On the Border: Für Damen und für Herenn

Writes: D.L. Luce

In the late 1950s, a play by Serbian playwright Branislav Nušić, Put oko svijeta, was staged at the Istrian National Theatre in Pula, a building built at his own expense by Pietro Ciscutti during Austro-Hungarian rule, and therefore named Politeama Ciscutti. The role of Jovanče Micić, a world traveller “from Jagodina”, was played by Božo Trakić. Almost everything from those early years has faded from my memory, except for the scene at the “Budapest railway station”. In that scene, Jovanče’s Montenegrin travelling companion, looking out from the train towards the Hungarian station, utters the following line (I quote from memory): “There must be two countries divided here; on one side it says Für Herren, and on the other Für Damenn.” Thus, at a small theatre performance, I acquired my first, naturally quite naïve, notion of a border. Later, I witnessed with my own eyes how men crossed that border more frequently than women?! I was reminded of this long-forgotten anecdote while reading Ödön von Horváth's novel Der ewige Spießer, which I first read in the Slovenian translation in the 1990s, under the title Večni fillister, and then again, in 1996, in Croatian, as Vječni malograđanin.¹ In Horváth's witty account of Mr Alfons Kobler’s 1929 train journey from Schellingstraße in Munich to the World’s Fair in Barcelona, the mentioned nouveau-riche philistine crosses, among others, the Italian border. Not knowing a single word of Italian, he gazes through the compartment window at the incomprehensible signs, including Donne and Uomini. Of course, in those far from particularly happy times, even with the best will in the world, I could no longer believe that a border was merely a soft dividing line between the men’s and women’s toilets.
***
But before we turn to borders over which, from time to time, heads roll, let me make a passing observation: Mr Kobler is travelling from Bavaria and Austria, where they drink beer, towards the Mediterranean, where they celebrate wine, and where, according to Ujević, nations who “drink wine, differ in certain characteristics from nations who drink only beer”²… In his work Sumrak kumira (Gözzendamerung), Nietzsche will point the finger at David Strauss, author of the celebrated book Život Isusov, regarding him as the creator of the brewer’s gospel, for Strauss had, in verse, pledged his allegiance to the beer, that brown liquid, with lifelong fidelity. How could one fail to find among the learned German youth that sentimental degeneracy which beer produces for the soul, asks, more or less, Nietzsche – how much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, pliancy, how much beer is there in the German intelligence. Did Horváth not, at the very height of his dramatic achievement, namely in what is undoubtedly his “Volksstük” - Priče iz Bečke šume (Geschihten aus dem Wiener Wald) from 1931, bring to the stage precisely that atmosphere of a stifling Mitteleuropean beer house, in which Corporal Adolf Hitler would deliver his militaristic speeches to an audience that was heavy, lame, damp, and pliant, only for Horváth to bring Priče to a close with what could well be called the hit of the season: Deutschlandlied. Croatia today, as a passing remark, may well be the only Mediterranean country in which more beer than wine is drank! My nono, my grandfather, considered beer unworthy of mention. He drank Malvasia from the Podbreg and Podkal localities. He planted vineyards.
***
My nono was born in 1897 “up in Lindar” (456 metres above sea level), above Pazin, at the time officially known as Mitterburg, so to speak, in the very geophysical heart of Istria, at the centre of the triangle formed by Trieste, Rijeka and Pula. He was baptised as Ciril Klenovar (the Bartoni family). My nona, my grandmother, was born in 1899, likewise at that same altitude of 456 metres above sea level, and likewise above Pazin, in Venetian known as Pissin. She was registered as Lanka Božić (Saroti family) in the baptism register They were from Lindar, Istriots, Croats and, naturally, citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. They knew that their Emperor Franz Joseph held court in Vienna, but they did not know that Istria was officially called Österachiche Küstenland (Austrian Littoral), nor did they trouble themselves over such matters. Apart from Italians, Craniolans (as they called the Slovenes) and Austrians, they had no opportunity to encounter anyone else among the multitude of nations inhabiting Old Austria. And although, according to Rosmani’s dictionary, the name Lindar (naturally, he adds an “o” – Lindaro, as Horváth's fictional Mr Kobler attest while crossing the Brenner”o” Pass) derives from the Latin Limitarium³, which points to a divide, a border, even in 1914, when the Great War began, they still had no clear idea of what a state or a state border was. It was only in 1918, when the Great War had come to an end and Old Austria had collapsed (Austria delenda, Masaryk), frontiera, the border, far removed from the one separating Für Herren and Für Damen, Done e Uomini, carved its way into their arduous yet simple, campanilismo way of life.                     
*** 
Ödön von Horváth, with whom this account of border began, was born, according to one of his own autobiographical notes, “in 1901 in Rijeka, on the Adriatic Sea, at a quarter to five in the afternoon (according to another version, at half past four)”, into an aristocratic family – his father was, what we would nowadays call, a career diplomat. At the time, Rijeka belonged to the Hungarian Littoral. After noting, “as a Libra does”, that he “left Rijeka weighing thirty-two pounds (16 kg)”, he moves from kilograms to metres, remarking, among other things, that when the World War broke out, he was 1.67 metres tall, and when it ended 1.80 (“I grew quickly during the war – and learned to move quickly, too”). In another note, he writes that he was born in “Rijeka, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna and Munich, held a Hungarian passport – but ‘homeland’? That is something unknown to me. I am a typical Old Austro-Hungarian mixture: Hungarian, Croatian, German, Czech”… He goes on to add that, for him, “the concept of homeland is a national fabrication”, and that he feels he “has no homeland”, which, as he puts it, does not make him unhappy but rather “frees him from unnecessary sentimentality”. For, he says, he belongs to a generation that “has no such illusions”, although he wonders whether this might, perhaps, be “our only illusion”? Hence: “I shall shed no tears for Austro-Hungaria.⁴” One thing, however, is certain; instead of the pre-war 18, post-war Europe could now “boast” as many as 30 sovereign states. He published his debut work, Knjiga plesova (Das Buch der Tanze), in 1920 in Munich.
***      
That same year, on 13 November, Ciril and Lanka, who had just married, learned in Pazin that, since the previous day, when the foreign ministers of the Kingdom od SHS (Yugoslavia) and the Kingdom of Italy, Ante Trumbić and Carlo Sforza, had signed the Treaty of Rapallo, they had become Italian citizens, and that the confin, the border, was now right there, near Rijeka (Fiume). Count Sforza, who, naturally, shared many of the prejudice of his time, was essentially an honourable man, convinced that the Croats and Slovenes who have remained “on the other side of the border” would be guaranteed the highest minority rights (on par with those of “the German minority in Denmark”). What he had not reckoned with was that, as early as 1922, Benito Mussolini would become the leader of the Fascist Italy. On the very day Mussolini came to power, Sforza, by then ambassador in Paris, handed in his credentials and refused the telephone calls and written appeals from the Duce urging him to return to his homeland (he published the letters in the Parisian journal Candide in 1928). An aristocrat in the finest sense of the word, that is, a sworn enemy of Italian Fascism, German Nazism, Spanish Francoism, and Russian Communism, he became the foremost esule among the esuli, and, having condemned himself to exile, would write, like so many before and after him: “malgrado l’assenza mi sia amara”! He believed that Fascism was “opera fantastica e di poco durare”. Throughout his life in exile, he remained faithful to the idea of Paneurope as a “common homeland that would negate none of the genuine strengths of our national patriotism⁵”. Yet that “opera fantastica di poco durare”, guided by the Duce’s slogans of romanità and italianità, and backed by castor oil, transformed Ciril’s and Lanka’s baptist names into Giovanni and Francesca. And with their new names, they continued to kopat, cukljat, štrepat, žorferat tršlje in the localities of Podbreg, Podkal, Dražej…                
***
In 1921, my father, Antun Lučić, was born in Orašac near Dubrovnik. He was known as Brican, as his mother was a woman from Konavle, from the Paljetak family line. Yet even after a conversation on the sidelines of the Pula Book Fair, the poet Luko Paljetak and I were unable to establish whether or not we are related. At the age of twelve, Brican received a gold coin bearing the likeness of King Alexander, having been the youngest trumpeter in an official orchestra in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Naturally, he was sent to music school in Dubrovnik, a decision that would shape the course of his life and eventually bring him to Lindar – the Lord works in mysterious ways. 
He would explain to them that in Konavle malvazija is called mavasija. Did they believe him?
***              
Two years after Mussolini’s March on Rome (1922), nono Ciril’s younger brothers – Dušan and Just-Pravdoslav, upon finishing their secondary education at the gymnasium in Pazin, emigrated to Zagreb, where they continued their studies. Thousands and thousands followed… Like Sforza, perhaps they too wrote down: “bitter are there the morsels of bread.” Once a year, my pranona, my great-grandmother, Marija went to the border at Rječina river (Rečina, Fiumera) so that she could call out to her sons across the border. Na Rečini stoji most, (At Rečina stands a bridge,) / ničesa ne veže, (it connects nothing at all,) / po njem gredu soldati, (soldiers walk across it,) / svaki pušku steže. (each clutching his rifle tight.) // Priko mosta lipi grad (Across the bridge a beautiful town) / pun je naših brati, (full of our brothers,) / a do mosta jena žica: (but beside the bridge stands a wire) / tu te čeka mati (where your mother is waiting for you)⁶. 
And when, in 1938, Horváth passed through his hometown for the last time, on his way to Paris, the “Iron Curtain” would still be standing there, between the two monarchies – and although the expression is attributed to Churchill, it was fist uttered in the Italian Parliament in 1924.
***           
In 1927, Ciril and Lanka had a son Niko, and in 1929 a daughter, Nada; Giovanni and Francesca, meanwhile, had Nicodemo and Natalia. That same year, at the World’s Fair in Barcelona, which was visited by Horváth’s piccolo borghese, the Italian pavilion was still “Mussolini and nothing else⁷”.  
***             
In 1943, my nono took a marked calf to Pazin for the Italian army, only to learn that Italy has capitulated. The calf returned to its own kind; it had never taken to the uniform. That same year, Niko Klenovar from Lindar and Antun Lučić from Orašac joined the Partisans. Istria was occupied by the commandos of the corporal from Ödön's beer house – half of Lindar was sent to Dachau. My nono was lucky, he spoke German. And the deputy commander-in-chief of the German garrison, an Austrian from Vienna in fact, who was also a university professor, liked to drink Malvasia with his prosciutto and “turn a blind eye” to things. Was this why my nona first told me the Germans were people just like us?
                ***
In 1945, my father was transferred from an operational unit to the cultural corps, and so he played and played and played, day after day, from Dubrovnik to Trieste. The day after the city was taken, he gave a concert in Ponte Rosso square. The day before, just a few streets away, Niko, Lanka’s and Ciril’s son from Lindar, above Pazin, had been killed. Trieste and Istria had been taken by Tito’s army, and the fight over new borders began; drawn, as usual, by the victors. All nationalists, even those who present themselves as internationalists, live under the dangerous illusion that state borders and ethnic boundaries coincide. Giovanni and Francesca, because the new bureaucracy was not particularly diligent when it came to church registers, became Ivan and Franica, although they continued to be called Cirili and Lanka. At Saint Martin cemetery, Ciril and Lanka lie wearing other people’s names!                
***
In 1946, in the atmosphere of the mentioned fight over new border, Antun Lučić is sent from Dubrovnik to Pazin with the task of mobilising musicians and “forming” a military band. As a Partisan lieutenant, he was assigned a salary in “Yugoslav lire”, which he celebrated by taking the entire orchestra “up there”, to an altitude of 456 metres. As the “wealthiest”, my nono naturally invited him to dinner, where he would meet our mother Nada Klenovar of the Bartoni family. They would have a church wedding the following year – I would be born in ’48, and my brother in ’54.
                ***
My nona’s sisters opted for Italy. They left for Pola, from Pola to Padua and Milan: addio Pissin, addio Lindaresi, addio Pola, addio tutto… Thousands and thousands followed… My brother would write a poem about a ship that, on the Pula-Venice-Ancona route, carried two thousand esuli. The poem was set to music by Franci Blašković (Gori ussi Vinetou): Toscana nave putana (fragment): 
Soldati, kameradi, importirani, (Soldiers, comrades, imported,) / deportirani, ežuli, emigranti, (deported, exiles, emigrants,) / bolni, ranjeni, siromahi, (the sick, the wounded, the poor,) / brižni, dišperani, dižgracijani, (the miserable, the desperate, the disgraced,) / svi se pelju na Toscani. (all aboard the Toscana.)    
Maledetta Toscana, nave putana. (Damned Toscana, whore of a ship.)8
The state is a “frigid monster”, it has no sense of belonging to one’s homeland about which Tommasseo, Črnja, Balota, Rakovac, Tomizza and others write with such pathos. 
***              
Lanka and Ciril of the Barton family died shortly before the last European war of the twentieth century would be fought on Croatian soil. And once again, it would be fought over borders. Dubrovnik, the city of my father’s youth, is burning, Orašac is under occupation, the Paljetak family home in Konavle has been burnt down. Another family of unfortunates, driven from their ancestral homes, knocks at our door in the Palazzini district of Pula.
And Malvasia ripens on both sides of the borders.

1 Ödőn von Horvath VEČNI FILISTER, Založba Wieser, Ljubljana 1990., prev Mojca Kranjc; VJEČNI MALOGRAĐANIN, Feral Tribune, Split 1996., prev. Igor Bošnjak.
2 Tin Ujević IZABRANI PROZNI SASTAVCI – Akademija flaše, MH, Zagreb 2006., str. 24.
3 Enrico Rosamani VOCABOLARIO GIULIANO, LINT, Trieste 1999., str. 543.
4 D. L. Luce Ödön von Horvath – Autobiografske crtice / Priče iz Bečke šume, Moderna vremena br. 3, str. 11/12, Zagreb 1996.
5 Grof Carlo Sforza EVROPA I EVROPLJANI (SINTHESE DE L’EUROPE), EX LIBRIS, Zagreb 1938, prev. Iso Velikanović, str 73.
6 Mijo Mirković alias Mate Balota DRAGI KAMEN, Na Rečini, MH, Zagreb 1938., str. 33.
7 Odön von Horvath VJEČNI MALOGRAĐANIN, Feral Tribune, Split 1996., str. 90.
8 Branko Lučić-libreto i Franci Blšković-muzika TOSCANA NAVE PUTANA, Pula.