Cultural policy: Book fair: Italy is a bad-tempered country

“Come with me to Italy for a little bit / Come with me to the blue sea for a little bit / And we act as if life were a beautiful journey,” sang the sophranist Isabell Münsch last week in the house of IG Metall, when the Gutenberg Book Guild held theirs during the Frankfurt Book Fair Celebrated 100th birthday. It is an old song by the recently deceased Catarina Valente from the 1950s, when Germans began to seek diversion in mass tourism, also to distract themselves from their fascist past.

This year it was a little different, as Italy came to Germany to distract from its post-fascist present under Giorgia Meloni as the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair. His official representatives just didn’t want to talk about anything political. And this approach promptly became a political issue. At the book fair there was talk about what Italy wanted to keep quiet about.

The whole problem began in the spring with the government’s refusal to take the writer Roberto Saviano, one of the country’s most successful authors with his socially critical books, as part of the official delegation to Frankfurt. Mauro Mazza, Italy’s representative for the trade fair appearance in Frankfurt, explained that his work was too “unoriginal,” even though Saviano has to live under police protection after his exposing books about the mafia. Saviano was then specially invited by Juergen Boos, the head of the book fair. The Meloni government wanted to send a signal,” said Saviano at a packed PEN Berlin event at the trade fair, with something like this message: “We can free ourselves from our critics.” This is a new quality, a form of covert censorship.

Unlike before, his opponents would no longer dispute the truth of his statements, but would question his entire personality. That is why Italy’s Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli was able to claim at the opening of the book fair that his government defends “freedom of expression in every form”. It is not the criticism that is negated, but the critic himself, said Saviano. He is declared a dissident who only says “bad things” about his country – “and dissidents only exist in authoritarian states and not in democracies.”

Nevertheless, Saviano was the star of the fair. 40 Italian authors had already met with him in advance open letter solidarity, which was initiated by the screenwriter and writer Paolo Giordano. It was the first time that Italy’s authors came together to protest against the Meloni government. Some of the signatories, such as Giordano, the Mussolini biographer Antonio Scurati and Francesca Melandri, who had once won the Premio Stresa, the Italian book prize, refused to travel to Frankfurt as part of their country’s official delegation and were left behind by theirs Invite German publishers. Others such as Helena Janeczek, German-Italian daughter of Holocaust survivors, or the writer and George Orwell translator Vincenzo Latronico remained part of the delegation, but appeared as part of an alternative Italy program, mostly moderated by the journalist Birgit Schönau , which had organized PEN Berlin to discuss the attacks on freedom of expression under Meloni (the other German PEN was once again unnoticed). “We are practically like renegades at the book fair,” explained Giordano, reinforcing Saviano’s diagnosis that they were dissidents.

The post-fascist repression in Italy takes place subcutaneously. Unlike in Poland under the PIS or in Hungary under Orbán, there are no new laws restricting press freedom, but individuals are being snubbed, like Scurati, who was no longer allowed to speak on television about the subject of Mussolini, or sued, like Saviano, because he said this on television Meloni’s government was called “bastards” because of its anti-refugee policy. Or like the writer Christian Raimo, after Melonis compared education policy to the “Death Star” from “Star Wars”. Unlike the best-selling author Saviano, Raimo – like many Italian authors – has to work as a teacher. He was told that he was endangering his job with such statements, which he had not made to his students in class but at a left-wing event.

While the Meloni government is loyal to the EU and NATO in foreign policy and supports the defense of Ukraine and Israel, the post-fascists act more ambiguously on the symbolic level, as the art historian Luciano Cheles pointed out in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. They use a kind of fascist quote pop to appeal to the admirers of the “Duce”. The motto of the Italian book fair appearance, “Rooted in the Future,” appears to be derived from an old slogan of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the neo-fascist predecessor party of Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, which read: “Nostalgia for the future.” At the opening of the book fair, Culture Minister Giuli spoke of a long history of cooperation between Italy and Germany, which can of course be formulated that way for these two former “Axis powers”, even though Italy was the last guest country at the book fair in 1988. Significantly, in 2024, Italy’s officials there repeatedly spoke of the “period before the Second World War”. But didn’t it have its own name that begins with “F” and ends with “s”?

After all, Hesse’s Prime Minister Boris Rhein (CDU) allowed himself to remark that one had to be on guard because “democracies don’t die with a bang, they wither away. The poison of this infirmity is called indifference. The Italian pavilion at the trade fair was surprisingly careless. Constructed between performances by Catalonia and Portugal, it was supposed to be reminiscent of an Italian piazza – if you knew that, you could recognize it. Scurati, on the other hand, the pavilion reminded him more of “a funeral home”: a lot of the past and hardly any reference to the present.

For Michael Braun, Italy correspondent for “Taz,” Meloni’s politics are aggressively introspective, unlike the “feel-good populism” of Silvio Berlusconi, who always promised his voters the best of luck, such as fewer taxes and a million new jobs and free treatment for sick pets. Meloni, on the other hand, is looking for Italy’s internal enemies, the migrants and refugees, whom she declares to be the culprits of Italy’s ongoing crisis, Braun explained when he presented his new book “From Berlusconi to Meloni”. In general, contrary to its sunny image as a holiday destination, one should imagine Italy as a “bad-tempered country”, without a welfare state and without a minimum wage, instead often with hourly wages of around five euros in the catering industry in Rome or around three euros in agriculture in the south. While the gross domestic product in Germany and France has risen constantly since 2000, it has fallen constantly in Italy.

Meloni’s false solution, the “Throw them all out” slogan as an emotional political offer for all racists and those who want to become racists, is also increasingly being spread in Germany, in stages also by the previous major parties in reaction to the new major party AfD, which fueled its recent election successes in East Germany with “Remigration now!” election posters. This demand comes from the German neo-fascism of the 70s, explained Marcus Bensmann from Correctiv at the book fair when he and Jean Peters, also from Correctiv, wrote the book “Nobody can say they didn’t know. The outrageous plans of the AfD” presented.

In a thoroughly entertaining way, the two explained not only the technical details of their famous revelation of the right-wing extremist secret meeting in a Potsdam hotel at the beginning of the year (work with a hidden camera in the wristwatch in the hotel), but above all its political implications, which range from the AfD to the CDU is enough. This is exactly the bridge that makes the AfD and its plans to discriminate against people with a migrant family history (at least a quarter of the population) so dangerous. They call it the “ethnic choice” so that citizens can no longer be considered equal.

Contrary to what many people think, the AfD is not primarily concerned with disparaging supposedly left-wing politics, even if it always attacks the Greens and the increasingly irrelevant Left Party. No, the right-wing radicals are concerned with “the substantive ‘gutting’ of the conservative parties and the elimination of their liberal-democratic traditions,” as Peter Kurz wrote in a guest article in the “FAZ” about the book fair. For the SPD politician, who was mayor of Mannheim until 2023, the aim is not to “shift the discourse” (also a popular catchphrase), but rather to end the discourse in general.

The around 30 percent that the AfD received in the last elections in the East also has to do with the fact that only “bonsai editions” of the “normal” parties exist there, as sociologist Steffen Mau said in an interview at another PEN Berlin event with its spokesman Deniz Yücel emphasized. In East Germany, the number of CDU members has fallen since 1990 from 130,000 to 30,000 now. Nevertheless, Mau, who invented the expression “ossification” for the East as a specific political-biographical experience of pain in the “two-society within Germany” after reunification, wanted to speak less about a general East-West contrast than about specific East-East faults. for example between big cities and rural regions or between men and women. Mau recommends keeping the Björn Höckes away from positions of power instead of hoping that they will weaken themselves through possible participation in government, because this would put migrants and queer people under even more pressure than they already are in the East.

Mau answered Yücel’s question as to whether it could be that the East Germans as a whole represent the largest migration group in the Federal Republic and turned it around: If you subtract the 20 percent of the population who have now moved from West to East Germany, Then the former GDR would continue to be the “land of the little people” in which only two percent of the entire German inheritance tax would be paid. Even if hardly anyone there wants the GDR back, people are generally more distant from the state. A development that Mau also predicts for West Germany, just as Michel Braun and Roberto Saviano describe the post-fascist attacks on democracy in Italy as the coming pattern for Germany.

According to Saviano, the Meloni government recommends that intellectuals study historical topics, “say the Bible or the First World War,” if they don’t want to get into trouble. Dealing with the complex present, or even wanting to help the refugees in the Mediterranean, is simply not possible for the post-fascists. By the way, in Italy only 41 percent of the population read a book a year. And the others? None at all, says Saviano. “Come with me to Italy for a bit,” Catarina Valente had sung, “come with me for a bit / because it’s worth it. / For the sun shines there during the day / and the moon shines there in the evening.”

The Italian pavilion was intended to be reminiscent of a piazza. It reminded Antonio Scurati more “of a funeral home”.

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