection of
short stories and travelogues, Pagine africane di un esploratore, would include the
reworked plot of L’Airone and the chapter on ‘Congolese women’ already pub-
lished in his travelogue from 1917.40 Some of the crucial passages of the original
novel were left out, while others were considerably reworked. In particular, the
opposition between black and white male sexuality disappeared with Mosila no
longer sacrificially offering herself for the safety of her people, but instead of-
fers herself out of a free and unrestrained lust, thus becoming even more similar
to Sonisia. The denunciation of the excesses and violence of the Leopoldian
colonial rule was confirmed, while the admiration for the indigenous world
that characterised the original novel was considerably softened.
The period between 1926 and 1927 coincides with the launch of the first
competition for a colonial romance organised by Fascist government as part of
the campaign aimed at promoting a peculiar Italian colonial consciousness. The
quest for an original Italian colonial corpus of literature implied the refusal of
the tropes of the everlasting allure of the oriental femme fatale, in order to con-
centrate, on the contrary, on the colonial prestige of the virile Italian people.
Cipolla found in this new context a long awaited opportunity to point to his
own work as the model of ‘a healthy and effective colonial literature’, that
should no more be simply aimed at popularising exotic lands inaccessible to the
Italian people.41 His previous colonial experience could be successfully recalled
to fit the political need to forge a colonial style devoid of any foreigner influ-
ence. In 1927, the changes in the novel’s plot were significantly justified by a
footnote in which Cipolla – without mentioning the previous novel – declared
Evans to be himself. This shift is crucial, insofar as the identification between
Evans and himself marks the transformation of the plot from the opposition
between European colonialism and African primitivism toward the contrast
between different styles of European colonialism.
Within fascism’s spiritual interpretation of modern colonialism, the dis-
course of empire became the site of debate over countries’ rights for conquest,
competing cultural traditions and styles. In this new climate, Cipolla’s concerns
about colonisers’ attitudes could be easily mobilised and resonated with the
normative conceptions of politics as a style in which fascism combined the
avant-garde gestures with the masscult of personality.42 The Italian ‘superior’
genius and the spiritual attributes of its action made its expansionist claims
morally outstanding. Cipolla had already noted in his early travel writing that
Italians, even if not being present in Africa in great numbers, had ‘the strength
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 85

of the race’. Congolese admiration and trust for the Italians were firmly rooted
in a number of reasons:
the character, their simplicity of manners. The exceptional sobriety, certain in-
nate surges of enthusiasm or anger, the way of speaking the indigenous language,
whose pronunciation came very naturally to us, while for the others it is laboured
and false (the French pronunciation is the negation of Central Africa’s languages),
and above all such a wonderful adaptability to the environment that the Italian
possesses in an outstanding amount, and that allows him to lower himself to these
primitive minds and understanding them to dominate.43

A similar stance will be recalled in 1931, emphasising that Italian sincerity con-
tained ‘a deep liking for the so-called inferior people’ and that the Italians’
ability to completely understand them would one day translate into the ability
to ‘correct the colonial injustices of the present’.44
The last step of the process of revision of L’Airone plot took place in 1936,
which coincided with the Ethiopian war and the Fascist declaration of Empire.
Cipolla would again rework this material in a series of articles that appeared in
the newspaper ‘Il Messaggero’, where the three female characters – the French
Lucie, Sonisia and Mosila – will be fused together.45 The original subject of his
first novel was, significantly, retreated around the contrast between the French
colonial camp and the Belgian one run by Cipolla himself, which faced each
other along the banks of the Congo River. The protagonist is the object of de-
sire of the métisses daughters of the French administrator. One of them, Berthe,
is in love with the ‘European’ and romantically dreams of being abducted by
Cipolla in order to be married. He was, however, already in love with ‘Ma-
demoiselle Lucie, thoroughbred Parisian, daughter of the Ibenga’s Governor’.
Lucie, an extraordinary being ‘originally stable, but deeply disturbed by the
tropical stay’, uses the excuse of wanting to go back to Europe in order to join
Cipolla at the Belgian station and to escape her indigenised father. The whiten-
ing of the colonial romance posits the Italian as the only proper embodiment
of sexual and racial morality. He is the bearer of the meanings of ‘Europe’,
which Lucie can rejoin through being connected to him without leaving from
Africa, and through which the boundaries of the colonial divide are reasserted.
The white couple, writes Cipolla, offered natives the ‘celebration of a lover’s
ritual unknown to them, that of two young white gods’. From this moment
onward, Lucia speaks almost literally the same words spoken by Mosila. When
the sleeping sickness hits the camp, she tries to convince the protagonist to
leave the village: ‘And after all, why should you care about the Belgians? You
have learned what the true Africa is; when you return to Italy from the glades
you could teach it to your countrymen and urge them to vindicate Adowa … I
am French, but I love Italy … because I love you.’46 This time the fulfilment of
the colonial romance is assured by the whiteness of the couple. After defeating
the sleeping sickness, Lucie and Cipolla return to Europe together.
86 Liliana Ellena

The resumption of Italian settlers’ experiences under ‘foreign’ empires was

functional to the restoring of Italian authority and relevance brought about by
the conquest of Ethiopia and was combined with a renewed interest toward
Central Africa, as marked by publications aimed to popularise anthropologi-
cal theories.47 In this context, Cipolla reworked, for the umpteenth time, his
personal experience in Belgian Congo, by adapting it to the political agenda
and presenting himself as the perfect example of the colonial male prestige. The
journalist’s transformation into the protagonist of the colonial venture produced
a substantial re-arrangement of the previous narration of adventure and explora-
tion by evoking a space in which experiences of annihilation and death co-exist
with fantasies of liberation and transformation. In this version, Evans’ romance
mirrored the opposition between the old, decadent and weak Europe and the
new virile Europe infused and reinvigorated by its Mediterranean-African roots.
The impossible romance between a European man and an African woman re-
quired a complete reversal of the triangle cast in the original novel. The centre
is no longer concerned with how the European man loves, articulated in the
opposition between Evans and the native warrior, but is shifted to the ques-
tion of who the White should love. In the 1930s, this question was no longer
a private matter, but represented a charged public domain on which depended
not simply individual morality, but also national/European racial prestige. In
contrast to the old forms, the new ‘virile’ colonialism was based on clear ra-
cial boundaries between coloniser and colonised, which reasserted whiteness
and Europeanness along gender and racial lines. The main changes of Cipolla’s
original plot signalled that even before the 1938 racial law, the triumph of
white romance was not predicated mainly in opposition to inter-racial sexual-
ity, but against the ghost of the métis, identified here with French colonial rule,
whose penetration into ‘most savage Africa’ was based on methods ‘seemingly
praiseworthy considered from Europe, but full of snags once applied on the
spot, and above all harmful for the whites’ prestige’.48 By inscribing the redefi-
nition of the boundaries across the colonial divide into questions of European
rivalry and competition, this representation suggests that imperial desire was
increasingly addressed not only to Africa, but also to Europe itself. The love al-
legory does not concern the relationship between Europe and Africa anymore,
but the focus is shifted to the field of inter-european relationships. It is France,
represented as a woman, to be saved and redeemed by the virile and racially
safe Italy.
In the same year, Mussolini declared miscegenation ‘an attack to European
civilisation’, as part of the enormous propaganda effort, the real target of which
was not to demonstrate the inferiority of the African populations, already taken
for granted, but to address the monstrosity and dangerousness of the hybrids.
One of the most striking examples of this virulent campaign is the resump-
tion of the nineteenth century Saartjie Baartman’s case, known as the Hotten-
tot Venus. She was presented as a métisse of Euro-African descent, and whose
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 87

‘monstrous’ features were the result of the mixing between Dutch settlers and
Hottentots.49 Lidio Cipriani, considered the engineer of the segregationist sys-
tem in East Africa, in 1936 attacked the French assimilationist system, alleging
that it would have entailed ‘catastrophic demographic consequences for the
preservation and rise of our civilisation’ extending the ‘nucleus of the infec-
tion’ to Europe, as it had already happened with Portugal, a nation considered
completely ‘negrotised’.50 In the period after 1939 and the outbreak of war, on
the pages of the journal La Difesa della razza, which hosted the biggest names
of Fascist ideologists of racism, the concern with miscegenation was addressed
not only to the colonies and to the practices of other European colonial pow-
ers, but increasingly also toward Europe itself.51 While in 1939 the ‘plague of
métissage’ implied that ‘the white France has virtually ceased to exist’, in 1940
not only was France not considered a ‘race’, but the reason for the French de-
feat was ascribed to its ‘racial anarchy which mixes blood as it does with white
coffee’.52 Interestingly enough, in the same year the journal published the ar-
ticle ‘Interpretazione razzista dell’Otello’ (Otello’s racist interpretation) where
the Shakespearian character was recruited in the anti-miscegenation campaign
granting to the Italian dramatist Gianbattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573), con-
sidered one of sources of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the primacy of having pointed
out the dangers of inter-racial marriage.53

Europeanness and Whiteness in Fascist Italy

The texts written by Arnaldo Cipolla belong to different genres and were dis-
seminated across different media from travel writings to newspaper articles, from
reportages to novels. In interwar Italian travel and colonial production, this
emphasised hybridity is in no way an exception. By analysing the body of travel
writing, Loredana Polezzi has stressed the specific intertextuality governing
an intergeneric network composed by political pamphlets, scientific treatises,
colonial novels and guide books, whose ‘cross-roads indicates genres which
seems to function as formal as well as conceptual links between other, more
distant texts types’.54 The public image of Cipolla embodies this specific mark.
One of his reviewers opposed him as a writer on exotic subject to nineteenth-
century old cosmopolitanism ‘the globe-trotter and the pure race Italian have
merged in him without overlapping … no artifice, no affectation, no snobbery
or babelism’.55 He combined the heroic allure of nineteenth-century explorers
with the modern appeal of special correspondents, ready to turn from sol-
dier into traveller, from tourist into colonial writer. While his travel writings
translated his military experience in Congo into the code of discovering and
exploration adventures, his journalist accounts made him into an embodiment
of the colonial hero of the Fascist revolutionary modernity. The topics handled
by Cipolla intertwined both his personal interest and the political climate. His
88 Liliana Ellena

long experience as a colonial writer and Africanist offered the basis for the po-
litical exploitation of his production and simultaneously his self-promotion. In
1934, he joined the Fascist writers’ trade union, which allowed him to follow
the military operations during the Ethiopian war and for which he was granted
the medal for military valour. He published his reports in the Il Messaggero
newspaper and eventually put himself forward as a candidate for ‘Italian Acade-
mician’ and even as a candidate for Senator.56
While Cipolla’s rewriting of the colonial romance was produced and solic-
ited by a specific political contingency, it cannot be merely considered a direct
projection of political changes in Italian colonial policies – from tolerant at-
titudes toward inter-racial relationships to a racist stand in the 1930s or even
from an anti-colonialist position to colonialism.57 On the contrary, it highlights
the set of tensions that were at the stake in the triangulation between Italy,
Europe and Africa during the interwar period through which cultural forms
of internal and external Orientalism were turned into the modernist dream
of Italian authenticity and displaced in the colonial imaginary. The work of
Arnaldo Cipolla and more broadly Italian colonial discourse bring to light the
double level on which meanings attached to Europeanness were called into play
in connection with colonialism. On the one side, Europe stands as an abstract
form, ‘a figure of the imagination whose geographical referents remain some-
what indeterminate’58 on behalf of which any colonial project is predicated
and justified. It exists as a homogenous idea of civilisation, whose superiority is
based, among others, on the idea of love as a free and equal relationship. On the
other hand, Europe is translated into specific attitudes, interests and normative
meanings constituted through the conflict between different and competing
national cultures and political projects. In this respect, Europeanness emerges
mainly ex negativo as a lack and a failure, as a ‘white race’s solidarity’ broken or
contradicted. In the imperialist game, Étienne Balibar has suggested, each co-
lonialist nation has put itself forward as the most European: ‘the other white is
also the bad white. Each white nation is spiritually “the whitest”.’59
The interplay between these two levels, and their frictions, emerged overtly
in connection with the Ethiopian war. In the international dispute over the
Italian invasion, the European civilising mission was put forward, both in order
to legitimise Italian intervention and to oppose it.60 In the internal debate over
colonial policies, the discourse on whiteness was linked to the concept of the
Italian race as the one destined to embody the moral strength of the European
stock. In this specific context, métissage emerged as a powerful trope for Eu-
ropean internal contamination and for challenges to rule. The protagonist of
Arnaldo Cipolla’s novel underwent a metamorphosis, hinting at the shift from
an ambivalent positing of the European coloniser as a negative model toward an
assertion of the Italian colonial style as truly embodying the values of European
civilisation. This ‘man of character’ asserted by colonial literature and Fascist
propaganda, who was able to control his sexual desires and instincts and who
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 89

embodied a modernised and renovated image of rule, was not simply part of
the effort to import cultured sensibilities to the colonies, but it was rather part
of the effort to make Italians into European colonial subjects, suggesting that
race was not merely about biology, but required specific regulation of sentiments
and affective dispositions. Cipolla’s endless investigation into who should be
intimate with whom reminds us that the Italian colonial ‘gaze’ in the interwar
years was not fixed merely on the ‘colonised’, but obsessively on the Europeans
themselves. The Italian colonial discourse, with its prevailing highly fantasised
colonial ‘other’, rather turns the focus on the contradictions between the mo-
bilisation of the European normative values attached to ‘race prestige’ and the
actual attitudes of Italian settlers in East Africa. The Latin-Mediterranean roots
of Italian culture, its ‘difference’ that was supposed to mark the distinctness of
the colonial rule, entered into conflict with the need to draw a clear bound-
ary between Italian Europeans and East Africans. The redefinition of accept-
able sexual behaviour and morality emerged during a specific conjuncture that
coincided with a crisis in colonial control, calling into question the tenuous
artifice of the rule within the European white community in East Africa and
what marked its borders. The high percentage of hybrids in Eritrea, the old-
est colony, resulted in English fears about the injection of African blood in
Europe by Italians during the Ethiopian war.61 The difficulty of making clear
distinctions between Italians and the natives was not only based on skin colour,
in which very often métis can be easily confused with the Italian European
brown type ‘with some Saracen traits’ or with ‘whites burned by the sun’, but
moreover with cultural attitudes and behaviours. In 1936, the journalist Ciro
Poggiali wrote down in his personal journal:
It is painful to say, but we have sent too many Southerns to Ethiopia. They are too
backwards to have the authority to impose what is called European civilisation.
Some of them are perfectly at their ease in the tukul’s filth, because in their villages
in Puglia or Calabria they had nothing better. This makes one laugh when the
race’s prestige is spoken of. If one ignores the face’s colour, what is the difference
between some of our most shabby fellow countrymen … and Ethiopian peasants,
who on the contrary are beautiful in their shapes and looks?62

The racial association of ‘white’ with European appeared, to say the least,
problematic to Italian readers as even the texts of colonial policymakers reveal.
By reminding the readers that in the discourse about ‘indigenous or national
manpower’, the ‘human question’ was often understated to considering the
man in the colony simply as an ‘animal-machine’, Antonio Petrucci criticised
the common belief that assumed the colonial enterprise as simply a matter of
investments and engineers. The article listed a number of mistakes made in the
colonies, rooted both in a feeble consciousness of the ‘race prestige’ and in an
unsatisfactory knowledge of indigenous attitudes and customs. He concluded
‘even the individual who do not have the burden of command in the Empire
should look after his behavior towards indigenous very carefully. Because the
90 Liliana Ellena

prestige he acquires or loses is acquired or lost for the Italians as a whole.’63

Traces of the clash between internal forms of Orientalism and colonial racism
can be found almost everywhere, as confirmation that Italians where Europe-
ans, but not quite. This contradiction feeds during the same years the Mus-
solinian rhetoric of the ‘popolo bue’ (ox people), who were never able to be up
to the Imperial task. In 1938, Galeazzo Ciano reported in his diary that once
informed about the unfair conduct of a farmers’ group from Bari visiting Mu-
nich, Mussolini got upset with the ‘slaves’ sons’ and remarked that the need to
infuse a ‘higher racial conception’ was crucial to proceed in the colonisation
of the Empire. Ciano noted down: ‘he added that if they would have had a
distinguishing somatic mark he would exterminate them all, sure to do Italy
and humanity a great favour’.64
The obsession with the colour line emerged from widespread anxiety
about the instabilities and vulnerabilities of Italian manliness and racial mem-
bership. As Giulia Barrera has convincingly argued,65 the reasons which moved
Mussolini to dictate from Rome the rules of everyday interaction between
Italians and their colonial subjects, as part of a totalitarian project to engineer
colonial life, largely emerged from an internal contradiction. The southern
Italians, farm workers and urban unemployed – who were supposed to migrate
and populate AOI (East Africa Empire) – were unsuitable to fit the settlers’
ethos imagined by Mussolini and to build a cohesive white and European com-
munity, which demanded an apartheid system to be imposed from above. The
instability of the identification between Italianness and Europeanness required
to be repeatedly reasserted and ‘scientifically’ proven. Already in 1938, the in-
famous Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti devoted an entire article to attest the
Europeanness of Italian stock: ‘A clear distinction should be made between the
Mediterranean of Europe (westerners) on one side, and the Orientals and Af-
ricans on the other side. The theories that uphold the African origins of some
European populations and include in a shared Mediterranean race also Semitic
and Hamitic populations, should therefore be considered dangerous.’66
Recently focussing on the genealogy of the ‘colonial intimate regime’,
Ann Laura Stoler has pushed even further the concern of Frantz Fanon’s work
in the 1950s with regards to the subjectivities produced through colonial sexu-
alities. By mapping what she calls the European ‘colonial bourgeois order’, she
suggests that the Dutch, the British and the French ‘each defined their unique
civilities through a language of difference that draw on images of racial purity
and sexual virtue’.67 This approach maintains that the assertion of European
supremacy in terms of patriotic manhood and racial virility was not only an
expression of imperial domination, but also was a defining feature of it. The
lapidary slogan by Mussolini, ‘Empires have to be conquered by weapons and
maintained through prestige’, hit directly upon the very core of the Italian
internal contradictions. The desire for Africa, articulated through colonial dis-
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 91

course, hinted very much at the impossibility of erasing the internal Otherness,
which returned over and over to destabilise the othering of Africa.
By turning the focus to the construction of Europeanness, rather than to
the genealogy of otherness’ stereotypes, the colonial discourse brings to light
how racialised representations not only affected real and imaginary management
of non-European subjects, but simultaneously also impacted on contested defi-
nitions of European identifications within the continent itself. As I have tried
to show through the work of Arnaldo Cipolla, and more broadly through the
debate on colonial prestige in Fascist Italy, the question of what constituted Eu-
ropean identities at home was steeped in racial metaphors and civilising tropes,
which highlight the difficult task of disentangling the link between colonial-
ism and Europeanness. Moreover, the racialised vision of the ‘New European
Order’ predicated by totalitarian regimes suggests that maybe no other period
than the interwar shows that racism was not simply a colonial reflect, fashioned
to deal with the distant Other, but a part of the very making of Europeans
themselves.

Notes
1. See Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between
the Wars (London: Tauris, 1999), in particular ch. 5. On the anthropological approach of this cri-
tique see William Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion. A Universal Experience? (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997).
2. Caroline Arni, ‘Simultaneous Love. An Argument on Love, Modernity and the Feminist
Subject at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, European Review of History 11, no. 2 (2004):
185–205, here 202f.
3. See Victor Robinson, ‘Introduction’ in Paolo Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Man-
kind (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1935). The original publication was Gli amori
degli uomini, 1885, while the previous two volumes were respectively Fisiologia dell’amore, 1872,
and Igiene dell’amore, 1877.
4. Matt K. Matsuda, Empires of Love. Histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2005); Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries. Colonial Family Romance and
Métissage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
5. See Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London:
Routledge, 1995), and Alain Ruscio, Amours Coloniales. Aventures et fantasmes exotiques de Claire de
Duras à Georges Simenon (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1996), 15–17.
6. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
7. I borrow this definition from Marie Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes.Travel Writing and Transcul-
turation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4.
8. F.T. Marinetti to Arnaldo Cipolla, 2 January 1915, see Corrispondenze/Fondo Cipolla/
Public Library of Como. All translations from Italian sources in this text are mine unless otherwise
noted.
9. Arnaldo Cipolla, L’Airone (Milan: Vitagliano, 1920). Henceforth, quotations of this work
will be given in the text.
10. Beside L’Airone, the trilogy includes La cometa sulla mummia (Florence: Bemporad, 1921),
and Oceana. Romanzo del mare indiano (Turin: Agenzia Giornalistico-Libraria, 1923).
92 Liliana Ellena

11. F.T. Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste (Paris: Sansot, 1909). The novel cost Marinetti a trial
for outrage of public decency. See Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social
Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–33, 49–76; and Cinzia
Sartini-Blum, ‘Incorporating the Exotic. From Futurist Excess to Postmodern Impasse’, in A Place
in the Sun. Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 138–162.
12. Barone Giuseppe Nisco, ‘Il Congo e gli italiani’, La Tribuna, 5 July 1904.
13. See Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings. Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–
1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. Savage
Intellect, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
14. Arnaldo Cipolla, Dal Congo (Milan: Bracciforti, 1907). This first edition was co-signed
with Vittorio Liprandi, an unknown army officer whose name will disappear from the second
edition two years later.
15. According to the statistics reported by Edoardo Baccari in 1905, there were 238 in a total
of 2,511 whites. See Edoardo Baccari, Il Congo (Rome: Rivista marittima, 1908), here 688.
16. Reported by Luigi Armani, Diciotto mesi al Congo (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1907), 100f.
17. See Baccari, Congo, and Cesira Filesi, ‘Progetti italiani di penetrazione economica nel
Congo Belga (1908–1922)’, Storia Contemporanea 13, no. 2 (1982): 251–282.
18. Some years later, the French Eugene Pujarniscle, for example, will aptly synthesise this
point ‘one might be surprised that my pen always returns to the words Blanc (white) or “Euro-
pean” and never to “Français” … in fact colonial solidarity and the obligations that it entails allies
all the people of the white race’, Philoxene ou de la litterature coloniale (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1931),
31.
19. Cipolla, Dal Congo, 247.
20. Ibid., 148.
21. Gianbattista Primo Cantale, Ragione e Stato Indipendente del Congo (Cremona: Foroni,
1906), 26. Libero Acerbi, Dal Congo al Nilo azzurro 1902–1915 (Viadano: Portanuova, 1975), 89.
22. Cipolla, Dal Congo, 164.
23. Cipolla, Dal Congo, 169. The regular army of the Congo Free State was officially estab-
lished by a decree in 1888. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were approximately
17,000 native soldiers subjected to European officers, most of whom were recruited mainly from
Belgium, Italy, and England.
24. Ibid., 229.
25. Arnaldo Cipolla, Al Congo. Memorie di un esploratore (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano,
1917), 113.
26. Ibid., 125.
27. Ibid., 133–134.
28. The subject of the Italian settlers in Congo can be found in a number of literary works.
Among them Luigi Pirandello, Zafferanetta, in Terzetti (Milan: Treves, 1912), a short story focussed
on a man who discovers to have a métisse daughter in Africa, leaves for Congo and never comes
back; Gino Rocca, ‘Le liane. Dramma in tre atti’, Comoedia 2, no. 9 (10 May 1920): 5–46, a play
set in a rubber plantation in Congo. Cipolla contended that both stories were inspired by his own
writings, in Arnaldo Cipolla, Pagine africane di un esploratore (Milan: Alpes, 1927), 123.
29. Susanne Gehrmann, ‘Les littératures en marge du débat sur les “atrocités congolaise”.
De l’engagement moral à l’horreur pittoresque’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, no. 314 (2005):
137–160.
30. See Kevin C. Dunn, Imagining the Congo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21–59.
It should be noted that Edmund Dene Morel, one of the main advocates of Congo indigenous
rights in the ‘Red Rubber’ scandal, would not hesitate to portray Africans as less than human and
as sexually uncontrollable rapists of European white women, while fighting against the presence
of black French troops on the Rhineland between 1919 and 1924. See Sandra Mass’ contribution
to this book.
 Overseas Europeans:Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy 93

31. Arnaldo Cipolla, ‘Autobiografia’, Raccontanovelle, no. 33 (15 February 1921): 7–10, here
8, a passage that would be included in his autobiography, La mia vita meravigliosa (Rome: La Na-
vicella, 1949).
32. Cipolla, La mia vita meravigliosa, 9.
33. Vittorio Bottego (1860–1897), a military officer, was one of the most celebrated Italian
explorers of East Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century and author of L’esplorazione del
Giuba.Viaggio di scoperta nel cuore dell’Africa (Rome: Società Editrice Nazionale, 1900).
34. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.
35. This is an expression by Jean Loup Amselle. The anthropologist uses it in order to un-
derline the interplay between attraction and disgust that characterises European representation of
Africa. See Jean-Loup Amselle, ‘L’Afrique. Un parc à thèmes’, Les Temps Modernes, no. 620–621
(2002), (Special Issue ‘Afriques du Monde’): 46–60.
36. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Modernity is Just Over There’, Interventions 8, no. 3 (2006): 380–393.
37. Teodoro Rovito, Letterati e giornalisti italiani contemporanei. Dizionario bio-blibliografico ita-
liano (Naples: Rovito, 1922), 104.
38. Arnaldo Cipolla, Il cuore dei continenti (Milan: Mondadori, 1926).
39. Ibid., 7 and 24. The two short stories were entitled respectively ‘Notturno equatoriale’
and ‘Lo sposo del Barghimi’.
40. Cipolla, Pagine africane di un esploratore.
41. Cipolla’s answer to the survey about the state of colonial literature, L’Azione coloniale,
15 March 1931, 43.
42. See Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle.The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
43. Cipolla, Dal Congo, 70.
44. See Arnaldo Cipolla’s contribution to the survey on Italian colonial literature, L’Azione
coloniale, 15 March 1931.
45. The three articles were published between October and November of 1936 on the cul-
tural page of the Italian newspaper, entitled respectively ‘Amore e morte nello sfondo dell’Ubangi’,
‘Il popolo negro fugge la malattia del sonno’ and ‘Solo contro un villaggio’. These short stories
were republished in Continente nero (Roma Vettorini, 1937), the text from which I quote.
46. Ibid., 45f.
47. One of the best known was Lidio Cipriani, Il Congo. Da un viaggio dell’autore (Florence:
Bemporad, 1932). As the personal archive gives evidence, Lidio Cipriani and Arnaldo Cipolla
exchanged a number of letters on Congo.
48. Cipolla, Continente nero, 48.
49. See Barbara Sorgoni, ‘“Defending the Race”. The Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot
Venus during Fascism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 3 (2003): 411–424.
50. Lidio Cipriani, ‘Su alcuni criteri antropologici per la colonizzazione in Africa’, Gerar-
chia, no. 12 (December 1936): 231.
51. See for example Guido Landra, ‘Il problema dei meticci in Europa’, La Difesa della razza,
no. 25 (5 November 1940): 11.
52. Elio Gasteiner, ‘Grandezza e decadenza della razza francese’, La Difesa della razza, no.
6 (20 January 1939): 11–14, here 14; Olivier Mordrel, ‘Le minoranze in Francia’, ibid., no. 9 (5
March 1940): 6; and Mordrel, ‘Razzismo francese’, ibid., no. 17 (5 July 1940): 23.
53. L.D., ‘Un’interpretazione razzista dell’Otello’, La Difesa della razza, no. 24 (20 Octo-
ber 1940): 30–33. See Shaul Bassi, Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (Bari:
Graphis, 2000).
54. Loredana Polezzi, ‘Imperial Reproductions. The Circulation of Colonial Images across
Popular Genres and Media in the 1920s and 1930s’, Modern Italy 1 (2003): 31–47, here 32. The
main survey on Italian colonial literature is offered by Giovanna Tomasello, L’Africa tra mito e realtà.
Storia della letteratura coloniale italiana (Palermo: Sellerio, 2004 (1984)), dealing, however, mainly
with high literature.
94 Liliana Ellena

55. ‘Il giramondo e l’italiano di razza pura si sono in lui amalgamati pienamente, senza sovrappo-
sizioni … non artifici, non preziosismi, non snobismi o babelismi’, M.R.C., ‘Bibliografie. Letteratura
esotistica’, Il Marzocco, 5 May 1929, 32.
56. The support of his candidacy to the ‘Accademia d’Italia’ is witnessed by a letter from
Dino Alfieri, Minister of Popular Culture, 5 April 1937, in Corrispondenza/Fondo Cipolla/
Como Public Library. His wish to be nominated Senator is mentioned in a letter to Ermanno
Amicucci, 4 July 1937, to Ermanno Amicucci, Director of ‘La Gazzetta del Popolo’, in 1846/Ci-
polla Arnaldo/Archivio storico della Gazzetta del Popolo/Archivio del Museo del Risorgimento
di Torino.
57. The latter is the interpretation suggested by Marco Lenci, ‘Amore nero o amore bianco?
Autocensura e pregiudizio razziale nel Congo coloniale di Arnaldo Cipolla’, Studi Piacentini 29
(2001): 123–152.
58. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27.
59. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Lon-
don: Verso, 1991), 43.
60. The clearest example is given in the French debate by the Manifeste pour la défense de
l’Occident, launched by Henry Massis in October 1935 on ‘Le Temps’ and the Réponse aux intel-
lectuels fascistes, published in Europe, no. 153 (15 November 1935): 452f.
61. Quoted by Gianluca Gabrielli, ‘Un aspetto della politica razziale nell’impero. Il “pro-
blema dei meticci”’, Passato e Presente 41 (1997): 77–105, here 78.
62. Ciro Poggiali, Diario AOI (15 giugno 1936–4 ottobre 1937). Gli appunti segreti dell’inviato
del ‘Corriere della Sera’ (Milan: Longanesi, 1971), 127. Poggiali was a war correspondent in Ethio-
pia for Italy’s leading newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera.
63. Antonio Petrucci, ‘Difendere il prestigio’, La Difesa della razza, no. 2 (20 November
1938): 41.
64. ‘I figli degli schiavi … ed ha aggiunto che se avessero un segno somatico distintivo li sterminerebbe
tutti; sicuro di rendere un gran servizio all’Italia e all’Umanità’, Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1937–1943
(Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 243. Galeazzo Ciano was the Italian Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1943.
65. Giulia Barrera, ‘Mussolini’s colonial race laws and state-settler relations in Africa Orien-
tale Italiana (1935–41)’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 3 (2003): 425–443.
66. ‘E’ necessario fare una netta distinzione tra i Mediterranei d’Europa (Occidentali) da una parte, gli
Orientali e gli Africani dall’altra. Sono perciò da considerarsi pericolose le teorie che sostengono l’origine afri-
cana di alcuni popoli europei e comprendono in una comune razza mediterranea anche le popolazioni semiti-
che e camitiche.’ ‘Il Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti’ was originally published in Giornale d’Italia, 14
July 1938, and a few weeks later in La Difesa della razza, no. 1 (5 August 1938): 5–27, here 14.
67. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’ and the
Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 10; see also Stoler, Carnal Knowl-
edge and Imperial Power.
 CHAPTER 5

‘Window to Europe’
The Social and Cinematic Phantasms
of the Post-Soviet Subject

ALMIRA OUSMANOVA

The following article analyses cinematic representations of post-Soviet subjects

marked by the collapse of the Socialist economic and political system, the loss
of former ideological reference points and the introduction of a market econ-
omy and consumer values. It focuses on the film Window to Paris (Yurij Mamin,
1993), which explores projections and anxieties related to the problem of ac-
cess to Europe. The film narrates a phantasmagorical story of a direct transfer to
Paris through a window, leading to a love relationship between a Russian man
and a French woman. The cinematic narrative encodes various strategic modes
of relationship with Europe, which fall into the two sometimes overlapping
categories of ‘disinterested love’ and ‘profitable exchange’.

After the Wall: Encounters with Europe in Post-Soviet Cinema

The process of European unification was central to the political and economic
debate in the 1990s. In this debate, cultural production, including the mass
media, played the role of mediator and interpreter, seeking to mobilise public
opinion, sway people’s emotions and provoke discussion on key issues relating
to Europe’s present and future. The reintegration of the two Europes became a
central theme in European cinema of the last decade. In this process, film func-
tions as an experimental site for exploring and testing new transnational and
multicultural models of European identity.1 National cinemas reacted to the
new political reality by articulating their societies’ expectations and anxieties in
Notes for this section begin on page 111.
96 Almira Ousmanova

relation to the attempt to forge a shared European identity. For the countries
of Eastern Europe, this has involved a sense of returning to Europe as a cultural
home. This essay will explore how post-Soviet cinema commented on this
opening up of borders with the reunification of Europe, and will investigate
what ‘Europeanness’ might mean for those excluded or left ‘outside’ Europe
politically while belonging to it geographically and culturally.2
It should be said at the outset that this cultural ‘belonging’ is complicated
by the almost complete lack of knowledge of post-Soviet cinema in the West.
This has less to do with artistic quality or cultural untranslatability than with
the political and economic factors governing the distribution system. An addi-
tional factor is the existence of an established discursive frame that posits ‘East-
erners’ as ‘subalterns’ who cannot speak for themselves. The term ‘transition’,
widely used during this period, is significant in this respect because it supposes
a defective subject whose goal is ‘normalisation’ in terms of a Western capitalist
model. In the 1990s, the Western media represented the ‘East’ almost exclu-
sively in terms of poverty, prostitution, illegal migrants and the Russian mafia.
As Michael Kennedy has argued: ‘the West wanted to see in Eastern Europe
proof of its own universality’, while ‘East Europeans wanted to confirm that
they were really part of the West’.3
Thus, in the post-Soviet media – East European cinema is a key example
– Europe tends to be referred to with admiration and respect. Svetlana Boym
notes that this relationship to Europe has taken the form of a romance, mixed
with resentment and disenchantment: ‘unlike the Western legal or transactional
relationship to the idea of Europe, the “Eastern” attitude used to be affection-
ate. The relationship with Europe was conceived in a form of love affair in all
its possible variations – from unrequited love to autoeroticism.’4
The fall of the Berlin Wall made a greater impact on post-Soviet citi-
zens than on their Western counterparts, since it was perceived as offering the
promise of a better life, the beginning of new era. Even today, the opening of
borders – no matter how partial – can be seen as the most positive achievement
of the last decades. Despite the complexity of the process, the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the reunification of Germany seem likely to remain in the memory of
millions of people as a staged media event, as if ‘television was the main actor
of the historical mutation’5 and Communism had fallen instantaneously under
the camera’s gaze.
Vestiges of such a view can be found in the film that will be analysed here,
Window to Paris (Yurij Mamin, 1993), whose plot does not seem so improbable
after what happened in Berlin. The ease and rapidity of the ‘transfer’ to Paris,
as portrayed in the film, normalises the freedom of moving back and forth,
crossing borders (rendered ‘invisible’) whenever one wishes and in an instant.
And yet there is a paranoid fear that the magic ‘hole’ will be closed up again
for the next two decades or centuries: the film’s protagonists feel as if they are
seeing Paris for the first and the last time. This perception remains a recurrent
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 97

motif in the media; each time, when new restrictions on the visa application at
the French consulate are announced, Russian newspapers are likely to run the
following headline: ‘The Window to Paris Has Once Again been Barred’.
Communism may have collapsed as a political system, but states of mind
and ways of life do not change overnight. People were still returning home to
small over-crowded apartments, doing boring, badly paid jobs (if they were
not unemployed) and waiting for a better life. Indeed, new walls and new bor-
ders appeared. This bitter sense of yet another disillusionment permeates 1990s
post-Soviet cinema, particularly in the case of those films recounting mishaps
befalling those who set foot on European soil.
In this respect, the opening sequence of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s White – a
film to which we will return – is symptomatic: the desperate attempt to con-
ceal the shabby shoes, the uncertain gait and the feeling of intolerable shame,
as though everyone looks down on you – even the birds. This film articulates
eloquently the massive inferiority complex that Europe’s poor Eastern relatives
have toward their newly recuperated ‘family’. Something similar is found in
almost every post-Soviet film that depicts the encounter with Europe. The ma-
jority of films dealing with this issue were produced between 1989 and 2000.
There were, however, a few films of the 1970s and 1980s that touched on the
topic. Some of these were rather successful, for they served as a window into
a world that remained largely unknown to Soviet people: for them, the ‘West’
existed as an imaginary land that could be accessed only through literature and
cinema.
Two important films made in the 1980s set the tone for contemporary
interpretations of the theme, namely, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983) and
Petr Todorovsky’s Intergirl (1989). Both films served to construct a dramatic
vision of Europe as a place of exile, implying that it is by definition impos-
sible for a Russian to live in the West, regardless of the motives for attempting
to do so. The two films differ in their specific class and gender perspectives:
Tarkovsky’s film tells the story of a cultivated man, a musician, whose personal
story evokes two centuries of cultural dialogue between Russia and Europe. As
Anna Lawton comments, Gorchakov – like his eighteenth-century predeces-
sor, the Russian composer Pavel Sosnovskii – ‘finds himself at a crossroad of
two civilizations, unable to reconcile their opposite values’.6 His nostalgia is a
result of profound alienation from the world and from himself.
The heroine of Todorovsky’s Intergirl, Tanya Zaitseva, could not be more
removed from the high cultural and moral concerns of Tarkovsky’s protago-
nist. She is a hard-currency prostitute who entertains foreign businessmen at
an Intourist hotel in Leningrad, until the appearance of her fairytale prince: a
Swedish businessman who falls in love with her and marries her. Tanya leaves
for Stockholm with him and settles in a capitalist paradise.7 She too becomes
consumed by nostalgia for her homeland and decides to return, but on the way
to the airport she is killed in a car accident. As Lawton observes, the film sug-
98 Almira Ousmanova

gests that the ‘harsh, dehumanizing, everyday Soviet reality that drove her to
prostitution seems preferable to the comfortable but dull life of the Swedish
upper classes’.8 If, in the first case, exile is interpreted as a metaphor for the
human condition (the ‘universal’ point of view of an intelligent man), in the
second it is portrayed as the result of a pragmatic choice conditioned by con-
crete social and economic factors. In both cases, the return home is impossible,
implying that one can cross the border only once and only in one direction.
Izabela Kalinowska has noted that 1990s cinema, and not just in Russia,
stages ‘all kinds of returns “home”’.9 This produces a dramatic change in the
cultural landscape: going to the ‘promised land’ is fraught with various anxiet-
ies that are symptomatic of the post-Soviet experience, but it ceases to be an
exceptional occurrence.10 The popular Soviet expression ‘See Paris and die’
gave way in the early 1990s to the similarly popular but more optimistic post-
Soviet joke: ‘Not that I want to stay here (in Russia) or move to Israel, but
what I like about moving is that the connection is via Paris.’
It is useful to relate Window to Paris to another East European film released
in the same year (1993), which is also concerned with the notion of Europe as
‘home’: Krzysztof Kieslowski’s French-Polish production White. Although the
two films convey different messages, both provide a commentary on the imme-
diately preceding era. Both transmit a bitter sense ‘of rupture, loss, fragmenta-
tion and nostalgia’,11 but also a sense of revitalisation and hope for a new life.
In Kieslowski’s film, the return home to Poland can be read as the conse-
quence of a failure of communication with the Europe that has been a home
for many Polish émigrés over the last two centuries. It is the story of a ‘perpetual
foreigner’, who remains an alien in the West and in the East. As Kalinowska
comments, it draws our attention ‘to the problems of an individual removed
from the cultural context of the community which formed him’.12 Window to
Paris also pays tribute to the eternal nostalgia of an East European (Russian)
intellectual longing for his European cultural home, but nevertheless choosing
to return to his country of origin. Other characters in the film – representing
different generations, social groups and professions – also consider emigrat-
ing, but in every case they are bound by a seemingly irrational patriotism to a
country that is falling apart.
The two films depict a love affair between an Eastern European man (Pol-
ish and Russian, respectively) and a French woman, linking the narrative of
lost identity to the concept of romantic love. Love provides an opportunity,
creating the conditions for a recovery of identity and providing a form of
relationship between East and West Europe. However, what at first appears to
be mutual love turns out to be based on a tragic misunderstanding based on
different cultural and political experience. A similar situation is found in the
film Casanova’s Cloak (Alexander Galin, 1993), in which a middle-aged spinster
who goes to Venice as interpreter for a Soviet delegation falls in love with an
Italian who works in the hotel. At the end of her stay, the lover politely asks
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 99

her to pay for his services – he is a gigolo. But he too has gotten things wrong,
having mistaken her for a wealthy, high-society lady.
Aspirations and disillusionment, failures of communication and mutual
misrecognition in the context of the recently opened up possibilities of an
encounter with Europe are the subject of this essay. I will discuss two principal
strategic modes of the relationship with Europe as articulated in post-Soviet
cinema, taking Window to Paris as a case study. The first, which I term ‘disin-
terested love’, designates a nostalgic love for Europe and its culture, reinforced
at the level of cinematic narrative by a romantic attraction (often unrequited)
toward a European man or woman. The second mode consists in what I will
term ‘profitable exchange’: in this case, Europe is again the ‘promised land’,
but it is so in the sense of a consumer paradise rather than a cultural home. For
many post-Soviet economic migrants or tourists, going to the West is a purely
pragmatic matter of achieving a better lifestyle, which is understood in terms
of material benefits.

Window to Paris as Cultural Palimpsest

The story begins in a gloomy Russian city, later identified as St Petersburg. The
central character, Nikolai Nikolayevich Chizhov, is a music and dance teacher
at a Business School for teenagers. Having lost his job, he cannot afford to rent
an apartment, so he sleeps in a school sports hall. He thus feels fortunate when
he acquires his own attic room in a communal apartment, inhabited by the
boisterous, vulgar Gorokhof family, who work at a music factory.
One night the communal apartment is visited by a ghost: that of an old
woman, presumed dead, who previously inhabited the room. The amazed resi-
dents, who have been drinking all night, follow her, climbing out of the window
and staggering down the fire escape to the street below, in search of entertain-
ment. In their drunken state, it takes some time before the magical truth dawns
on them: the city through the window is not St Petersburg, but Paris.
The enterprising Gorokhov and his family quickly become daily commut-
ers devoted to the pursuit of whatever consumer items they can get a hold of in
Paris: money, clothes, a satellite dish, an old Citroën. On their way in and out
of their own apartment, the Russians have to pass through another apartment
on the Parisian side belonging to a young French woman Nicole, an artist who
earns a living by making luxury items (stuffed animals) for wealthy clients. She
starts to get annoyed with the intrusive visitors who keep trudging through her
apartment. One day, she chases the Gorokhov family back to St Petersburg,
where she becomes trapped, finding herself in a nightmarish world of filth
and mind-numbing greyness. She ends up arrested and spends the night at the
police station, surrounded by prostitutes and delinquents. When Nikolai finds
out, he rescues her from the police by claiming that she is Edith Piaf (and that
100 Almira Ousmanova

he is Elvis Presley) on tour in St Petersburg. Sick and tired, Nicole just wants
to go back to her apartment. Since she has caught a cold, Nikolai takes care of
her and a romantic relationship starts to develop between the two.
Eventually, Nikolai takes his students to Paris. For them, Paris turns out to
be an unending sequence of parks, balloons and carousels. The teenagers refuse
to go back to Russia. A debate ensues between Nikolai and Nicole (who sides
with Nikolai) on the one hand, and the teenagers on the other, who reason
that their parents would be only too happy to learn that they had stayed in
Paris; they believe they will be able to survive in Paris by singing and danc-
ing. Nikolai is faced by a serious dilemma, for he has himself been thinking
of remaining in Paris. He poses a question that is addressed not so much to
the teenagers as to the film’s audience: is it right to flee to a land of wealth, or
should one return to one’s homeland and work to improve it? As he says: ‘It’s
a miserable, bankrupt country, but it’s your country. Aren’t you willing to try
to make it better?’ The teenagers seem to agree. However, there is a problem:
while they are saying goodbye to Paris and Nicole, the window closes. In their
efforts to return to Russia, Nikolai and the teenagers, led by Nicole, highjack
a plane to take them to St Petersburg. The magic dream is over.
It is a grotesque narrative, in which the realistic is oddly mixed with the
fantastic. As Lawton notes: ‘The events are presented as being normal, and the
settings suggest the ordinary world. But characters, events, and places stand
in an absurd relation to each other.’13 It may be noted that the Russian tradi-
tion of grotesque narrative was born in St Petersburg and was developed by
Soviet poets and filmmakers whose creative work is inseparably linked to the
city. First, there was Gogol, then Oberiuts, FEKS and many others; probably,
it is because ‘Leningraders are more inclined to use comics, épatage, shock
therapy of the social consciousness …, raising absurdity to a high degree of the
absolute.’14 It is not surprising that many of the literary and cinematic motifs in
the film, which make intertextual reference to this cultural tradition – and to
everyday life in 1990s Russia, more carnivalesque than any absurdist represen-
tation – were overlooked or misunderstood by foreign spectators. One Western
reviewer characterised the film as ‘a noisy satire’ whose ‘story is incoherent
while its blatant message is more bankrupt than the Russian economy. It has a
fantasy plot that is poorly accomplished’.15 The gags were consequently felt to
be primitive.
I suggest that the narrative of Window to Paris is so dense that it requires
meticulous exegesis. Not only is it an encyclopaedia of post-Soviet life, but
in many ways it is also a palimpsest of Russian and Soviet culture: a ‘memory
text’. It is therefore necessary to be familiar with multiple cultural references,
as well as with the social context, in order to be able to appreciate the film’s
black humour. it is vital to be aware of Soviet ideological codes in order to in-
terpret some of the visual images and to understand the work of estrangement
and irony.
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 101

There is no space here to unravel the film’s entire web of cultural refer-
ences. I will limit myself to discussion of certain themes that touch on key sore
points in the memory of the post-Soviet subject. These sore points indicate a
failure to relate to the symbolic order, to a core identity. Both the individual
and the traumatised community display a tendency to relive the wounding
experience of the past;16 this is what causes the repetitive character of some of
the cinematic motifs.
Let us start with the first two sequences, which evoke the dissolution of
public and private spaces in the post-Soviet world. In the first sequence, we see
the communal apartment and its inhabitants, who are speaking to a policeman
about a lady who has vanished. The communal apartment is chosen as a site
for unrealistic and bizarre events, even though it is endowed with very realistic
features associated with this kind of housing. Communal apartments remain
one of the most painful topoi of Soviet culture. From the time of the 1920s
housing shortage, communal apartments became a powerful social institution
that regulated the structure of living space, sanitary norms and modes of in-
teraction between inhabitants. Housing was an instrument of social stratifica-
tion in Soviet society – to have a ‘personal’ room in a communal apartment
was a sign of well-being, compared to life in the dormitories – yet it was also
an efficient way of erasing class boundaries: scientists and workers, poets and
criminals would live side-by-side.
Ilya Utekhin, who conducted meticulous research on communal apart-
ments in St Petersburg, notes that certain aspects of their inhabitants’ behav-
iour, opinions and habits are markers of what have been called ‘cultures of
poverty’, or ‘deprivation societies’.17 People who live in such poor conditions,
and are more or less equal in their poverty, believe that everything that is re-
garded as desirable comprises a closed system; wealth is a resource that can
be accessed only through internal redistribution. The essential requirement is
to gain access to this closed system of goods. Consequently, the communal
outlook is characterised by obsessive attention to each co-habitant’s individual
share: when viewed from the outside, this can look like an expression of envy
and greed.18 Hence Gorokhov, on getting to Paris, immediately sets up a re-
distribution system.
Such living conditions encouraged mutual hatred and envy. Privacy was
a completely unknown concept. This is what most strikes Nicole when faced
with the ongoing intrusion of strangers who seem not even to notice that they
are disturbing her. It was normal for flatmates to spy on each other, and mis-
fortunes suffered by one’s neighbour would be relished since they might lead
to the improvement of one’s own living conditions.19 This is what happens to
Nikolai in the film: he gets a room because of the old woman’s disappearance,
but on his arrival nobody looks pleased.
These communal apartments had a very distinct odour not unlike that of
public toilets: their smell is impossible to erase from memory. Window to Paris
102 Almira Ousmanova

also refers to this. Nikolai meets up with his old friend Guljaev who had emi-
grated to Paris some ten years before. His friend keeps complaining (hypocriti-
cally, in Nikolai’s view) about his new life, manifesting a sort of nostalgia for
his communal apartment and the gossip in the kitchen. Nikolai takes him to
St Petersburg through the window, blindfolded. As he descends the stairs, Gul-
jaev joyfully recognises the smell.
If private space is portrayed in this way, how then is public space repre-
sented in the film? In an interesting sequence, a motley crew of musicians and
street performers are seen trying to cheer up citizens in what appears to be a
bread line – this was the period when food was distributed through a rationing
system, and even that involved spending hours in a queue. It turns out to be a
vodka line, and there is no vodka left. In order to prevent a fight from breaking
out between the lucky few and their unlucky fellow-citizens, the musicians
strike up the International – and it works. People who have queued for hours
are immediately set in motion and start to follow the band, singing in hoarse
voices the familiar words of the Marxist anthem. The singing of the Interna-
tional in this scene is highly symbolic: a nostalgic memory of the time when
Communism was a utopia uniting the working classes of all nations, and not
only those who are now fighting for cheap vodka.
We can see how heterogeneous the crowd is, yet they are all marching,
united in song, as if Soviet times had returned. However, it seems that all times
have returned simultaneously: in one square, the crowd meets a group of mon-
archists; further on, we see marching anarchists, followed by people singing
religious chants. Later, Nicole, wandering through the streets of St Petersburg,
witnesses the frenzied activity of the awakening masses, enjoying their newly
regained freedom of expression. It seems that all social groups have come out
onto the streets to protest: some (mostly, women) chant ‘Hands off Lenin!’,
while at the next corner, others proclaim liberal values. She is struck by the
atmosphere of mounting aggression: shortly after, a man walking ahead of her
suddenly commits an act of vandalism, destroying a public telephone. Having
given vent to his aggression, he continues walking down the street.
Public space is transformed into a gigantic carnival site: everyone is here,
ready to defend their values or political views, or simply to release negative
emotions. But this site is also a gigantic flea market, for the demonstrators have
merged with traders selling all kinds of items, old and new. Thus, the concepts
of democracy and freedom of choice are linked to the notion of a market place
that imposes its own rules, and where everything can be sold and consumed.
That this bizarre mixture of times and public parades should be staged in
St Petersburg is no accident. The film’s title is a play on the phrase ‘a window
onto Europe’, immortalised in Pushkin’s 1833 poem to the city, ‘The Bronze
Horseman’, which became a standard metaphor for Russia’s relationship with
the West. It was Peter the Great who conceived St Petersburg as the meeting
point of two cultures, the gateway ‘through which technology and new ideas
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 103

could flow. St Petersburg was to mark the way for Russia to become modern’.20
The city was meant to change the whole Russian way of life. Depending on
the specific historical period and political regime, the ‘window’ would be more
or less open or closed, but it never became a genuine gateway.
St Petersburg always functioned for the West as a projection: an ideal image
of what Russia would become. Whatever the historical period, St Petersburg
continued to be the most European Russian city – mostly on account of its
architectural style, its noble ‘northern’ beauty. For two centuries, St Petersburg
was a Mecca for the best Italian and French architects, sculptors and decorators,
who were invited there to undertake their most daring projects. As a result, St
Petersburg was often seen as an artificial copy of the West. The nineteenth-
century writer and philosopher, Alexander Herzen, declared that St Petersburg
‘differs from all other European towns by being like them all’.21 The similarity
is indeed striking: the inhabitants of the communal apartment in Window to
Paris would immediately have been able to distinguish Paris from any other
Russian city.
The ‘myth of Petersburg’ generated a whole tradition of fantastic narratives
in which it was portrayed as ‘an unreal city, a supernatural realm of fantasies
and ghosts’.22 It was home to the lonely, haunted figures who inhabited Nikolai
Gogol’s Tales of Petersburg (1835) and to murderers like Raskolnikov in Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). The vision of an all-consuming
flood became a constant theme in tales of doom relating to the city, from Alex-
ander Pushkin’s ‘Bronze Horseman’ (1833) to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913).
Josef Brodsky believed that there was ‘no other place in Russia where thoughts
depart so willingly from reality: it is with the emergence of St Petersburg that
Russian literature came into existence’.23
The director of Window to Paris, Yurij Mamin, plays with the metaphor
of a ‘window onto Europe’ by interpreting it literally. If there were an actual
window giving access to Europe, it would have to be located in St Peters-
burg. Mamin also appeals to the ways in which the myth of Petersburg was
constructed in Russian culture: Nikolai gets his class to perform Pyotr Tchai-
kovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, the role of the Countess being given to
the old lady who previously lived in the communal apartment. The old lady
personifies the damned city – both can drive one mad.
Neither has Mamin forgotten that it was in St Petersburg that the Revolu-
tion was born, without which the modern history of the city is unthinkable.
The ghost of the Revolution, personified by Lenin, haunts the film characters
both in Paris and in Russia. When they first get to a Parisian bar, they mis-
takenly pay for the beer with Soviet roubles. The barman stares at the coins,
but takes the money: for him, it is a tourist souvenir. Lenin’s profile on a coin
becomes a symbol of Russia’s bankruptcy – political and economic; inflation,
not to mention political crisis, peaked in 1993. The omnipresence of the dol-
lar and European banknotes (massively enlarged) on the walls of the business
104 Almira Ousmanova

school symbolises the arrival of the new ‘gods’ with whom the Russian rouble
cannot compete. The historical irony consists in the fact that coins bearing
Lenin’s profile become post-Soviet citizens’ only hard currency, and that the
‘Revolution’ is virtually the only brand that can be exchanged for consumer
goods in the West.
The references to Lenin include an interesting intertextual nod to early
Soviet cinema. When Guljaev, the friend Nikolai brings back from Paris, gets
out of the taxi and is finally allowed to open his eyes, he sees the image of Lenin
at the Finland Station and is greatly taken aback: all of his nostalgic sentiments
vanish. The image of Lenin is like a frightening dream, a hallucination, as if
nothing had changed during all of these years. The way the statue of Lenin is
shot and Guljaev’s reaction to it are strikingly reminiscent of a sequence from
Fragment of Empire (Friedrich Ermler, 1929), where the protagonist, sub-officer
Philimonov, who has been suffering from amnesia for ten years, recovers his
memory and immediately sets out for his native city, St Petersburg. The city,
however, has changed, as has the country. He realises this when he suddenly
perceives the monument to Lenin with its outstretched hand (pointing to the
future, of course). He gazes at Lenin, desperately trying to recall who it might
be. The intellectual montage techniques used in this earlier film represent the
protagonist’s damaged psyche. In Window to Paris, this already established cin-
ematic metaphor designates the ‘return of the repressed’: as Guljaev recovers his
memory, he comes back to his senses. Guljaev’s point of view is used by Mamin
as a defamiliarisation device, by making things look ‘strange’ in both Paris and
post-Soviet Russia. If in Fragment of Empire Lenin stood for the coming of a
new age and his statue embodied social progress, in Window to Paris estrange-
ment is required to remind the audience that Soviet times are over, but there is
a danger of their restoration.
For Gorokhov’s and Nikolai’s companions – the ex-Communist, the hippy
musician and the ‘alcoholic anonymous’ – the party card, with its portrait of
Lenin, becomes a means of payment in Paris, but this magic pass to solidarity
and internationalism have lost their relevance in present circumstances (the
French Communists, most of whom look Asian or African, seem embarrassed
and yet behave very politely, even taking them on a coach tour of Communist
memorials in Paris).
Apart from St Petersburg as a living architectural reminder of European
culture, what other connotations does ‘Europe’ have in the post-Soviet cul-
tural imaginary? As seen in this last instance, there is the memory of a common
Communist past. There is also the memory of French culture, whose bizarre
mixture of real and imaginary topoi is embodied in the figure of Nicole.
Nicole is strikingly different from the three Gorokhov women, who seem
to incarnate the merciless caricature of what Soviet women were felt to have
become: shapeless, loud and atrociously dressed. They serve to remind the au-
dience of the Communist ideal of the robust woman barely distinguishable
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 105

from a man. This exaggerated caricature is required by the film’s somewhat

distorted representation of the Socialist emancipation project, but also by its
narrative logic: the appearance and behaviour of these women have to create
a sharp contrast with the elegant femininity of a French woman. When the
Gorokhov women buy new clothes in an attempt to look smart, they appear
all the more ridiculous. Having bought their kitsch clothing in Tati, the com-
bined effect is that of a traffic light: the mother is dressed in red, her pregnant
daughter in yellow and the grandmother in green.
By contrast, Nicole is an embodiment of ideal femininity, the personifica-
tion of a dream shared by both Soviet men and women.24 In Soviet times, the
image of the ‘typical’ French woman was embodied by Edith Piaf. Thus, the
policemen in St Petersburg immediately ‘recognise’ Nicole as Edith Piaf; they
hold up the magazine with her image on the cover and, for them, Nicole looks
exactly the same. In this respect, both France and Nicole as ‘dream woman’
represent an obscur objet du désir, to cite the title of Luis Buñuel’s film. How
then is the memory of Europe transformed by the characters’ encounter with
Europe in the form of Paris and a ‘real woman’?

Disinterested Love or Profitable Exchange?

The encounter with Europe produces a culture shock, a genuine bouleverse-

ment, in all of the film’s characters. The imago projected by Soviet culture
breaks down; it does not correspond to the real state of things, producing a pro-
found referential crisis. Having never been abroad, the characters know only
what they could have gleaned from the Soviet mass media. They quickly realise
that Europe is not quite what they had imagined, but, since they cannot change
their ‘ways of seeing’ overnight, they continue to use their mental schemata
to interpret what they see. Like bricoleurs, they have to fit new experiences
into an existing interpretive framework. What we witness here is a process not
just of adjusting to new ‘civilized’ codes of behaviour, but also of reworking of
previous mental constructs and stereotypes into a new configuration.
Window to Paris reproduces virtually all of the major Soviet propaganda
clichés about the West. The Soviet mass media elaborated a more or less apoca-
lyptic mode of representation of the West, which consecrated the binary op-
position between good and evil, socialism and capitalism. Whenever Western
countries were mentioned in the news, it was exclusively in the context of
ecological disasters, economic crises, horrifying crimes, unemployment and
other negative factors.25 No wonder that Nikolai’s first ‘vision’, on initially
deciding not to return home and stay in Paris, mimics the nightmarish images
of Soviet propaganda and indeed is very scary: he imagines himself becoming a
Parisian clochard, who lives on a rubbish tip, catches raw frogs to eat and walks
alone through a rainy Paris at night, unshaven, dirty and dressed in rags. He is
106 Almira Ousmanova

glad not only to be awoken from this nightmare, but even more so to discover
that the window is still open, allowing him the possibility of escaping such a
terrifying fate. Clearly, Nikolai’s nightmare expresses the fear of losing one’s
home in the metaphorical sense of ‘homeland’. He could not be so scared by
the prospect of not having a home as such: after all, his ‘home’ had previously
been a sports hall. The principal fear here is that of finding himself alone in a
hostile environment in the capitalist West.
In Soviet Russia, the West was imagined and constructed as the embodi-
ment of self-interest, heartlessness, sexual decadence and immorality. This cari-
caturesque representation was rooted in the traditional Russian discourse on
‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’, according to which Europe epitomised ‘civilisation’
– superficial and oriented toward the cult of technology and formalised eti-
quette – whereas Russia was considered to be a ‘culture’ based on spirituality.
Filmmakers such as Tarkovsky played a part in supporting the image of Europe
as ‘morally bankrupt’ – a place devoid of spirituality. Such an opposition clearly
reflects an inferiority complex at not having been accepted by the West and an
unacknowledged awareness of the low level of material culture in Russia.26
The motif of Western sexual depravity is articulated in Nikolai’s and
Gorokhov’s second meeting with Nicole. Infuriated by their night time visit
and the damage they have caused, she tries to explain to them exactly what they
have done. Gorokhov is staring at her, and while she moves from one object to
another, he starts to develop his own interpretation, based on popular Soviet
jokes about sexually liberated French women. This turns out to be a primitive
zoomorphic reading of her gestures. Decoding her message as an expression of
sexual desire, he whispers to Nikolai: ‘See how she wants you!’
The theme of the moral disintegration of the ‘decadent’ West is developed
in the sequence that depicts Nikolai job hunting in Paris. He successfully takes
part in an audition organised by Guljaev and is offered a job in an orchestra that
performs for high-society audiences. There is, however, a strange condition: he
is asked not only to refrain from smoking and to wear a tailcoat, but also to take
off his pants. He resists and walks onto the stage as he is. There, he sees some-
thing beyond his wildest imaginings: a half-naked male orchestra playing for
a completely nude audience. In fact, he should not have been so shocked, for
he has already seen how his friend Guljaev is earning his daily bread – playing
music in a restaurant on a violin that he clamps between his buttocks.
Thus, the protagonists’ multiple misadventures in Paris correspond to the
image of Europe from the official Soviet standpoint. In the course of the film,
the image of another Europe gradually takes shape and these clichés lose their
validity. Nor is this new image idealistic or idyllic. A picture emerges that is
more diverse; the relationships between the film’s characters correspondingly
become more complex. Rich and poor, inequality and justice, coexist. Europe
is a consumer paradise, but it is also a cultural ‘home’ for many Russians.
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 107

The diversification of attitudes toward Europe, as well as the multiplicity

of subject positions, forms the symbolic centre of the film’s narrative. This is
articulated, firstly, through the theme of capitalism as a consumer society and
market place; and, secondly, through the theme of love. Both strands are closely
connected in terms of the strategic modes of relationship with Europe, defined
by class and gender positions, which they suppose.
From the standpoint of post-Soviet citizens, consumer society is seen as the
major goal of social progress. By contrast, the Soviet regime, being a ‘society
of labour’, was built on the idea of the attempt to eradicate private forms of
consumption. As Søren Damkjaer notes: ‘The principles of planned consump-
tion had led to a rationed level of consumption for the majority of the popula-
tion, who shared the relatively scarce consumer goods according to the criteria
of political patronage and privilege.’27 This was supposed to be an ideological
alternative to the capitalist West. However, perennial shortages made people
feel deprived. This explains why the Soviet state was so inconsistent in terms
of its consumer policy, why its attitude toward consumption was always so
ambivalent. In fact, communism failed precisely because of the harsh material
conditions of everyday life. The conflict between the communist and capitalist
systems took place in the sphere of consumption: as Ina Merkel notes in rela-
tion to East Germany, ‘the Cold War was won in the market place’.28
Hence, Europe’s present is perceived by the film’s characters as Russia’s
radiant future. Walking through Paris, Nikolai and Gorokhov are amazed to see
supermarkets filled with all of the consumer goods they have never seen: they
stare at the electronic equipment, cars, clothes and the variety of fresh fruits. All
of this makes a striking contrast to Russia, where, on an everyday basis, people
have to struggle to survive. A facile explanation of why France is so far ahead is
given by Gorokhov: ‘We fended off the Mongol hordes for them, while they
were building their prosperity.’
Gorokhov joyfully throws himself into the lively process of exchange and
smuggling; he sells everything – matrioshkas, pianos, Tchaikovsky’s music –
while other characters display an ambivalent attitude toward consumption. He
is learning to embrace the capitalist system. The only thing that he does not
put on the market, as he declares to Nikolai, is his motherland. In a nice irony,
Mamin here reminds his audience of yet another Soviet topos: the theme of
betrayal used to be associated with the idea of ‘selling the motherland’. As a
worker, Gorokhov shows no traces of the supposed asceticism of the prole-
tariat. He seems to be unaware of the principles of proletarian international-
ism, having no sympathy for his French counterparts who, for him, are merely
market competitors.
The lure of consumer society generated what came to be known as ‘sau-
sage migration’: the term commonly used to refer to the mass migration of the
1990s, triggered not so much by political necessity or ethnic conflict as by pov-
108 Almira Ousmanova

erty and economic need. Window to Paris reflects on the question of how and
why former Soviet citizens migrated to the West. Various strategies of migration
are articulated through different characters. These include the former musician,
Guljaev, who had emigrated to Paris at an earlier stage and now works in a res-
taurant. With bitter irony, Mamin (himself an emigrant) highlights the duplicity
of the emigrant’s discourse. Claiming that all French people are greedy and
nasty (while he sits in a French restaurant, drinks French wine, wears French
clothes and tells of his travels around the globe), Guljaev sheds false tears, nos-
talgically recalling kitchen conversations and former times of frankness and
authenticity. Then we have the old woman, the former aristocratic ‘owner’ of
the magic window: her figure recalls the first-wave of emigration triggered by
ideological dissent against the Soviet regime. Additionally, we have the teenag-
ers, singing and dancing for tips in Paris, who have no wish to return home –
as if for the younger generation, Russia has no future at all. Lastly, there is
labour migration, represented here by the new phenomenon of ‘shuttle busi-
ness’, personified by Gorokhov. Gorokhov’s attitude toward Europe is prag-
matic, confined to his class position and with no concern for European cultural
values that do not form part of his cultural memory. Europe is on his mind (in
his business plans), but not in his heart.
However, Mamin’s lead character Nikolai does not fit any of these catego-
ries. On the one hand, he is a liminal subject, ready to migrate: he has lost his
job, he has no family and even his city becomes alien to him. In addition, he falls
in love with Nicole. Yet, he chooses to return home. Thus, there is some room
in this consumer paradise for romantic feelings. This second type of attitude to-
ward Europe is embodied in the love story between Nikolai and Nicole.
The representation of love in cinema is by definition related to the issue of
gender identity. Recent Russian cinema is obsessed with recuperating mascu-
linity, with female characters serving as a site for male fantasies related to power
and sexual control. The renaissance of the notion of Russian identity is largely
due to the appearance of new images of heroic masculinity. In practically every
recent Russian box office hit, the conflation of national identity with mascu-
line authority has been a key factor in the film’s success.
Window to Paris evokes the difficult process of acquiring a new male iden-
tity. All of the main characters are ex-something and are in the process of be-
coming something else. For instance, Gorokhov is in the process of becoming
a businessman. He is sexually active, energetic and has few qualms about the
ethical aspects of his entrepreneurial activities. In his relationship with the three
women in his family, he behaves in a very decisive way; as father, husband and
son-in-law, he is used to dealing with women. He personifies the new hege-
monic masculinity. Mamin cannot conceal his sympathy, tinged with shame,
for this new cultural hero of our times.
Unlike Nicole, represented in the film as the ideal woman, Nikolai, for all
his romanticism, is definitely not an ideal lover: middle-aged, not particularly
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 109

handsome and gauchely dressed. There is something pitiful in his appearance.

In Kieslowski’s White, Karol also lacks any sex appeal. There is, however, a cru-
cial difference between the two men: firstly, we know nothing about Nikolai’s
sexual fantasies, to the extent that it is doubtful whether he has any; secondly,
unlike the enterprising hairdresser Karol, Nikolai persists in his inertia.
Nikolai’s weakness and passivity are closely related to the crisis of mascu-
linity in late Socialist society and the beginning of Perestroika.29 His tragic po-
sition is defined by two factors: he is a man and he belongs to the intelligentsia
– a social group whose status in the Soviet Union was always highly dubious,
but which in the 1990s lost the last remnants of its symbolic capital. Intellectu-
als do not figure among the heroes of recent Russian films, while characters
like Gorokhov are frequent. Window to Paris comments on the position of in-
tellectuals (particularly men) unable to adjust to the new economic realities and
left feeling helpless.30
Both sides of Nikolai’s personality suffer an identity crisis. His not-quite-
male behaviour, apart from his lack of sexual initiative, is marked by the fact
that he faints three times, on more or less any occasion that requires a decision
or a declaration of intent. He seems to be paralysed by a general state of social
anomie and does not know what to do in a world that is falling apart. He is a
typical ‘hero of our times’, a contemporary personification of the ‘superfluous
person’ glorified by nineteenth-century Russian literature. The only thing that
he still seems to possess is his pure love for culture and the arts. This is why he
enjoys being in Paris, walking through the streets, recognising familiar places,
seeing its beauty day and night, listening to its music, while his flatmates are
busy smuggling through the window and selling everything they can find on
either side.
His love for Nicole seems to be as disinterested and pure as his love for
European culture. One might want to ask whether Nikolai is really romantic or
merely impotent. In the course of the film, he is transformed from a passive
into an active subject: he rescues Nicole from the police and then takes care of
her when she gets sick; he brings the teenagers to Paris and then manages to
convince them to go home; he learns how to make decisions. His journey to
Paris is a classical fairytale test – in this case, of his romantic outlook. He re-
mains strikingly immune to the lure of consumer society. Nikolai seems to be
the last man of Soviet culture – a ‘fragment of empire’, for there is no place
for people like him in this new world, just as there is no time and place for
romantic love. In his imagination, Europe is an embodiment of romantic love
– a place where utopia remains alive.
The way love is represented in the film is interesting in its own right. The
majority of the post-Soviet films of the early 1990s exploited the female body
and featured explicit sex scenes. Sex became the major audience attraction.
Window to Paris is a rare exception: it speaks about love ‘in the age of permis-
siveness, when a sexual encounter is often nothing more than a “quickie” in
110 Almira Ousmanova

some dark corner of an office’31 – an age when, by ‘love’, people actually mean
‘sex’ (as illustrated by the popular post-Soviet proverb of the 1990s: ‘Sex is
not yet the reason for getting acquainted’). The film’s erotic sub-texts are very
subtle; it is, in fact, a very romantic film. By contrast with Kieslowski’s White,
the long-awaited moment of fulfilment is never realised and would hardly be
appropriate. This is an ‘impossible’ love, which will never be consummated.
But it is not enough to say that the film represents love in an entirely chaste
manner. The subtlety derives from the juxtaposition of words and unspoken
sentiments. Just as we never see a sex scene, we also never hear words of love.
Since the main characters experience constant difficulties in speaking to each
other, their story develops primarily through visual narrative: gazes, gestures,
colours, light and camerawork are more eloquent than words. As Koen Raes
puts it: ‘Love presents itself as covering the domain of the unspoken, as being
beyond speech, as an emotion that cannot be uttered or expressed by words.’32
I would not argue that love does not need words, nor that ‘language can
only be a poor expression of what love really is’, but I would agree with Raes
that love ‘involves the promise of an encounter without codes, a communica-
tion without a grammar’.33 Love happens when an emotional affinity between
two people comes about: in the film, this is suggested by the peculiar circum-
stances that make communication and understanding between the two lovers
possible. At first they seem too different, yet it is precisely this difference, as in
the case of Karol and Dominique in Kieslowski’s White, which excites them.
In Paris, Nicole would probably never have even noticed Nikolai; she starts
empathising with him and then falls in love with him at the point when her
misadventures in St Petersburg seem to be over. She feels grateful to him for
rescuing her, and she understands him better now. Love arises as an instanta-
neous flash and then everything gets transformed in its light. It is only at this
moment that ‘true love emerges’: in Slavoj Žižek’s words, ‘we witness the sub-
lime moment when eromenos (the loved one) changes into erastes (the loving
one) by stretching his hand back and “returning love”. This moment designates
the “miracle” of love, the moment when “the real answers” appear.’34 Nicole
now sees people and things differently; she no longer personifies a radical oth-
erness, with which no relationship of empathy is possible.
However, for this initial emotional arousal to mutate into something more
stable and solid, there has to be a possibility of linguistic exchange. In Window
to Paris, as in White, language starts to play a crucial role when the danger of
misunderstanding appears and the protagonists cannot find a proper language
to express their feelings. A desperate Karol sets out to learn French, after he
has already failed once. Nikolai does likewise when he exhausts his limited
vocabulary of a bizarre assortment of French and English words plus Italian
musical terminology.
Nicole is ready also: when she gets tired of foreigners tramping through
her flat all of the time, she decides that the only language these people can
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 111

understand is swear words. She buys a French-Russian lexicon and masters the
entire contents. She takes the first step, initiating communication in an obscene
variant of Nikolai’s native tongue. It is only later that she comes to understand
the meaning of these words, as well as the reality that stands behind them.
Nikolai, a man who probably does not know the words of love in any language,
expresses his feelings mostly through his deeds. However, he seems to need the
French language in order to communicate his feelings to Nicole. We may recall
that, in nineteenth-century Russian culture, French was the only language of
love among cultivated people in high society. And together they carefully pro-
nounce the words: La fenêtre vers Paris.
Thus, love turns out to be the most efficient mode of intercultural ex-
change, while the emergence of love is also the condition for becoming a
subject. Nicole’s love gives Nikolai a chance to view himself in a new light, to
regain self-respect and, therefore, to be able to return home. Through Nicole’s
love, he becomes a subject, capable of making decisions and taking action. As
Žižek puts it: ‘the object of love changes into subject the moment it answers
the call of love’.35
On a symbolic level, the narrative suggests that the nostalgia for Europe is a
longing for romantic love. The film communicates the utopian belief, grounded
in the political climate of the early 1990s, that Europe is so close and that access
to it is very open. This utopian belief would give way to disappointment – in
the film as in reality – when the borders proved to be as material as they had
been prior to 1989 and the dream of freely travelling back and forth turned out
to be no more than a dream. In this sense, Window to Paris is a film about the
historical imaginary of the post-Soviet subject, for whom access to Europe has
turned out to be a kind of cultural neurosis.

Notes

1. Apart from the famous Three Colours trilogy by Krzysztof Kieslowski (1993–1994), films
by Milcho Manchevski (Before the Rain, 1994), Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, 1987), Agnieszka
Holland (Europa, Europa, 1991), Lars von Trier (Europa, 1991), Emir Kusturica (Underground,
1995), and others have touched on the question of a new European identity.
2. The enlargement of the European Union involves careful and highly formalised pro-
cedures for making decisions on the terms of membership in the EU. It is thus predicated on
exclusion at least as much as on inclusion, with the necessity of defining its eastern borders being
crucial to the process.
3. Michael D. Kennedy, ‘An Introduction to East European Ideology and Identity in Trans-
formation’, in Envisioning Eastern Europe. Postcommunist Cultural Studies, ed. Michael D. Kennedy
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–45, here 44.
4. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 221.
5. Dominique Wolton, Éloge du grand publique. Une théorie critique de la télévision (Paris: Flam-
marion Champs, 1990), 253.
6. Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 126.
112 Almira Ousmanova

7. In 2003, the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson made the film Lilya Forever, which nar-
rates the pitiful story of a Russian teenage prostitute who also finds herself in Sweden. This can
be seen as an updated version of a familiar plot: a Russian woman is portrayed as a criminal or
prostitute (or both). The early twentieth-century image of the beautiful, enlightened Russian
woman seems to have vanished from the cultural memory of Europe.
8. Lawton, Kinoglasnost, 212.
9. Izabela Kalinowska, ‘Exile and Polish Cinema: From Mickiewicz and Slowacki to
Kies;lowski’, in Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices, ed. Domnica
Radulescu (Lanham: Lexington, 2002), 107–124, here 107.
10. Several post-Soviet films explicitly address the topic of the encounter with Europe.
Though I will not discuss them here, it is useful to recall some of them: Hitchhiking (Nikita
Mikhalkov, 1990); Restless Arrow (Georgy Shengelaya, 1993), whose plot is based on the idea of a
direct transfer back in time to the Soviet 1960s; I Want to Prison (Alla Surikova, 1998); French and
Russian Love (Alexander Alexandrov, 1994); Casanova’s Cloak (Alexander Galin, 1993).
11. Domnica Radulescu, ‘Introduction’, in Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern
European Voices, ed. Domnica Radulescu (Lanham: Lexington, 2002), 1–14, here 3.
12. Kalinowska, ‘Exile and Polish Cinema’, 108.
13. Lawton, Kinoglasnost, 231.
14. Sergei Dobrotvorsky, ‘The most Avant-Garde of All the Parallel Ones’, The New Orleans
Review 1 (1990): 84f.
15. See Dennis Schwarz, Online Film Critics Society, http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com.
16. Kalinowska, ‘Exile and Polish Cinema’, 116.
17. See Ilya Utekhin, Ocherki kommunal’nogo byta (Moscow: OGI, 2001).
18. Ibid., 47.
19. Natalia Lebina, Povsednevnaja zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda. Normy i anomalii. 1920–30 gody (St.
Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo ‘Dmitry Bulanin’, 1999), 198.
20. Bruce W. Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight. St Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia (New
York: Basic Books, 2000), 3.
21. Alexander Gertsen, ‘Moskva i Peterburg’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1954), 2: 30–37, here 36.
22. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London: Penguin, 2002), 6.
23. Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986),
76.
24. It would be useful here to recall a conversation René Étiemble had in 1957 when he
visited the Soviet Union for the second time: ‘“Ah!” – me disait une Moscovite, elle-même très dis-
tinguée de visage et de manières – vous en avez de la chance, vous autres Francais! Toutes les femmes chez
vous sont minces, élégantes et jolies, bien différentes de celles qu’on voit dans les rues de nos villes: trop grasses,
affalées, negligees.’ The woman who says this adds, ‘Parce que nous avons vécu trop longtemps coupés les
uns des autres, nous vivons les uns et les autres sur des images légendaires, fabuleuses’ (‘Ah!’ - a woman
from Moscow was telling me, a very distinguished woman in appearance and manners - you are
really lucky, you French! All your women are slim, elegant and pretty, very different from the ones
that can be seen in our towns: too fat, slumped, sloppy.’ The woman who said this continued,
‘Because we have lived for too long cut off the ones from the others, and we both have mythical,
fairy-tale images of one another’.) (René Étiemble, Le Meurtre du petit père. Naîssance à la politique
(Paris: Arlea, 1989), 229).
25. On this issue see Kristian Gerner, ‘Soviet TV News. “Sobornost” Secularized’, in Symbols
of Power.The Aesthetics of Political Legitimation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, eds Claes Arvids-
son and Lars Erik Blomqvist (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International 1987), 113–140.
26. See Mikhail Jampol’sky, ‘Rossija. Kul’tura I subkul’tury’, in Novaja volna. Russkaja kul’tura
i subkul’tury na rubezhe 1980–90-h gg. (Moscow: Moskovskij rabochij, 1994), 40–55, here 45.
27. Søren Damkjaer, ‘The Body and Cultural Transition in Russia’, in Soviet Civilization
between Past and Present, eds Bryld Mette and Erik Kulavig (Odense: Odense University Press,
1998), 117–132, here 127.
 ‘Window to Europe’:The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject 113

28. Ina Merkel, ‘From a Socialist Society of Labor into a Consumer Society? The Transfor-
mation of East German Identities and Systems’, in Envisioning Eastern Europe. Postcommunist Cul-
tural Studies, ed. Michael D. Kennedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 55–65,
here 60.
29. In the early 1990s, the phenomenon of ‘sofa emigration’ appeared; that is, of unem-
ployed, mainly educated men who, instead of adapting to new circumstances, preferred to stay at
home, while their women would take on any kind of work in order to feed their families. Women
became the breadwinners and owners of small business enterprises in the economic system of the
transition period. They were particularly active in the ‘shuttle business’. This issue has been exten-
sively researched in recent studies of masculinities in Russia (for instance, see O muzhe(n)stvennosti,
ed. Sergei Oushakin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002)).
30. See Elena Kabanova, ‘Postsovetskij period. Kino i zritel’ v poiskah drug druga’, in Istorija
strany. Istorija kino, ed. Sergei Sekirinski (Moscow: Znak, 2004), 460–491, here 469.
31. Slavoj Žižek, ‘From Courtly Love to The Crying Game’, New Left Review 202 (November–
December 1993): 95–108, here 95.
32. Koen Raes, ‘On Love and Other Injustices. Love and Law as Improbable Communica-
tions’, in Love and Law in Europe, ed. Hanne Petersen (Dartmouth: Ashgate, 1998), 27–51, here
27.
33. Ibid., 45.
34. Žižek, ‘From Courtly Love to The Crying Game’, 105.
35. Ibid., 106.
 Part II

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LOVES

 CHAPTER 6

Love in the Time of Revolution

The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska

MARCI SHORE

For Polish poets born at the fin-de-siècle, life was unbearably heavy. They were
a particular generation, the last to be educated under the partitioning empires
and the first to come of age in the universities of independent Poland. Now
the patriotic burden of poets had been mercifully lifted, and the young poet Jan
Lechon; captured a certain temporal ethos when he wrote: ‘And in the spring
let me see spring, not Poland.’1 These poets were Poles and Europeans; many
were ‘non-Jewish Jews’, in their sometimes-friend Isaac Deutscher’s words,
who very much felt themselves to be Poles. They spoke Russian and French as
well as Polish; they read philosophy in German; they moved about in rather en-
tangled circles with shifting boundaries, connected to one another by not more
than one or two proverbial degrees of separation. They were polyglots who
came under the influence of Marinetti and Apollinaire and fell in love with
Mayakovsky; East Europeans whose sense of Europe embraced the continent’s
entirety; quintessential cosmopolitans who felt at home in Paris, Moscow and
Berlin – yet who at once felt inextricably bound to Poland, who believed in
their role as the ‘conscience of the nation’ and who very much felt that Warsaw
belonged to them. They were afflicted with a certain fatal narcissism – it was
a narcissism they indulged in, but more poignantly, suffered from. They sat
in their café called Ziemian;ska and believed, with absolute sincerity, that the
world moved on what they said there. Often they fell into bouts of despair and
self-hatred, and – not despite, but rather precisely because of – their narcissism,
they embodied the observation that intellectuals comprise the only class who
loves to hate itself.2 They fell in love with poetry and they fell in love with the
Revolution – and perhaps with both much, much too completely.

Notes for this section begin on page 134.

118 Marci Shore

The Poets of Café Ziemian;ska

During the dark and cold winter of 1922, the young poet Władysław Bro-
niewski fantasised about meeting a diabolical woman. Instead he made the ac-
quaintance of Aleksander Wat, an ‘extreme futurist’. It was a time in the elegant
city of Warsaw when this small group of young futurists lived amid cafés and
cabarets, dabbling in nihilism and wallowing and exalting in visions of the col-
lapse of European civilisation, of the end of the world. The First World War had
already irrevocably destroyed one Europe. At stake was the future – or absence
thereof – of the new one that had been born. In the evenings, they gathered
on the upper floor of a café named Ziemian;ska, where they would speak of
their friend the avant-garde poet Adam Wazæyk, translator of the French futurist
Guillaume Apollinaire, with the rhyme Wazæyk brzydki twarzyk – ‘Wazæyk with
the ugly little face’. In December 1922, Broniewski noted in his diary that at
Café Ziemian;ska, he had been meeting with a small group of writers: Alek-
sander Wat, Anatol Stern, Mieczysław Braun. ‘All Yids. People of much intel-
ligence and erudition … I have benefited much from that – above all because
I’ve become acquainted with the new Russian poetry … Mayakovsky, the most
important of them all, has revealed to me completely new worlds.’3
Władysław Broniewski came of age fighting for Polish independence in
Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s Legions – he wore the gray Legionnaire uniform,
adorned with a sky-blue ribbon. His bedroom in his mother’s apartment was
decorated in the style of the Polish szlachta: a Persian rug, crossed swords,
ancestral daggers.4 In October 1918, at the age of twenty, he commented in
his diary that ‘a woman who is not pretty should be sensible, otherwise she is
intolerable’.5 He longed for an entanglement of love and war, and despaired of
boredom, which for him was ‘life’s tragedy’.6 At the war’s end, he felt uncon-
nected, as if he had departed so far from all spheres that he no longer had any
place. By January 1921, he had clarified what he needed in the language of
nineteenth-century Romanticism: ‘to find an idea that would rejuvenate me,
that would force me to treat my own life as a backdrop, that would propel me
towards sacrifices, towards battle … To find a creative power for myself, that
would allow me to become “immortal in the effects of my own action”.’7
Aleksander Wat, the polyglot futurist, had already reached the conclusion
that neither rejuvenation nor regeneration were possible, that rather civilisation
– Europe – had degenerated beyond repair. At the age of eighteen, ill and fe-
verish, in a manic, ‘trance-like’ state, Wat composed the long prose poem I from
One Side and I from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove. There Biblical references
mated with narratives from European literature and characters from Greek
myths, entangled through a Polish Wat infused with neologisms, archaisms and
obscure words borrowed from some dozen different foreign tongues. The eso-
teric sophistication and density of the language betrayed an astounding breadth
of knowledge – and a self-education that devastatingly pointed to nothingness.
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 119

Wat wrote of eternal nights that never pass; of the horror of encountering one’s
own sallow image at midnight; of the nightingales that sing him to death; of
his faces, which he changes with each zenith of the sun. Sleepy castrates moan
in the corners of a grotesque arcade; children emerge from graves to suck his
fingers; and ‘God with a swollen hydrous body trembles from cold and loneli-
ness’. ‘At midnight’, the young Wat wrote, ‘it is always necessary to place your
head under the dazzling, yes! dazzling knife of the guillotine.’ The piece was
saturated with a deep sense of moral degeneration, of the collapse of civilisation,
of the ‘cursed principium individuationis’ that paralysed him. There was nothing
redemptive, there was no salvation and the blasphemy throughout the poem
suggested less heresy than it did nihilism. Sexuality had become licentious and
grotesque. ‘– I leave for your meeting’, wrote the eighteen year-old Wat, ‘where
trembling in tears and without sensation you will surrender, you will surrender,
he (she) will surrender, we will surrender, all of you will surrender, they – the
men (they – the women) will surrender’. In the last stanza, Wat returned to him-
self, tormented by his own self-absorption, and wrote of how it was he himself
who was burning in the ‘inquisitorial interior’ of his pug iron stove.8
Before long, the Crakowian Bruno Jasien;ski joined the Warsaw futurists
Aleksander Wat and Anatol Stern. Jasien;ski had returned home to Cracow after
having spent his teenage years in Russia; now he went to Polish university,
where he became a futurist. Of all of them, he was the dandy, all nineteenth-
century elegance dressed in black with a top hat and a wide tie and a monocle
on one eye. Schoolgirls went crazy for him – but Jasien;ski, like his new Warsaw
friends, was infatuated rather with Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tom-
maso Marinetti, infatuated most of all with Marinetti’s announcement that
words had been liberated – a revolution, Wat later described, just as much as
Nietzsche’s had been when he announced that God was dead.9 The futurists
were intoxicated with transgression as well. In their 1921 manifesto, Wat and
Stern declared that the great rainbow monkey named Dionysus had taken his
last breath long ago and that they were throwing away his rotten legacy, relegat-
ing civilisation, culture and their morbidity to the trash heap.10
The Polish novelist they revered was not amused. Stefan ZÆeromski was a
generation their senior, the luminary of the Young Poland circle who came of
age at a moment when it was imperative to see Poland, not spring. Now in
his book Snobbism and Progress, ZÆeromski turned the Polish futurists’ cosmo-
politanism against them, deriding them for snobbery, for their rather pathetic
imitation of foreign fashion. ZÆeromski accepted ‘the most modern artistic cur-
rents’ elsewhere in Europe, but he disparaged their Polish counterparts: ‘These
trends are in essence new pages of Italian, French and Russian literature. In
Poland, however, they are “cigarette butts,” alien, colorless, unreadable, mate-
rial evidence of snobbism.’11
The Polish futurists were quite hurt; nonetheless, ‘snobbism’ soon joined
their list of favourite words, together with ‘passéisme’, ‘bourgeoisism’ and later,
120 Marci Shore

‘joy’. For the Łódz; poets Witold Wandurski and Mieczysław Braun, Café Zie-
mian;ska was all about snobbism. ‘Don’t go at all to Ziemian;ska! You’ll suffocate
in the fumes of snobbish literati and pretentious false literature’, Mieczysław
Braun warned Władysław Broniewski. ‘Stay away!’12 Broniewski agreed. In
spring of 1924, he wrote to an old army friend that he was getting sick of those
Jewish literati from Ziemian;ska. He had, upon closer acquaintance, become
convinced that they had psyches very different from his own – Jewish intellect
was all quickness, flashiness and false depth – in contrast to his Slavic intellect:
heavier and less ethereal. His futurist poet friends from Ziemian;ska were, he
concluded, ‘masters of outcry, of a noisy-gloomy passion entangled in itself ’.13

Mayakovsky and Revolution

It was these masters of outcry who introduced Broniewski to Vladimir Maya-

kovsky’s poetry. The introduction was a fateful one. The Italian futurist Mari-
netti had liberated words from syntax; the Russian futurists had gone a step
further: they had liberated words from their referents, signifiers from their sig-
nifieds. Yet having done this, they fled from the implication – the absence of
any stable meaning, radical contingency – into the embrace of the Revolution.
Now in Poland all of Café Ziemian;ska, the waiters as well, were reciting Maya-
kovsky’s ‘Left March’ – the Russian refrain levoi! levoi! levoi! resounded through-
out the café.14 This was not mere amusement; the poets of Café Ziemian;ska
took themselves very seriously. In July 1921, Aleksander Wat, Anatol Stern
and Bruno Jasien;ski, ‘in the name of the Polish futurists’ – that is, themselves
– wrote a letter to Vladimir Mayakovsky. ‘The Polish futurists, establishing re-
lations with futurists of all countries, send fraternal greetings to the Russian
futurists’, they began. They solicited his contribution to ‘the first large interna-
tional journal-newspaper devoted to futurist poetry from all over the world in
all languages’.15 The highly ambitious international journal-newspaper lasted
for only two issues. Their love for Mayakovsky lasted much longer. In the end,
it was neither Marx nor Lenin, but the breathtakingly handsome Russian fu-
turist who seduced the Polish poets. Radical nihilism and radical contingency
proved unbearable; in the end they could not endure it. They fled. They arrived
at Marxism in the mid to late 1920s, before socialist realism, before Stalinism.
For these poets, Marxism meant Revolution – something radical, ecstatic, con-
summating. What Marxism in theory would become when applied, what com-
munism would mean in practice – they did not yet know. Their Marxism was a
much more multivalent and contestatory one, chosen at moments when there
was little space for opportunism. For the Polish avant-garde poets, as for Jean-
Paul Sartre, revolution was a categorical, existential imperative. Revolution was
self-actualisation through self-annihilation; the consummation of subjectivity
through its abandonment; and the transcendence and the fulfilment of both
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 121

their Polishness and their Europeanness. Distinctions between East and West
would be effaced once and for all, Poland would be liberated from all hitherto-
existing inferiorities and the Polish poets would assume their place among the
vanguard of the world.
In 1923, Broniewski initiated the futurists’ first ‘ark of the covenant’ with
the Communist Party. The poets would join the revolution, lending their tal-
ents to the theosoph-turned-communist Jan Hempel’s Marxist journal. Witold
Wandurski contributed the scathing ‘To the Gentlemen Poets’, a verse accus-
ing the café poets – his friends and the friends of his friends – of manicurism
and self-indulgence, of falling behind Europe, which had now become the
progressive Other – in contrast to their own, eastern half of Europe, of whose
‘backwardness’ they were at times painfully conscious. The Polish poets had
failed to see the future in Europe, Wandurski declared:

Oh, independent hypocrisy! Freedom of masturbation!

How does it fail to disgust you, poets, this verbal onanism?
Look! In Europe the wind already blows…
Hurl the fire-brand into the keg of the powder-magazine!16

It was a short-lived experiment. The Party was displeased with the futurists’
contributions and the verdict was passed down to Hempel. A mésalliance on
both sides, Braun told Broniewski.17
After that, the futurists set out upon different paths. Braun rebelled against
both proletarian poetry and the avant-garde, telling Broniewski in January 1925
that he had now adopted a classical style: ‘Today I’m at a new stage. Nothing
connects me to the so-called new art. I’m reaching out to other places for “mod-
els”. I’m writing classically. I don’t care at all about the gains of futurism, I’m
alien vis-à-vis Russian poetry; Mayakovsky, Esenin, Apollinaire somewhere fell
into a void and utterly disappeared for me.’18 When the Second World War
came, Braun, as a Jew, went to the Warsaw ghetto. From behind the wall, he
sent letters to his friends on the ‘Aryan Side’ in which he wrote of the Pol-
ish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad and the Polish Romantic poet Adam
Mickiewicz, who lived in Paris.
One evening Aleksander Wat met the aspiring actress Ola Lev at a year’s
end drama school ball. Afterward, he ran excitedly to his friend Irena Krzy-
wicka, the sexually liberated feminist whose writing seemed to Wat to be ‘pas-
séist’, and told her the wonderful news: such a beautiful girl – and she wanted
him! Irena Krzywicka was impressed. After all, Wat himself was rather ugly.19
But he was not ugly to Ola, and theirs was to be greatest love affair of all. He
would take her with him to Café Ziemian;ska, where she would mix choco-
late into her coffee. When once at a party where the guests drank vodka and
ate herring served on newspaper, a certain soon-to-be-Trotskyite named Isaac
Deutscher pulled Ola onto his lap, Wat jealously pulled her away, for she be-
longed to him.20
122 Marci Shore

In 1927, Aleksander Wat and Ola Lev were married, and Wat presented
his bride with a homemade wedding gift: a collection of short stories titled
Lucifer Unemployed. The tales were parabolic, anti-utopian, nihilist. In one titled
‘The Eternally Wandering Jew’, Nathan, an orphaned Talmudic student from
the shtetl Zebrzydowo, travels through all of Europe to the US in search of his
benefactor, the rich Baron Gould. The story, set during a moment when Eu-
rope is ‘cannibalistic, impoverished, mystical, sadistic, prostituted’, is framed by
the foil of the US and the dialectic of the Old and New Worlds; by the image
of the isolated shtetl; and by the refrain, ‘there is always mud in Zebrzydowo’.21
In New York, now as Baron Gould’s secretary, Nathan conceives of the ideal
social world as one that reconciles communism and Catholicism. He insists that
the Jews convert en masse to Catholicism; and the yeshiva student himself be-
comes Pope. The story ends hundreds of years later, when the last anti-Semites
come upon Nathan’s shtetl Zebrzydowo. There they convert to Judaism and
restore the ancient Hebraic traditions.
As Wat hovered at the edge of this abyss, vacillating among nihilism, Ca-
tholicism and communism, Witold Wandurski made an existential leap into the
arms of the Revolution. Broniewski was too timid; he failed to grasp, his friend
wrote from Łódz;, that revolution was a fire into which you must throw yourself,
burn yourself, descend into savagery and barbarism. Wandurski was ecstatic, he
had reached an epiphany: their problems with apparatchiks like Hempel, their
whole stance of ‘intellectual autonomy’, it was all masked intellectual oppor-
tunism, appeasement. ‘Yes, appeasement! I want content, life, joy’, he wrote to
Broniewski, ‘I want to be an authentic futurist.’22 A few days earlier, Wandur-
ski had abandoned poetry to serve as secretary for two of the ‘reddest’ labour
unions in Łódz; – and he felt wonderful. He urged his friend to do the same,
to break free from Café Ziemian;ska – which was, after all, an empty place, ‘the
hole in the bagel’ – and throw himself into the fire of revolution.
In the meantime, the young poet Władysław Broniewski, who had dreamt
of a fantastical romance with a diabolic woman, now fell in love with a pretty
girl named Janina Kunizæanka. He wrote her love letters in a language reminis-
cent of the knights and castles of pre-modern chivalry. Janina Kunizæanka loved
him as well, with an affection and concern that would last her entire life. Her
greatest, most undying love, though, was for a tall woman with a strong voice
named Wanda Wasilewska. These two women would come to mean more to
each other than any of the six husbands they had between them.
In 1926, Wanda Wasilewska was not yet in Warsaw. She was still living in
Cracow, where she drank black coffee and chain-smoked and wrote poems for
a newspaper called Robotnik (The Worker). She was a promising young leader
of the Polish Socialist Party and a woman of great passions – for Poland, for
social justice and above all for a man named Janek, who was her first love. In
the journal she kept as a teenager, she described masochistic fantasies: she lies
beneath his boots and kisses off the dust that clings to them, she feels his spurs
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 123

digging into her back until she bleeds. ‘Because I believe in you as in God’, she
addresses Janek in her diary, ‘And for me you are the highest essence, you are
my master, my ruler. If you were to so order, I would fulfil anything. Even the
worst humiliations, the worst injuries, I would bear with a smile if you were to
so much as want that.’23
Władysław Broniewski was not the only one for whom the Russian futur-
ist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky opened up new worlds. As a generation, it was,
perhaps, their identification with Stefan ZÆeromski’s novel Przedwios;nie (The
Spring to Come) – the story of the young, romantic youth who finds his way
to the revolution – and their love for Mayakovsky that set them apart. It was a
love that consumed them with a particular intensity – and a love that was finally
consummated in the spring of 1927, when Mayakovsky, the ‘gangplank’ be-
tween the avant-garde and the Revolution, paid a visit to Warsaw.24 He was to
be their most passionate love affair – a love affair which was, they thought, the
beginning of the future, of the new world. Now at the train station, the poets’
first impression of Mayakovsky was an impression of enormity.25 Mayakovsky
himself was hypnotising, his voice was of ‘colossal range’.26 Rooms trembled
when he read his poetry. ‘I assume’, Wat wrote of an evening that spring with
Mayakovsky, ‘that chills went up the spines of quite a few of the people there,
for that truly was imperious power. That wasn’t a man, that wasn’t a poet; that
was an empire, the coming world empire.’27
They were all intoxicated by his voice, yet also by his hands, large and
tender, and by his gentleness, his paradoxical fragility. Janina Broniewska sensed
that beneath his powerful exterior was a ‘self-defense against shyness and lyri-
cism’.28 Ola Watowa, too, felt that in this ‘figure of a giant there was something
very gentle, disarming, something that at moments seemed like weakness’.29
For Wat, Mayakovsky was the picture of Russian manhood, and at once a su-
perhuman of ‘cosmic melancholy’.30 As Mayakovsky read his poetry in Wat’s
living room, Janina Broniewska went into the kitchen to help Wat’s delicate
wife, who struck her as possessing an odalisque-like beauty. From the kitchen,
Janina Broniewska saw how the Russian poet could not keep his lyrical, en-
chanting eyes away from their hostess.31 For her part, Ola Watowa and her
husband both fell very much in love with the Russian futurist.32 In that colossal
voice was the threshold of the new world.
Mayakovsky was happy to meet his Polish counterparts, he grew close to
Wat, but maintained a scepticism toward the literary scene in Warsaw more
generally and in particular its desire to be Parisian. ‘They chase the youth to the
Louvre’, Mayakovsky wrote of Polish intellectuals, ‘they’re happy when Warsaw
is called the Little Paris, they get themselves “the unknown soldier,” they speak
in French and read bad French novels – this is the position of those who rule
over Polish literature’.33 In Mayakovsky’s opinion, if Warsaw was Paris, then
it was ‘a very small Paris’. As for the Polish writers who claimed that Warsaw
was another Moscow, this was, in Mayakovsky’s opinion, ‘simply a mistake’.34
124 Marci Shore

Mayakovsky himself was en route from Paris when he visited Poland. It was in
Paris that he met Bruno Jasien;ski, who had left Poland for the French capital in
1925. There in Paris Jasien;ski one day saw the French writer Paul Morand’s novel
Je brûle Moscou in a bookstore window. He was enraged – and returned home to
write I Burn Paris, the wild apocalyptic tale of a deathly plague transmitted via
contaminated water that destroys the debauched, bourgeois city – only those
in prison are spared.35 Thus, Jasien;ski portrayed, was the old, bourgeois Europe
defeated; in its place ascended the new, progressive Europe. For this the French
deported him, and Jasien;ski forsook returning home to Poland in favour of
sailing on to Leningrad and a hero’s welcome. He was not alone. By this time,
Witold Wandurski also had headed east for the great socialist homeland.
At the end of the decade, Aleksander Wat became the editor of a new
Marxist literary periodical. On the pages of Miesieç cznik Literacki (The Literary
Monthly), he recanted his futurist youth. The futurists, he wrote, had aspired to
a ‘progressive revolution of forms of expression’, but instead had engendered
only anarchisation. There had been no place in bourgeois art for a battle against
passéisme; yet the futurists’ own battle against passéisme, which should have led
to social revolution as in Russia, had led them instead toward anarchism and
decadence. Wat’s memoirs of futurism were a pre-Stalinist self-criticism: the
futurists had reached the workers’ movement without historical materialism.
Polish futurism, Wat wrote, had been ‘the crooked mirror in which Caliban
gazed at himself with a grimace of abomination’.36 Shortly after Wat wrote this,
Vladimir Mayakovsky took his own life in his Moscow room. The first detail
that reached the Polish poets who so loved him was the phrase from his suicide
note ‘liubovnaia lodka/razbilas’ v byt’ (the love boat/crashed against the everyday).37
Now Wat dedicated the May 1930 issue of The Literary Monthly to the Russian
friend who had shown him the path to the Revolution.38
The Literary Monthly lived on after Mayakovsky’s death for little more than
a year. In September 1931, the police interrupted an editorial board meeting
and arrested those present. This was the ritual baptism in prison they had been
so excitedly anticipating. Aleksander Wat’s wife Ola sent care packages with
notes tucked inside the head of a herring. Władysław Broniewski sat in the cell,
translating Gogol and reciting his poetry. Broniewski was that kind of poet,
Wat was later to remember, the best kind – poetry in any circumstance. When
Wat and Broniewski were released several months later, they began receiving
invitations again to receptions at the Soviet embassy. No one spoke about poli-
tics, and the Polish poets threw themselves upon the caviar. This was their life
– pastries at Café Ziemian;ska and herring in their prison cell and caviar at the
Soviet embassy.
Bruno Jasien;ski, the dandy who wore a top hat and monocle, was spared
Polish prison. Upon arriving in Leningrad, the former futurist was given a
grand reception: the Soviet Union, homeland of the proletariat, was more than
happy to grant asylum to this Polish revolutionary persecuted in bourgeois
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 125

France. In Russia, the gaunt Jasien;ski immediately abandoned his Polish wife
for an obese Russian journalist. They spent their vacations in Tadzhikistan, and
from one such visit Jasien;ski returned with two Tadzhik eagles, which joined
him and his new wife in their Moscow home. When a Polish writer came to
visit, Jasien;ski hosted an extravagant dinner party in his filthy apartment. The
table, set with silver and crystal and glasses bearing the numerals of the last
emperor, strained from the weight. Beluga and caviar and crystal. Spider webs
covering the iron doors of the stove. There was no need to freeze the alcohol;
there was frost in the room.
While Wanda Wasilewska’s self-effacing romance with Janek was long, their
engagement was short. In May of 1923, she wrote in her diary that ‘the royal
prince has gone’, and that a chapter in her life had ended.39 Before long, she
married another man and gave birth to a daughter; soon afterward, her young
husband died. A short time after his death, Wanda Wasilewska met the brick-
layer – and Polish Socialist Party activist – Marian Bogatko, with whom her
courtship began during a kayaking trip on the Vistula river. When their kayak
overturned, Bogatko saved Wasilewska from drowning. Unlike the young ath-
letic bricklayer, Wasilewska was a weak swimmer.40
At the age of fifteen, Wanda Wasilewska had written in her diary that she
judged it ‘nobler’ to be a man’s lover than to be his wife.41 To this youthful
view she now returned, and soon Bogatko had become her lover. In 1933, she
wrote a long letter to her mother, justifying her decision to continue living
with Bogatko without a wedding and insisting that so often she rejoiced at the
absence of formalities. How good that there had been no marriage. ‘For once,
finally’, Wasilewska wrote, ‘I’m a person and not someone else’s appendage
… even though Marian and I share the same values (of equality), on my side
there would be the minus that I am a woman, and as a result would always be
the other one, and not myself.’42 Being herself was something she had long de-
spaired was impossible. In January 1922, on her seventeenth birthday, she had
confessed in her diary, ‘I know well that I will always be only a shadow of the
person I love.’43 A self was not the only thing whose absence she felt painfully.
In 1919, at the age of fourteen, Wanda Wasilewska had written of how desper-
ately she longed to find a girl who could be a true friend, to whom she could
confide all of her secrets.44 It was fifteen years later when Wanda Wasilewska
met such a girl, who was by now a woman – a mother of a young girl named
Anka and the wife of the famous revolutionary poet Władysław Broniewski.
Soon Wanda Wasilewska and Janina Broniewska could not endure a single day
without one another.45
In 1933, Witold Wandurski was arrested in the Soviet Union, accused of
right-wing deviation, Polish nationalism and espionage. He was executed the
following year. Before Wandurski was shot, his interrogators extracted from
him an elaborate false confession damning to his friends, to Bruno Jasien;ski and
Władysław Broniewski. Now, three years later, it was the height of the Terror,
126 Marci Shore

and Bruno Jasien;ski was to follow Wandurski to the grave. In Moscow, Jasien;ski
defended himself: he had never been a Polish spy, he had had nothing to do
with Polish spies. He wrote a letter to Stalin counter-attacking those who ac-
cused him.46 Three days later, he changed his mind; he sent a second letter to
Stalin, this time a self-criticism: ‘You have taught us to have the courage to
confess fully to our errors, but I am ashamed to confess to them before you.’
Nonetheless he did. Only now did he realise how he had been an instrument
in the maneuvers of the Trotskyite enemies.47 Stalin was unmoved. Jasien;ski
was arrested. In prison they tortured him. He confessed to everything. Several
days later, he sent a letter to his persecutors, recanting the testimony extracted
under duress. In January 1938, in a prison cell awaiting execution, he wrote of
his favourite poet Mayakovsky, who had brought him to the October Revolu-
tion, and he thanked the Stalinist security apparatus for having opened his eyes,
for having helped him to understand his guilt, the depth of filth in which he
had been wading about like a blind man.48 Aleksander Wat wrote a poem after
the death of his dandyist futurist friend: ‘arrogant Bruno… Let us say/a bedtime
prayer for him.’49

Communism-in-Power

On 1 September 1939, interwar Warsaw came to an end. Despite his illustrious

military record, Władysław Broniewski was not mobilised. He was now in his
forties – too old from the point of the view of the Polish Army. Moreover, he
was known as a communist. Undeterred, Broniewski set out on his bicycle in
search of his regiment – he wanted to fight for Poland. After he had traversed
the route from Warsaw through Lublin and Tarnopol, friends found him in a
Lwów hotel. He was wearing his military uniform, awaiting his assignment,
eager to fight.50 But it was too late. On 12 September, Broniewski found his
regiment; five days later, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland.51 After five
days more, the Polish defence commander signed an act of capitulation, relin-
quishing Lwów to the Red Army.
Slavoj Žižek has written of how there is, perhaps ‘no greater love than that
of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the
other at any moment if the revolution demands it’.52 And the revolution de-
manded just this of Wanda Wasilewska. Refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland
were pouring into now-Soviet Lvov; the city quickly became a juxtaposition
of anarchy and Soviet totalitarianism. Some seven years earlier, Wasilewska had
confided to her mother that she felt much more for Marian Bogatko than she
could have ever imagined feeling for anyone. ‘I don’t know – perhaps I’m blind
and deaf ’, she wrote to her mother, ‘but I don’t see so much as the slightest flaw
in that man – he is so wonderfully young, pure and good. Not a single second
goes by when that boy thinks of himself – generosity comes to him somehow
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 127

so easily and so simply, that one doesn’t even notice it.’53 Now in Soviet Gali-
cia, Wanda Wasilewska would call on that generosity again. It was the moment
of her extraordinary rise to power, the moment when she was to become a
man of state and a confidante of Stalin. Yet Marian Bogatko did not share his
wife’s uncritical enthusiasm for Soviet life, he was wary of the propaganda and
sceptical. His distrust toward the Soviet state was mutual, and Bogatko’s stay
in Lvov would prove to be short. On a certain day in April 1940, two or three
unknown men rang the doorbell of the villa Bogatko shared with Wasilewska.
He answered the door. One of the men shot him.54
Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Ukrainian section
of the Bolshevik Party, had by the time of Bogatko’s murder already become
a great admirer of Wasilewska.55 Given his fondness for her, Khrushchev was
very disturbed to learn that ‘their Chekists’ had killed her husband. He ordered
‘his Ukrainians’ to go to Wasilewska, apologise and ask for her understanding.56
One of these Ukrainians was the communist playwright Oleksandr Kornei-
chuk, charged by Khrushchev with organising cultural life in Lvov. Aleksander
Wat, upon his own arrival in Lvov in autumn of 1939, also went to see Kornei-
chuk, who was living then at the Hotel George. To Wat, Korneichuk seemed
to possess a kind of beauty alluring to homosexuals – ‘masculine, but at once
servile, sweet-scented’.57 And so the sweet-scented Korneichuk and his Ukrai-
nian friend went to Wasilewska and asked for her understanding. She under-
stood. Before long, Wanda Wasilewska had become Korneichuk’s lover.
In Soviet Lvov the poets of Café Ziemian;ska were invited by a scenogra-
pher friend to a dinner party at a fashionable gathering spot. On that evening,
he drove their wives to the restaurant in a black limousine; he was especially
generous, ordering delicacies and vodka for everyone. Then someone provoked
a brawl. Wat was hit in the jaw. Blood poured from his face; he collapsed.
Adam Wazæyk, who had recently become an editor of a Stalinist newspaper in
Lvov, helped Ola Watowa to revive her husband. Their scenographer friend
fled the restaurant. Aleksander Wat, Władysław Broniewski and Anatol Stern
were arrested; now it was they who rode in the same black limousine to prison.
Having been communists in interwar Polish prison, now they were Polish na-
tionalists, Jewish nationalists, Zionists, Trotskyites, spies and provocateurs in
Soviet prison. Inside Aleksander Wat’s prison cell, he and his companions held
contests to see who could kill the most lice. Later, Wat and Broniewski were
transferred to Lubyanka, Moscow’s infamous prison. There, Wat talked to his
cellmate about linguistics, and to his interrogator about Polish literature. Luby-
anka had a library as well as torture chambers, and there in Stalinist prison
Wat read European literature: Tolstoy, Saint Augustine and Machiavelli, Marcel
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.58
By now, Janina Broniewska and Władysław Broniewski had long been
separated, and she was pregnant with her new lover’s child. Yet now that Bro-
niewski found himself in Soviet prison, she refused to pursue a formal di-
128 Marci Shore

vorce. For her, it would have been ‘worse than unfaithfulness in marriage. It
would have been a disavowal of everything that joined us throughout our lives.
Solidarity, boundless confidence in the sincerity and earnestness of our shared
convictions made it impossible to divorce a communist imprisoned in a Soviet
prison.’59 Then came the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union and the amnesty
of 1941; Wat and Broniewski were released from prison, and Wat found him-
self in Kazakhstan. There in Alma-Ata, Mayakovsky’s friend Viktor Shklovskii
found Wat on the street and took him in; now Wat joined Shklovskii’s circle
of friends: the novelist and playwright Konstantin Paustovsky, the humorist
Mikhail Zoshchenko, Zoshchenko’s young wife, the screenwriter Mikhail
Shnaider and the film director Sergei Eisenstein. It was Mayakovsky, dead for
over a decade, who had inducted Wat into this Russian circle, and now an edi-
tor came to Wat to attempt to persuade him to write down his reminiscences
about his Russian futurist friend, offering to pay him well. Wat refused. He
refused even to speak of Mayakovsky; he could not bear it.60

On Warsaw’s Ashes

The war ended. From Kazakhstan and Moscow via Jerusalem, Władysław Bro-
niewski returned to a Warsaw now burnt to ashes. There he wrote a beautiful
poem in praise of Stalin. The other poets also returned to Warsaw after their
years in the Soviet Union. In communist Poland, Adam Wazæyk became the
‘terroretician’ of socialist realism. He retold the history of the avant-garde for
the benefit of those too young to remember, and explained that the thrill of
discarding all formerly obtaining literary rules was the thrill of remaking the
world. Wazæyk did not go as far in belittling his avant-garde years as he might
have; his younger colleague suspected that this was because ‘Wazæyk never could
have renounced Apollinaire – he would sooner have slashed his own arteries.’61
And, in fact, Wazæyk continued to see in the French avantgardist’s work ‘the
brilliant introduction to almost all of innovative poetry’.62 Yet he qualified
himself: words were only a substitute for people, avantgardism in literature a
substitute for revolution. ‘In a word’, Wazæyk concluded, ‘unable in the realm of
art to carry through battles for upheaval in social life, (the avant-garde) enacted
upheavals in the forms of art’.63 Mayakovsky was the exception. His poetry
stood as ‘an example of great revolutionary passion’, he had understood the
strength of words and the responsibility a writer must bear for them.64
Aleksander Wat was ostracised. He was no longer a Marxist and spoke
out against socialist realism at a Writers’ Union meeting. ‘When the bear is
grumpy, you give him a bat on the head and then he’ll shut up’, he was an-
swered in Russian. He returned home feverish and ill. Not long afterward, on
New Year’s Eve of 1954, The Literary Monthly’s star literary critic, who had once
fallen in love with Władysław Broniewski’s young wife, presented the now
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 129

weak and sickly Aleksander Wat with a gift: a complete collection of the short-
lived Literary Monthly with the dedication ‘In memory of the shared sins of our
youth’. On the first page of the first issue Wat scribbled, ‘the corpus delecti of my
degradation … in communism, by communism’.65
Among the literati in Poland, it was Adam Wazæyk who pulled the cur-
tain on his own performance. Apollinaire’s translator-turned-‘terroretician’ of
socialist realism initiated the revolt against his own reign. He did so with an
impassioned bitterness. His 1955 ‘Poem for Adults’ was a eulogy for a lost Po-
land. Its motif is the unrecognisability of Warsaw; its tone is one of dislocation;
its refrain: ‘give me a piece of old stone/let me find myself again in Warsaw’.
He wrote of ‘vultures of abstraction’ who ‘devour our brains’, of ‘language …
reduced to thirty incantations’, of a ‘lamp of imagination extinguished’.66 The
narrative topos in ‘A Poem for Adults’ was drawn from an old story: the em-
peror is wearing no clothes.
Wazæyk walked around repeating, ‘I’ve been in an insane asylum.’67 As 1956
came to an end, Wazæyk was among those who came together with the idea
of beginning a new literary monthly called Europa. When the Party refused
to consent to Europa’s existence, Wazæyk returned his Party card.68 Władysław
Broniewski had harsh words to say about Wazæyk’s betrayal of the Party – not-
withstanding the fact that Broniewski himself had always remained a ‘fellow
traveller’ and did not even have a Party card to return.69 An older friend sent
a copy of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to Broniewski – and Broniewski with-
drew his poem about Stalin from the next edition of his collected poems.70
Now Anatol Stern returned to Moscow, where Mayakovsky’s onetime lover
Lila Brik, sister-in-law of the French surrealist Louis Aragon, introduced him
to Bruno Jasien;ski’s Russian wife – who just several days earlier had returned
to Moscow after a seventeen-year stay in the gulag. She showed Stern the letter
from the prosecutor: Bruno Jasien;ski had been rehabilitated, his death sentence
post-humorously overturned.71
Stern copied the letter by hand and brought it back to Poland. Soon after-
ward, he and Adam Wazæyk published an anthology of Mayakovsky’s poetry –
in a Polish translation by themselves, by Władysław Broniewski and Bruno
Jasien;ski. In his introduction, Stern reminded his readers that Mayakovsky and
the Revolution were one. He added of Mayakovsky’s love for the Revolution:
‘And if for her he devoted at times even his own poetry, he did this as a man
who was ready to do anything his beloved demanded of him – even at those
times when he sees her claiming that to which she has no right and that which
she should not demand.’72
Aleksander Wat did not recover from his illness, and abandoned Warsaw
for warmer climates, for France and Italy. Living in West European exile, Wat
fell into bouts of self-hatred and struggled with his identity. At moments he
felt he was – and always had been – a Jew, a Polish-speaking cosmopolitan.
At other moments, he felt strongly that as a Polish poet, his homeland was his
130 Marci Shore

language, and he belonged in Poland, where his father and his father’s fathers
were buried. ‘In the end’, Wat wrote in his diary in Paris, ‘I’ve found myself in
a fine place: not at home, not with the emigration – in a void.’73

Death

Władysław Broniewski would call his friends in the middle of the night and
demand that they listen as he recited his poetry. In 1960, he published an an-
thology of Polish translations of foreign poetry – of Aleksander Pushkin, Vlad-
imir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin, of Friedrich Wolf and Bertold Brecht
– titled My Poetic Friendships.74 By now, Broniewski had deteriorated into al-
coholism. He drank and smoked himself to death: in February 1962, he died
of throat cancer. In London, Broniewski’s old editor from the interwar years
gathered information for Broniewski’s obituary. He wrote to Wat asking about
the legendary Literary Monthly, and about the 1931 imprisonment of The Lit-
erary Monthly’s editorial board.75 Wat answered in detail. ‘Of the first seven
revolutionary writers’, he wrote to Broniewski’s onetime editor, ‘there remains
only myself, sick, wrecked, but for a long time now the most radically cured
of that degeneration’.76
After Broniewski’s death in Warsaw, the younger Polish émigré poet
Czesław Miłosz arranged for the Wats to spend a year in Berkeley. In his let-
ters to Wat from California, Miłosz warned him that America was something
entirely different, inexplicable in any terms available to Europeans. ‘Because
we’re so peculiar’, Miłosz wrote, ‘sometimes an American Jew can understand
us, but even so, only to a small extent … I know cases of people who fled from
America because “there are no cafés” – and this is a symbolic formulation of
something deeper.’77 Now for the first time, Wat would encounter in person
the place that as a young writer he had conjured up as Europe’s Other in ‘The
Eternally Wandering Jew’. In December 1963, the Wats arrived in Califor-
nia, where the Berkeley Slavicists received them warmly, and where Wat was
charmed by the bright, young graduate students.78 Yet it was a capriciously
ephemeral interlude. Wat sensed that others at Berkeley feared that Wat would
try to find a way to stay in the United States, and so treated him coldly; their
fears humiliated him.79 The same young people who had been so embracing
and attentive during those first days now disappeared, their curiosity having
been satisfied, their interest now waned, they avoided him when they passed
on the street. As Wat watched them turn the other way, he began to understand
not only the superficiality of their initial warm reception, but also their fear of
being ‘contaminated’ by someone like himself who would surely not manage
to make a career there; he felt the division of American society into the ‘los-
ers’ and the successful ones. ‘Now I, too, am a loser’, Wat wrote in his diary.80
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 131

America had not saved Aleksander Wat. On the contrary, it alienated him more;
he could not find a place for himself in this land where there were no cafés.
In the 1960s, Anatol Stern wrote a warm, even hagiographic book about
his old futurist collaborator Bruno Jasien;ski.81 Stern speculated: had Jasien;ski
been able to see into the future what awaited him in ten years, would he have
come home to Poland instead of boarding that ship bound for Leningrad? Or
would Jasien;ski’s fanatical nature not have allowed for a change in itinerary
even if he were to have had forebodings of the tragic ending?82 Stern had solic-
ited Wat’s contribution to his work on Jasien;ski, but Wat had refused. Stern was
disappointed. Even in his sixties, Stern continued to be moved by the memo-
ries of their futurist antics of long ago.83 By now Wat saw in Stern’s nostalgia
for their futurist years only pathos. Moreover, it seemed to Wat that the one
great contribution Stern had made to Polish poetry in those early years – the
unabashed sexuality he refused to censor – Stern himself now discounted. At
one time, Stern had paid a high price for his refusal to shy away from erotism;
in his youth, he had gone to prison on charges of profanity.84 Of his one-time
futurist co-author Wat now wrote to a younger literary historian – invoking
an allusion to the intentional misspellings that the futurists had once delighted
in: ‘he was already back then “pontifical”, but – then – it added charm to his
impudence. But a 67-year-old Kingg of New Art! – it’s a sorry sight. It’s dif-
ficult today to imagine the freshness and lustre of the boasting intelligence, the
wit he had then.’85
On Friday, 29 July 1967, Ola Watowa went into the room where her hus-
band was sleeping, took him in her arms and tried to wake him. His head was
turned to the side, he was cold and calm. She saw the sheets of paper by his
feet. On one, Wat had written in large letters: ‘DO NOT SAVE ME.’ On a
second, he had written a letter to her – ‘my life, my everything’ – pleading
with her to forgive him for this crime.86 Earlier that evening, he had swal-
lowed forty tablets of Nembuttal. He was buried in France, in the cemetery in
Montmorency. The erratically written pages left at the foot of the bed told a
remarkable love story that lasted nearly half a century. Their love was, for Wat,
the one source of purity in his anguish-laden life. He did not believe he had
ever deserved Ola.87 Now in his final pages he wrote poetry to her, for her,
about her: ‘The faithfulness and devotion of (my) wife/ make sublime our/
male debacles…//The purity and devotion of (my) wife/sanctifies existence.’88
When, many years after his suicide, now in her old age, Ola Watowa wrote her
memoirs, she began with the words, ‘Everything that is most important in my
life is connected to Aleksander.’ She wrote of how she would get goose bumps
whenever she thought of how she might not have been at that drama school
ball, she might never have met him, and her life would have been wasted.89
After the war, Wanda Wasilewska had chosen not to return to Poland. She
remained in Soviet Ukraine with Oleksandr Korneichuk. He in turn remained
132 Marci Shore

a playboy, ostentatiously unfaithful. She was unhappy but said nothing. Like-
wise, about Marian Bogatko’s murder Wasilewska never said to her daughter
a single word. If she spoke about this at all, it was to Janina Broniewska, who
kept her friend’s secret. At home in Warsaw, Janina Broniewska was not entirely
without jealousy that her closest friend had chosen to remain far away, and
once told her granddaughter, drawing on a slang pejorative for Poland’s eastern
neighbours, ‘Out of love for Korneichuk Wanda stayed with those Russians.’90
When Wasilewska died suddenly of a heart attack in 1964, Broniewska traveled
to Kiev for her funeral. Afterward, she wrote, ‘In my home there remain her
books, her furniture, and so, so often I have the impression that she still lives. I
know the beating of Wanda’s heart, I know her personal affairs. It was proposed
to me that I write her biography, but I couldn’t do it. She’s just too close.’91
Later, Janina Broniewska would emphasise that family members, sisters, do not
choose one another, whereas theirs was ‘a love by choice’.92

Intimacy, Betrayal and Marxism

Janina Broniewska referred often in her memoirs to the private language she
and Wasilewska shared, their letters read more than once as if encrypted. And
so even under Stalinist totalitarianism, and even among communists, a space
for intimacy remained. This speaks as well to the young Broniewski, who in
the 1920s was writing proletarian poetry in a new, communist idiom and let-
ters to Janina Kunizæanka in a language reminiscent of chivalry – Broniewski’s
multilingualism, like that of these two women, ran deep. In fact, it is so that
among all of these figures, an internal Bakhtinian polyphony of voices never
disappeared. After Broniewski’s death, when his friends and fellow poets wrote
of him, they would marvel at ‘how much love that man bore in his heart’.93
Throughout his life, Broniewski maintained perhaps four great passions: for
women, for poetry, for Poland and for the Revolution. Their accompanying
discourses – romantic and literary, patriotic and communist – while sometimes
disentwined, nonetheless coexisted even in the most improbable – and inaus-
picious – circumstances. Likewise did Wat’s love for his wife transcend all of
his ideological choices – even at the height of his communist engagement, he
ignored Isaac Deutscher’s accusation that he was harbouring foolish bourgeois
prejudices and whisked Ola Watowa off of Deutscher’s lap. Theirs was a love
story. Yet so was the Revolution. Their own narcissism was unbearable – they
fled from it, desperate for a love that would consume them. As for Wandurski
who longed to burn himself in the fire, and Wasilewska who longed to feel
spurs digging into her back, so for all of them, Revolution was a passion not
devoid of masochistic fantasy. They were never enthralled by communism, per
se, as much as they were by the promise of transcendence via conflagration –
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 133

transcendence of national boundaries, transcendence of all that was backwards

and constricting, unjust and inadequate in Poland, transcendence of their own
self-absorption. For the poets of Café Ziemian;ska, the Revolution was only
secondarily dialectical materialism; more importantly, it was their realisation of
their European cosmopolitanism, their self-fulfilment through self-annihilation,
their fiercest of romantic loves.
Yet the Revolution proved capricious and fickle and did not love the poets
back. And so in the end did the poets of Café Ziemian;ska and their friends
live their lives ensconced in angst, the creators as well as the victims of tragic
fate. And here ‘tragic’ must be in understood in its non-classical meaning, as
the preservation of the beauty of a disastrous action.94 The poets suffered this
fate intensely personally as well, by the force of their private relationships. For
them, the moment of Mayakovsky’s 1927 visit was the ecstatic beginning of
the Revolution, the new world – yet in fact it was the climax, the beginning of
the end. He was their greatest love affair, the nexus point of liminality through
which they fell in love with the aesthetics of the Revolution. For these writers,
faith and betrayal referred not only to Marxist ideology, but more poignantly
to Mayakovsky, the greatest of all of their loves.
In the end, the choices they made to opt for (and out of) Marxism became
those that framed their lives. They were a particularly sad generation, pursued
in their old age by a demon of communism, who haunted their old city, its
ruined cafés that were burnt to ashes. They died consumed by their pasts. Ulti-
mately, these avant-garde poets-turned-revolutionary Marxists were destroyed
by Marxism, by the choices they made to embrace Marxism – choices they
made in the absence of an understanding of what Marxist ideas translated into
communism-in-practice meant. Their story contains no possibility of an aes-
thetically pleasing ending. They became neither Polish nationalists of the Right
nor revisionist Marxists, they did not try to sift through the layers of Stalin,
then Lenin, and return to Marx. They were too old, too crushed – this was left
for the next generation. For the Polish generation born at the fin-de-siècle, the
young avant-garde poets of the 1920s, after Marxism there was no new love,
after Marxism there was nothing.
Many years after Aleksander Wat had committed suicide, when she had
long been living in Paris, his wife Ola Watowa went to Warsaw and paid a visit
to Adam Wazæyk, by then an old man and the last of the avant-garde friends
among the living. As soon as Ola Watowa sat down in his apartment, Wazæyk
hurried to remind her that he was also once a Stalinist. I know, I know, she
answered. She had not forgotten. The confession was not Wazæyk’s only source
of pain. The Polish PEN Club had recently dedicated an evening to the French
futurist Apollinaire; Wazæyk had not been invited. ‘I was the first one in Poland
to translate Apollinaire’, he told Ola Watowa, ‘and they didn’t even invite me
to say a few words’.95
134 Marci Shore

Notes
1. Quoted in Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (London: Macmillan, 1969),
385.
2. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect. French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992), 38.
3. Władysław Broniewski, Pamieçtnik 1918–1922 (Warsaw: PIW, 1984), 323.
4. Aleksander Wat, My Century.The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, trans. Richard Lourie (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 6.
5. Broniewski, Pamieçtnik 1918–1922, 38.
6. Feliks Lichodziejewska, ed., ‘Pamieçtnik Władysława Broniewskiego 1918–1922’, Polityka
7 (13 February 1965): 1.
7. Broniewski, Pamieçtnik 1918–1922, 214.
8. Aleksander Wat, ‘JA z jednej strony a JA z drugiej strony mego mopsozæelaznego piecyka’,
in Poezje, eds Anna Micin;ska and Jan Zielin;ski (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1997), 307–335.
9. Wat, My Century, 5.
10. Anatol Stern and Aleksander Wat, ‘GGA’, in Antologia polskiego futuryzmu i nowej sztuki,
ed. Helena Zaworska (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolin;skich, 1978), 3.
11. Stefan ZÆeromski, Snobizm i posteçp (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo J. Morkowicza, 1926), 1, 4,
73, respectively.
12. Braun to Broniewski, Łódz;, 22 May 1923, teczka Brauna, Muzeum Broniewskiego,
Warsaw (MB).
13. Feliksa Lichodziejewska, ‘Korespondencja Władysława Broniewskiego z Bronisławem
Sylwinem Kencbokiem’, Pamieçtnik Literacki 62, no. 4 (1971): 149–219, quote at 212–213.
14. Witold Wandurski, ‘Majakowski i Polscy Poeci’, in Włodzimierz Majakowski, ed. Florian
Nieuwazæny (Warsaw: Pan;stwowe Zakłady Wydawnictw Szkolnych, 1965), 277–286, here 280.
15. Bruno Iasenskii, Aleksander Vat, and Anatol Stern to Vladimir Maiakovskii, Warsaw, 1
July 1921, 2852/1/599, RGALI, Moscow.
16. Witold Wandurski, ‘Do panów poetów’, Nowa Kultura 15 (22 December 1923): 392.
17. Feliksa Lichodziejewska, ed., Od bliskich i dalekich. Korespondencja do Władysława Broniew-
skiego 1915–1930, vol. 1 (Warsaw: PIW, 1981), 115–116.
18. Braun to Broniewski, Łódz;, 6 January 1925, in Lichodziejewska, Od bliskich i dalekich,
1: 143–144.
19. Irena Krzywicka, Wyznania gorszycielki (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1998), 274.
20. Ola Watowa, Wszystko co najwazæniejsze (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1990), 13, 20.
21. Aleksander Wat, ‘The Eternally Wandering Jew’, in Lucifer Unemployed, trans. Lillian Val-
lee (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 8.
22. Wandurski to Broniewski, Łódz;, 22 January 1926, A/2, MB.
23. 15 October 1919 and 29 February 1920, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, Tsentral’nyi
Derzhavnyi Arkhiv-Muzei Literatury i Mystetstva Ukrainy, Kiev (TsDAMLM). Copy provided
by Timothy Snyder.
24. Wat, My Century, 24.
25. Wiktor Woroszylski, ZÆycie Majakowskiego (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1984), 534.
26. Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years, ed. Bengt Jangfeldt, trans. Stephen Rady (New York:
Marsilio, 1992), 12.
27. Wat, My Century, 44.
28. Janina Broniewska, Dziesieçc ; serc czerwiennych (Warsaw: Iskry, 1964), 157.
29. Watowa, Wszystko co najwazæniesze, 16.
30. Wat, My Century, 44.
31. Broniewska, Dziesieçc ; serc czerwiennych, 157.
32. Wat, My Century, 46.
33. Vladimir Maiakovskii, ‘Poverkh Varshavy’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2 (Kalingrad:
FGUIPP Yantarny Skaz, 2002), 91. Alexander Zeyliger helped with this reference.
 Love in the Time of Revolution:The Polish Poets of Café Ziemian;ska 135

34. Maiakovskii, ‘Naruzhnost’ Varshavy’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 88.

35. Bruno Jasien;ski, Paleç Paryzæ (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1957).
36. Aleksander Wat, ‘Wspomnienia o futuryzmie’, Miesieçcznik Literacki 2 (January 1930): 68–
77, quote at 71.
37. Janina Broniewska, Maje i listopady (Warsaw: Iskry, 1967), 47f.
38. Aleksander Wat, ‘Poeta rewolucji Majakowski’, Miesieçcznik Literacki 6 (May 1930): 281–
288.
39. 6 May 1923, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, TsDAMLM.
40. Zofia Aldona Woz;nicka, ‘O mojej siostrze’, in Wanda Wasilewska we wspomnieniach, ed.
Eleanora Syzdek (Warsaw: Ksiaçzæka i Wiedza, 1982), 55f, here 55.
41. 19 October 1919, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, TsDAMLM.
42. Syzdek, ed., Wanda Wasilewska we wspomnieniach, 55f.
43. 20 January 1922, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, TsDAMLM.
44. 4 October 1919, ‘Dziennik 1919–1924’, 73/1/323, TsDAMLM.
45. Janina Broniewska, ‘Przedmowa do “Utworów dla młodziezæy” W. Wasilewskiej’, in
Wanda Wasilewska, ed. Helena Zatorska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1976),
341–344.
46. Jasien;ski to Stalin, 25 April 1937, M/III/55, Archiwum Wschodnie, Warsaw. Polish
translations from the original Russian appear in Krzysztof Jaworski, Bruno Jasien;ski w sowieckim
wieçzieniu. Aresztowanie, wyrok, s;mierc; (Kielce: Wyzæsza szkoła pedagogiczna im. Jana Kochanow-
skiego, 1995).
47. Bruno Jasien;ski to Stalin, 28 April 1937. Jaworski, Bruno Jasien;ski w sowieckim wieçzieniu,
95.
48. Ibid., 141f.
49. Wat, ‘Sny sponad Morza S:ródziemnego’, in Poezje, 103.
50. Quoted in Agnieszka Cies;likowa, Prasa okupowanego Lwowa (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo
Neriton, 1997), 77.
51. Feliksa Lichodziejewska, Broniewski bez cenzury 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo
Społeczne KOS, 1992), 7.
52. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 19–20.
53. Zofia A. Woz;nicka and Eleonora Sydzek, eds, ‘Listy Wandy Wasilewskiej’, Zdanie 6
(1985): 33–39, quote at 38.
54. Jacek Trznadel, ed., Kolaboranci. Tadeusz Boy-ZÆelen;ski i grupa komunistycznych pisarzy w
Lwowie 1939–1941 (Komorów: Fundacja Pomocy Antyk, 1998), 416–423; Watowa, Wszystko co
najwazæniejsze, 36.
55. Nikita Siergiejewicz Chruszczow, ‘Fragmenty wspomnien; N.S. Chruszczowa’, Zeszyty
Historyczne 132 (2000): 109–192, here 118.
56. Ibid., 140.
57. Aleksander Wat, Mój Wiek. Pamieçtnik mówiony (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1998), 1: 275.
58. Wat, My Century, 189, 224–234.
59. Broniewska, Maje i listopady, 235.
60. Wat, My Century, 328.
61. Jan Kott, Still Alive. An Autobiographical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994),
186.
62. Adam Wazæyk, ‘U z;ródeł nowatorstwa w poezji’, Kuz;nica 1, vol. 12 (18 November 1945):
2f, quote at 3.
63. Ibid., 3.
64. Adam Wazæyk, ‘O włas;ciwe stanowisko’, Kuz;nica 5, no. 10 (12 March 1950): 1.
65. Watowa, Wszystko co najwazæniesjze, 147; Wat, My Century, 13–15.
66. Adam Wazæyk, ‘Poemat dla dorosłych’, in Poeta pamieçta. Antologia poezji s;wiadectwa i sprze-
ciwu 1944–1984, ed. Stanisław Baranczak (London: Puls Publications, 1984), 66–72.
67. Kott, Still Alive, 181.
136 Marci Shore

68. ‘Protokół Nr 217 posiedzenia Biura Politycznego z dnia 19 stycznia 1959 r’, in Centrum
władzy. Protokoły posiedzen; kierownictwa PZPR wybór z lata 1949–1970, eds Antoni Dudek et al.
(Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN), 323; also see Kott, Still Alive, 210.
69. Bohdan Drozdowski, ‘Władysław Broniewski’, ZÆycie Literackie 19 (11 May 1958).
70. Stefan ZÆółkiewski to Władysław Broniewski, 26 March 1956, MB.
71. Anatol Stern, Bruno Jasien;ski (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1969), 9–19.
72. Anatol Stern, ‘Słowo wsteçpne’, in Włodzimierz Majakowski, Poezje, eds Mieczysław
Jastrun, Seweryn Pollak, Anatol Stern, and Adam Wazæyk (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1957), 8.
73. Aleksander Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, ed. Krysztof Rutkowski (London: Polonia,
1986), 69.
74. Władysław Broniewski, Moje przyjaz;nie poetyckie (Warsaw: PIW, 1960).
75. Mieczysław Grydzewski to Aleksander Wat, 28 February 1962, London, A-58, Aleksan-
der Wat Papers, Uncat MS Vault 526, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Univer-
sity, New Haven (AWPB).
76. Wat to Mieczysław (Grydzewski), La Messuguiere, 2 March 1962, C-219, AWPB.
77. Miłosz to Wat, Berkeley, B-127, AWPB.
78. Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, 93.
79. Wat to Miłosz, Berkeley, C-222, AWPB; Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, 114f.
80. Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, 130.
81. Stern, Bruno Jasien;ski, 17.
82. Anatol Stern, ‘Bruno Jasien;ski w Paryzæu czyli trzy portrety pisarza’, Kamena 2 (21 Janu-
ary 1968): 4.
83. Anatol Stern to Aleksander Wat, 9 June 1963, A-5, AWPB.
84. Zbigniew Jarosin;ski, ‘Wsteçp’, in Antologia polskiego futuryzmu i nowej sztuki, ed. Zawor-
ska, xxxix; Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Ksiaçzæka Moich Wspomnien; (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
1968), 231f.
85. Wat to Jan S:piewak, 24 December 1965, Antony (letter unsent in this version, ‘zmien-
iony, złagodzony’), C-222, AWPB.
86. Aleksander Wat, ‘Zeszyt ostatni’, 14; Ola Watowa to Seweryna Broniszówna, 20 August
1967, Toulon, C-237, AWPB; Watowa, Wszsytko co najwazæniejsze, 176f.
87. Wat, Dziennik bez samogłosek, 206–208.
88. Wat, ‘Zeszyt ostatni’, 1967, 14, AWPB.
89. Watowa, Wszystko, co najwazæniejsze, 9.
90. Cited in Ewa Zawistowska, personal correspondence to author, Halkidiki, Greece, 15
January 2001.
91. Janina Broniewska, ‘O mojej przyjaciółce Wandzie Wasilewskiej’, Promełej (March 1975):
6.
92. Ibid., 6.
93. See Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s contribution to Stanisław Witold Balicki, ed., To ja – daçb.
Wspomnienia i eseje o Władysławie Broniewskim (Warsaw: PIW, 1978).
94. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 352.
95. Watowa, Wszsytko co najwazæniejsze, 26f.
 CHAPTER 7

Love, Marriage and Divorce

American and European Reactions
to the Abdication of Edward VIII

ALEXIS SCHWARZENBACH

The abdication of Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson in December

1936 was one of the most publicised love stories of the twentieth century.1 As
it involved a European and an American protagonist and made headlines on
both sides of the Atlantic, it is an ideal case to study attitudes toward love in
America and Europe. The first part of this article analyses and compares the
representation of this Anglo-American love story by the American, British and
European media. This section is not only based on newspaper archives, but
also on previously unexplored British Foreign Office reports summarising the
media coverage in a wide range of countries.2 In the second part, the media
evidence will be compared to another rich but rarely explored set of sources:
the great number of unsolicited letters that Edward VIII received during the
abdication crisis.3

Brief Summary of the ‘World’s Greatest Romance’4

During a weekend party in Leicestershire in January 1931, Wallis Simpson, the

35-year-old American wife of a London-based British-American businessman,
met Prince Edward, the 37-year-old heir to the British throne. According to
Wallis, it was three years later, during a summer cruise with the Prince of
Wales, that she and Edward ‘crossed the line that marks the indefinable bound-
ary between friendship and love’.5 Following the death of his father George V,
Edward became King in January 1936. A couple of months later, Wallis Simp-
Notes for this section begin on page 153.
138 Alexis Schwarzenbach

son separated from her husband and began divorce proceedings. In August
1936, she accompanied the king on another cruise and in September she was
his guest at Balmoral in Scotland. On 27 October, her divorce case was heard
at a court in Ipswich in East Anglia. She received a decree nisi, which meant that
in April 1937 her divorce would become absolute and she could re-marry. It
would be her third marriage, for between 1916 and 1927 she had been married
to an American air force officer.6
Three weeks after the divorce, the king informed Prime Minister Stanley
Baldwin of his intention to marry Wallis Simpson. While the king was free to
marry whomever he wanted provided the woman was not a Catholic, the con-
servative prime minister was convinced that Wallis Simpson would not make an
acceptable queen for Britain and its Empire. Apart from Baldwin, a rather het-
erogeneous and by no means organised group of people also opposed Edward’s
marriage plan. It included members of the royal family and the royal house-
hold, sections of the social and political elite of London, as well as prominent
ecclesiastics such as the archbishop of Canterbury. While some people sim-
ply disliked Wallis Simpson because she was an American commoner, others
maintained that the Church of England, headed by the king, did not condone
divorce and that thus a marriage to a divorcee was unacceptable. In order to
overcome the difficulties caused by his marriage plan, the king informed Bald-
win on 23 November that he wanted to marry Wallis Simpson morganatically,
i.e., without her automatically assuming his rank.
Instead of preserving Edward’s throne, the morganatic marriage proposal
provided his opponents with a tool to settle the matter in accordance with their
own interests. They were now able to argue that their opposition to the king’s
marriage plan stemmed neither from the fact that Wallis Simpson was an Amer-
ican commoner nor from the fact the Church of England did not condone di-
vorce. Instead, they argued that the king’s morganatic marriage proposal caused
legal problems leading to a ‘constitutional crisis’. On 4 December, Baldwin
informed the House of Commons of the king’s morganatic marriage plan and
explained that such an unprecedented constitutional act would require special
legislation. Without giving any reasons for their decision, Baldwin unmistake-
ably stated that: ‘His Majesty’s Government are not prepared to introduce such
legislation.’ He added that also none of the governments of the Dominions
– who shared their royal head of state with Britain – were prepared to accept a
morganatic marriage of their sovereign.7 As the king was determined to marry
Wallis Simpson against the constitutionally binding advice of his government,
he abdicated in favour of his brother on 10 December. Just before leaving
Britain on the following day, Edward addressed his former subjects via the
radio and explained: ‘You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it
impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my du-
ties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman
I love.’8
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 139

Headlines in the Americas

The first media reports on Edward and Wallis appeared in American papers
in autumn 1934, more than two years before the abdication.9 After the ac-
cession of Edward in January 1936, American interest in the story increased
and especially long reports were written about the summer cruise to which
the king had invited a group of friends including Wallis Simpson, but not her
husband. Often, they were illustrated with photographs aimed at proving the
strong bond that had allegedly developed between the king and his American
friend. The most frequently reproduced image was a snapshot taken at the
Yugoslavian port of Sibenik. It shows Wallis Simpson inadvertently touching
the king’s arm while trying to leave a small boat (Figure 7.1). The New York
Daily Mirror added the following caption to this image: ‘Mutual interests in
many fields helped the sincere bond of affection between King Edward and
Mrs. Ernest Simpson, pictured on a boat during a recent holiday along the
Dalmatian coast.’10
American interest in ‘Wally’s royal romance’11 became frenetic once the
media found out that the ‘Baltimore girl who won (the) friendship of Edward
VIII’12 was suing for divorce and thus removing the legal obstacle to an Anglo-
American royal wedding. The New York Daily Mirror announced with outmost

Figure 7.1. King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Sibenik, August 1936.
Courtesy Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS.
140 Alexis Schwarzenbach

certainty a day before the divorce came through: ‘King will Wed Wally’.13 Once
Edward’s desire to marry Wallis Simpson was confirmed at the beginning of
December, there was no room left on the front pages for other news. On 3
December, a day before Baldwin’s announcement of the king’s marriage plans,
the British Library of Information in New York reported to the Foreign Of-
fice in London: ‘Constitutional crisis is principal news in American press with
full page headings. Even presidential tour is relegated to second place.’14 Five
days later the Foreign Office was told: ‘American interest in the debate about
the King has been enormous. It was catered to the very full by the press and
the radio, and there has been so great a flood of news and comment as to bear
comparison only with war conditions.’15
Once the crisis was over, the British Library of Information in New York
and the British embassy in Washington agreed that ‘responsible newspapers’16
such as the New York Times had covered the events leading up to the abdication
‘with accuracy and fairness’17 and that in quality papers there had been ‘gener-
ally a sympathetic understanding of the situation’.18 By this, they meant the
‘constitutional crisis’ arising out of the king’s morganatic marriage plan and the
rejection of it by the governments of Britain and its Dominions.19 However,
both British observers in the US stressed that the influential tabloids, especially
those owned by the media mogul William Hearst, had unconditionally sup-
ported the king’s desire to marry Wallis Simpson and had made no effort to
explain let alone understand the British government’s point of view. Accord-
ing to the British Library of Information, the Hearst press ‘sprung to the de-
fence of the King as a popular and democratic person, nor have they neglected
to emphasize and re-emphasize the fact that Mrs. Simpson is an American’.20
The British ambassador in Washington complained that the Hearst press had
inaccurately argued ‘that opposition in British Empire to King’s marriage is due
to American birth of Mrs. Simpson’.21
An article of the New York American, one of the main Hearst papers, il-
lustrates the way in which the American tabloids reported and promoted the
romance between an ordinary ‘Baltimore woman’ and the King of England.
At the same time, the article sheds light on the way in which concepts of love
and marriage were linked to ideas about Europe and America. On 26 October,
a day before the Simpson divorce, the New York flagship of the Hearst press
titled: ‘King Edward of England to Wed Mrs. Ernest Simpson in June, 1937’
and, all in capitals: ‘HE IS SINCERELY IN LOVE’. The article went on to
give the following details: ‘King Edward’s most intimate friends state with the
utmost positiveness that he is very deeply and sincerely enamoured of Mrs.
Simpson, that his love is a righteous affection, and that almost immediately
after the coronation he will take her as his consort.’ Love was thus the only
necessary precondition for marriage and the fact that Wallis Simpson had been
married twice before did not diminish the quality of her present love.
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 141

A further revealing passage, while being heavily influenced by one of the

main political objectives pursued by William Hearst in the 1930s, namely an
Anglo-American alliance,22 alluded to the special and highly interesting pe-
ripheral position Britain occupied in Europe, both in terms of geography and
emotions.23 The New York American stated:
(Edward) believes that it would be an actual mistake for a King of England to
marry into any of the royal houses of the Continent of Europe, and so involve
himself and his empire in the complications and disasters of these royal houses. He
believes further that in this day and generation it is absurd to try to maintain the
tradition of royal intermarriages, with all the physical as well as political disabilities
likely to result from that outgrown custom.

Europe was thus represented as an old-fashioned, declining and in fact doomed

continent, while the traditional intermarriages between European royal fami-
lies were used as a powerful metaphor to emphasise the degenerate charac-
ter of the entire continent. Peripheral Britain, however, was represented as a
country not really belonging to Europe. The article stressed the possibility of
Britain saving itself from Europe’s inevitable downfall by means of an alliance
with the modern United States, with whom it already shared one of the main
means of collective identification, namely, language. The ideal metaphor for
this move was the union between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. ‘Finally’,
the article concluded, ‘(Edward) believes that the most important thing for the
peace and welfare of the world is an intimate understanding and relationship
between England and America, and that his marriage with this very gifted lady
may help to bring about the beneficial co-operation between English-speaking
nations.’24
Heavily influenced by the US media, the press in Latin America also
treated the story of Wallis Simpson and the British king as a romantic love
story. The British ambassador in Mexico reported that the Mexican press made
little effort to explain the British government’s point of view and that most
articles were written ‘in the style of vulgar sensationalism reserved for Royalty
by the United States news services on which the Mexican press depends’.25 His
colleague in Uruguay was less indignant, but also reported that ‘the general
tendency has been to dwell upon what may be termed the romantic aspect of
the question’.26 As in the United States, in Latin America the press had begun
to report on Edward’s friendship with Wallis Simpson well before her name was
first mentioned in the British press. Already in October 1936, the readers of El
Rivadaria, a newspaper published in Argentine Patagonia, were able to glance
at the notorious snapshot of Wallis Simpson touching the arm of the king in
Sibenik. The story of the Edward VIII and the ‘belleza norteamericana’ (beauti-
ful North American) had thus reached the southernmost part of the American
continent at least two months before the first reports on the subject began to
appear in Europe.27
142 Alexis Schwarzenbach

Silence in Britain

In striking contrast to the North and South American press, the British media
made no reference to the king’s friendship with Wallis Simpson until shortly
before the abdication. While her name was included in the list of people who
dined with the king or accompanied him on his holidays, no paper hinted in
any way at the possibility of a romantic attachment. Even photographs showing
Edward and Wallis during their summer holiday were ‘so retouched as to elimi-
nate entirely the picture of his companion and make it appear that the king was
alone’.28 On several occasions, the British distributors of American newspapers
and magazines even removed or blackened out articles dealing with the king
and Mrs. Simpson, an unusual behaviour that the government failed to explain
to the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, who inquired about it in Parliament.29
A variety of reasons led to this remarkable and largely self-imposed silence
observed by all British media, ranging from the conservative Times to the com-
munist Daily Worker. Initially, the press was ignoring Wallis Simpson in much the
same way as it had ignored previous royal mistresses who were married upper-
class women. On 16 October 1936, the king held a meeting with the British
press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, because Edward feared that Wallis Simpson’s
divorce and the attention it received in the United States could prompt Brit-
ish papers to break their silence. Beaverbrook, owner of the Evening Standard
and the Daily Express, then the world’s largest newspaper with a circulation of
2.25 million, promised to refrain from sensationalism and also succeeded in
convincing the rest of the British media to keep up their silence.30 Finally, there
was the fear of libel suits, a potentially costly possibility that British papers had
to take into account when writing about the king’s private life, but which the
American papers could safely ignore.31 For all these reasons, the British press
remained silent about the king’s friendship with Wallis Simpson even after her
divorce. This was despite the fact that the editors of all of the major newspapers
knew that Edward’s marriage plans had led to serious problems between the
king and his government, and that the issue was discussed in ever larger social
circles. On 25 November, the conservative MP, London socialite and passion-
ate diarist Chips Channon noted: ‘The possibility of a royal marriage is still the
talk of London.’32
The pretext the media used to break their silence was a sermon by the
bishop of Bradford on 1 December, who criticised the king in general terms for
not taking his religious duties seriously enough. Referring to this speech, on 3
December, the national papers began writing about the difficulties between the
king and his government, a day before the prime minister officially announced
the king’s morganatic marriage proposal and the government’s opposition to it.
Several detailed analyses exist of the way in which the British media covered
the events leading up to the abdication only a week after Baldwin’s official
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 143

announcement of the crisis.33 They show that while the tabloids belonging to
the press lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere supported the king, of the major
national dailies, only the liberal News Chronicle openly supported the king’s
morganatic marriage proposal. All of the other national newspapers including
the Times, Telegraph, Morning Post and Manchester Guardian, as well as the vast
majority of provincial newspapers supported the government. Of the major
weeklies, the Spectator supported the government, while the New Statesman
supported the king. Although in terms of their print-run, the papers favourable
to the king outnumbered those opposing him,34 a press campaign in favour of
him never materialised, mainly because Edward decided not to participate in
it. Once he had failed to get his government’s approval to address the nation
in a radio broadcast on 4 December, in order to gather public support for his
marriage plan, the king had in fact quickly made up his mind to abdicate.35 At
the end of an intense week of crisis, there was widespread relief in the British
media about the solution found, namely, the abdication of Edward VIII and the
succession of his brother Albert, who came to the throne as George VI.
The importance attached to love played a central role in the British media
coverage of the abdication crisis. The editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley
Martin, supported the king, arguing that Edward’s ‘dislike of humbug pre-
vented him making a formal marriage to a Royal personage whom he did not
love, though a farce of this character would have been welcomed by the Cabi-
net and solemnized by the Church’.36 The News Chronicle believed that there
were ‘many people in this country who would not desire to see as Queen of
England a woman who had previously been married’. Nevertheless, the liberal
newspaper was convinced that the general public would eventually accept a
morganatic marriage ‘if the King, who is of an age old enough to know his
own mind, is sufficiently in love to persists in his intention’.37 Beaverbrook’s
tabloids argued much more simply. They wanted to ‘secure for the King free-
dom to marry the woman of his choice, a freedom enjoyed by the humblest
of his subjects’.38 The quality newspapers supporting the king therefore used
the same arguments that in America had been employed by the Hearst press,
namely, that divorce should be no obstacle for a marriage based on true love
and that royal intermarriages were an outdated European anachronism. The
British tabloids, on the other hand, considered love marriages to be a universal
human right to which anyone was entitled, applying even to the King of Eng-
land and a twice-divorced American woman from Baltimore.
While the papers supporting the king valued love more highly than any
other feeling, the papers supporting the government believed that there were
much more important feelings than love. The Daily Telegraph argued that the
king had to put the ‘august and permanent interests (of the nation and the
Empire) before personal feelings which, however deeply they may concern his
own happiness, are in that respect strictly private and not national or impe-
144 Alexis Schwarzenbach

rial’.39 The Western Mail believed that the king had to ‘make whatever personal
sacrifice is necessary to comply with the traditions of his august position’.40 The
papers opposed to the king’s marriage plans thus argued that Edward’s love for
Wallis Simpson should play a subordinate role compared to his feelings of duty
and responsibility toward Britain, the Commonwealth and the Empire. What
exactly the duty of the king was depended on the point of view of the newspa-
per. Some believed it was the king’s duty to follow the advice of his ministers;
some argued that as ‘Defender of the Faith’ he had to live a life according to the
teachings of the Church of England, which did not condone divorce.
The Times was one among many papers that pointed out that its objec-
tion to the king’s marriage plan was not influenced by ‘some old-fashioned
conventional dislike of the marriage of the King with a “commoner”, or with
an American’. The paper explained that the marriages of two of the king’s
brothers to British commoners had been very popular and claimed that there
were ‘many daughters of America whom (the king) might have married with
the same approval and rejoicing’. Instead of objecting to the nationality of the
king’s proposed bride, the Times explicitly criticised Wallis Simpson’s matrimo-
nial history. It argued that it was wrong for the king to marry a woman who
‘has already two former husbands living, from whom in succession she has
obtained a divorce’. According to the Times, a royal marriage to a divorcee was
bound to lead to an ‘overwhelming objection … because it would scandalize a
very large proportion of the nation and Empire and therefore do infinite harm
to the whole institution of the British Monarchy’.41
By concentrating on the issue of Wallis Simpson’s divorces instead of her
American descent the opponents to the king’s marriage plan nevertheless fo-
cussed on a theme with very strong American connotations. Various studies
have analysed the long history of specifically American attitudes toward di-
vorce.42 They have shown that, while in the course of the last centuries at-
titudes toward divorce have gradually become less strict on both sides of the
Atlantic, in this development America was usually ahead of Europe. At any
given time, it was easier and socially more acceptable to obtain a divorce in
America than in Europe. Although the ever more relaxed American attitudes
toward divorce had a direct influence on the country’s legal, literary and cin-
ematographic traditions,43 to this day divorce remains a highly controversial
topic within American society.44 Many Europeans, however, failed to notice
the controversial status of divorce in America and instead preferred to cultivate
the stereotypical notion that in comparison to themselves, US Americans were
far too relaxed and carefree about it.
Various factors facilitated the development of divorce-related anti-Ameri-
can prejudices. One of them were American novels, plays or films centred
around divorce, which were regularly exported all over the world. In the year
of the abdication crisis, for example, Clare Boothe’s play The Women was first
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 145

staged on Broadway. Subsequently shown in 18 countries, this comedy set in a

Nevada divorce ranch was also turned into a internationally successful film in
1939.45 Another means of distribution for stereotypes about American attitudes
toward divorce were reports about sensational divorce cases. In 1936, millions
of American and European cinemagoers knew perfectly very well that one of
Hollywood’s greatest stars, Gloria Swanson (1899–1983), had been divorced
twice as many times than Wallis Simpson. While Swanson was to acquire two
more husbands, the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton (1912–1979), who had
just divorced her first husband in 1935, was to entertain the world with six
more divorces in the course of the following decades.46
A letter written to the editors of the Daily Express during the Abdica-
tion crisis shows how easy it was for members of the British general public
to establish a link between Wallis Simpson’s matrimonial history and divorce-
related anti-American prejudices: ‘Isn’t it very dreadful that Edward VIII, son
of our Beloved King George, should bring Hollywood ideals to Britain? Surely
he could have found some sweet British Girl.’47 Due to the American con-
notations of divorce, the opponents to the king’s marriage plan could exploit
widespread anti-American prejudices while at the same time insisting that there
was nothing wrong with Wallis Simpson being American. This implicit use of
anti-Americanism was necessary because many British papers such as the Times
advocated good political relations between Britain and the US, ‘the two great
English-speaking democracies’.48 Furthermore, no serious journalist could
have denounced divorce as an exclusively American vice, given that in Britain
divorce rates were also rapidly rising.49
Explicit criticism in the Times and other papers opposed to the king was
only expressed about his morganatic marriage proposal. This plan was rejected
because it involved a legal tradition that only existed in continental Europe.
The Times explained: ‘(A) British King is bound by no such rule as has made
the morganatic marriage a Continental institution. Abroad it has been neces-
sary because the monarch’s choice has been constitutionally limited to certain
princely families. It is precisely because the King of England has been as free as
the law of the realm can make him to choose his wife irrespectively of rank or
nationality that no such device is or has been necessary or possible in this coun-
try.’50 Incompatible with English freedom, a key element of British national
identity often invoked in comparisons with continental Europe, a morganatic
marriage was thus rejected because it was not in line with Britain’s peripheral
European identity.51
Implicitly rejecting a marriage with a divorcee because this was considered
to be too American and explicitly rejecting a morganatic marriage because it
was too European, the Times and other papers thus argued that an ideal Brit-
ish marriage was a union of two equal partners who had never been married
before and intended to remain married for the rest of their lives.
146 Alexis Schwarzenbach

Restraint in Europe

After the abdication, the Foreign Office noted with great satisfaction that in
striking contrast to America, ‘the press of practically all European countries has
behaved wonderfully well over the crisis’.52 The European media had largely
refrained from mentioning the king’s friendship with Wallis Simpson before the
British papers started writing about the subject. Once the story had broken,
most of them backed the British government’s point of view. The Foreign Of-
fice noted that in Austria, most reports were ‘very guarded’, in the Netherlands
they were ‘enlightened and sympathetic’, in Switzerland, ‘restrained and sym-
pathetic’, in Czechoslovakia, ‘friendly and sympathetic’ and in Hungary, full of
‘respectful reserve’.53 In Poland, the government had even ‘induced the leading
Polish newspapers to refrain from publishing any of the reports and rumours
regarding the King’s matrimonial intentions that were given so much promi-
nence in the American press’.54
It is of particular interest in our case to note that not only the state-
controlled media of Europe’s dictatorships sided – for one reason or the other
– with the British government, but also the great majority of the free press in
Europe’s democracies. One good example comes from the heart of Europe,
from Switzerland. The country’s most important liberal newspaper, the Neue
Zürcher Zeitung, told the story of Edward and Wallis as a modern fairytale and
printed a widely reported yet incorrect version of it.55 According to the Swiss
daily, Wallis and Edward had not met in Britain in 1931, but in America ‘twenty
years ago’. Edward was supposed to have seen Wallis for the first time when she
was not yet married during a ball in Baltimore. Later, ‘their paths crossed again
by chance’, but Wallis was by then already married to her first husband. Fi-
nally, they met again after Wallis’s second marriage had brought her to London.
There, she was quickly included into Edward’s circle of friends and the two of
them were often seen dancing ‘tango and rumba for hours at the Ritz and in
more exclusive nightclubs’.56
Despite indulging in detailed accounts of this love story with a ‘fairy tale
quality’,57 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung firmly believed that the king’s duty was far
more important than his love. After the abdication, it blamed ‘the romantic
dream of King Edward VIII’ for seriously threatening the political stability of
his country by shattering ‘the foundation of the British monarchy’. It called the
events preceding the abdication a ‘most unpleasant performance’, which could
have been avoided had the king realised that his morganatic marriage proposal
was doomed because the necessary legislation had ‘no chance’ of being in-
troduced: ‘Unfortunately Edward VIII did not immediately draw the obvious
conclusions from this fact, a move he should have made in the interest of the
British Empire the unity of which largely depends on the moral authority of
the crown.’58
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 147

British Foreign Office reports contain many similarly harsh statements from
all over Europe. Much of this criticism was caused by the fear that Edward’s
marriage plans posed a serious threat to British and European political stabil-
ity. After the abdication, it became clear that this extraordinary event failed
to cause any political damage. Therefore, most European papers interpreted
the way in which the crisis was solved as a reassuring proof of the strength
of Britain’s political system. In Austria, for instance, ‘the development of the
crisis and the attitude of the leading figures and of British public opinion are
held up as an example of stability of the British peoples, and the conviction
finds expression that that stability will continue to exercise its influence in the
consolidation of peace’.59 The Swedish daily Dages Nyheter also expressed its
relief and stated: ‘The free nations of Europe have long looked up to England
as the guardian of democracy, and will congratulate themselves on the fact that
the dangers which have threatened the constitutional monarchy from within
during the last few weeks have been averted without irreparable damage.’60 In
France, where the Popular Front government of Léon Blum was in the middle
of one of its regular crises, there was also widespread ‘admiration for the re-
silience and strength shown by English institutions and for the coolness and
courage with which the British people surmounted the crisis’. According to
the British embassy in Paris, ‘journals of every shade of opinion’ argued that
‘France … has been given an object lesson in Parliamentary government and
in national behaviour. She should reflect upon the example of a country where
tradition lives in the conscience of the people and the supreme law is the safety
of the nation.’ Only Le Populaire, the Socialist newspaper controlled by Léon
Blum himself, was ‘unable to resist the temptation of pointing out once or
twice that monarchy has weaknesses and dangers to which a republic such as
France is not exposed’.61
Almost everywhere in Europe the fragile security situation thus led to a
negative perception of King Edward’s marriage plan, which stood in sharp
contrast to the view propagated in the American tabloids, namely, that an An-
glo-American royal wedding would foster world peace. Yet to what extent the
specific political situation in late 1936 – the Spanish civil war had broken out,
Hitler was forming alliances with Italy and Japan – was responsible for the
widespread agreement among European papers that duty was more important
than love remains difficult to assess. What can be stated with certainty, however,
is that in Scandinavia, there were two interesting exceptions to this rule.
In Denmark, there was an intense and antagonistic public debate about
whether the king should follow his heart or the advice of his government. The
British legation in Copenhagen reported on 5 December that ‘Opinion varies
with Party colour, Right emphasising danger to the Empire, Left showing sym-
pathy with the human element in the problem.’62 In a subsequent report, the
legation explained that ‘the Socialist Press and, rather less emphatically, their
148 Alexis Schwarzenbach

allies, the Radicals, (took) the point of view that the opposition to the King’s
plans sprang from old-fashioned or reactionary circles’.63
A similar if less intense debate took place in Sweden. The British embassy
in Stockholm reported that conservative papers such as the Dagens Nyheter or
Svenska Dagbladet emphasised that one of the key duties of a monarch was
‘the suppression of personal feelings’ and criticised the king for having ‘set
his private interests above that of the realm’. The left-wing Social Democraten,
however, interpreted the abdication as a ‘victory for Mr. Baldwin, the Church
and respectability’ and emphasised that Edward showed ‘commendable firm-
ness of character, in that he refused to be compelled to desist from the choice
of his heart’. The Social Democraten concluded: ‘In any case the moral victory
lies with the monarch, who has voluntarily abdicated rather than bow down
to prejudice.’64
This evidence suggests that in Denmark and Sweden, there was an overlap-
ping of political opinions with views about the status and importance of ro-
mantic love. In line with most other European papers, the conservative media
of in both Scandinavian countries attached more importance to duty than to
love because this traditional attitude seemed to guarantee social and political
stability. Left-wing and to a lesser extent liberal newspapers, on the other hand,
perceived romantic love as a progressive social force that conservative circles in
Britain had once more defeated, but that should eventually succeed in decon-
structing outdated bourgeois values and power structures.
In contrast to the views held in the two Scandinavian monarchies, in Brit-
ain the oppositional left, apart from a few Communists, never tried to make
political profit from the government’s struggle with the king.65 The Labour
Party backed Baldwin in his opposition to the king’s marriage plan, while
the country’s first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was one of
the most severe critics of Edward’s attachment to Wallis Simpson. Instead of
being backed by the left, Edward received political backing from the right.
His most important political supporter was Winston Churchill, who seized
the opportunity to stand up against his rival Baldwin, while Oswald Mosley’s
British Union of Fascists as well the former liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd
George also threw in their lot for the king.66

Letters to a King in Love

The international media reports on the abdication can be compared to another

very important set of sources, namely, the thousands of letters written by mem-
bers of the general public to Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. These
letters were preserved because, in 1945, Godfrey Thomas, private secretary to
the Duke of Gloucester and former assistant private secretary of Edward VIII,
thought that they contained ‘a remarkable cross-section of public opinion from
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 149

all classes which should be of much interest & value to anyone who in years to
come is writing about the Abdication’.67 While I do not think that these letters
can be used like a contemporary opinion poll showing how ‘ordinary people
felt’, a qualitative analysis of these very subjective sources can reveal ways in
which Edward’s contemporaries perceived the romantic issues at stake that are
invisible or not as clearly apparent in the media accounts analysed above.68
One of the most intensely debated issues in the letters sent to Edward was
the relative importance attached to love and duty. While this was also discussed
in many of the media reports on the subject, the high level of emotion in the
letters is striking and shows how important these matters were to Edward’s
contemporaries. Some people vigorously urged the king to do his duty rather
than to follow his heart. An anonymous British subject wrote: ‘For Gods sake
put the EMPIRE FIRST’,69 another even threatened that ‘MRS. SIMPSON
WILL BE SHOT’ if Edward were to abdicate.70 Margaret Laidlay from Lee-
on-the-Solent near Portsmouth put it rather more subtly: ‘About nine years
ago, I was faced with the choice between a great love and “doing the decent
thing”. I chose the latter. Although I renounced perhaps the biggest thing in
a woman’s life, and shall remain a rather lonely spinster, I know that my gain
outweighs the loss – because I have peace of mind.’71 On the other side of the
spectrum of opinions, emotions ran equally high. Some people were even pre-
pared to take up arms in order to defend the king and his rights – ‘I’ll die for
you if necessary’ wrote a man from Sussex on the day the news broke.72 Alec
Roylance from London formulated his reasons for being in favour of the king’s
marriage plans very clearly: ‘Love is the most powerful force throughout the
universe. A man in love is a happy man. A happy king cannot fail to be a good
king.’ That Edward was really in love was completely clear to Roylance. He
told the king: ‘With such a choice as you can command, it is obvious that you
love this charming American lady.’73
Both people in favour and against the king’s marriage plans urged Edward
to behave in a masculine way. Two examples: an anonymous Scottish woman
who was outraged at the thought of Edward marrying Wallis Simpson – ‘the
leavings of some other poor man whom she wrecked before’ – urged the king
to leave her by telling him: ‘Be a man, shake yourself up.’74 Herbert Coppock
from Didsbury near Manchester, on the other hand, told the king: ‘I am unac-
customed to address royalty, but with all due respect, if I may for a moment
address you not as a King, but as a Man, I would say, stick to your guns and if
no precedent exists for your action or contemplated action, then make one.
Our country owes its greatness to the creation of precedents even as Nelson by
putting his telescope to his blind eye, won the battle of Trafalgar.’75
This evidence suggests that two quite different concepts of masculinity ex-
isted at the same time. One concept clearly stipulated that good masculine be-
haviour meant putting duty above love. It was often linked to the late Victorian
generation and the example of Edward’s father King George V (born in 1865),
150 Alexis Schwarzenbach

whose marriage had been a dynastic arrangement lacking any sense of romance.
His wife, Princess Mary of Teck, had originally been engaged to George’s elder
brother Albert Victor. Two years after his premature death in 1891, Mary got
married to George, the new heir to the throne. The other masculinity concept
was usually associated with the generation of Edward himself, who was born
in 1894 and who was a young adult when the First World War broke out. The
essentially twentieth-century second concept held that the vigorous pursuit of
personal happiness was a more masculine behaviour than fulfilling one’s duty
and sacrificing one’s romantic feelings while doing so.76
Anti-American prejudices were much more explicit in the letters sent to
Edward than they were in the media coverage of the abdication. One anony-
mous British subject called Wallis Simpson an ‘American adventuress’,77 an-
other stated: ‘We don’t want an American prostitute as Queen.’78 Very often
these prejudices were linked to the allegedly negative attitudes Americans had
toward love, marriage and divorce. One ‘Canadian who feels like all Canadians
over this matter’ was outraged at the idea of a ‘scheming, clutching, twice-
divorced, American hag’ becoming queen,79 while ‘one of the people’ described
Edward’s future wife as a ‘second divorced crazy American woman’.80 Oth-
ers consciously avoided using anti-American prejudices and claimed that the
only problem was Wallis Simpson’s divorces. Rene Page from Wellingborough
in Northamptonshire, for example: ‘We do not object to your marrying a
Commoner, or an American, but to marry a woman who has been divorced
twice & whose former husbands are still living we think, the morals of the
whole world would be at stake … We women feel that if this woman had any
moral standing, she would remain where she is & not cause you & the nation
any more anxiety.’81 Yet, like the British press opposed to the king’s marriage
plans, such universalistically formulated anti-divorce letters were implicitly us-
ing the widespread European prejudices about Americans being too relaxed
about divorces.
As in the case of the masculinity debate, it seems that generational differ-
ences also played an important a part in the debate about the compatibility of
love and divorce. A 26-year-old Polish woman in love with a married man who
was unable to obtain a divorce, for example, wrote to Edward: ‘The majority of
my compatriots and almost all women with the exception of a few old puritan
spinsters feel a spontaneous sympathy for your majesty.’82
Even the people who were convinced that Edward had to give up Wallis
Simpson because this was the only right – and masculine – thing to do, never
questioned that he was in love with her. Instead, they often expressed doubts
about the quality of Wallis Simpson’s romantic feelings. ‘You may be genuinely
in love with her but do you really suppose that she has true affection and love
for you’, wrote J.R. Jones from Walton-on-Thames without adding a question
mark.83 Many people even believed that Wallis Simpson must be unable truly
to love; for example, an anonymous ‘wife and mother’ from East Yorkshire
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 151

who claimed to ‘know something of the value of real love’. She stated: ‘I can-
not imagine any lady who has previously given herself, and her heart, twice,
possessing the right kind of love to make Your Majesty really, and truly happy.
Such a love must surely wither, and die before many years have passed. No two
people making such a union can ever hope for eternal happiness. Possibly no
issue would ever come of the marriage.’84 Together with the fact that many let-
ters debased Wallis Simpson using xenophobic and misogynistic terminology,
this evidence suggests that even those who opposed Edward’s marriage plans
perceived the king and his love to be true and pure, while Wallis Simpson and
her feelings were considered to be false and dirty. This phenomenon of putting
all of the blame during a royal crisis on one ‘bad woman’, who was supposedly
corrupting the pure prince, was, of course, nothing new. Rather, it was one
of the oldest narrative themes used for the description of royal couples, such as
Caesar and Cleopatra, Justinian and Theodora or Russia’s last imperial couple,
Nicholas and Alexandra.85

Two Love Stories

A very important theme that the media reports failed to highlight but which
is very prominent in the letters sent to Edward is the fact that for many of his
contemporaries, the abdication crisis was not about one, but about two, love
stories. On the one hand, there was the love story between Edward and Wallis
Simpson, on the other hand, there was the love story between the people and
the king. In order to explain the latter, we have to take into account the general
history of European monarchies.
In the course of the nineteenth century, all European monarchies realised
that dynastic legitimacy alone was not enough to secure their thrones. Con-
sequently, royal households began to devote a lot of their time and energy to
the construction of emotional links between royal families and their subjects.
One prime aim of this public relations activity was to create a sense of mu-
tual love between the monarchy and the people.86 In the case of Edward VIII,
the construction of a sense of mutual love between him and his subjects had
been extremely successful. Ever since his birth, he had regularly participated
in important and widely publicised royal pageants and his looks were known
to almost all of his subjects through the regular publication of official photo-
graphs and newsreel films. Edward’s trips to all parts the world as soon as he
reached adolescence made it possible for large numbers of people to come into
relatively close and often direct contact with the prince. The construction of a
widely loved royal persona for Edward benefited from the accidental facts of his
extremely youthful looks, his great charm and spontaneity as well as his splen-
did photogenic smile. For many women, he was the most glamorous bachelor
alive. The American fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1906–1989) remembered:
152 Alexis Schwarzenbach

‘To be a woman of my generation in London – any woman – was to be in love

with the Prince of Wales.’87 But Edward also appealed to men. ‘I shook hands
with you at Saut Ste Marie. With me was an American soldier, in uniform.
You made him a devoted admirer of you, as you have of millions in all lands’,
remembered a Canadian First World War veteran when writing to Edward in
1936.88 Many of Edward’s contemporaries explained that his popularity was
due to the fact that he reminded them of a ‘fairy prince’,89 while Jungian psy-
chologists would probably use the archetype ‘puer aeternus’ to explain Edward’s
phenomenal global popularity.90
During the abdication crisis, the emotional bonds established over the past
four decades between the king and his contemporaries played an important
role. When rumours began to spread that the king may abdicate, many people
became very anxious and feared that they were going to lose not a sovereign,
but a lover. ‘Please oh please your Majesty do not leave us, we should miss you
so very, very much’, wrote Eleanor Cooper from Dagenham, Essex. Fred S.
Itacker from Osterly in Middlesex implored the sovereign: ‘Edward our Prince,
England loves you and wants you. Do not leave us.’91 Many of Edward’s subjects
felt that the king had to chose between his love for Wallis Simpson and his love
for his people. Mary Canning from Cambridge wrote: ‘If you leave us and
marry this lady, you won’t be happy because of the knowledge that you have
let down the many millions of your subjects, and surely the love of these many
people is greater than that of one woman.’92
Once Edward had abdicated and pronounced his farewell speech, many
of the letters he received expressed the great grief and sadness many people
felt. They employed terminology otherwise used when love stories end or
loved ones die. Margaret Wilermith from Egham, Surrey, wrote: ‘I am heart-
broken that we are to lose you as our King … We shall all try to serve your
royal brother faithfully in his difficult task; but I do not think that many of us
feel that anyone can take your place in our hearts.’93 For others, Edward fully
entered the realm of romance because he had sacrificed everything for love. A
woman from Prague, Miss Benesova, wrote the day after the abdication: ‘As a
very young girl, I had the chance to see Your Royal Highness during your visit
in Praha (Prague) more than twenty years ago and since this time you are for
me “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche”. Therefore it would have been a great
disappointment for me, if you preferred the throne to the love. Fortunately you
didn’t. I am very thankful to you that I was not deprived of my ideal and wish
you joy.’94

L’Amour, le divorce et l’occident

Three years after the abdication, the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont pub-
lished his landmark study on the history of love, L’Amour et l’Occident. It in-
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 153

cludes a reference to Edward VIII, which all contemporary readers must have
understood even if the king’s name was not mentioned. When discussing the
effects of the Tristan myth on contemporary marriages, Rougemont deplored
the fact that many of his male contemporaries only believed in marriage based
on passion, where nothing else counts ‘pas même la couronne s’il est roi’ (not even
the crown if one is king).95
Rougemont believed that such a marriage would not last for he was con-
vinced that passion and marriage were incompatible. Unlike many of his fellow
Europeans, he was thus not against Edward’s marriage because he believed that
the king should have valued his duty higher than love, but because he believed
that a marriage based on passion was doomed to fail and end in divorce and
personal unhappiness.
History proved Rougemont wrong in this particular case for Edward and
Wallis never divorced. In another passage of his book, however, Rougemont
touched on one of the central themes of this article, namely, the different at-
titudes toward love and marriage in America and Europe. In the passage ‘Sens
de la crise’ (Sense of the crisis), which the author included into the 1956 edition
of his study after having lived in the United States for several years, Rougemont
explained that for Americans, love, marriage and happiness were synonyms.
He also stated that for them, Hollywood-style ‘romance’ was the only basis for
getting married. Due to America’s high divorce rates, Rougemont thought that
this attitude was fatal, but he had to acknowledge that identical developments
were taking place in Europe. He concluded: ‘The entire evolution of the West
goes from the tribal wisdom to personal risk; this is irreversible and one has to
condone it, in as much as it tends to align the collective or native destiny to
personal decisions.’96
This article has demonstrated that different American and European at-
titudes toward love, marriage and divorce did not just interest intellectuals such
as Denis de Rougemont. We have seen that this also deeply influenced the way
in which the abdication of Edward VIII was represented and perceived by very
many of his contemporaries. But while it has become clear that divorce-related
anti-American prejudices were a central element shaping European attitudes
toward American ways of loving, the analysis of American notions of European
forms of love still needs to be undertaken. This would certainly be a rewarding
task and would fill in another gap in the still largely unexplored cultural history
of twentieth century emotions.

Notes
1. This article is based on a paper delivered at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) in
Essen. Most of the archival research was undertaken while I was a Swiss National Science Fund
Fellow at the Oxford University History Faculty. My participation in Luisa Passerini’s KWI re-
search group ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’ was made possible through scholarships of
154 Alexis Schwarzenbach

the Janggen-Phoen Stiftung in St. Gallen and the Swiss National Science Fund in Bern. I would
like to thank the editors of this book, the other members of the KWI research group and the
Registrar of the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle, Pamela Clark, for their useful comments, the
staff of all of the archives consulted for their efficient and professional help and, last but not least,
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for permission to quote from documents held by the Royal
Archives. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of non-English sources are mine. In analogy to
the historical documents consulted for this article, the term ‘American’ is used in this text both to
refer to citizens of the United States and their cultural practices as perceived by Europeans as well
as an adjective pertaining to the entire American continent because Latin American reactions to
the abdication of Edward VIII are also taken into account.
2. The main newspaper archive used is the one of the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich. The
Foreign Office documents are located in the Public Record Office (PRO) in Kew.
3. The letters are held by the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle (RA). For previous use made
of these sources see below, note 72.
4. Time, 16 November 1936, RA, DW/ABD/MISC/1.
5. Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, The Heart Has Its Reasons.The Memoirs of the Duchess of Wind-
sor (London: Companion, 1958 (1956)), 197.
6. There is an enormous amount of literature on Edward and Wallis. The most useful biog-
raphies are: Philip Ziegler, King Edward VIII.The Official Biography (London: Collins, 1990); Greg
King, The Duchess of Windsor.The Uncommon life of Wallis Simpson (London: Aurum, 2003).
7. Text of Baldwin’s statement reproduced in The Times, 5 December 1936.
8. Transcript of radio broadcast of Prince Edward, 11 December 1936, in Edward Duke of
Windsor, A King’s Story.The Memoirs of the Duke of Windsor (London: Prion, 1998 (1951)), 413.
9. See Wallis and Edward. Letters 1931–1937. The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and
Duchess of Windsor (New York: Summit, 1986), 128.
10. Daily Mirror, 26 October 1936, RA, DW/ABD/Misc/1.
11. New York Evening Journal, 30 September 1936, ibid.
12. Liberty, 26 September 1936, ibid.
13. Daily Mirror, 26 October 1936, ibid.
14. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 3 December 1936, PRO, FO 395/
545.
15. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 8 December 1936, ibid.
16. Ambassador Lindsay, Washington to Foreign Office, 7 December 1936, ibid.
17. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 15 December 1936, ibid.
18. Ambassador Lindsay, Washington to Foreign Office, 11 December 1936, ibid.
19. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 3 December 1936, ibid.
20. British Library of Information to Foreign Office, 8 December 1936, ibid.
21. Ambassador Lindsay, Washington to Foreign Office, 7 December 1936, ibid.
22. For a detailed account of Hearst’s life see David Nasaw, The Chief. The Life of William
Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
23. For Britain’s peripheral position and identity see Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in
Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars (London: Tauris, 1999), and Paul Ward,
Britishness since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2004), especially 108–112.
24. Clipping of New York American, 26 October 1936, RA, EDW/ABD/MISC/1.
25. Murray (Mexico) to Foreign Office, 12 December 1936, ibid.
26. Milington-Drake (Montevideo) to Foreign Office, 12 December 1936, ibid.
27. El Rivadavia, 14 October 1936, RA, DW4/1/3. This was probably not the first Latin
American article that appeared on the story.
28. Marshall M. Knappen, ‘The Abdication of Edward VIII’, The Journal of Modern History
10, no. 2 (June 1938): 242–250, here 249.
29. See Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties. 1930–1940 in Great Britain (London: H. Hamil-
ton, 1940), 278, and A. Susan Williams, The People’s King.The True Story of the Abdication (London:
Allen Lane, 2003), 20.
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 155

30. See Max Aitken Beaverbrook, The Abdication of King Edward VIII (New York: Athe-
naeum, 1966), 30–33.
31. For the influence of British libel laws on newspaper articles and books about the abdica-
tion see Knappen, Abdication.
32. Henry Channon, ‘Chips’. The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (London: Phoenix Giant,
1999), 85.
33. Apart from Ziegler, Edward VIII, see also Kingsley Martin, The Magic of Monarchy (Lon-
don: T. Nelson, 1937), 66–93; Muggeridge, Thirties, 276–289; Frances Donaldson, Edward VIII
(London: Futura, 1976), 276–296; Brandi McCary, Press, Politics and the Abdication of Edward VIII
(New Orleans: Department of History, Loyola University, 1996); and Williams, People’s King,
134–152.
34. Edward himself later calculated that 8.5 million newspaper copies supported the govern-
ment, while 12.5 million, or 60 per cent of all of the newspapers produced, supported his own
cause. See Duke of Windsor, King’s Story, 373.
35. See Ziegler, Edward VIII, 314–319.
36. Martin, Magic of Monarchy, 72.
37. News Chronicle, 3 December 1936, quoted in The Times, 4 December 1936.
38. Beaverbrook, Abdication, 42.
39. Daily Telegraph, 3 December 1936, quoted in The Times, 4 December 1936.
40. Western Mail, 3 December 1936, quoted in The Times, 4 December 1936.
41. Ibid.
42. See, for instance, Glenda Riley, Divorce. An American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1991); Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce. From the Revolutionary Generation to the
Victorians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Joseph Epstein, Divorce. The American
Experience (London: Cape, 1975); William L. O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1967).
43. See Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law. American Failures, European
Challenges (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Kimberly A. Freeman, Love Ameri-
can Style. Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976 (New York: Routledge, 2003). Ira Lurvey
and Selse E. Eiseman, ‘Divorce Goes to the Movies’, University of San Francisco Law Review 30,
no. 4 (1996): 1209–1219.
44. For a recent US criticism of the phenomenon see Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The Divorce
Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
45. On Boothe see Sylvia Jukes Morris, Rage for Fame. The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce (New
York: Random House, 1997).
46. See Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson (London: Michael Joseph, 1981), and C. David,
Heymann, Poor Little Rich Girl.The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton (London: Hutchinson, 1985).
47. Quoted in Martin, Magic of Monarchy, 66.
48. The Times, 3 December 1936.
49. On the history of divorce in Britain see Richard Goodall, The Divorce Dilemma (Folke-
stone: Renaissance, 2000).
50. The Times, 4 December 1936. The only constitutional limitation of the king’s freedom to
choose his bride was that she must not be a Catholic.
51. For a recent overview of British national identity see Ward, Britishness.
52. Handwritten note on report ‘Turkish interest in events preceding King Edward’s abdica-
tion’, 28 December 1936, PRO, FO 395/545.
53. All these reports are contained in the dossier PRO, FO 395/545. It also contains re-
ports about the press coverage in Romania (‘respectful admiration at the dignity displayed on
all sides’), Belgium (‘with greatest delicacy and restraint’), Portugal (‘marked self-restraint’) and
Turkey (‘tone of the press was unexceptionable’).
54. British Embassy, Warsaw to Foreign Office, 14 December 1936, PRO, FO 395/545.
55. Fairytales were among the most important representational themes of twentieth century
monarchies. For details see my paper ‘“Some day my Prince will come” – Love and Royal Fairy
156 Alexis Schwarzenbach

Tales from Grimm to Walt Disney’, presented at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen on
26 March 2004.
56. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 7 December 1936.
57. Ibid.
58. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11 December 1936.
59. British Embassy, Vienna, to Foreign Office, 11 December 1936, PRO, FO 395/545.
60. British Embassy, Stockholm, to Foreign Office, 11 December 1936, ibid.
61. British Embassy, Paris, to Foreign Office, 12 December 1936, ibid.
62. P. Ramsay (Copenhagen) to Foreign Office, 5 December 1936, ibid.
63. British Legation, Copenhagen, to Foreign Office, 17 December 1936, ibid.
64. Greenway (Stockholm) to Foreign Office, 11 December 1936, ibid.
65. For the insignificant Communist support for Edward see Williams, People’s King, 179.
66. See Ziegler, King Edward VIII, 298–335, and Williams, People’s King, 179–180.
67. Thomas to Miss Milsom, 18 June 1945, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication.
68. Williams, People’s King, 208. Even if one were to make a quantitative analysis of the let-
ters, which Williams fails to do, the result could not be used like a modern opinion poll for the
views of people who decided, for one reason or the other, to write to the king, and are not neces-
sarily representative of public opinion.
69. ‘A subject from ENGLAND’ to Edward VIII, 7 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/
C019/444-5, Letters against marriage.
70. Anon. to Edward VIII, 10 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters after Abdication.
71. Laidlay to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/C019/442-3, Sympathetic
letters (unanswered).
72. Illegible from Hove, Sussex to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD:
Letters before Abdication.
73. Roylance to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, ibid.
74. ‘The Real Mäckay’ to Edward VIII, 4 December 1936, ibid.
75. Coppock to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, ibid.
76. I have found no evidence that either of these two concepts were in any particular way
attached to European or American stereotypes.
77. ‘One of those who gave all’ (woman), 7 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/C019/444-5,
Letters against marriage.
78. ‘Your obedient servant at present’ to Edward VIII, 6 December 1936, ibid.
79. ‘A Canadian who feels like all Canadians over this matter’ to Edward VIII, 3 December
1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication.
80. ‘One of the People’ to Edward VIII, 3 December 36, RA, PS/GVI/C019/444-5, Let-
ters against marriage.
81. Page to Edward VIII, 6 December 1936, ibid.
82. ‘La majorité de mes compatriotes et presque toutes les femmes à l’exception de quelques vielles filles
puritaines éprouvent une sympathie spontanée pour votre majesté.’ Mayzell to Edward VIII, 10 December
1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication.
83. Jones to Edward VIII, 4 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/C019/444-5, Letters against
marriage.
84. ‘A Wife and Mother’ to Edward VIII, 6 December 1936, ibid.
85. For the case of Justinian and Theodora see my ‘Die imaginäre Königin als Heilige
und Hure. Wahrnehmungen von Grace Kelly und Romy Schneider’, in Der Körper der Königin.
Geschlecht und Herrschaft in der höfischen Welt seit 1500, ed. Regina Schulte (Frankfurt am Main:
Campus, 2002), 302–320.
86. For details see my article ‘Royal Photographs. Emotions for the People’, Contemporary
European History 13 (September 2004), 255–280.
87. Diana Vreeland, D.V. (Cambridge: Kluwer, 2003), 70.
88. Illegible Canadian ex-serviceman from Toronto to Edward VIII, 8 December 1936,
RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before Abdication.
 Love, Marriage and Divorce: US and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII 157

89. Duff Cooper quoted in Ziegler, King Edward VIII, 167.

90. See Marie-Louise von Franz, Puer aeternus. Ewiger Jüngling und kreativer Genius (Küsnacht:
Stiftung für Jung’sche Psychologie, 2002).
91. Fred S. Itacker to Edward VIII, 3 December 1936, RA, PS/GVI/ABD: Letters before
Abdication.
92. Canning to Edward VIII, 6 December 1936, ibid.
93. Wilermith to Edward VIII, 11 December 1936, ibid.
94. Benesova to Edward VIII, 11 December 1936, ibid.
95. Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1939), 285.
96. Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1995), 316–319.
 CHAPTER 8

‘Dear Adolf !’
Locating Love in Nazi Germany

ALEXANDER C.T. GEPPERT

Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars … He was no politician.
He was a media artist himself. He used politics and theatrics and
created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12
years. The world will never see his like. He staged a country.
– David Bowie, Playboy, September 1976

Adolf Hitler, Rock Star?

Starting with Heinrich Mann in 1933, both contemporaneous observers and

contemporary historians have struggled with the problem of Adolf Hitler’s
physical attractiveness, his ‘dreadful sex appeal’ and the considerable emotional
effect he had on so many of his followers.1 Traudl Junge (1920–2002), his long-
time private secretary, sketched a number of episodes that illustrate Hitler’s ap-
parently irresistible erotic power and sexual fascination in her bestselling 1947
autobiography Bis zur letzten Stunde. According to Junge, neither women nor
men could resist him. ‘Before the war, the gates were opened once a day when
Hitler began his daily walk, and then people streamed into the grounds and
lined his way’, she depicted a particularly intriguing scene at the Berghof,
which was, from 1928 onward, Hitler’s notorious mountain-retreat on the
Obersalzberg, close to Berchtesgaden:
Hysterical women gathered up the stones which his feet had touched, and even
apparently reasonable people behaved in a most irrational manner. On one occa-
sion a lorry bringing tiles to the Berghof was plundered by a few very overexcited

Notes for this section begin on page 173.

 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 159

women, and the tiles – which the Führer’s hands and feet had certainly never
touched – ended up as souvenirs in the display-cabinets of their living rooms. Love
letters from such women made up a considerable part of the post which arrived in
the Führer’s chancellery.2

Traudl Junge, along with other female colleagues such as the older and more
experienced Christa Schroeder, were responsible for the extensive and strictly
formalised treatment of these missives. ‘Hundreds of telegrams. Love declara-
tions from the entire Volk’, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary in October
1936. Numerous other sources confirm reports of the constant stream of pil-
grims and admirers heading for the Obersalzberg, hoping either to catch a brief
‘live’ glimpse of their beloved object of desire, or to share in his aura by taking
away future relics such as pieces of wood from the Berghof ’s garden fence or by
digging up some of the earth on which Hitler had trodden.3
In retrospect, these reports do not seem entirely exaggerated. Years later,
former female devotees spoke of a collective ‘hypnosis, psychosis’ that had
taken hold of them. While some who had managed actually to touch Adolf
Hitler were so overcome with emotion afterward that they could not wash
their hands for several consecutive days, other women reported that they ‘lifted
their eyes to the heavens and – like wet rags – sank slowly to the ground’.
‘There they lay like butchered calves’, a contemporaneous observer reported
in retrospect, ‘sighing deeply. Joy and fulfilment’. Those who did not experi-
ence emotional reactions of this kind came to wonder why it was only they
who remained so ‘cold’ and unmoved, and whether they did not in fact suffer
some crucial lack of feeling. Yet, for the affected, the sheer sight of their object
of desire sufficed to evoke the most intense psycho-physiological reactions.
Thus, a female participant of an oral history project undertaken in the mid-
1980s remembered how she had, at the age of twelve, experienced her first
orgasm while participating in a National Socialist solstice celebration held in
the autumn of 1933.4
Professional journalists and foreign commentators confirmed the continual
occurrence of similar outbursts of lust and fainting fits throughout Hitler’s years
in power. They reported on the considerable emotional effects that the Führer
had on his audiences – which, from a present-day perspective, one would be
inclined to associate with superstars such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones or
Michael Jackson. On the occasion of a Nuremberg party rally held in Septem-
ber 1934, for example, the American CBS correspondent William L. Shirer
(1904–1993) was shocked to see the contorted faces of ‘ten thousand’ women
who had been waiting in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting ‘We want our Führer’
until he appeared on the balcony for the briefest of moments. ‘They looked up
at him as if he were a Messiah’, Shirer noted with a mixture of amazement and
disgust in his journal, ‘their faces transformed into something positively inhu-
man. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of
the women would have swooned from excitement’.5 Even if such an observa-
160 Alexander C.T. Geppert

tion may also be the direct consequence of a certain kind of mass phenomenon,
the empirical evidence of its overtly erotic nature is overwhelming.
The present essay will not repeat the simplistic and rather mechanical argu-
ment that women, in short, were simply ‘seduced’ by the sexually impressive
Adolf Hitler. Even if they did form the majority of the German electorate and
were regarded by Hitler himself as vital to his electoral success, the argument
that women effectively brought him to power has long been dismissed as a
popular myth. Yet, those present-day German feminists who fight furiously
against reports of supposed fits of Hitler-induced swooning do not interpret
the problem adequately either. Eager to reject any association between fascism
and sex appeal, they run the risk of neglecting a key element of Hitler’s grip on
the German nation by dismissing these strong emotional effects – confirmed
by a wide array of historical sources – as mere ‘fantasies’ of predominantly male
contemporary historians. What is worse, they fail to consider the central argu-
ment about National Socialism’s highly modern and at least partially liberalising
sexual politics, which a different and far more sophisticated branch of feminist
scholarship, including the work of historian Dagmar Herzog and others, has
successfully advanced in recent years.6 Complicated as all of this may be, funda-
mental questions remain: what did these women see in Adolf Hitler? And can
their unquestionable devotion be sufficiently explained with the help of Max
Weber’s much-quoted and oft-discussed concept of ‘charisma’?7
That there exists an obvious gap between lived, individually experienced
emotions on the one hand, and ‘official’ emotional programs on the other, is
a truism. Yet, under the new regime, this emotional disparity became a most
pressing problem. More consistently than ever before, the boundaries between
private and public blurred. The National Socialists’ attempt to draw these two
spheres as close together as possible and to merge them, eventually, into each
other was intentional and innovative. Linguistically, family and love became
noticeably nationalised, birth and motherhood militarised, every aspect of the
individual’s existence politicised and vice versa. At least in theory, emotional
ties and bonds were supposed to be exclusively oriented toward the State, the
Volk and, above all, the Führer, and far less toward a personal ‘significant other’,
thus necessarily bypassing and in fact downgrading the traditionally most im-
portant social form, the family, by insinuating a new degree of loyalty after
1933 that transcended established emotional hierarchies.
Yet, how far did these programs extend and how effective was this kind
of ‘emotional re-education’? The present essay concentrates on the problem’s
‘demand side’. Analysing the significance of emotions projected onto the Führer
and examining the connection between love and public order, this study poses
larger questions about the potentially subversive and/or integrative function of
emotionality within European society in the first half of the twentieth century.
How did Adolf Hitler’s admirers imagine him? In what form and for what
reason did many of them attempt to approach him personally, and what kind
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 161

of private hopes did they place in the self-declared head of state? Finally, what
does all of this tell us about the steering and management of emotions during
Germany’s twelve years of dictatorship?
In a wider context, therefore, the essay analyses the status and significance
of politically determined and publicly desired frameworks. Its central tension
derives from possible conflicts and contradictions between public, officially im-
plemented concepts on the one hand, and private, mostly unsolicited and po-
tentially deviant practices on the other. Even in twentieth-century mass society,
establishing a personal, if not romantic, relationship with one’s political leader
seemed a highly desirable goal. As sociologist William Josiah Goode noted half
a century ago, there is no emotion that is more projective than love. Since the
attracted person is, usually, hardly ever willing to believe that the object of his
or her love or passion does not in some way reciprocate the feeling, he or she
will be ready to go far before accepting rejection as genuine.8 As this essay dem-
onstrates, among a specific sub-group of German society, emotional transfer-
ence proved so successful under National Socialism that it caused considerable
counter-effects, entirely unforeseen and hardly controllable by the regime. In
quite a number of cases, officially prescribed devotion transformed into true,
even if obviously unrequited, love.
In analysing Adolf Hitler as an object of passionate desire and discussing the
problem of loving the dictator as expressed in the bulk of ‘fan mail’ he received,
this essay identifies links between two of the most distant units: individual and
private on the one hand, and collective and political on the other. Though
by no means jeopardising the political system per se, in the case of Nazi Ger-
many, such liaisons proved much more dangerous than is immediately apparent.
Thus, neither Adolf Hitler himself nor his personal (if any) love life and private
‘women’s question’ are at the centre of this essay. Rather, it focuses on his im-
age, appeal and persona in the popular and public imagination, as well as those
emotions projected onto him. The dictator was adored and loved like a present-
day rock star – although he was and remained, in fact, Adolf Hitler.

The Archive

Empirically, this analysis is based on a collection of personal love letters ad-

dressed directly to Adolf Hitler. While their existence could have been known
to scholars since the mid-1990s, these letters have – for various reasons – hith-
erto remained largely unexamined, awaiting serious research. The unlikely his-
tory of their survival is, in itself, intriguing. This cache of letters was discovered
by Wilhelm K. Eucker (1912–2000), a member of the German resistance who
had fled to France, Spain and North Africa, where, having changed his name
to William C. Emker, he became an officer of the US Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), a precursor of the CIA. Once the war was over, Emker was sent first
162 Alexander C.T. Geppert

to Vienna, then back to Berlin to work for the Information Services Control
Branch of OMGUS, the Office of Military Government for Germany (US). In the
spring of 1946, during an unofficial visit to the bombed-out Reich Chancellery
in Wilhelmstraße, located in the Russian sector, he found piles of private letters
written to Adolf Hitler strewn across the floor. Originally received and filed by
several secretaries, including Hitler’s own Traudl Junge, this unlikely trove had
apparently been ignored by the Russian agents. Despite removing government
and military documents, file cabinets and other pieces of equipment from the
premises, they had left stacks of disordered papers behind. In more than twenty
subsequent visits to the Chancellery, Emker claimed to have systematically col-
lected several thousand documents, all of which he carried out in his briefcase,
forwarded to his US address, and repossessed after his arrival a year later.
Emker waited half a century before a drastically abridged and often inad-
equately edited selection of the letters – 43, to be precise – was published in
a small booklet, rife with careless errors.9 In retrospect, Emker explained to
friends, he had endeavoured not to embarrass any potential survivors and had
not formerly found anyone who considered the letters significant enough to
publish in full. Before his death in 2000, Emker handed the entire bundle over
to a German friend and collaborator whom he designated as a custodian. This
friend had previously helped him publish both the letters’ digest and his frag-
mentary autobiography.10 Although deteriorating rapidly due to inadequate
storage, to date the entire collection is still held in private hands rather than
properly preserved in a publicly accessible archive. While other samples of a
similar kind and likely of the same provenance are spread over various files
available at the German Bundesarchiv, 200 additional folders ‘packed with do-
mestic correspondence addressed to Hitler’ and ‘thousands of hideous poems’
dedicated to him, both ‘of inestimable sociological value’, appear to have been
acquired by the Library of Congress in November 1948. Yet, whatever hap-
pened to these so-called ‘Chancellory Papers’ after their accession is not en-
tirely clear. Unfortunately, the material’s current whereabouts are completely
unknown, a fact which could not be satisfactorily explained despite an ex-
tended in situ search.11

The Letters

For the following close reading, approximately one hundred of Emker’s collec-
tion of love letters were examined. Others could not be consulted for purely
technical reasons: either they were incomplete or consisted of mere fragments,
did not contain any indication of their senders or date of origin, or were scrib-
bled in such indistinct handwriting that they remained entirely illegible even
to experts of penmanship. Five distinct features can nevertheless be identified,
all relating to format and form:
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 163

First of all, both the total number of these letters and their distribution
over time are unknown. Neither of these figures can be reconstructed, as the
respective file records have not survived. There are, however, credible hints that
the number of letters flowing daily into the Führer’s Adjutancy in Berlin ran at
least several hundred, if not more. According to a comparatively reliable Italian
source, Mussolini is said to have received up to 30,000–40,000 personal letters
of a similar kind per month; for instance, 42,000 in October 1936 alone.12
Only a certain portion, however, of the letters received in the Reichskanzlei
were actual love letters. The vast majority concerned any number of diverse
subject matters, from problems of everyday food supply caused by the war, to
Germany’s geopolitical situation, to possible ways of further weakening the
enemy. Since neither the official finding aids nor the actual files still exist, it is
unclear exactly when the first love letter was received in the Chancellery and
whether Hitler had already obtained similar correspondence prior to his sei-
zure of power in January 1933. The last letter consulted for this analysis dates
31 December 1944. Generally speaking, their numbers seem to have remained
comparatively constant, with peaks in 1939 (12 letters) and 1943 (15 letters),
and a certain, if short-lived, drop in the interval (1941: 3 letters) (Figure 8.1).
These figures, however, must be treated with a necessary degree of scholarly
caution; since the general number of letters received is effectively unknown,
they indicate no more than a vague trend of limited significance, and are not
statistically representative.
Second, a similar range of evidence can be observed with a view to the
occasions around which such letters were composed. Religious holidays such
as Christmas or Easter, secular ones such as the New Year, and Hitler’s birthday
on 20 April, provided the most welcome opportunities to address the Führer
personally, to convey cordial wishes for his future welfare and to communicate
one’s own concerns, often complete with a handmade gift or a rhymed poem.
The composition of such birthday letters was at least semi-officially endorsed,
while the writing of love letters clearly was not. In 1935, for instance, the
Braunschweiger Tageszeitung conducted a public competition on the topic ‘What
do I owe to Adolf Hitler?’ Answers need not have been written in an elaborate
or artistic manner, but should rather have ‘come from the heart’. Of the to-

Figure 8.1. Love Letters to Adolf Hitler, 1938–1945 (this sample N = 59)
164 Alexander C.T. Geppert

tal contributions received, twenty-two were awarded prizes, before the entire
bundle of essays was officially handed over to the Reich Chancellery for future
use. In the next year, 151 poems alone were received in the Presidential, and
not the Reich Chancellery.13
Unlike the painstakingly assembled inventories of Hitler’s own Christmas
presents sent to friends and acquaintances during the early years after the sei-
zure of power or the long list of some 500 personal visitors during his five
month-long imprisonment in Landsberg am Lech in the summer of 1924, no
comprehensive records of the items received at the Reich Chancellery have
survived. ‘Everything that I send to you is written in a spirit of true love’,
declared a female devotee, who also enclosed a cake baked ‘out of pure love’.
Together with their ‘poetic’ laudations, other women consigned four-leaf clo-
vers, home-stitched pillows (with ‘feathers from my own bedspread!’), pri-
vate photographs or even entire marriage contracts, which for practical reasons
were already completely filled out, with only his signature still missing. ‘My
fervently adored Führer!’, one woman wrote, ‘You have a birthday and we know
only two ardent wishes: may everything in our Fatherland be now and in future
just as you want it to be, and may God provide that you be preserved for us for
ever. Your loyal, E.E.’ A third woman declared that her love was simply ‘as true
as gold – there is nothing to be done’, while Wilhelmine Houschko rhymed
as follows:14
For Hitler’s birthday:
A pure thought
An ardent prayer
Lord, help us to be worthy
That Hitler
Lives and fights
For us.

She mailed this poem from Vienna, her place of residence, to Berlin on the
occasion of Hitler’s birthday in April 1938, i.e., shortly after the so-called An-
schluss, and she would, like numerous others, continue to write him faithfully
over the following years.15
Third, little is known about the social background and personal circum-
stances of the authors of these letters, though a certain amount of evidence
can be indirectly deduced from what and how they wrote. The love letters
consulted in this study were authored exclusively by women. Letters from men
contained in the same collection were of a very different, and, at least su-
perficially, much less erotic character, being concerned rather with technical
matters. Men composed letters to express their opinion as to the future of the
war and the inevitable restructuring of Europe, to make wide-ranging political-
technical suggestions with regard to strategic planning, to assure Hitler of their
unshakable support, or to offer their personal assistance in realising his plans.
Quite a few of the male writers sought private audiences with their beloved
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 165

Führer to present diverse ‘projects’ and to secure Hitler’s personal support be-
fore setting out to realise their frequently far-reaching and often far-fetched
plans. Whatever their personal motivation, and despite the homoeroticism la-
tent in National Socialism, none of the male writers openly declared that he
longed romantically and/or sexually for Hitler.
Again, the broad variation among the letters indicates considerable social
and, hence, educational heterogeneity, although it is virtually impossible to
infer from the source material anything as to cultural, regional or confessional
backgrounds of the female authors. Some women wrote in clear, elegant but
nonetheless strong-minded prose, while others contended, to varying degrees
of success, with orthography. A third group had most acute problems express-
ing their thoughts comprehensibly in written form. There are numerous, some-
times hilarious, stylistic weaknesses and occasional humorous lapses to be found
amongst these letters. Addressing Adolf Hitler as her ‘dear good darling’, a cer-
tain, surnameless Rosemarie from Dessau, for example, stated on 4 November
1943 that ‘I would so love to be your little bride, but I’m really not at all happy
that I haven’t got my false teeth yet’.16 Format, style and quality of the statio-
nery differed widely as well. While many female authors apparently wrote un-
der their real names and indicated current home addresses – some letters even
arrived from other European countries such as Austria, France or Switzerland
– others used obvious pseudonyms. Yet, all of them included some form of
postal address, not only hoping, but explicitly expecting, that they would soon
receive a personal reply.
Fourth, there is no discernible pattern to the frequency, form or length of
the love letters. While the aforementioned Rosemarie wrote in November and
December 1943 several times to Berlin, other women tried to establish contact
only once. These letters range from a few lines hastily scribbled on prefab-
ricated, commercial birthday cards, to detailed love letters, often of twenty
pages and more. When they did not receive the kind of answer for which they
had longed, many women simply wrote again, complaining bitterly about the
lack of replies and frequently making little effort to conceal their great disap-
pointment. ‘You obviously don’t want to have anything to do with me’, wrote
a resigned Erna Jung from Ludwigshafen on 2 August 1944 after a number of
attempts to establish personal contact had failed, ‘otherwise you would long
ago have allowed me to visit you’. Others tried to explain their discontent and
disbelief as a mere consequence of ‘too much work’ in his case and bad tim-
ing on both of their parts. As an alternative scenario, they projected a common
future in post-war times when Hitler would no doubt be less occupied, so that
the loving couple could eventually unite and forever live happily together. ‘It is
solely because I have this profound, great feeling in my heart that I now feel so
estranged from my husband’, another wife, equally frustrated by one missing re-
ply after the other, explained an increasing estrangement from her real husband
as the consequence of a burning desire and insatiable yearning for the Führer.17
166 Alexander C.T. Geppert

Last but not least, when addressing Adolf Hitler, almost all of these women
invested a good deal of creative energy inventing unique pet names, apparently
meant to convey the intensity of their emotions. These nicknames were, simul-
taneously, oriented on the conventions of the love letter genre and to National
Socialist language. Thus, the writers invented shortened and minimising forms
of salutation, such as a simple, yet intimate ‘Adilie’; made alluring compliments
by calling him ‘my dear, sweetest Adolf ’; or strung together several such en-
dearments, designating him ‘the man of my heart, my roly-poly darling, my
very dearest Adolf ’. Other women opened their letters by greeting Hitler with
‘hail my very dearest Adolf ’, ‘my dear Adi!’, ‘my adorable sweetheart!’ or ‘you
sweet, amiable dear, my precious, my very best, my ardently loved one’. His
‘loyal wife Lucie Hitler’ addressed one of her love letters outright to her ‘Dear
husband, Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler’ – precisely in this order.18
The overabundant use of self-invented pet names, often entirely opaque to a
third person outside of the romantic relationship, is certainly intrinsic to love
letters as such and thus can be found in numerous other contexts as well, yet
these attempts to incorporate officially sanctioned propaganda language into
personal salutations is unique. In these highly charged salutations, the writers
struggled to fuse expressions of their private romantic feelings for the Führer
with the rhetorical formulas usually employed when referring to him in public.
The intensity, but also the ineptitude, of their repeated attempts to combine the
two in a single utterance is obvious.
A number of women introduced a further noteworthy element of address
into their letters. They insisted on addressing Adolf Hitler as ‘Your Majesty’,
even when reporting for pages and pages on their everyday and family life,
their children, relatives and friends, pouring out worries about solitude, despair
or illnesses, or when simply asking for financial aid in case of personal need.
Writing shortly before Christmas 1941 from Prague, Margarethe Marie Louise
explained her motives and reasoning for so doing in more detail:
I realise, honourable Reich Chancellor and Führer of the Great German Empire,
that Your Majesty has not been formally given the crown; yet, in my inmost heart,
I can only address Your Excellency, Your most revered, honourable Reich Chancel-
lor and Führer des Großdeutschen Reiches with the word “Majesty” – and I dare to
use this expression in a private letter as an intimate, completely secret – yet, at the
same time – completely normal term.19

‘It’s not madness that makes me ask the Führer to admit me into his presence,
to let me be with him’, expressed yet another woman in a similar letter written
in March 1943 to the Reich Chancellery:
In earlier times it was possible to speak – just once – to a king. Why not in our
time, to our Führer? My only, inmost wish is to be with the Führer – and this wish
has simply taken possession of me. I cannot dismiss it … I often even wonder if I
am perhaps becoming mad? But then the Führer would also be that. I can only love
someone similar to myself.20
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 167

Here, distinct notions of the sovereign are blurred. Hitler was regarded as dif-
ferent forms of head of state in one person: not only Reich Chancellor and
Führer, but also King and the ‘secret emperor’ for whom the nation had so long
been waiting. At the same time, there is a vague longue-durée perspective, an
unconscious undercurrent to some of the arguments. Twentieth-century mani-
festations of Ernst Kantorowicz’ famous medieval doctrine of the ‘king’s two
bodies’ shine through. According to Kantorowicz, beginning in the fifteenth
century, though with roots in classical antiquity, the sovereign came to be seen
as a persona mixta or, rather, as una persona with duae naturae. His rule was God-
given, of divine origin. Since he formed part of a larger body that transcended
his own physical existence, the ruler was endowed with supernatural powers,
allowing him to heal by touch. Though unaware of the similarity, the women
writing to Hitler and appealing for relief employed an age-old discursive model
of addressing the ‘just sovereign’; precisely the same could be said for the well-
known ‘If Hitler only knew’ formula.21
The submissions and letters contained importunings of every possible kind.
Quite a few offered, in more or less subtle ways, sexual intercourse and bodily
intimacy. ‘You are searching for a woman – and I for a man’, Martha H. from
Halle an der Saale volunteered on 27 January 1939, ‘[n]ow everything remains
up to you. I myself am prepared to do absolutely anything. Tell me when, and
come.’22 One woman promised to leave her back door unlocked in case of a
nocturnal surprise visit on the part of Adolf Hitler. Another announced that
she would hide a second set of keys in her gardens to enable Hitler to enter
unimpeded at night – and all of this frenzy due not to love of state in a figura-
tive sense, but rather a far-reaching, physical desire for its head. Only under the
latter condition could this entreaty, in turn, be taken as a literal act of applied
patriotism, in the unconditional offering of one’s own body. A third admirer,
by the name of Eva Koch, left no doubt as to the earnestness of her devotion.
‘I kiss you, your behind and bare myself to you, so that you realise how much I
love you’, she wrote, ‘[y]ou cannot demand any greater patriotism than that.’23
However, the love, yearning and imagined intimacy so fervently expressed
in these letters always remained unrequited. It is more than likely that Hitler
never saw any of the love letters; at least, not a single answer has been found.
‘Official receipt or thanks in single cases were not given. The letters received
were presented to the Führer in listed form’, thus a high official explained the
general bureaucratic procedure. After their arrival at the Chancellery, secretar-
ies such as Junge and Schroeder read and carefully filed these letters under the
sender’s name. In exceptional cases, especially to authors of birthday greetings,
standardised replies were dispatched. A very few even received official thank-
you cards embossed with Hitler’s signature and expressing his ‘sincere gratitude
for the friendly greetings and the great loyalty which they reflect’.24 The au-
thors of ardent love letters, however, do not seem to have merited any answer
at all. If they wrote persistently, the Chancellery informed the local police,
168 Alexander C.T. Geppert

who gave them an official warning. Correspondents who did not heed such a
warning could eventually be declared ‘mentally unfit’, prosecuted and sent to
a psychiatric hospital.
In three cases, it can be deduced that such a procedure seems to have been
followed: Anna Wempe from Berlin sent eight love letters to Adolf Hitler, Ger-
trud Wenge from Koblenz three and Margarete Sauer from Stargard in Pom-
mern also three, after which point the local police received instructions from
Berlin to respond straightaway and put an end to further written advances. Yet,
in spite of a first ‘friendly’ warning, all three continued writing. Wempe, for
instance, started using a male pseudonym, while another woman wrote a harsh
farewell letter of complaint to Adolf Hitler himself. Telling him, in a most out-
raged manner, that the police had come to see her, she expressed her sincere
disappointment that Hitler had apparently not had the courage to write to
her personally and explain his lack of interest. Only under the condition that
Hitler broke the news himself, face-to-face, was she ready to accept his roman-
tic rejection at all.25 While we may be tempted to play down this woman’s love
for the dictator by declaring it retrospectively as ‘merely’ ascribed, projected
and imagined, this emotionally-laden affair seems to have been all too real
for her.

Loving the Dictator

Present-day lawyers, criminologists and psychologists would not hesitate to

classify such forms of deviant – and possibly compulsive – behaviour as com-
paratively minor forms of ‘stalking’. These letters clearly entailed neither any
direct, physical contact or violence, nor did their writers cause fear on the part
of the ‘victim’. In fact, Hitler chose not to react in any way at all. Especially in
the case of today’s numerous celebrities who are loved and pursued to the point
of harassment by their fans, sociologists have adopted the concept of ‘erotoma-
nia’, ‘erotomanic delusion’ or ‘paranoia erotica’. The same clinical condition
has also been described as the De Clérambault Syndrome, named after the
French prison psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault
(1872–1934), who, between 1913 and 1923, published a number of learned
articles on psychoses passionnelles.26 He pointed to a form of paranoid delusion of
amorous quality. According to de Clérambault, an erotomanic stalker is usually
a woman who has developed a deluded belief that the object of her love, a man
with whom she may have had very little or virtually no contact at all, recip-
rocates her own affection. Neither by experience nor by argument can she be
convinced of the opposite. Frequently, the chosen person is of a much higher
social status and thus is likely to be unattainable. It remains, however, disput-
able whether such a retrospective diagnosis could help to explain an obviously
widespread practice, and indeed to foster its necessary historicisation.27 Espe-
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 169

cially regarding Adolf Hitler, the psychological speculation or psychoanalytic

reasoning so prevalent and fashionable in the late 1970s and early 1980s have in
fact proved a mixed blessing when examining the origins of his appeal to the
masses. By the very rules of their profession, historians do not consider whether
one of their ‘cases’ would today be categorised as potentially pathological, if for
one simple reason only: it would neither essentially change anything nor offer
a satisfactory explanation.
What is it then that makes these letters appear in part so absurd, sometimes
even comical, yet also so grotesque and disturbing? Quite clearly, the phenom-
enon’s occurrence as such is not limited to Adolf Hitler. Contemporary celebri-
ties who receive comparable correspondence include not only pop musicians,
movie stars and screen idols, but also democratically elected politicians and fed-
eral chancellors equally at the centre of public media attention, in the German
case especially Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schröder.28 Yet other European dicta-
tors of the early twentieth century such as Hitler’s Fascist counterpart, Benito
Mussolini, were also objects of obsession and prominent addressees of the same
kind of passionate attention.29 Only a carefully designed, horizontally and ver-
tically comparative large-scale historical study could give detailed and secure
information as to the precise historical differences and similarities between all
of these cases, and, in particular, the ways in which they contrasted with vari-
ous forms of political charisma existing prior to the twentieth century. In the
present context, it must suffice to point to the social position of the dictator as
such, which is by definition elevated and tantamount to specific embodiments
of ruling masculinity.
For Mussolini, at least, the following can be established on a more concrete
basis. Compared to the letters that Hitler received, submissions to the Italian
dictator were frequently composed in a semi-official and much less personal
style, even if there are also a number of cases of women bluntly offering them-
selves and outspokenly suggesting that he should father their child. Generally,
the Duce appears as a different type of leader – less sexualised and more avun-
cular – who was to be contacted for direct advice and uncomplicated assistance
in cases of social injustice, misfortune or personal emergency beyond one’s own
control – precisely the kind of occasions suggested in an article ‘Quando si scrive
una lettera a Mussolini?’ (When does one write a letter to Mussolini?), which
the noted narrator, sports journalist and writer Orio Vergani (1899–1960) pub-
lished in the Corriere della Sera in November 1936. Here, the Italian dictator
was depicted as a caring and omnipresent, yet slightly distant father figure to
be addressed in moments of long-term misery and personal despair, whose task
it was to serve as everybody’s last resort. It seems that Mussolini, unlike Hitler,
was also ready to fulfil such a role, even if only to a certain extent. A limited
number of scribbled comments in the letters actually preserved, either by him
or one of his secretaries, prove that at least some of these submissions did, in
fact, reach the intended recipient. In rarer cases, Mussolini made benevolent
170 Alexander C.T. Geppert

comments and even ordered specific actions that, however, seem never to have
been characterised by outstanding financial generosity.30
What is, on the other hand, most remarkable in the love letters sent to
Adolf Hitler is his direct, immediate and entirely uninterrupted personal pres-
ence imagined by the writers in a domestic context. Despite his actual physical
absence in their homes, for these women ‘Hitler’ could not have been more
real. In some cases, Hitler may well have filled the emotional gap left by absent
fathers and sons, lovers and husbands completely absorbed by total warfare;
in others, he may merely have been the object of a ‘crush’, a hypothetical
possibility, given that many of the women wrote about their male partners
as well as Hitler. Yet, in general, there cannot be the slightest doubt as to the
earnestness of their heartfelt love, unrequited as it was. Adolf Hitler constituted
a very concrete, even integral, part of their daily lives. The writers considered
themselves so close to and intimate with Hitler that they did not flinch from
addressing him in personal terms. As numerous references to specific speeches
and marches, radio transmissions and propaganda events in the letters them-
selves suggest, this was their way of responding to the regime’s omnipresent
penetration into everyday life by a variety of means, all aiming at both mind
and body. Many felt so directly involved and personally addressed that they
believed themselves to have been perhaps not the only, but most certainly the
true recipient of his words, for whom alone Hitler had carefully composed his
messages. Some writers even sought (and supposedly found) hidden hints in his
speeches that they interpreted as direct references to themselves – and hence as
secret replies to what they believed to have already communicated to him.
While the source material does not contain sufficient evidence to justify
any speculation as to the ‘actual’ motives of the writers, three distinct, though
by no means mutually exclusive figures of the Führer can be deduced from the
letters: first, Hitler as an adored object of desire, a powerful sex symbol and a
pined-for lover; secondly, Hitler as a close friend, a confidant, almost a fam-
ily member, like an uncle sincerely interested in the wellbeing of his kin; and,
thirdly, Hitler as the sacred redeemer, saviour and sovereign, a God-sent crea-
ture, a royal figure equipped with healing powers of heavenly origins. Some-
times one of these three Führer figures overshadowed the other two, but more
often than not they were combined in an inextricable manner. On the occasion
of Hitler’s 43rd birthday in 1932, for instance, Ida Erbe from Barchfeld sent a
telling cable in which several distinct images were mixed, the result being one
big tangle of passionate emotions that is impossible to unravel:
My beloved Führer! My heart is so full, my birthday wishes became a prayer. Now
I know that God who, in his unending love, sent you to us will lead and protect
you. You shall remain Adolf Hitler and become our second Bismarck. We live, and
if necessary, we die for our Führer and his aim! … Heil! Heil Hitler! Let us con-
tinue the struggle! Ours is the truth! Ours the final victory! Best birthday wishes,
Ida Erbe.31
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 171

Here, in her ‘prayer’, Hitler transcended everything, with one single exception.
He became the beloved object of passionate desire, a protective statesman and
guarantor of truth as well as an omnipotent creature of supernatural powers,
with God, the Almighty, remaining the only supreme authority above him. Yet
since God had sent him in his ‘infinite love’, there was no doubt whence Hit-
ler derived his powers and for what reason both ‘truth’ and ‘the final victory’
had to be ‘ours’. On the part of his admirers and followers, the only adequate
response and only possible reaction to such earthly divinity was love. Thus,
political actors as diametrically opposed as Joseph Goebbels on the one hand,
and the exiled Social Democratic Party, on the other, made almost identical
statements. ‘The Führer is always present for his people. Yet they also love him
with all their heart’, the former noted in his diary in July 1937, while an of-
ficial report by the latter had already stated two years earlier that ‘[h]e is loved
by many’.32
In the end, both the apparent earnestness of these women’s hopes for a
union with Adolf Hitler and the regime’s clumsy attempts at reacting to such
outbreaks of unsolicited, highly eroticised passion that they could not com-
pletely control, raise far-reaching questions about the nexus of love and order,
sex and politics. In this specific context, it remains a ghastly paradox that those
who took the omnipresent Hitler-myth at face value and believed in the ubiq-
uitous propaganda as unswervingly as they could were eventually prosecuted
and imprisoned. Despite the considerable and far-reaching effects this could
have on their lives, the female letter writers tried to express something obvi-
ously impossible within two existing frameworks usually believed to be quite
separate, i.e., the genre of romantic love letters on the one hand, and linguistic
conventions of National Socialism, on the other. It is such a blatant clash of
two very different and distinct languages that makes reading these letters today
such a deeply disturbing experience. It is hard to believe that Hitler was actu-
ally loved by a considerable section of his followers, but there is no doubt that
they used the conventional language of romantic love with all of its stereotypes
in presenting him as their object of desire.
Whether such passion was the direct result of Hitler’s historically fre-
quently ascribed charisma or not, to ‘diagnose’ it as love produces an effect of
both alarm and disbelief on our part. Familiar with both distinct sets of rhetoric
rules and linguistic conventions, we almost inevitably react with a profound
sense of irritation vis-à-vis these continuous efforts to speak the unspeakable
in such a candid manner – attempts which, in retrospect, could not but fail. In
the very end, diagnosing ‘love’ may entail that historians will never be capable
of fully explaining Hitler’s fascination, attractiveness and ‘dreadful sex appeal’
as one of the reasons for his leadership and power. For us, laughter may be the
only way to conceal our apprehension in view of such an alarming and deeply
disquieting possibility.
172 Alexander C.T. Geppert

Staging a Country

During the twelve years of National Socialism, overly emotional displays be-
tween husbands and wives and between family members were not politically
encouraged. Any emotional exclusivity was considered risky for the Volksge-
meinschaft ideal, the state and the Führer. A strong and uncontrollable emotional
sub-community could well prove a potential threat to the national whole. If
one of the most outstanding features of the Nazi state was its totalitarian ten-
dency to erase all boundaries between public and private life, and to politicise
every aspect of the individual’s existence, then close emotional bonds between
individuals were not in the direct interest of the authorities.
Thus, there was no official conception of ‘love’ in National Socialism, or
at least no positively defined conception. ‘Love’ was not a central term, and
it did not form part of any ideological concept. Hence, no separate entry of
‘love’ is to be found in the various linguistic dictionaries of National Socialist
vocabulary. As a matter of fact, however, the term is applied with a surprising
frequency in different kinds of official and semi-official documents. Most of
the time it appeared in a strictly figurative, undichotomous and deromanticised
sense: love for something – the fatherland, the nation, the state. The only some-
body to be loved was the Führer and/or God, with the relation between the two
not being always clear in these documents. For instance, ‘A man, risen from the
midst of the people, preaches the gospel of love for the fatherland’, an official
propaganda book declared, directly proclaiming Hitler to be the new Messiah
and confirming the quasi-religious component already diagnosed.33
If there were expressions of private, romantic love in the public realm, it
was Adolf Hitler exclusively who took on the part of the ‘significant other’.
Thus, the innumerable love letters written by private followers and admirers
found their direct equivalent in those public declarations of love for the Führer,
which various party officials made over the years, first and foremost Joseph
Goebbels. As early as April 1926, he proclaimed, ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you be-
cause you are both great and simple at one and the same time. You are indeed
what is called a genius.’ A few weeks later, Goebbels elaborated further, calling
the object of his desire a ‘truly creative instrument of a divine fate’: ‘I stand
before him, utterly overwhelmed. In fact he is like a child: sweet, good, merci-
ful. Also as cunning, clever and agile as a cat, but like a lion too: roaring, great,
gigantic. A real, true man.’ In a lengthy leading article written for the Münchner
Neueste Nachrichten on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday in April 1935, Goebbels
expressed not only his own personal adoration of Hitler. Rather, Goebbels de-
clared that he was speaking in the name of and on behalf of the entire German
people who felt attached to Hitler ‘not merely in deep respect but also with
profound, heartfelt love’.34
David Bowie’s provocative statement, quoted at the beginning of this es-
say, is inevitably one-sided, but it draws a valuable parallel: Hitler was indeed
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 173

loved like a rock star by many of his admirers and followers, including some
of his immediate subordinates. Yet what may, prima facie, look like the perfect
evidence ‘from below’ for the applicability of the much-debated charisma con-
cept, proves to be far more ambiguous on closer inspection. Loving a rock star
is seldom problematic, loving a dictator is always so. While these pairs are both
mutually dependent, the implications of such imaginary couplings are far from
identical. Unlike celebrity fixations, at stake in this obsessive view of Hitler was
an entire political regime. While love of Hitler underpinned that system, it also,
paradoxically, helped to destabilise it.

Notes

1. Heinrich Mann, ‘Der große Mann’, in Der Haß. Deutsche Zeitgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam:
Querido, 1933), 79–103, here 87f.: ‘Dann keuchten die Massen unter seinem überwältigenden Ansturm
und rückhaltlos ergaben sie sich diesem fürchterlichen sex-appeal’. I am most grateful to Rita Hortmann and
the late Luise Rox for linguistic and technical assistance, and to Jörn Rüsen and Claudia Schmölders
for comments and criticism. Helmut Ulshöfer was so kind as to let me access the private William C.
Emker Collection (WCEC) in Wiesbaden, Germany, which he holds as a custodian.
2. Traudl Junge, Bis zur letzten Stunde. Hitlers Sekretärin erzählt ihr Leben (Munich: List, 2003),
96f.:
Vor dem Krieg wurden jeden Tag einmal die Tore geöffnet, wenn sich Hitler auf seinen
Spaziergang begab, und dann strömten die Menschen herein und säumten seinen Weg.
Hysterische Frauen nahmen Steine mit, die sein Fuß berührt hatte, und die vernünft-
igsten Menschen benahmen sich wie toll. Einmal wurde sogar ein Lastwagen, der
Ziegelsteine zum Berghof hinaufbrachte, von ein paar übergeschnappten Frauen ge-
plündert, und die Steine, die weder des Führers Hände noch Füße berührt hatten,
wanderten als wertvolle Andenken in die Vitrinen des Wohnzimmers. Von solchen Da-
men trafen dann die Liebesbriefe ein, die einen großen Teil des Posteingangs in der
Kanzlei des Führers ausmachten.
See also Christine Schroeder, Er war mein Chef. Aus dem Nachlaß der Sekretärin von Adolf Hitler, 2nd
ed. (Munich: Langen Müller, 1985).
3. Ralf Georg Reuth, ed., Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher 1924–1945, 5 vols. (Munich: Piper,
1992), here 3: 1000 (31 October 1936): ‘Berge Telegramme. Liebesbezeugungen aus dem ganzen
Volke.’ Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon,
1987), 60f.
4. Walter Kempowski, ed., Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? Deutsche Antworten (Munich: Hanser,
1973), 47–49, 62f.: ‘Wir haben uns drei Tage kaum die Hände zu waschen getraut, vor lauter Rührung,
nur weil er sie geschüttelt hat.’ ‘Die Frauen drehten das Weiße aus den Augen raus und sanken wie nasse
Lappen hin. Wie geschlachtete Kälber lagen sie da, seufzten schwer. Freude und Erfüllung.’ Doris K., in
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer? Ehemalige Nationalsozialisten und Zeitzeugen berichten über ihr Leben im
Dritten Reich, ed. Lothar Steinbach (Bonn: Dietz, 1984), 79.
5. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary. The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 14f.
6. See, for instance, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, ‘Feminisierung des Faschismus’, in Die Nacht
hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommt schon der Tag. Antifaschismus – Geschichte und Neubewertung, ed. Clau-
dia Keller (Berlin: Aufbau, 1996), 45–69, or Eva Sternheim-Peters, ‘Brunst, Ekstase, Orgasmus.
Männerphantasien zum Thema “Hitler und die Frauen”’, Psychologie heute 8, no. 7 (July 1981):
36–41. I am grateful to Dagmar Herzog for sharing these references and other information with
me; see in this context her state-of-the-art anthology Sexuality and German Fascism (Austin: Uni-
174 Alexander C.T. Geppert

versity of Texas Press, 2002) (= Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1/2), and especially her
Sex after Fascism. Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2005).
7. The literature is vast. For surveys see Birthe Kundrus, ‘Frauen und Nationalsozialismus.
Überlegungen zum Stand der Forschung’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 36 (1996): 481–499, and
Kundrus, ‘Widerstreitende Geschichte. Ein Literaturbericht zur Geschlechtergeschichte des Na-
tionalsozialismus’, Neue Politische Literatur 45, no. 1 (2000): 67–92. Claudia Schmölders, Hit-
lers Gesicht. Eine physiognomische Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2000). Although relying on an idea
en passant already propagated twenty years earlier (Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘30. Januar 1933 – Ein
halbes Jahrhundert danach’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 4-5 (29 January 1983): 43–54, here
50), the most profound attempt to make ‘charisma’ the key concept to analyse Hitler’s persona
can be found in Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4: Vom Beginn des Er-
sten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1919–1949 (Munich: Beck, 2003),
551–563, 866–872. However, the very first to describe and analyse Hitler as a charismatic leader
in Weber’s sense was the German-American sociologist Hans Gerth in 1940; see his ‘The Nazi
Party. Its Leadership and Composition’, American Journal of Sociology 45, no. 4 (January 1940):
517–541. Another locus classicus is M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Das Modell der charismatischen Herrschaft
und seine Anwendbarkeit auf den “Führerstaat” Adolf Hitlers’, in Lepsius, Demokratie in Deut-
schland. Soziologisch-historische Konstellationsanalysen. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1993), 95–118. See also Ludolf Herbst, ‘Der Fall Hitler. Inszenierungskunst und
Charismapolitik’, in Virtuosen der Macht. Herrschaft und Charisma von Perikles bis Mao, ed. Winfried
Nippel (Munich: Beck, 2000), 171–191; Marcel Atze, ‘Unser Hitler’. Der Hitler-Mythos im Spiegel
der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003); and Henning Bühmann,
‘Der Hitlerkult. Ein Forschungsbericht’, in Personality Cults in Stalinism, eds Klaus Heller and Jan
Plamper (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 109–157.
8. William J. Goode, ‘The Theoretical Importance of Love’, American Sociological Review 24,
no. 1 (February 1959): 38–47, here esp. 38n1.
9. Helmut Ulshöfer, ed., Liebesbriefe an Adolf Hitler – Briefe in den Tod. Unveröffentlichte Do-
kumente aus der Reichskanzlei, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Akademische Schriften,
1996). Some of these letters were translated into English and provided with a short introduction
by Will Hobson. See Ulshöfer, ‘Dear Adolf ’, Granta 51 (January 1995): 73–83. See also Andreas
Rosenfelder, ‘Empfänger unbekannt. Chronik der Gefühle. Hitlers Liebesbriefe sind immer noch
nicht angekommen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 February 2004, and Hans-Jörg Vehlewald,
‘“Süßer Adolf, ich bin zu allem bereit.” Wissenschaftler untersuchen Liebesbriefe an Nazi-Diktator
Hitler’, BILD, 14 February 2004.
10. Eucker’s/Emker’s fragmentary autobiography was published as Zwischen den Welten. Auto-
biografie des Antifaschisten Willy Eucker, ed. Helmut Ulshöfer (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Akade-
mische Schriften, 1993), here esp. 171f., 182f.
11. See, for instance, ‘Persönliche Zuschriften an Adolf Hitler’, Bundesarchiv, Berlin
(BArch), NS 10/157, Fos. 126, 138, NS 10/158, Fo. 172 or NS 10/160, Fos. 150-150v; Douwe
Stuurman, ‘The Nazi Collection. A Preliminary Note’, The Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of
Current Acquisitions 6, no. 1 (November 1948): 21f.; Thomas R. Henry, ‘Hitler Considered a God
Letter Collection Shows. Library of Congress Gathered Data in Ransacked Reichchancellery’,
Evening Star, 15 December 1948.
12. Orio Vergani, ‘Lettere a Mussolini. Quando si scrive una lettera a Mussolini?’, Corriere
della Sera, 3 November 1936.
13. Hauptschriftleiter Heinz Henckel to Reichskanzlei, Berlin, 11 November 1935, Ger-
man Captured Document Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington,
DC (GCDC), Reel 18; ‘Was verdanke ich Adolf Hitler? Das neue Preisausschreiben der BTZ’,
Braunschweiger Tageszeitung, September 1935; ‘Was verdanke ich Adolf Hitler? Das Ergebnis un-
seres Preisausschreibens’, Braunschweiger Tageszeitung, 28/29 September 1935; Staatssekretär und
Chef der Präsidialkanzlei to Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, Abtlg. VIII,
Berlin, 7 May 1936, GCDC, Reel 18.
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 175

14. Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Liste. Ein Dokument persönlicher Beziehungen (Munich:
Herbig, 2003), 12–15; Margarete to Adolf Hitler, Königsberg/Ostpreußen, 10 December 1939,
WCEC: ‘Mein Herzensadolf, ich schicke Anfang dieser Woche ein Paket an Dich ab mit einem von mir
handgearbeiteten Kissen (Die Federn sind aus meinem Zudeck!)’; Anne-Marie R. to Adolf Hitler,
Chesières, Switzerland, 5 August 1940, ibid.; Kershaw, Myth, 73; Miele to Adolf Hitler, Berlin,
10 September 1939, WCEC: ‘Ja, ja, mein lieber, süßer, guter Adolf, die Liebe ist echt wie Gold. Da kann
man nichts machen.’
15. Wilhelmine Huschko to Adolf Hitler, Vienna, April 1938 (?), GCDC, Reel 19:
Zu Hitlers Geburtstag:
Ein reiner Gedanke
Ein heißes Gebet
Herr lass uns wert sein
Dass Hitler
Für uns lebt
und kämpft.
16. Rosemarie to Adolf Hitler, Dessau, 4 November 1943, WCEC: ‘Mein liebes, gutes Schat-
zel! ... Gern möchte ich Ihre kleine Braut werden und sein, es gefällt mir nur nicht, daß ich noch immer
meinen Zahnersatz nicht habe.’
17. Erna Jung to Adolf Hitler, Ludwigshafen, 2 August 1944, ibid.: ‘Sie wollen doch nichts von
mir wissen, sonst hätten Sie mir schon längst einen Besuch bei Ihnen gestattet’; Jose und Buben to Adolf
Hitler, Bad Kreuznach, 30 September 1941, ibid.: ‘Mein Lieb. Ich danke Dir auch für alle Liebe und
Treue, für alles Schöne. Du bist so lieb und gut zu mir. Dies macht mich so reich und glücklich, mein großer,
treuer Liebster. Es tut mir oft so leid, daß Du, mein Lieb, so viel Arbeit hast, aber nach dem Kriege, dann
wird es auch für Dich, mein Lieb, besser werden’; Rosa M. to Adolf Hitler, Grombach, 29 March 1943,
ibid.: ‘Nur dadurch, weil ich das Große im Herzen trage, ist mir mein Mann fremd geworden.’
18. Ritschie to Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 2 December 1940, 17 August 1941, 30 January 1943;
Miele to Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 10 September 1939; Margarete to Adolf Hitler, Königsberg/Ost-
preußen, 10 December 1939; anonymous to Adolf Hitler, Arnsdorf, January 1945; Maria to
Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 12 June 1939; Milly Fahlert, geb. Könick (?) to Adolf Hitler, Bergstraße, 23
June 1939; Lucie Hitler (sic) to Adolf Hitler, 2 May 1939, all ibid.: ‘Adilie’, ‘mein lieber zuckersüßer
Adolf ’, ‘mein Herzensmann, Purzelchen, mein Herzensadolf ’, ‘Heil Adöfflilein’, ‘Lieber Adi!’, ‘Süßes
Adilie!’, ‘Mein heißgeliebtes Herzelchen!’, ‘Du süßes herzensbestes Lieb, mein Einzigstes, mein Allerbester,
mein trautes und heiß Geliebtes’, ‘Mein herzlieber Mann!’, ‘mein lieber Ehegatte, Führer und Reichskanzler
Adolf Hitler’.
19. Margarethe Marie Louise to Adolf Hitler, Prague, 22 December 1941, ibid.:
Ich weiß, hochgeehrter Herr Reichskanzler und Führer des großdeutschen Reiches,
daß Ihre Majestät formal nicht gekrönt sind: jedoch in meinem Innern spreche ich Ihre
Exzellenz, Ihre Hochwürdigkeit, hochgeehrter Herr Reichskanzler und Führer des
Großdeutschen Reiches, nicht anders als mit dem Wort “Majestät” an – und deshalb
wage ich das Wort Majestät in diesem Privatbriefe als ein für mich “im stillen” ganz
übliches Wort auszusprechen – zu schreiben.
20. Gertrud Z. to Adolf Hitler, Berlin-Charlottenburg, 14 March 1943, ibid.:
Es ist kein Wahn, der mich den Führer bitten läßt, er soll mich bei ihm (sic) lassen,
zu sich nehmen. Man konnte doch früher auch einmal mit einem König sprechen.
Warum heute nicht mit seinem Führer? Ich kenne keinen Wunsch als beim Führer
zu sein. Dieser Wunsch bin ich selber. Ich kann ihn nicht streichen … Ich denke oft
darüber nach, ob ich nicht doch verrückt bin? Aber dann wäre es der Führer ja auch.
Ich kann doch nur lieben, was mir ähnlich.
21. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges. Etude sur le
caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Librairie
Istra, 1924); Klaus Schreiner, ‘“Wann kommt der Retter Deutschlands?” Formen und Funktio-
nen von politischem Messianismus in der Weimarer Republik’, Saeculum 49 (1998): 107–160.
176 Alexander C.T. Geppert

22. Martha H. to Adolf Hitler, Halle an der Saale, 27 January 1939, ibid.: ‘Du suchst eine Frau,
ich suche einen Mann... Es liegt alles nur an Dir, ich bin zu allem bereit. Bestelle mich und komme.’
23. U. to Adolf Hitler, 25 August 1942, ibid.; Margarete ‘Weiberl’ to Adolf Hitler, Königs-
berg/Ostpreußen, 10 November 1939, ibid.:
Mein Herzensmann! … Ich laß für Dich einen Hausschlüssel und einen Schlüssel
von meinem Zimmer anfertigen, vielleicht gibt’s sie auch gleich passend zu kaufen
… Also, mein Herz, Du kommst dann her, möglichst früh, wenn Du willst, klingle
bei der Vermieterin meines Zimmers … an, und frage, ob ich da bin. Und wenn alle
Stränge reißen, haben unsere Eltern (denn Deine sind es ja jetzt auch) mir erlaubt, daß
Du jederzeit zu uns in Haus kommen kannst, also dann übernachten wir gemeinsam
im Elternhause!
Eva Koch to Adolf Hitler, 22 July 1940, ibid.: ‘Ich küsse Dich auf Deine 4 Buchstaben und tue Front
frei, damit Du fühlst, wie lieb ich Dich hab. Mehr Patriotismus kannst Du nicht verlangen.’ See also Alf
Lüdtke’s contribution to this volume.
24. Staatssekretär und Chef der Präsidialkanzlei to Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung
und Propaganda, Abtlg. VIII, Berlin, 7 May 1936, GCDC, Reel 18: ‘Empfangsbestätigung oder
Danksagung im einzelnen ist nicht erfolgt. Die Eingänge haben dem Führer listenmäßig vorgelegen.’ ‘Für
Ihre freundlichen Grüße und für die mir in Ihrer Zuschrift zum Ausdruck gebrachte treue Gesinnung spreche
ich Ihnen meinen aufrichtigen Dank aus. Gez. A. Hitler.’
25. Reichsicherheitsdienst an den Chef der Reichskanzlei, 26 August 1942; Reichsminister
und Chef der Reichskanzlei an den Herrn Reichsminister des Innern, 14 May 1942; Reichsmin-
ister und Chef der Reichskanzlei an den Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD; Frau A. to Adolf
Hitler, 10 April 1944, all WCEC.
26. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, ‘Psychoses passionnelles’, in Oeuvre psychiatrique, vol. 1
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), 309–451, esp. ‘Érotomanie pure, érotomanie as-
sociée. Présentation de malade’ (1921), 346–370.
27. Paul E. Mullen, Michele Pathé, and Rosemary Purcell, Stalkers and Their Victims (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); G.E. Berrios and N. Kennedy, ‘Erotomania. A
Conceptual History’, History of Psychiatry 13 (December 2002): 381–400; Rebecca Löbmann,
‘Stalking. Ein Überblick über den aktuellen Forschungsstand’, Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und
Strafrechtsreform 85, no. 1 (2002): 25–32; Martin Brüne, ‘Erotomanic Stalking in Evolutionary
Perspective’, Behavioral Sciences and the Law 21, no. 1 (2003): 83–88.
28. Personal communication with Sigrid Krampitz, Gerhard Schröder’s former executive
secretary, and Dr. Ulrich Gundelach, Leiter des Petitionsausschusses des Bundeskanzleramts, Ber-
lin, 16 January 2006. Available information is scarce because these letters are not publicly acces-
sible. Unfortunately, the Bundeskanzleramt repeatedly refused to provide any further information
and made it quite clear that they were not interested in cooperating. See also Park Elliott Dietz,
Daryl B. Matthews, Cindy Van Duyne et al., ‘Threatening and Otherwise Inappropriate Letters
to Hollywood Celebrities’, Journal of Forensic Science 36, no. 1 (January 1991): 185–209.
29. In 1989, a small selection of 80 letters was published as Caro Duce. Lettere di donne italiane
a Mussolini, 1922–1943, ed. Giorgio Boatti (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989). However, that the number
of love letters properly contained in this anthology is so limited may well be the consequence of
an undisclosed editorial decision. See in this context Piero Melograni, ‘The Cult of the Duce in
Mussolini’s Italy’, Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 4 (October 1976): 221–237, and Richard
J.B. Bosworth, ‘Everyday Mussolinism. Friends, Family, Locality and Violence in Fascist Italy’,
Contemporary European History 14, no. 1 (2005): 23–43. The love letters that Mussolini himself
wrote in 1937 to Claretta Petacci (1912–1945), his ‘official’ lover of many years, recently disap-
peared mysteriously from the central archives in Rome without a trace.
30. Vergani, ‘Lettere a Mussolini’.
31. Ida Erbe to Adolf Hitler, Barchfeld, 20 April 1932, GCDC, Reel 18:
Meinem geliebten Führer! Mir ist das Herz so voll, meine Geburtstagswünsche wur-
den zum Gebet. Nun weiß ich, dass Gott, der Sie in seiner unendlichen Liebe zu uns
geschickt hat, Sie führen und schützen wird. Sie sollen Adolf Hitler bleiben und unser
 ‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany 177

zweiter Bismarck werden. Wir leben, und wenn es sein muß, sterben wir für unseren
Führer und sein Ziel!... Heil! Heil Hitler! Weiter im Kampf! Unser ist die Wahrheit!
Unser der Endsieg! Mit Geburtstagsgruß, Ida Erbe.
32. Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher (13 July 1937), 3: 1099: ‘Der Führer ist unermüdlich zu den Men-
schen. Aber sie lieben ihn auch aus vollem Herzen’; ‘Die allgemeine Situation in Deutschland’, Deutsch-
land-Berichte der Sopade 2.3 (14 March 1935): 275–286, here 279: ‘Er wird von vielen geliebt.’
33. Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998);
Robert Michael and Karin Doerr, Nazi-Deutsch. An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third
Reich (Westport: Greenwood, 2002). Deutschlands Erwachen in Bild und Wort, introduction: ‘Ein
Mann, aufgestanden mitten aus dem Volk, verkündet das Evangelium der Liebe zum Vaterland’; cf.
Schmölders, Gesicht, 105f.
34. Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, 1: 243, 266: ‘Adolf Hitler, ich liebe Dich, weil Du groß und einfach
zugleich bist. Das was man ein Genie nennt’ (19 April 1926); ‘Er ist ein Genie. Das selbstverständlich
schaffende Instrument eines göttlichen Schicksals. Ich stehe vor ihm erschüttert. So ist er: wie ein Kind, lieb,
gut, barmherzig. Wie eine Katze listig, klug und gewandt, wie ein Löwe, brüllend-groß und gigantisch. Ein
Kerl, ein Mann’ (24 July 1926). Joseph Goebbels, ‘Deutschland ist wahrhaft auferstanden! Dr.
Goebbels zum Geburtstag des Führers’, Münchner Neuste Nachrichten 110, 21/22 April 1935, 1f.:
‘nicht nur mit Verehrung, sondern mit tiefer, herzlicher Liebe.’
 CHAPTER 9

Love, Again
Crisis and the Search for Consolation
in the Revista de Occidente 1926–1936

ALISON SINCLAIR

In the relationship of Spain to Europe in the early twentieth century, and up

to the outbreak of Civil War in 1936, the Revista de Occidente (RO) occupies
a special position.1 Founded in 1923, under the direction of Ortega y Gasset,
RO’s purpose was to be a major conduit for ideas from abroad to reach Spain. It
aimed at a well-educated and cultured elite, and was deliberately and explicitly
non-political. RO was, however, only part of a complex structure of cultural
exchanges between Spain and Europe in this period, a complexity to be seen
in the wide spectrum of Ortega’s activities in disseminating culture. Other
ventures of Ortega besides RO, such as El Espectador (1916–1934), would run
as subscription only (and with Ortega as the sole contributor); España (1915–
1923), which again included in its agenda that of opening Spain to foreign cul-
ture, was political, unlike RO, and Ortega left it in 1915 as it moved politically
further to the left.2 He published in the daily paper El Imparcial (in publication
until 1933), and in 1917 joined with Nicolás María de Urgoiti in setting up
another daily, El Sol (in publication until 1939). Through his participation in
both of these other papers, it is arguable that his impact on the public was more
far-reaching than through RO.
The received view on Spanish intellectual and cultural life in this period
has highlighted elite journals such as RO, and elite institutions such as the
Residencia de Estudiantes, founded in 1910,3 as prime channels through which
Spain had its cultural contacts with the outside world. It is clear that both RO
and the Residencia were indeed of signal importance in Spain’s cultural and in-
tellectual life in this period. Their functioning is still in need of re-assessment,
Notes for this section begin on page 194.
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 179

as is the degree to which there was networking between members of different

institutions such as the JAE, the Ateneo de Madrid,4 and diverse professional
associations.5
In relation to the project of Europe in Love, the major contribution of RO
in the period of 1923 to 1936 is that it is instrumental in bringing Spain into a
relationship with the ideas of civilisation, specifically those of European civili-
sation. It achieves it not in specific articles about love as such, but in a series of
articles that consider issues of gender, and which consequentially have implica-
tions for the idea of love. This essay considers the dynamics of this discourse
on gender in the early years of RO, from 1923 through to the outbreak of war
in 1936, when the review’s regular publication was interrupted.6 The years
under discussion cover two sharply contrasting periods in Spanish politics:
the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) and the Second Republic
(1931–1936). In the light of the dramatically shifting politics they represented
(a move from a right-wing dictatorship to the liberal politics of the Republic),
the non-political or apolitical stance of RO is noteworthy, and constitutes a
careful balancing act. While it eschewed the overtly political, it could be argued
that RO engaged in the projection of structures of society that in a broader
sense could be construed as political. The idealisation of relationships between
the sexes appearing with consistency through these pre-Civil War years reveals
a type of cultural attitude with resonances that are social and consequently
political in a broad sense.
The articles on gender in RO throughout this period present a nostalgic
and in many ways traditional view of the relations between the sexes, and they
continue to do so up to the Civil War. At the inception of the Republic in
1931, one might imagine a shift in the tenor of the articles concerned with
gender, but this noticeably and remarkably fails to happen. My argument is that
the review engaged in an imaginary of consolation in which a series of articles
sketched out an attitude toward society that favoured and linked together con-
cepts of love, the feminine and civilisation. The view of gender thus promoted
– first in the years of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, and then through the years
of the Second Republic – is essentialist and tidy. In offering a consolation of
tidiness, the articles run curiously against the current of liberal social devel-
opments of the time, most notably concerning the emancipation of women,
both in Spain and Europe. In so doing, they complicate our understanding of
Ortega’s role in facilitating Spain’s cultural relations with Europe. While RO has
a reputation for looking forward and outward, this aspect of its activity and the
specificity of its importations suggest a type of retrenchment of social attitudes
that inevitably carried an implied political message.
The imaginary of consolation I have alluded to does not engage directly
and centrally with the question of love. But the articles in question show a
view of relations between the sexes that is set in a structure of stability. This is a
significant structure to present within Spain in this period, given that a purely
180 Alison Sinclair

superficial political and social stability during the dictatorship gave way to overt
and disruptive instability during the Republic, resulting from extremes of social
and political progressiveness, on the one hand, and a conservative championing
of traditional values, on the other. Spain was, of course, not alone in Europe
in experiencing social and political disruption in this period, and arguably the
proffering of an imaginary of consolation would have been as relevant in Eng-
land, France or Germany. Where Spain stood to be ‘different’ from elsewhere
in Europe was in the concept of where stability of society (and relations of
gender and love) might lie. Outlining gender relations that echoed patriarchal
structures, and that because of those structures offered a sense of social stabil-
ity, responded to a conservative tradition, but was also one that was far from
absent from more liberal standpoints. The articulation of ‘proper’ gender posi-
tions that would be found in the work of sexual reformers in the 1920s and
1930s, particularly among champions of eugenics such as Marañón and Pitta-
luga, discussed later, for example, looked toward a utopian future in which the
disorders caused by disease (and thought to be linked to degeneration) might
be removed. Such utilitarian underpinning might seem distant from ideas of
‘love’, but it formed a major part of the discourse on matters of gender in this
period in Spain. Love is presumed to occur within a structure in which there
might be ‘proper’ gender roles, a ‘proper’ functioning within society, and love
will thus contribute to a civilised future.
Implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, the imaginary of consolation stands,
then, in counterpoint to the instability of political and social life in the West
in this period and maps out gender relations in which – one deduces – ‘love’
might occur. It thus has a bearing on the theme of Europe and Love, albeit a
somewhat indirect one. In the context of the articles of RO, love is rarely if
ever discussed explicitly. Apparent exceptions, such as Bertrand Russell’s essay
of January 1930 on ‘The place of love in human life’, or that of Rosa Chacel on
the ‘Schema of practical and present-day problems of love’, are in fact largely
philosophical or sociological.
The selection of which authors would have their work published in RO
was patently in line with Ortega’s strong editorial policy. Publications with a
bearing on psychoanalytic thought demonstrate this: here, Ortega was cau-
tious and selective, and while a number of articles by Jung appeared, there is a
striking sparseness of reference in RO to the work of Freud.7 In terms of the
imaginary of consolation that RO pursues in relation to matters of gender, it
is as though Freud might disturb a vision of the imaginary in which a social
structure guaranteed some stability and meaning. Freud’s Civilisation and its
Discontents (1930) did nothing to produce a reassuring vision of society, but, on
the contrary, emphasised the aggressive nature of man. RO appears to assert that
– whatever the conflicts and difficulties of the Western world in the interwar
years – structure and meaning were still retained. It is curious in the light of
his attitude to Freud that Ortega would voice his own concerns about the role
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 181

of the masses in modern society. He did this famously in The Rebellion of the
Masses (1930), a work in which he recognised social change, and argued the
case for a new order that would be born out of an elite coming into awareness
of its proper role in society.
Ortega’s intention in setting up his review was to create a circle of intellec-
tuals, to bring into being a set of others with whom he could discuss things of
the day. For Evelyne López Campillo, the chosen non-political nature of RO
constitutes a reduction in Ortega’s ambition.8 Yet Ortega’s propositions (‘Pro-
pósitos’), published in the first number of RO, suggest something other than
that. He speaks of wanting to appeal to the ‘curiosity’ of a readership envisaged
as ‘calmly’ interested in culture and the arts. This curiosity is free-floating,
detached from hierarchies and divisions of social and cultural structure – a
type of curiosity that is neither exclusively aesthetic nor particularly scientific
or political. It is what the alert individual feels in his desire to confront and
know the depths of contemporary reality.9 These aims can thus be seen as
the expression of a different ambition. In part, they contain the general ideal
of producing an educated and cultured population by exposure to the ‘best’
ideas from Europe and elsewhere. But something more complex is suggested
in Ortega’s explanation of the reference to the West (‘occidentalidad’) in the title
of his review. Rooted in the belief that there is a Europe that is cosmopolitan
and cultured, history had changed things. The cosmopolitan spirit before the
First World War, he says, could be seen as a surface style of internationalism, in
which national differences and peculiarities were ‘annulled’, whereas the post-
war cosmopolitan spirit of the West was one that now existed in a more realistic
way. War had brought closeness through conflict, but this did not prevent those
involved from having to rely on one another more and to have co-existence.
Ortega conjures up, therefore, an idea not of tough love, but of a tough togeth-
erness between countries, born of the difficulties of their recent contact/con-
flict. This is coupled with the idea that many feel the current world to be the
one they experience as chaos. He hopes that RO will bring some light to the
situation, and more significantly, that it will put its readers in touch with the
‘new architecture’ currently being reconstructed in the West.10 Simultaneously,
then, the experience offered by this review is of difficulty and of encounter,
of order for the chaos of experience and hope that Spain will be brought into
the development of the countries of the West.11 The articles on gender in RO
might be considered as an element not wholly consonant with the forward
thinking nature of Ortega’s aims for the journal, given that they offer strikingly
calm and reconciled views on how to understand gendered difference. Yet, they
are outward looking. In publishing articles on gender that form an imaginary
of consolation, and specifically in choosing articles that in their majority are
authored outside of Spain, Ortega subscribes to an ideal of love and gender re-
lations that is European rather than Spanish, cultivated and civilised rather than
passionate and individualistic (the contemporary stereotype norms for Spain);
182 Alison Sinclair

in short, an ideal that will be soothing and consoling in troubled times. That it
has an embedded imbalance, insofar as woman is frequently figured in the ar-
ticles as ‘superior’, and yet excluded from the world of action, is not in conflict
with the idea of love, but rather maps well onto the model of courtly love, in
which the woman appears as a superior, and, at times unapproachable, being.
An implied message in this article is arguably that there could be an orderly and
‘civilised’ world not just in the sphere of gender relations, but also elsewhere.
The arena of politics that Ortega eschews in RO is one that for Spain, through-
out the years RO was being published, was violent, turbulent and would even-
tually explode into the Civil War. RO presents an alternative form of public life,
in intellectual exploration and debate, and in the exchange of ideas without
acrimony or political agenda.
The articles on gender (some two dozen between 1923 and 1936) are thus
tinged with a desire to analyse and interpret the present with a view to a future
that is intuited as uncertain. They appear at the average rate of two a year in the
period up to the Second Republic, after which they are much more sparse. By
working chronologically, I shall track how Ortega created over time a collec-
tion of others with whom he could converse, simultaneously creating a corpus
of ideas.12 The review as a whole had a strong pedagogical intent. There are
numerous introductory footnotes or epigraphs that place the authors of articles
in modern society, and that offer an evaluation of their importance to the cul-
tured reader. A discussion of all of the authors of articles dealing with gender
is not possible in this essay: they include Kretschmer, Spranger, Frank, Russell,
Giménez Caballero, Pittaluga, Dantín Cereceda, Kierkegaard, Chacel, Simmel,
Marañón, Keyserling and Jung.13 I shall concentrate on a small selection rep-
resenting Ortega’s desire to give his readers the ideas of those he considers to
be from the foremost European thinkers, underpinning their work with local
writers whose work might be considered ‘scientifically respectable’.

Georg Simmel

Prominent in RO is the German sociologist Georg Simmel. He died in 1918,

some five years before his articles started to appear in Spain, and it is evident
that Ortega had a didactic aim in bringing Simmel to the attention of the Span-
ish public. Ortega had become acquainted with Simmel’s work when he went
to Berlin in August of 1906, where he attended Simmel’s lectures, which then
led to Simmel becoming a major influence on his work.14 Ortega’s note ac-
companying Simmel’s article on ‘Masculine and Feminine: Towards a Psychol-
ogy of the Sexes’ (November and December 1923) declares: ‘I shall take the
liberty of recommending to the readers of this Review that they make an atten-
tive reading of these exceptional pages which shed so much light on the lasting
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 183

conflict between masculine and feminine.’15 The essays reproduced in RO are,

incidentally, straightforward translations of the originals, not adapted especially
for the Spanish reading public.
A curiosity is that this was not Simmel’s first appearance in the review. His
first appearance had been in July and August of 1923, and with what was argu-
ably a more challenging piece on fashion (‘Philosophy of Fashion’), and one
that revealed him as a subtle philosopher and critic. In many ways, this initial
contribution sets Simmel up as a writer of distinction, and prepares the reader
to respect him. The fact that Simmel’s writings on gender are acknowledged
as a problem area in his output by current scholarship was either not perceived
as such by Ortega, or was skirted around by introducing Simmel via another
area of writing first. The status of Simmel’s writings on gender has been much
debated, and an excellent evaluation of the debate is offered by Witz.16 She
notes that many current evaluations rely on a curate’s egg motif to explain the
unevenness of the writing. Her own reading, by which Simmel’s ontology of
gender consigns woman to the periphery, while his sociological imagination
releases man into a more fertile working area, is a discrimination singularly help-
ful in situating him in the corpus being established by RO.
‘Philosophy of Fashion’ has a bearing on gender in a way that is significant
for the implied status of its author in RO’s corpus, since it designates Simmel
as a philosopher and sociologist who has an eye to historical reality. One might
observe that Ortega shows himself imaginative and forward thinking in hav-
ing this particular essay as the first example of Simmel’s work to bring to his
reading public. Simmel points out how fashion satisfies two fundamental and
yet opposing desires in man: to be like the rest, to be anonymous within the
masses, and at the same time to be distinguished and different.17 Fashion is,
for Simmel, not just related to existential human desires, but relates to those
sub-structures of society that we create. It is, thus, an aid to create a distinct
inner circle, from which those deemed inferior will be excluded. The double
and contradictory function of fashion maintains us in a temporal suspense that
lends vitality to the present moment.18 Simmel’s contribution to existential
philosophy is exemplified in this first part of his essay on fashion. It is only in
the second part (August 1923) that he makes the more obvious, and in some
senses, more pedestrian association of fashion with women. Yet this link is saved
from its potential triviality by the fact that Simmel identifies woman with a
social position of inferiority as determined by history, one that predetermines
her adherence to fashion.19 The function of history in guaranteeing Simmel’s
respectability as an author will have its counterpart in the recourse to medicine
and science in other articles on gender, as set out below.
In ‘Masculine and Feminine’ (November and December 1923) Simmel
argues for a traditional (Platonic and Aristotelian) split between the worlds of
the masculine and the feminine. The crux of his contribution lies in his attempt
184 Alison Sinclair

to define and place woman outside of the familiar binaries, so as to secure her
a sense of ‘authentic femininity’, and in so doing, he follows the tradition of
Herder, Goethe and Nietzsche, rather than that of Kant and Hegel.20 He is not
simplistic, yet there is a patriarchal traditionalism underlying what are presented
as contemporary and challenging analyses. While he appears to retain the sharp
critical edge of historicity that had raised the level of his discussion of fashion,
he slips between this and a disturbing essentialism. Thus, man’s position of
social superiority, his ‘place of power’ (posición de fuerza), recognised histori-
cally, means that he considers his position less than woman does hers, with the
result that man is more objective. This ‘objectivity’ becomes a type of ‘objective
truth’, valid for both men and women.21 Yet the fact that Simmel perceives the
supposed ‘objectivity’ of the world as one associated with the masculine (as a
social and historical fact) is one of his major insights, albeit one not entirely
comfortable for those excluded from that field of objectivity.
Simmel argues biological difference to be the foundation of social differ-
ence,22 a schema within which woman was more bound up with her sexual be-
ing than man. Viewed retrospectively, we can see how the style of this argument
on gender will be consistent with that presented by Marañón. More generally,
it was consistent with the organicist strand of thinking on gender and sexual-
ity in Spain during this period.23 Simmel does something quite curious in this
paper. He argues that woman was more conscious of her subordinate place in
society, but maintains that the difference with man, based on biology, matters
less to her, precisely because of the nature of that sexual difference. Appealingly
(and this is where we can see the beginning of the narrative of consolation), he
views her as removed to a place out of history and strife by virtue of her sex-
uality: ‘Woman reposes in her femininity as if in an absolute substance.’24 He
thus invites approbation for his acuity in perceiving that gender difference is a
matter of construction and social norms as well as any biological foundation,
and then affirms that the difference in fact lies in sexuality. His very emphasis
at this point nonetheless suggests some need to over-compensate the weakness
of the essentialist argument. ‘In the life of woman, being and sexuality are pro-
foundly identified. Woman encloses herself in her sexuality, absolutely deter-
mined, determined within herself, without need to refer to the other sex for
the essential nature of her own character.’25 The use of ‘profoundly’ invites the
reader to acquiesce to some spiritual appeal. At the same time, the observation
that woman relates to her own sexuality independent of her relationship to
man simultaneously sets her free from her observed subservience and appears
to make her the positive and self-determined possessor of the essential nature
ascribed to her.
Why did Ortega so support Simmel? One simple answer is to be found in
Ortega’s own disarmingly patriarchal judgment made on the poetry of Ana de
Nouailles in July 1923, a judgment where his liberalism of earlier years is no
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 185

longer evident.26 Here, he balanced on a knife-edge in relation to the feminine

similar to the one evident in Simmel: woman is ‘superior’, and as such she is
unsuited to make public the feelings that are associated with lyrical poetry, re-
vealing as she does the monotony associated with the ‘eternal feminine’.27 By
this, Ortega cunningly relegates woman to a position of superiority, abstract-
ing her from the field of existential struggle that is the world of the masculine.
Thus, Ortega articulates the way that the liberal mind can operate in two di-
rections in order to preserve the terrain of power and interest ascribed to the
masculine by traditional gender structures. Woman is apparently praised for her
devotion, and her total absorption of herself in her role of the feminine (by
which, among other things, she will never be in a position to challenge man
in his ambitions). But in a move that betokens sour grapes in the face of this
conceded moral superiority of woman, she (with the products of her intellect)
is dismissed as of little interest. The logic of the dismissal lies within the char-
acterisation of woman as genre rather than individual. Only man is engaged
in existential struggle, and thus only the contents of his soul will be of real
interest.
The relation of Ortega’s views on Ana de Nouailles to the articles of Sim-
mel that he later published does, however, seem clear. In particular, the dis-
cussion of woman’s unsuitability for creative work in the arts, as advanced by
Simmel in ‘Feminine Culture’ – an article that would be published in RO in
1925 – is a significant pointer to the way Ortega would produce his own read-
ing of an example of feminine culture.28
Ortega is therefore consciously and deliberately selective about the profile
of Simmel published in RO. His experience in Berlin was that he valued in
particular the work of this sociologist who, albeit with six books published, was
nonetheless not far up the academic ladder.29 Ortega was happy to publish else-
where other areas of Simmel’s work: between 1926 and 1927, seven volumes
of Simmel’s sociological works appeared in the Revista de Occidente press, that
largely centred on the sociology of groups.30 But the writings with a bearing
on gender, as is evident from those of Marañón and Pittaluga that would come
to support them, are intended to form a corpus. Indeed, what is as interesting
as Ortega’s choice to publish the article on fashion, and that on masculine and
feminine, is the fact that he did not publish ‘On Love (A Fragment)’, which
had appeared in Logos (1921–1922) in German. It is unlikely that Ortega would
have been unaware of it. This provocative and engaging piece discusses love in a
manner consonant with it being a civilised ideal, but does so without reference
to gender structures in society. The omission from RO suggests Ortega’s deter-
mination to create a corpus of work on gender relations and attributes rather
than to engage fully in a discourse on love. That said, the degree to which there
are moral implications to be drawn about the value and function of the femi-
nine relates to a concept of love as civilisation.
186 Alison Sinclair

Trust me, I’m a Doctor

Reading the articles on gender chronologically allows us to see a dynamic of

development in the corpus. Ortega’s views, sketched out briefly in the review
of Ana de Nouailles, come in shoulder-to-shoulder with the offerings of Sim-
mel, the latter made weightier by having been established first as a sociologist
of repute. Subsequently, a contemporary respectability is added to the debate
by the intervention of those known for their work in the sciences. Foucault
has reminded us of how medical discourse came to control and police sexual
activity,31 but also of how – paradoxically – the increased discourses in relation
to sex led to a series of evasions, in that what was recounted, predominantly,
was the range of aberrations and departures from the norm.32 In this context,
therefore, we could read the scientific backing of the discussions on gender
in RO as both bringing the body and sexuality into the discussion, and at the
same time denying their unruly presence, given that the source of the scientific
backing was one that was so intent on systems and control. There is thus a type
of double bind of discourse about gender and sexuality. While they become
a topic for public debate, that debate simultaneously allows for greater polic-
ing. When what is written is penned by a medically or scientifically qualified
writer, there is a claim, explicit or implicit, to evidence-based authority, so that
the inclusion in RO of writings on gender from those in the field of medicine
can be read as a strategy that offers the modern authority of science to add to
the gravitas of philosophy. In the specific context of Spain in the early twentieth
century, there is a further dimension – doctors were prominent in public life
and politics. When the Second Republic was voted in, some 50 out of the 472
deputies were medically qualified,33 and their place of power in public life was
affirmed.
The strategy of scientific weight applies particularly to the articles of Gre-
gorio Marañón, an eminent endocrinologist. Marañón’s work on sexuality at-
tracted considerable attention in Spain, and he would head the Spanish branch
of the World League of Sexual Reform in 1932.34 His placing in a world of sex-
ual reform suggests that his views might be generally liberal in character, but his
interest in eugenics places him (and others) in markedly prescriptive positions.
The apparent mismatch between his role as the leader of sexual reform and
the nature of his theories is arguably characteristic of Spain at the time, rather
than exceptional and puzzling. Marañón (and others such as Gustavo Pittaluga)
spoke from a belief in science, specifically in medicine, and with a driving
conviction that eugenics, the science that, if acted upon, stood to improve the
race. Such beliefs might entail revolutionary and liberalising legislation, but in
social terms, they largely sprang from profound convictions about the proper
nature and occupations of men and women. The background of Marañón in
eugenics makes an addition of cultural capital to his support for Simmel that
derives not from any way in which the articles themselves are more ‘scientific’,
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 187

but from the scientific standing of their author in Spanish society. In the case of
Marañón, this scientific standing was based, in a formal way, on his work as an
endocrinologist, a doctor and a man much in the public eye. Ortega could thus
be viewed as consolidating the academic respectability of the pieces on gender.
In a similar manner, the original use of Simmel could be related to an interest
in mapping gender that was historicised (so using a ‘science’ of the humanities,
that is, an objective and empirical view) as well as being philosophical.
Two essays by Marañón, of January and December 1924, contribute to
the debate on the construction of gender relations in society: ‘Notes towards a
biology of Don Juan’ ( January 1924), and ‘Sex and Work’ (December 1924).
Their central message is syntonic with the assertions of Simmel and Ortega of
a traditional division of existential space by man and woman, in that Marañón
conveys his idea of the ‘proper’ nature of men and women (part of his champi-
oning of the cause of eugenics).
In ‘Notes towards a biology of Don Juan’, questions are raised about the
nature of love by association with an icon now seen to represent a loss of
value, and ‘proper’ love is associated with the social function of reproduction.
Marañón places his focus on the consequences of a deviation from ‘proper mas-
culinity’, proclaiming that Don Juan is not the masculine superhero he has tra-
ditionally been construed as being, but rather represents a style of masculinity
that is deficient.35 Don Juan is not the Romantic hero of a narrative of love, but
is a type that reveals degeneration, within which there is a dangerous approach
between masculine and feminine, dangerous because it is not through attrac-
tion, but similarity. The originality of Marañón here is his offering that the
image of the ‘pseudo-virility’ of Don Juan is the result of locker-room chat.36
It betokens, thus, we might conclude, not confidence in virility, but lack of
confidence in the same, since the conversation of pseudo-virility is engaged in
as an attempt by the men concerned to distance themselves from a feared ver-
sion of their own sexuality. Marañón simultaneously scorns both Don Juan and
the feminine he is said to resemble: ‘the man who does nothing but make love
is, in the first place, half a man, as we shall see presently, and, in consequence,
a man of low mental state and of insignificant moral structure’, adding to this
that the very type of woman attracted to Don Juan is of a deficient nature: the
deficient masculinity that is allied to femininity attracts only the deficient form
of the feminine.37
The ‘proper’ nature of woman merely implied in the Don Juan essay (a
‘proper’ nature that would participate, one deduces, in ‘proper’ love) then
emerges in ‘Sex and Work’ (December 1924). Here – to a degree – Marañón
concurs with woman’s relegation to a position of superiority (as outlined by
Simmel and Ortega). In this essay, he produces a eugenic and utopian vision
of society that is – if its members act ‘properly’ – devoted to the production of
offspring. He rescues woman from her potential deficiency of being attracted
to Don Juan, and reinstates her to a position of superiority and consolation for
188 Alison Sinclair

the future. Man is equipped to be energetic and to provide, woman is totally

engaged in reproduction and nurturing and love is harnessed to the production
of the race.
There is a degree of over-statement in this essay that suggests that there is
more at stake, and, as might be observed of many of the contributions to RO,
there is an underlying struggle for cultural power. I suggested earlier that Mara-
ñón was brought into RO at this point to add scientific weight to a cultural ex-
change. In his turn, he is at pains to present himself as one who is in a position
to pronounce with authority on topics that others – without his experience
– could only sketch out as philosophical and sociological possibilities. One can
detect, for example, a need to carve out his position of authority, particularly in
his disparaging references to Freud. He refers to Freud, for example, in a way
intended to trivialise and downplay his contributions; Freud is in fashion, the
darling of the café crowd: ‘Right now there is a fashion for the ideas of a Vi-
ennese psychologist whose fame has come to be known by the non-scientific
public and now figures in the cultural heritage of café experts: I refer to Freud.’
He tries to upstage Freud, criticising him for having confused the sexual im-
pulse (libido) with the sexual instinct. This last he labels as ‘a concept that is
much wider and more noble than that (libido)’.38
The difficulty with Freud may not belong to Marañón alone, and arguably
applies to other essays published in RO to this point. Freud’s theories presented
problems to those desiring to keep woman in a separate realm and neatly occu-
pied with the task of mothering. Freud’s awareness of woman as a sexual being
would have been contained with some difficulty in the simple and anxiety-
reducing models so far discussed, and it is significant in this context that whereas
his clinical methods were adopted in Spain in the early twentieth century, he
was far less adopted as a theoretician.39 Specifically, the complexities of Freud’s
view of the sexes are absent from the schema proposed by Marañón, accord-
ing to which woman, besides being physically less well-equipped than man for
physical labour, has a nervous system which equally unfits her.40
Marañón’s model of woman in society is clearly congruent with that of
Simmel. But while Simmel’s model consists of one active member of society,
and one that is passive and all-enduring, and wrapped in its own activity and
devoted to it, Marañón’s model is presented with a utilitarian and eugenic cast.
The life Marañón depicts, or assumes, takes on two characteristics. Firstly, his
arguments for the way in which man is better suited than woman to take on
work outside of the home are based on the model of man as the hunter, with
woman devoted to the home. Curiously, the latter is referred to as the sexual,
so that man is placed in an asexual sphere. Simmel had imagined woman as
being bound up in her sexual being, and thus far from the state of excitement
produced by the perception of sexual difference (which for the woman, ac-
cording to Simmel, is not a topic of concern). But it is precisely the desire for
self-preservation, or rather for the preservation of the species, that drives the
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 189

model of the division of sexual labour proposed by Marañón. Man and woman
are equally yoked to this destiny.41 The burden of Marañón’s argument here is
that woman is bound to the life of sex while man is destined to struggle in the
external world to support the life of the home. Puzzlingly, the roles of man and
woman are reversed – in a sleight-of-hand – to suggest the degree to which
man and woman are united in their destiny of producing and protecting their
offspring. Love, as such, is not under discussion, but implied as part of this
utopian arrangement.
That Marañón was not out on a limb in Ortega’s eyes is suggested by the
publication in March and May 1925 of a further piece by Simmel. This cannot
have been other than the editor’s choice, given the fact that Simmel had died
in 1918. The essay, ‘Feminine Culture’, supports Marañón’s ‘Sex and Work’ in
that it perceives feminism as a problem, and claims, by way of consolation (to
men?), that those women who seek further participation in the world of men
are unlikely to increase.42 Anticipating Ortega’s works of 1930, The Rebellion
of the Masses and The Mission of the University, Simmel targets specialisation in
work as an evil while presenting a modern perception of woman as a multi-
tasker.43 Yet woman’s participation in the world of work is seen as working
against her essential personality – that of not having one. While still limiting
woman’s possible spheres of activity (he suggests that she might participate in
medicine, history and writing), he nonetheless has a broader perception of her
range of action than that intimated by Marañón.
If Marañón lent scientific weight to the writings of Simmel, those of Gus-
tavo Pittaluga bolstered that scientific support. Pittaluga – a doctor, and like
Marañón, a founding member of the Spanish chapter of the World League for
Sexual Reform – offers three articles that underline the essentialism of what has
preceded them, and provides further organicist authority through their refer-
ences to Kretschmer, a German psychiatrist whose work set out to correlate
body build and physical constitution with personality characteristics and men-
tal illness, a brief account of which had appeared in the second number of RO
in August 1923.44 Pittaluga’s essays, ‘Biology of the vices’ (December 1925),
‘Irony, Temperament and Character’ (May 1927) and ‘Climacteric of Courtesy’
(December 1930) take up and develop strands already presented in RO. In the
first of these essays, notable for being entirely free of references to Freud, Pit-
taluga re-iterates the stance of Simmel and Marañón on woman. Indeed, he
is even more socially committed and applied, and pronounces a judgment on
woman in a way more fitted to pastoral theology than to a journal of liberal
views. Woman, for example, is naturally repelled by vice,45 vice being an activ-
ity that wastes vital energy, above all the energy that might go into furthering
the purpose of the race. More specifically, Pittaluga’s support for Marañón as
a contributor to RO is shown in the degree to which he promotes a specific
scientific culture, particularly by his underpinning of his argument with the
work of Kretschmer in his second article. His clear alignment with Marañón is
190 Alison Sinclair

signalled by the title of his third article, ‘Climacteric of Courtesy’ (December

1930), an obvious reference to Marañón’s work on the mid-life crisis, and again
another piece that combines a biological/medical approach with a reading of
culture.

Jung and the Revista de Occidente

Lastly, but by no means least, we come to the presence of C.G. Jung in RO. This
is significant because of Jung’s international standing, his complex relationship
with Freud and the fact that he – and the concepts he stands for – appears to
be adopted in lieu of those of Freud. This adoption of Jung, particularly in the
selection of works published and referred to, would seem initially to confirm
the desire of RO to publish analyses of structures of gender that console, rather
than disturb, and are oriented to a stable and productive society. Again, love is
implied as positive and civilising.
The overall position of Jung in the Spanish intellectual life in the early
twentieth century is not entirely clear, despite the prominence accorded him in
RO, and it merits further and more detailed research. The break between Freud
and Jung (evidenced in their letters) had come about in 1914,46 well before the
founding of RO or the publication of the complete works of Freud in Spanish,
which began in 1922. The evidence of the two in Spanish print culture is hard
to track, but greater than might be supposed, given the existence in libraries of
translations into languages other than Spanish. There were English and French
versions of a number of single works by Freud available at this early stage. The
library of the Ateneo contained, for example, The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life (1914), The Interpretation of Dreams (1920), Introduction à la psychanalyse
(1922), Trois essais sur la théorie de la sexualité (1923), Totem et Tabou (1924) and
Psychologie collective et l’analyse du moi (1924). Meanwhile, the full German edi-
tion of Jung’s work Psychologische Typen was available in the Ateneo in a 1921
edition. Other works by Jung appeared in French: Metamorphoses et symboles
de la Libido (1927), L’inconscient dans la vie psychique normale et anormale (1928),
Essais de Psychologie analytique (1931, two copies of this edition in the Ateneo),
La psique y sus problemas actuales (1935) and Conflits de l’ame enfantine. La rumeur.
L’influence du père (1935). The presence of these editions in the Ateneo library
suggests that they were sought after and valued by that reading public, one
of intellectuals and men in public service, and in an institution that included
scientific as well as cultural and literary sections. Conceivably, one could mark
the ‘arrival’ of Jung in Spain with the Spanish editions of Lo inconsciente (1927)
(the only work by Jung to be published by the press of the Revista de Occidente),
which would be followed by publication in other presses of Teoría del psicoanáli-
sis (1935) and El yo y lo inconsciente (1936).
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 191

The 1925 contribution of Jung to RO was ‘Psychological types’ (Novem-

ber 1925). This positively supported extract, with the editorial note that it
constitutes one of the earliest and most fertile attempts made recently to estab-
lish a science of character,47 appears to indicate that the initial enthusiasm for
Jung in RO was linked to other work on body and character, including that of
Kretschmer, and those interested in eugenics.
The meaning we should ascribe to the promotion of Jung in RO is one
that requires analysing considerable nuances. As indicated, Jung’s works were
readily available in Spain in this period, in a variety of languages. While I have
suggested that we can read the supplantation of Freud by Jung in RO as part
of a project to publish theories consonant with a view of gender that had been
gradually but consistently promoted within the journal, the case may not be
quite so simple. What we might refer to as the ‘presence’ of Jung in Spanish
intellectual life in general in this period (his existence in the print culture, and
the interest of his work in intellectual circles, both as yet insufficiently docu-
mented) was probably on a broader platform than that of clinicians and psy-
chiatrists, and this is evident in the selections produced by RO itself. With the
exception of ‘Woman in Europe’, a reprint of Jung’s essay of 1917 published in
October 1929, the contributions to RO by Jung are less gender-oriented than
they might be.
‘Psychological types’ advances Jung’s theory of individuation that envi-
sions human development in the course of a life to be possessed of a dynamic
of balance and self-righting. The increasing presence of Jung’s cultural style of
interpretation (which will be later supplemented by ‘Archaic man’, published
in April 1931, the month that the Second Republic was declared) is conso-
nant with the interest expressed both in RO and the Residencia de Estudiantes
in ancient history and archaeology. The leaning toward history, culture and
civilisations can also be read as an urge toward wholeness, an urge which is
further expressed in writings by Jung and others, particularly noticeable in
the later years of RO. Yet it is tangentially, but unmistakably, that this cultural
approach is aligned with views about gender, and by implication a framework
into which love might fit. ‘Archaic man’, for example, will reveal Jung’s belief
in the fact that man had a soul, and that the collective unconscious could be
referred to as humanity’s soul.48 This has obvious congruence with the all-
encompassing structures of Simmel (for all of their tensions and subtleties), and
the binary models deriving – according to their authors – from the observa-
tions of biology and medicine. Jung’s concept of the unconscious, both collec-
tive and individual (the latter expounded to some degree in July 1936 in ‘The
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’) was distinctive from Freud’s in its
fundamentally positive outlook and conviction of the rightness with which
things would evolve. Jung did not avoid the problem of evil, and incorporated
the idea of the shadow into his psychology as a way of situating the source of
192 Alison Sinclair

unacknowledged urges. But Freud conjured up a world in which unacceptable

desires and ambitions were clearly prominent in motivating action, and his
overall understanding of the individual and the society he formed was that they
were complex and ultimately unruly. Freud alerted his readers about hidden
dangers and desires. Jung, meanwhile, acknowledged them, but did so in a way
that made them less a subject for apprehension.
In Jung’s world, solutions are offered, some of them in line with the con-
solation myths already outlined. ‘Woman in Europe’ opens with a questioning
of whether it is even possible for man to write about woman.49 The woman
conjured up by him is one who lives in major urban centres. He introduces the
subtle and insightful suggestion that the behaviour of woman is constructed
by her response to the projections placed upon her by man, but he states that
her ‘true nature’ is one of modest withdrawal to the background so as not to
get in man’s way. Because of her fundamentally passive nature, woman cooper-
ates (arguably even for Jung, it could be interpreted that she colludes) in her
destiny: ‘at the same time she joins and becomes entangled in her destiny;
for whosoever digs a pit for others will themselves fall into it’.50 But if there
is this cautionary note about woman colluding with her destiny, she is also
conceived of as the solution to present ills. Hers is the sex with a leaning to-
ward higher things, precisely because of her devotion to love. Luisa Passerini
has highlighted the way in which the process of transition being undergone
by the West is, according to Jung, experienced as a form of psychic conflict,
thus contrasting with the reaction of man whose reaction is within the realm
of the scientifically applied intellect. Women are, according to this essay, in a
much more acute state of crisis in their response to what is around them, yet
it is with them that, through love, new meanings for life might be found. This
view offers a new angle on woman as relegated to a position of superiority (as
in Simmel), and places the role of love in a more explicit position. As Passerini
neatly summarises, the Jungian interpretation ‘is concerned with love between
the heterosexual couple and the cultural components connected with it’.51 This
encapsulates both the conclusions to be drawn from Jung’s essay and, more
broadly, the link between the gender models discussed in RO and the idea of
love.

All Change for the Second Republic?

One might have expected the Second Republic to tell a different story. The
fact that it does not do so, at least in RO, reinforces the conclusions I have so far
advanced about the nature of RO and Ortega’s intentions related to it. Relative
to the period of the dictatorship, there are now fewer articles on gender, soci-
ety and culture. Concepts relating woman to the unconscious are directed to
a reading public well educated in that domain. Thus, Jung’s essay ‘The Psychic
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 193

Problem of Modern Man’ (May 1932) presents man as a solitary creature slowly
being led away from his immersion in the collective unconscious.52
The Second Republic came in on a wave of optimism and of resolve to
bring in liberal reform. By 1933, however, the atmosphere had become more
embattled, and it is into this context that we can place the increasingly strident
notes of some of the later articles in RO of the 1930s. The desire for con-
solation is picked up in the 1933 essay on ‘Inclination’ by Count Hermann
Keyserling, a well-travelled German social philosopher who had lectured at
the Residencia de Estudiantes in 1924,53 but it is as though the model sketched
out by Jung is now unsettled. Keyserling extends the patriarchal and essential-
ist strands of theory presented in RO thus far, and produces a further spin: he
presents woman in a new guise now, primitive, passive, passionate and almost
exclusively governed by ‘gana’.54 The danger for man is when he succumbs to
her and accepts her norms.55 By a curious quirk, Keyserling then presents man
as feeling inferior to woman, and thus engaging in a structure of courtly love,
and it is thus through his essay that the discussion on gender and love in RO
reaches a further state of resolution. Like Marañón, Keyserling sees the Don
Juan figure as a cultural danger point. He is a Don Juan who has lost what is
‘primordially’ masculine, has become feminised, one who moves toward ide-
alising woman, and hence to courtly love. This characterisation of Don Juan is
presented as specific to Spain, and is notably distinct from the model as it ap-
pears in France and Germany.56 Keyserling thus steps over the European border
to empathise with the Hispanic preoccupation for endangered masculinity. His
manoeuvre fits in with the note that we could call the ‘clarion call’ and which
is prominent in a number of the essays of the 1930s in RO, particularly those
of the latter part of the Republic.

Conclusion

In public life in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, there is considerable anxiety and
social unrest. The discourse of the imaginary of consolation does not reflect
this, but allows it to be intuited, as something produced defensively as a type
of reaction-formation. At the same time – curiously – it shows Spain to be in
touch with Europe. Rita Felski has argued for a complex model of modernity
obtaining in Europe in the early twentieth century, and suggests that if we read
modernity as masculine (disruptive, restless, individualistic), it is accompanied
by an urge to the opposite. Thus, alongside (masculine) modernity there is a
cultural nostalgia pervading public and philosophical discourse.57 Read in the
light of her discussions, the articles in RO that are treatments on gender are
arguably a sign of Spain’s Europeanness (or of Ortega’s desire to make Spain
participate in European modernity). As Michael Richards has detailed, the re-
ception of ideas on science in Spain in this period is remarkably complex, and
194 Alison Sinclair

the reception of cultural ideas is no less so.58 The evidence points, nonethe-
less, to a directive approach within RO toward contained and consoling ver-
sions of gender and gender relations, and to that aspect of complex modernity
that places emphasis on the response to the disruptive aspects of modernity.
As shown in the examples of Jo Labanyi’s contribution to this volume, most
specifically in her examples from Giménez Caballero and Madariaga, some of
the expressions within Spain of the gender polarities and counter-positions
were more extreme than elsewhere in Europe. Arguably they became more so
through the 1930s, as tension about conflict and change mounted. The fears
about masculinity (improper) and the hopes for femininity (potential salvation)
are given emphasis, and Don Juan is figured as decadent rather than romantic.
Despite the turn given to the account of gender relations in 1933 by Keyserling
(framed in terms of courtly love, but perceived as dangerous because of the
denatured Don Juan figure at its centre), the overall discourse of gender in RO
can be seen within the broad framework of the Europe in Love project in that a
distanced dialogue is held with selected features of European thought on social
structures within which love might fit. The way in which it appears, however,
underscores the caution with which we should approach the idea of a discourse
of courtly love in modern Spain: what it participates in is, above all, a defensive
discourse that accompanies modernity and a denial of movement and unrest.

Notes
1. This article, part of the Europe in Love project, forms part of a project on ‘Centres of
Exchange’, funded by the British Academy. An expanded Hispanic context for this discussion
can be seen in Alison Sinclair, Trafficking Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Spain (Woodbridge:
Boydell and Brewer, 2009). I would like to thank both the KWI and the British Academy for
their support for this work.
2. Andrew Dobson, An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 28.
3. The Residencia de Estudiantes was founded by the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios ( JAE).
A private institution, it provided a university residence in Madrid for those attending university
courses, but more significantly offered tuition and cultural events of its own. Its aim was, like that
of the JAE, to broaden the field of knowledge of the students, particularly through contact with
cultural activity outside Spain.
4. Founded in 1835, the Ateneo de Madrid was a meeting place for members of diverse pro-
fessional and political circles. See Sinclair, Trafficking, 113–114.
5. See Alison Sinclair, ‘“Telling it like it was?” The “Residencia de Estudiantes” and its Im-
age’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 6 (2004): 739–763 and Sinclair, Trafficking.
6. See Evelyne López Campillo, La Revista de Occidente y la formación de minorías (1923–1936)
(Madrid: Taurus, 1972), 255, for details.
7. See Sinclair, Trafficking, 133f. After 1925, Freud’s presence in RO is in the form of brief
references only, and at no point are excerpts from his work published. Although Ortega had pro-
moted the translation of Freud’s Complete Works by Biblioteca Nueva in 1922, he later moved to a
position of increasing distance from Freud and had reservations about his theories.
8. López Campillo, La Revista de Occidente, 55f.
9. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Propósitos’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 1 (1923): 1–3, here 1.
 Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation 195

10. Ortega y Gasset, ‘Propósitos’, 2.

11. The belief that Spain stood to gain from Europe in education, social beliefs and social or-
ganisation had been prominent in Spanish public thought since the establishment of the Institución
Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) (Free Institution of Education) by Francisco Giner de los Ríos in 1876.
See Sinclair, Trafficking, 32–57.
12. The strong pedagogical intent of RO can be seen in its numerous introductory foot-
notes or epigraphs intended to offer orientation to the reader of the importance of the authors
concerned.
13. There are significant links here with the activity of the Residencia de Estudiantes and its
publication Residencia, in which Kretschmer, Giménez Caballero, Pittaluga, Keyserling, Jung, and
Marañón all appear, the latter repeatedly. Marañón, Pittaluga, and Dantín Cereceda were linked
through their membership of the World League for Sexual Reform. The articles of Spranger,
Frank, and Kierkegaard appeared as works that were being published by the Revista de Occidente
press, while Russell’s article was a chapter of Marriage and Morals, being published by the press of
España, with which Ortega had been involved until 1915.
14. Nelson Orringer, Ortega y sus fuentes germánicas (Madrid: Gredos, 1979), 30.
15. José Ortega y Gasset, editorial note to Georg Simmel, ‘Lo masculino y lo fememino.
Para una psicología de los sexos’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 5 (1923): 218.
16. Anne Witz, ‘Georg Simmel and the Masculinity of Modernity’, Journal of Classical Sociol-
ogy 1, no. 3 (2001): 353–372.
17. Georg Simmel, ‘Filosofía de la moda I’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 1 (1923): 43–66, here
46.
18. Ibid., 58.
19. Georg Simmel, ‘Filosofía de la moda II’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 2 (1923): 211–230,
here 211.
20. Witz, ‘Georg Simmel’, 358.
21. Georg Simmel, ‘Lo masculino y lo femenino. Para una psicología de los sexos I’, Revista
de Occidente 1, no. 5 (1923): 220–222.
22. Ibid., 225.
23. See Michael Richards, ‘Spanish Psychiatry c.1900–1945. Constitutional Theory, Eugen-
ics, and the Nation’, Alternative Discourses in Early Twentieth-Century Spain. Intellectuals, Dissent and
Sub-cultures of Mind and Body, special number of Bulletin of Spanish Studies, eds Alison Sinclair and
Richard Cleminson, 81, no. 6 (2004): 823–848.
24. Simmel, ‘Lo masculino y lo femenino. Para una psicología de los sexos I’, 225.
25. Ibid., 226.
26. López Campillo, La Revista de Occidente, 31.
27. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘La poesía de Ana de Noailles’, Revista de Occidente 1, no. 1 (1923):
29–41, here 37f.
28. Georg Simmel, ‘Cultura femenina I’, Revista de Occidente 3, no. 21 (1925): 286f.
29. Orringer, Ortega y sus fuentes germánicas, 30.
30. Vol. 1: I. El problema de la sociología. II. La cantidad en los grupos sociales. Vol 2: III. La sub-
ordinación. Digresión sobre mayorías y minorías. Vol. 3: IV. La lucha. V. El secreto y la sociedad secreta.
Disgresiones sobre el adorno y la comunicación secreta. Vol. 4: VI. El cruce de los círculos sociales. VII. El
pobre. Disgresiones sobre la negatividad de ciertas conductas colectivs. Vol. 5: VIII. La autoconservación de los
grupos. Disgresiones sobre las funciones hereditarias, sobre la psicología social y sobre fidelidad y gratitud. Vol.
6: IX. El espacio y la sociedad. Disgresiones sobre la limitación social, sobre la sociología de los sentidos y sobre
el extranjero. X. Ampliación de los grupos y formación de la individualidad. Disgresiones sobre la nobleza y
sobre la analogía de la psicología individual con las relaciones sociales.
31. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1, 54.
32. Ibid., 51.
33. Thomas F. Glick, ‘La “Idea Nueva”. Sciencia, política y republicanismo’, in La voluntad
de humanismo. Homenaje a Juan Marichal, eds B. Cibplijauskaité and C. Maurer (Barcelona: Anthro-
pos, 1990), 57–70, here 62.
196 Alison Sinclair

34. The WLSR was founded in 1928 at a congress in Copenhagen, and lasted until 1935.
Its objectives (referred to as the ‘planks’) included reforms in the conditions of marriage, birth
control, sex education and greater tolerance in sexual matters, including the de-criminalisation of
‘aberrant’ sexual desire. See Ralf Dose’s outline in ‘The World League for Sexual Reform. Some
Possible Approaches’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 1 (2003): 1–15 (a special issue on
the WLSR).
35. Gregorio Marañón, ‘Notas para la biología de Don Juan’, Revista de Occidente 2, no. 7
(1924): 15–53, here 18f.
36. Ibid., 20.
37. Ibid., 22.
38. Gregorio Marañón, ‘Sexo y trabajo’, Revista de Occidente 2, no. 18 (1924): 305–342,
quote at 314.
39. Thomas F. Glick, ‘The Naked Science. Psychoanalysis in Spain, 1914–1948’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 24 (1982): 533–571.
40. Marañón, ‘Sexo y trabajo’, 315.
41. Ibid., 318.
42. Simmel, ‘Cultura femenina I’, Revista de Occidente 3, no. 21 (1925): 273–301, here 275.
43. Ibid., 280–281.
44. Kretschmer’s place in the RO canon would be confirmed in no. 5 (49), July 1927, with
‘La concordancia de cuerpo y alma en el matrinomio.’
45. Gustavo Pittaluga, ‘Biología de los vicios’, Revista de Occidente 3, no. 20 (1925): 146–75,
here 172. ‘Vicio’ is a term that needs to be understood in the social sense of ‘bad ways’, rather
than in the moral sense of ‘vice’.
46. William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters, abridged by Alan McGlaschan (London:
Picador, 1979).
47. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Tipos psicológicos’, Revista de Occidente 3, no. 29 (1925): 161–183,
here 161.
48. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘El hombre arcaico’, Revista de Occidente 9, no. 94 (1931): 1–36, here
27.
49. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘La mujer en Europa’, Revista de Occidente 7, no. 76 (1929): 1–32,
here 1.
50. Ibid., 7.
51. Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between the
Wars (London: Tauris, 1999), 93–95.
52. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘El problema psíquico del hombre moderno’, Revista de Occidente 10,
no. 107 (1932): 202–234, here 203.
53. Sinclair, “Telling it like it was”?’, 756.
54. ‘Gana’ does not translate easily into English. It is less obvious than desire, and is associ-
ated with ‘tener ganas de…’ (to want to, to desire to do something), as in ‘avoir envie de…’.
55. Count Hermann Keyserling, ‘Gana’, Revista de Occidente 11, no. 120 (1933): 294–325,
here 304.
56. Ibid., 306f.
57. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995),
35–60.
58. Richards, ‘Spanish Psychiatry c.1900–1945’.
 CHAPTER 1 0

Political Readings of Don Juan

and Romantic Love in Spain
from the 1920s to the 1940s

JO LABANYI

Walter Mignolo has argued that the 1898 Spanish-American War in the Carib-
bean and the Philippines marked an epochal shift in the world system, ending
the period of Western European hegemony instituted in 1492, as the United
States entered the world stage as an imperial power.1 Spanish intellectuals were
quick to recognise this shift since Spain had been the direct victim of US ag-
gression. In fact, in the seventeenth century, Spain had already lost its place
as the centre of Western European hegemony as Amsterdam took over from
Seville as the centre of Atlantic trade.2 The early twentieth century saw a pro-
liferation of Spanish publications responding to this shift in the world system;
these writings have been seen as a bout of soul searching about Spain’s relation
to the rest of the modern world, but they can also be read as part of a wider
discussion on the relative values of ‘Old Europe’ and ‘New America’ (to use
current terminology). Spanish intellectuals – assigned to a marginal position for
the previous three centuries – were well placed to appreciate Mignolo’s insight
that loss of hegemony means loss of cultural credibility: this epochal shift was
a challenge not just to Western Europe’s political and economic hegemony,
but also to the ‘universality’ of Western European culture. It could be argued
that at least some of the numerous essays written in Spain from 1905 – the
tercentenary of the Quixote – through to the 1940s about Spanish literary types
associated in various ways with love (Don Quixote, Don Juan, Celestina) are
not defending a Spanish exceptionalism, but positing Spain as a repository of a
universal European culture based on love, which the more economically suc-

Notes for this section begin on page 210.

198 Jo Labanyi

cessful European nations are felt to have abandoned. The claim often made in
these essays, that Spain can offer a model to northern Europe, has been inter-
preted in existing criticism, including my own, as a sour grapes justification of
Spain’s economic backwardness.3 They can perhaps be read more interestingly
as echoes – and in some cases anticipations – of the crisis of European values
that would become a major cultural issue in northern Europe with the carnage
of the First World War.
It is not coincidence that two of the three Spanish intellectuals whose
writings on Don Juan will be examined here – Ramiro de Maeztu, who swung
from guild socialism to the Spanish equivalent of Action Française, and the
liberal humanist Salvador de Madariaga – had been war correspondents in Eng-
land during the First World War (in which Spain did not participate). The third
intellectual examined – the avant-garde writer and convert to fascism, Ernesto
Giménez Caballero – witnessed the immediate aftermath of the First World
War in Strasbourg, which had recently returned from German to French con-
trol, where he taught at the University from 1920 to 1921 and from 1923 to
1924. It is also not coincidental that Madariaga – the only one of these writ-
ers who championed liberal humanism – should propose Romantic love as an
ideal; for this reason, in addition to his writings on Don Juan, this discussion
will include the exploration of Romantic love in his historical romance on the
conquest of Mexico.
This essay will not consider those Spanish intellectuals, notably, Unamuno
and Azorín, who turned to Spanish literary figures – especially Don Quixote –
in order to idealise Spain’s supposed failed modernity, since this has been much
discussed. I prefer to focus on less studied intellectuals who were political fig-
ures. Consequently, this discussion will also exclude the considerable number
of writers – literary and medical – who drew on Don Juan not for political pur-
poses, but to elaborate views on sexuality.4 Another reason for choosing these
three writers is that all three married women from another European country,
whose intellectual life would impact significantly on them. Their lives thus
mirror the fusion of ideas and feelings that is the key strength of their recourse,
for political ends, to literary figures associated with love.
This essay will stress that these three thinkers are concerned not just with
Spain, but also with a wider geopolitical scenario, including both Europe and
the Americas. It is useful to start with brief biographical sketches in order to
show how the physical, intellectual and amorous trajectories of these three
writers crossed European (and Atlantic) boundaries.

Three Political Biographies

Maeztu (1874–1936) was born to an English Protestant mother (whose first

language was French, having grown up in France) and the owner of a Cuban
 Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s 199

sugar plantation who had returned to Spain. From 1891 to 1994, the young
Maeztu worked on a sugar plantation and in the tobacco industry in Cuba,
which impressed on him the belief – prior to reading Weber’s The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), whose linkage of capitalism and religion
would deeply influence him – that capitalism was perfectly compatible with Ca-
tholicism: a point which he felt was also demonstrated by the industrialisation
of his native Basque Country and Catalonia. He lived in London as a foreign
correspondent from 1905 to 1919, studying philosophy at Marburg University
in 1911. In England, he established close contacts with the thinkers associated
with the journal The New Age and with Catholic intellectuals. He returned to
Spain in 1919 with an English wife, Alice Mabel Hill, and their British-born
son. The 1926 book studied here, Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina: Ensayos
en simpatía (Don Quixote, Don Juan and Celestina: Essays in Collective Sentiment)
was begun during a 1925 lecture tour of the United States. From 1927 to 1930,
he was Ambassador to Argentina. In 1931, reacting to the declaration of the
Spanish Republic, he founded Acción Española, based on Maurras’ Action Fran-
çaise, and became the editor of its journal. In October 1936, three months into
the Spanish Civil War, the British government unsuccessfully interceded with
the Spanish Republican authorities to save him from death by firing squad, on
account of his open support since 1931 for a counter-revolutionary uprising.
Giménez Caballero (1899–1988) married Edith Sirone, daughter of the
Italian consul in Strasbourg, in 1925. Two years later, he converted to fascism
after a trip to Rome, establishing long-term links with Italian fascist intellectu-
als – especially Bottai, editor of Critica fascista, and Malaparte, whose work he
translated.5 In 1928, he undertook a European lecture tour as a fascist intellec-
tual. A major avant-garde cultural entrepreneur in the late 1920s, he is regarded
as the first Spanish surrealist writer to draw on the theories of Freud. As the
editor of Spain’s leading arts magazine La Gaceta Literaria and founder of Spain’s
first film club, he played a key role in introducing to Spain the work of Euro-
pean avant-garde writers and filmmakers of all political persuasions, including
Eisenstein. Giménez Caballero himself directed two avant-garde films, plus a
short documentary on Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews in the Balkans and
Middle East, whom he visited on behalf of the Spanish Republican Govern-
ment during the 1934–1936 period of conservative rule.6 In 1933, he became
a founding member of the Spanish fascist party, Falange Española. A leading
figure in the Francoist propaganda apparatus during and after the Civil War, he
visited Hitler and Goebbels in Germany in 1941. An unrepentant fascist to his
death, he became an embarrassment to the Franco regime as it strove to court
US support after 1945, and thus he was shunted off to Stroessner’s Paraguay
as Ambassador from 1958 until his 1969 retirement. The main work I shall
discuss here, Dialoghi d’amore tra Laura e Don Giovanni o Il Fascismo e l’Amore
(Love Dialogues between Laura and Don Juan or Fascism and Love), was delivered
orally by him in Florence on 25 May 1935, at the Maggio Fiorentino cultural
200 Jo Labanyi

festival, and published in September of that year in the Rome-based fascist

journal AntiEuropa.7
Madariaga (1886–1978) – who wrote equally well in Spanish, French and
English – was educated in Paris and moved to England in 1916. He was re-
cruited by the British Foreign Office to write pro-Allied war reports for the
Spanish press, due to his having married the Scottish political economist Con-
stance Archibald in 1912. In 1927, he was appointed to the newly created King
Alfonso XIII Chair of Spanish at Oxford, returning to serve the Spanish Re-
public on its election to power in 1931 – among other things, as Ambassador
in Washington (1931) and Paris (1932). Although Oxford remained his family
home until his death, he was based for much of his life in Geneva, working
for the League of Nations from 1921 to 1927 and again as Spanish Republican
representative from 1931 to 1936. In 1936, he broke with the Republic on ac-
count of what he saw as its drift toward totalitarianism, and went into lifelong
exile in England, from where he worked to denounce the Nationalist uprising
and subsequent Franco Dictatorship.8 In this capacity, he undertook repeated
lecture tours of the United States and Latin America. After the Second World
War, Madariaga continued to work for European unity through the European
Movement and as founder and first President of the Collège d’Europe, created
to form a European intellectual elite; from 1946 to 1952, he was President of
the newly founded Liberal International, and chaired the Cultural Section of
the 1949 Congress of Europe at The Hague. In his concluding speech at The
Hague, Madariaga declared his faith in a Europe based on love: ‘Above all,
let us love Europe’, by which he meant love for Europe’s cultural heritage.9
The 1943 historical romance El corazón de piedra verde (The Jade Heart) that
will be analysed here was written in Oxford, based on research conducted by
the Hungarian Emilia Rauman, whom he had met at the Spanish Embassy in
Vienna in 1934, and whom he had helped escape Nazi-occupied Austria in
1938, with her Austrian Jewish husband, by offering her work as his literary
secretary. Madariaga married Emilia in 1970, at the age of eighty-four, on the
death of his Scottish wife – Emilia by this time also being widowed. Through
the coyness of Madariaga’s biographers, one deduces that this was a love of a
lifetime.10
It is crucial to bear in mind the distinct biographical trajectories of these
three political figures when considering their writings, to which we will now
turn.

Maeztu: The Critique of Don Juan as Modern Egoist

As Villacañas argues, Maeztu’s reading of Weber clinched his lifelong attempt to

encourage the construction of a Spanish industrial bourgeoisie driven by an ethic
of labour rather than consumption.11 His youthful admiration for Nietzsche,
 Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s 201

which nourished an equally lifelong dislike of State control, led him in the late
1890s and early 1900s to reject Marxism for a version of social democracy. His
political evolution while in England follows that of The New Age, with which
he was associated, moving from Fabianism to guild socialism, with an increas-
ingly strong religious dimension.12 In this last respect, he was influenced by his
contacts with British Catholic intellectuals, including Chesterton and Belloc,
and particularly his close friend T.H. Hulme, whose death in the First World
War reinforced his belief that liberal humanism was in crisis. Maeztu’s Authority,
Liberty and Function in the Light of the War, published in English in 1916 (The
New Age printed an extract in 1915), championed a modern industrial version
of the medieval guild system, based on a spiritually informed notion of mutual
responsibility rather than the liberal notion of individual human rights, which
he saw as having led to a selfish, competitive and destructive consumerism,
whose consequence was the expenditure of lives in the First World War. The
1919 Spanish version of this book was explicitly titled La crisis del humanismo
(The Crisis of Humanism); from then on, Maeztu became an advocate of a curi-
ous mix of modern industrialism within a pre-modern Catholic framework,
which he saw Spain as particularly well placed to develop, leading the way
illuminated by the contemporary European Catholic Right. This mix is sum-
marised by the phrase ‘the reverential sense of money’ he coined, adapting
Weber, in a series of 1926 press articles, coinciding with the publication of Don
Quixote, Don Juan and Celestina. From 1927, Maeztu flipped politically, espous-
ing a retrograde authoritarianism based on a pre-modern notion of the Divine
Right of Kings, while continuing to advocate capitalist industrialism. His po-
litical activism became openly counter-revolutionary with the 1931 declaration
of the Republic. Villacañas rightly sees him as the unacknowledged precursor
of the Opus Dei technocrats, who would clinch the Franco Dictatorship’s fu-
sion of National-Catholicism and capitalism in the 1960s.13
Don Quixote, Don Juan and Celestina – Maeztu’s most famous book – is a
brilliant exercise in historical-cultural analysis. Central to it is Maeztu’s critique
of Don Juan, viewed as an embodiment of the hedonistic individualism that
Maeztu sees as the outcome of modern humanism, which then culminates in
a narcissistic capitalist consumerism. He notes, rightly, that northern Europe
has turned Don Juan into a Faustian idealist – the restless hero in pursuit of
impossible love – but that this is completely lacking in the Spanish dramatisa-
tions of his story: not only in Tirso de Molina’s 1630 play, El burlador de Sevilla,
which created the figure, but even in Zorrilla’s 1844 Romantic version, Don
Juan Tenorio.14 The Spanish Don Juan mocks divine and earthly authority, car-
ing only for instant gratification through sexual conquest. Maeztu notes that
Zorrilla’s Romantic Don Juan finally falls in love only when he encounters the
innocent Doña Inés, who satisfies his egocentric power drive by surrendering
to him totally, because he is incapable of love in the sense of altruism. Maeztu
sees Don Quixote as an embodiment of altruistic love; Celestina (the procuress
202 Jo Labanyi

in Rojas’s 1499 tragicomedy of the same name) as an embodiment of knowl-

edge; and Don Juan as an embodiment of power, noting that they represent a
splitting and humanist abrogation of the attributes of God. That is, they repre-
sent the modern separation of spheres, which Maeztu wishes to counteract by
returning to a medieval corporatism in which the various capacities work in
unison and are driven by a religious sense of communal responsibility. Maeztu
sees Don Juan as an option only for socially irresponsible egoists in a godless
world. What is needed is a marriage of Don Quixote’s capacity for selfless love
and Celestina’s practical skills, infused with the power and energy that Don
Juan has monopolised and squandered. Here, Maeztu is advocating the sev-
ering of US-style capitalism (power harnessed to practical skills) from liberal
humanism and its injection into an Old World pre-modern belief system built
on divinely ordered communal love (as illustrated by Don Quixote’s fusion
of chivalric love with social justice). Without power and practical skills, Don
Quixote’s capacity for love makes him a figure of ridicule; with them, he be-
comes a blueprint for a new universal order that combines the best of the New
World with the best of the Old World. Villacañas argues that we should not see
this eclectic ideological mix as pre-determined by Maeztu’s subsequent politi-
cal evolution, but that we should value it – while recognising the naivety of its
reading of medieval corporatism – as a major contribution to the theorisation
of a conservative modernity.15

Giménez Caballero: Don Juan as Fascist Superman

Giménez Caballero is also a critic of liberal humanism, but takes up the figure of
Don Juan as a revolutionary antidote to what he sees as a debilitating European
courtly love tradition that places men in the service of women. The title of his
1935 fascist tract Love Dialogues between Laura and Don Juan or Fascism and Love is
a critical reference to the sixteenth-century neo-Platonic text Dialoghi d’amore,
published in Italy by the Spanish Jewish humanist Leo Hebraeus, expelled from
Spain with other Jews in 1492. Giménez Caballero’s text was reissued in Span-
ish in 1936 with the title Exaltación del matrimonio (Exaltation of Marriage), for in
it he subjects Petrarch’s Laura and Don Juan to a forced marriage.
Giménez Caballero’s best-known 1932 work, Genio de España (Genius of
Spain), is a Freudian analysis of the malaise of Western individualism.16 The
ideal of love he proposes in Love Dialogues is likewise an antidote to the West-
ern individual subject. The book stages an imaginary love encounter between
Laura and Don Juan, immodestly declaring that he himself, as a Spaniard, is
Don Juan and his Florentine wife is Laura. Giménez Caballero insists that he
has fallen in love with fascism as a result of falling in love with his Italian wife:
fascism is for him a passionate stance. In Love Dialogues, he sees Laura and Don
Juan as embodying two conflicting European models of love, which are both
 Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s 203

products of the modern Western individualism that first developed in the Re-
naissance, bound on a collision course. For, if Don Juan represents the anarchic
male hero who subjects women to his will, Laura represents the Petrarchan
inaccessible female who spurns her male lover. Both Don Juan and Laura are
admirable in their massive egos, but both are sterile: Laura because she refuses
to surrender to a man, Don Juan because he moves on rather than begin a fam-
ily (and indeed is hardly ever depicted as leaving his female victims pregnant).
In a famous 1924 article, ‘Notes towards a Biology of Don Juan’, published in
Ortega y Gasset’s journal Revista de Occidente and discussed in Alison Sinclair’s
essay in this volume, the Spanish medical specialist Gregorio Marañón had
noted this fact, suggesting that Don Juan’s failure to adopt the paternal role was
a sign of effeminacy.17 By contrast, Giménez Caballero denounces as effeminate
the courtly lover who is in thrall to his disdainful lady. There are clear male
anxieties in this denunciation of the woman who refuses to subject herself to a
man, while Don Juan is criticised, not because he subjects women to his will,
but because he does not get them pregnant. Both types, Giménez Caballero
suggests, are leading the West to sterility. His answer is to force Don Juan and
Laura to marry, discovering love in perpetual conflict and through the self-
sacrifice of having children. (If this is autobiographical, as he claims, one won-
ders what his wife thought about it.) The Petrarchan figure of Laura is thus
forced into the mould of the Madonna and Child – though she is not a virgin,
but is subjected to an ongoing violation by Don Juan.
Giménez Caballero is explicitly advocating a Christian marriage based on
procreation and the self-sacrifice of both parties as an antidote to what he sees
as the threat of female emancipation (women no longer agreeing to submit sex-
ually to men). He thus describes Laura as a ‘“femme fatale”, Greta Garbo of the
Renaissance. Nordic and blonde, like Greta’.18 Although both Don Juan and
Laura have to sacrifice their individual freedom, their forced marriage means
that Don Juan will subject Laura to lifelong sexual conquest, to which Laura
has to consent – the self-sacrifice is not an equal one. Hence, Giménez Cabal-
lero declares that his text is a treatise on fascism and love, since it expounds a
notion of love based on hierarchy and violent subjection – but love nonethe-
less. It should be said that there is a surrealist aspect to this project of marrying
two irreconcilable opposites – Laura and Don Juan – not least in the rejection
of the neo-Platonic amor intelectualis of Leo Hebraeus for an explicitly sexual
notion of union. Giménez Caballero describes Hebraeus’s neo-Platonism as
deriving directly from ‘the most refined casuistry of the Provençal troubadors’
together with ‘the most subtle ardours of the Jewish Cabbala’.19 While this may
seem to have anti-Semitic overtones, we should note – in addition to Gimé-
nez Caballero’s positive attitude to the Sephardic Jewish Diaspora, mentioned
above – that in this passage, he breaks with the stereotyping of Jews as carnal by
aligning them with the neo-Platonic tradition that he is critiquing. Giménez
Caballero’s concept of fascist love is overtly based on sexual conquest and not
204 Jo Labanyi

on mystical transcendence. He explicitly praises Don Juan’s sexual prowess be-

cause it represents an urge to ‘punish woman’.20 As he puts it in Genius of Spain:
‘When Don Juan … fell in love with a woman, it was not to become her friend
and partner, but her adversary. To conquer her, force her to the ground – admirable
enemy! – and in the supreme ecstasy of genital triumph stamp an unforgettable,
burning kiss on her mouth.’21 Elsewhere in Genius of Spain, Giménez Caballero
corroborates this notion of fascism as violent sexual subjection, the important
point being that the fascist hero, like Don Juan, incites undying love in the
women he conquers: ‘Every people is driven by a female longing. When it finds
its man, it surrenders.’22
In Love Dialogues, Giménez Caballero insists that Don Juan is quintes-
sentially Spanish, and that the Petrarchan idealisation of woman is alien to the
Spanish tradition. At this point, he links his discussion of Don Juan to Spain’s
conquest of its American empire. How, he asks, could Petrarchism exist in the
‘ardent, virile atmosphere’ of a Seville (Don Juan’s hometown) ‘ringing with
the virile, macho tones of a recently discovered America, smelling of recently
expelled Africans, Moors, jealous passions, conquest, rape, war, adventure, her-
oism’?23 His blatantly racist apology for imperial violence is at least honest in its
transparency. Empire is explicitly equated with sexual violence (rape) and with
the conquest of racial others. Giménez Caballero is here arguing that Spain can
offer something to fascist Italy, since Don Juan – who knows how to conquer
empires – could not have been born in Italy, the land of unconquerable Pe-
trarchan Lauras. We should remember that this is written at the time of Italy’s
invasion of Ethiopia, as Giménez Caballero observed24 when recycling chunks
of this text in his Roma madre (Mother Rome), which won an Italian fascist prize
(as the author, never modest, notes in his introduction). In highlighting Don
Juan’s Andalusian origins in this passage, Giménez Caballero is also proposing
him as an amalgam of West and East. A key feature of his earlier Genius of Spain
had been his suggestion that fascism amalgamates the strengths of both cultural
systems (Lenin being the Eastern ‘superman’), thus again placing Spain, with its
eight centuries of Arab rule from 711 to 1492, in a privileged position to take
a leading role in European fascism.25
Don Juan represents for Giménez Caballero an embodiment not only of
the cultural miscegenation of West and East, but also of the mixing of races in
Spanish America. The 1939 fourth edition of Genius of Spain again links the
sexual violence of Don Juan to empire, whose goal is seen as miscegenation: ‘as
a people we are makers of races but never racist … We are race-makers, Don
Juans, magnificent virile studs’.26 In the case of imperial conquest, it seems that,
in order to produce children, Don Juan does not have to be settled in a forced
marriage. Indeed, Don Juan’s restless urge constantly to move on is necessary
to make him a figure of empire, always pushing at the boundaries – Plus Ultra,
as Charles V’s imperial motto put it. In an earlier fascist tract, Circuito imperial
(Imperial Circuit) (1929), Giménez Caballero had proposed Don Juan as the im-
 Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s 205

age of a fascist modernity because of his sportive attitude, always trying to beat
records: ‘Splendid performances of Don Juan! … Don Juan, recordman’.27 When,
in his 1942 text Amor a Cataluña (Love for Catalonia), Giménez Caballero ad-
vocates this same kind of love based on violent subjection as a way of dealing
with Republican Catalonia on its fall to Franco’s army (Giménez Caballero had
entered Barcelona with the victorious Nationalist troops in January 1939), he
speaks of subjecting Catalonia to the ‘yoke’ of marriage to the Spanish State. In
Mother Rome, he similarly talks of Mussolini’s march on Rome as ‘a Don Juan,
a virile tyrant’ taking Italy by force: ‘But Mussolini did not rape Italy. He mar-
ried her in Rome!’28 It seems that, in a European context, Don Juan needs to
be made productive via the straightjacket of marriage, but that, in the context
of empire, the more women he can violently fertilise, the better.29

Madariaga: Political Union via Romantic Love

Giménez Caballero and Madariaga disliked each other intensely. The two men
met at least twice as political antagonists: in fascist Italy in July 1934, during
Madariaga’s visit to Venice representing the League of Nations’ International
Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, Giménez Caballero being one of the fas-
cist intellectuals invited by the Italian host delegation; and at the Council of
Europe’s Strasbourg sessions in 1949–1950, when Giménez Caballero was sent
by the Franco regime (not recognised by the Council) as an unofficial observer
to obstruct debate on Spain.30 In his reports on these sessions,31 Giménez Ca-
ballero recounts how, at a reception, the wife of the US Head of Intelligence
asked him, ‘Is it true that the Aztecs are so cruel?’, because she was having
nightmares after reading Madariaga’s historical novel, The Jade Heart. The US
Head of Intelligence tried to bring Giménez Caballero and Madariaga together
to pursue the topic but they avoided each other. Giménez Caballero refers to
the League of Nations, for which Madariaga worked for two decades, as ‘that
cesspit in Geneva’.32 Madariaga’s role as head of the League of Nations’ Disar-
mament Committee from 1922 to 1927 and his continued efforts to secure a
peaceful Europe throughout the 1930s, particularly his 1935 role as Chairman
of the League of Nations’ Committee of Five, which vainly tried to halt Italian
aggression in Ethiopia, clashed directly with Giménez Caballero’s open calls for
a fascist politics of violence to renew what he saw as a decadent, liberal Europe.
Madariaga wrote about Don Juan in two texts. In his 1952 Bosquejo de
Europa (Sketch of Europe), he named Don Juan as one of Europe’s four major
cultural archetypes (with Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet). Like Giménez
Caballero, but more ambivalently, he sees Don Juan as an incarnation of Eu-
ropean individualism and of imperial conquest: ‘Don Juan embodies the spirit
of expansion, discovery and conquest that has made Europe the creator of
America. And the torch-bearer of universal culture. It is true that Don Juan
206 Jo Labanyi

is also the source of the crimes and excesses that sully the history of Europe’s
empires.’33 Madariaga notes that, in Zorrilla’s Romantic version, Don Juan is,
like Faust, saved by the love of a woman (contrary to Tirso de Molina’s original
in which he goes unrepentant to hell). Unlike Giménez Caballero, who has no
dealings with romantic love, Madariaga clearly privileges Zorrilla’s version. In
Madariaga’s earlier 1948 radio play, La don-juanía o seis don Juanes y una dama
(Don-Juanism or Six Don Juans and a Lady), written for the BBC Latin Ameri-
can Service for broadcast to Latin America on Halloween34 and published with
a substantial essay in his 1950 Don Juan y la Don-juanía (Don Juan and Don-
Juanism), he brought together six different European versions of Don Juan,
whose brawling – an implicit allegory of the Second World War – is stopped by
a veiled Doña Inés, who declares herself to be the eternal feminine. Only Zor-
rilla’s Romantic Don Juan is capable of appreciating her message of redemption
through love. Madariaga’s writings on Don Juan largely echo those of Maeztu,
as he sees him as a negative image of brute male force – except that he uses
the Romantic redemption of Don Juan to argue for a Western individualism
tempered by love, that is, the taming of the masculine by the feminine. We may
note that, in Madariaga’s radio play, it is the Spanish Don Juan and Doña Inés
who offer a model of redemptive love that brings peace to Europe.
Given Madariaga’s preference for Zorrilla’s play, in which Don Juan is
redeemed by romantic love, it is not surprising that his 1943 novel about the
conquest of Mexico, The Jade Heart, should be cast in the form of a historical
romance. The novel proposes an inter-racial marriage based on mutual love
and respect as a model for empire – one which the novel makes clear is an
ideal not borne out by the Spaniards’ general behaviour in New Spain (as the
Vice-Royalty of Mexico was called) nor in the Old Spain of the Inquisition. In
keeping with Madariaga’s critique of Don Juan as the prototype of the impe-
rial plunderer in Bosquejo de Europa, the novel describes Cortés as the greatest
womaniser among the Spanish conquistadors. The novel’s Spanish hero, Alonso
Manrique, is clearly meant as a utopian antidote to the donjuanesque behav-
iour of the novel’s real life (and some of its fictional) male characters. This is
popular romance fiction in the utopian form of ‘history as it might have been’.
Thanks to its popular fictional format, The Jade Heart is one of the few texts by
Madariaga still in print, last issued in 2004.
The novel was conceived as an antidote to Cortés also in that it was written
as a way of using the vast amount of historical research – chiefly of indigenous
Mexican customs and beliefs – undertaken for Madariaga’s 1941 biography of
Cortés, which he had not been able to include in the ‘factual’ account. Because
Madariaga turned to the popular genre of the historical romance for pleasure,
after the efforts of writing a serious biography, he can allow himself a freedom
of imagination that he does not permit himself in his more overtly political
works. The result is a text that provides insights into his political assumptions
precisely because they are betrayed indirectly through his treatment of the love
 Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s 207

plot. The novel was a labour of love also in the sense that, as noted above, the
research for it was undertaken by Emilia Rauman, whom he would later marry
and to whom he dedicated a volume of dreadfully clichéd love poetry.35 The
Jade Heart is dedicated to her as its ‘godmother’. Given that she had already
published studies on Spanish history before she met Madariaga,36 one wonders
whether she was in fact responsible for some of its writing.
The Jade Heart is notable for its efforts to get inside the indigenous mindset
prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, who only reach Mexico City at the end of
the second of its three parts. The whole of the first two parts are an anticipation
of Alonso’s meeting with the Aztec princess Xuchitl, which occurs on the very
last page of Part 2, for they have both dreamed of each other for years – this
is a love foretold. This legitimises the Spanish conquest as something that was
‘meant to be’. The fact that Alonso is not part of Cortés’s army allows him to
be untainted by the generally violent behaviour of the Spaniards in Mexico; he
consistently refuses to participate in their looting and raping, similarly refusing
the offers of women by local chiefs. His chastity is that of the courtly love hero,
driven by desire for an inaccessible ideal – something that, as an adolescent
back in Spain, he had sought in religious faith, becoming disillusioned by his
experience of the Spanish clergy.
Consistent parallels are drawn between the Old World and the New. The
chapters of Part 1 and Part 2 alternate between Xuchitl and Alonso (she comes
first), until their two stories converge at the end of Part 2. Both New and Old
World societies are shown to be driven by contradictions, and are ethnically
and culturally diverse. Madariaga gives Alonso an Arab great-grandmother, a
converted Jewish mother and an Arab nurse; he is brought up to read Hebrew
and Arabic texts. He is born the day that Granada falls to the Catholic Kings,
in a southern Spain where Jews are generally respected, but where anti-Semitic
pogroms are starting. The novel depicts in tragic terms the departure for exile
of the Jews expelled in 1492, including Alonso’s Rabbi grandfather ha-Levy,
though this tolerance of religious diversity is attenuated by the fact that ha-
Levy has come to believe in the Christian faith (like his daughter before him).
Both he and his daughter convert out of rational conviction; this could not be
more different from Giménez Caballero’s passionate conversion to fascism.
The novel contains a large amount of rational questioning by Alonso and
Xuchitl of their respective societies’ religious beliefs. Both Christian and Aztec
belief systems are shown to be based on rigid binary oppositions, which Alonso
and Xuchitl discover do not hold, since opposites can coincide and the same
thing can have a positive and negative side. This is especially true of sexuality:
both Xuchitl and Alonso – she particularly – are brought up with an open, nat-
ural attitude to the body, later complicated by their exposure to a religion based
on the notion that the body must be chastised. If, as previously recounted, the
wife of the US Head of Intelligence was horrified by Madariaga’s descriptions
of Aztec sacrifice, she had missed the point because the novel draws explicit
208 Jo Labanyi

parallels with Christian practices: when Xuchitl, converted and married to

Alonso, witnesses an auto da fe in Spain, it reminds her of the smell of burning
flesh of the Aztec human sacrifices she had so deplored. While these parallels
put Aztec and Spanish culture on a par, they also show Madariaga’s inability
to think outside the secular rationalism that the European Enlightenment dis-
seminated as a universal category.37 The novel’s romance format is undercut
by Part 3 when Xuchitl and Alonso return, married, to Spain, only to find
Alonso’s converted Jewish mother arrested by the Inquisition. After her release,
his mother will die from the effects of torture, before Alonso, who has been
arrested in turn, can be reunited with her. Xuchitl finds herself not at the heart
of civilisation, but alone and pregnant in a hostile, primitive land.
Notwithstanding its negative depiction of Spain, the novel takes it for
granted that Christianity is a superior religion of love – albeit imperfectly prac-
tised by most Christians. Like Giménez Caballero – despite their vast political
differences – Madariaga appeals to the image of the Madonna and Child as the
emblem of this religion of (maternal) love. The difference is that, for Giménez
Caballero, the female is the conduit for producing the son, whereas Madar-
iaga shows the female’s need for love and succour, as well as that of the male.
Despite Madariaga’s clichéd love poetry, in this historical romance he creates
female characters who are as much agents as their male counterparts, and who
are equally capable of intellectual reflection and growth. The ethnocentric rep-
resentation of Xuchitl’s ecstatic discovery in Christianity of the religion of
love she had always intuited but had never known is tempered by immediately
plunging her into an intolerant Spain in the Inquisition’s grip. The last page,
however, holds out the possibility of a happy ending, as she and Alonso set sail
back to the New World with their newborn son, whose string of names – Ro-
drigo Manrique ha-Levy ben-Omar Nezahualpilli38 – proclaims racial fusion,
albeit hierarchically ordered.
This happy ending is, however, disturbed by the novel’s final words, which
describe the mixed-race infant trying to put in his mouth the jade heart that
provides the novel’s title. The jade heart’s presence in the novel complicates the
Enlightenment secular rationalism that pervades its pages, for it is a magic amu-
let representing the contradictory nature of love: it brings a perfect experience
of love to the person who has a healthy attitude to the body, but sexual torment
to the person who regards sexuality as sinful. The jade heart has passed from
Xuchitl’s mother, on her death, to her father, for whom it signifies the torment
of his sexual desire for the Bad Queen: an exotic femme fatale with a penchant
for killing her lovers after lovemaking. What is going on in this extraordinary
strand of the story is not clear, except that through it Xuchitl, who steals into
the Bad Queen’s secret chambers, learns that love has its dark side. Alonso has
a similar induction through the brazen Marta, the daughter of the Jewish Es-
quivel family who are the novel’s villains: converted Jews who denounce other
Jews to the Inquisition, and who dog Alonso in both Old and New Worlds,
 Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s 209

father and son finally meeting their end in the auto da fe that Xuchitl and Alonso
witness. The depiction of the Bad Queen and Marta Esquivel introduces some
unfortunate ethnic and sexual stereotypes, despite the novel’s generally positive
depiction of Aztec and Jewish (and Arab) women.
Nonetheless, the novel’s hero, who represents the ideal, humane, loving
coloniser, though a coloniser for all that, is presented as a mixture of the three
races that made up early modern Spain, and is shown to be capable of romantic
love for a woman of yet another race – just as she, importantly, is shown to
be capable of the romantic love that has so often been seen as an exclusively
European phenomenon. Both Giménez Caballero and Madariaga exalt misce-
genation as the major achievement of Spain’s empire – as would Maeztu in
his last book, Defensa de la hispanidad (Defence of Hispanic Values) (1934), which
proposed the Spanish model of colonial relations as the basis for a new world
system embracing all peoples, regardless of race, by contrast with the Northern
European segregationist model. It is striking that all three of the very different
writers discussed in this essay should be united by belief that the miscegenation
practised in Spain’s early modern empire signified a political order based on
love. This view has regularly been advanced under modernity to justify Spain’s
imperial project, by both Spanish Right and Left – and is still heard in Spain
today to argue that Spaniards are not racist.39

Conclusion

The three writers we have analysed all use the trope of love to position Spain in
relationship to the Americas as well as to Europe. Maeztu rejects the hedonistic
egoism of Don Juan for Don Quixote’s chivalric notion of altruistic service,
allied to Don Juan’s energy and Celestina’s practical skills, as a way of harness-
ing the strengths of capitalism to those of medieval corporatism, in order to
establish an alliance with the European Catholic Right that will allow Europe
to confront the new hegemony of the United States. The implication is that
the Spanish legacy in Spanish America, which implanted medieval corporatist
structures in the New World, will allow the latter to do the same.
Giménez Caballero’s work is more closely focussed on Europe, Don Juan
being proposed as the charismatic leader of a Spanish-Italian fascist alliance.
When Giménez Caballero proposes Don Juan as the prototype of the Spanish
conquistador, he is not concerned with the future of the Americas, but is argu-
ing that Spain’s past capacity for imperial conquest allows it to play a leading
role in European fascism. The United States comes into this political scenario
only by implication, via Giménez Caballero’s Spenglerian belief in European
decadence, requiring an injection of virile energy from the fascist Don Juan.
His defence of fascism represents a desire to re-establish a threatened European
pre-eminence, achieved by drawing on Europe’s position (and particularly that
210 Jo Labanyi

of Spain) as a meeting point of West and East. It is often forgotten that the
subtitle to his fascist tract Genius of Spain is Exhortations towards a National and
World Resurrection; the goal is the creation of a new world order.
Madariaga, as an upholder of liberal Enlightenment values, rejects Don
Juan as sexual predator – seen as the unacceptable face of European (and not
just Spanish) imperialism – for a romantic notion of love, represented by Zor-
rilla’s version of the Don Juan story, which can unite Europe after the Second
World War. Romantic love is similarly used by him to shape the fusion of
races in both Spain and Spanish America. Although his use of love as political
trope does not address the question of Europe’s relation to the United States,
it should be remembered that a major drive behind the movement to create a
united Europe, to which Madariaga devoted his political career, was to counter
a growing US hegemony.
Love means very different things to these three writers, but they all see it
as something that derives from European culture. Even the liberal Madariaga,
despite his positive depiction of his Aztec heroine, grants her the possibility
of romantic love only via union with a Spaniard. For Maeztu, US capitalism
needs to be redeemed by an ‘Old European’ chivalric altruism. For Giménez
Caballero and Madariaga, the United States simply does not figure in their ex-
plorations of love as political allegory. If these writers draw on Spanish literary
models, or, in the case of Madariaga’s historical novel, incarnate romantic love
in a multiracial Spanish hero, it is in order to suggest – explicitly or implicitly –
that Spanish culture and history offer models for rethinking Europe.
We should remember here that not all of the models of love explored by
these three writers are positive; all of them reject at least certain aspects of the
Don Juan figure, and the writer who most valorises Don Juan – Giménez Ca-
ballero – proposes him as the fascist superman: a model that cannot be regarded
as positive by any reader with a concern for ethics. Perhaps one of the most
important points to emerge from this discussion is that the northern European
idealisation of Don Juan as a restless hero in search of an impossible ideal is not
supported by the Spanish representations of him, whether in Tirso de Molina’s
and Zorrilla’s source texts, or the works by the early twentieth-century Spanish
political thinkers we have studied. We have here a key example of how northern
Europe has appropriated southern European culture for its own ends, turning a
character whose egoism can indeed be seen as a figure of the negative side of
modern individualism into a tragic hero, thereby idealising the pursuit of self-
interest as Promethean curse – what one is tempted to call ‘Don Juan’s burden’.

Notes
1. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
 Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s 211

2. Ibid., 58.
3. See Jo Labanyi, Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989).
4. For discussion of medical analyses of Don Juan’s sexuality, see the essay by Alison Sinclair
in this volume. For an overview of the Don Juan theme in early twentieth-century Spanish lit-
erature, see chapters 3 and 4 of Roberta Johnson, Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), which includes women writers; and A.S. Pérez-
Bustamante, ed., Don Juan Tenorio en la España del siglo veinte. Literatura y cine (Madrid: Cátedra,
1998), which includes cinematic representations.
5. See Mónica and Pablo Carbajosa, La corte literaria de José Antonio. La primera generación cul-
tural de la Falange (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003), 54.
6. Despite his fascist politics, Giménez Caballero maintained a lifelong interest in reinte-
grating Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain in 1492, back into their Spanish ‘homeland’. In the
1920s, he toured Sephardic Jewish communities in Morocco with the cultural historian Américo
Castro, who in the 1940s and 1950s, as a Republican exile in the United States, made his scholarly
reputation as a defender of the medieval Jewish contribution to Spanish culture.
7. See Ernesto Giménez Caballero, ‘Dialoghi d’amore tra Laura e Don Giovanni o Il Fas-
cismo e l’Amore’, AntiEuropa 5 (1935): 567–599, here 567, and Exaltación del matrimonio. Diálogos
de amor entre Laura y Don Juan (Madrid: E. Giménez, 1936), 9.
8. For a politically acute account of Madariaga’s career, which stresses his role in keeping
alive international opposition to the Franco regime, see Paul Preston, Salvador de Madariaga and
the Quest for Liberty in Spain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
9. See O. Victoria Gil, Vida y obra trilingüe de Salvador de Madariaga, 2 vols. (Madrid: Fun-
dación Ramón Areces, 1990), 1: 288.
10. See Octavio Victoria Gil, Vida y obra; and Carlos Fernández Santander, Madariaga, ciu-
dadano del mundo (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1991).
11. See José Luis Villacañas, Ramiro de Maeztu y el ideal de la burguesía en España (Madrid:
Espasa, 2000).
12. For the intellectual trajectory of Alfred R. Orage, editor of The New Age, who in 1922
would become a disciple of Gurdjieff, see Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London:
Tauris, 1999), 107–118.
13.Villacañas, Ramiro de Maeztu.
14. A key factor in the northern European ‘misreading’ of Don Juan is the ‘discovery’ and
subsequent dissemination of Spanish Golden Age literature by the German Romantic critic, Au-
gust Wilhelm von Schlegel, for whom it represented a primitive energy untamed by classicism
– Don Juan being seen as a prime example.
15.Villacañas, Ramiro de Maeztu.
16. Curiously, Madariaga’s first book, published in English, was called The Genius of Spain
(1923). Giménez Caballero makes no reference to it.
17. For Marañón’s various essays on Don Juan, see Johnson, Gender and Nation, 186–189;
and Pérez-Bustamante, Don Juan Tenorio, 317–333. Marañón’s crucial point was that, in devoting
himself to love, Don Juan was shirking his male responsibilities in the public sphere, in which men
legally participated as heads of family.
18. Giménez Caballero, Exaltación del matrimonio, 45. All translations of quotations from
Spanish originals in this essay are my own.
19. Ibid., 17.
20. Ibid., 31.
21. Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Genio de España. Exaltaciones a una resurrección nacional y del
mundo (Barcelona: Planeta, 1983), 140 (emphasis in original).
22. Ibid., 103.
23. Giménez Caballero, Exaltación del matrimonio, 61.
24. Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Roma madre (Madrid: Ediciones Jerarquía, 1939), 120.
212 Jo Labanyi

25. For discussion of Giménez Caballero’s analysis of fascism as an amalgam of West and East,
see Jo Labanyi, ‘Women, Asian Hordes and the Threat to the Self in Giménez Caballero’s Genio
de España’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 73 (1995): 377–387.
26. Giménez Caballero, Genio de España, 105.
27. Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Circuito imperial (Madrid: La Gaceta Literaria, 1929), 18–19
(emphasis in the original).
28. Giménez Caballero, Roma madre, 125, 128.
29. Although Giménez Caballero, like most Spanish fascist intellectuals, was shaped by con-
tact with Italian rather than German fascism, his violent misogyny invites analysis in the light
of Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalysis of the Nazi ‘soldier male’, whom Theweleit sees as defined
by an insecure sense of ego-boundaries epitomised by the fear of women. See Klaus Theweleit,
Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987/1989), whose ideas are applied to Giménez
Caballero in Labanyi, ‘Women, Asian Hordes and the Threat to the Self ’.
30. See respectively Victoria Gil, Vida y obra, 1: 191; and Ernesto Giménez Caballero, La
Europa de Estrasburgo (Visión española del problema europeo) (Madrid: Istituto de Estudios Políticos,
1950), and Informe sobre el Consejo de Europa (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1950).
31. Giménez Caballero, La Europa de Estrasburgo and Informe sobre el Consejo de Europa.
32. Giménez Caballero, Genio de España, 62.
33. Salvador de Madariaga, Bosquejo de Europa (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1969),
79.
34. It was traditional in Spain, until relatively recently, for Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio to be
performed on Halloween because of its ghost scene.
35. Salvador de Madariaga, Poemas a Mimí, in Poesía (Madrid: Austral, 1989), 143–158.
36.Victoria Gil, Vida y obra, 1: 179.
37. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity. Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20–37.
38. ‘Rodrigo Manrique’ and ‘Nezahualpilli’ are the names of Alonso’s and Xuchitl’s fathers,
respectively.
39. There is not space here to go into the complexities of Spanish racial discourse, which
has varied hugely over time as well as being massively contradictory. Suffice it to say that the
Inquisition’s obsession with ‘purity of blood’ was concerned more with religious deviance than
with miscegenation, and was based on the notion that racial ‘others’ could be ‘saved’ via their
assimilation (voluntary or enforced) into Christianity. Mixed-race alliances in the Americas were
often justified, particularly under modernity, as ‘whitening’ the race. Giménez Caballero’s sup-
port for the repatriation of Spanish Jews formed part of this project for ‘saving’ racial others via
their incorporation.
 Part III

EUROPEAN BORDERS AND

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN
LOVE RELATIONS
 CHAPTER 1 1

Between Europe and the Atlantic

The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism

MARGARIDA CALAFATE RIBEIRO

Between Europe and the Atlantic: Portugal as Semi-Periphery

An overview of the history of Portuguese expansion and imperialism shows

that Portugal tended to define itself simultaneously as the centre of a colonial
empire and a periphery of Europe: in the words of Boaventura Sousa Santos,
as a semi-periphery.1 Portugal’s ambiguous position was, early in its history,
inscribed in frequent references to the country’s geographical location. In his
first chronicle of the expansion (1449–1450), Gomes Eanes de Zurara states:
‘here on one side the sea hems us in and on the other we face the wall of the
Kingdom of Castile’.2 The notion of a siege implied by this definition was
developed by Luís de Camões, the national poet, who wrote in the sixteenth
century. In his epic Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), Camões elevates a confining geo-
graphical condition into the identity of an expanding homeland. He describes
the ‘Lusitanian Kingdom’ as a borderland ‘where the land ends and the sea
begins’.3 The fact that Portugal shares a border with the hitherto unexplored
ocean means that a large part of its history has taken place outside of European
circuits. In The Lusiads, Portugal is the ‘head of Europe’, which may be defined
more widely as the head of the world given the poem’s Eurocentric parameters.
This founding discourse of national identity is elaborated from its inception as
a journey that unites origin, that is, the West with the unknown world of the
East. To cite Camões’ poem: ‘We Portuguese are from the West, / We come in
search of the lands of the East’.4
A further foundational notion contributes to Portugal’s sense of identity:
its pioneering role as a mediator between worlds. This turns its frontiers into

Notes for this section begin on page 228.

216 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

arbiters of communication and thus also arbiters of control over the worlds on
either side. Such a notion is driven by a doubly centrist image of Portugal: in
relation to Europe, Portugal was the discoverer of new worlds, spreading news
of their existence throughout the European nations; in relation to a variety of
Others, Portugal was the representative of Europe. Thus, Portugal is perceived
as a Janus-figure facing both Europe and the Atlantic.
However, besides celebrating Portugal as centre of the world, The Lusiads
also depicts Portugal’s ‘fragilities’ in its attempt to retain its central position.
This explains why the poet, who starts his epic by beseeching the ancient Muse
to stop chanting because ‘another higher valour is rising up’,5 ends it on a mel-
ancholic note, referring to the ‘dark and vile sadness’6 into which his homeland
has plunged. Through its artistic elegance, the subtle, ambiguous discourse em-
bodied in The Lusiads provides a complex image of the Lusitanian Kingdom.
This image swings between celebration of the nation as the vanguard of Europe
and consideration of the threats that would cause its decline, turning it into a
backwater of Europe as foretold in the epic.

Lusotropicalism: Romance at the Semi-Periphery

The Lusiads is an epic about a small nation on the western edge of Europe that
traversed the open seas in search of universal status. The poet’s perspective is in-
fused with a notion of universality mediated through romantic love. It is out of
love that Tethys opens up the seas and the ‘gates to the East’ to Vasco da Gama,
the heroic Portuguese navigator celebrated in the epic. Nymphs repeatedly save
the Portuguese sailors from the dangers of the unknown, from strong winds
and from the boundless ocean. Finally, it is through romance that the Portu-
guese celebrate their empire on the famous Island of Love (Island of Venus) in
the epic’s ninth canto. The island represents the warriors’ reward and regenera-
tion through love. Following Helder Macedo’s analysis, for Camões, love is an
existential process and the ultimate goal of human endeavour.7 Camões was
one of the first European poets to weep for the death of a lover from the East,
his Chinese Dinamene, with her ‘meek and pious gaze’, whose virtues (gentle-
ness, gravitas, modesty, goodness and serenity) were those traditionally associ-
ated with the European model of the donna angelicata. In addition to oriental
beauty, Camões celebrates ‘blackness of love’ for the slave Bárbara, ‘so sweet
that the snow vows to exchange its colour for hers’, whose revitalising seren-
ity, shy smile and gentle sweetness are described in terms very similar to those
used by the poet to describe his ‘“heavenly” Circe’.8 Macedo notes that to have
sexual relations with native women is one of the perks of empire, but what is
unusual is the way the poet dignifies the racial aspect of his dark mistress, who
‘seems strange but not barbarous’.9 As Macedo observes: ‘The onomatopoeic
non-word “barbara” is derived from the Greek term used to mimic the sub-
 Between Europe and the Atlantic:The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism 217

human non-intelligibility of languages spoken by other peoples and is a form

of denial of their different human identity. By using it as the beloved’s name in
a poem celebrating her blackness, Camões transforms it into an affirmation of
identity for his strange, but certainly not barbarous servant-mistress.’10
Nevertheless, the same poet who elevates love for the Other, recognising
it as an independent identity, writes in a letter to a friend from Goa about the
lack of beauty and dignified courting among local women, begging for white
European women to come from Portugal:
So what about the women of the country? Apart from being the colour of brown
bread, just suppose you try Petrarchan or Boscanesque gallantries on them: they
answer you in language as coarse as vetch, which tastes bitter to the palate of one’s
understanding and dampens one’s ardour, be it the most fervent in the world. Just
imagine, sir, the feelings of a stomach accustomed to resisting the false charms of
the adorned little face of a Lisbon lady, being confronted now with this loveless
salted meat.11

This double standard manifest in Camões’s love for the Other parallels the
double positioning that marks Portugal’s long colonial presence in the world.
The duplicity, or at least ambiguity, inherent in Portugal’s relationship with the
Other and in Portuguese colonialism itself has undoubtedly marked Portuguese
imperialism, just as, in a different context, it allows the nation to be classified as
semi-peripheral, even in today’s changed context. Boaventura de Sousa Santos
follows the earlier historian Charles Boxer in classifying Portuguese colonial-
ism as a semi-peripheral colonialism, a colonialism enacted by a country that
was imperially deficient.12 For Sousa Santos, Portugal failed to colonise effec-
tively and at the same time induced an excessive degree of colonisation, since
its colonies were subjected to a double colonisation: by Portugal itself and,
through Portugal, by the more powerful European players on which Portugal
was often dependent. This accounts for the distinct nature of Portuguese co-
lonialism. Sousa Santos’s interpretation is premised on a hierarchy of models
of colonisation, with the British model, from the nineteenth century onward,
being normative. While British imperialism maintained a precarious balance
between colonialism and capitalism, Portuguese imperialism was marked by a
precarious imbalance between excessive colonialism and insufficient capital-
ism.13 This helps to explain the self-representation of the Portuguese coloniser
as positioned somewhere between colonised and coloniser; to use Sousa San-
tos’s metaphor, between Prospero and Caliban. In Portugal’s African empire,
established at the end of the nineteenth century, the need for the Portuguese to
view themselves as colonisers was directly proportionate to their proximity to
the colonised. From very early on, this situation created alternative models of
colonial society, based on the mixed-race relationships resulting from the fact
that the colonising group was overwhelmingly male and poor, and from the
fact that men who had relations with native women would often take the mu-
latto offspring of these liaisons into their homes, so that they could be brought
218 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

up to be ‘civilised’. Such children were called ‘mulattoes of the colonial house’,

normally begotten by a male coloniser before or during his marriage to a white
woman. Many so-called ‘old colonials’ in Portuguese Africa were ostracised by
their peers because they took up with native women and brought up mulatto
children. With a few exceptions, such as the famous case of Ana Olímpia from
Luanda who became the subject of an inter-racial love story at the end of the
nineteenth century,14 most mulattoes were born as a result of rape or similar
abuses in which the power relationship was fundamentally unequal. To use the
anthropologist Christian Geffray’s term to sum up this kind of Portuguese co-
lonial love, it was an ‘amour dans la servitude’,15 a perfect instance of the precari-
ous positioning of the Portuguese somewhere between Prospero and Caliban.
The socio-political, scientific and literary discourses of the twentieth century
barely analyse these inter-racial relationships as such, preferring instead to focus
on their product, the mulatto. The result is that the relative value of the mulatto
oscillates wildly, depending on the interplay between changing geographical
and historical factors within the Portuguese Empire. This situation is reflected
in the co-existence of two types of discourse in the Portuguese inter-racial col-
lective imaginary: one almost epically glorious and the other ruinous.
In 1892, as Portugal began to adopt an European colonial model in Africa,
the Portuguese explorer and scientist Henrique Carvalho wrote in his book Ex-
pedição Portuguesa ao Muatiânvua. Meteorologia, Climatologia e Colonisação (A Por-
tuguese Expedition to Muatianvua. Meteorology, Climatology and Colonisation):
As you undoubtedly know, two evident principles distinguish colonising nations
as they function in the Tropics: the first replaces the native with a white individual
as a means of transforming the territory they occupy, and the result is the extinc-
tion of the black race; the second takes advantage of the native as a natural com-
ponent of the task hand, preparing through him the acclimatisation of the white
race so that eventually the bloods of the two races mix, for the resulting benefit
of humanity.16

Henrique de Carvalho summarises the two epistemological positions of his era:

the first, politically popular and based on ‘the survival of the fittest’, imposed
racism as the cornerstone of colonisation; the second, in his view on a sounder
footing, was based on a vibrant hybridity, which he saw as the most promising
evolutionary path for humanity. Far from the pre-lusotropical colonialism ex-
pressed by Henrique Carvalho, who foresaw a fusion of the races that would be
to the benefit of all humanity, at around the same time (1873), António Ennes,
a high-ranking colonial official, sought to blame black women for what he saw
as the degeneration of the human race, referring to the mothers of mulattoes
as follows:
Africa has charged the black woman with wreaking vengeance on Europeans, and
the vile black woman – for all black women are vile – has subdued the proud con-
querors of the Dark Continent, reducing them to the sensuality of monkeys, the
ferocious jealousy of tigers, the inhumane brutality of slave-traders, the delirium
of alcoholism, all the brutalizing effects of inferior races.17
 Between Europe and the Atlantic:The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism 219

In the 1930s, Germano Correia, a Goan doctor and scientist, and author
of numerous books on Portuguese colonisation, shared this racist vision. Cris-
tiana Bastos enjoins us to read his work in order to revisit the ghosts of racism
present in the history of Portuguese colonisation, in relation to the identity of
Luso-descendants in India. Germano Correia endowed this racial group, born
of mixed Indian-Portuguese parentage, to which he himself belonged, with an
immaculate pedigree based on physical anthropology and anthropometry, and
the concepts of blood purity, genealogy, class and whiteness of skin – thus deny-
ing their indigenous component.18 At around the same time, Mendes Correia, a
driving force behind physical anthropology in Portugal, began his address to the
First National Congress on Colonial Anthropology in Oporto (1934) – entitled
‘Mulattoes in the Portuguese Colonies’ – by citing passages from the novel Ana
a Kaluanga (Ana the Kalunga), by Hipólito Raposo, in which the mulatto is re-
ferred to as ‘an unexpected being in the grand design of the world, an unhappy
experience of the Portuguese’.19 A little later, in a nation that had emerged from
the same empire – Brazil – Gilberto Freyre developed radically different theories
on the adaptation of the Portuguese to the Tropics and the results of this con-
tact. In the words of the author, this ‘new civilisation’, generated in the ‘contact
zone’, is the luso-tropical. What Germano Correia, in Portuguese India, tried
to ignore, and what Mendes Correia criticised as proof of colonial failure – the
mulatto – was elevated by Gilberto Freyre in Brazil as proof of the superiority
of Portuguese colonialism. According to Freyre, the Portuguese were a people
caught between Europe and Africa, with a unique aptitude for living in har-
mony with peoples from the Tropics and for playing a mediating role:
The Portuguese man is great for the following magnificent peculiarity: he belongs
to a lusotropical people. Every time he has tried to be a European in the Tropics,
like the English, Belgians, and French, a white lord among tropical peoples of
colour, he has been reduced to a ridiculous caricature of those imperial nations.
Imperial nations which are today in rapid disintegration.
For there are no longer people of colour who are inclined to be a forever defence-
less reserve of labour, almost an animal in the service of white exploiters.20

What had been viewed as a weak point in Portuguese colonialism – from

the nineteenth century European (and particularly British) imperialist perspec-
tive, which saw Portugal as a country that had failed to modernise, just as it had
failed in its colonial mission – was, in Freyre’s model, elevated to an original
status that legitimised a new world order: the lusotropical order.21 The new
concept that he introduced was an ennoblement of inter-racial sexual relation-
ships, using the traditional framework of the sugar plantation system as his
reference point. This was the system in which he had been born, and which he
studied in landmark publications such as Casa Grande & Senzala (Slaves & Mas-
ters, published in 1933), which analyses the patriarchal rural society of the sugar
plantations that resulted from the slave trade. There, slaves and masters, blacks
and whites, lived together, around the hearth, and it was this environment that
220 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

produced the mulattoes comprising the dominant element in Brazil’s racial

make-up. As rightly pointed out by several of the authors who have prefaced
his works,22 Freyre looks at the sugar plantations from the Casa Grande – that
is, from the master’s perspective – and not from the Senzala – the slaves’ point
of view.
On the other hand, it is important to stress that Freyre was trained in cul-
tural anthropology of the time, and was in fact reacting to a social anthropology
from the North (particularly from the US where he studied) that considered
the southern hemisphere, and particularly his Brazil, as a ‘little world of no im-
portance’.23 At the same time, he was reacting to some of the foundational
narratives of the Brazilian nation that associated mulattoes with racial degener-
ation, and viewed their ‘bleaching’ as the only possible redemption.24 As Cris-
tiana Bastos shows, in Brazil, scientific racism was interpreted in a sui generis
fashion to argue that it was possible to diminish the supposedly harmful effects
of mixing the races by promoting marriage between whites and mulattoes; for
that reason, immigration from Europe was encouraged.25
Freyre rejects this notion, preferring instead to see Brazil’s mixed racial
make-up as its strength. According to Freyre: ‘the product of that hybridity
was no longer deemed to be the fruit of an original sin and condemned to
marginality. Rather, it became the happy result of a fertile and creative hu-
bris, destined to spawn an entirely new civilisation.’26 For good or ill, Brazil is
probably the most racially mixed country in the world, and Luanda the most
hybrid city in Africa. This may explain how this geographical region, united
by the Atlantic and an experience of Portuguese colonisation, has given birth
to the dangerous, if reassuring, concept of a ‘cordial colonialism’ that stands
at the heart of the theory of lusotropicalism. This theory views miscegenation
as an absence of racism, when in practice, it was a different kind of racism.27
The Estado Novo (New State), which took power in Portugal after the military
coup of 1926 and was headed by Salazar from 1932 until his death in 1968,28
was based on nationalist policies, grounded in the concepts of national unity
and empire. The cornerstone of the intended national resurrection was a return
to the original values of the Portuguese imperial adventure. These shored up,
within an imperial ideology, the notions of the ecumenical Christian vocation
of the Portuguese and an unconditional unity between the metropolis and
its colonies. Salazar’s foreign policy was based on the conviction that Europe
only ‘conspired against Portugal’. During his long rule, Europe marginalised
Portugal, and Portugal, in turn, marginalised itself from Europe. The resulting
isolation, grounded in an uncompromising belief in the territorial integrity of
Portugal and its colonies, was ideologically rooted. It assumed that the unique-
ness of Portuguese identity could be fulfilled only from within the history
that had helped to shape that identity.29 After the Second World War, follow-
ing the emergence of the Asian and African liberation movements, the status
of Portugal’s colonial territories was called into question in international in-
 Between Europe and the Atlantic:The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism 221

stitutions such as the United Nations. The Constitutional Revision of 1951,

provoked by foreign pressure but also by some internal pressure, changed the
surface appearance of Portuguese imperialism. Thus, a ‘history of five centuries
of colonisation of which we should be proud’ was – overnight – rewritten as
‘five centuries of relations between different cultures and peoples’, to quote an
important Salazar cabinet minister, Caeiro da Matta.30 A colonial society be-
came ‘pluriracial’. The nation that had been imperial suddenly became ‘pluri-
continental’, and the colonies were renamed ‘overseas provinces’ – a term that
had, in fact, been used in the past. Portugal’s special civilising mission became
the equally special mission of ‘integration in the Tropics’. The adaptation of
the theories and discourse of Freyre was swift and so was their ensuing promo-
tion via the media, providing a philosophy to support and lend credibility to
the ‘changes’ of 1951. Freyre’s work made it possible to continue to claim that
Portuguese colonisation was unique, while at the same time making it appear
scientific and modern.
The element allowing for the adaptation of the Brazilian discourse of luso-
tropicalism by Portuguese discourse under Salazar is the messianic tone that
proclaims the ‘new order’ through which Portugal could be reborn.31 At the
time, Europe was engaged in the decolonisation process and caught between
the economic hegemony of the United States and the ‘communist threat’ of
the USSR. In foreign policy, lusotropicalism, appropriated by the Estado Novo,
would first be used to defend the concept of an ‘Iberian bastion’32 suspicious
of a democratic Europe. It would subsequently be used to articulate a defence
of the whole of Europe, whose survival was threatened by the emergence, at
the end of the Second World War, of the two superpowers. It claimed that the
future of Europe and of Western Christian civilisation could only be guaranteed
through the creation of a Euro-African space. Portugal, the pluricontinental
nation and creator of multiracial societies – Brazil being Freyre’s paradigm –
was once again at the centre of the world. It signalled the creation of a ‘Euro-
Africa’, and skirted round the problem of de-colonisation.
The long-lasting Salazar regime co-opted Freyre’s lusotropicalism as a
‘magic formula’33, in response to increasing international criticism of its contin-
ued support for colonialism in the late 1950s and 1960s. In fact, there was more
to this image of racial harmony, based on inequality, than Salazar’s mainstream
racism. Appropriating Freyre’s lusotropicalism for political expediency, when in
1961 armed resistance movements rose against the Portuguese in Angola, Salazar
ordered the immediate, brutal crushing of the liberation movements without
even a hint of an inclination to negotiate. So began a thirteen-year war fought
on three fronts, as Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau quickly followed Angola’s
example. However, according to the regime, Portugal was not at war but merely
exerting its sovereignty since Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were
integral parts of Portugal. Concomitant with the regime’s view of ‘cordial co-
lonialism’, this was also a ‘cordial war’. Thus, in a very informal way, Portugal
222 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

encouraged the wives and families of military officers serving in Angola, Mo-
zambique and Guinea-Bissau to accompany them – something that was unheard
of in other colonial wars in Africa. In its publications, the National Women’s
Organisation declared full support for the role of those women who went to Af-
rica with their husbands, normally spending two years there during which time
they were charged with the mission of ‘improving the black woman’.34 Such a
mission, conceived in the traditional corporatist terms of the regime’s ideology,
combined service to the family with the nation’s civilising mission, in what can
be viewed as an attempt to provide support for the Portuguese military.
By transferring the family unit to Africa, the Estado Novo seems to pursue
its policy of colonising through the family, at the same time offering greater
stability to those whom it displaced from Portugal to fight a war, by allowing
them to share their day-to-day experiences with their families. While this strat-
egy helped to stabilise populations, particularly in the capitals and main cities,
it triggered a policing of the moral and political values to which the Estado
Novo subscribed, and so inter-racial liaisons began to be avoided, at least among
the elites. It also gave a younger Portuguese generation the chance to experi-
ence Africa, not as a distant place where one went to war, but rather as a place
where one lived with one’s family, where one worked, where one’s children
were born and educated and where opportunities for work not available in the
metropolis could be enjoyed. It encouraged people not just to go to Africa,
but also to stay in Africa; in other words, to fuse emigration, colonisation and
waging war. Today, when many of these military wives discuss this episode in
their lives, they claim to have been unaware of the manipulation of which they
may have been agents. They rarely feel that there was a deliberate, thought out
policy – and, in fact, we cannot state that there was a deliberate policy to that
effect – but they recognise that their presence gave an air of ‘normality’ to a
highly abnormal situation, that is, to a colonial war.35
The discourse of lusotropicalism, which continues in some quarters to this
day, never really signposted a cultural end to the Portuguese Empire. However,
literary texts steeped in the experience of this colonial war did herald an end,
even if they were generated by the ideological intolerance of a regime that
supported and relied on war. Of course, official discourse was cloaked in a
lusotropicalism that converted the war into a sovereign mission, and for which
mutilation or death was a heroic gesture in defence of the homeland. But the
experience of war undid that officially sanctioned fiction, and initiated a tex-
tual and literal journey home to Portugal. Indeed, the military coup of 25 April
1974 was a simultaneous liberation for Portugal and its colonies, directly at-
tributable to the military’s experience of war in Africa. The ‘romantic’ result of
those thirteen years of war, which had taken nearly one million Portuguese to
Africa, is registered on the skin of the many mulattoes distributed throughout
Portugal as well as the former colonies, as well as in the many literary works
that are usually classed as ‘literature of the colonial wars’.
 Between Europe and the Atlantic:The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism 223

Luso Love in a Time of Colonial War

In Jornada de África (African Journey), a novel from the 1960s colonial wars in
Africa, Manuel Alegre36 evokes a revised version of Camões’s love affair with
the slave Bárbara. The Bárbara in African Journey is in the process of becoming
free, as she is a member of an Angolan liberation movement (MPLA – Popular
Movement for the Liberation of Angola)37. However, she is in love with a re-
bellious officer of the Portuguese colonial army. To quote the novel, she is free,
but is ‘colonised by love’, while he is ‘captivated’ by love.
The book’s title, African Journey, signals an immediate intertextual link to
the 1607 text African Journey by Jerónimo de Mendonça. Mendonça’s text was
an account of the 1578 military expedition to Alcácer Quibir in North Africa,
where a dramatic battle lost Portugal its King D. Sebastião and a large part of its
nobility and middle class, leading to its annexation by Spain and its loss of status
among the nations of Europe. This shared title activates an allegory extensively
deployed in Portuguese literature and in Manuel Alegre’s own poetry, which
fuses the historical and mythical image of Alcácer Quibir with the territories in
conflict during the colonial wars. Such an equation confirms the poet’s vision
of this war as the marker of an end. In the novel, Sebastião, the hero, and his
companions in arms, whom Manuel Alegre renders perfect inheritors of the
tradition of Camões, are fighting a colonial war in Angola. This revisitation of
the mythical space of Alcácer Quibir was already explicit in Alegre’s poems,38
where it takes on a double meaning encapsulated in the myth. First, it makes
the territory at war into a symbolic space of national loss with no possibility
for recuperation. Second, it opens up the archetypal place of rebirth through
the return of the king. Through the use of this allegory, an ambiguous time is
represented, as was indeed lived in Luanda and Lisbon during the years of the
colonial wars. The subversion contained in this strategy of intertextual intersec-
tion of times, spaces and personalities in the fabric of Alegre’s poetry39 takes on
a greater and more prominent role in the novel, due to its narrative structure
in the form of a prose chronicle written by a poet. The poet’s style opens up a
rich texture of polyphonic meanings, in a novel in which several personalities
are rolled together, and where they also dissolve into other characters (e.g.,
Sebastião and the Poet). Furthermore, the amalgam of several times and spaces
allows for the dramatisation of a jigsaw puzzle of subversive identifications be-
tween Sebastião and the king who disappeared on the shores of Alcácer Quibir,
the Angolan Bárbara who is a militant of the MPLA, and Camões’s Bárbara;
between planes and boats, steeds and jeeps, troop carriers and cavalry loads; and
between Luanda and Alcácer Quibir.
In addition to its strategy of textual fragmentation combined with histori-
cal reference, African Journey also contains textual fragments in parentheses, as
a way of communicating to the reader the opinions of the movements on the
other side of the war. These textual fragments relay the thoughts of Domingos
224 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

da Luta, an MPLA guerrilla fighter. Related to these fragments are the letters
between Sebastião and Bárbara that reveal, through their intimacy, the impos-
sible love and disintegration of Sebastião. He seeks a precarious grounding in
textual quotations from poets and novelists, whose voices prolong his inter-
rogation of this anti-epic time when love is lacking. Added to these contem-
porary voices, which plot out alternative discourses to the authoritarian master
narrative through which the nation’s identity was conceived, are clippings from
newspapers, which Sebastião reads to keep up to date.
This textual alignment of multiple voices not only tries to counter the
monoglossia of the regime, but it also tries to create an alternative decentred
discourse located in a ‘somewhere’ where all of the action seems to be taking
place, revealing the emptiness at the centre (that is, Portugal, which ordered the
war). Thus, Manuel Alegre’s African Journey repeats the book previously writ-
ten by Jerónimo de Mendonça, the chronicler of the battle of Alcácer Quibir,
but in a different mode.40 It is no longer just the chronicle of an expedition to
restore empire that led to death, but also the chronicle of a struggle for liberty.
In Alegre’s African Journey, Sebastião is not a sovereign destined to create
a myth, but a rebel officer sent to Angola, destined to deconstruct the myth.41
Similarly, the writer Jerónimo de Mendonça, the homonym of the writer of
the other African Journey, is an anti-colonialist resident of Luanda, destined to
write a different chronicle. Sebastião’s companions – Jorge Albuquerque Co-
elho, Alvito, Duarte de Meneses, Vasco da Silveira, Miguel de Noronha and
other names associated with the battle of Alcácer Quibir – are reincarnated as
protagonists in another fatal battle, and are destined to be the heroes of another
epic. In this way, personal and national identities are interrogated and are con-
fronted by the experience of lived realities. The narrator undertakes a voyage
from self to Other, and, following Camões’s example, he does it through the
love of a woman. Throughout his wanderings in Africa, Sebastião falls in love
with the Other, with whatever Portugal designates as barbarous – to draw
again on the onomatopoeia which in Greek tradition signals sub-humanity,
a sub-humanity that Camões had already denied in his Endechas a Bárbara Es-
crava (Lamentations for a slave called Bárbara). Bárbara, in African Journey, is the
sister-in-law of the writer Jerónimo de Mendonça who introduces Sebastião
to the world of Angolan poets and explains to him the position of whites in
Angola, caught between the heritage and privilege associated with their colo-
nial side and an African identity. Bárbara is a ‘daughter of the empire’, with a
Goan father and a Cabo-Verdean mother, while self-identifying as an Angolan
woman and member of the MPLA. Sebastião describes her through the eyes
of someone from the metropolis who has been seduced, in a discourse fraught
with lusotropicalism. She is the one who confronts him with his unsustainable
double position, as a member of the colonial army and an anti-colonialist, tell-
ing him that coincidences do not cancel out differences and that history does
not repeat itself but rather evolves:
 Between Europe and the Atlantic:The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism 225

Mixed blood, Sebastião thinks, only the greatest of mixing could achieve such
beauty; Europe, Africa, Asia. Long live the great Lusiad journey.
‘Our culture is a culture of miscegenation.’42

Manuel Alegre refashions in his MPLA member, Bárbara, Camões’s cativa

(captive), who centuries before had seduced and rendered cativo (captivated) the
poet Camões, inducing him to write the verses cited by Sebastião. In another
strategic echo of Camões, in Alegre’s novel love is the guide to knowledge,
giving ‘understanding to things that did not have it’.43 As they discuss their
identities in the their first encounter, Sebastião, despite being anti-colonialist,
is blatantly confronted with his position as a lieutenant in the fascist colonial
army. In their dialogue, not only are the political and geographical camps of
both of them defined, but also their different memories of a history in com-
mon, which determine the different centres of their identities. Sebastião is a
European Portuguese, who fought against the regime. Bárbara, the daughter of
empire, was fighting for a country.
In wartime, Bárbara was the Other. But in the time frame within which
Sebastião insists on recuperating her for himself – the time of Sebastião the rebel
and fighter against the dictatorship, now more or less adrift in this conflict-
ridden land – Bárbara’s love is transformed into hope for a possible regenera-
tion, saving him from his doomed position. However, the time in which they
live and over which they have no control is still one of division, and the exit
to different destinations imposes itself. Bárbara will leave for exile and Sebas-
tião for Nambuangongo/Alcácer Quibir. Only the son of Sebastião, desired by
Bárbara, might bring the sign of a new time, sought by both – a transnational
time. Bárbara wanted to create such a time in the midst of the barracks where
Sebastião was on duty – a barracks she invades with her love and her subversive
power. That power shows both the fragility of the Portuguese forces, who, in
the middle of Luanda, allowed themselves to be penetrated by the enemy rep-
resented by her, and also the greater subversion of wartime by love. However,
Bárbara’s desire was not realised against the troubled backdrop of a war between
opposing sides, which immediately interrupts them with more deaths, amputa-
tions, persecutions and departures in this ‘time to which we are condemned’,44
as Bárbara writes in her last letter to Sebastião. Through it, the last chance to
save Sebastião and, along with him, the country seems to be denied.
However, the love of Bárbara, through its alchemic power, came to trans-
form ‘appetite’ into ‘reason’, to draw on Helder Macedo’s interpretation of
Camões’s lyrical poetry,45 giving meaning to Sebastião’s mission, and leading
him to transpose the lack of logic underpinning a futile war into the logic of
a war for liberation. Through the narrative, Bárbara emerges as the symbol
of Sebastião’s confrontation with himself and with his own history. The deep
meaning of the love between Bárbara and Sebastião is a symbol of the lesson
for all humanity learnt from the conflict, and a call for reconciliation, love and
226 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

peace, and to oppose division, lovelessness and war, as indeed was inscribed in
The Lusiads: Camões had clearly shown that it was Tethys’s love for Vasco da
Gama, and not conquest, that made the Portuguese sea the mare nostrum.
We learn in the novel that Sebastião ‘entered alone deep into the for-
est, god knows in the direction of what’. But as the poet continues ‘There is
still the sea (Dom Sebastião will appear in a large boat behind the islet in Vila
Franca do Campo)’.46 It is on this sea, which unites rather than separates, that
the imaginary of the future nation will be constructed, a nation that, follow-
ing Camões, only love will bring about, as Alegre later wrote in Com que Pena
– Vinte Poemas para Camões (Twenty Poems to Camoens):
From Barbara came that missing difference
After her, language was no longer just one colour
From Barbara a being herself she was the Other
Lady of ours sacred blackness
Before Barbara Europe was so little
We are the captive, not Barbara.47

Europe and the Shadow of Former Empire

The literature of the colonial wars that appeared after 25 April 1974 is a lit-
erature of return and not of departure, of loss and not discovery, of emptying
rather than replenishment, of guilt and remorse instead of exaltation and he-
roics. The image of Portugal emerging from this literature is one of Portugal
disintegrating bit by bit in Africa. This explains the obsessive recourse by some
poets and prose writers to issues of personal identity and the rediscovery of the
Portuguese subject, against a backdrop of violent physical, psychological and
social rupture inflicted on all sides: Portuguese and African. Contrary to the
time of Camões’s Bárbara, the inability to consummate relationships between
African women and Portuguese men is the dominant note in the literature of
this period. Likewise, an intransitivity that echoes the zeitgeist into which the
characters were born and the war that separated them haunts the diversity of
literary relationships.
After 25 April 1974, Portugal changed from a ‘colonising nation to a coun-
try that created new nations’.48 This transformation provided the necessary
foundation to redeem Portugal’s young democracy as, in Portugal, post-colo-
nialism is intimately linked to post-Salazarism, the birth of the democratic pro-
cess and Portugal’s European dimension. Unlike the nineteenth century, when
the Portuguese exorcised the loss of one empire (Brazil) by recourse to another
(Africa), the key image of the 25 April movement was the end of Portugal as
an imperial nation. This new image of the nation quickly found expression in
the first post-Revolution works on the colonial wars, where we can read ‘For
me, Portugal is over’; ‘Guinea has disappeared. It has been wiped off the map’;
‘Mozambique is finished’; ‘Angola has ceased to exist’.49
 Between Europe and the Atlantic:The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism 227

Portugal’s entry into the European Economic Community, in 1986, may

initially have been viewed as the volte-face necessary for rapid relief from impe-
rial traumas; it neutralised the vague dream of reconnecting with that emotive,
cultural geography linking Portugal to the image of its former empire. It was
also the political mechanism through which Portugal could quickly pass into
the European, post-colonial era. Lourenço has noted that it was not merely a
case of the Portuguese going into Europe; Europe had also arrived in Portugal.
The famous slogan of the time – ‘Europe With Us’ – highlights this subtlety.
By changing the direction of the search, which for centuries had originated
in the periphery and been toward the centre, the Portuguese were able to
sit comfortably at the table of European nations. As Sousa Santos emphasises,
the slogan contained the promise that Portugal could ‘construct a democratic
and stable society, a society like those in Western Europe’.50 Europe nurtured
Portugal’s fledgling democracy, ensuring that it followed the Western model.
Concomitantly, Portugal projected a European identity, which it reconciled
with its nostalgia for the empire. Manuel Alegre sums up well Portugal’s posi-
tion as a country with no empire and on the geographical, cultural and eco-
nomic periphery of Europe. That position could be sublimated by emphasising
the nation’s different relationship to Europe, a difference seen as a value based
on a unique imperial experience:
We have something to take to Europe too, our own historical experience, and the
great richness we have – our culture and our extraordinarily special relationship
with other peoples and other continents – and we are going to take to Europe a
conceptualisation that is open to the world, that respects others, rather than being
Eurocentric, along with the capacity to understand the differences of others. At
the end of the day, that is the special singularity of our identity and of our culture;
that is the contribution that we must take to Europe.51

If this sublimation were to be realised, would other dreams remain sus-

pended between the image of that distant empire and Europe? After Portugal’s
integration into Europe, in the late 1990s, the concept of lusophonia, mani-
fested in the Community of Officially Portuguese-speaking countries and in
Portuguese official discourse, became the founding myth for this particular
‘post-lusotropical’52 European democracy. Literature, architecture, art, Euro-
pean cultural programmes established in Portugal, exhibitions (such as Expo98
in Lisbon), the names of new developments and shopping malls all register the
memory of the Portuguese seaward drift and of the contacts to which it led, as
the hallmark of Portugal in Europe.53 This is ‘lusotropically’ embodied in the
‘particular aptitude of the Portuguese to contact with the tropical peoples’, as
evidenced in the exemplary legal text that instituted the school inter-exchange
programme, Entre Culturas (Between Cultures), promoted by the Ministry of
Education and financed by the European Community.54
Portugal’s peripheral geographic position led it, in the sixteenth century,
to be the first European empire. This frontier geography had been poetically
228 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

elevated to an identity in Camões’s famous verses, which put the Lusitanian

kingdom at the head of Europe, in what was the first European modernity,
one with a markedly Iberian flavour. Its peripheral position in Europe from
the 1950s to the 1970s allowed it to be the last European empire. The colonial
wars, to which this peripheral condition led Portugal and its empire, sought to
defend the fiction that Portugal was a centre. However, at the same time, ‘Af-
rica becomes a mirror in which the unspoken and undisguised face of Portugal
is reflected.’55 Therefore, the war would also undo the fiction and initiate the
journey home to Portugal and to Europe.
Taking up a suggestion advanced by Eduardo Lourenço, one can wonder
whether, for the Portuguese of today, lusophonia might not be the new Portu-
guese ‘Rose-coloured map’, where all of the real empires of the past continue in
Portuguese dreams, shining as both fantasy and phantom in Portuguese souls.56
Bárbara, the historic image of a conquered Africa and of Portuguese love for
the continent, continues to raise its head among us in the space between the
fantasy and phantom of an empire under whose shadow the Portuguese still
live. But in fact, and as Isabel Castro Henriques argues, ‘without the remotest
recourse to lusotropicalism’, the consequences of the colonial enterprise can
never expunge the demands of prolonged cohabitation, something that alters
the past, while sketching out the future.57 The future would be a politically, so-
cially, economically and culturally European one, but historically and culturally
anchored in the South Atlantic, as metaphorically encapsulated by José Sara-
mago in Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft), which imagines Portugal and Spain
splitting off the European landmass and drifting toward the South Atlantic.

Notes

1. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘O Estado, as relações salariais e o bem-estar social na semi-

periferia: o caso português’, in Portugal. Um Retrato Singular, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos
(Porto: Afrontamento/Centro de Estudos Sociais, 1993), 17–56, here 20.
2. All translations from the original Portuguese are my own, unless otherwise indicated. ‘Ca
da ua parte nos cerca o mar de outra havemos muro no reino de Castela’; Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica
da Tomada de Ceuta (Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1992), 52. See also Luís Filipe
F.R. Thomaz and Jorge Santos Alves, ‘Da Cruzada ao Quinto Império’, in A Memória da Nação,
eds Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1991), 81–164.
3. Luís Camões, Os Lusíadas (Lisbon: Instituto Camões, 1992), 3: 20.
4. Ibid., 1: 50.
5. Ibid., 1: 3.
6. Ibid., 10: 145.
7. Helder Macedo, ‘Love as Knowledge. The Lyric Poetry of Camões’, Portuguese Studies 14
(1998): 51–64, here 51.
8. Ibid., 60.
9. To quote the ‘Lamentations for a slave called Bárbara’. Cf. Luís Camões, ‘Endechas a
Bárbara Escrava’, in Lírica (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1980), 82 and 85.
10. Macedo, ‘Love as Knowledge’, 61.
 Between Europe and the Atlantic:The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism 229

11. Quoted in Clive Willis, ‘The Correspondance of Camões (with Introduction, Com-
mentaries and Translation)’, Portuguese Studies 11 (1995): 15–61, here 61.
12. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Entre Próspero e Caliban. Colonialismo, pós-colonialismo
e inter-identidade’, in Entre Ser e Estar – Raízes, Percursos e Discursos da Identidade, eds Maria Irene
Ramalho and António Sousa Ribeiro (Porto: Afrontamento, 2001), 23–85, here 26.
13. Ibid.
14. Ana Olimpia Vaz de Caminha was a late nineteenth-century Angolan woman of the Cre-
ole bourgeoisie of Luanda, Angola. She was born a slave and became one of the country’s richest
women by marrying a slave trader. She is the main female character in the novel Nação Crioula
(Creole) by the Angolan writer Jose Eduardo Agualusa.
15. Christian Geffray, ‘Le lusotropicalisme comme discours de l’amour dans la servitude’,
Lusotopie (1997): 361–372.
16. Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho, Expedição Portugueza ao Muatiânvua 1884–1888.
Meteorologia-Climatologia-Colonisação (Lisbon: Typographia do jornal ‘As Colónias Portuguezas’,
1892), 2.
17. António Ennes, 1946, 192, quoted in Santos, ‘Entre Próspero e Caliban’, 67.
18. Cristiana Bastos, ‘Um lusotropicalismo às avessas. Colonialismo científico, aclimação e
pureza racial em Germano Correia’, in Fantasmas e Fantasias no Imaginário Português Contemporâ-
neo, eds Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Ana Paula Ferreira (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2003),
227–253, here 230f.
19. Quoted ibid., 244.
20. Gilberto Freyre, Aventura e Rotina. Sugestões de uma Viagem à Procura das Constantes Portu-
guesas de Carácter e Ação (Lisbon: Livros do Brasil, n.d.), 10. See also on the same page:
This is the aspect of Portuguese greatness that particularly attracts me: they are almost an en-
tire nation of precursors to the French Rimbauds, or the British Lawrences of Arabia, or the
American Lafcadios or even the German Humboldts, in their realization of a vocation that
has in its sights the destiny of an entire transnational civilization: the lusotropical civilization of
which Brazil is a part. Through my contact with the Portuguese Orient and with Lusophone
Africa, with some of the main Portuguese islands in the Atlantic, with the Algarve which is
almost Africa, with the Alentejo which is half-Moorish, with a Portugal that from Trás-os-
Montes to Minho, not to mention the Beiras, dreams of the tropics, of the sun and the heat,
and disenchanted Moorish girls through women of colour, I was able to confirm a reality that
I had only guessed at years ago, and predicted in some studies and contemplations.
21. See Cristiana Bastos, ‘Tristes Trópicos e Alegres Luso-Tropicalismos. Das notas de via-
gem em Lévi-Strauss e Gilberto Freyre’, Análise Social 33, nos. 2–3 (1998): 415–432; Bastos, ‘Um
lusotropicalismo às avessas’; Cláudia Castelo, ‘O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo’ – o Lusotropica-
lismo e a Ideologia Colonial Portuguesa (1933–1961) (Porto: Afrontamento, 1998).
22. Cf. Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande y Senzala. Formacion de la familia brasilena bajo el regimen
de la economia patriarcal, Prologue and Chronology by Darcy Ribeiro (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacu-
cho, 1977); and Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e senzala. Formação da família brasileira sob o regime da
economia patriarcal, presented by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 50th ed. (São Paulo: Global Editora
e Distribuidora, 2005).
23. Bastos, ‘Tristes Trópicos e Alegres Luso-Tropicalismos’, 427.
24. See Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões. Campanha dos Canudos (Rio de Janeiro: Francisco
Alves, 1957), especially the chapter ‘Um Parênteses Irritante’; Aluísio de Azevedo, O Mulato (Rio
de Janeiro: H. Garnier, n.d.). On lusotropicalism see Déjanira Couto, Armelle Enders, and Yves
Léonard, eds, ‘Lusotropicalisme. Idéologies coloniales et identités nationales dans les mondes
lusophones’, dossier in Lusotopie (1997) (Paris: Karthala): 195–478; Castelo, ‘O Modo Português de
Estar no Mundo’; Bastos, ‘Tristes Trópicos e Alegres Luso-Tropicalismos’; Yves Léonard, ‘O Im-
pério Colonial Salazarista’, in História da Expansão Portuguesa, eds Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti
Chaudhuri, vol. 5 (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1999), 10–30; Yves Léonard, ‘Salazarisme et lu-
sotropicalisme, histoire d’une appropriation’, Lusotopie (1997): 211–226; Miguel Vale de Almeida,
Um Mar da Cor da Terra. Raça, Cultura e Política da Identidade (Oeiras: Celta, 2001).
230 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

25. Bastos, ‘Um lusotropicalismo às avessas’, 249.

26. Ibid., 250.
27. As the British historian Charles Boxer pointed out in the 1960s in his book Race Rela-
tions in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) and recently
Boaventura de Sousa Santos showed in ‘Entre Próspero e Caliban’, here 41.
28. Salazar died in 1970 and his successor, Marcello Caetano, failed to live up to early expec-
tations of reform and was overthrown by the military coup of 25 April 1974.
29. História de Portugal, directed by José Mattoso, vol. 7: O Estado Novo (1926–1974), ed.
Fernando Rosas (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1994), 297.
30. Quoted in Castelo, ‘Congressos e conferências culturais’, in Dicionário de História do
Estado Novo, eds J. M. Brandão Brito and Fernando Rosas (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1996),
191f. José Caeiro da Matta was a diplomat and a minister in Salazar’s regime: Minister for Foreign
Affairs from 1933 to 1935 and from 1947 to 1950, and Minister for Education from 1944 to 1947.
In 1960, he was the director of the Commemorations of Henry the Navigator, and in charge of
all publications regarding the event.
31. See Castelo, ‘O Modo Português de Estar no Mundo’, 37.
32. See António José Telo, ‘O fim do ciclo africano do império’, in Portugal na Transição
do Milénio. Colóquio Internacional, eds J. M. Brandão Brito and Fernando Rosas (Lisbon: Fim de
Século, 1998), 327–355, here 335.
33. Ana Calapez Gomes, ‘Aspectos da ideologia na época das descolonisações’, Vértice 13
(April 1989): 70–75, here 70.
34. Quoted by Irene Flusner Pimentel, ‘Movimento Nacional Feminino’, in Dicionário de
História do Estado Novo, eds J. M. Brandão Brito and Fernando Rosas, vol. 2 (Lisbon: Círculo de
Leitores, 1996), 639.
35. These considerations are based on a study the author is undertaking about the presence
of Portuguese women in Africa during the years of the Colonial War, which includes inter-
views with women who experienced such a situation. Cf. Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, ‘África
no Feminino. As mulheres portuguesas e a Guerra Colonial’ and ‘Depoimentos: a presença e a
participação feminina na Guerra Colonial’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 68 (April 2004): 7–29
and 129–166, respectively.
36. At the time Manuel Alegre published African Journey, 1989, he was an irreverent Social-
ist Member of Parliament. However, in the memory of most of his generation, who had been
condemned to war and to exile, he was the poet who had published Praça da Canção (1965) and
O Canto e as Armas (1967). In these poems that were read, copied and chanted by so many Por-
tuguese, we find an accentuated rhythm and the sense of an epic, the voice of a collective sense
of national damnation that the poet tried to reverse. It had been a charismatic call to arms from
a poet with outstanding credentials as an opponent of the fascist regime. Manuel Alegre was the
first student from Coimbra University to articulate a public discourse against the Colonial Wars.
He was also the first army official to be arrested by the Portuguese secret police (PIDE) as a re-
sult of a failed uprising in Angola. He was an important exile in Paris and Algeria, where he ran
‘Rádio Liberdade’. Furthermore, he was the only Portuguese person to speak at the funeral of
Amílcar Cabral.
37. The MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) was, with UPA (Union
of the Peoples of Angola), later FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA
(National Union for Total Independence of Angola), one of the three liberation movements in
Angola. After the 1975 independence, the MPLA was internationally recognised as the representa-
tive of the Angolan people. An almost 30 year civil war started soon after independence, which was
fought between the MPLA government and UNITA. After a peace agreement and particularly the
death of Jonas Savimbi in 2002, the MPLA shares power with UNITA in the government.
38. See, for example, the poems in the sections ‘Nambuangongo meu amor’ and ‘Três
Canções com Lágrimas e Sol para um Amigo que Morreu na Guerra’ from Praça da Canção, and
the poems in the sections ‘Continuação de Alcácer Quibir’, from O Canto e as Armas, in Manuel
Alegre, Obra Poética (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1999), 125–136 and 173–183, respectively.
 Between Europe and the Atlantic:The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism 231

39. This strategy was already used in Manuel Alegre’s poetry in ‘Crónica da Tomada de
Ceuta’, in which a personal account of his departure for Angola is juxtaposed next to the depar-
ture of the Portuguese for Ceuta at the beginning of colonial expansion. Similarly, in ‘Crónica
de El-Rei D. Sebastião’, the experiences of damnation lived by the poet in the ambushes be-
tween Quipedro/Nambuangongo are juxtaposed to the damnation of the Portuguese army on
the beaches of Alcácer Quibir. Cf. Alegre, Obra Poética, 382–387 and 414–418, respectively.
40. Roberto Vecchi, ‘La guerra coloniale tra genere e tema: Jornada de África, di Manuel
Alegre’, in Dalle Armi ai Garofani. Studi sulla letteratura della Guerra Coloniale, eds Manuel Simões
and Roberto Vecchi (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1995), 51–58, here 55.
41. Ibid.
42. The dialogue continues:
‘Our father was Goan, our mother was Cape Verdean, and on our father’s side, we even
have a Chinese grandmother.’
Sebastião could not contain himself
‘That captive who has captivated me’
‘Without doubt. Because of her, my father called me Bárbara’…
‘It’s all the same chronicle’ Sebastião replied…
‘I am Angolan, and the liberty of Angola will be won by Angolans.’
‘I am Portuguese, and I tell you that there will be no liberty in Angola while there is
no liberty in Portugal.’
‘Angolans are not just struggling against a regime. They are struggling for the right to
independence.’
‘MPLA.’
‘Victory or death’, Bárbara replied
‘And I am the enemy, even if I am anti-colonialist.’
‘You are a soldier.’
‘And a resister.’
‘That is a problem among the Portuguese. Here, you are part of the colonial army.’
Cf. Alegre, Jornada de África, 156f. and 162f.
43. Camões, Lírica, 462.
44. Alegre, Jornada de África, 198.
45. Macedo, ‘Love as Knowledge’, 61.
46. Alegre, Obra Poética, 551.
47. Ibid., 605.
48. Eduardo Lourenço, ‘Da ficção do Império ao império da ficção’, Diário de Notícias. Su-
plemento 10 Anos de Democracia (24 April 1984), 26.
49. Augusto Abelaira, Sem Tecto, Entre Ruínas (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1979), 199; Álamo
Oliveira, Até Hoje. Memória de Cão (Lisbon: Ulmeiro, 1986), 73; António Lobo Antunes, Fado
Alexandrino (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1989), 19; Rocha de Sousa, Angola 61 – uma crónica de guerra
ou a visibilidade da última deriva (Lisbon: Contexto, 1999), 498.
50. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Pela Mão de Alice. O Social e o Político na Pós-Modernidade
(Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1996), 49 and 58.
51. Alegre interviewed by Brito Vintém, ‘Sou um filho da língua de Camões’, Notícias do
Interior (July 1991), 16.
52. The expression is from Almeida, Um Mar da Cor da Terra – Raça.
53. For a long historical perception of this question see Francisco Bethencourt, ‘A Memória
da Expansão’, in História da Expansão Portuguesa, eds Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri,
vol. 5 (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1999), 442–483.
54. The quotation continues:
Portuguese culture, characterised by a deliberate universalism and by the multiple ci-
vilisational encounters which allowed the welcoming of the diverse, the understanding
of the Other and the universal embrace of the particular, is an open and miscegenated
culture, enriched by the wandering of a people set in a search of its whole dimensionality
232 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

beyond its borders … Having achieved a fascinating pilgrimage of centuries, Portugal

returns to the folds of the European continent and integrates itself in its original cultural
space, contributing with its worldliness to the construction of an open, ecumenical
Europe.
Despacho Normativo n. 63/91, Ministry of Education.
55. David Robertson, ‘The Vision of Colony and Metropolis in Portuguese Colonial wars
Literature’, in Literature and War, ed. David Bevan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 119–140, here
156.
56. Eduardo Lourenço, A Nau de Ícaro seguido de Imagem e Miragem da Lusofonia (Lisbon:
Gradiva, 1999), here 177.
57. Isabel Castro Henriques, ‘A sociedade colonial em África. Ideologias, hierarquias, quoti-
dianos’, in História da Expansão Portuguesa, eds Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, vol.
5 (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1999), 216–274, here 274.
 CHAPTER 1 2

The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear

Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic

SANDRA MASS

In the aftermath of the First World War, the concept of Raum (space) gained
new importance in both German literature and political debates. Although it
had already been present in the geopolitical and colonial planning for the ‘im-
perial infrastructure’, as the historian Dirk van Laak has recently shown, the
synthesis of Raum and Volk (people) only became widely recognized publicly in
the Weimar Republic.1 The geographic position of Germany, the handing over
of territories in the wake of the Versailles Treaty and the loss of the German
colonies were all lamented in post-war discourses on the ‘national narrowness’
by almost all of the political camps. The front-line soldier of the First World
War and main author of the ‘soldierly literature’ of the Weimar Republic, Ernst
Jünger (1895–1998), for example, put it this way: ‘In our time the borders have
become so narrow in every sense, that everywhere one has the desire to blow
them up.’2 Jünger formulated an active and aggressive attitude toward the bor-
der question, whereas most of the other commentators described Germany as
a conquered nation and as a defence community. The most obvious indicator
of this perception was the success of the book Volk ohne Raum (People without
Space) published in 1926 and written by the colonial author Hans Grimm
(1875–1959). On its publication, this book about the former German colony
Deutsch-Südwestafrika (German Southwest Africa) gained a public beyond the
author’s usual readership, who was then heard throughout German society.3
Its title became a political slogan of everyday life and an exceptional seman-
tic carrier in all of the fields that concerned themselves with the question of
Raum, for instance geopolitics.4 Furthermore, in the conservative and National
Socialist use of the concept of Raum and Lebensraum, respectively, the East

Notes for this section begin on page 246.

234 Sandra Mass

signified the representation of Slavic and Bolshevik threats toward the German
people.5 Alongside the nationalist fixation on one’s ‘own’ borders and spatial
limits, there existed a political and mental clinging to the old monarchic and
imperialist system. This mindset of eternally looking backward was to become
a fundamental problem of the Weimar Republic, as more progressive and dem-
ocratic forces did not seriously fight against this mentality and ideology. The
racist connection between Volk and Raum could be established in the course
of the Republic’s history and became one of the key concepts of the National
Socialists.
The propagandist literature and practice concerned with the national nar-
rowness in the Weimar Republic focussed mainly on three border territories:
firstly, in the Rhineland, one dealt with the propaganda that became known
as the campaign against the ‘Black Horror’, directed against the stationing of
African colonial soldiers in the territory under French occupation. Secondly,
there was the East, the ‘bleeding border’, where marauding German Freikorps –
paramilitary organisations – continued to fight against first the advancing Red
Army and then against the Baltic nationalists. Thirdly, the revisionist colonial
literature reached its climax in the Weimar Republic where overseas colonies
envisaged as middle-term goals literally became ‘fantasy empires’.6
These border territories were described and illustrated in a substantial body
of propaganda literature, novels, newspaper articles and autobiographies, whose
authors represented almost the entire political landscape of the Weimar Repub-
lic, apart from the far left. They were high-ranking civil servants and military
men, officers as well as generals and members of the Women’s movement and
the Colonial movement. This essay concerns itself with the analysis of all three
geographical frontiers, and stresses the phantasmagorical differences next to the
similarity in their lamentation of the loss of territory.7 Beside the political claims
made by the propaganda, this essay shows how the texts under review here can
be understood as attempts at creating an ‘imagined community’ in post-war
Germany. They were written to tell the reader where the border of the nation
runs, or better, where it should be. This function of the propaganda was hardly
made explicit; rather, it used gendered and sexual images of space and border
to represent the political aim so widespread in the Weimar Republic.
With the use of the allegory of sexuality, respectively non-legitimate forms
of sexuality, to illustrate the loss of space, the former became a distinct sign to
differentiate between oneself and the other, to mark the ‘alien’ and the menace
emanating from it for the nation. Nevertheless, sexuality did not just serve as
a metaphor, representing dominance and colonial rule, as Ann Laura Stoler
notes: ‘It was a fundamental class and racial marker implicated in a wider set of
relations of power.’8 The analysis of official and semi-official propaganda and
colonial and martial remembrance literature offers insights into the relation
between the nation seen as a body and gendered and racial concepts of sexual-
ity.9 The concept of the Volkskörper (imagined community of bodies) contained
 The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic 235

an analogy between an individual body and a social body of a community – a

transfer of physiological descriptions of the individual body onto the imagined
image of the nation or the people. Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), a well-known
geopolitician, gave a very lucid impression of the contemporary use of the
analogy: in 1927, he compared the loss of territories with ‘unhealed burns in
the outer skin of the Volkskörper’.10 Its use was not limited to the far right, but
widely accepted in the Weimar public and political sphere. In the contexts of
colonialism and occupation, sexuality and especially inter-racial sexuality, func-
tioned as images and representations of national borders and its transgression.
In the interpretation of contemporary racial-hygienic authors, for example,
inter-racial sexuality caused pollution and degeneration of the Volkskörper. The
concept stressed the necessity to defend itself against attacks from ‘outside’ and
‘inside’. Thus, inter-racial sexuality represented the most severe assault on the
virility and health of a people as it is interpreted as contagious infection. While
the common interpretation acknowledges the assumption that women are seen
as the ones who posed the threat to the imagined community, this article un-
derlines the importance of the concepts of male subjectivity and masculinity
for the negotiation of post-war stability, following up on the results of feminist
historians who have shown the link between the nation’s body and the female
body.11
The three discourses on the national narrowness used different forms to
talk about contagious infections of the Volkskörper in the realm of a frontier.
This essay shows the different ways in which the relation between the catego-
ries of gender, sexuality and race were constructed and contested. Whereas
the discursive use of sexuality in the sources under review here were to fix the
images about who is virile, manly and white, or weak, feminised and black,
respectively Slavic, they did at the time lead to an intermingling of these du-
alistic patterns. In accordance with the common assumption in Postcolonial
Studies, that racial or ethnic identities as ‘Whites’ or ‘Blacks’, as ‘colonisers’ or
‘colonised’ are only supposedly fixed and stable, this essay enquires about the
discursive forms in which these identities of the self were in danger and argues
that sexuality itself caused the irritations and failures in the discursive attempt
of masculine subject formation.

‘Black Horror’

In the course of the French occupation of the Rhineland, African soldiers

were stationed in Germany. In 1920, the men coming to the Rhineland were
primarily from North Africa and Senegal and were made up of about 30 per
cent of the French occupation troops. On the side of the Anti-Versailles Coali-
tion, this was interpreted as an especially humiliating aspect of the conditions
dictated to them by the treaty. They regarded it as a slap in the face at the hands
236 Sandra Mass

of the victorious French. Thereafter, numerous groups and individuals took

part in propaganda, by publishing pamphlets and organising public protest ral-
lies against the ‘Black Horror’.12 It was especially through pamphlets and in the
daily press that groups closest to the government launched the campaign on a
massive scale.13 The ‘Black Horror’ campaign was particularly effective because
it could rely on an acceptance of an inner disjunction among the German peo-
ple and on the limitation of the geographical space, where France was named
as the cause of the ‘German narrowness’. With the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine
to France, the uncertain political future of the Saarland and above all with the
occupation of the Rhineland, France was said to have seriously reduced the
territory on which Germans were to live.
At the centre of the texts about the ‘Black Horror’, one can find the racial
and colonial perceptions of the character of the African male. The body of the
colonial soldier was the primary criterion of distinguishing and separating him
from the ‘White’ man. Africans were thought of as a primitive people and as
creatures driven by instincts, animal-like, as ‘devoid of culture’,14 as ‘savages’,15
as ‘Barbarians’,16 and were constructed as a ‘race’ inferior to European civilisa-
tion: all representations stressed the instinctive nature of the colonial soldier, his
sexual energy and the necessity to keep these energies in check. ‘The sexual
drive of the Black soldier is simply devoid of all inhibition and doubly danger-
ous, because they see things differently from us’, writes Bruno Stehle in his
brochure Die farbigen Fronvögte am Rhein (The Coloured Socage Bailiffs on the
Rhine).17 The threat this represented was primarily projected onto German
women, who were said to be the much-desired victims of the colonial troops.
The rape of white women seemed to be the logical conclusion to draw from
the unbridled sexuality of the Africans.
However, the propaganda did not succeed in denying the fact that the Af-
rican soldiers had not always been met with hostility and fear in the Rhineland.
References to instances of consensual relationships between German women
and the soldiers were too obvious. Love relationships, affairs and marriages
between African soldiers and German women are testimony to an at least het-
erogeneous standpoint of the female population in the occupied areas.18 This
much was also clear to various government bodies. The Governing President
of Düsseldorf, concerned with female morality, wrote to the Supreme Presi-
dent (Oberpräsident) of the Rhine Province in 1921: ‘The growing proximity
between the female youth and members of the occupation has started at the
outset of the occupation. German citizens are outraged that a large number of
women and girls have demeaned themselves by embarking upon intimate re-
lationships immediately after the last German troops had left.’19 These women
were described as ‘wenches forgetting their honour, immoral creatures’,20 as
women who followed ‘their over-heated senses into sexual depravity’.21 They
were then integrated into the campaign under the header of the ‘white shame’
 The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic 237

and ‘white disgrace’, respectively.22 This ‘fraternisation’ was lamented by all of

the political groups of the propaganda movement and even by its opponents.
Whereas right-wing newspapers and political formations thereby wanted to
illustrate the downfall of the ‘white people’, the so-called ‘white shame’ was
used on the political left as an argument where it was levelled at those accusing
the colonial soldier of having a violent character.23
In the minds of those instigating the ‘Black Horror’ propaganda, the task
of national education had to be expanded into controlling sexuality. Here,
two threats had to be faced: the presence of the Africans in Germany and the
behaviour of German women. Whereas the Africans were regarded as a danger
per se, the behaviour of the German women in the Rhineland was viewed as a
threat to the Volkskörper. Sexual relationships with African soldiers were seen as
an indicator of their treason. Prostitutes, partners of African men and mothers
of Afro-German children were therefore excluded from the national commu-
nity. Individual sexual behaviour ultimately constituted Rassenschande (racial
desecration), thus the Rheinische Frauenliga (Women’s League of the Rhein-
land) wrote in 1923: ‘Every country knows women who forget their honour,
who barter their female dignity for money … We have every right to refuse
to recognise as German women those women from which the blacks have to
be protected.’24 While the condemnation of inter-racial sexuality alluded to
the imagined threat to the racially conceptualised nation and can also be seen
as an attempt to control female sexual behaviour, inter-racial sexuality was at
the same time regarded as an indicator for the decline of the white man. The
German man, thus the propagandists, was not able to safeguard the German
women, and, consequently, the German nation.25
The obsession with inter-racial sexuality and the sexualised language by
which acts of rape and non-respectable sexuality were described, were found
in the semantic and allegorical analogies appearing in speeches made about
the threatened Volkskörper. The ‘humiliation’ of the nation was described in
anatomical metaphors. The assault on the female body in the texts therefore
metonymically stood for the political situation and the generally prevalent idea
of crisis and threat. The Versailles Treaty was interpreted as a ripping apart of
the community, as a ‘shameful rape’, where the loss of certain German terri-
tories was compared to ‘the foreign powers tearing pieces out of the body of
the German Reich’.26 As a final stage, the ‘total fragmentation of Germany’27
was imagined. Germany was seen as a ‘humiliated people’ with ‘a slur on its
honour’, thus said the propagandist August Eberlein, using the same phrases for
the rapes of women as for the description of the national situation.28 Evaluat-
ing the signing of the Versailles Treaty, the historian Gerhard Ritter said the
German Reich would thereby be degraded to a ‘brutally exploited colony’.29
The women’s rights activist and nationalist Käte Schirrmacher went so far as
wanting to discuss the situation in the Rhineland at the Anti-Slavery Congress
238 Sandra Mass

in Rome (1921): ‘One would now be inclined to believe that an “Anti-Slavery

Congress” would have to regard the occupation in the Rhineland by coloured
troops as the intolerable slavery of white, Christian Germans. But far from it!’30
The propaganda against the African occupation soldiers mainly concerned
the geographical space of the nation. With the allegorical representation of the
‘raped nation’ and the reference to the ‘tearing away of pieces of the national
body’, the propagandists combined images of individual and collective bodies
and connected them with the loss of Raum in the West. On a second level, the
propagandists tried to overcome national restrictions and asked for interna-
tional support. In their brochures, which were frequently translated into other
languages and spread by diplomatic representatives in the respective countries,
the German propaganda groups attempted to increase their influence by ap-
pealing to the ‘solidarity of the white race’, as done, for example, in 1921 in
the anonymous propagandistic text Was droht dir, Europa? (What is threatening
you, Europe?).31 It was in particular the US upon which the propagandistic
attention focussed. But also the colonial powers of England and Italy became
the target of such propaganda campaigns, by pointing out the endangered unity
of Europe – endangered by France. France was accused of having gone against
the ‘solidarity of the white race’ by stationing colonial soldiers in Germany, as
written by the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung in 1921: ‘That coloured troops are em-
ployed as institutions watching over whites is indeed a cultural crime, a betrayal
of the feeling of solidarity among white races, and a continuation of the politics
of England and France that had already been started during the war.’32 With
the prognosis that the arming of African men and the experience of superiority
toward the German population would cause a destabilisation of the European
colonial system in the nearest future, the propagandists aimed to widen the
debate toward the European level. In 1921, Joseph Lang published his apoca-
lyptic vision of the descent of the ‘white race’ in his brochure Die schwarze
Schmach. Frankreichs Schande: ‘If the whole civilised world does not stand up
soon and demands the withdrawal of the coloured troops, the day will come
where the rolling avalanche cannot be hold.’33 In mirroring European whites,
the propaganda presented a space where the disruptions and divisiveness of
war could be overcome as long as France was excluded from this community.
The ‘Black Horror’ campaign explicitly charged France of being a traitor of
the attempt to create a community based on the White race that transgressed
national borders. Edmund Dene Morel, the British Labour representative, held
a similar position. His publications on the so-called ‘Black Horror’ gained full
support by the German propagandists, especially because Morel, as a socialist,
did not arouse public suspicion as a right-wing propagandist.34 He had already
been popular for his engagement against the Belgium colonial politics and slav-
ery in Congo.35 His warnings were directed to a European audience: ‘For the
European democracy, this … introduction of African troops upon European
soil is a terrific portent.’36
 The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic 239

For the propagandists, it was incontestable: belonging to the German na-

tion meant being White. Additionally, sharing a bed with a Black occupation
soldier could lead to an exclusion from the national community. Furthermore,
the relation between being German and being White included the belief of
belonging to the community of the ‘White race’. This link was not only valid
in the views of right-wing politicians in the propaganda, but also left-wing
authors supported the idea of a common European heritage, a community of a
superior civilisation, which was seen under threat by the stationing of African
soldiers on European ground. Male and female authors used the gender order
to strengthen this racist imaginary. At the same time, though, the campaign was
used to implement a discourse about legitimate forms of sexuality. The multi-
tude of functions of the propaganda could be interpreted as one reason for the
encompassing support of the campaign in the early Weimar years.

Balticum

The post-war fantasies of Germany’s eastern border were of a different kind,

even though they, too, were permeated with sexual imagery. After the end of
the war, Freikorps soldiers remained in the area of the former Ober-Ost, which
the German army had occupied and administrated during the war.37 In the pe-
riod following the armistice, they, on the one hand, fought against leftist rebels
within Germany, and tried to regain their former power by staging coups d’états.
On the other hand, at the request of the government and with permission of the
Allied forces, they were to ensure the retreat of German soldiers at the eastern
frontier and to slow down the advancing Red Army. Approximately 20,000 to
40,000 soldiers crossed the border into the Balticum, as the soldiers now called
the former Ober-Ost. After the retreat of the Red Army, the Freikorps also turned
against the national movement of Lithuania and Poland; this period of conflict
between armed militias resembled a civil war, with thousands of civilians dying
in the process. This war was represented in an enormous quantity of memory
and propaganda literature written in particular by fascist men in the 1920s and
1930s. In their books, authors and Freikorps soldiers, such as Ernst von Salomon
or Rüdiger von der Goltz, created a ‘different world’, an anarcho-fascist ideal
state, as is prominent in the works of Ernst Jünger, that was the exact opposite
to bourgeois life.38 The way the soldiers depicted themselves, their conception
of the soldierly man, can be traced back to the mindscape of the East as devel-
oped during the war, which has been described so clearly by the historian Vejas
Gabriel Liulevicius in his book on the perception of the Eastern front.39
This mindscape consisted of images of an endless and hostile nature, bore-
dom and the fight against the enemy.40 In German descriptions, the nature and
landscape was riddled with dirt and diseases.41 In their war memory books, Paul
von Hindenburg (1847–1934), field marshal during the war and, from 1925
240 Sandra Mass

onward, President, and Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937), chief of general staff,

wrote about the ‘uncivilised country’ in Ober-Ost.42 Dirt was a most prevalent
synonym for Russia, and the task of cleaning it fell to the German soldiers
occupying it. Directives told German soldiers to make themselves homes in
Ober-Ost and thereby render visible German culture.43 From the perspective of
German military and cultural politics, the goal was to import German culture
and to remove the ‘dirt’ from a piece of earth described as rich and promising.
Propaganda campaigns, orders and directives warned soldiers of visiting the
brothel and of venereal diseases. So-called ‘dirty literature’ was to be eliminated
by the occupation army itself.
In the post-war period, countless autobiographical texts were published
in which these mostly right-wing men transfigured the battles in the Balticum
into a personal process of maturing, which finally led to the existence of the
soldierly man. The literature provided the reader with an encompassing im-
age of the male Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people), built by African
colonialists, soldiers, Freikorps and the male youth, united in the yearning for
more space.44 Descriptions of nature constructed the images of the space for
which they were fighting. The landscape was seen as ‘a landscape of gentle and
treacherous loveliness’, as a ‘lovely landscape’ where one seemed ‘always in fact
to be standing on swaying swamp-ground’, as both tempting and repulsive.45
This ambivalence toward the place where the soldiers lived and fought for at
least one year can be interpreted as a colonial trope. And in fact, some of the
Freikorps had colonial plans for further German peasant settlement in the Balti-
cum; others directly characterised the civil war in the East as ‘an expedition in
the interior of Africa’.46 The visions the soldiers had were manifold: neverthe-
less, all shared the characteristics of ‘eternal soldierhood and onward-pressing
spirit of colonisation’.47
Anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism and a distinct hate for the other woman
characterise these texts. The women of the enemy army are described as savage
and uncivilised female warriors. These women took a very active part in the
‘butcheries’, thus wrote Georg Heinrich Hartmann in his description of the time
he spent in a Freikorps, published in 1929.48 The texts display an intense feeling
of revulsion against Communist women, who, according to Klaus Theweleit’s
psychoanalytical study of the Freikorps-literature, symbolised ‘a horror’ that ‘had
no name in the language of the soldierly man’.49 ‘At the hands of seductively
smiling, gun-toting women’ one received ‘the longest death …, the most bit-
ter and the most cruel which one could suffer’, wrote the Freikorps author
Thor Goote.50 At the same time, these descriptions of the other women are
ambivalent: the sensuality and the sexual prowess imputed to them are seduc-
tive and tempting. The way in which these descriptions are placed in the texts
illuminates their function as a legitimisation for the following violent excesses.
Communist and Latvian women are desired but at the same time mutilated
beyond recognition. The depictions of their executions are bloody, cruel and
 The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic 241

sadistic; they refer to the dangers of desire. Sexuality here uncovers the instable
process of the construction of borders. The Freikorps literature stressed the loss
of borders, both national and subjective. Beyond the frontier, the soldiers im-
agined the East as a space of boundlessness, with regard both to the landscape as
well as to the rape and slaughter of the population. To the mind of the Freikorps,
the loss of limits and the battles along the frontier were to be used fruitfully to
establish a vision of Germany’s national future.

Africa

Africa also offered the possibility of boundary transgression, as it transpired

from the colonial memory literature after 1918. There, dreams and experiences
were possible that could not be experienced in a Germany ‘impoverished in
dreams’. German colonialists, especially the soldiers of the colonial army, kept
on writing about the love they had developed for their second Heimat: ‘ardent
love’ had replaced the violence of colonisation.51 As can be read in the memo-
ries, many soldiers laid down their weapons to return to Germany only with
a ‘heavy heart’.52 The ‘love for Africa’ was bound to the perception of Africa
as a country that could be shaped, where the influence of the individual was
still noticeable and actions would have consequences, and which also offered a
space that could be individually shaped, offering men and women more pos-
sibilities of self-development. Every memory and every description of the for-
mer colonies, be it in a novel or in the allegedly dispassionate representations of
a battle, were located in a space that was to contain the possibility of individual
improvement. The alleged namelessness of the landscapes and the German ig-
norance of the local population, which revealed itself when talking about the
uninhabited areas, were not only indicators of the colonial act itself, in which
the landscape was subjugated to the German order, but also offered possibilities
to lose oneself in it, to transcend one’s own boundaries.
The war in German East-Africa became the most prominent public ex-
ample for Africa’s ability to create ‘manly heroes’. This trope was not new in
colonial literature. Ernst Jünger, who went to Africa with the Foreign Legion
in 1913, imagined in Das abenteuerliche Herz the expansion and the possibility
of Africa in connection to the narrowness of Germany: ‘Africa was, to me, the
epitome of wildness and of the original, the only conceivable space for a life
on the scale that I had planned to live mine on; and it was clear that, as soon as
I was free to do so, I had to go there.’ Elsewhere, he wrote that Africa appeared
to him as the place ‘in which one could move without coming up against a
brick garrison or a prohibitive sign at each step, where it was still possible to be
a self-determined master possessing all attributes of power’.53
Frequently, the descriptions of the ‘love for Africa’ are interspersed with
motifs of sexual encounters, where parts of Africa’s landscape are coded as the
242 Sandra Mass

bodily shape of a woman, as in the remembrance novel by the mostly unknown

colonial author H. Consten:
Firm liana-arms embrace and strangulate the inclining tree giants, who feeble and
tired and exhausted by the strangulating embrace, surrender to death at the hands
of this female vampire of the jungle, drained of all their juices and resistance. Fully
aroused at touch, like a woman’s succulent thighs, other lianas, whose soft tex-
ture flushes as if alive, cling to the trees … Red blossoms quiver like ever-thirsty
woman’s lips! … Thus I ponder and I dream.54

Sexual and sexualising representations of ‘Africa as nature’ made flesh

its spatial expansion. These representations underscored its ‘virgin character’
and saw therein unlimited possibilities for male fantasy: ‘Thus I ponder and
I dream’. At the same time, the (sexual) encounter with nature transported
narrowness and deadly embrace. The abundant female landscape sucked dry,
clung to and strangulated until death occurred. The colonial landscape stood
for Ur-mother and vampire at the same time.55 One can find the image of the
‘ever-growing mother’ also in the work of Ludwig Deppe in the description
of a war burial: ‘the hero’s grave is completely covered with clinging plants
and blossoming flowers: thus our comrades rest in the African jungle, as if
put to sleep by a mother, in the infinite peace of our eternal mother nature.’56
The colonial author De Haas remembered Africa as ‘the maternal earth, who
gave man enough room for contemplation, so that he may be reminded that
he has from the beginning of time been connected to her bosom as to noth-
ing else, which spoke to him and in him’.57 The image of ‘Mother Nature’
was associated with both ahistoricity and authenticity, which was diametrically
opposed to ideas of the modern society as a space of acceleration – as genu-
inely anti-modern modernity, as space for personal development, the image
as welcomed by colonialists, enabling them to put into words their longings
by harking back to romantic descriptions of nature and the cultural pessimism
of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German middle-class. Furthermore,
these descriptions of nature offered an opportunity, in particular for soldiers,
to display their level of education, especially when they used the well-known
middle-class descriptions of nature as a model, as the historian Birthe Kundrus
put it.58 The colonial landscape became ‘a place of desire and longings, an aes-
thetic emotion’,59 a stage also for sexual encounters, which were endowed with
a particular ‘magic’60 and in which wild beasts became metaphors for orgiastic
unions, which for a moment over-ruled female modesty:

Blissful days and nights! African nights! What may you at home know of the magic
of holding a dear wife in your arms in the midst of the wildest, the most un-
touched nature. When the breeze floats around the temples like silk, when thou-
sands of glow-worms dance a marriage gig, when nocturnal birds and crickets sing
the ceremonial tune and then, when the primitive roar of the lion tears asunder all
that is peaceful, and makes the loving woman shudder and lean against the man’s
chest.61
 The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic 243

The description of Africa’s landscape rarely managed to do without point-

ing out the violence: lion’s roar, vampire-like lianas likened to women’s legs,
wildfires, the threat of the Ur-mother, etc. All of these represented the coun-
terpart to the romanticising view of the ‘magic’ of Africa. But it was this am-
bivalence that created the colonial man, who could at the same time feel love
and prove himself in the face of danger. This offered him a so-called multitude
of being: in Africa, longing and violence seemed to lie closer together than on
the European continent.
In the colonial literature on the World War in Africa, one can deduce from
most of the memories and descriptions that in the last two years of the war,
the war had increasingly become an existential strain on the Europeans as well
and had lost the attraction of adventure. The physical condition of the soldiers
became critical; they ran high fevers and were weak.62 The memories also tell
of an increasing occurrence of psychological illnesses. The white soldiers had
lost the feeling of a sense of all of their ‘wanderings’, the sense of the war. What
formerly had been dismissed, the narrowness of home, then appeared to the
medical doctor Ludwig Deppe as a dream image of the Heimat. The mytho-
logical idea of the Europeans and their paradise in Africa seemed to have run
its course by the end of the war. At the end of the nineteenth century, colonial
critics above all had pointed out the psychotic manifestation of the colonial
project. The bloody repression of rebellions and the torturing of the indigenous
population were denounced under the name of Tropenkoller (frenzy of the trop-
ics), as an effect of the hegemonic position that rendered some whites unable
of self-control.63 The Tropenkoller was the transferral of the neurasthenic debate
into the colonies. But still, the ‘nervous metropolis’ became the opposite of the
calm wide space of Africa, as a fantasy of free sexuality and a place to escape
from middle-class morals. Colonial expansion, thus, became medication for
‘nervous Germans’, not without the constant referral to the dangers generated
by the ‘Heart of Darkness’, which Africa represented as well.64
In the interest of colonial propaganda, it was stipulated not to write too
often or in too much detail about wartime violence. From the point of view
of colonialism’s defenders, an eventual ‘returning’ of the German colonies was
after all connected to the civilising abilities of the Germans. Furthermore, the
romanticisation of Africa was used to deflect attention from the war in Europe.
The huge popularity of stories about the ‘African adventures’ and the ‘colonial
heroes’ also stem from the experience of the European World War, the destruc-
tion of lives, ideas and landscapes, and from the crisis of valiant masculinity.65
As the colonial forces returned to Germany in 1919, they found there a society
defined by military defeat and marked by the experiences of the war. The un-
precedented violence, the unimaginable number of its victims and the yet to
be ascertained number of physically and psychologically damaged people do,
indeed, beyond cultural pessimism about the mechanisation of war, indicate a
‘historically unprecedented amassment of death and destruction’.66 It was this
244 Sandra Mass

tremendous experience of killing that produced an audience for further colo-

nial fantasies, creating African spaces as a romantic and beloved landscape.

Conclusion

This essay suggests not limiting the analytical tools that have helped research in
colonialism to the colonial times. The German case is particularly interesting
and unique for the political conditions after the First World War, as Germany
had to give up its colonies with the signing of the Versailles Treaty and it be-
came, though of course not colonised, an occupied country. But was Germany
a post-colonial society after 1918? In the strict sense of the definition – refer-
ring only to the existence of overseas colonies – it was. But colonial images,
metaphors and allegories still shaped public discourses and political ideas after
the German Empire had vanished. Although it remains important to maintain
the fundamental differences between a colonial system and colonial imagina-
tions, the essay shows that new results can be gained concerning the continuity
and discontinuity of colonial mentality if one sets aside a rigid definition of
colonialism.67
Furthermore, this analysis suggests that the Balticum and the Rhineland
should be discussed in the sense of colonial spaces. Racist imaginations and
expansionist conceptions of space were established in the two propaganda cam-
paigns as in the colonial memory literature. While it was the exclusive domain
of the colonial authors to fantasize about the vastness of Africa, they did find
a common ground with the propagandists railing against the Rhineland oc-
cupation and the Freikorps literature, when both lamented the narrowness of
Germany. All three of them also stood for the defence against the ‘Bolshevik
or Slavic threat’. The demise of the monarchy and the dissolution of the old
Wilhelminian order left behind a political and mental void, which seemed in-
creasingly to be filled by the Left. Whereas the geographical space had become
ever smaller because of the cessation of territories, the internal intellectual
and political space was said to be marked more and more by disorder and to
have been taken over by Communists. It was within this political climate that
Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (1870–1964), the former General of the Schutztruppe
(Colonial Army) in German East-Africa and a leader of Freikorps soldiers after
the war, was made into a colonial hero who still carried with him the signs of
the ‘old world’ and was seen as capable of winning back the geographical space
and reinstating the intellectual and political hegemony of the Right.68 Numer-
ous press articles commented on Lettow-Vorbeck’s return to Berlin in 1919
and described the political character of the march through the Brandenburg
gate, as, for example, in an article in the Post:
Berlin’s second major Reicke said: “You, who came back to us over the sea, you
are our last hope. You are men, help us, protect us from the dreadfulness, which
 The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic 245

that monster of Russian origin – once depicted as a hyena, then as a blood-sucker

– is currently preparing to accomplish.” No socialist spoke, and that was good …
The “International” was not sung; instead it was “Deutschland, Deutschland über
alles”.69

The identification of the colonial hero as male underlines what the analysis
made clear from the three propagandistic spaces: the identification of Germany
as a nation too narrow and stripped down was illustrated with gendered and
sexual allegories and metaphors. The propaganda used forms of illegitimate
sexuality to illustrate the danger that the Rhineland occupation meant for the
image of the German Volkskörper. Sexuality, especially inter-racial sexuality, was
repeatedly acknowledged as a threat to the White and European culture. The
propagandists used an image of a White man’s community that was presented as
a space where inter-racial relationships between Africans and Europeans were
eliminated. In the case of the Eastern border, the imaginations of sexual threat
were related to the Red Army soldiers and later, after the retreat of the Red
Army, to Lettic and Latvian women, who with their ‘man-murdering sensual-
ity’, threatened to endanger the ‘soldierly’ of the Freikorps male soldier, if we
follow here Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of the Freikorps literature in Male Fan-
tasies.70 The Freikorps literature presented what happens, when, in the process
of expanding space, the borders were transgressed. The texts about the Baltic
battles pointed less to the fact of a spatial shortcoming; rather, they stress the
concept of the border, the frontier that was to be transgressed. The frontier,
however, was an ambivalent concept; it integrated both desire and repulsion. In
a way similar to the Rhineland, speaking about the conquest of the space and
the conquest of the women became interchangeable. But whereas the speaking
of the rapes in the Rhineland were told as the story of the national ‘narrow-
ness’, the killing and the raping of Communist women were described as if
representing spatial expansion and border crossing.
The female German victim, the German passive male and the virile Af-
rican occupation soldier represented the Rhineland, whereas the ‘East’ was
represented via the German man being active and raping the female inhabit-
ant. The texts all deal with men moving in lost spaces. Whereas the East and
the Colonial space appeared to be open, though dangerous, the Rhineland
space illustrated the fear of what would happen when German men were not
allowed to move: the other man started to enter the space. Vastness and border
crossing, though, also included dangers for the construction of masculinity. The
landscape in the Colonial literature is illustrated with fantasies of romantic love
and beautiful nature. ‘Africa’, described as female, could thus be interpreted as
a place for male catharsis. At the same time, the literature used the colonial trope
of the Tropenkoller to point to the threat that the ‘heart of darkness’ posed to
the male subject.

Translated by Karen Diehl

246 Sandra Mass

Notes
1. The editors of this book and Christina Benninghaus (Universität Bielefeld) were helpful
critics of the article. I would like to thank them. Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur. Deutsche Pla-
nungen für eine Erschließung Afrikas, 1880–1960 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004); Werner
Köster, Die Rede über den ‘Raum’. Zur semantischen Karriere eines deutschen Konzeptes (Heidelberg:
Synchron, 2002); Heike Wolter, ‘Volk ohne Raum’. Lebensraumvorstellungen im geopolitischen, litera-
rischen und politischen Diskurs der Weimarer Republik. Eine Untersuchung auf der Basis von Fallstudien
zu Leben und Werk Karl Haushofers, Hans Grimms und Adolf Hitlers (Hamburg: Lit, 2003); Vanessa
Conze, ‘Die Grenzen der Niederlage. Kriegsniederlagen und territoriale Verluste im Grenz-
Diskurs in Deutschland (1918–1970)’, in Kriegsniederlagen. Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen, ed. Horst
Carl (Berlin: Akademie, 2004), 163–184.
2. Ernst Jünger, ‘Der Frontsoldat und die Wilhelminische Zeit’, Die Standarte, 20 September
1925, reprinted in Jünger, Politische Publizistik, 1919–1933, ed. Sven Olaf Bergötz (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 2001), 81.
3. Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum (Munich: Langen, 1926). Until 1935, 315,350 copies were
sold. It therefore belongs to the twenty ‘most sold books in Germany of the first half of the twen-
tieth century’. See Annette Gümbel, ‘Instrumentalisierte Erinnerung an den Ersten Weltkrieg.
Hans Grimms “Volk ohne Raum”’, in Krieg und Erinnerung. Fallstudien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhun-
dert, eds Helmut Berding, Klaus Heller, and Winfried Speitkamp (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2000), 93–111, here 106.
4. For an overview concerning the history of geopolitics and geography see Jürgen Oster-
hammel, ‘Die Wiederkehr des Raumes. Geopolitik, Geohistorie und historische Geographie’,
Neue Politische Literatur 43, no. 3 (1994): 374–397.
5. See, for example, Alfred Rosenberg, Der Zukunftsweg einer deutschen Außenpolitik (Munich:
Eher, 1927); for the National Socialist use of the concept of Raum see Mechtild Rössler, Wis-
senschaft und Lebensraum. Ein Beitrag zur Disziplingeschichte der Geographie (Berlin: Reimer, 1990);
Birgit Kletzin, Europa aus Rasse und Raum. Die nationalsozialistische Idee der Neuen Ordnung, 2nd
ed. (Münster: Lit, 2002).
6. Birthe Kundrus, ed., Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frank-
furt am Main: Campus, 2003).
7. Frontier should not be understood as a fixed border, but as a contact zone with a moving
border, in which encounters, e.g., between colonisers and colonised take place and in which in-
clusion and exclusion are negotiated.
8. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule (Berkeley: University of Calilfornia Press, 2002), 45.
9. Inge Baxmann, ‘Der Körper der Nation’, in Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frank-
reich im Vergleich (19. und 20. Jahrhundert), eds Etienne François, Hannes Siegrist, and Jakob Vo-
gel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 353–365; Wulf D. Hund, ‘“Fremdkörper und
Volkskörper”. Zur Funktion des Rassismus’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 42 (2002): 345–359; for an
overview concerning racial hygiene and eugenics in Germany see Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte
der Rassenhygiene und Eugenik in Deutschland, eds Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayertz
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).
10. Karl Haushofer, Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung (Berlin: Vowink-
kel, 1927), XIV, quoted in Conze, Grenzen, 168f.
11. Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1992).
12. Sally Marks, ‘A Black Watch on the Rhine. A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Pru-
rience’, European Studies Review 1 (1983): 297–333; Gisela Lebzelter, ‘Die “Schwarze Schmach”.
Vorurteile – Propaganda – Mythos’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985): 37–58; Sandra Mass,
‘Das Trauma des weißen Mannes. Afrikanische Kolonialsoldaten in propagandistischen Texten,
1914–1923’, L’Homme 12, no. 1 (2001): 11–33; Christian Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen nie-
dergemetzelt”. Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus,
 The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic 247

Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914–1930) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001); Jean-Yves Le Naour, La honte
noire. L’Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises, 1914–1945 (Paris: Hachette, 2003).
13. Anon., Was droht dir, Europa? (Munich: Gmelin, 1921); Ray Beveridge, Die schwarze
Schmach. Die weisse Schande (Hamburg: F.W. Rademacher, 1922); Alfred Brie, Geschändete deut-
sche Frauen. Wie die farbigen Soldaten in den besetzten Gebieten wüten (Leipzig: Graphische Werke,
1921); Heinrich Distler, Das deutsche Leid am Rhein. Ein Buch der Anklage gegen die Schandherrschaft
des französischen Militarismus (Minden: Köhler, 1921); August Eberlein, Schwarze am Rhein. Ein
Weltproblem (Davos: Schroeder, 1921); Adolf-Viktor von Koerber, Bestien im Land. Skizzen aus der
mißhandelten Westmark (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1923); Joseph Lang, Die schwarze Schmach.
Frankreichs Schande (Berlin: Neudeutsche Verlags- und Treuhandgesellschaft, 1921); Rheinische
Frauenliga, Farbige Franzosen am Rhein. Ein Notschrei deutscher Frauen, 4th expanded ed. (Berlin:
Engelmann, 1923); Fr. Rosenberger, Denkschrift über die Seuchengefahr infolge der Besetzung europä-
ischen Gebietes mit Farbigen. Für den ‘Deutschen Notbund gegen die Schwarze Schmach’ e.V. in München
(Munich: Gmelin, 1922); Wilhelm von der Saar, Der blaue Schrecken und die schwarze Schmach, 2nd
ed. (Stuttgart: Curt Winkler, 1921); Hugo Ferdinand Sigel, ‘Sind die schwarzen Besatzungstrup-
pen eine besondere gesundheitliche Gefahr für das deutsche Volk?’, (unpublished) Ph.D. Thesis,
Universität Tübingen, 1923; Bruno Stehle, Die farbigen Fronvögte am Rhein. Eine Tragödie (Munich:
Privately Published, 1922).
14. Frauenliga, Franzosen, 57.
15. Eberlein, Schwarze, 87.
16. Ibid., 35. Eberlein quotes a Norwegian newspaper.
17. ‘Der Geschlechtstrieb ist bei den Farbigen eben bar jeder Hemmung und doppelt gefährlich, weil sie
über die Dinge anders denken als wir.’ Stehle, Fronvögte, 13. The topos of the ‘over-abundant sexua-
lity of the savages’ already surfaces in the contemporary writings of the colonial expansion of the
early modern period. Cf. Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, Edle Mohren. Afrikaner im Bewußtsein und
Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 1993); Sabine Schülting, Wilde Frauen, Fremde Welten.
Kolonialisierungsgeschichten aus Amerika (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1997).
18. Myron J. Echenberg, Colonial Conscript. The Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Africa,
1857–1960 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991), 67.
19. ‘Die Annäherung der weiblichen Jugend an Angehörige der Besatzung hat mit Beginn der Beset-
zung eingesetzt. Es hat die deutsche Bürgerschaft ganz schön empört, daß sich eine große Anzahl von Frauen
und Mädchen sofort nach Abmarsch der letzten Deutschen dazu hergab, intime Beziehungen anzuknüpfen.’
Von Keudell to the Supreme President of the Rhine Province, 21 January 1921. Landeshaupt-
archiv Koblenz, 403, Nr. 13464: Akten betr. sittlicher Schädigung durch die Besatzung (Files
concerning the moral risk of the occupation).
20. Eberlein, Schwarze, 19.
21. Ibid., 145.
22. Ibid., 17: ‘Certainly there also exist among the Germans – as with any other people
– such elements that will fraternise with the enemy for their own personal gain.’
23. Lilli Jannasch, Schwarze Schmach und schwarz-weiß-rote Schande (Berlin 1921: Neues Vater-
land), 2nd ed. (Flugschriften des Bundes Neues Vaterland; no. 18/21).
24. ‘In jedem Land gibt es Ehrvergessene, die ihre weibliche Würde um Geld verschachern… Wir haben
alles Recht, uns zu weigern, die Frauen, vor denen die Farbigen geschützt werden müssen, als deutsche Frauen
anzuerkennen.’ Frauenliga, Notschrei, 57. For the history of the Rheinische Frauenliga see Sandra
Mass, ‘Von der “schwarzen Schmach” zur “deutschen Heimat”. Die Rheinische Frauenliga im
Kampf gegen die Rheinlandbesetzung, 1920–1929’, WerkstattGeschichte 11, no. 32 (2002): 44–57.
25. Beveridge, Schmach, 28; Lang, Schmach, 10; for a detailed analysis of this argument see
Mass, Trauma.
26. ‘Deutsche Schmach’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 June 1921.
27. ‘One of the French goals is the fragmentation of Germany. It has, however, achieved the
opposite: the German people has been bound together stronger than ever in its hate of the arch
enemy’, in ‘Frankreich und die schwarze Schmach’, Grenzlandkorrespondenz, no. 6 (December
1922).
248 Sandra Mass

28. Eberlein, Schwarze, 2.

29. Quoted in Christoph Cornelißen, ‘“Schuld am Weltfrieden”. Politische Kommentare
und Deutungsversuche deutscher Historiker zum Versailler Vertrag, 1919–1933’, in Versailles. Ziele
– Wirkung – Wahrnehmung, ed. Gerd Krumeich (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 237–258, here 237.
30. ‘Ein Lügenkongreß’, Deutsche Zeitung, 14 April 1921.
31. Anon., Europa.
32. ‘Die Wahrheit ins Ausland! Die schwarze Schmach’, in Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 24 Febru-
ary 1921. Further examples of an unlimited number of such comments: ‘The German govern-
ment must categorically refuse that the population of the territories occupied by the Entente has
to suffer the ignominy of a coloured occupation … The occupation of the left Rhine German
territory does not happen as a hostile act of war but peacefully, on the basis of a signed treaty.
The stationing of Black troops makes a mockery of the feeling of solidarity of the community of
the white race.’ ‘Protest gegen die schwarzen Besatzungstruppen’, Vossische Zeitung, 3 December
1918; ‘The employment of these coloured people, who are unable to communicate with the
population, as guards, as personnel checking papers, etc., is perceived as a serious threat to the
population.’ ‘Hamburg und die Schwarze Schmach’, Hamburger Nachrichten, 12 May 1921.
33. ‘Wenn nicht bald die gesamte zivilisierte Welt geschlossen aufsteht und die Zurückziehung der
farbigen Truppen von europäischem Boden verlangt, wird der Tag kommen, an dem sich die rollende Lawine
nicht mehr aufhalten lässt!’ Lang, Schmach, 16.
34. Edmund Dene Morel, The Horror on the Rhine (London: Union of Democratic Control,
1920). Morel’s arguments fit with the contemporary ideas of some European socialists about a
‘supra-national control’ of African colonies. See Liliana Ellena, ‘Political Imagination, Sexuality
and Love in the Eurafrican Debate’, European Review of History 11, no. 2 (2004): 241–272, here
245.
35. For Morel see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. A Story of Greed,Terror and Heroism
in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
36. Edmund Dene Morel, The Black Man’s Burden (Manchester: The National Labour Press,
1920), 222, quoted from Koller, Wilden, 287. In Gümbel’s essay on Hans Grimm, one can also
find the interesting remark that Grimm had the idea for his novel Volk ohne Raum after having
met Morel. Gümbel, Erinnerung, 96.
37. Freikorps were volunteer associations, who recruited demobilised soldiers. See Hagen
Schulze, Freikorps und Republik, 1918–1920 (Boppard: Boldt, 1969); Robert George Leeson
Waite, Vanguard of Nazism.The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918–1923 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1952).
38. Ernst von Salomon, Die Geächteten (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1930); von Salomon, ed.,
Das Buch vom deutschen Freikorpskämpfer (Berlin: Limpert, 1938); Rüdiger von der Goltz, Meine
Sendung in Finnland und Baltikum (Leipzig: Koehler, 1920); on Salomon see Jost Hermand, Ernst
von Salomon.Wandlungen eines Nationalrevolutionärs (Leipzig: Hirzel, 2002). Rüdiger von der Goltz
was the leading general in the Balticum after the war.
39. The following part of the essay is mainly based upon Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land
on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
40. Ibid., 151–175.
41. In a less dramatic way the landscape was characterised in Freikorps literature by its greyish
and overall dull atmosphere. See, e.g., Edwin Erich Dwinger, Die letzten Reiter ( Jena: Diederichs,
1935), 11.
42. ‘Merely by itself, the totally mixed population will not create a culture, left to itself it will
cave in to Polish-ness.’ Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserinnerungen (Berlin: Mittler, 1919), 138; the
Russian soldiers, however, are regarded as ‘splendid soldier material’ (prächtiges Soldatenmaterial).
See Paul von Hindenburg, Aus meinem Leben (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1920), 89.
43. Liulevicius, War, 220; Das Land Ober-Ost. Deutsche Arbeit in den Verwaltungsgebieten Kur-
land, Litauen und Bialystok-Grodno, ed. Oberbefehlshaber Ost (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1917).
 The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic 249

44. See, e.g., Dwinger, Reiter, 18.

45. Salomon, Geächteten, 134, 133. See also Luilevicius, War, 234f.
46. Quoted in Luilevicius, War, 240f.
47. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, ‘Der deutsche Vorstoß in das Baltikum’, in Curt Hotzel,
Deutscher Aufstand. Die Revolution des Nachkrieges (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1934), 48, quoted in
Luilevicius, War, 238.
48. Georg Heinrich Hartmann, ‘Erinnerungen aus der Kämpfenden Baltischen Landes-
wehr’, in Der Kampf ums Reich, ed. Ernst Jünger (Essen: Deutsche Vertriebsstelle ‘Rhein und Ruhr
Kampf ’, 1929).
49. Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 2 vols. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990), 1: 77.
50. Thor Goote, Kamerad Berthold, der ‘unvergleichliche Franke’. Bild eines Deutschen Soldaten
(Braunschweig: Westermann, 1937), 286, quoted from Theweleit, Männerphatasien, 1: 81.
51. Adolf von Mecklenburg, ‘Zum Geleit’, Kolonial-Post 22, no. 1 (1928).
52. Richard Wenig, Kriegs-Safari. Erlebnisse und Eindrücke auf den Zügen Lettow-Vorbecks durch
das östliche Afrika (Berlin: Scherl, 1920), 12.
53. Quoted in Dirk Blotzheim, Ernst Jüngers ‘Heldenverehrung’. Zu Facetten in seinem Frühwerk
(Oberhausen: Athena, 2000), 27. Jünger, however, fled the Foreign Legion and was arrested in
the desert. Only after his father’s intervention was Jünger released and then returned to school to
finish his final examination.
54. Hermann Consten, …und ich weine um dich, Deutsch-Afrika (Stuttgart: Strecker und
Schröder, 1926), 2. See also F. Behn, who described the longing for Africa as ‘the mourning of
a lover, who had been strange and sweet, which left a longing in the soul that was forever unsa-
tisfied’. Quoted in Herbert Todt, Die deutsche Begegnung mit Afrika im Spiegel des deutschen Nach-
kriegsschriftums (Frankfurt am Main: Blazek & Bergmann, 1939), 3. See also Leo Frobenius, who
explicitly calls Africa ‘his Africa’ and effusively and tenderly speaks of its ‘sisterly-motherly hand’
that he again and again seeks out and has to take. Leo Frobenius, Erlebte Erdteile, vol. 3: Planmässige
Durchwanderung Afrikas (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, 1925), 454.
55. The descriptions call to mind the dreamlike journey described by Joseph Conrad in
Heart of Darkness. Urs Widmer has termed Marlowe’s journey a ‘journey to the mothers’, ‘in a
metaphorical as well as a very concrete sense, to the mother, the archaic mother, who all-giving
and omni-potent, is everything to the child, a journey into a “dark continent”, a journey into
that “dark continent”, in general, which prior to that had also been talked about (in a surprisingly
similar metaphor), i.e., Sigmund Freud, a journey, thus, to the women, their mysterious sexuality.’
Urs Widmer, ‘Nachwort’, in Joseph Conrad, Herz der Finsternis mit dem Kongo-Tagebuch (Zurich:
Haffmanns, 1992), 191–208, here 203.
56. Ludwig Deppe, Mit Lettow-Vorbeck durch Afrika (Berlin: Scherl, 1919), 468.
57. Rudolf de Haas, Der Wilderer von Deutsch-Ost (Berlin: Scherl, 1927), quoted in Todt,
Begegnung, 6.
58. See also the excerpt from a soldier’s letter from German South-West-Africa: ‘I have now
seen more of the country of Africa than I have of Germany (but really seen, sitting on a horse and
not fleeing through the landscape in a train, as do sinners against God’s beautiful nature.) How
marvellous, to be free of the revolting teeming of the masses of your cities! … No smothering
police force to bother about. And how simple one’s desires become! No need of theatre, concerts,
and such. No watch is necessary … And a most wonderful advantage, newspapers are obsolete!
One washes oneself now and then, and if there is enough water, one also takes a bath.’ Franz Hen-
kel, Der Kampf um Südwestafrika (Berlin: Paetel, 1908), 11, quoted in Birthe Kundrus, Moderne
Imperialisten. Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Boehlau 2003), 152.
59. Kundrus, Imperialisten, 139.
60. The expression ‘magic’ (Zauber) can be found often in the memories of the African co-
lonial period. It was not necessarily a sexual connotation. See, e.g., Lettow-Vorbeck’s description
of German East-Africa before the outbreak of the war: ‘It must be mentioned that on my ceaseless
travelling I fully enjoyed the magic of the tropics, the immersion in the vast wilderness, far remo-
ved from all culture, the glorious chase for dangerous beasts, the nights spent under the sparkling
250 Sandra Mass

stars to the deep roar of the lion a-hunting.’ Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, Mein Leben (Biberach:
Koehler, 1957), 121. Also Hans Paasche, a liberal defender of colonialism and, later on, an oppo-
nent of colonialism, pointed out the ‘naturalness’ of the place, to which ‘many of us had lost their
hearts’, ‘to the African nature with her people and animals und her freedom’. Hans Paasche, Das
verlorene Afrika (Berlin: Neues Vaterland, 1919) 16, quoted in Adjai Paulin Oloukpona-Yimon,
Unter deutschen Palmen. Die ‘Musterkolonie’ Togo im Spiegel deutscher Kolonialliteratur (Frankfurt am
Main: IKO, 1998), 2; on ‘magic’ as a topos in colonial literature on German South-West-Africa,
see Kundrus, Imperialisten, 147.
61. Hugo Erdmann, Deutsch-Ostafrikaner. Ein Tropen-Roman (Berlin: Scherl, 1918), 101.
62. Deppe, Lettow-Vorbeck, 292.
63. Thomas Schwarz, ‘Die Kultivierung des kolonialen Begehrens – ein deutscher Son-
derweg?’, in Kolonialismus als Kultur. Literatur, Medien, Wissenschaft in der deutschen Gründerzeit des
Fremden, eds Alexander Honold and Oliver Simons (Tübingen: Francke, 2002), 85–102, 87.
64. Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler
(Munich: Hanser, 2000), 407–421.
65. Cf. similar readings of Lawrence of Arabia in England 1919/1920: Graham Dawson, ‘The
Blond Bedouin. Lawrence of Arabia, Imperial Adventure and the Imagining of English-British
Masculinity’, in Manful Assertions. Masculinities in Britain since 1800, eds Michael Roper and John
Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), 113–144.
66. Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Die Eskalation des Tötens in zwei Weltkriegen’, in Die Erfindung
des Menschen 1500–2000, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Vienna: Boehlau, 1998), 411–429, 414.
67. For a definition cf. Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus. Geschichte – Formen – Folgen
(Munich: Beck, 1995), 21.
68. On Lettow-Vorbeck and the construction of colonial heroes cf. Sandra Mass, Weiße
Helden, schwarze Krieger. Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland, 1918–1964 (Cologne:
Boehlau 2006).
69. ‘Berlins zweiter Bürgermeister Reicke sagte: “Ihr, die Ihr über’s Meer zu uns zurückgekommen
seid, bedeutet unsere letzte Hoffnung. Ihr seid Männer, helft uns, bewahrt uns vor dem Fürchterlichen, das
jenes Ungeheuer russischen Ursprungs, das bald als Hyäne, bald als Blutsäufer dargestellt wird, zu vollbringen
sich anschickt.” Kein Sozi sprach, und das war gut... Nicht die “Internationale” wurde gesungen, sondern
entblößten Hauptes “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”.’ Die Post, 3 March 1919, quoted in Adolf
Rüger, ‘Das Streben nach kolonialer Restitution in den ersten Nachkriegsjahren’, in Drang nach
Afrika. Die deutsche koloniale Expansionspolitik und Herrschaft in Afrika von den Anfängen bis zum Ver-
lust der Kolonien, ed. Helmuth Stöcker, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie, 1991), 262–283, here 268.
70. Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 1: 77.
 CHAPTER 1 3

Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg,

Edith Stein
Love in the Time of War*

SVETLANA SLAPŠAK

I do not want to theorise on love as a counterpart of war, and thus to diminish

the immeasurable dimensions of war, compared to any other human and social
activity – or worse, to fall into the trap of naive and blurring stereotypes on
love preventing war, or stopping it. Anyone remembering the 1960s and 1970s
could ponder on how love was merely an often unsuccessful rhetoric gimmick
appealing to underlying cultural layers of the discourse of Christianity, while
hard political and public work was necessary in organising the anti-war move-
ments in many countries, which were aimed at stopping the war(s) in the war-
ring areas (Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Congo, etc.) On the contrary, I want
to reflect on love as one of the civic activities, pertaining to collective identity
and citizenship, and therefore one of the fields of public discourse and activity
that can oppose war on equal terms of public concern and aims, and not as a
possible refuge from it. The opposition war-peace, the expected and the ‘natu-
ral’ one remains in the field of public discourse and politics: the shift should be
to thematise the history of emotions, or the anthropology of emotions of war
times, and to follow a gender divide in it.
A rather narrow space, a kind of site-catchment, that I want to explore is
that of women from the intellectual elite, each of them in their well defined,
small unit of exchanging and producing ideas, approximately at the same time
– during the Second World War. Site-catchment is an archaeological term, and
means defining possibilities of controlling a space (site) in everyday mobility
requirements of a human group settled there, usually over a one-day span. My
use of the term underlines limited communication frameworks – in this case
Notes for this section begin on page 267.
252 Svetlana Slapšak

siege, war zone, exclusion and eventually concentration camps, and the expan-
sion of theorising under such restrictions. Further re-semantisation of the term
goes into the texts: war, as a kind of hypo-text, is hardly mentioned, the pain
and the toils of everyday life are generally omitted and they cannot be read
from the core texts that firmly reside in theory – philosophy, ethics, history,
folklore. This clear division allows for reading biographical data as part of the
hypo-text. Standard textual procedures of a scientific discourse in humanities,
in the times of war, have to be seen in such a multi-level division. Beside the
hypo-text (life during war) and the core text (scientific discourse in this case),
there is also a third text to be read – the meta-text, or the explanatory hints in
the choice of topics, examples, quotations, etc., from which immanent poetics
can be construed. If all of the three texts have some same narrative units, like
war and opposition to war, then we could even speak of a genre, or sub-genre,
polemography, which is not historiography, nor war prose, but a reading-in the
war through a basic anti-war procedure, the continuation of writing just as if
there still were peace and normality.
Feminism and gender studies of modern times have done a lot first to
‘mythify’ women’s ‘innate’ opposition to war, and then quite a lot to decon-
struct and de-mystify this construct, still ‘workable’ in war zones and in grass-
roots activism. Women against the war remains a powerful narrative, in which
some features of women’s writing can be seen more clearly against a gloomy
background: life and living as the only sense bearers; everyday and common
as meaningful and even subversive; trivial as resistance to highbrow and false
discourse on sacred goals, patriotism and necessity of violence. Women theoris-
ing on love during war, as scarce a phenomenon as it is in Europe during the
Second World War, opposes both mainstream gender-genre conventions, and
women’s writing during (or on) war.

Reinterpreting Antiquity in Search of Love Theories

By choosing three women that opposed the war through thinking and writing
on love, all three of them writing during the Second World War, I position the
philosophy of love in women’s culture, in order to celebrate these women’s
breach into the field of man’s privileged reflective, spiritual and intellectual
competence, such as philosophy, and in order to put forward an unexplored but
convincingly justified European invention of Antiquity.
There are only two moments in European history in which love is defined
as a public affair, pertaining to citizen’s identity: more largely confirmed, the
culture of Greek polis of the classical period, especially the Athenian one, and
much contested but almost lasting as much as the ‘golden era’ of Athenian
democracy, the 1968 revolution in understanding, acting and presenting love.
 Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War 253

Of course, there have been several intellectual projects, more precisely utopias
in modern Europe, and the one invented by François Rabelais is particularly
evocative, of proposing a liberal sexual life as a foundation of civic fulfilment.
We cannot deny that our ways of making love, living together, choosing part-
ners and presenting sexuality have radically changed ever since 1968, with deep
traces in almost every section of culture and everyday life, most visibly in the
popular culture and in the media. The ‘Make love not war’ slogan can also be
understood as re-vindicating the public space for love as a civic activity in the
context that I try to limit and define in this chapter.
It was not surprising that one of the most successful global cultural ac-
tivities in March 2003, aiming at preventing the war in Iraq, was the simul-
taneous performance of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in more than 300 places all
over the world. Lysistrata’s carnivalesque plot is about women of Athens, who
proclaim a sexual strike until the peace treaty between Athenians and Spar-
tans is concluded, and they gain the support of the Spartan women for the
strike as well. The needy male citizens on both sides consent to peace after a
number of comic twists and turns. The male sexual suffering is a public affair,
seeking solutions in confronting or negotiating women’s refusal of sex as their
own public and political intervention: women were not citizens, Aristophanes’
upside-down comic world is conditioned by genre and context – and an ex-
clusively male theatre public. But there are many other aspects that point to
the Ancient understanding of love and sexuality as a public matter. The recent
study by Paul Ludwig sheds a new light on Ancient understanding of desire and
power, and on how sexuality formed political space by the use of women and
homosexuality. However, the male sexuality and its phenomena and divergence
(patriotism, friendship, military discipline/imperialism, public nudity) remain
the main topic of Ludwig’s debate, without special attention to female sexual-
ity and its role in the society.1 Interestingly enough, a stable motive of Ancient
Greek literature, from the Classical period to the late Hellenistic times, that
of the dangers of male sexuality for the stability of the state, does not occupy
much space in the book.2
The argument that social stability depends largely on satisfied male sexual
desire, or that the male sexual desire can de-stabilize the state, can be easily
traced back to Lysistrata and Aristophanes. But it reappears in different literary
genres later, and it becomes a standing motive in writings of Alciphron3 and
other late ‘re-inventors’ of the Athenian Golden Age: hetaerae, the courtesans,
give themselves a credit of keeping dangerous philosophers’ minds away from
concocting revolutions and instability by keeping their bodies sexually satisfied.
Instead of preparing civil war and tyranny, philosophers are somewhat too tired
to get up early and go to exercise politics after a night of love. Furthermore,
the courtesans prevent male folk from incestuous relationships and from adul-
tery, hence confirming family values. Social stability and stability depending
254 Svetlana Slapšak

on a good sexual life? Male sexuality as a natural threat to the stately order and
democracy? The Athenian democracy constantly feared the destructive force
of male sexuality in its more political form – the homosexual relations, always
constructed as power relations (younger and older lover, never two consenting
adults), because they reflected aristocratic behaviour and the threat of aristo-
cratic conspiracy against democracy. That fear was well confirmed by history
(Harmodios’ and Aristogeiton’s tyrranoctony), and by more recent events in
Athenian democracy (the tyranny of the Thirty, executed by Socrates’ pupils).
Alciphron’s ironic arguments follow a long line that can be seen in Plato’s dia-
logues, especially Menexenes, where Socrates produces an ironical theory that
Aspasia in fact wrote Pericle’s speeches, and that she is an excellent, though se-
cret, teacher of rhetoric. In Aristophanes’ Women in Parliament (Ecclesiazousae),
women easily steal their husbands’ language, and make the Parliament vote to
delegate the power to women. The connection with wit and irony, which in
Plato’s case serves more as a simple equation of women = (means) irony, went
through a more subtle change after the death of democracy and deep cultural
transformations in the Hellenistic era. On the one side, clever Alciphron’s argu-
mentation, which does not include the real fear of anti-democratic conspiracy,
and on the other, the case of Athenaeus, chronologically close to Alciphron,
who developed a concept in which gender and genre are related. His Deipnoso-
phistae, or Philosophers at the Feast, is a curious work, of which half of the text is
preserved. Athenaeus is interested in everything and anything: his guests at the
imaginary (or real?) symposium debate on history, literature, mythology, tech-
niques, hard sciences, geography, travel, food, love, philosophy, art, architec-
ture, plants, animals, condiments, but avoid any allusion to the local, political,
actual or anything concerning power games. In Book XIII, which bears the
title On women, Athenaeus’ intellectuals discuss women and love.
Feasting intellectuals do not have a single woman-guest among them. They
also do not have women entertainers, as was customary for men-only sym-
posia – at least in earlier times. Some of the philosophers’ schools, present in
Athenaeus’ group, are Epicureans, thus familiar not only with women’s pres-
ence, but also with their participation in philosophic and academic activities.
The absence of women might be explained with a new and different mental-
ity, or maybe a new social status, which did not allow for hiring expensive
sexy entertainers (their role was always multiple), but whatever the reason,
Athenaeus’ group looks like an old boys’ club. When they refer to tacky, or
overtly obscene narratives, they seem to enjoy it acoustically, which is one of
the most expanded modalities of sexual satisfaction today (sex-prone phone
industry), being cheaper, more comfortable and a less risky way of enjoying
oneself. The contextual scenery of Book XIII can be understood fully only
when we compare it to the complex setting of the Ancient symposium seen by
today’s historic anthropologists – readers of images4 – and also to the changed
 Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War 255

context of Hellenistic symposium: it is definitely miserable when it comes to

gentlemen’s delights. The acoustic aspect of enjoyment, boldly compared and
arguable through today’s technologically advanced but anthropologically paral-
lel practice, appears as the main semiotic code of Book XIII.
Again, the work of memory is masterly displayed, by quoting, using and
re-narrating the plots of the so-called Middle Comedy – collections of an-
ecdotes, bits and pieces of many authors, historians and polyhistors, and the
textual tradition which is defined as pornography, or writing on whores. Athe-
naus is the inventor or the first user of the term we know of, and whores, or
hetairai, are the class of women that serve as a screen for projecting this gender
specificity, or strategy of complexity. Hetaerae are given a literary genre and a
discourse. The literary genre is pornography, which is obviously understood as
a form of prose, apart from comedy, and the discourse, or the oral genre, is the
joke (Witz). The hidden complexity of gender relations is thus deconstructed
and re-classified, with an innovative solution to the problem of self-expression
and intellectual emancipation of hetairai. In fact, all the jokes cited by Ath-
enaeus’ participants (the old boys’ club) are about the intellectual superiority of
hetaerae, especially when their charms do not work any more in their old age.
They typically outsmart men, be it philosophers, butchers, soldiers or kings.
By treating gender concepts in this way, Athenaeus proposes not only a new
strategy of dealing with complexity, which we could define as the disciplinary
expansion, interdisciplinary cooperation and looking for a definition between
genre and discourse, but he does a much more remarkable job of connecting
gender and culture. The debate about women and love moves from the anthro-
pological situation of alterity of women toward the integration of women into
the world – even if it is the virtual world of memory – allowing for women
to excel in the same privileged art of commanding the memory, and having a
genre/discourse to do it properly. That gender is conceptualised – and realised
in culture, which is accepted as a general framework – is a theoretical pre-
condition today for all the gender studies area. Athenaus’ old boys’ club did
reflect on women as secondary, from the position of power and a restrained
acoustic command of sexuality. But from this position, new options for dealing
with complexity appeared, and the ancient alterity has been replaced by a much
more responsible and intellectually challenging process of inventing new (tex-
tual/discursive) spaces for women’s identity. Athenaeus’ strategy of complexity
can be read as a good example of epistemological experiment, an impressive
endeavour coming from the neglected part of the past in which we should
certainly invest more of our attention.
Rediscovering the Ancient politics about love (with all of the conceptual
differences) unveils indirectly the still functioning contemporary censorship
and re-naturalisation of love, muffled into ‘nature’, which is very much like the
gender itself used to be presented. The cultural and performative aspects of love
256 Svetlana Slapšak

become especially challenging and inspirational when theorised by women

authors before and out of great places, seasons and jargons of theory on gender,
love and sexuality.

Chronodistopia: Three Women, Same Time, Different Places

My point about this topic is that it was already presented, researched and used
in public discourse for defining a certain anti-war intellectual attitude and the
philosophical relation to the Ancient views on love and public sphere long be-
fore 1968 and Ludwig’s book, but in cultures less resonant and hardly recorded
in what we might understood as the collective (Western) European memory.
I am referring to the case of Anica Savic; Rebac, who was educated in quite a
unique social-cultural context of Viennese, Novi Sad and Beograd intellectual
circles at the peak of the activities of these circles to invent/imagine a new so-
ciety and its culture, namely, the Yugoslav society and culture. To do this, it was
necessary to construct a code of interpretation of Antiquity and to establish a
certain intimacy between Balkan/Yugoslav and Ancient, which would not use
‘origin’ as a tool, or any of the known tools of the European appropriation of
Antiquity. Anica Savic;’s godfather and mentor, Laza Kostic;, a poet and a theo-
retician, wrote a treaty about beauty, in which he relies on Heracleitos’ teach-
ing, but repeats in fact many of Athenaeus’ statements: a large portion of this
treaty is in fact on love.5 Not only Anica Savic; Rebac, but the whole genera-
tion of students of Antiquity from the region were well aware of Laza Kostic;’s
attempt to bring closer the Balkan cultures and the Antiquity, including Kostic;’s
experimenting with the translation of Homer into the Serbian epic decameter,
his theory of theatre originating in Balkan ritual performances and so on. In
the case of Olga Freidenberg, the early revolutionary energy in her circle of
Petrograd intellectuals was also translated into a re-interpretation of Antiquity,
again against the model of origins and appropriation, more toward universal
anthropological and folkloric lineage or parallels (paligenesis+polygenesis). In
this case, as well, the ‘classical’ was less interesting to research than pre-classical
or post-classical, both in terms of chronology and evaluation. This interest was
local and responded to the local needs. When a new interest in Athenaeus,
for instance, emerged just a couple of years ago, nothing of this ‘peripherial’
European tradition was mentioned.6 Looking at issues treated by less known
Hellenistic authors, not only as if their works were mere reference treasures,
occurred far from academic centres and produced original theories. No better
parallel could be presented than Michael Bakhtin, who ‘unearthed’ Menippos,
a nearly forgotten Hellenistic author, when he constructed a relevant liter-
ary theory around Menippos’s work, approximately at the same time as Savic;
Rebac and Freidenberg were working on similar operations of re-reading.7
Even in the case of Edith Stein, who wrote in the very heart of Western (Ger-
 Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War 257

man) philosophical tradition, there is a veil of oblivion woven from different

aspects of her otherness: gender, fluctuating ethnic and religious positioning
and the eventual closure inside the institutions of the Catholic church. The
ignorance of these data lies in the (Western) European cultural colonialism,
and the gender constraints that are of a more universal nature, a kind of longue
durée feature, and certainly not limited to Europe. The three authors that I am
interested in analysing belong in different degrees to liminal cultures, languages
and disciplines. They are outsiders in humanities and academia today as they
were outsiders in their lifetimes. In the cases of Freidenberg and Savic; Rebac,
gender instigated censorship is one side of the problem, the European cultural
supremacy the other; while in the case of Stein, we see that the intensity of the
first can easily cover the absence of the latter by its sheer intensity.

How European is Theorising on Love?

Three aspects of the politics of love in Europe at the same historic moment of
the Second World War are to be explored in this chapter: gender, history and
anthropology of intellectuals. Before them, the overall notion of ‘European’
should be addressed: what is European about these three women and their
work? The tradition of theorising love starts with Plato’s Symposion, which
is the first attempt at confronting contemporary sexual practices, patterns of
behaviour and ruling discourses in their variety (all of the guests at the sympo-
sium), and the need to theorise them critically (Socrates), who in fact ‘trans-
lates’ an absent authority in the matter, Diotima. There is a strong European
tradition of interpreting Plato’s dialogue (together with Phaedros) over the cen-
turies, whenever love and beauty come to the field of vision of philosophy,
but also for less theoretical purposes, like a crypto-defence of homosexuality.
A clear reference to this can be seen in Anica Savic; Rebac’ thematic approach
to ‘pre-platonic erotology’ (the title of her Ph.D. thesis), which immediately
stresses her distancing from this tradition, and a remarkably ambitious project
of exploring its unrecognised sources. Another European feature in this case
can be a model of intellectual closure – monasteries, universities, intellectual
circles, (revolutionary) salons. All three women were functioning in such clo-
sures, which deteriorated radically during the war, while other, violence-based
closures were formed. Communicating under such conditions is certainly not
specifically European, neither is feminist networking (the case of Rebecca West
and Anica Savic; Rebac), but neglecting non-Western European achievements
in humanities, both arts and academia, is a recognisable – and questionable –
European feature. Women in philosophy, with all of the difficulties of affirma-
tion, pushing women where they belong, into literature, is also a European
feature: Olga Freidenberg is mostly known today through her correspondence
with her famous cousin, Boris Pasternak; Anica Savic; Rebac – for those who
258 Svetlana Slapšak

recognize the coded name Militsa – from her presence in Rebecca West’s trav-
elogue. Multilingual capacity is another European feature, along with constant
translation and terminological invention, such as Anica Savic; Rebac’ erotology
for the philosophy of love. This contribution should serve to fixate, date and
put the name of the author on this very useful neologism.
The aspect of gender difference is thematically situated: conceptualising
love in theoretical terms, in spite of circumstances. In their work, love is not a
symbol of hope or human values, and it is not escapist, even for a bit; it is a pro-
posal for a public civic attitude, although addressed to different recipients and
thus differently presented. Parallels for such intellectual behaviour can be found
in war-torn Europe, the example of Carl Orff ’s Catulli Carmina (1943) should
suffice in this sense. However, although love and sex are the principle topics of
Orff ’s musical and theatrical work, they do not send a political/civic message.
The only message that could have been constructed in reception of his work
was on the ‘universal’ level. In the cases of the three women I am presenting,
the political move is clearer, also because it is not backed up by any state institu-
tion. Their insisting on love affecting upon and originating from public life – be
it historical, thus slightly masked as a message, be it an open call to the Pope
(as in the case of Edith Stein), does not invoke personal human happiness and
consolation, but social and political action that is openly against the romanticis-
ing of love in its Western intimate/bourgeois context, and ‘hailing’ its political
energy. Such political tension, quite close to a high emotional exciting, can be
found in the texts of Western intellectuals who felt compelled to explore the
horrors of the just finished Second World War – Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-Paul
Sartre, Hannah Arendt and especially Simone de Beauvoir, who saw the double
victimisation of human and women, continuing, not purged or punished, after
the war. The three women, whose reflections on love remained unknown for a
long time, could be perceived today as almost prophetic figures, or at least very
early birds in thinking love in terms of public responsibility.
The three women ‘exemplifiers’ are Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg
and Edith Stein. In fact, I chose Edith Stein as tertium comparationis because she,
both by her writing and her public role, became well known in the Catholic
Church culture (as a Jewish woman who turned to Catholicism, who was killed
in a concentration camp as a nun and eventually was sanctified). Her position
seems to be much more interesting in the secular culture after her letter to the
Pope Pius XII was recently released by the Vatican and published, stirring a new
controversy over the position of the Vatican on the genocide of the Jews. I will
have to go to the biographies of the three chosen women, in order to illustrate
the context, to underline the synchronicity and last but not least, to establish a
hypo-text: their life stories as conforming-confirming texts of their core texts.
There is, of course, my intervention regarding choice of data, epitomisation
of data, choice of narrative – in one word, intentionality. I would like to put
 Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War 259

it even more bluntly: it is a clear intention of feminist solidarity by telling a

she-story.

Hypo-text: Anica Savic; Rebac

Anica Savic; (married Rebac) was born in 1894 in Novi Sad (former Yugosla-
via), the cradle of modern feminism in the Balkans, into a wealthy family of
intellectuals of mixed Greek and Serbian origins. As a girl, she could not attend
the high school reserved for boys, but she received the maximum of attention
and the best education at home, which was one of the liveliest intellectual
focuses of the city – then under Austro-Hungarian Empire, hosting the best
of Serbian intelligentsia at the time. The little girl published her first transla-
tions from Ancient Greek (Pindarus) at the age of 10, her pioneer translations
of Emile Verhaaren’s poetry at the age of 12 and she wrote her dramas, mainly
with Ancient and Anti-Christian motives, at the age of 13. By the age of 18, she
commanded Ancient Greek and Latin, German, French, English, Italian and
Hungarian. This Wunderkind was accompanied by her mother to the University
of Vienna, probably one of the intellectually most exciting cities in Europe
around 1910, and studied there the crown discipline of academia of that time
– Ancient Studies. She was also involved in the Yugoslav movement, fostered by
students coming from different parts of the Balkans, dreaming about destroy-
ing the Austro-Hungarian Empire and constructing a new, democratic, multi-
ethnic state(s) in its place. She had to flee back home before she presented her
Ph.D. because of the outbreak of the First World War. In the meantime, she met
Hasan Rebac, a Muslim of Serbian origin and a well-known guerrilla fighter
for the Serbian cause in Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Austrian rule. They
married after the war, and Anica Savic; Rebac consequently lost most of her
social support in Novi Sad. The couple settled in Beograd, where she could
not get a post at the University, although she brilliantly defended her Ph.D.
thesis at the Beograd University. They were soon both employed by the state in
Skopje, today Macedonia, she as a teacher in a girls’ high school, he as a teacher
at medressa (Muslim religious school): this unprivileged position was due to the
couple’s staunch opposition to the monarchy and its right-wing government,
and to their socialist ideas. This is where Rebecca West, alarmed by the French
philosopher Denis Saurat8 and by her Beograd ‘informer’ and guide, a Serbian
Jew and multi-talented Stanislav Vinaver,9 travelled to meet Anica; upon meet-
ing, the two women forged a lasting friendship. Anica is described as ‘Militsa’
in Rebecca West’s book on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), in
the following terms: ‘Once I showed Denis Saurat, who is one of the wisest of
men, a letter that I had received from Militsa. “She writes from Skopje, I see”,
he said. “Really, we are much safer than we suppose. If there are twenty people
260 Svetlana Slapšak

like this woman scattered between here and China, civilization will not per-
ish”.’10 Or, a little further in the book: ‘Yet these two are steady as pillars. They
are pillars supporting that invisible house which we must have to shelter us if
we are not to be blown away by the winds of nature. Now, when I go through
a town of which I know nothing, a town which appears to be a waste land of
uniform streets wholly without quality, I look on it in wonder and hope, since
it may hold a Mehmed, a Militsa.’11 It is with Anica-Militsa that Rebecca West
visits a sacrificial site in Macedonia, guided by her new friend, who is an excel-
lent authority in matters of Balkan rituals, and this is where she formulates her
predominant metaphor of useless sacrifice (black lamb) in the Balkans. West’s
critical eye tries to spot internal signs of collapse in the Yugoslav society and
culture, while she was convinced that Yugoslavia was an easy prey of the rising
Nazi-fascist coalition around it. In fact, that was the main reason for her deci-
sion to visit and research this part of Europe – the fear that it will vanish soon in
its cultural diversity. And she was right in her prediction. Black Lamb is a figure
that denotes internal violence and its irrational motivation in the Balkans, an
active cultural memory far from today’s Western – and European – stereotypes
on the Balkans. Ironically enough, the work of Rebecca West was silently ne-
glected and prevented from translation for many years by the Yugoslav authori-
ties after the Second World War, because of her sympathies for the Serbian royal
house of Karadjordjevic;i.12
Anica Savic; Rebac exchanged letters with Rebecca West before and af-
ter the Second World War. While one of the letters, where she describes the
horrors of war and her and Hasan’s successful attempts at escaping Serbian
nationalist paramilitaries (tchetnik) to get them, while they were hiding in a
deep Serbian province, was published, others remain unknown to the public.
She also had a rich exchange of letters with the people that she was consult-
ing with about her ideas and research: Gershom Sholem, whom she asked
several questions about Kaballa; Heinrich Leisegang; and her professor in Vi-
enna, Ludwig Radermacher. Denis Saurat had been among the people she
addressed when researching Christian and Jewish mysticism. In order to clarify
her position, she translated much of her work to German. An excellent transla-
tor (Pindarus, Lucretius, Shelley, Goethe, Thomas Mann), she also translated
the mystic epic The Ray of Microcosm by the Montenegrian romantic poet P. P.
Njegoš (who was both the religious and political ruler of Montenegro in the
early nineteenth century) into English and German – this translation was pub-
lished after her death in Harvard Slavic Studies. Her relation with Thomas Mann
was remarkable: she was the first one in Yugoslavia to qualify him as a great
European writer; she translated his three novellas (Tonio Kröger, Der Tod in Vene-
dig and Tristan) in 1929, and these translations are still considered the best in
Serbo-Croat; and she followed his work with a keen critical interest until the
very end. He in return included her definition of love in his Joseph und seine
Brüder.13 Anica Savic; Rebac finally got a position at the Beograd University in
 Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War 261

1945, as her socialist ideas were considered relatively acceptable by the new
communist authorities, and her anti-fascist convictions were well known. She
contributed to the new socialist and Marxist ideological concepts by presenting
P.B. Shelley’s socialist ideas in a public lecture in 1945, and by translating folk
partisans’ song (most of them women’s songs) into English. Her first public ap-
pearance might not have been the most popular among political leaders, since
Shelley’s socialism was the topic whose political reflection was contained in a
shortened Lenin’s (or Stalin’s) interpretation of Marxism. But this was more a
sign of political solidarity on both sides, and she at least was not punished for
it. She refrained from any public support for the new authorities later on. Since
she was a convinced feminist before, the new turn toward feminism was noth-
ing new to her, and she wrote a number of articles for a periodical of university
educated women. In 1953, Anica committed suicide after the sudden death of
her husband.

Hypo-text: Olga Freidenberg

Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955) was born into a Jewish family; her mother
was the sister to Boris Pasternak’s father and her father, also a good friend of
Pasternak’s father, was an ingenuous inventor – among others, of the automatic
telephone switch.14 Olga Freidenberg, whose life is known mostly through
her correspondence with her cousin Boris Pasternak,15 was a brilliant young
woman with the knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin, German, English,
French, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese languages, who received the oppor-
tunity to study at the University of Petrograd after the revolution, and obtained
a unique chance to form a new department of Classical studies, as a student of
then influential linguist, Nikolai Marr. She introduced an innovative approach
to the study of Antiquity, based on semiotic theories and the study of folklore,
thus becoming a forerunner of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michael Bakhtin.16
Although she did not share Marr’s rather fantastic linguistic theories, favoured
by the regime, she had to pay the consequences of being connected to him
when he fell out of grace: her major study on poetics of Ancient literatures was
refused to be published in the 1930s. In fact, most of her work was never pub-
lished. A victim of petty intrigues at the department she founded, she did not
have real collegial support, or students-followers. Her brother died a prisoner
in Siberia. She endured teaching and researching in almost total isolation, cut
off not only from Western developments in the discipline, but also from access
to sources in her own surrounding. During the siege of Leningrad, she taught
courses to her students and languages to privates for bread. After the war, her
situation did not get better, and her health was ruined. She retired, and then
died in 1955. More than 15 years after her death, her correspondence with
Pasternak, her diaries (more than 2,500 pages) and her studies were discovered.
262 Svetlana Slapšak

The collection of her main studies on Antiquity was first published in 1978 in
Russian, translated into Serbo-Croat in 1987 and into English in 1997.

Core text: Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg

The parallels between the two contemporary lives and works, those of Anica
Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg, and the individual intellectual histories are
striking; that is why I am adding the tertium comparationis, Edith Stein, separately.
Both Olga Freidenberg and Anica Savic; Rebac were classicists; they may have
had a common influential predecessor, Polish classicist Theodore Zielinski, who
cooperated with Anica Savic; Rebac’s colleagues in Revue internationale des études
balkaniques (RIEB), published in Beograd in the 1930s by Milan Budimir and
Petar Skok (1932–1938) as a playground for the innovative approach to Antiq-
uity and Balkan history, with a strong anti-fascist and pro-Yugoslav orientation.
Thus, positions of Anica Savic; Rebac in her link with RIEB and Olga Freiden-
berg in her avant-garde formalist surrounding have several common features
in researching Antiquity: interest in folklore and comparative insight; semantic
and semiotic analysis; clear political investment (against traditionalism, favoring
democratic aspects and values, with a ‘zing’ of hidden pro-communist sympa-
thies added to that); and linking Ancient phenomena to their own contempo-
rary situation, including a certain ‘feminist practice’ represented both by men
(for instance, the editor of RIEB and colleague Milan Budimir) and by women
(Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg). By ‘feminist practice’, I refer to a posi-
tion of taking for granted women’s equality in everyday life and careers, and,
thematically, working toward the toughest and most authoritarian disciplines
and academic circles – Ancient studies, philosophy, literary theory, religion and
folklore, with an energy that we could define today as deconstructive. Anica
Savic; Rebac took an active attitude, writing about forgotten feminists from
her native region, and taking part in Association of Women Academics after
the Second World War. Olga Freidenberg, living in a new culture in which the
feminist ideas were at least proclaimed popular in the early revolutionary days,
was almost obsessed in tracing Ishtar, the Mediterranean goddess of fertility,
in many rituals and texts; both Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg had
similar conclusions about the double nature of Phaidra (from Euripides’ play
Hippolytos) as a possible ritual memory of the old goddess. Curiously enough,
both Anica Savic; Rebac’s and Olga Freidenberg’s work is saved thanks to their
feminine friends and relations. Anica Savic; Rebac’s friend happened to be the
Director of the University Library in Beograd, where her archives are still kept;
her student, a woman, published her manuscript on Ancient aesthetics a year
after her death; two women (I was one of them) took care of publishing her
complete works in 1984–1988; and two women took care of preserving, open-
ing and handing over Olga Freidenberg’s work for publishing.
 Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War 263

Meta-text: Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg

But the most fascinating facet of both women’s work is their synchronous work
in theorising love in Antiquity, that is, Eros. Anica Savic; Rebac’s work is more
complex and theoretically refined: she forged a term to denote the philosophy of
love, erotology, which might be attractive even today, in the situation of hyper-
production of terms and jargon. She published her Ph.D. thesis on erotology
in 1932, but worked on the topic throughout the 1940s, enlarging the picture
to mysticism and Judaeo-Christian folklore, to bogomils of Bosnia in the Middle
Ages (a dualistic heresy that was extinguished by Serbian kings, but continued
in Bosnia), up to the concept of love in the mystic poetry of P. P. Njegoš. That
is why she needed interpretations of Milton’s Paradise Lost (and one of the
contemporary interpreters happened to be Denis Saurat) and of Kaballa. She
invigorated her interpretation of Eros and the state in her book on Ancient aes-
thetics, which contains an outline of the erotology of Plato and Aristophanes.
As a taste of her way of thinking, there is the example of her imaging of what
art could be like had Plato’s aesthetic model ever come to life: it would be most
similar to Piet Mondrian’s paintings.
Anica Savic; Rebac discusses different phases and different forms of Eros in
the god’s ritual varieties – diverging and converging gender constructs and so-
cial functions – from the cosmic egg (feminine) to wind and fire daemon (mas-
culine), and military and gymnastic friendship protector (homosexual). This
double or multiple nature of Eros goes through a serious political modification
in the Athenian democracy, ending in two forms (dual Eros): Eros, the erotic
passion as a danger for the inner state’s stability, be it male or female, and, Eros,
the wisdom master, the one that provides for civic values, or ‘social virtues’ as
Anica Savic; Rebac calls them.17 This Eros takes care so that the uncontrollable
sexuality does not create stasis, the civil war.18 She attributes this development
to Euripides and Socrates and their influence in Athens. Anica Savic; Rebac’s
approach relies on semantic history, folklore elements connected to rituals and
the history of ideas, along with the ‘classic’ European philosophical practice.
Her civic Eros, presented in the model of a minimal education for Athenian
citizens in her book on Ancient aesthetics, has in fact a distinctive anti-war
political meaning. This is the most delicate part of Anica Savic; Rebac’s discus-
sion, since she cannot deny that war was conceived as one of the activities of
the Athenian democracy – any war against enemies outside, be it for reasons of
colonial expansion and supremacy, against other Greeks, or against ‘barbarians’
and other non-Greeks. In fact, as it is quite clear from Pericles’ speech over
dead Athenians killed in the Sicilian expedition during the Peloponesian war
(as rendered by Thucidides), making war is one of the basic democratic activi-
ties of a male citizen, and the line of equal Athenian heavy pedestrians (hoplites)
is its main visual presentation (isokephaleia, or all of the heads in the same line).
And, at the same time, stasis, the civil war, is considered the ultimate evil for the
264 Svetlana Slapšak

polis. To bypass this problem, Anica Savic; Rebac insisted on the apparent sim-
plicity of a citizens’ education: little grammar, geometry, music and swimming.
Preparing for the war remains in the area of sports, that is, competition and rites
de passage. This ambivalence allowed her to focus her interest on the first cluster
of civic education. Many years later, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Alain Schnapp19
researched this ambivalence in detail and came out with groundbreaking results
on complex practices and representations of identity-construct in Antiquity.
A good portion of Schnapp’s seminal work is about the anthropology of love.
In Anica Savic; Rebac’s later work on Ancient aesthetics, in which she had to
oppose openly Croce’s negation of such theorising in Antiquity, the relation
of peace-love is easily integrated into her reading of immanent aesthetic theo-
ries contained in different Ancient texts – epics, lyrics, drama, philosophy. No
wonder her favourite author in this study is Aristophanes, who is a partisan of
peace, has respect for the sexual needs of women – even older women, as in his
comedy Ecclesiazousae – and ridicules Athenian male citizens as obsessed with
war and power. Her work on aesthetics in Antiquity, done during the war and
published after her death in 1953, relates as a meta-text also to the situation
in war-torn Yugoslavia, where different nationalist groups were fighting each
other, forming both fascist and anti-fascist coalitions. She was undoubtedly in
favour of the latter.
Olga Freidenberg’s analysis of Eros is more fragmentary, incorporated in
her study on Ancient and earlier (in her terms folkloric) times. She constructs
Socrates (in Plato’s Symposion) as a ‘mask’, a dissimulator, but with a ‘shining
divinity’ inside him,20 the one who can exclusively reflect on the double nature
of Eros. As a master-obstetrician of truth (maieutike techne), Socrates must have a
female double (Diotima) and must operate in a specific genre, defined by irony
and parody. If the Eros in the state is ‘controlled’ by double-minded thinkers,
who can combine distance and passion, irony and mystical conviction, then it
is possible to make a linkage in interpretation. This Eros is adapted to the case
of war through which Olga Freidenberg had to live: an invisible enemy outside,
and a single-minded enemy of constraining ideology within, which can be
fought only with a double sense and irony. The passionate and destructive Eros,
the war Eros in her case, originated from restricted/censored thinking, while
the state-constructive Eros is his opposite. Let me plunge into an anthropologi-
cal aspect of their position on Eros: during the war, Anica Savic; Rebac was
surrounded by people who could turn into killers without any previous notice,
and was also in a precarious situation of foreign occupation. Olga Freidenberg
was living in an unpredictable situation with denouncers following the moves
of the power, and, at the same time, living in impossible conditions (hunger,
cold, danger and disease), imposed by an otherwise invisible enemy. The state-
constructive Eros invented by Anica Savic; Rebac had to take care of the inner
instability in order to resist the danger coming from the outside; the state-
constructive Eros invented by Olga Freidenberg had to destabilise the paranoid
 Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War 265

ideological unity in order to win over the outside danger, and in order to regain
its civic qualities. In both cases, the Ancient Eros was considered the affair of
the state, a public and social construct, with ritual roots and imaging, but also
a simulacrum or projection of an imminent political desire. This private Love-
Eros was for both of them something public in the distant European past, and
it could be re-established as such in the time of need, for instance, in the mas-
sive catastrophe of the world war. The necessary corrections in the concept of a
citizen diverge, of course, in the two cases, but there was a synchronous turn in
thinking of the two women in the same discipline and in a similar context.

Hypo-text, Core Text and Meta-text: Edith Stein

How does Edith Stein fit into this equation? While Olga Freidenberg and An-
ica Savic; Rebac remained unjustly unknown, even in their own discipline,
Edith Stein is globally known: she is a saint. She was born into a Jewish family
in Breslau, in 1891, studied philosophy and was Husserl’s assistant in Freiburg.
Her Ph.D. thesis concludes in proposing empathy as a specific form of knowl-
edge. We are not far from the concept of love in her thesis, but Edith Stein
would follow a different path. After reading the autobiography of Saint Theresa
d’Avila, she converted to Catholicism, just as many years before Husserl turned
from Judaism to Protestantism. Changes of churches and religions are certainly
a distinctive European feature when it comes to the history of intellectuals, and
it will not be tackled here.
First among Dominicans, and then among Carmelites in Cologne, Edith
Stein continued her philosophical writing, trying to connect phenomenology
with different Christian philosophies. She fled to Holland in 1938 because of
the Nazi threat, but was taken from the monastery into Auschwitz in 1942,
where she was gassed with her sister that same year. She was beatified in 1987,
and proclaimed a saint in 1998. Her letter to the Pope Pius XI, written in 1933,
was released from the Vatican archives to be published immediately, in February
2003. One line of research would be to follow the empathy in her writings,
and also to try and link phenomenology to semiotic and anthropological ap-
proach, which can be done, like in the case of Ernst Cassirer. The other line of
research is somewhat awkwardly obvious – and that is the concept of Christian
love, which is by definition related to public domain, civic construct and the
state, but is deprived of any relation to sexuality and desire. From Edith’s letter
to the Pope, this aspect of Christian love is highly politicised, implicating the
responsibility of the Catholic church if it does not react politically to Nazism:
if Christian love toward the other – the Jews, is neglected, and if the other is
not protected, it may cease to function as the motor of the Catholic teaching,
which is public and state-related. There is another thin thread to follow in the
work of Edith Stein, exemplified in the book on woman published after her
266 Svetlana Slapšak

death.21 Although the woman’s love can be only motherly love according to
Edith Stein, there is a lot of debate on women’s career, women’s choices and
women’s institutions. In fact, Edith’s book is a seminal work in what we today
call feminist theology. Whichever way we think today of her theorising and the
practice of Christian love during the war, with the most tragic of consequences,
Edith Stein’s example is the one of acting on behalf of love and performing
love against the war, which includes many aspects of civic and state construct of
values still in use today in the overall pacifist thinking and rhetoric. Therefore,
she presents a necessary mirroring counterpart of the openly atheist approaches
of Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg, but also the most clearly struc-
tured and the most politically efficient relation between peace and love. This, of
course, is secured by a different epistemological status of their respective objects
of theorisation – love. Edith Stein operates within the framework of sustainable
and obtainable truth – Christian truth – while the other two operate in the un-
mapped territory of knowledge. Their point of convergence is, however, in the
public discourse, which for the two academics always remains in the domain
of desire, while for Edith Stein it represents an area of possible/controlled in-
vasion. Restrictions for Stein come only from organisational hierarchy, which
also includes gender. Although remaining on different sides of the stream, the
academics and the nun could not only easily communicate if given a chance
during their lifetimes, but could also politically cooperate in favour of peace
and against the war, using love as the central notion. The three women never
met, never wrote to each other and probably never even heard of each other.
But their point of convergence can be easily reconstructed – and functional –
in modern gender studies and feminist theorising and practices today.
The three women reflecting on love at the time of (the same) war, from
which one of them did not survive, has opened some still relevant epistemo-
logical questions pertaining to philosophy, anthropology and history of love,
but also pertaining to gender studies and feminism. The contexts of commu-
nist, enlightened Catholic and socialist ideologies of their social and political
environment conditioned their ‘feminist practice’ or self-understood feminism,
which can be read through their hypo-, core and meta-texts, but is not the
very subject of their reflection – while love certainly is. The contextual narra-
tives can be used in interpreting Anica Savic; Rebac’s and Olga Freidenberg’s
explanations of the Ancient Greek stately Eros, the positive and the citizen-
forming one. They both postulate love as a cultural and social construct, not
only ‘translatable’ into, but originating from ideologies and accommodated
politics. The historic link with rituals, in the case of Olga Freidenberg, does
not turn toward ‘nature’ as explanation, but serves as one of the tools to build a
convincing framework of anthropological features (‘structure’ avant la lèttre) in
order to read super-positions or chronology of Ancient concepts of love. Anica
Savic; Rebac historicises less, in order to conceptualise anthropological features
of love in Antiquity into a system of thought, following the model of the his-
 Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War 267

tory of ideas. If Olga Freidenberg precedes structuralism, Anica Savic; Rebac in

a way precedes new historicism. They both do not include a psychoanalytical
or symbolic approach to Eros, but insist on social and political aspects of love.
For both women authors, symbols present phases of semantic/semiotic his-
tory, or condensed lemmata in an imaginary dictionary of ideas. Edith Stein,
on the other hand, proposes a clear and direct concept of (Christian) love as a
political tool, restrained by the clerical context and by its recipients, but at the
same time following a clear line of critique of ideological and ethic inconsis-
tencies within an uncontested conceptual framework in the intellectual history
of Europe, as exemplified by Luther’s or even Trotsky’s ‘believer’s criticism’.
Anica Savic; Rebac and Olga Freidenberg seem to have had a hidden agenda
of deconstructing their contemporary ideological narratives by introducing a
new and quite paradoxical political narrative – that of love in the distant past.
Addressing ideological and intellectual circles that seemed to accept the idea
of constant innovation and change, they propose a subversive side-plan that
would enlarge the space of civic consciousness and action. Both of their Erotes
have democratic spirits of expanding political and civic practices beyond the
limits defined by present politics and ideological narratives. Edith Stein’s love
does not connect to democracy, but to inside rules and proclaimed principles.
All three, Anica Savic; Rebac, Olga Freidenberg and Edith Stein, challenge
philosophy and humanities in general to rethink one of the least debated and
largely minimised topics, love, while their personal life stories invite us to look
at many tragic aspects of otherness – geographical, cultural, gender-defined
and linguistic.

Notes
*
The reason I wanted to analyse how reflecting on love in a theoretical framework is done in
the situation of war was due to my personal experiences during the war in Yugoslavia.
1. Paul W. Ludwig, Eros and Polis. Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
2. See Claude Mossé, La femme en Grèce antique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1983), and Florence
Dupont, L’érotisme masculin dans la Rome antique (Paris: Belin, 2001).
3. This second-century AD Greek author wrote fictitious letters of courtesans, parasites,
fishermen and peasants, placing them in the fourth century BC. Motives are taken from the so-
called New Comedy (Menander as the representative author, also appearing in the letters). See
Allen R. Benner, ed., The Letters of Alciphron, Aelian and Philostratus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989).
4. François Lissarrague, Greek Vases. The Athenians and Their Images (New York: Riverside,
2001).
5. Laza Kostic;, Osnove lepote u svetu s osobitim obzirom na srpske narodne pesme (Novi Sad, 1880)
(Foundations of Beauty in the World, with a Special Attention to Serbian Folk Songs).
6. David Braund and John Wilkins, Athenaeus and His World. Reading Greek Culture in the Ro-
man Empire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). In the foreword by Glenn Bowersock, an
innovative approach in reading Athenaeus as an author, not only as a reference, is proposed.
268 Svetlana Slapšak

7. See Robert Bracht Branham, ed., Bakhtin and the Classics (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 2002).
8. One thing remains unclear in the information about Saurat, and that is who, in fact, was
the first to communicate with him, Anica or Rebecca?
9. He appears as ‘Konstantin’ in West’s book: avant-garde theoretician, poet, linguist, critic,
translator – among others of Rabelais’ works.
10. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey through Yugoslavia (London: Mac-
millan, 1982 (1942)), 807.
11. Ibid., 809.
12. A lame, heavily cut and censored version of her book appeared at the beginning of
the crisis in Yugoslavia, fostering a very pro-Serbian version of the work. The translator, Nikola
Koljevic;, former university professor and specialist in English literature, was a close collaborator
of Radovan Karadžic; in Bosnia, and committed suicide in 1996 in the Serbian para-state in the
region.
13. On the reception of Thomas Mann and translations by Anica Savic; Rebac, see Tomislav
Bekic;, ‘Thomas Mann in Jugoslawien’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Universität Jena 25, no. 3
(1976): 385–393; on Mann’s quotation of Savic; Rebac’s work, see Tomislav Bekic;, ‘Anica Savic;
Rebac i Tomas Man’, Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik 27, no. 1 (1979): 81–90.
14. See Olga Freidenberg, Image and Concept. Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, eds Nina Bragin-
skaia and Kevin Moss, with a foreword by Vyacheslav V. Ivanov (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997).
15. See Elliot Mossman, ed., The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg 1910–
1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
16. Freidenberg, Image and Concept, X.
17. See Anica Savic; Rebac, Predplatonska erotologija, Književna zajednica (Novi Sad: Književna
zajednica Novoga Sada, 1984), 90.
18. See Nicole Loraux, The Divided City. On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (New
York: Zone, 2001). In her book, published earlier in French, Nicole Loraux examines the case of
statis in the Athenian democracy.
19. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter. Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek
World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Alain Schnapp, Le chasseur et la cité.
Chasse et érotique en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997).
20. Freidenberg, Image and concept, 107.
21. Edith Stein, Die Frau. Ihre Aufgabe nach Natur und Gnade (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder,
1959).
 CHAPTER 1 4

Secular Couplings
An Intergenerational Affair with Islam

RUTH MAS

In 1995, Alain Ruscio launched a study of French colonial discrimination in

the Maghreb in which, discussing mixed marriages, he provocatively asks, ‘Are
the two communities at least able to encounter each other, to come to know
each other better through the most natural of relations, love?’1 Some of the
most salient questioning of the acceptance of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims into
France has centred on the physical and emotional coupling of members of the
two communities. Since at least France’s colonial project of assimilation, its
claims for the ‘liberation’ of the Maghreb have gone hand in hand with mixed
marriages in order to ensure the control and ‘equality’ of its colonised people.2
Mixed marriages were de facto métissage-in-action, propped up by French racial
policies that ‘endorsed’ Islam and endorsed these marriages as an ideal of assim-
ilation and racial regeneration.3 The primary object of the politics of regenera-
tion, promoted under the guise of mixed marriages, was the feminine Algerian
Muslim subject who needed to be saved from the restrictions of oppressive and
patriarchal Islamic law, forced marriages and polygamy.4 Studies that have at-
tempted to recover the ‘muted’ Maghrebi feminine subject have yielded how
resistant she could be to France’s liberating ‘overtures’; despite the strong efforts
by feminist groups to address the situation of colonised Muslim women, the
latter did not all welcome French forms of liberation.5 Arguments made about
the emancipatory promise of métissage and of mixed marriages persist in con-
temporary France, especially after the term entered common parlance in the
1980s in order to subvert its racial connotations and to render French notions
of universalism more complex. However, while the success of a mixed mar-

Notes for this section begin on page 286.

270 Ruth Mas

riage embodies a pluralist imaginary about the coexistence of different cultures

within the nation state, the colonial resonances of such an imaginary in France
continue to focus on the liberation of Muslim women.
In order to approach the continued significance of the question of métissage
in contemporary France, I will focus on the work of Fethi Benslama, a practising
psychoanalyst whose clinical study of the trauma of exile for Franco-Maghrebis
both informs his sociological and anthropological academic work and contrib-
utes to the growing body of scholarship by Muslim Franco-Maghrebi intellec-
tuals. Métissage emerges as a particularly salient site of reflection for Benslama,
especially in La demeure empruntée (The Borrowed Dwelling, published in 1995),
a case study of Samia, a young Franco-Maghrebi woman who married a non-
Muslim French man. Through it, we can analyse the ordering of the social,
historical and political relations between France and the Maghreb – themes
that run through Benslama’s La Nuit brisée (1988), Une Fiction troublante (1994)
and La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam (2002). Benslama puts forward a com-
plicated analysis that stems from the displacement of a post-colonial writer, in
which the story of colonial violence behind exile can be retrieved to examine
how it rearticulates the differences in citizenship, religious affiliation and eth-
nicity in the historical coming together of (post-)Christian and/or the domi-
nant majority French and Muslim Maghrebi cultures in France.
Using Benslama as a platform, I question the usefulness of mixed marriage
as an ideal that mitigates the impact of a history of colonisation on the post-
colonial feminine subject. Of course, this is not to deny the subjectivity and
agency of the (post-)colonised whose relationship to the politics of the colo-
niser (with regards to the forces of power that structure the Maghreb’s relation-
ship to France) are in a sense paradoxical. My point is to emphasise the inherent
inequality in the distribution of power between coloniser and colonised, which
is sedimented into a post-colonial context instead of presenting an image of the
fully submissive colonised subject as delivered to the overwhelming and all-
pervasive power of the colonialist, which not only controls the colonised, but
moreover seems to be fully in control of the effects of his political strategies.
The figure of Samia in La demeure empruntée allows us to trace the re-elaboration
of the French colonial project of assimilation back into the métropole through
the colonial tropes of métissage6, which are now being elaborated as part of the
French post-colonial project of integration. In this regard, La demeure empruntée
should be read in relation to Robert Young’s argument (through G.C. Spivak)
that when sex is set up as the heart of race and culture, ‘hybridity suggests the
necessity of revising normative estimates of the position of woman … who
only becomes a productive agent through an act of colonial violation’.7 Do-
ing so positions the (post-)colonised Muslim Franco-Maghrebi woman as the
primary subject of this inquiry into métissage and establishes the ethico-political
boundaries of ‘mixed unions’ as the enactment of hybridity.
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 271

It is the Story of Samia…

The ambivalent status of le couple métissé is a metonymy for the ambivalence of

métissage in an environment whose consistent resistance to the integration of
its Maghrebi immigrants crosses both liberal and conservative anxieties about
the presence of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims in France. La demeure empruntée
evokes the development of Benslama’s thinking and his position on the par-
ticular problematic of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims in France. After summarising
Benslama’s case study with special attention to his interpretation, I will discuss
it in terms of his theorising of métissage in order to draw out how Benslama, in
supplementing métissage with the concept of intersigne, makes exile a condition
of integration. I then turn to a discussion of the utility and value of Benslama’s
analysis and the post-colonial reading that it enables. In such a reading, Samia’s
‘mixed marriage’ stands as a prototype for the historical coupling of Algeria
with France – a model of le couple métissé – in which the interplay between
‘mixed marriages’ and the integration of Maghrebis into France continues to
be structured by a colonialist discourse on race and sexuality.
La demeure empruntée was published as an article of the same name.8 Because
of its 1995 publication and some of the references it contains, we can assume
that the case study Benslama recounts took place in the mid 1990s, prob-
ably between 1993 and 1995. It tells of a family of Franco-Maghrebis, who
have come to see him in a public clinic that Benslama describes as located ‘in
the heart of one of the distraught housing projects in the northern suburb of
Paris’, and in which Benslama has been working as a psychoanalyst for over a
decade. Samia figures within this case as a young woman of Algerian extraction
who runs off against her parent’s will and marries a French (i.e., non-Franco
Maghrebi) man. La demeure empruntée reflects the struggle of Franco-Maghrebi
Muslims against the constraints of French assimilation, and Benslama has pub-
lished his study to analyse the effects of forces of globalisation on the post-
colonial processing of Maghrebi Muslims into France. Benslama’s argument
about the socio-political stakes involved in ‘constraining subjectivity along
ethnic lines’ is developed in a context where the totalising nature of the na-
tion state is in conflict with religious, ethnic and cultural totalities. In La de-
meure empruntée, his argument is directed against the currency given to ‘l’âme
de l’étranger’ (the psyche of the foreigner), which has been constructed out of
the relativisation and essentialisation of culture in current French theories of
ethno-psychiatry. What Benslama objects to most specifically is the ‘increasing
ethnicisation of psychological uniqueness (singularité), such as the idea of an
ethnic unconscious … which is always concerned as if by chance, with Africans
and Maghrebis, but never Europeans’. ‘You would think’, he continues, ‘that
the latter are endowed with a universal unconscious, or with the universal as
unconscious’ (78). The problem that this poses for the immigrant, according to
272 Ruth Mas

Benslama, is that s/he is ‘no longer the object of discovery in her or his singular-
ity, but of re-cognition (re-connaissance), in other words, of a postulate whose truth
is anticipated by well established anthropological knowledge’ (78). Benslama
argues that, moreover, faced with ‘horrifying ruptures of transmission, [parents]
are sometimes prone to make their children find again, at all costs, the fiction
of the community body of their origin … [The] children of the foreigner who
are born in the exile of their parents … are sacrifice[d] in order to find once
again the originary metaphor supposedly lost to the generation of the parents’
(79). Benslama challenges normative and essentialising understandings of eth-
nicity on the grounds that they erase (sacrifice) the singularity of the Franco-
Maghrebi subject, and that such erasure ignores and thus renders meaningless
the trauma and pain of their exile (especially the second generation) who are
consequently deprived of the capacity to ‘metaphorise’ it (79).
Benslama sets La demeure empruntée in three movements of what he terms
as a ‘genealogical billiard game’. The first movement began when Samia was
about sixteen years of age, two years before Benslama actually meets her. Samia’s
parents, Mr and Mrs K., had been living in France for twenty-five years, have
Algerian citizenship and were fostering French (i.e., non Franco-Maghrebi
Muslim) children within the context of a ten-year collaboration with an asso-
ciation for the protection of children.9 Benslama describes them as a ‘modern
couple whose four children were brought up with little reference to the Islamic
tradition, which had hardly taken into consideration religious holidays’ (81).
Benslama does not provide any additional details about the family’s economic
situation or milieu in either Algeria or in France, or about the parents’ pro-
fession. After a serious car accident almost costs Peguy (one of the children
whom they have fostered since babyhood) her life and she falls into a coma,
the parents, who have been by her bedside night and day, vow to adopt her if
she survives. Benslama states that Peguy’s eventual emergence from the coma
was considered to be a ‘renaissance’. After getting the consent of Peguy’s elderly
grandparents, whom they have also brought into the family and support, Mr
and Mrs K. eagerly start their proceedings for adoption.
However, after a lengthy process of application, Mr and Mrs K. are refused
the right to adopt Peguy, who is a French citizen, on the grounds that as Al-
gerian citizens, they must conform to the prohibition of adoption by Algerian
law. Peguy continues to remain a ward of the State placed with Samia’s parents.
Peguy’s age is not mentioned and we can only assume that she is an elementary
school child when Benslama recounts: ‘Peguy, who had been placed at the K’s
home since she was a baby, considered herself as their child to the point that,
at school she refused to answer to her original family name. She finally found
this subterfuge, to write on her books: Peguy B. (her patronymic) family K. It
is in this way that this child, even though she knew her natural genealogy had
herself constructed a montage, a fiction that permitted her to face her situ-
ation.’ Benslama describes how Peguy begins to resemble the other children
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 273

physically, to speak Arabic like them and to ‘melt completely into the family
landscape’ (81).
Mr and Mrs K. are assigned to Benslama as soon as the administrators
inform them that it will be impossible to pursue the adoption. Benslama de-
scribes how Samia’s parents do not take the news well at all, how they are
utterly and completely devastated, are crying and overcome by a complete
sense of injustice. In reference to the second time he sees them, one month
later when they present themselves at his practice, Benslama states, ‘I noticed
the drastic change in their attitudes, in their speech and even in the way they
dressed. I couldn’t help noticing that Mrs K. was wearing a scarf that covered
her hair.’ Mrs K. then promptly informs Benslama that they had just discovered
that Islam prohibited the adoption of Peguy and that even if the time ever
came when they would be allowed to adopt her, they would refuse. Benslama
states, ‘It is true that not only does Qur’anic law not recognise adoption, but it
prohibits … changing the name and the genealogy (filiation) of the child’ (81).10
‘Then’, Benslama states, ‘their discourse becomes religious, very conservative,
and one day a closure, a withdrawal suddenly took place, which subsequently
did not stop from hardening; it was to the point that we began to ask ourselves
whether we should continue collaborating with them, [even though] they fos-
tered, moreover, two other children with the service’ (81).
Samia appears in the story a year and a half later. Having reached the age
of majority (18 years of age), she decides to acquire French citizenship, which,
despite the fact that she was born in France, she can acquire only as an adult.
Her parents, whom Benslama describes as having ‘rapidly converted to reli-
gious tradition’, are hostile to her holding anything but Algerian citizenship.
Samia, who has not adapted well to the conservative pressures of parents who
now control her every move, refuses to go to school and even disappears for
two weeks. Benslama describes Mr and Mrs K. as living through ‘unspeakable
anguish’. When she finally returns, she agrees to visit Benslama on her parents’
suggestion. When Samia enters his office, Benslama remarks that physically, she
looks no older than fifteen years of age, and that later on he realises that her
emotional maturity was not far from that level. He describes her as ‘an adoles-
cent in great difficulty, sad, who couldn’t look anybody in the eye, and wouldn’t
stop fidgeting, not comfortable in her own skin, who didn’t know where to
stand and [who was] in a permanent state of anxiety’ (81). She promptly asks
Benslama for the name of a church because she ‘felt Christian’, wanted to prac-
tise Christianity and has only come to see Benslama to tell him so. Benslama
quickly ascertains that she has no knowledge of Christianity. Faced with his
realisation of this, Samia breaks out into an ‘abusive tirade against Islam, about
her hatred of the religion, about how she doesn’t consider herself an Arab and
how she wants to change her first name. And how sorry she was she hadn’t
done it when she could have’ (82). Benslama assumes that she is referring to the
opportunity to do so afforded to her by French citizenship and wonders about
274 Ruth Mas

the significance of the effect that the proposal to ‘de-baptise’ herself must have
had on a candidate applying for French citizenship. She violently condemns
‘her parents, their religious attitude, their national belonging’, and, at times,
Benslama fears that she is going to storm out and slam the door.
When Benslama turns the conversation around by asking her if there is
something that she enjoyed doing that had nothing to do with her parents or
her family, Samia responds that she wants to be a writer like George Sand. After
being able to engage her on the topic of Sand, Benslama realises that she will
probably return to see him. He states:
The figure of this writer remained thereafter, for more than a year that the sessions
lasted, present between us, like a pact that represented an essential cloud that obvi-
ously had identifying value for Samia and it was an identification that I accepted
– that rendered possible the transference – and that permitted to put into work a
metaphoricity of étrangement for her … an entrance through fiction that writing
represents of literature in the body of the Other. It is the possibility of identity that
is no longer caught in the dilemma between faithfulness to the ethnic body and
its betrayal in entering the glorious body of an other-nationality (nationalité-autre).
From the identitarian cry of one identity to another, toward an identity that writes
itself, that is the … solution that Samia chooses, the importance of which I would
only fully come to grips with later. (82)

Benslama worked with her throughout the next nine months as she slowly
began to ‘untangle the web of hate in which she felt enclosed, where confu-
sion reigned between the national, the ethno-linguistic and the religious’ (82).
Together, they sorted out the differences between being an Arab or Algerian
and a Muslim, and how having French citizenship does not exclude being a
Muslim. Benslama states that:
These simple differences were not simple for her, because her parents themselves
had set the categories at odds … It is obvious … that for an identity to constitute
itself in its singularity, readability is required, and thus, distinct lines and spacing
outs. But wasn’t it necessary that she first be able to accept herself and to be ac-
cepted in the ideal of writing in the French language in order to tolerate such or
other identitarian representations of her parents? Samia was beginning to assume
her origin without passing through the reactive faith or the religiosity of her par-
ents. The choice of this feminine figure that surpasses the position of the tradi-
tional woman, as much by her name (George) as by the trajectory of her life, was
not a coincidence either. (82)

However, Benslama assesses that ‘as Samia advanced on the path to autonomy
and self-affirmation and that she liberated her autonomy as a theologico-sexual
identity, the hatred of Samia for her mother grew’ (83). Benslama recounts how
she became increasingly sexually provocative and spent more and more time
with boys, into whose arms she would throw herself whenever she saw her
mother. The worried parents visit Benslama and relay the humiliation they
feel before their neighbours and the rest of the family. Samia’s mother is espe-
cially vigilant about her daughter’s virginity and states, ‘The dresses she wears
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 275

are rape dresses’ (82). During the summer holidays, Samia is raped. Benslama
reports that her mother dramatically lived the loss of her daughter’s virginity.
Feeling that they have reached the depths of humiliation and indignation, her
mother asserts, ‘Samia has done everything to us – nationality, the rejection
of religion, rape – what else can she do?’ (83). However, it was the father,
Benslama recounts, who surprised him the most because of the compassion he
demonstrated toward his daughter. Samia later told him, ‘I had to be raped and
to lose this piece of skin in order for my father to take interest in me and to tell
me that he loves me’ (83). Because for the family there is nothing else to do and
‘the irreparable had been committed’, the atmosphere relaxes and Samia is sent
off to Bretagne to train as a librarian. After six months, she decides to live with
Eric (a non-Muslim youth from Bretagne) and eventually becomes pregnant.
When her mother finds out, she faints and decides to cut off all contact with
Samia. ‘However’, Benslama states, ‘at the eighth month of her pregnancy,
Eric wrote a letter to Samia’s mother in which he told her he wanted to give
the baby an Arabic name’ (84). The very same day, without consulting her
husband, Samia’s mother hurries off to her daughter’s house and ‘returns with
Eric’s promise to marry Samia and to convert to Islam, at least for appearances
sake’ (84). They eventually get married with both families in attendance, but
the conversion of Eric, Benslama tells us, is sincere and not a ‘simulacra’. Dur-
ing Samia’s last visit to Benslama, where she shows him the baby, Samia sar-
donically comments, ‘It had to be me, a non-believing Muslim, who ends up
with the only Breton capable of becoming a practising Muslim’ (84). She goes
on to tell Benslama that Eric’s mother and his sister were increasingly interested
in Islam, and that they were finding many points in common with Christianity.
Benslama concludes, ‘Long ecumenical conversations brought the two families
together. And throughout this time, in the middle of them, Samia continued to
entertain her passion for George Sand’ (84).

L’entre-deux and the Debris of Colonisation

My aim in what follows is to provide a contrapuntal analysis to that of Bensla-

ma’s language of metaphor in his psychoanalytic reading of La demeure emprun-
tée. As such, I propose a reading that is undergirded by an understanding of
subjectivity whose constitution can be understood in relation to the contin-
ued materiality and discursivity of power and the sedimentation of historical
ontologies through which colonial structures endure.11 In such a reading, the
colonial context of mixed marriages surfaces in the European political imagi-
nary that has structured ‘le couple métissée’ at a time when efforts are being
made to efface colonial memory along with its subjects.12 The allegorical sig-
nificance of La demeure empruntée in relationship to this debate lies in how the
people involved in Benslama’s case study revive and illustrate France’s past and
276 Ruth Mas

continuing relationship with Algeria, and the points of divergence and con-
vergence between the Maghreb and France. My attempt is thus to exploit the
representational qualities of La demeure empruntée in order to then highlight
their historical sedimentations at the same time as I maintain the primacy of
subjectivity throughout the analysis. In other words, I take distance from meta-
phorical readings of the subject in order to avoid the trap of analogy, which
would collapse colonial history and the post-colonised subject, thus erasing the
subjectivity of the latter.
Samia’s marriage to Eric is grounded in the history of France’s project of
assimilation of its ex-colonies. Through Samia’s rape, the body of Samia be-
comes the site for the recognition of the violent interplay between Algeria and
France; it is only after forcing ‘violence’ to be acknowledged that Samia is free
to marry Eric. Ultimately, the mixed marriage continues to speak its colonial
ontology in a context where the social marginalisation of Franco-Maghrebis is
refracted into the contemporary debate on mixed marriages in France. In what
follows, I want to examine how Benslama approaches this issue in his descrip-
tion of European fascism and Islamic intransigence as the double hegemony
within which Franco-Maghrebis are caught, i.e., a struggle for and against the
internal colonialism of Franco-Maghrebis in France. I will examine Benslama’s
discussion of exile in relation to métissage in order to emphasise the importance
of the historical sedimentation of the power of empire for the consideration
of Benslama’s liberal reading of Franco-Maghrebi subjectivity in relationship
to Islam.
Métissage, Benslama argues, ‘does not open the doors into the paradise
of subjectivity, which, often in the clinical field, is usually the correlation of
psychic suffering and sometimes catastrophes, especially at the heart of trans-
mission between generations. I am referring here to the children of migrants
… (Métissage) does not suffice in order to be creative, to become more free,
or more respectful of others.’13 For Benslama, the problem with notions of
métissage is that they do little justice to the question of subjectivity, namely, the
subjectivity of Muslim Maghrebi migrants whose genealogies and histories are
lost in the free-floating relativistic plurality of identities evoked by theories of
métissage. The extremity of the ‘hyperparadoxical’ qualities of métissage posited
by some scholars worries Benslama because of their potential to swing over to
what he terms a delimitation, which feeds into the culture of globalised markets,
‘where anything can coexist with anything and ally itself with anything else’.14
Métissage risks, according to Benslama, the danger of ‘dis-affiliation, de-insti-
tutionalisation, and de-localisation that submits them to market logics … of
consumption. Consumable alterities’.15
Benslama has further qualified this condition as the interplay of disinheri-
tance between territory and psyche that takes its toll on the subjects of exile.16
Exile for Franco-Maghrebi Muslims is thus not only an exile into another
world, that of the West, but also stems from the violently imposed exile into
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 277

the economic processes of modernity set into motion by empire and ‘marked
by colonial violence, the devastating rapidity of the processes of transformation,
and the way in which they are disrobed by the economic ideology of devel-
opment’.17 Benslama analyses the symptoms and effects of exile with respect
to the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject as having both physical implications
and characteristics as well as psychic ones that stem from the displacement of
the religious from their existences.18 Supplementing the notion of métissage
with intersigne opens up the discussion of métissage to incorporate the experi-
ences of those who are marginalised in France, such as Samia and her fam-
ily; positioned at the intersigne, they are the by-product of the link between
France and Algeria, never fully located in either France or Algeria. When read
against the theorising of métissage, the Franco-Maghrebi Muslims in La demeure
empruntée provide the subjective ground of l’entre-deux (between-two), which
Benslama describes as ‘the location of the sign of love and death, the location
of thought’.19 Benslama’s entre-deux puts a finger on the Orientalist dichoto-
mies of East/Islam and West, in order to carve out a space in the present for
the historical recognition of the binary and violent logic of the relationship be-
tween France and the Maghreb within which Muslim Franco-Maghrebis have
been trapped. ‘(T)he rapport of co-belonging is designated as the illegitimate
product of the coupling between Islam and the West and is caught between the
horrified interpellations of the two.’20
The individuals in La demeure empruntée illustrate Benslama’s identification
of Franco-Maghrebis Muslims as ‘movers between worlds’,21 subjects caught
between diasporic movements of mass displacement and the lived exile of their
lives in France. La demeure empruntée provides a point of departure for Bensla-
ma’s theorising of ‘disconnection and dispersion’ implied by métissage and its
effects on the subjectivity of Franco-Maghrebis Muslims, who, Benslama ar-
gues, are in ‘antagonistic and violent rapport’ with their ‘location’.22 La demeure
empruntée delimits the tensions in the spectrum of co-belonging in France.
Benslama’s work is useful in setting up the problems that Franco-Maghrebi
Muslims encounter in France against the background of the hegemony and vi-
olence of French colonial power. Samia’s fate can be read as being intertwined
with that of her sister’s. Both are products of repudiated Algeria (encapsulated
most vividly by their mother), with which France refuses to ‘hybridise’. Peguy
evokes the potential for the ‘adoption’ of France by her Algerian parents. Their
initial decision to adopt her transcends the political history of conflict between
them resulting in part in their own disaffiliation from France; they do not have
the right to French citizenship and are consequently still bound to Algerian law.
Peguy represents the ultimate limit of their affiliation with France. The impos-
sibility for Peguy’s/France’s adoption is not an isolated incident, and it simul-
taneously disrupts the acceptance of Peguy’s Algerian family in France. Given
the fact that Samia’s ‘Frenchness’ is not as concretised as Peguy’s, the effects of
the ‘dislocation of Algeria’ are also nefarious to her.
278 Ruth Mas

Ultimately, Samia is doubly dislocated/exiled, first via the aftermath of

France’s/Peguy’s inability to be adopted by Algeria/her parents, which severs
her affiliation with her mother and which impedes her integration into France.
Secondly, her dislocation is reflected in the need for her to ‘apply’ to be ‘lo-
cated’ in France when she has to apply for French citizenship despite the fact
that she is born in France. Samia’s ‘dislocation’ is sedimented as the historical
debris of Algeria’s status as a legal French territory after Algerian Independence
in 1962, ever since then, the French have struggled over which ‘French’ to
consider ‘French’. More recently, France’s attempts to cease immigration have
caused Benslama to blame the French state for the mass-denationalisation of
Franco-Maghrebis by passing the 22 July 1993 law. The law declared that chil-
dren born in France of Maghrebi parents (some of whom already had French
identity cards that were eventually withdrawn) no longer automatically acquired
French citizenship. Plans were also made for the mass deportation/repatriation
of Franco-Maghrebi Muslims and provoked the social dismemberment of the
millions who have since been marginalised economically and culturally to the
banlieues. Not only were many Algerians expelled and their identity regularly
policed, but laws requiring children of Algerian born parents to apply for
French citizenship were also implemented.
The social violence in France that has affected Samia and that has resulted
in the exclusion of Samia’s mother/Algeria from its body politic has been a
contributing factor in the transposition of ‘race’ as a contemporary category
of exclusion. The racial categories and discourses of exclusion that figure in
France’s public discourse have enabled Benslama to critique the French nation
state on the grounds of citizenship: ‘Three processes of the destitution of immi-
grants are being produced for twenty years under our eyes: the discourse of the
naturalisation of a common (comme-un) body from which they are ejected, masse
de-nationalisation and legal de-legitimisation.’23 Benslama compares France’s
passing of the 22 July 1993 law to the Vichy regime’s withdrawal of French
nationality from its Jewish citizens: ‘The Nation of laws’, Benslama contends,
‘has gone against its principles, through a historically continuous line that goes
from colonialism in Algeria whose natives were nationals without citizenship
or rights, to the situation of migrants today, and passing through Vichy’.24 ‘The
ability of fascist discourse to prey on the present condition of Franco-Maghrebi
Muslim immigrants has been facilitated by their exile from their homelands.
Fascist discourse has fragmented to such an extent that it no longer can be
identified solely with Le Pen’s party and followers and attached as it currently is
to fears over the naturalisation of those not covered by state birth, [it] uses the
immigrant [as] its subject as well as its vehicle.’25
Due to the large-scale post-colonial Maghrebi immigration of the last de-
cades, the anxiety over mixed marriages as the objects of métissage (as the model
for the encounter of ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’) is now being extended to the issue of
immigration. In France, the stories of mariages blancs – ‘fake marriages’ – whose
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 279

aim is only to obtain residency papers for one member of the couple, have
filled the pages of popular newspapers and overshadowed (if not been conflated
with) discussions of mixed marriages, which are believed to be on the rise.26
In line with its intention to curb public fear about the invasion of France by
Maghrebi immigrants, the French government has done everything it can to
curtail ‘fake marriages’ by denying many mixed couples the right to get mar-
ried unless both partners have met official residency requirements. The na-
tionality laws passed on 27 July 1993 and the restrictions on entrance and stay
introduced on 24 August 1993, harshly reinforced control, introduced ‘fraud’
clauses into the legislation and rendered the status of the partner applying for
residency even more tenuous than it had been before.27 Not only are marriages
found to be fraudulent delayed, postponed or legally annulled after the fact,
many precautions have been put into place in order to discourage those who
intend to marry solely to acquire citizenship. For example, a residency card
can only be obtained one year after marriage as long as the couple is still living
together, and now, in that year, the applicant can be deported at any time; the
1993 laws and those since have provided more categories under which that can
happen and citizenship applications have also tightened to allow for the revok-
ing the citizenship of those not found to be properly assimilated.28
The present context grounds Benslama’s suspicion of what he terms the
‘fiction of the common body’ of the host country, to which access and belong-
ing is assured through the principle of nationality, and which considers Samia
and her family strangers. Yet the mixed marriage of Samia to Eric has not over-
come the problem of violence so long as Samia has been completely cut off
from her mother/Algeria. In other words, the subjectivity of Samia cannot be
fully integrated because the relational lines between Samia and her mother/
Algeria are disrupted. I want to suggest that the association of Islam with the
extra-national forces that have oppressed Muslim women in Islamic countries
circumscribes the idea of Islamic community in France and, consequently, the
possibilities for the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject enabled by Benslama’s
discussion of La demeure empruntée. Samia figures within it as the prime example
of those who are caught between what Benslama calls the ‘fiction of com-
munity bodies’, namely, ‘the social discourse of assimilation and identitarian
claims’ and ‘religious and communitarian proselytism’.29 Benslama also resists
the idea of ‘other fictions of common bodies’, which run into conflict with
that of the French nation state, which is presently being compounded by the
internationalised fears of Islam, especially post-September 11.30 His description
of La demeure empruntée as being based on the “tryptic” of identity-nationality-
integration (that) shows the crucial stakes in assigning the foreigner to the iden-
tity of her origin, to the fiction of the community body, in the host coun-
try’,31 suggests that for Benslama, there are grounds on which the possibility of
an extra-nationally defined body-politic in France can be problematic. Those
grounds extend beyond Benslama’s initial concerns in La demeure empruntée
280 Ruth Mas

about immigrants being restrained within totalised prescriptions of ethnic and

religious community in the field of anthropological psychology. They centre
on the political possibilities for religiously (read, Islamically) defined commu-
nity and the hegemonic potential that they carry for the Muslim feminine
subject, which Benslama rejects as much as he does the force behind French
nationalism.
Benslama’s anxiety about the hegemonic potential behind unified notions
of Islamic community is transposed into La demeure empruntée and results in a
few tensions within Benslama’s work. After all, it is only when Samia rejects
Islam altogether and runs off and marries a French man that she is ‘liberated’
from her mother, who wants to control her with the weight of Islamic cus-
tom and tradition. What gives me pause in this scenario is how easily readers
of La demeure empruntée can couple the ‘liberation of Muslim women’ with
the ‘violence of Islam’ and ignore the very clear association of violence with
the French nation, a violence that Benslama does emphasise throughout his
work, but that he somehow ignores in his claim that Samia’s parents had set
at odds what it meant to be Algerian, Arab and, Muslim. Benslama’s anxiety
also surfaces within the shift in descriptions of Samia’s mother before and after
her ‘conservative hardening’: first, Samia’s mother is a ‘modern’ parent who
brought up the children ‘with little reference to the Islamic tradition or even to
holidays’. What Benslama has done here is dichotomise modernity and Islam –
modern couples, in other words, are those who have little reference to religious
traditions – thus ignoring the very many modern Muslims around the world
whose adherence to the Islamic tradition is conservative. Such a conflation also
permits Benslama to speak of the categories such as ‘Arab’, ‘French’, ‘Muslim’
and ‘Algerian’ as being brought into conflict by Samia’s parents. However, the
onus is on Benslama to establish how that is so – has he not been arguing at the
same time that those categories are also in conflict under the weight of France’s
imperial ambitions, French society and French government? This conflation
also enables Benslama’s relative silence around the subjectivity of Samia’s ‘ex-
treme’ mother, who, paradoxically, as a Muslim woman, serves as the image of
violent Islam through her association with Algeria; Benslama never fully ex-
plores her resistance to Samia’s mixed marriage. Instead, Samia’s mother can be
easily understood as a woman besought with extreme religious conservatism,
coldly narcissistic with regards to her daughter’s rape, who cuts off her daughter
completely and who tries to force Eric to convert to Islam.
The resistance to Islamic extremism that directs Benslama’s thinking about
Islam, especially with regard to his attempts to safeguard the Muslim Franco-
Maghrebi subject, can garner him accusations of having constrained and essen-
tialised the question of Franco-Maghrebi subjectivity along Islamic or religious
lines. By relaying the question of violence against Algerian women back to the
French context, the malevolent forces of ‘Islam’ are kept outside of France’s
political structures; this reinforces the French state as necessary to the control
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 281

and limitation of both an internal and external Islamic terrorist threat. Such
a reading is enabled because, again, unexplored, the image of Samia’s mother
brings the Islamic tradition closely in line with ‘hegemony’ and risks inflating
Islam to such despotic proportions that the ‘genealogical de-legitimisation’ that
Benslama so decries is rendered legitimate. That the subjectivity of Muslims
is kept within the confines of the French nation and the link to the Maghreb
serves only to amplify the international stakes that pit Islam against the West is
consonant with Talal Asad’s argument that adherence to an ‘imported’ religious
tradition is the pivot around which such loyalties are often tested with regards
to immigrants in a post-Christian secular West. ‘The politicization of religious
traditions by Muslim immigrants’, he contends, ‘serves to question the inevi-
tability of the absolute nation-state – of its demands to exclusive loyalty and its
totalizing cultural projects’.32 In this case, loyalty, exclusive loyalty to the liberal
ideological unity of the French nation state functions as the precondition to
the ‘liberation’ of the Muslim Franco-Maghrebi feminine subject by severing
authority from her own religious traditions understood to be located in the
Maghreb. What I am trying to emphasise is how easily her subjectivity is kept
within the confines of the French nation and circumbscribed to the extent that
it is obscured, so that her agency is derived only from the failure or rejection
of Islam writ large.
Yet I maintain that Benslama nevertheless leaves the experience of ‘Islam’
open to the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject. The salient point that emerges
from the consideration of Franco-Maghrebi subjects as Muslims is how their
subjectivity is configured by the apparatus of power put into play by a moder-
nising liberal state such as France, where the key role that France plays in Al-
geria is left completely silent. Such silence actually speaks to the fact that Islam
bears the responsibility of its compatibility with liberalism, whose authority
is internationally unquestioned as are the hegemony of its political ideals and
salvific capacities, especially post-September 11.33 To accept this, however, is
not to deny that the processes of power accompanying the liberal state do
disclose other types of subjecthood for Franco-Maghrebis that intersect het-
erogeneously with Islam as a religious tradition.34 In this regard, Benslama’s
discussion of métissage, when brought in relation with the issue of mixed mar-
riages, exposes other possibilities of Muslim subjectivity in relation to secular
workings of the liberal French state. These include, as in the case of Samia’s
disavowal of Islam, somebody of Muslim culture or, in her own words, ‘a
non-believing Muslim’, signifiers that speak to the ambivalent positioning yet
intersecting of ‘Muslim’, ‘liberal’, ‘French’ and ‘secular’, within the regenerat-
ing mechanisms deployed by the secular liberal nation state.35 The vitality of
such intersections for the Muslim Franco-Maghrebi subject is put into play
through the baby with a Muslim name, the embodiment of l’entre deux, which
is born into a union that qualifies in significant ways the binary logic that puts
métissage into motion. How severely this vitality is mitigated by the fact that in
282 Ruth Mas

Benslama’s narrative, the baby with a Muslim name remains nameless, is still,
nevertheless, a question.
The undoing of the binary logic of métissage that would antagonise the
categories of ‘Muslim’ and ‘French’ is activated by and figured in Eric’s con-
version to Islam as well as Samia’s definition of herself as a non-believing Mus-
lim. Here, I want to begin by heuristically considering religious conversion as
another agentialised form of métissage so as to locate Benslama’s liberal read-
ing of Muslim subjectivity within it. Gauri Viswanathan, in Outside the Fold:
Conversion, Modernity and Belief, has argued for understanding conversion as
an ‘oppositional gesture’, which ‘in an era of religious tolerance functions an
expression of resistance to the centralizing tendencies of national formation’.36
I find intriguing Viswanathan’s interlacing of conversion with the notion of
‘dissent’ to argue that conversion can ‘unbuckle the consolidating ambitions of
the secular state, within which former religious orthodoxies are subsumed’.37
However, I would suspend the categories of ‘resistance’ and ‘dissent’ and pro-
visionally replace them with ‘reconfiguration’ in order to more aptly address
the possibility of ‘oppositional gestures’ to the French state without giving
undue emphasis to the effectivity of the subject. La demeure empruntée is replete
with the ‘oppositional gesture’ of conversions in an age of religious intolerance:
Samia’s conversion away from Islam, and even France/Peguy’s stubborn insis-
tence on being affiliated to the family (to Algeria), which may be understood
as an aborted attempt at conversion into what Benslama terms as the culture of
Islam,38 despite her parent’s difficult ‘reconversion’ to Islam. It is useful to recall
Asad’s discussion of the concept of culture as part of the totalising project of
the liberal modernising state and empire, which sought to transform colonial
subjects into more progressive secular beings by conceiving of culture as of a
common way of life. Conversion, which also does not escape a colonial con-
struction, here functions not only to define the parameters of the intersection
between subjectivity, Islam and the nation state, but also reflects how the ‘con-
versions’ of Samia and Peguy can figure differently as assimilation or adoption
into a community, neither of which are religiously defined, in which nation
and ethnicity are contiguous.
In comparison, Eric’s conversion to Islam does not directly link the ques-
tion of subjectivity to religion and ethnicity, but it may reconfigure the colonial
heritage of the intersections of ethnicity and the nation because of the way it
situates the issue of religion within the post-colonial French state.39 Cast in this
way, the conversion of Eric to Islam can easily be interpreted as a destabilising
of secular power that undermines the fixed boundaries of both the nation and
the subject – a ‘conversion’ seen as trumping all of the others in the story of
Samia and that forces religion onto the public sphere of the French state despite
its very rigid advocation of laïcité. However, Benslama’s take on Eric’s conver-
sion, as being followed by ‘long ecumenical conversations that brought the two
families together’, seems to echo an ideal of tolerance and the ‘finding points
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 283

in common’ between Islam and Christianity that can be comfortably contained

by secular structures of power. I suggested above that Benslama’s discussion of
the ‘conversion’ to Islam of Samia’s parents facilitates a reading of Islam that can
be read more like a ‘reversion’ to or of Islam (i.e., retrograde Islam) than a con-
version. Juxtaposed, it is difficult to see how Benslama would justify his support
of Eric’s relationship to the Islamic tradition over that of the parent’s of Samia
and this may very well have to do with the ability of Eric to not overtly chal-
lenge the state’s secular ordinances. However, any conclusion that Benslama is
leaving room for the subject’s experience of Islam only as a privately defined
religion is at least partially undermined by his reporting of Samia’s ironic com-
ment that as a non-believing Muslim she married Eric, the only Breton capable
of becoming a practising Muslim. The analysis of Eric’s religious conversion to
Islam begins to hint at how Benslama’s liberal reading of métissage yields a range
of relationships that the Franco-Maghrebi subject can have to ‘Islam’, a range
whose outermost boundaries simultaneously engage and eschew the normativ-
ity of Islamic textualities that accompany Islamic practice.
This issue perhaps may be approached more directly through Samia, espe-
cially in relation to how ‘Islam’ has been foreclosed as violent. In this regard,
I want to turn to how the question of the possibilities opened to the Franco-
Maghrebi Muslim subject is raised when Benslama ‘revives’ the integration
(politically and psychoanalytically) of the feminine Muslim Franco-Maghrebi
fragmented subject through his description of Samia’s fascination and identifi-
cation with the nineteenth-century female novelist George Sand, known for
her many love affairs and for her idealisation of love. What strikes me here is
Benslama’s featuring of ‘the ideal of writing in the French language’ within
which he claims Samia had to be accepted in order to ‘tolerate the identitarian
representations of her parents’. Benslama privileges the French non-Muslim
body of writing in so far as it enables the subject to ‘engage and become active
in her own future … open a rapport of debt to the Other of all identity (l’Autre
de toute identité) – the metaphor of a borrowed dwelling’.40 I will return to this
point below, especially with regards to how he links the question of subjectivity
to the ‘religious’ or the ‘metaphysical’. But, for the moment, I want to con-
sider Asad’s argument that: ‘The emergence of literature as a modern category
of edifying writing has made it possible for a new discourse to simulate the
normative function of religious texts in an increasingly secular society.’ ‘The
remarkable value’, he continues, ‘given to self-fashioning through a particular
kind of individualized reading and writing is entirely recognizable to Western
middle-class readers of literary novels but not to most Muslims in Britain or
the Indian subcontinent’.41 Asad is writing from the context of the reaction by
Muslims in Britain to the Rushdie Affair and should not be read as prescribing
a normative definition for all Muslims or of the Islamic tradition that stands in
opposition to the secular West, but instead as pointing to the employment of
literature in the larger project of modernising ‘unprogressive subjects’. Asad, of
284 Ruth Mas

course, would not deny the fact that while most Muslims in France (or else-
where) might not welcome refashionings in which they have no say, this does
not preclude the fact that some Muslims would agree with them and that they
might even do so in ways that reconfigure the power of the French state.
What I am pointing to here is the manner in which Benslama’s advocacy
for the fiction of literature also raises questions about the limits of the type of
‘literature’ that enables the integration of the Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject
in a socio-political context, whose attempts at marginalising Islamic religious
practises from the public sphere increasingly reflect their hegemony over what
constitutes ‘community’ in a liberal nation state such as France. What possibili-
ties are there for Samia, for example, other than to relate to France through the
body of texts considered to be properly European? The answer to this question
depends on the manner in which texts attributed to an ‘ethnic origin’ or, more
accurately, to a ‘religious origin’ are allowed to reveal other spaces of identitar-
ian articulation and engagement within the French state. The consideration
of such possibilities beg the following questions: has the French nation state
put the categories of French and Islamic at such odds for Samia that for her to
‘choose’ one is for her really to reject the other? And, can Franco-Maghrebi
Muslim women in France try to define themselves by way of Islamic textualities
or have we already decided that pious, traditional, orthodox, etc. readings of
the Qur’an cannot enable the ‘integration’ of the female Muslim subject? Such
a ‘choice’ is driven by prescriptions of the modern appropriateness of the reli-
gious texts of Islam (Qur’an and Hadith) for the feminine subject. In this way,
the questions of the identitarian ‘obligation’ to Islam as defined by a dogmatic
reading of the Qur’an – a reading that looms behind Samia’s subjectivity in the
image of her mother – are really questions of the obligation of Muslim citizens
to the French state in which the Islamic religious tradition is represented as
contradicting its totalising cultural and political project. This is not so much a
statement about the psychological usefulness of (French) literature as opposed
to religious texts for subject formation as it is a question about the subject’s
relation to power, whether we attribute such power to the French state or to
putative assumptions of what Islam is. Thus, my query is not whether Samia’s
fragmented self should or should not be integrated in interaction with French
texts or if it would be better integrated in relation to the Qur’an. My aim is to
pose a different question – to ask what choice has Samia been given? Would
the French state, which is disavowing its colonial history with Algeria, which
resists granting either her or her parents citizenship and which encourages her to
change her ‘ethnic/Muslim’ name, would this very same state encourage Samia
to define herself in relation to Islamic textualities, from which the practices that
emerge challenge the hegemonic norms of secular liberal governance?
I do not doubt that Benslama’s analysis of Samia’s reading of Sand could
enable other possibilities for the feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject.
Within such a liberal reading of Muslim subjectivity, Samia’s identification with
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 285

the status of the almost revolutionary and visionary figure of George Sand (a
simultaneous insider and outsider noted for her courageous stance against the
violence and fear of France’s Revolution of 1848, and her challenge to norma-
tive assumptions about gender and sexual identity) would provide an intrigu-
ing point of entry into the analysis of the potential that a Sandian version of
France holds for the accommodation of the religious as well as cultural or ethnic
differences of France’s many Samias and the limits of such an accommodation
to the centralisation of state power. In this regard, Samia’s refashioning into an
idea of the French nation through her engagement with the image of Sand,
positioned at the margins and yet at the pinnacle of French modernity and the
Romantic movement, complicates any notion that such a positioning of the
feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim subject or subject of Muslim culture is
uniformally aligned with the interests of the French nation state. Thus, I do not
want to be taken as saying that Benslama is prescribing only certain ‘French’
choices for the Franco-Maghrebi subject – I am not. To do so would be to
maintain the rigid dichotomy between Islam and France that I am arguing
Benslama is working against, despite the tensions in his work. Instead, what I
am interested in is how the implied preclusion of certain practices and ways of
being Muslim in France from normative definitions of what constitutes French
literature – namely, those practices identified with traditionalist interpretations
of the Qur’an – speaks to how Benslama’s emphasis on subjectivity is tied to
the secularising and hegemonic project of the liberal modern nation state. The
role that the state plays in enacting what Asad has called the hegemonic political
goals of modernity highlights the inevitability of the primary position that ‘the
ideal of writing in the French language’ holds in Benslama’s work.42
This line of questioning assumes Asad’s critique of the ‘regenerating’ ma-
chinery of modernity and the asymmetry of power that exists between nation
states and between the states and their subjects.43 I have used Benslama’s work
to explore how, within such processes, the subject is situated in a complex web
of power relations that she is subjected to, however variegated that positioning
may be.44 Benslama’s liberal reading of the Franco-Maghrebi subject is con-
sequently productive of a kind of plural thinking of the relationship between
Islam and liberalism. As I have argued elsewhere, hidden in his statement that
the subject can ‘open a rapport of debt to the Other of all identity (l’Autre de
toute identité) – the metaphor of a borrowed dwelling’ is the fact that Benslama
is very much working from the perspective of the ever-reformability of a tran-
scendental Other, in order to simultaneously advocate the unboundedness of
the nation and of Islam.45 The success of such an endeavour ultimately depends
on whether the reconfiguring of ‘Islam’ to the ‘West’ and of their relation-
ship, that Benslama’s thinking, suggests does not presuppose the marginalisation
of religious practices of collectivities and the texts that accompany them in
liberal states, as well as whether the relations between states can be equitably
reconstituted.
286 Ruth Mas

Within such a fashioning of a religious and political project, which con-

ceives of accommodating the multiplicity of changing traditions and accom-
panying modes of being and practices of Europe’s new Europeans in order to
transcend civilisational or modern and pre-modern dichotomies, the limits of
the possibilities for the Franco-Maghrebi subject that Benslama opens up in
relationship to ‘Islam’ are met most forcefully with regard to the feminine sub-
ject. What a reading of La demeure empruntée yields is that the historical mutabil-
ity of and violence toward the feminine subject that scholars such as Young and
Spivak so decry will not be dissolved so long as her possibilities of subjecthood
are dichotomised between violent Islam or liberating France. Thus, my aim
in discussing what constitutes the Muslim subject in France (or how such a
subject is constituted) has been to avoid advocating the dichotomous aspects of
métissage, which would polarise traditional Islamic subjectivities to liberal secu-
lar ones, but to see them both as inter-relatedly functioning within the same
grammar of political possibilities. To that end, I have been asking if, within the
interconnectedness of Islam and secularism, the feminine Franco-Maghrebi
Muslim subject is allowed to ‘reflect [on] whether other traditions, such as
Islam, might have their own resources for imagining such an ethic that respects
dissent and honours the right to adhere to different religious or non-religious
convictions’.46 As Asad has shown, such reflections may and do function within
a secular project of modernity, where the two, both secular and traditionalist,
co-exist by being intimately connected and located at the interstices of the
webs of power of the liberal state. To allow for such reflections would enable a
radical reconsideration of the secular, liberal politics of the French state sedi-
mented in the ambitions of French empire and colonialism, and of the reposi-
tioning therein of the feminine Muslim subject.

Notes

1. Alain Ruscio, Le Credo de l’homme blanc. Regards coloniaux français (XIX-XX siècles) (Paris:
Editions Complexe, 1995), 185. I have provided all of the translations in the text.
2. In Le Maghreb à l’épreuve de la colonisation (Paris: Hachette, 2002), Daniel Rivet argues
against the oppositional understanding of colonialism in the Maghreb.
3. Jean-Loup Amselle, Affirmative Exclusion. Cultural Pluralism and Rule of Custom in France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 72.
4. Ibid., 70–74. While Muslims were permitted to practise Qur’anic law, they did so only at
the expense of their local customs and through the French colonial surveillance of its application
that prepared the ‘necessary invasion’ of their own. To this end, the project to ‘regenerate’ the
Muslim populations of Algeria into French citizens involved imposing rational legislation whose
purpose was to annihilate religious and cultural traditions. It was a regenerating of the local justice
system that took as its object the ‘liberation’ of women from Qur’anic dictates.
5. Jean Dejeux, Image de l’étrangère. Unions mixtes franco-maghrébines (Paris: La Boîte à docu-
ments, 1989), 175.
6. Ruscio, Le Credo, 36.
 Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam 287

7. Robert Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London-New York:
Routledge, 1995, 19.
8. Fethi Benslama, ‘La demeure empruntée’, Transeuropéennes, no. 6/7 (winter 1995/96):
76–84, hereafter cited in text.
9. From the case study, it is not clear how many children they have.
10. Family law in Tunisia (the Majalla, codified after Independence in 1968), for example,
recognised in the law passed on 4 March 1958 the right of a child to be adopted if abandoned,
even though it has been accused of going in contradiction with Qur’anic principles. However,
family law in Algeria (Qânûn al-usra) forbids adoption according to article 31. See Dejeux, Image
de l’étrangère, 175.
11. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
12. Ruth Mas, ‘Compelling the Muslim Subject. Memory as Postcolonial Violence and
the Public Performativity of “Secular and Cultural Islam”’, The Muslim World 5, no. 96 (October
2006): 585–616.
13. Fethi Benslama, ‘Le Métissage de l’inconscient. Réponse à l’exposé de François Laplan-
tine’, L’Information Psychiatrique 3 (March 2000): 249–251, here 250.
14. Ibid., 250. Benslama’s objection to scholar François Laplantine, for example, was based
on the lack of empirical grounding of his theorising of métissage and how it ignored ‘analysable
identities’. Thus, Benslama’s concern lay beyond the scientific criticism of the void absolutes of
philosophy, however differentially defined.
15. Benslama, ‘Métissage de l’inconscient’, 250.
16. Fethi Benslama, La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam (Paris: Aubier, 2002), 91f.
17. Ibid.
18. In other words, Franco-Maghrebi Muslims suffer from being cut off from their culture,
society and family, and the continuity and interconnectedness with which these different spheres
adhere to the Islamic tradition; this is what Benslama terms a genealogical de-legitimisation.
19. Fethi Benslama, ‘Présentation’, Cahiers Intersignes, no. 1: ‘Entre Psychanalyse et Islam’
(1990): 5–8, here 5.
20. Ibid., 7. Benslama’s engagement with the discourse of métissage is most succinctly spelled
out in his response to François Laplantine, a French ethnologist who lectured at a conference
entitled ‘Psychiatrie, langue, culture’, in Fort-de-France from 5–10 December, 1999. Laplantine’s
lecture, ‘Pour un pensée métissée’, and Benslama’s response, ‘Métissage de l’inconscient’, were
published in the March 2000 edition (no. 3) of L’information psychiatrique.
21. Fethi Benslama, ‘Majida Khattari. Hyperbole du féminin’, Art Press 18 (1997): 107–109,
here 109.
22. Fethi Benslama, ‘L’enfant et le Lieu’, Cahiers Intersignes 3 (1991): 51–68, here 51.
23. Fethi Benslama, ‘Il est naturel…’, Lignes 31 (May 1997): 69–77, here 77.
24. Ibid., 76.
25. Ibid., 73f.
26. France Proulx, ‘Recent Demographic Developments in France’, Population-E 58, no.
4–5 (2003): 525–558. Although French statistics do not officially differentiate between the re-
ligious or cultural origins of its citizens, figures suggest that the number of marriages between
French citizens and non-French citizens is rising more quickly than the number of non-mixed
marriages.
27. Claudine Phillipe, Gabrielle Varro, and Gérard Neyrand, Liberté, Égalité, Mixité… Conju-
gales. Une sociologie du couple mixte (Paris: Anthropos, 1998), 49.
28. Ibid., 49-51.
29. Benslama, ‘Présentation’, 7.
30. Benslama, La Psychanalyse, 106f.
31. Benslama, ‘La demeure empruntée’, 76.
32. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 266.
288 Ruth Mas

33. For a discussion of the intersections between liberalism and Islam see Saba Mahmood,
‘Questioning Liberalism Too’, Boston Review 28, no. 2 (April/May 2003): 18–20, here 19.
34. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 12–14, in which he discusses understanding modernity as a project and
the role that ‘imaginative literature’ plays within it.
35. Mas, ‘Compelling the Muslim Subject’, 585f.
36. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold. Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1998), 50; emphasis added.
37. Ibid., 47.
38. Asad, Genealogies, 248–253.
39. The colonial agenda of the liberation of the Muslim feminine subject was most carefully
executed by the Bureaux Arabes, which, supported by the crypto-Catholicism of St. Simonian
ideas, articulated the hope of fusing the races through its promotion of mixed marriages. The
prominent St. Simonians in the Bureaux took the belief in the fusion of races to heart by marrying
Maghrebi women, converting to Islam and eventually introducing and developing the concept of
a ‘French Muslim’, so that French Muslims also were the ones who assured the control over their
Maghrebi subjects in function of French imperial aims.
40. Benslama, ‘La demeure empruntée’, 84.
41. Asad, Genealogies, 287f. Asad is writing in the context of the reaction to the Rushdie
Affair in the UK, which also had a strong impact in France and to which Benslama also reacted.
See Fethi Benslama, ‘Rushdie or the textual question’, in For Rushdie. Essays by Arab and Muslim
Writers in Defense of Free Speech, ed. Anouar Abdallah (New York: Braziller, 1994), 82–91, and
Benslama, Une Fiction troublante. De l’origine en partage (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 1994).
42. Asad, Formations, 13.
43. Ibid., 7. Asad argues: ‘The difficulties with secularism as a doctrine of war and peace
in the world is not that it is European (and therefore alien to the non-West) but that it is closely
connected with the rise of a system of capitalist nation-states – mutually suspicious and grossly
unequal in power and prosperity, each possessing a collective personality that is differently medi-
ated and therefore differently guaranteed and threatened.’
44. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 777–795,
here 778.
45. Ruth Mas, Margins of Tawhid. Liberalism and the Discourse of Plurality in Contemporary Is-
lamic Thought, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 2006.
46. Mahmood, ‘Questioning’, 19.
 Contributors

Margarida Calafate Ribeiro is Researcher at the Centre for Social Stud-

ies, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and has held Eduardo Lourenço’s Chair
at the University of Bologna since 2008. Her research interests include post-
colonial studies, Portuguese literature and literature from Portuguese-speaking
countries, the history of the Portuguese Empire, colonial wars, and women
and war. Her latest work was on the Portuguese colonial wars and the expe-
rience of wives of war veterans in Africa, whose testimony she gathered and
edited. She is the author of Uma História de Regressos. Império, Guerra Colonial e
Pós-Colonialismo (2004) and África no Feminino. As mulheres portuguesas e a Guerra
Colonial (2007). She has also co-edited Fantasmas e Fantasias Imperiais no Imag-
inário Português Contemporâneo (2003); Lendo Angola (2008); Moçambique. Das
palavras escritas (2008); and Atlantico periferico. Il postcolonialismo Portoghese e il
sistema mondiale (2008).

Liliana Ellena teaches Women’s and Gender History at the University of Tu-
rin, Italy and has been a Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Es-
sen. She completed her master’s degree in Gender and Ethnic Studies at the
University of Greenwich (UK) and received a Ph.D. from the University of
Turin. Her work, concentrated on the fields of gender and cultural history,
has explored links between visual sources and new objects and approaches of
research including post-colonialism and transnational history. She is the co-
author of Il Quarto Stato. La fortuna di un’immagine tra cultura e politica (2002);
has edited the new Italian edition of Frantz Fanon’s I dannati della terra (2007);
and has co-edited a monographic issue of the journal Zapruder on transnational
women’s movements (2007). Her most recent publication is ‘“White Woman
Listen!” La linea del genere negli studi postcoloniali’ in Gli studi postcoloniali.
Un’introduzione, eds Shaul Bassi and Andrea Sirotti (2010). During the last few
years, her research has focused on the memory of colonialism in European cin-
ema. Currently, she is completing a monograph on competing representations
of modernity in interwar Italian cinema.
290 Contributors

Alexander C.T. Geppert directs the Emmy Noether research group ‘The Fu-
ture in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twenti-
eth Century’ at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of Freie Universität Berlin. He
received master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Georg-August-
Universität Göttingen, and a Ph.D. from the European University Institute in
Florence. He has held various long-term fellowships at the University of Cali-
fornia in Berkeley, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris,
the German Historical Institute in London, the Internationales Forschungs-
zentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut
in Essen and at Harvard University. Publications include numerous articles
and six (co-)edited volumes: European Ego-Histoires. Historiography and the Self,
1970–2000 (2001); Orte des Okkulten (2003); Esposizioni in Europa tra Otto e
Novecento. Spazi, organizzazione, rappresentazioni (2004); Ortsgespräche. Raum und
Kommunikation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2005); Wunder. Poetik und Politik des
Staunens im 20. Jahrhundert (2010); and Imagining Outer Space. European Astro-
culture in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming 2011); as well as a monograph,
Fleeting Cities. Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (2010). At present, he
is working on a comprehensive history of outer space and extraterrestrial life in
the European imagination of the twentieth century.

Jack (John) Rankine Goody was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge.
During the Second World War, he was stationed in the Near East, Italy and
Germany. He undertook fieldwork in Ghana, later in India (Gujarat) and in
China. Jack Goody has written extensively on literacy, the family, the Bagre
myth of the LoDagaa, and on cuisine and the culture of flowers. His most
recent works are The East in the West (1996); Islam in Europe (2003); Capitalism
and Modernity.The Great Debate (2004); The Theft of History (2007); Renaissances.
The One or the Many? (2009); The Eurasian Miracle (2009); and Europe, the Near
East and Metals (forthcoming).

Jo Labanyi is Professor of Spanish at New York University and a Fellow of

the British Academy. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish
cultural history, she is founding editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.
Her most recent books are Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel
(2000); the edited volume Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain (2002);
and Spanish Literature. A Very Short Introduction (2010). She is currently co-
authoring Cinema and Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain and A Cultural
History of Modern Spanish Literature, and co-editing Europe and Love in Cinema
and A Companion to Spanish Cinema.

Alf Lüdtke is Honorary Professor at the University of Erfurt and Distinguished

Visiting Professor at Hanyang University, Seoul/Republic of Korea. The foci
of his research are the history of work and of working people; domination as
 Contributors 291

socio-cultural practice and process (especially policing); notions and perspec-

tives of the history of the everyday; and the visual in history and historiogra-
phy. His publications include: Gemeinwohl, Polizei und Festungspraxis. Staatliche
Gewaltsamkeit und innere Verwaltung in Preußen, 1815–1850 (1982; trans. into
English 1989); Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und
Lebensweisen (1989; trans. into French 1993, English 1995 and Korean 2002);
Herrschaft als soziale Praxis. Historische und sozialanthropologische Studien (1991,
ed.); Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in
den Faschismus (1993); Die DDR im Bild (2004, co-ed.); and The No Man´s Land
of Violence. Extreme Wars in the 20th Century (2006, co-ed.). He has founded and
co-edited the journal Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen (SOWI), and is one of
the founders of the journals Historische Anthropologie and WerkstattGeschichte, as
he is a co-founder of the book series Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit.

Ruth Mas is a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
She is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Islam and Critical Theory in the
Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Cur-
rently, her scholarly focus is on the production of secular Islamic intellectual
traditions in France and their engagement with post-structuralist thought. She
has received visiting fellowship at Cambridge University, Viadrina University,
and has been a Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen. She has
also attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University and
the Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at the University of California,
Irvine. In addition to editing two special issues of the journals European Re-
view of History and Nations and Nationalism, her publications include ‘Love as
Difference. The Politics of Love in the Thought of Malek Chebel’, European
Review of History (2004); ‘Compelling the Muslim Subject. (Post)Colonial Vio-
lence, Memory and the Public Performativity of “Secular/Cultural Islam”’,
Muslim World (2006); and ‘Transnational Politics. Recent Accounts of Muslims
in France’, Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies (2010).

Sandra Mass is Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Universität

Bielefeld, and Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS).
Her publications include Weiße Helden, schwarze Krieger. Zur Geschichte kolonialer
Männlichkeit, 1918–1964 (2006) and articles on racism, development aid and
gender in the twentieth century. Her most recent publication is ‘Mäßigung der
Leidenschaften. Kinder und monetäre Lebensführung im 19. Jahrhundert’ in Das
schöne Selbst. Zur Genealogie des modernen Subjekts zwischen Ethik und Ästhetik, eds
Jens Elberfeld and Marcus Otto (2009). She is also one of the editors of L’Homme.
Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft. Her current research
project concerns the history of capitalism and focuses on the cultural and every-
day history of money during the nineteenth century, entitled ‘Kinderstube des
Kapitalismus: Geld, Kinder und ökonomische Erziehung im 19. Jahrhundert’.
292 Contributors

Almira Ousmanova is Professor of the Department of Media at the Euro-

pean Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her research interests in-
clude theories of visual culture (in particular, film theory in the digital age and
visual sociology); studies of gender representations in visual arts; and the social
and cultural history of Soviet cinema. Her main publications include Umberto
Eco. Paradoxes of Interpretation (2000); Gender Histories in Eastern Europe (2002,
co-ed.); Bi-Textuality and Cinema (2003, ed.); Gender and Transgression in Visual
Arts (2006, ed.); Visual (As) Violence (2007); and Belarusian Format. Invisible Real-
ity (2008). Currently, she is working on a monograph History and Representation.
Cinematic Images of the Soviet.

Luisa Passerini is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turin and

External Professor of History and Civilisation at the European University In-
stitute, Florence. Among her recent publications are, as author: Europe in Love,
Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics Between the Wars (1999); Il mito d’Europa.
Radici antiche per nuovi simboli (2002); Memory and Utopia.The Primacy of Intersub-
jectivity (2007); Love and the Idea of Europe (2009); Sogno di Europa (2009); and,
as editor: Across the Atlantic. Cultural Exchanges between Europe and the United
States (2000); Figures d’Europe. Images and Myths of Europe (2003); a special issue
of the European Review of History on ‘Europe and Love – L’Europe et l’amour’
(2004, with Ruth Mas); Fuori della norma. Storie lesbiche nell’Italia della prima
metà del Novecento (2007, with Nerina Milletti); and Women Migrants from East
to West. Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe (2007, with Dawn
Lyon, Ioanna Laliotou and Enrica Capussotti).

William M. Reddy is William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor

of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. His published works include
Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (1987); The Invisible Code. Honor and Senti-
ment in Postrevolutionary France (1997); and The Navigation of Feeling. A Frame-
work for the History of Emotions (2001). His current research interests include
theories of culture, methodological approaches to the history of emotions, and
the history of romantic love.

Alexis Schwarzenbach studied modern history at Balliol College in Oxford

and received a Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence in
1997. He is currently finishing a post-doctoral research project on the cultural
history of twentieth-century monarchies at Universität Zürich. His publica-
tions include an article in Contemporary European History entitled ‘Royal Pho-
tographs. Emotions for the People’ (2004); a biography of the most famous
Swiss scientist, Das verschmähte Genie. Albert Einstein und die Schweiz (2005); and
a biography of his great-grandmother Die Geborene. Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille
und ihre Familie (2004). Both biographies have been translated into French.
 Contributors 293

Marci Shore is Associate Professor of History at Yale University, where she

teaches European intellectual history and carries out research on poetic mi-
lieus, intellectual exchange and the cultural history of totalitarianism. She is
the author of Caviar and Ashes. A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism,
1918–1968 and articles on Jewish, gender and literary history, and the transla-
tor of Michał Głowin;ski’s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons. She is currently
at work on two studies: The Self Laid Bare, an examination of the central Eu-
ropean encounters occasioned by phenomenology and structuralism; and The
Taste of Ashes, an account of Eastern Europe’s grappling with its memories of
totalitarianism at the century’s end.

Alison Sinclair is Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and Professor of Mod-

ern Spanish Culture and Intellectual History at Cambridge University. Her
published works include The Deceived Husband. A Kleinian Approach to the Lit-
erature of Infidelity (1993); Uncovering the Mind. Unamuno, the Unknown, and the
Vicissitudes of Self (2001); Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-century Spain. Hil-
degart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform (2007); and Trafficking
Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Spain (2009). She has also done work on
sexual reform and the comparative history of eugenics in Europe. Her current
project is on ‘Wrongdoing in Spain, 1800-1936: Realities, Representations
and Reactions’.

Svetlana Slapšak is Professor of Anthropology of the Ancient Worlds and of

Gender Anthropology, and the Dean at Ljubljana’s Institutum Studiorum Hu-
manitatis (ISH) – Ljubljana Graduate School in Humanities. Her research as a
classical philologist and anthropologist has mainly focused on women’s cultures
in the Balkans – from ancient Greece through romanticism to the conflicts of
the 1990s and the present day. Since 1994, Svetlana Slapšak has been the editor
in chief of the journal ProFemina, a quarterly for women’s culture and feminism
in Belgrade. Her main publications include War Discourse, Women’s Discourse.
Studies and Essays on Wars in Yugoslavia and Russia (2000); Balkan Women for Peace
(2003); Women’s Icons of the Twentieth Century (2003); Women’s Icons of the Antiq-
uity (2006); and Little Black Dress. Essays in Anthropology and Feminism (2007).
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 Index

abdication 145, 149 Alegre, Manuel 15, 223–6, 227, 230n36,

Acción Española 199
Acerbi, Libero 81
Action Française 13, 198–9
Adam and Eve 26–7
Adams, Michael 34, 52n7
admiration 37, 40, 71, 78, 84, 85, 96, 147,
155n53, 200–201
adoption 272–3, 277, 282, 287n10
Adorno, Theodor W. 258
Africa 5
Central Africa 8
colonialism in 7–8
East Africa 89, 241–4
Euro-African romance in Congo
77–83
in First World War, colonial literature
on 243–4
German East Africa, boundary
transgressions in 241–4
Heimat in 16
love for 90–91
sexual representations of 242
soldiers from, fear of 235–9, 245
white colonial romance, adaptation
for Fascist times 83–7
see also Angola; overseas Europeans
African Journey (Alegre, M.) 223–6, 230n36
African Journey (Mendonça, J. de) 223–5
L’Airone (Cipolla, A.) 77–9, 83, 84, 85
Albert Victor, Prince 150
Alcácer Quibir 223, 224, 225, 230n38,
231n39
Alciphron 254
231n39
Alfieri, Dino 94n56
Alfonso XIII 200
Algeria 230, 269, 274, 286n4
citizenship of 272, 273
family law in 272–3, 277, 287n10
and France, past and continuing
relationship between 275–86
independence for 278
people of Algerian extraction 271
Allison, Anne 50
Ambedkhar, Dr. B. R. 29
American empire, Don Juan and conquest
of 204
Amicucci, Ermanno 94n56
De Amore (Capellanus) 37
L’amour et l’Occident (Rougemont, D. de)
11, 152–3
Amselle, Jean-Loup 93n35, 286n3
Ana the Kalunga (Raposo, H.) 219
Anderson, Perry 72n13
Angola 15, 221–2, 223–4, 226, 229n14,
230n36, 251
Popular Movement for the Liberation
of Angola (MPLA) 15, 223–4, 225,
230n37
anti-Americanism 144–5, 150, 153
anti-Bolshevism 240–41
AntiEuropa 200
Apollinaire, Guillaume 117, 118, 119,
121, 128, 129, 133
Archibald, Constance 200
Arendt, Hannah 258
302 Index

Aristogeiton 254 Beck-Gernsheim, Elizabeth 34, 52

Aristophanes 16, 253–4, 263, 264 Beigbeder, Frédéric 47
Armani, Luigi 92n16 Belloc, Hillaire 201
Arni, Caroline 18n2, 75 Bely, Andrei 103
As Good as It Gets ( James L. Brooks film) Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 83
46 Benjamin, Walter 59, 60
Asad, Talal 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, Benninghaus, Christina 246n1
287n32, 288n34, 288n43 Benslama, Fethi 17, 270, 271–5, 275–86
asexual love 24, 188 Berghof 158–9, 173n2
Asia 5, 22, 104, 225 Berlin Wall, effect of fall 96–7
liberation movements 220 Berliner Börsen-Zeitung 238, 248n32
literature of, love in 2–3 Berrios, German E. 176n27
South Asia 6–7, 51 betrayal 78, 107, 118, 129, 132–3, 238,
Aspasia 254 274
aspiration 34, 65 Beveridge, Ray 247n13
disillusionment and 99 birthday wishes (and cards) 163, 164, 165,
assimilation 87, 212, 269–70, 271, 276, 167, 170
279, 282 Bis zur letzten Stunde ( Junge, T.) 158–9
Ateneo de Madrid 179, 190, 194n4 ‘Black Horror’ 234, 235–9, 245
Athenaeus 254–5, 256 Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (West, R.)
Athens, golden age of 253–5 259–60
attraction, physical 23–4, 31, 44, 56n61, Blotzheim, Dirk 249n53
79, 82, 99, 187 Blum, Léon 147
Atze, Marcel 174n7 Boccaccio, Giovanni 43
St Augustine 10, 39, 127 Bogatko, Marian 125, 126–7, 132
Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light Bolshevism
of War (Maeztu, R. de) 201 anti-Bolshevism 240–41
auto da fe 207–8, 209 love for state, politics of mass
autoeroticism 96 participation 62
avant-garde 118, 121, 123, 128, 133 Boothe, Clare 144–5
Azorín ( José Martinez Ruiz) 198 de Borneil, Giraut 36–7
Aztec societies, religious beliefs of 207–8 The Borrowed Dwelling (Benslama, F.) 270,
271–5, 275–86
Baartman, Saartjie 86–7 changing traditions, multiplicity of
Baccari, Edoardo 92n15 286
Bakhtin, Michael 132, 256, 261 ‘common body’, fiction of 279
Baldwin, John 43–4 conversion in age of religious
Baldwin, Stanley 138, 140, 142–3, 148 intolerance 282–3
Balibar, Étienne 88, 94n59 diasporic movements 277
Balkans 14, 199, 256, 259–60, 262 disinheritance 276–7
Balticum 239–41, 244 experience of ‘Islam’ 281
Freikorps in 239–41 feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim
Barrera, Giulia 90, 94n65 subject, possibilities for 284–5
Barthes, Roland 2 France and Algeria, past and
Basch, Norma 155n42 continuing relationship between
Bassi, Shaul 93n53 275–86
Bastos, Cristiana 219, 220 Franco-Maghrebi Muslims in
Baxmann, Inge 246n9 France, case study of 271–5
Beauvoir, Simone de 258 genealogical de-legitimisation 272,
Beaverbrook, Lord Max Aitken 142, 143 281, 287n18
Beck, Ulrich 34, 52
 Index 303

identity-nationality-integration Butor, Michel 3

279–80 Bynum, Caroline 23
Islam, hegemonic potential of 280
Islam and liberalism, relationship Caeiro de Matta, José 221
between 285 Café Ziemian;ska 117–33
métissage, notion of 269–70, 276–9, Calafate Ribeiro, Margarida 15, 17,
281–2, 283, 286, 287n14, 287n20 215–32
migration, exile and 278–80 Calvin, John 44
Muslim subjectivity 281–2 Camões, Luís de 215–16, 223, 224,
Qur’an and religious texts of Islam 225–6, 228
284, 285 Canning, Mary 152
religious intolerance 282–3 Cantale, Gianbattista Primo 81, 92n21
resistance to Islamic extremism Capellanus, Andreas 37, 43
280–81 Carbajosa, Mónica and Pablo 211n5
social violence in France 278 Carey of Clifton, Lord George 35
Bosworth, Richard J.B. 176n29 caricature 104–5, 106, 219
Bottai, Giuseppe 199 Carmelites 265
Bottego, Vittorio 82, 93n33 Carvalho, Henrique de 218
Boudet, Jean-Patrice 41 Casanova’s Cloak (Alexander Galin film)
bouleversement 105 98–9
Bowie, David 158, 172–3 Cassirer, Ernst 59, 265
Boxer, Charles 217 Castro Henriques, Isabel 228, 232n57
Boysen, Benjamin 38 Cathars 22, 27
Brandt, Willy 169 Catulli Carmina (Orff, C.) 258
Branham, Robert Bracht 268n7 Cavallo, Adolfo 40
Brantlinger, Patrick 92n13 Celaleddin Rumi, Mevlana 26
Braun, Mieczysław 118, 120, 121 celebrities 168, 169, 176n27
Braund, David 267n6 Celestina (Comedy of Calisto and
Braunschweiger Tageszeitung 163–4 Malibea) 197, 199, 201–2, 209
Brazil 6–7, 51, 57, 219–20, 221, 226, Chacel, Rosa 180, 182
229n20 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 94n58, 212n37
Brecht, Bertold 130 Channon, Henry (‘Chips’) 142
Brie, Alfred 247n13 charisma 160, 173–4n6
Brik, Lila 129 charismatic leadership 13, 173–4n6,
Brodsky, Josef 103 209, 230n36
Broniewska, Janina 123, 125, 127–8, of Hitler, Adolf 160, 171, 173
132 political charisma 169
Broniewski, Władysław 118, 120, 121, Charles, Prince of Wales 35
122, 123, 124, 125–6, 127–8, 129, Charles d’Orléans 41
130, 132 Charles V 204
‘Bronze Horseman’ (Pushkin, A.) 103 Chaucer, Geoffrey 41, 43
Brownlee, Kevin 54n24 Chesterton, G.K. 201
Brüne, Martin 176n27 Chevalier de la Charette (Chrétien de
Buddhism 23, 29 Troyes) 43
Budimir, Milan 262 China 260
Bühmann, Henning 174n7 ‘incoming-daughter-in-law
Bundesarchiv 162, 174n11 marriages’ in 24
Buñuel, Luis 105 love poems 28
Bureaux Arabes 288n39 Chrétien de Troyes 43
El burlador de Sevilla (Tirso de Molina Christianity
play) 201
304 Index

Christian and Aztec societies, trust in Europeans 85

religious beliefs of 207–8 see also overseas Europeans
‘Christian European roots’ 3 conquistador, Don Juan as prototype
Christian marriage, advocation of 202–5, 209–10
203–4 Conrad, Joseph 121, 249n55
in Europe 5 consolation, imaginary of 179–80
European Christianity 22–3 Consten, Hermann 242, 249n54
Judeo-Christian values 25, 27 construction
Reformation 44, 54n31 of borders 241
religion and love 21–3, 27 of dyad Europe-love 7
virtue in 38 of emotional links 151
chronodistopia 256–7 of Europeanness 4, 9, 91
Churchill, Winston S. 148 of gender difference 184
Ciano, Galeazzo 90, 94n64 of gender relations in society 187
cinema in post-Soviet era 95–9 historical reconstruction 70–71
Cinzio, Gianbattista Giraldi 87 of masculinity 245–6
Cipolla, Arnaldo 7–8, 76–7, 77–9, 80–82, of self 34
83–6, 87–9, 91 of sexual desire 47–8
Cipriani, Lidio 87, 93n47 consumer society, lure of 107–8
citizenship 16–17, 251, 270, 274 conversion in age of religious intolerance
acquisition of 279 282–3
of Algeria 272 Conze, Vanessa 246n1
of France 273, 274, 277, 278 Cooper, Eleanor 152
Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud, S.) Coppock, Herbert 149
180 Correia, Germano 219
Clark, Pamela 153–4n1 Il Corriere della Sera 80, 169
Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian de 168, Cosmopolitan 47
176n26 courtly love 5–6, 36–8, 40, 41–2, 43,
Collège d’Europe 200 44–5, 50
colonialism courtship 23–4, 125
colonial war, love in time of 223–6 Cousin, Victor 6, 46
Europeanness and 76–7, 80–81, 86 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky, F.) 103
family colonisation 222 The Crisis of Humanism (Maeztu, R. de)
Italian discourse 89 201
modern colonialism, Fascist Critica fascista 199
interpretation of 84–5 Croce, Benedetto 264
romance, competition for 84 culture 33, 181, 221, 225, 227, 236, 253,
The Coloured Socage Bailiffs on the Rhine 256
(Stehle, B.) 236 Balkan cultures 256
Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, M.) 47 Bronze Age cultures 29
communal apartments, life in 99–100, Catholic culture 258
101–2 Christian culture 25
communism civilisation and 119
collapse of 97 codes of ‘love’ 60–67
communism-in-power in Poland coexistence of cultures 270
126–8 cultural differences in love relations
compassionate love 24 14–18
concupiscentia 38, 41–3, 51 cultural studies 3, 4
Congo 8, 76, 238, 251 culture shock 105
Europeans, experiences in 79–80, cultured elites 178
81–2, 86 cultured readership 182
 Index 305

dissemination of 178 Defence of Hispanic Values (Maeztu, R. de)

‘Feminine Culture’ 185, 189 209
feminism and 262 Deipnosophistae (Athenaeus) 254–5
French culture 104 Deist, Wilhelm 72–3n21
gender, society and 192–3, 255 DeJean, Joan 56n57
German culture 240 Dejeux, Jean 286n5
indigenous cultures 77–8 Denmark 147–8
institutions of 21 denunciations 62–3
Islamic culture 25, 28 deportation 278
Italian culture 89 Deppe, Ludwig 242, 243
liminal cultures 257 Deshpande, Shashi 3
Maghrebi cultures 270, 287n18 Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung 66–7
miscegenation of East and West Deutscher, Isaac 117, 121, 132
204–5 dictators
Muslim culture 281, 282 see Franco; Hitler; Mussolini; Primo
national cultures 88 de Rivera; Salazar; Stalin
oral cultures 27 dictatorship 13, 59, 146, 161, 179–80,
popular culture 34, 253 192, 200–201, 225
Portuguese culture 231 La Difensa della razza 87
in post-Soviet Russia 96, 99, 100– Dinzelbacher, Peter 36
101, 102–3, 104, 105–6, 109, 111 disinterested love 105–11
print culture 190, 191 dislocation 129, 177–8
Russian culture 103, 106, 109, 111 Distler, Heinrich 247n13
secular culture 258 divine love 21, 23, 26
Soviet culture 100–101, 105, 109 Dobrotvorsky, Sergei 112n14
Spanish culture 208, 210, 211n6 Dobson, Andrew 194n2
universal culture 205–6 Doerr, Karin 177n33
Western (and European) culture 23, Doerr, Margarete 68
99, 104, 109, 197, 210, 245 domination 58–60
women’s culture 252 Don Juan 2, 3, 49, 206
written cultures 28 conquistador, prototype of 202–5,
Yugoslav society and 260 209–10
cultural danger point 193
da Gama, Vasco 216, 226 decadent rather than romantic 194
Dages Nyheter 147, 148 hedonism, embodiment of 13, 201,
Daily Express 142, 145 209
Daily Mirror (New York) 139–40 modern egoist 200–202
Daily Telegraph 143–4 ‘Notes towards a biology of Don
Daily Worker 142 Juan’ 187–8
Dal Congo (Cipolla, A.) 81 political readings of 197–205
dalliance 23–4 ‘rake’ and danger to himself and
Damkjaer, Søren 107, 112n27 others 45
Dante Alighieri 6, 22, 38 sexual prowess 203–4
Dantín Cereceda, Juan 182 Don Juan and Don-Juanism (Madariaga, S.
Davis, Belinda 72n20 de) 206
Dawson, Graham 250n65 Don Juan Tenorio ( José Zorrilla moral
De Clérambault Syndrome 168 play) 201
death, love and 130–32 Don-Juanism or Six Don Juans and a Lady
decadence 7, 82, 86, 106, 124, 194, 205, (Salvador de Madariaga radio play) 206
209
306 Index

Don Quixote, Don Juan and Celestina. modernity and 59, 69–70
Essays in Collective Sentiment (Maeztu, emotionology 70
R. de) 199, 201–2 emotions
Donne, John 52 articulation of 60, 68, 70
Dörner, Bernward 72n16 construction of emotional links 151
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 103 emotional disparity in regard for
double love 3 Hitler 160
Dumont, Louis 28–9 role in politics 59–60
Dunn, Kevin C. 92n30 sexuality and 76
work of being German and 63–5
Eanes de Zurara, Gomes 215 Enlightenment in Europe 1, 2, 6, 45,
earthly love 21, 23, 27 208, 210
Eastern Europe 16–17 Ennes, António 218
see also Balticum; Poland Epicurus 254
Eberlein, August 237, 247n13 Epstein, Joseph 155n42
Ecclesiazousae (Aristophanes) 264 equality and love 28–9, 30–31
Echenberg, Myron J. 247n18 Erbe, Ida 170–71, 176–7n31
Edward VIII 10–11, 137 Erdmann, Hugo 250n61
abdication of 145, 149 Eritrea 89
criticism from Europe on romance Ermler, Friedrich 104
of 147–8 Eros 263, 264, 265, 266, 267
European media, restraint on Esenin, Sergei 121, 130
romance of 146–8 España 178
letters from public to king in love El Espectador 178
148–51 Esquire 47
love, media and role in Britain of Estado Novo in Portugal 220, 221, 222
143 Ethiopian War 85, 86, 88
media reports on Mrs Simpson and ethnicity 15, 207, 270–71, 272, 274, 280,
139–41 282
morganatic marriage proposal 145 ethnic background 35
people and king, love story between ethnic conflict 107–8
151–3 ethnic difference 285
silence in British media on romance ethnic identities 235
with Mrs Simpson 142–5 ethnic origin 284
value of love for 143–4 ethnic positioning, fluctuations in
‘World‘s Greatest Romance’ 137–8 257
see also Simpson, Wallis ethnic stereotypes 209
Egypt 5 multi-ethnic states 259
love in ancient Egypt 28 ethnographic remarks 80–81
Eintopfsonntag (Nazi call for nationwide Étiemble, René 112n24
sharing) 63, 72n18 eugenic vision of society 187–8
Eiseman, Selse E. 155n43 Euripides 262, 263
Eisenstein, Sergei 128, 199 Euro-African romance in Congo 77–83
Eleanor of Aquitaine 37 Eurocentrism 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 18, 75,
elites 36, 38, 44, 138, 178–9, 181, 200, 78, 215, 227
222, 251 Europa 129
Ellena, Liliana 7, 16, 18n5, 75–94 Europe
elopement 44–5 belonging to 1
Emker, William C. (Eucker, Wilhelm K.) ‘Christian European roots’ 3
161–2 courtly love in 5–6
emotionality 17, 160
 Index 307

criticism on romance of Edward VIII Falange Española 199

from 147–8 family colonisation 222
cultural differences in 18 Fanon, Frantz 90
cultural differences in love relations Fascism 59
14–18 Italian Fascist Declaration of Empire
Eastern Europe 16–17 85
Enlightenment in 1, 2, 6, 45, 208, love for state, mass participation and
210 62, 67–8
Europe in Love project 1, 18n7, 179, ‘Father State’, notion of 60, 61–3
194, 194n1 feelings, presence and impact of 58,
exile in 97–8 59–60, 62, 64–6, 67–8, 70–71
imperialism of 14 Felski, Rita 193
Islam in 17 ‘Feminine Culture’ 185, 189
love in 1–2, 3, 4–5, 7–8, 8–9, 9–10 femininity
media in, restraint on romance of Revista de Occidente (RO) on 184–5,
Edward VIII 146–8 187, 194
migrants to, cultural roles of 3 in Russia 105
nexus Europe and love 9–14 feminism 3, 46, 189
Orientalism and, clash between love in time of war 252, 259, 261, 266
internal forms of 90 fiction 45
peripheries of 14–18 Une Fiction troublante (Benslama, F.) 270,
Portugal between Atlantic and 288
215–16 Figes, Orlando 112n22
racial differences in 18 Filesi, Cesira 92n17
romantic love, Western tradition of First World War 6, 198
6, 21–23, 33–35, 47–48 Africa in, colonial literature on
Russia and, encounters in post- 243–4
Soviet cinema 95–9 love for state, politics of mass
European Economic Community (EEC) participation 62, 63–4
227 romantic love, Western tradition of
European Union (EU) 9 46
Europeanness 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17 Versailles Treaty 83, 233, 235–6,
colonialism and 76–7, 80–81, 86 237, 244
construction of 4, 9, 91 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 47
divisions within 18 Foreign Legion 241, 249n53
exclusion from and meaning of 96 Foucault, Michel 47, 72n10, 195n31,
paradigmatic Europeanness 12–13 288n44
Polishness and 121 Fragment of Empire (Friedrich Ermler film)
of Spain 193–4 104
whiteness in Fascist Italy and 87–91 France 14
Evans, Richard J. 72n11 and Algeria, past and continuing
Exaltation of Marriage (Giménez Caballero, relationship between 275–86
E.) 202 citizenship of 273, 274, 277, 278
exile French ‘liberal’ colonialism 84
Europe as place of 97–8 le couple métissé, ambivalent status of
for Franco-Maghrebi peoples 278–80 271, 275–6
overseas Europeans 82–3 mariages blancs (fake marriages) 278–9
exotic landscapes 83–4 métissage, notion of 17, 86–7, 88,
92n28, 269–70, 276–9, 281–2,
face 34, 40, 52, 67, 78, 84, 118, 127, 217 283, 286, 287n14, 287n20
faith 22, 44, 133, 144, 200, 207, 274 ‘racial anarchy’ in 87
308 Index

social violence in 278 discussed in Revista de Occidente (RO)

see also Paris 179, 181–2, 183–5, 186, 187,
Franco, Francisco 199, 200, 205 190, 191–2, 193–4
Franco-Maghrebi peoples 17 relations in society, construction of
changing traditions, multiplicity of 187
286
‘common body’, fiction of 279 gender difference
conversion in age of religious construction of 184
intolerance 282–3 love in time of war 258
diasporic movements 277 see also Freidenberg, Olga
disinheritance for 276–7 gender studies 252, 255, 266
feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim Genealogies of Religion (Asad, T.) 287n32,
subject, possibilities for 284–5 288n41
genealogical de-legitimisation 272, genealogy
281, 287n18 of ‘colonial intimate regime’ 90–91
identity-nationality-integration genealogical de-legitimisation 272,
279–80 281, 287n18
Muslims in France, case study of Genius of Spain (Giménez Caballero, E.)
271–5 202, 204, 210
religious intolerance for 282–3 geopolitical romance 76–7
resistance to Islamic extremism George V 137, 145, 149–50
280–81 George VI 143
Frank, Andre Gunder 182 Geppert, Alexander C. T. 11–12, 158–77
freedom of choice 23–4 Germany 14
Freeman, Kimberley A. 155n43 German engagement with work
Freidenberg, Olga 16, 256, 257–8, 266–7 65–7
reflections of love in wartime 261–2, Germanness 66
263–5 National Socialism 160, 161, 165,
see also gender difference/love in 171, 172
time of war Nazi regime in 9, 11–12, 158–73
Freikorps 15, 73n24, 248n37 Office of Military Government for
Weimar Republic and 234, 244, 245 Germany (US) 162
Freud, Sigmund 47, 180–81, 188, 190, see also Weimar Republic
191, 192 Gerner, Kristian 112n25
Freyre, Gilberto 219–22, 229n20 Gerth, Hans 174n7
Führer 63, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, Gertsen, Alexander 112n21
167, 170, 171, 172, 173 Gestapo 62, 72
futurism 118–20, 120–21 Giddens, Anthony 33–4
Gil, Octavio Victoria 211n9
Gabrielli, Gianluca 94n61 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto 13, 182,
La Gaceta Literaria 199 194, 198, 199–200, 205, 206, 207,
Galin, Alexander 98–9 208, 209, 210, 211n6, 212n29
gallantry 45 American empire, Don Juan and
Gandhi, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) 29 conquest of 204
Garbo, Greta 203 Christian marriage, advocation of
Garon, Sheldon 49–50 203–4
Gasteiner, Elio 93n52 cultural miscegenation of East and
Geffray, Christian 218 West 204–5
Gehrmann, Suzanne 82 Don Juan as fascist superman 202–5,
Gellately, Robert 72n15 209–10
gender 16–17
 Index 309

imperial violence, racist apology for Hindu love 23, 28–9, 30, 33, 49, 50–51,
204 57n80
Gitagovinda ( Jayadeva) 6, 49, 50–51 Hindu society 5
Glendon, Mary Ann 155n43 Hippolytos (Euripides) 262
Glick, Thomas F. 195n33, 196n39 historicization of love 4–9
Gloucester, Prince Henry, Duke of 148–9 history of notion of love 24–5
God 36, 39, 44 Hitler, Adolf 147, 172–3, 199
Goebbels, Joseph 159, 171, 172, 177n32, absurdity of letters to 169
177n34, 199 archive of personal love letters
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 184, 260 addressed to 161–2
Gogol, Nikolai 100, 103 ardent love letters to, warnings
Goltz, Rüdiger von der 239 against 167–8
Goodall, Richard 155n49 charisma of 160, 171, 173
Goode, William Josiah 161, 174n8 De Clérambault Syndrome 168
Goody, Jack 4–7, 21–32 educational heterogeneity of authors
Goote, Thor 240, 249n50 of letters to 165
Greece 12 effect on followers and power of
Grimm, Hans 233, 246n3 158–61
grotesque narrative of Window to Paris 100 emotional disparity in regard for 160
Guinea-Bissau 221, 222, 226 frequency, form and length of letters
to 165
Hacking, Ian 287n11 imagined intimacy with 167
Hadewijch 23 importunings 167, 171
Halperin, David M. 53n13 love letters to 11–12, 161–2, 162–8,
Harmodios 254 168–71
Hartmann, Georg Heinrich 240, 249n48 motivations of writers of letters to
Harvard Slavic Studies 260 166, 170–71
Haushofer, Karl 235, 246n10 number and distribution over time
Hearst, William 140, 141, 143 of letters to 163
Heart of Darkness (Conrad, J.) 79, 82 as object of passionate desire 161
The Heart of the Continents (Cipolla, A.) occasions for composition of letters
83–4 to 163–4
Hebraeus, Leo 202, 203 personal circumstances of authors of
hedonism, Don Juan as embodiment of letters to 164–5
13, 201, 209 personal presence imagined by
Hegel, Georg W.F. 184 writers of letters to 170
Heimat in Africa 16, 241–4 public and private concepts of,
Heinz, Friedrich Wilhelm 249n47 disparity between 160–61
Hempel, Jan 121, 122 seduction by 160
Henckel, Heinz 174n13 social background of authors of
Henkel, Franz 249n58 letters to 164–5
Henry, Thomas R. 174n11 sovereignty, addresses to 166–7
Herbst, Ludolf 174n7 Hitler, Lucie 166, 175n18
Herder, Johann Gottfried von 184 Hoffmann-Curtius, Kathrin 173–4n6
heroic love 46–7 Homer 256
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 34 Huang, Chien-shan 24
Herzen, Alexander 103 Hull, Isabel 44, 56n61
Herzog, Dagmar 160, 173–4n6 Hulme, T.H. 201
Hill, Alice Mabel 199 human nature 45, 47
Hindenburg, Paul von 239–40 human sacrifice 207–8
Hund, Wulf D. 246n9
310 Index

Huschko, Wilhelmine 164, 175n15 Islam 5

Husserl, Edmund 265 in Europe 17
Hutton, Betty 145 experience of 281
hybridity 87, 220, 270 hegemonic potential of 280
colonisation and 218 and liberalism, relationship between
285
I Burn Paris ( Jasien;ski, B.) 124 Qur’an and religious texts of 284,
I from One Side and I from the Other Side of 285
My Pug Iron Stove (Wat, A.) 118–19 role of love in 25–7, 29
Ibn Gabiral 24 in Turkey 21–2, 29–30
Ibn Hazm 25 see also Franco-Maghrebi peoples
iconography of romantic love 39–41 Itacker, Fred S. 152
identity Italy 12, 147
collective identity, citizenship and colonial discourse 89
16–17 Ethiopian War 85, 86, 88
crisis in Russia of 108–9 Europeanness in Fascist times 87–91
ethnic identities 235 Fascist Declaration of Empire 85
nationality and integration for genealogy of ‘colonial intimate
Franco-Maghrebi peoples 279–80 regime’ 90–91
immigration see migration manliness in, vulnerability of 90
El Imparcial 178 miscegenation, declaration of 86–7
Imperial Circuit (Giménez Caballero, E.) racial membership, vulnerability of
204–5 90
imperialism 14, 75, 77, 210, 215, 217, whiteness in Fascist Italy 87–91
221, 253
India 6, 29, 50, 219, 283 Jacques de Lalaing 40
individualism 13, 14, 25, 45–6, 201, The Jade Heart (Madariaga, S. de) 200,
202–3, 206, 210 205, 206–9
infantile sexuality 47 Jainism 29
inheritance of love 52 Jampol’sky, Mikhail 112n26
integration 221, 227, 255, 270, 271, 278, Jannasch, Lilli 247n23
283, 284 Japan 6, 147
identity, nationality and 279–80 practice of love in 33, 49–50
intellectual autonomy 122 Jasien;ski, Bruno 119, 120, 124–5, 125–6,
intellectual circle, formation of 181 129, 131
inter-racial love 218 Jayadeva 6, 49, 50–51
inter-racial marriage 84, 87, 206 Je brûle Moscou (Morand, P.) 124
inter-racial relationships 1–2, 77, 83, 88, Jesus Christ 23, 27, 39
218, 222, 245 Joachimsthaler, Anton 175n14
inter-racial sexuality 86, 219, 235, 237–8, Johnson, Roberta 211n4
245 Jones, J.R. 150
Intergirl (Petr Todorovsky film) 97–8 Jornada de África (Alegre, M.) 15
internationalism 104, 107, 181 Juan see Don Juan
intersigne, concept of 271, 277 Judaism 5, 22, 24–5
intimacy 10, 24, 29, 77, 81, 132–3, 167, Judeo-Christian values 25, 27
224, 256 Judt, Tony 134n2
conjugal intimacy 31 Jung, Carl Gustav 13, 180, 182, 190–92,
intimate relationships, public 192–3
function of 76 Jung, Erna 165, 175n17
sexuality and 76 Junge, Traudl 158–9, 162, 167, 173n2
spiritual intimacy 38 Jünger, Ernst 233, 239, 241, 246n2
 Index 311

Junta para Ampliación de Estudios ( JAE) Lebina, Natalia 112n19

179, 194n3 Lebzelter, Gisela 246n12
Lechon;, Jan 117
Kabanova, Elena 113n30 Leeson, Robert George 248n37
Kalinowska, Izabela 98 Leisegang, Heinrich 260
Kant, Immanuel 6, 46, 184 Lenci, Marco 94n57
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 71–2n9, 167, Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 104, 120, 133, 261
175n21 Leopold, King of the Belgians 79–80,
Keen, Maurice 36, 40 81, 84
Kelly, Henry Ansgar 41 Lepsius, M. Rainer 174n7
Kempowski, Walter 173n4 Lessing, Doris 13
Kennedy, Michael 96 letters
Kershaw, Ian 173n3 to Hitler 11–12, 161–2, 162–8,
Keyserling, Hermann 182, 193, 194 168–71
Khrushchev, Nikita S. 127 from public to king in love 148–51
Kierkegaard, Søren 182 Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul von 244–5,
Kieslowski, Krzysztof 97, 98, 109, 110 249–50n60
King’s two bodies 61, 167 Lev, Ola 121–2, 124
Klemperer, Victor 74n41 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 261
Knappen, Marshall M. 154n28 Leyla and Majnun (Nezami Ganjavi) 2–3
The Knight of the Vermilion Robe 42–3 Les liaisons dangereuses (Laclos) 2, 3–4
Koch, Eva 167, 176n23 Libera, Alain 53n20
Koerber, Adolf-Viktor von 247n13 liberalism
Koljevic;, Nikola 268n12 and Islam, relationship between 285
Koller, Christian 246n12 liberal reform, optimism for 193
Korneichuk, Oleksandr 127, 131–2 libertines 2, 3–4, 18n1
Köster, Werner 246n1 Library of Congress 162, 164n11, 174n13
Kostic;, Laza 256, 267n5 Lichodziejewska, Feliks 134n6
Krampitz, Sigrid 176n28 Lincoln, Bruce W. 112n20
Kretschmer, Otto 182, 189, 191 Lissarrague, François 267n4
Krüger, Gerd 73n24 The Literary Monthly (Miesiecznik Literacki)
Krzywicka, Irena 121 124, 128–9, 130
Kundera, Milan 47 Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel 239, 248n39
Kundrus, Birthe 174n7, 242, 246n6, Lloyd, George, David 148
249n58 Löbmann, Rebecca 176n27
Kunżanka, Janina 122, 132 location 15, 215, 277
see also dislocation
La Fayette, Marie Madeleine de 2 LoDagaa, Ghana 5, 21–2, 27–8
Laak, Dirk van 233, 246n1 Loew, Fritz 66–7
Labanyi, Jo 12, 13–14, 194, 197–212 Logos 185
Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise-François Lombard, Peter 41
Choderlos de 2, 3 London Evening Standard 142
Laidlay, Margaret 149 López Campillo, Evelyne 181, 194n6
Landra, Guido 93n51 Loraux, Nicole 268n18
Landwehr, Achim 71n7 Louise, Margarethe Marie 166, 175n19
Lang, Joseph 238, 247n13 Lourenço, Eduardo 227, 228, 231n48,
language and love 110 232n56
Latzel, Klaus 74n36 love
laughter 171–2 absence of conception of,
Lawton, Anna 97–8, 100 assumption of 81
Lebensraum 233 for Africa 90–91, 241–3
312 Index

ancient politics about 255–6 political union via romantic love

ardent love letters to Hitler, 205–9, 210
warnings against 167–8 as public affair 252–3
asexual love 24, 188 public and private loves 7, 9–14
in Asian literature 2–3 racial boundaries, sexuality and 76–7
by association, nature of 187 religion and 21–31
centrality in medieval period 37–8 rule of love 34–5, 51–2
collective identity, citizenship and same-sex love 34–5
16–17 sexuality and 17–18, 76
compassionate love 24 social order and 3–4
contradictory nature of 208–9 stages of love’s conquest 43–7
courtly love 5–6, 36–8, 40, 41–2, theorising on, European nature of
43, 44–5, 50 257–9
cultural differences in love relations ‘triumph’ of love in industrialised
within European borders 14–18 West 33, 34–5
discourse, tradition in Europe of 2, universal nature of, idea of 35
3, 75–6 unrequited love 96, 99, 161, 167,
disinterested love 105–11 170
divine love 21, 23, 26 value for Edward VIII 143–4
double love 3 vocabulary of 76
earthly love 21, 23, 27 see also religion and love; romantic
emotions, sexuality and 76 love
in Europe 1–2, 3, 4–5, 7–8, 8–9, Love Dialogues between Laura and Don Juan
9–10 or Fascism and Love (Giménez Caballero,
heroic love 46–7 E.) 199–200, 202–4
historicization of 4–9 Love for Catalonia (Giménez Caballero,
inter-racial love 218 E.) 205
inter-racial relationships 1–2 love for state, politics of mass participation
as intercultural exchange 110–11 58–71
intimate relationships, public Bolshevism 62
function of 76 cultural codes of ‘love’ 60–67
Japan, practice of love in 33, 49–50 denunciations 62–3
language and 110 domination 58–60
letters from public to king in love Eintopfsonntag 63
148–51 emotionality, modernity and 59,
letters to Hitler 11–12, 161–2, 162– 69–70
8, 168–71 emotionology 70
love for state, politics of mass emotions, articulation of 60, 68, 70
participation 58–71 emotions, role in politics 59–60
and lust as ‘desire’, theorisation of emotions, work of being German
47–8 and 63–5
media and role in Britain of 143 Fascism 62, 67–8
metaphor of love, political ‘Father State’, notion of 60, 61–3
implications 26 feelings, presence and impact of 58,
neo-Platonic amor-intelectualis 203 59–60, 62, 64–6, 67–8, 70–71
nexus Europe and 9–14 First World War 62, 63–4
opportunity and political experience German engagement with work
in Russia 98–9 65–7
people and king, love story between Nazism 59–60, 62, 63, 68–9, 70
151–3 order, longing for restoration of
Platonic love 24 62–3
 Index 313

princely authority 61–2 social stability, male sexual desire and

rationalisation 58–9 253–4
Second World War 62 Stein’s reflections on 16, 256–7, 258,
self-will (Eigensinn) 62 262
sentimental love 60 theorising on love, European nature
Volksgemeinschaft 63 of 257–9
work and 60, 63–5, 65–7 Lucifer Unemployed (Wat, A.) 122
work of destruction, engagement in Lucretius 260
68–9 Ludendorff, Erich 240
love in time of revolution 117–33 Lüdtke, Alf 7, 58–74, 176n23
ashes of Warsaw 128–30 Ludwig, Paul W. 253, 267n1
avant-garde 118, 121, 123, 128, 133 Lurvey, Ira 155n43
betrayal 118, 129, 132–3 The Lusiads (Camões, L. de) 15, 215–16
capricious nature of revolution 133 amour dans la servitude 218
communism-in-power 126–8 donna angelicata 216
death 130–32 lusotropicalism 216–22
futurism 118–20, 120–21 Other as independent identity, love
intellectual autonomy 122 for 217
intimacy 132–3 lusophonia 228
Marxism 120, 121, 132–3 lust (concupiscentia), love’s dark partner 38,
Mayakovsky and the revolution 41–3, 51
120–26 Luther, Martin 44, 267
poets of Café Ziemian;ska 118–20 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 16, 253–4
polyglot poets 117, 118–19
prison, ritual baptism in 124 MacDonald, Ramsey 148
self-actualisation through self- Macedo, Helder 216–17, 225, 228n7
annihilation 120–21 Machiavelli, Niccolò 10, 127
snobbism 119–20 Madariaga, Salvador de 13–14, 194, 198,
terror in Soviet Union 125–6 200
Young Poland 119 on contradictory nature of love
love in time of war 251–67 208–9
alterity of women 255 human sacrifice, auto da fe and 207–8
ancient politics about love 255–6 negative depiction of Spain 208
Athens, golden age of 253–5 Old World and New, parallels drawn
chronodistopia 256–7 between 207
feminism 252, 259, 261, 266 political union via romantic love
Freidenberg’s reflections on 16, 256, 205–9, 210
257–8, 266–7 religious beliefs of Christian and
gender difference 258 Aztec societies 207–8
gender studies 252, 255, 266 secular rationalism in writing of
love as public affair 252–3 205–8
love theories, reinterpretation of Maeztu, Ramiro de 13, 198–9, 209, 210
antiquity in search of 252–6 critique of Don Juan as modern
men-only symposia 254–5 egoist 200–202, 209
polemography 252 Mafarka le futuriste (Marinetti, F.T.) 78
pornography 255 Mahmood, Saba 288n33
Savic; Rebac’s reflections on 256, Maimonides 25
257–8, 266, 267 Malaparte, Curzio (Kurt Erich Suckert)
sexual strike 253 199
site-catchment 251–2 Mamin, Yurij 8, 103–4, 108
Manchester Guardian 143
314 Index

Manicheaism 23, 27 media

Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti 90, 94n66 reports on Mrs Simpson and Edward
Mann, Heinrich 158, 173n1 VIII 139–41
Mann, Thomas 47, 260, 268n13 and role in Britain of love 143
Mantegazza, Paolo 75 medical science, sexual activity and
Marañón, Gregorio 13, 180, 182, 184, 186–90
185, 186–90, 193 medieval accommodation of love and
Marglin, Frédérique 51 sexual regulation 33, 35–41
María de Urgoiti, Nicolás 178 medieval woman mystics 23
mariages blancs (fake marriages) 278–9 Melograni, Piero 176n29
Marie de Champagne 37, 43 men-only symposia 254–5
Marin, Louis 71–2n9 Mendes Correia, António 219
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 10, 77, 78, Mendonça, Jerónimo de 223–4
92n11, 117 Menexenes (Plato) 254
Marks, Sally 246n12 Menippos 256
Marr, Nikolai 261 Merkel, Ina 107, 113n28
marriage Il Messaggero 85, 88
celebration of 34–5, 45 metaphor of love, political implications 26
Christian marriage, advocation of métissage, notion of 17, 86–7, 88, 92n28
203–4 Franco-Maghrebi peoples 269–70,
‘incoming-daughter-in-law 276–9, 281–2, 283, 286, 287n14,
marriages’ in China 24 287n20
mixed marriages 17, 269–70, 271, le couple métissé, ambivalent status of
275, 276, 278–9, 280, 281, 271, 275–6
288n39 Michael, Robert 177n33
morganatic 145 Mickiewicz, Adam 121
Martin, Kingsley 143 Middle Ages 6
Martin-Marquez, Susan 18n4 Mignolo, Walter 197
Marx, Karl 58–9, 71n2, 120 migration 222, 278
Marxism 10, 201, 261 of dissenters from Soviet Union 108
love in time of revolution 120, 121, European migration to Brazil 220
132–3 exile for Franco-Maghrebi peoples
Mary of Teck 150 278–80
Mas, Ruth 17, 18n6, 269–88 Italian migration to Congo 80
Maschmann, Melita 68 migrants to Europe, cultural roles of
‘Masculine and Feminine’ 183–4 3
masculinity 14, 108–9, 169, 187, 193, ‘sausage migration’ 107–8
194, 235, 243, 245 ‘sofa emigration’, phenomenon of
concepts of 11, 149–50 113n29
construction of 245–6 Miłosz, Czesław 130, 134n1
manliness in Italy, vulnerability of 90 Milton, John 263
Russian studies in 113n29 miscegenation 3, 13, 86–7, 204, 209,
Mason, Timothy 67 212n39, 220, 225
Mass, Sandra 15–16, 233–50 The Mission of the University (Ortega y
Massis, Henry 94n60 Gasset, J.) 189
Matsuda, Matt K. 91n4 mixed marriages 17, 269–70, 271, 275,
A Matter of Time (Deshpande, S.) 3 276, 278–9, 280, 281, 288n39
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 10, 117, 118, modern egoist, Don Juan as 200–202
120–26, 128, 129, 130, 133 Molina, Tirso de 201, 206, 210
Mead, Margaret 47 Mommsen, Hans 72n17
Mecklenburg, Adolf von 249n51 Mondrian, Piet 263
 Index 315

Montpellier Codex 39 Nezami Ganjavi 2–3

Moodysson, Lukas 112n7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 119, 184, 200–201
moral economy 63 Nisco, Baron Giuseppe 79
moral disintegration of ‘decadent’ West Njegoš, P.P. 260, 263
106 nostalgia 13, 97–8, 102, 111, 131, 193,
Morand, Paul 124 227
Morel, Edmund Dene 238, 248n34 Nostalgia (Andrei Tarkovsky film) 97
morganatic marriage 145 Nouailles, Ana de 184–5, 186
Morning Post 143 Nouvelle Héloise (Rousseau, J.-J.) 2, 3
Morocco 3 La Nuit brisée (Benslama, F.) 270
Morris, Sylvia Jukes 155n45
Mosley, Oswald 148 Ober-Ost 239–41
Mossé, Claude 267n2 obsessions 50, 82, 90, 169, 212n39, 237
Mossman, Elliot 268n15 Obst, Dieter 72n17
Mother Rome (Giménez Caballero, E.) Office of Military Government for
204, 205 Germany (US) 162
Mozambique 221, 222, 226 Old World and New, parallels between
Muggeridge, Malcolm 154n29 207
Mullen, Paul E. 176n27 O’Neill, William L. 155n42
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten 172 ontology 183, 275–6
Münkler, Herfried 71n8 open concealment 38–9
Murasaki Shibiku 2–3, 6, 49–50 Orage, Alfred R. 211n12
Muslims order, longing for restoration of 62–3
Arab, Algerian or, difference Orff, Carl 258
between 274, 280 Orientalism and Europe, clash between
subjectivity of, Franco-Maghrebi internal forms 90
peoples and 281–2 origins 5, 30, 33, 41, 48, 90, 169, 170,
see also Islam 204, 256, 259, 284, 287
Mussolini, Benito 12, 86, 90, 163, 169– Orringer, Nelson 195n14
70, 205 Ortega y Gasset, José 13, 178, 179,
My Poetic Friendships (Broniewski, W.) 130 180–82, 182–3, 184–5, 186, 187, 189,
192, 203
Nagy, Piroska 53n21 Osterhammel, Jürgen 250n67
Le Naour, Jean-Yves 246–7n12 Oushakin, Sergei 113n29
Narveson, Kate 57n87 Ousmanova, Almira 8, 95–113
National Socialism 160, 161, 165, 171, Outside the Fold. Conversion, Modernity and
172 Belief (Viswanathan, G.) 282
Nazism overseas Europeans
in Germany 9, 11–12, 158–73 absence of conception of love,
politics of mass participation 59–60, assumption of 81
62, 63, 68–9, 70 colonial romance, competition for
Nelson, Horatio, Lord 149 84
neo-Platonic amor-intelectualis 203 Congolese trust in Europeans 85
Neue Zürcher Zeitung 146 ethnographic remarks 80–81
The New Age 199, 201, 211n12 Euro-African romance in Congo
New Statesman 143 77–83
New York American 140–41 Europeanness and whiteness in
New York Times 140 Fascist Italy 87–91
Newman, Francis 5 exile 82–3
News Chronicle 143 exotic landscapes 83–4
Newton, Sir Isaac 45
316 Index

experiences in Congo 79–80, 81–2, St Paul 44

86 Paustovsky, Konstantin 128
French ‘liberal’ colonialism 84 People without Space (Grimm, H.) 233
geopolitical romance 76–7 Pericles 254, 263
indigenous population, enforcement peripheries of Europe 14–18
of European civil code on 80–81 see also Portugal, Spain
modern colonialism, Fascist Peter the Great 102–3
interpretation of 84–5 Petersburg (Bely, A.) 103
Orientalism, clash between internal Petrarch 6, 13, 38–9
forms of 90 Petrucci, Antonio 89, 94n63
racial association of ‘white’ with Phaedros (Plato) 257
‘European’ 89–90 Philosophers at the Feast (Athenaeus) 254–5
racial boundaries, sexuality and 76–7 ‘Philosophy of Fashion’ 183
self-reflection 78 Phule, Mahatma 29
sleeping sickness 78, 79 Pilsudski, Marshal Jósef 118
white colonial romance, adaptation Pindarus 259, 260
for Fascist times 83–7 Pirandello, Luigi 92n28
whiteness, reassertion along gender Pittaluga, Gustavo 13, 180, 182, 185,
and racial lines 86 186, 189
Ovid 39, 53n19 Plato 254, 257, 263
Ozment, Steven 44 Platonic love 24
Playboy 47
Paasche, Hans 249–50n60 A Poem for Adults (Ważyk, A.) 129
Page, Rene 150 poets of Café Ziemian;ska 118–20
Pagine africane di un esploratore (Cipolla, Poggiali, Ciro 89, 94n62
A.) 84 Poland 9–10, 68–9
Palacios, Asin 22 communism-in-power in 126–8
Pamela (Richardson, S.) 45 Polishness and Europeanness 121
Pankow, Hermann 73n23 return home to 98
paradigmatic Europeanness 12–13 Young Poland 119
Paradise Lost (Milton) 263 see also love in time of revolution
Paris polemography 252
misadventures in 106–7 Polezzi, Loredana 87, 93n54
refusal to return from 100 political readings of Don Juan 197–205
see also France political union via romantic love 205–9,
Parker Bowles, Camilla 35 210
Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer) 41 Pollard, Sydney 73n22
partners 44, 46, 49, 145, 279 polyglot poets 117, 118–19
choice of 23–4, 253 Pope Pius XI 265
female 62 Pope Pius XII 258
love partnerships 6, 52 Le Populaire 147
male 170 pornography 255
sexual 6, 28, 35, 36, 51, 52, 53 availability of 34
Passerini, Luisa 56n65, 91n1, 153–4n1, Portugal 14, 15
192, 196n51, 211n12 Alcácer Quibir 223, 224, 225,
passion 230n38, 231n39
Hitler as object of 161 colonial war, love in time of 223–6
romantic love, Western tradition of Constitutional Revision (1951) 221
45 Between Cultures (school inter-
Pasternak, Boris 257–8, 261 exchange programme) 227–8
Pathé, Michele 176n27
 Index 317

democracy and transformation in concepts of Hitler, disparity between

226 160–61
disintegration in Africa of 226–7 emotions 12
EEC entry (1986) 227 loves 7, 9–14
Estado Novo in 220, 221, 222 spaces in Russia, dissolution of
between Europe and Atlantic 101–2
215–16 unity of 10
family colonisation 222 Pujarniscle, Eugene 92n18
former empire, Europe and shadow Purcell, Rosemary 176n27
of 226–8 Purgatorio (Dante) 38
hybridity, colonisation and 218 Pushkin, Alexander 102, 103, 130
lusophonia 228
peripheral geographic position The Queen of Spades (Pyotr Tchaikovsky
227–8 opera) 103
racism as cornerstone of colonisation Don Quixote (Cervantes) 3, 13, 197–9,
218, 219 201–2, 205, 209
romance and empire of 216–22 Qur’an and religious texts of Islam 284,
Salazar regime in 221–2 285
A Portuguese Expedition to Muatianvua.
Metereology, Climatology and Colonisation Rabbi Aqivah 22
(Carvalho, H. de) 218 Rabelais, François 253
post-Soviet era in Russia 95–111 racial association of ‘white’ with
post-war period of romantic love 46 ‘European’ 89–90
Pratt, Mary Louise 83 racial boundaries, sexuality and 76–7
Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall film) 48 racial differences in Europe 18
Primo de Rivera, Don Miguel 13, 179 racism 17, 91, 221
Prince Genji (Murasaki Shibiku) 2–3, 6, colonial racism 90
49–50 as cornerstone of colonisation 218,
princely authority 61–2 219
La princesse de Clèves (La Fayette, M.M. scientific racism 220
de) 2, 3 sentimental racism 79
prison, ritual baptism in 124 Radermacher, Ludwig 260
projection 60, 61, 88, 95, 103, 179, 192, Radkau, Joachim 250n64
265 Radulescu, Domnica 112n11
propaganda 12, 64, 86, 88, 127, 166, 170, Raes, Koen 113n32
171, 172, 199, 234, 240, 243, 244–5 rape 44, 204, 205, 218, 236, 237, 241,
black soldiers in Rhineland, 276, 280
propaganda against 236–9 ‘rape dresses’ 274–5
Soviet clichés about West 105–6 ‘raped nation’, allegory of 238
Propósitos (Ortega y Gasset, J.) 181 Raposo, Hipólito 219
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of rationalisation 58–9
Capitalism (Weber, M.) 199 Rauman, Emilia 200, 207
Proulx, France 287n26 The Ray of Microcosm (Njegoš, P.P.) 260
Proust, Marcel 10, 127 Rebac, Hasan 259
Provençal poetry 5, 203 The Rebellion of the Masses (Ortega y
La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam Gasset, J.) 181, 189
(Benslama, F.) 270 Red Army 15, 73, 126, 234, 239, 245
‘Psychological types’ 191–2 Reddy, William M. 4, 6–7, 33–57, 70, 76
public and private Reformation 44, 54n31
boundaries between 172 religion and love 21–31
Adam and Eve 26–7
318 Index

asexual love 24 gender discussed in 179, 181–2,

Buddhism 29 183–5, 186, 187, 190, 191–2,
Cathars 22, 27 193–4
China, ‘incoming-daughter-in-law intellectual circle, formation of 181
marriages’ in 24 internationalism 181
choice of partners 23–4 Jung and the 190–92
Christianity 21–3, 27 liberal reform, optimism for 193
compassionate love 24 love by association, nature of 187
courtship 23–4 Marañón’s work in 186–90
dalliance 23–4 ‘Masculine and Feminine’ 183–4
earthly love, renunciation of 23 medical science, sexual activity and
equality and love 28–9, 30–31 186–90
European Christianity 22–3 ‘Philosophy of Fashion’ 183
freedom of choice 23–4 Pittalunga in 189
Hindu love 23, 28–9, 30 ‘Psychological types’ 191–2
history of notion of love 24–5 Second Republic and 192–3
individualism and love 25 selectivity in 180–81, 185
Islam, role of love in 25–7, 29 Simmel and 182–5
Islam in Turkey 21–2, 29–30 utopian vision of society 187–8
Jainism 29 ‘Woman in Europe’ 192
Judaism 22, 24–5 woman in society, Marañón’s model
Judeo-Christian values 25, 27 of 188–9
LoDagaa, Ghana 21–2, 27–8 Revue internationale des études balkaniques
medieval woman mystics 23 (RIEB) 262
metaphor of love, political Rheinische Frauenliga (Women’s League of
implications 26 the Rheinland) 237, 247n13
secular and divine love, intertwining Rhineland, black soldiers stationed in
of 26 235–9, 245
secular love 21–2 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 11
sexual love 24, 26–7 Richards, Michael 193–4, 195n23
socio-economic perspective 30–31 Richardson, Samuel 45
Song of Songs 22, 24 Richert, Dominik 72–3n21
Spain, Islamic culture in 21–2, 25–7 Riley, Glenda 155n42
Remembrance of Things Past (Proust, M.) Ritter, Gerhard 237
127 ritual dance 51, 57n81
repatriation 212n39, 278 El Rivadaria (Patagonia) 141
representation of love in Russia 109–10 Robinson, Victor 91n3
Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Petrarch) 38–9 Rocca, Gino 92n28
Residencia de Estudiantes 178–9, 191, 193, romance and empire of Portugal 216–22
194n3, 195n13 romantic love, Western tradition of 6,
Reuth, Ralf George 173n3 33–52
Revista de Occidente (RO) 13, 193–4, 203 centrality of love in medieval period
biological and social difference 184 37–8
consolation, imaginary of 179–80 Christian virtue 38
contemporary reality, search for 181 courtly love 36–8, 40, 41–2, 43,
elitism of 178–9 44–5, 50
eugenic vision of society 187–8 elopement 44–5
Europeanness of Spain 193–4 First World War 46
‘Feminine Culture’ 189 gallantry 45
femininity 184–5, 187, 194 heroic love 46–7
human nature 47
 Index 319

iconography of 39–41 Russia 3, 8–9

individualism 45–6 aspiration, disillusionment and 99
infantile sexuality 47 Berlin Wall, effect of fall 96–7
inheritance of love 52 bouleversement 105
The Knight of the Vermilion Robe 42–3 caricature 104–5
love and lust as ‘desire’, theorisation cinema in post-Soviet era 95–9
of 47–8 communal apartments, life in 99–
lust (concupiscentia), love’s dark 100, 101–2
partner 38, 41–3, 51 communism, collapse of 97
marriage, celebration of 34–5, 45 consumer society, lure of 107–8
medieval accommodation of love culture in post-Soviet era 96, 99,
and sexual regulation 33, 35–41 100–101, 102–3, 104, 105–6,
natural nature of, idea of 35 109, 111
non-Western identification with 35 disinterested love, profitable
open concealment 38–9 exchange or 105–11
passion 45 Europe and, encounters in post-
pornography, availability of 34 Soviet cinema 95–9
post-war period 46 exile, Europe as place of 97–8
Reformation, shift of norms 44 femininity 105
rule of love 34–5, 51–2 grotesque narrative of Window to
same-sex love 34–5 Paris 100
sexual behaviour, disciplining of identity, crisis of 108–9
44–5 language and love 110
sexual love and divine passion, love, opportunity and political
connection between 38–9 experience 98–9
sexual regulation 33, 35–41 love as intercultural exchange
spiritualised eroticism 47–8, 48–51 110–11
spiritualised love 40–41 moral disintegration of ‘decadent’
spiritualised sensuality 36–7 West 106
stages of love’s conquest 43–7 Paris, misadventures in 106–7
sublime love, sexual ardour and 33–4 Paris, refusal to return from 100
tapestries 40–41 post-Soviet era 95–111
‘triumph’ of love in industrialised public and private spaces, dissolution
West 33, 34–5 of 101–2
universal nature of, idea of 35 representation of love 109–10
see also Don Juan romantic love, longing for 111
Romer, Eric 47 St Petersburg 102–4
Rosenberg, Alfred 246n5 subject in post-Soviet era 95, 96, 99,
Rössler, Mechtild 246n5 101, 107–9, 111
Roth, Phillip 47 symbolic order 101
Rothermere, Harold Harmsworth, Rycaut, Paul 24
Viscount 143
de Rougemont, Denis 11, 12, 67–8, Saar, Wilhelm von der 247n13
152–3 Sade, Marquis de 14
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2 Salazar, António de Oliviera 220–21
Rovito, Teodoro 93n37 Salomon, Ernst von 239, 248n38
rule of love 34–5, 51–2 Sälter, Georg 71n7
Ruscio, Alain 76, 269, 286n1 same-sex love 34–5
Rushdie, Salman 283 Sand, George 274, 275, 283, 284–5
Rusk, Michael 73n24 Saramago, José 228
Russell, Bertrand 180, 182 Sartre, Jean-Paul 120, 258
320 Index

Sauer, Margarete 168 allegory of, Weimar Republic as

Saurat, Denis 259, 260, 263 234–5
Savic; Rebac, Anica 16, 256, 257–8, 266, emotions and 76
267 infantile sexuality 47
reflections on love in wartime 259– inter-racial sexuality 86, 219, 235,
61, 262, 263–5 237–8, 245
Schirrmacher, Käte 237–8 intimacy and 76
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 72n14 love and 17–18
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 211n14 medical science, sexual activity and
Schmitz-Berning, Cornelia 177n33 186–90
Schmölders, Claudia 174n7 racial boundaries, sexuality and 76–7
Schnapp, Alain 264 social stability, male sexual desire and
Schröder, Gerhard 169 253–4
Schroeder, Christa 159, 167, 173n2 Sexuality, State and Civil Society (Hull, I.)
Schulze, Hagen 248n37 44, 56n61
Schwarz, Dennis 112n15 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 260, 261
Schwarz, Thomas 250n63 Shems-i Tabrizi (Shemüddin) 26
Die schwarze Schmach. Frankreichs Schande Shirer, William L. 159, 173n5
238 Shklovskii, Viktor 128
Schwarzenbach, Alexis 10–11, 137–57 Shnaider, Mikhail 128
Sebastião I, King of Portugal 223–5 Sholem, Gershom 260
Second Republic in Spain 192–3 Shore, Marci 9–10, 117–36
Second World War 62, 251–2 Siegel, Lee 56n77, 57n78, 57n79, 57n80
secular love 21–2 Sigel, Hugo Ferdinand 247n13
secular and divine love, intertwining Simmel, Georg 13, 182–5, 186, 187, 188,
of 26 189, 191
secular rationalism 58–9, 205–8 Simpson, Wallis 10–11, 137, 149–51,
Sedgwick, Eve 48 151–3
sedimentation 270, 275, 276, 278, 286 anti-Americanism, divorce-related
self 144–5, 150
actualisation through self- divorces of, media concentration on
annihilation 120–21 144
construction of 34 European media, restraint on
self-reflection 78 romance of 146–8
self-will (Eigensinn) 62 media reports on Edward and
sentimental love 60 139–41
sex appeal 109, 158, 160, 171, 173 silence in British media on romance
sex symbol 170 with Edward 142–5
sexual ardour and sublime love 33–4 ‘World’s Greatest Romance’ 137–8
sexual behaviour, disciplining of 44–5 Sinclair, Alison 12, 13, 18, 178–96, 211n4
sexual desire, construction of 47–8 Sirone, Edith 199
sexual love 24, 26–7 site-catchment 251–2
and divine passion, connection Sketch of Europe (Madariaga, S. de) 205–6
between 38–9 Slade, Sir Adolphus 30
sexual partners 6, 28, 35, 36, 51, 52, 53 Slapšak, Svetlana 16–17, 251–68
sexual prowess of Don Juan 203–4 Slaves and Masters (Freyre, G.) 219–20
sexual regulation 33, 35–41 sleeping sickness 78, 79
sexual representations of Africa 242 snobbism 119–20
sexual stereotypes 209 Snobbism and Progress (Žeromski, S.) 119
sexual strike 253 Social Democraten 148
sexuality social difference 184
 Index 321

social order and love 3–4 Steinbach, Lothar 173n4

social stability, male sexual desire and Stern, Anatole 118, 119, 120, 127, 129,
253–4 131
social violence in France 278 Sternheim-Peters, Eva 173–4n6
socio-economic perspective on love Stoler, Ann Laura 76, 90, 94n67, 234,
30–31 246n8
Socrates 254, 257, 263, 264 The Stone Raft (Saramago, J.) 228
El Sol 178 Stroessner, Alfredo 199
Song of Songs 22, 24 Stuurman, Douwe 174n11
Sorgoni, Barbara 93n49 subject in post-Soviet Russia 95, 96, 99,
Sosnovskii, Pavel 97 101, 107–9, 111
Sousa Santos, Boaventura 215, 217, subjectivity
228n1, 229n12 feminine Franco-Maghrebi Muslim
sovereignty, addresses to Hitler’s 166–7 subject, possibilities for 284–5
Soviet Union 66–7 Muslim subjectivity 281–2
early Soviet cinema 104 subaltern subject 96
propaganda clichés about West sublime love, sexual ardour and 33–4
105–6 Svenska Dagbladet 148
Red Army 15, 73, 126, 234, 239, Swanson, Gloria 145
245 Sweden 147–8
terror in 125–6 symbolic order 101
see also Russia, post-Soviet era Symposion (Plato) 257, 264
space (Raum) and people (Volk) 233–4,
238 Tales of Petersburg (Gogol, N.) 103
Spain 3, 147 tapestries 40–41
Europeanness of 193–4 Tarkovsky, Andrei 97, 106
Islamic culture of 5, 21–2, 25–7 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 103
negative depiction of 208 Terhoeven, Petra 72n19
public and private love in 12–14 terror in Soviet Union 125–6
racial discourse in 212n39 Theweleit, Klaus 73n24, 212n29, 240,
see also Don Juan; Revista de Occidente 245, 249n49
(RO) The Third Bagre. A Myth Revisited (Goody,
Spanish America 13 J.) 27–8
Spectator 143 Thomas, Godfrey 148–9
Spierenburg, Pieter 72n10 St Thomas Aquinas 41
spiritualised eroticism 47–8, 48–51 Thucidides 263
spiritualised love 40–41 Tilly, Charles 72n13
spiritualised sensuality 36–7 Times 143, 144, 145
Spivak, Gayatri C. 270 Todorovsky, Petr 97–8
Spranger, Eduard 182 Tolstoy, Leo 23, 127
The Spring to Come (Žeromski, S.) 123 Tomasello, Giovanna 93n54
St Petersburg 102–4 tradition 2, 3, 4, 14–15, 17, 75, 78, 184,
Stalin, Josef 126, 128, 129, 261 202
Stalinism 10, 59, 120 Arab tradition 25
stalking 168 changing traditions, multiplicity of
Stanley, Henry Morton 82 286
Stearns, Peter 47, 70 Christian tradition 27
Stehle, Bruno 236, 247n13 cultural tradition 33, 84–5, 100
Stein, Edith 16, 256–7, 258, 262 Greek tradition 224
love in wartime, reflections on Hebraic tradition 122
265–7 Hindu tradition 29, 49, 50–51
322 Index

Islamic tradition 280, 281, 283, 284, social violence in France 278
287n18 virginity 77, 274, 275
love discourse, tradition in Europe of Viswanathan, Gauri 282
2, 3, 75–6 vocabulary of love 76
Platonic tradition 16, 203–4 Volksgemeinschaft 63, 240
of royal intermarriage 141 Volkskörper 234–5, 237, 245
Russian tradition 100, 103, 106 Vreeland, Diana 151–2
Spanish tradition 204
see also romantic love, Western Wallerstein, Immanuel 94n59
tradition of Wandurski, Witold 120, 121, 122, 124,
trauma 17, 101, 227, 270, 272 125–6, 132
Trilogy of sex (Mantegazza, P.) 75 Warsaw, ashes of
Tropenkoller (frenzy of the tropics) 243, see also love in time of revolution;
245 Poland
Trotsky, Leon 267 wartime
troubadours 1, 5, 203 Freidenberg’s reflections of love in
Turner, David M. 56n57 261–2, 263–5
Twenty Poems to Camoens (Alegre, M.) 226 Savic; Rebac’s reflections on love in
259–61, 262, 263–5
Ulshöfer, Helmut 174n9 Stein’s reflections on love in 265–7
Unamuno, Miquel de 198 Wasilewska, Wanda 122–3, 125, 126–7,
United States 13 131–2
anti-Americanism, divorce-related Wat, Aleksander 118–19, 120, 121–2,
144–5, 150 123, 124, 126, 127, 128–31, 132, 133
Library of Congress 162, 164n11, Watowa, Ola 123, 127, 130–31, 132,
174n13 133
love in 10–11 Ważyk, Adam 118, 127, 128–9, 133
Office of Military Government for Weber, Max 34, 58–9, 71n2, 160, 199,
Germany (US) 162 200
Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 174n7
attitudes to romance of 139–41 Weimar Republic 15–16, 233–45
unrequited love 96, 99, 161, 167, 170 Africa, boundary transgressions in
Usborne, Cornelie 246n11 German East Africa 241–4
Utekhin, Ilya 101 African soldiers, fear of 235–9, 245
utopian vision of society 187–8 anti-Bolshevism 240–41
Balticum 239–41, 244
St Valentine 41 ‘Black Horror’ 234, 235–9, 245
Vaz de Caminha, Ana Olimpia 218, border territories 234
229n14 Freikorps 234, 244, 245
Vecchi, Roberto 231n40 in Balticum 239–41
Vehlewald, Hans-Jörg 174n9 Heimat in Africa 241–4
Vergani, Orio 169, 174n12 inter-racial sexuality 235, 237–8
Verhaaren, Emile 259 love for Africa 241–3
Versailles Treaty 83, 233, 235–6, 237, 244 Ober-Ost 239–41
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 264, 268n19 ‘raped nation’, allegory of 238
Viet-Nam 251 Rhineland, black soldiers stationed
Villacañas, José Luis 201, 211n11 in 235–9, 245
Vinaver, Stanislav 259 Die schwarze Schmach. Frankreichs
violence Schande. 238
imperial violence, racist apology for sexual representations of Africa 242
204 sexuality, allegory of 234–5
 Index 323

space (Raum) and people (Volk) ‘Woman in Europe’ 192

233–4, 238 women
Tropenkoller (frenzy of the tropics) alterity of 255
243, 245 of the enemy, hate for 240–41
Volksgemeinschaft 240 medieval woman mystics 23
Volkskörper 234–5, 237, 245 woman in society, Marañón’s model
women of the enemy, hate for of 188–9
240–41 The Women (Clare Boothe play) 144–5
Wempe, Anna 168 Women in Parliament (Aristophanes) 254
Wenge, Gertrud 168 work
Wenig, Richard 249n52 of destruction, engagement in 68–9
West, Rebecca 257–8, 259–60, 268n10 and love for state, politics of mass
Western Mail 144 participation 60, 63–5, 65–7
White (Krzysztof Kieslowski film) 97, 98, The Worker (Robotnik) 122
109, 110 World League for Sexual Reform
Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe 155n44 (WLSR) 186, 189, 196n34
whiteness ‘World’s Greatest Romance’ 137–8
in Fascist Italy 87–91
white colonial romance, adaptation Yalman, Nur O. 25–6, 28–9, 30
for Fascist times 83–7 Young, Robert J.C. 91n5, 287n7
Wilermith, Margaret 152 Young Poland 119
Wilkins, John 267n6 Yugoslavia 139, 259–60, 264, 267,
Wilkinson, Ellen 142 268n12
Williams, A. Susan 154n29
Willis, Clive 229n11 Zafrani, Haïm 24–5
Window to Paris (Yurij Mamin film) 8, Zamponi, Simonetta Falasca 93n42
95–6, 98, 105–11 Žeromski, Stefan 119, 123, 134n11
as cultural palimpsest 99–105 Zielinski, Theodore 262
Witz, Anne 183, 195n16 Ziemann, Benjamin 250n66
Wolf, Arthur P. 24 Žižek 110, 111, 113n31, 126–7
Wolf, Friedrich 130 Zorrilla y Moral, José 201, 206, 210
Wolter, Heike 246n1 Zoshchenko, Mikhail 128