Ernst Wiechert
La Signora

In the history of German literature, there is a brief chapter that is, from a literary point of view, of little relevance, yet it has always attracted me enough to lead to a moderate collection. The great Germanist Ladislao Mittner defined the "black twelve-year period" as that time (1933-1945) when Nazi cultural propaganda tried to impose a certain type of low-quality literature and theater, forcing the true Great writers of the era into exile.

Very modest authors like Hans Grimm, Hans Blunck, Erwin Kolbenheyer, Friedrich Griese, and Ernst Wiechert thus found themselves involuntarily (because the works chosen as propaganda manifestos were written before the Nazi rise) at the heart of redefining the canon of the new Aryan knowledge.

Replacing the reformist push of far more influential authors like Mann, Hesse, Sachs, this handful of writers reveled in the anachronistic poetry of nature (Bäume im Wind), in the most blatant colonialism (Südafrikanische Novellen), and in the apology of frenzied militarism (Die Majorin, Das einfache Leben). The perfect corollary of a lobotomization campaign that did not spare, as we know, not even the smallest.

"La signora" (die Majorin, 1936) is, therefore, not an indispensable text, by a rather forgettable author (Das einfache Leben - A Simple Life can still be read) whose importance does not lie in its content but in its ability to tell "something else", to go beyond the story itself. Mondadori published this work for the first time in 1936. By 1944 it was already in its seventh reprint. The second cover announces it as "a true jewel of nature and the soul where the drama of a war veteran finds its catharsis in the act of love of a chosen woman". The story, as I said, is not indispensable. It has not been reprinted or translated. The story of this "Majorin" is not indispensable because no catharsis is needed anymore. Indispensable, as a true witness, is in my opinion, the support: in its bright green, in its lines marked by a dense and deep black, in its binding as strong as barbed wire. It has resisted.

Three years later, in 1947, La Signora Anna Seghers, a Jewish author who escaped the extermination, was presented to Italy with the first edition of The Seventh Cross (1942), one of the first poignant testimonies on the Holocaust. The comparison moves. The edition does not have the same tenacious green as the regime editions, the letters and numbers blur in the gray of the ink. There are many typos. The pages crumble and drift away. And costs more.

I found "La Signora" at a bookseller first. Later on, "The Seventh Cross" but at another junk dealer. They stand next to each other on a shelf. And they tell me two stories of women.