Notes from a Swiss Prison with an introduction by Stanislao G. Pugliese
Silone, Ignazio
IGNAZIO SILONE, born Secondo Tranquilli in the Abruzzi region of Italy on May 1, 1900, was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). He changed his name while in a Spanish prison,...
...From there, Silone worked with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA), DISSENT / Summer 2006 85 in coordinating assistance to the antifascist resistance working within Italy...
...I consider Switzerland as my second patria, as the homeland of my spirit...
...in other words, it must dismantle the present elephantine totalitarian state and replace it with a political organization that is the direct expression of the people...
...Divine Providence can make use of anything, even the Swiss federal police...
...When the investigation into this political intermezzo is finished, I will return to my work in completing The School for Liberty...
...Hannah Arendt...
...it is a contradiction that has a historic foundation, due to the unequal development of the various European countries, and therefore only a subsequent historical development can eliminate it, when the other countries, bordering Switzerland, will themselves enjoy the benefits of democracy and political freedom...
...I am aware that to go to prison and suffer persecution for the sake of liberty is easier than to persecute and to imprison...
...This article is excerpted from Memoir from a Swiss Prison, by Ignazio Silone...
...it is something that must be experienced to understand what it means...
...c) the traditional and opposing modes of understanding socialism that set the terms for reformism and maximalism are now DISSENT / Summer 2006 91 anachronistic: reformism wished to paint a rosy veneer over a society whose crisis was organic and structural...
...Illuminations, ed...
...As Italian historian Lamberto Mercuri wrote in his introduction to its first publication in 1979 (a year after Silone's death), it is a document that details Silone's conception not just of his politics but of his writing and life as well...
...That is, the call to civil disobedience was directed toward individual behavior and passive resistance and was "not an invitation to violence...
...I could not return to Italy...
...But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out...
...Suffering from a pulmonary hemorrhage and high fever, Silone was released from prison on December 30, 1942, and went to Davos, where he remained under surveillance and was again called in for questioning before the Swiss courts issued a sentence on February 11, 1943...
...Silone was to get medical attention...
...We must leave them behind...
...I mean to say that in my activity, which was imposed upon me by circumstances, I neither saw nor felt a "relapse" or a "regression" into a phase of my life that had been superceded, into political activity in the strict sense of the word...
...Although the military struggle might defeat Fascism and Nazism, it was this third, domestic front that would be decisive in overcoming the social and political conditions that gave rise to Fascism...
...there is a true revolution when the most undervalued and painful element of a society becomes a force upon it, and in its image, the entire society is reorganized...
...Furthermore, they came and still come because they have found in my books an echo of their own intimate sufferings and an overcoming and sublimation of that suffering in a modern, humane, and Christian conception of man, society, and the state...
...I mean to say red Fascists...
...it is necessary to re-introduce ourselves to the Italian people with a program of clear structural changes to be realized while a new spirit blows across the country following the collapse of the present dictatorship...
...d) in place of the centralized state, we must advocate a federal democracy as the only form capable of assuring self-governance of the people...
...Now, I tell you, I refuse to become a Fascist, and especially a red Fascist...
...and, if he finds them and grabs them, he mangles them, he tears them to pieces, he bites them, chews them up, swallows and digests them...
...A day later, Silone was astonished to read in the newspapers that the EC of the Comintern had "unanimously" condemned Trotsky...
...but, more important, I became a man...
...If I think back on the sufferings, the dangers, the errors, the penitence suffered by many friends and myself, it seems that we had that painful and privileged experience of which Saint Bernard speaks...
...All available evidence for and against us clearly and abundantly DISSENT / Summer 2006 87 proves the "crime" of which we are guilty is neither communism nor anarchism but democracy and liberty, pure and simple...
...it required students and teachers to refuse to participate in the numerous ceremonies that marked the academic calendar...
...We are speaking of courageous men, convinced idealists, in whom the passion for liberty burns as in the purest heroes of the democratic revolutions...
...My collaborator was evidently afflicted with a particular form of mental illness, which might be described as "archival madness," that is, a manic desire to conserve, accumulate, and file the largest quantity of paper that he could find...
...He sought instead to replace economic determinism with an ethical foundation: in place of centralization, federalism...
...90 DISSENT / Summer 2006 Near the end of writing my novel The Seed Beneath the Snow, I began writing another book, The School for Liberty, as a positive continuation and as antithesis to The School for Dictators...
...The epistolary relationship raises more questions than it answers, but we do know that in an attempt to extricate himself from that base and humiliating relationship, he allowed himself to be expelled from the communist movement, thereby ending his relationship with Bellone, the fascist police, and the PCI...
...We do not want a revolution of drunken, mutinous slaves but of free men...
...By then, he was living in exile in Switzerland...
...3. Memoriale dal carcere svizzero, edited by Lamberto Mercuri (Rome: Lerici, 1979), pp...
...Before ending this memoir, I cannot fail to touch on a painful subject, the most painful subject of this entire affair, that which most preoccupies me and for which I pass sleepless nights: the fate of the confiscated proceedings, especially those that carry information and addresses of antifascists living in Italy...
...I have spoken and freed my spirit...
...6. On the consequences of the present arrests and the destruction of the Foreign Office of the Italian Socialist Party...
...A collector, however, interprets this Latin saying differently...
...It appeared evident 88 DISSENT / Summer 2006 to me that the highest aspiration of man on earth must be, above all, to become good, honest, and sincere...
...It is therefore in the interests of Europe that in the Italian crisis—which will have from month to month dramatic phases—the Italian workers intervene with a spirit animated by democracy and freedom...
...What worth are all your magnificently eloquent tirades on the basic rights of man, on the dignity of man and your defense of culture...
...We must not forget that we have never really known a true democracy...
...Besides, it is the repetition of an old phenomenon...
...That same year, Silone wrote a biting satire, The School for Dictators...
...Not only did I gain a clearer conception of society, not only did my political thinking break free of the Bolshevist nightmare, discovering in my daily encounters with a free, democratic, and peaceful people the possibility of a form of human existence that I had previously thought impossible...
...While Stalin was imploring his allied counterparts Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt to open a second front in the west, Silone insisted on defeating Fascism on the third, or domestic, front...
...4) on the nature of the Italian crisis and on the necessity for action on behalf of liberty and democracy among the working classes...
...Most probably, Italy will be the first country, among those currently subject to dictatorship, which will have to confront the crisis of the passage from dictatorship to democracy...
...On December 1, 1942, II Terzo Fronte, Organo del Partito Socialista Italiano was published...
...Arguing that the 86 DISSENT / Summer 2006 activities of Silone and his three colleagues at the Foreign Office constituted "a grave threat to the external security of the Confederation," the judge found nonetheless that the activities were "effectively limited to an ideal preparation and a distribution of advice...
...I hope to be read not by a policeman but by a man and a Christian...
...And so it is no mere academic quibble for me to set forth here in clear and unambiguous terms precisely what my friends and I were trying to achieve, ideologically and politically, nor is it something that we can leave to the historians of the future...
...It was a trenchant critique of the fascist regime and a call to civil disobedience on the part of Italians still living in Italy...
...And in fact, from the point of view of a certain socialist orthodoxy, they were and are heresies, but heresies pregnant with life and painful truths...
...And, if a trial does takes place, Italian fascism will certainly be on trial...
...and he creates them as entirely new creatures, creatures that are entirely his own...
...7. On the fate of the confiscated material, with special regard to the part concerning the organization in Italy...
...It is the dictatorship of Barabbas, imperium Barabbae...
...I don't believe that in the conscience of the investigating functionaries there is any doubt on this essential point: we are resolute partisans of democracy and liberty...
...What moral validity does your self-styled humanism have...
...9. Yet Silone was himself to collaborate with Allen Dulles of the American Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency...
...SECONDO TRANQUILLI (IGNAZIO SILONE) Author note: I am indebted to Antony Shugaar for assistance with the translation...
...there are pages in those books that were written in blood...
...And so, when all is said and done, couldn't the fact that I have been arrested, which forced me to abandon a line of work for which I am not at all cut out, and obliged me to return to the solitary pursuit of writing, be a blessing in disguise...
...I am in fact convinced, and have tried to express this in all my writings, that to resist Fascism we have no need of material means, or of arms, nor great bureaucratic apparatuses, but above all we need a completely new way of thinking about life and men...
...My last books, and especially Bread and Wine, The School For Dictators, and The Seed Beneath the Snow, are the sincere expression of a man who remains radically opposed to fascism and to every form of dictatorship, but for human and ideal reasons that transcend those of political antifascism...
...My political correspondence (not very voluminous or frequent: in one year I must have written about twenty letters) was the continuation and the translation into an immediate and simple language of my work as a writer...
...I beg, I implore the attorney general, who must examine and guard the papers confiscated from the Foreign Office of the PSI, to take every measure to ensure that the lives of antifascists in Italy are safeguarded...
...Silone refused to condemn Trotsky without having seen the evidence, and Stalin insisted that if the motion to condemn was not unanimous, it would be withdrawn...
...It is, in short, an "examination of conscience" of a major twentiethcentury writer...
...without family (I had become an orphan at age fifteen, my only remaining brother was then in prison as a Catholic antifascist, and, soon after, died in prison) 4; I had been expelled from France and from Spain...
...in place of bureaucratic statism, a pluralistic system permitting free initiative and the self-government of the producers...
...Those friends came and still come to me, not so much because of my past as an antifascist conspirator in Italy, but rather because of my present independence, which allows me to judge the conditions and aspirations of the working classes with a dispassionate soul and the needs and the necessities of international life...
...I do not doubt the correctness and the loyalty of the police agents charged with the investigation against us, but among the disadvantages of a profession devoted to searching, shadowing, scrutinizing, analyzing, and decoding, there is that of not seeing the forest for the trees...
...My work as a writer has been the testimony of this struggle of mine and its internal maturation...
...the difference with the past was enormous, and not only because of my internal transformation, but also because—even though writing on political subjects to men committed to a difficult political struggle—I was (and am) absolutely without political ambition, and I was pressed (and am pressed) to share with others who have need for certain conclusions that I have arrived at through reflecting on our era and our sufferings...
...His period of Swiss exile was marked also by essays and journalism, including an innovative journal, information, inspired by German Expressionism and the Bauhaus movement...
...translated and edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese, with artwork by Antonio Pugliese (Merrick, NY: Cross-Cultural Communications, 2006) 1. Riccardo Formica (pseudonym "Minotti...
...It wasn't only an episode of the internal struggle between socialists and communists...
...It is terrible when God loses his patience and he cries out into the soul of someone...
...It was accessible to all and, if practiced by a great number of people, it was a political weapon of immense potential, capable of paralyzing the repressive apparatus of the regime and hastening its collapse...
...Although I view imprisonment and other punishments—which I accept as evidence of my love of freedom—as nothing more than a badge of honor and pride, as would any other decent human being, I would nonetheless be sorry if the Swiss authorities, for whom I have great respect, were to judge me or punish me for crimes with which I had nothing to do or for deeds that they have misunderstood or have taken in the wrong spirit...
...2. On liberal socialism, see Carlo Rosselli's Liberal Socialism, edited by Nadia Urbinati and translated by William McCuaig (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Harvard University Press, 1999), pp...
...there is the danger of isolating the episode from the historical context of which it is an integral detail...
...A spiritual bolshevization of the Italian workers would return the country to the tragic situation of 19191922 and would rehabilitate the sad dilemma in the eyes of a fearful Europe: Fascism or Bolshevism...
...From this there derives the paradoxical and painful consequence that in this political police operation both the accused and the accusers clearly fight for the same ideal: the latter to defend democratic institutions in their own country, the former to introduce those very same institutions in their wretched country...
...STANISLAO G. PUGLIESE 1 DI feicnebe dm ysr 1942:deSrinacrreeDembe 14 steicnthebr alr racks of the canton police of Zurich, placed under investigation for certain political activities concerning Italy that I carried out along with friends...
...If I can cite from memory the salient passages from many of my letters it's because they were not improvised expressions of a politician seeking success, but conclusions that had matured in me during long years of silence and meditation...
...Bernard, "Liberarvi animam meam," Epistle 371...
...The same difference will give the Italian crisis a very radical character...
...Romolo was later arrested in connection with an assassination attempt against the king of Italy...
...During the course of working on Silone's essay, I was mindful of the old Italian proverb II traduttore un traditore (The translator is a traitor...
...The Giolittian era, from 1901 to 1914, was characterized by the domination of a restricted parliamentary oligarchy...
...That he may receive my message as a Christmas gift...
...But if I express doubt that the traditional forces and institutions in Italy are capable of realizing democratization in the country, it is not because of some sectarian prejudice but because of historical experience and the very social structure of Italy...
...So the Italians were guilty of illegal political activity, and Silone and Formica were officially to be expelled from Swiss territory...
...85-120...
...They asked me to continue writing and to make my thinking known to them...
...Their lives are in danger...
...Now I have no doubt—no doubt at all— that the Swiss authorities recognize the tragic consequences that would fall upon the Italian antifascists should, in one way or another, by the indiscretion of some bureaucrat, the Italian police come into possession of the information and addresses that concern them...
...DISSENT / Summer 2006 93...
...The article in question made it a crime to use violence to challenge the public order of a foreign state or to advocate a violent overthrow of a foreign power...
...In any case, I realize, in my high esteem for the authorities of this country, that in the painful struggle between the democratic police and democratic, political militants, the hardest role is not that of those who go to prison...
...There, Joseph Stalin insisted that the EC condemn Leon Trotsky for treason based on a document that Stalin refused to make available to the members of the committee...
...Piero Pellegrini ("Pedroni...
...His status as a refugee in Switzerland and his registration with the Swiss Police for Foreigners expressly forbade any political activity...
...A revolution is not merely the substitution of men in power...
...1269- 1272...
...It was time for Italians to reclaim their human dignity, their honor as free citizens, and to reassert their natural rights...
...6 Like all those who are impassioned and worried about the future of Europe after this war, so my friends, too, were, and are, tormented by the outcome of the political future in Italy and, in a very precise way, by the question of whether or not our country will finally be able to order itself in a democratic and free manner, or whether it will fall between the frying pan and the fire, from a fascist dictatorship to a Bolshevik dictatorship...
...To it we can now apply the words of the Eternal One spoken to the prophet Isaiah: "For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and have held myself back...
...By bringing together the political problem of the country with a moral task, civil disobedience would synthesize thought and responsible action...
...The memoir, translated into English here for the first time, was drafted on December 17, 1942...
...When Silone naively asked to read the incriminating document, Stalin protested...
...I was gravely ill and without any means of support...
...Ignazio Silone, Romanzi e saggi, edited by Bruno Falcetto, vol...
...But this problem, in and of itself, is neither theoretical nor abstract and cannot, therefore, have an answer based on phrases and discussions...
...Fascism, though, has pushed it to the extremes...
...8. In an open letter of August 1936 sent to the editorial board of the journal Das Wort in Moscow while the Stalinist purge trials were underway, Silone vehemently criticized the Russian communists for having betrayed the workers' cause: "What is the worth of your protests against the Fascist police and tribunals...
...Antifascism would become conscious of its own power...
...The Spirit blows where it chooses [John 3:8] and Habent sua fata libelli...
...It would transform antifascism—which until that point had been mostly intellectual—into an enthusiastic spirit of sacrifice, an audacious conquering of freedom...
...or, when this was not possible, applying the letter of the law in a way that produced a result contrary to the intent of the regime...
...These words may have been intended as a general statement about books...
...The task of the Italian socialist and democratic revolution is, therefore, very simple...
...6. "Books have their own destiny...
...After eleven years of isolation and literary work I acceded to the categorical imperative of my conscience, which demanded I translate the concepts of autonomy, responsibility, dignity, into a more immediate and comprehensible language...
...But this was equivocal...
...For him, not only books but also copies of books have their fates...
...Their value is essentially that of human testimony...
...Exactly twelve years ago, in December 1930 (as today, a few days before Christmas), I was a guest in this very prison where I am currently incarcerated...
...Although cleared of that charge, he was still held as a "communist," but more likely as the brother of Ignazio Silone...
...But because of Silone's fame as a writer, his ill health, and the impossibility of expulsion in wartime, when the Swiss border was sealed, the three were to be placed under house arrest...
...A state at the service of society and not vice versa...
...Interview with translator, March 2000...
...Darina Silone died in Rome on July 25, 2003...
...Two weeks later, Silone and the threeperson staff of the Foreign Office of the PSI' were indeed arrested...
...So books like The Divine Comedy, Spinoza's Ethics, and The Origin of the Species have their fates...
...2. On my stay in Switzerland since 1930 until today and on my obligations to the foreign police...
...We must leave Barabbas to fascism and recognize ourselves in Christ...
...In this memoir I propose to develop and explain myself on the following points: (1) on the general political nature of my arrest and that of my friends...
...1. On the general political character of my arrest and that of my friends...
...2) on my stay in Switzerland from 1930 to today and my obligations toward the Police for Foreigners...
...Although hoping that I have not betrayed Silone, I will not go so far as Jorge Luis Borges, who once wrote, "El original es infiel a la tradución" (The original is unfaithful to the translation...
...one who struggled against two forms of totalitarianism but whose greatest battle may have been within his own soul...
...Further muddying the waters is the curious fact that after Silone became a famous antifascist writer in the 1930s, he was never "outed" by the fascist regime (although documents indicate he was still being followed by fascist spies...
...92 DISSENT / Summer 2006 Conclusion...
...Fascism (and national socialism) has chosen Barabbas...
...And he pointed out, not without some bitterness, that his arrest had been forced by Radio Moscow—the Swiss Federal Police had rendered Stalin a very welcome service...
...Their lives deserved to be defended and safeguarded with all the precautions that the circumstances demand...
...Charged with important tasks by the PCI, he traveled to Moscow for a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in May 1927...
...While I studied Pestalozzi, Vinet, Calvin, the civil and religious history of Switzerland, the Italian philosophy of Bruno, Vico, Croce, the American philosophy of Dewey, and the judicial theory of Georges Gurvitch, I took advantage of this at the time as nourishment for my soul, as sources for my new book, The School for Liberty and as a guide and inspiration in my letters to Italian friends...
...maximalism dreamt of a gloomy and anti-historical apocalypse...
...I have finished...
...Fascism has taken from socialism its negative and materialist aspect...
...e) our ideal is not the nationalization of industry and a state-run economy, but a pluralistic economy in which all forms are permissible, according to the technical requirements of the various branches of production, all forms that allow for the control of the economy to pass to the producers and consumers (guilds, cooperatives, mixed unions, municipalization, and nationalization of public transportation and credit...
...Perhaps prison, for my spirit, is the most propitious place...
...4. Silone's father died in 1911 when the son was eleven...
...In the lexicon of the time, "social democratic," at least for Silone, meant a Marxist, centralized, statist socialism...
...I can affirm without fear of being refuted that the diffusion of my books in Italy has come about without my assistance...
...In the lexicon of the southern Italian peasantry, "cristiano" meant a decent person, not necessarily a follower of the religion...
...it is a tragic, objective, real contradiction, independent of our good- or ill-will...
...After his expulsion from the party, Silone swore that he would not return to the world of politics...
...Civil disobedience meant ignoring laws, decrees, regulations...
...I don't believe that my books have great literary value...
...3. On the first political contacts with elements of the Italian political opposition toward the middle of 1941...
...I myself know full well their formal defects...
...Until the middle of 1941, I had scrupulously respected the promise I had given to the Swiss foreign police to abstain from any political activity...
...it is something that cannot be recounted...
...See From Hitler's Doorstep: The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942 - 1945, edited by Neal H. Petersen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) and the collection of documents gathered by Peter Kamber at http://www.peterkamber.ch/ignazio.html 10...
...During that decade and a half, he continued to write, publishing Bread and Wine in 1937 and The Seed Beneath the Snow in 1938...
...fascism appropriated many things from socialism that seemed essential to socialism but were not...
...The existing difference between the state and Italian society is the abyss into which Italian fascism is falling...
...his only surviving sibling, Romolo, was also buried under the rubble but managed to live...
...He and a few others established the Centro Estero (Foreign Office) of the PSI in Zurich in 1940...
...For some time, it seems, he had carried out an exchange of letters with Guido Bellone, a police official in Rome...
...So began a long and painful process of disillusionment that was to end with Silone's expulsion from the Communist Party in 1931...
...The entirety of my letters to Italian friends can be summed up in the following concepts: (a) Even recognizing that the military defeat can hasten a change of regime in Italy, we must scrupulously abstain from falling into the service of those powers who are currently at war with our country: we fight fascism as Italian revolutionaries and not as Anglo-Saxon agents, and if we discover that some socialist or other forgets this rule, which for us is sacred . . . we must quickly eliminate them from any contact with us...
...it meant sabotaging munitions work, refusing to turn over crops to the state, running the trains late, resigning from the civil service, or obstructing the oppressive functioning of the state from within...
...In short, each category of citizen should find a particular way to disobey...
...For the future of Italy and democracy, these are precious men...
...The pain provoked by the persecutions ceases to be a useless expenditure of energy when the pain, with the aid of conscience, is capable of renewing and purifying," I wrote in one of my early letters...
...I am, and I want to remain, a writer, tied to no other discipline except that which my thinking and conscience master...
...I am not, nor do I wish to be, a politician, in the meaning ordinarily given this word...
...It would be a most instructive trial...
...The Italian example will have a Europeanwide significance...
...in a word, I was on the threshold of suicide.' In that period I underwent an atrocious crisis but one that granted me salvation...
...If now I look back at the time I passed in this country and the transformation I underwent, I seem to have become another man entirely: at the time, I was thirty years old, I had just recently left the Communist Party, to which I had sacrificed my youth, my studies, and every personal interest...
...This deformity of Italian life is much older than fascism...
...trans...
...Civil disobedience for Silone was, above all, "a transformation of the spirit, a refusal to acquiesce to a regime that is contrary to reason and conscience...
...I will complete it in prison or an internment camp, or in my home, there where the authorities send me: the place is not very important...
...All the debates and studies concerning the political and social future of Europe and the world reduce themselves in substance to this: if we must bow before the dilemma "fascism or bolshevism" or if there exists an exit to the present crisis that is a path of democracy and freedom...
...5. In an interview, Silone's widow, Darina, stated that Silone had contemplated suicide several times in his life...
...The federal police have confiscated, through one of my collaborators, much material...
...If so, it will] [c]ertainly not be because of any exhibitionistic theatrical impulse or desire for spectacle but because if the judges are to judge us with a full and thorough understanding of the case, it will be our unavoidable duty to lay out before them the painful and difficult trial of the death of fascism and the birth of Italian freedom...
...No one denies the diabolical means of penetration and corruption that the Italian fascist police services make use of in Italy and abroad...
...In the summer of 1929, penniless, broken physically and spiritually, told by his doctors that he did not have long to live, and on the verge of suicide, Silone sat down to write a novel of his native town, "so at least to be able to die among my own people...
...During the course of their marriage, he more than once threatened to kill himself...
...Apparently, Silone, in an attempt to mitigate the condition of his younger brother, who had been languishing in fascist prisons since 1928 (and where he would die in October 1932), passed along to Bellone information concerning the clandestine organization of the PCI in Italy and abroad...
...Although there is no disputing Silone's authorship of some of the letters, there is still a question concerning how long this relationship went on (a 'farewell" letter of April 1930 to Bellone mentions a period of ten years), how serious the damage to the PCI, and Silone's motives (at least two scholars have implied questionable sexual intrigue...
...Under questioning by the Swiss police after his arrest two weeks later, Silone admitted to having written the manifesto...
...this exigency implies a superceding of our present ideology and a superceding of cynical and skeptical nihilism so prevalent in today's political life...
...It was time for the Italian people to reestablish those spontaneous ties of spiritual affinity that the totalitarian regime had attempted to smother...
...1 (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), pp...
...but quickly, hand in hand with an interior rebirth I was undergoing, it corresponded with an effective distancing of my conscience from any ambition or any coveting of power...
...For the moment though, you Swiss have an audacious, reckless, almost miraculous advantage: your Confederation was born 750 years ago, while ours is still within the bosom of the Lord and perhaps will be born in the next few years...
...7) on the fate of the material confiscated, with particular regard to the part that concerns the organization [the PSI] in Italy...
...Without this 'new way of thinking about life and men,' we ourselves, dear friends, will become Fascists...
...For my rebirth and resurrection (from the defeated man I was in 1930 arriving in Switzerland, to who I am and what I feel like today), I am, in very large measure, indebted to Switzerland...
...This is one of the many painful contradictions of a Europe torn to pieces...
...Silone found his mother's body after digging through the rubble by hand for several days...
...In those first contacts with my friends who were fighting in Italy, I saw that their spiritual hunger for truth was just as strong and just as obvious as the hunger for material food is in someone who has fasted for a long time...
...10 I have expressed myself with utter sincerity...
...Among others, I remember a moving sentence in a letter by a man who, until then, I had thought was resistant to my way of thinking: "These things that you send us," he wrote me (and the letter must be among the confiscated material), "for a long time I've been thinking of them too, in secret, or at least, given my intellectual limits, I was trying to think about them, but I didn't know how to express them because I was afraid that, from the point of view of socialist orthodoxy, they could be heretical...
...The term used today," Silone wrote, "within Italy and abroad, to describe our thought and to distinguish it from traditional social democracy is `liberal socialism...
...more significantly, I rediscovered a Christian and divine aspect to the very meaning of man's existence on earth, the very meaning of reality, a holy, Christian sense that had been present for me in my early adolescence but which I lost as I grew older...
...the most vivid, living texts of Italian freedom have been written in prison: from the Consolations of Philosophy of Boethius to the books of Giordano Bruno and Tommasso Campanella...
...4. On the nature of the Italian crisis and the necessity of action for liberty and democracy among the working classes...
...It's one of those debts that can only be repaid as gratitude, a nostalgia, a love for the rest of one's life...
...This was a base betrayal by Stalin, because the Soviets knew that the Swiss police would now be forced to arrest Silone and his colleagues...
...During the same period in which a break was delineated within the dominant political class in Italy, a clandestine yet intense work was taking place within the antifascist emigration to regroup the antifascist forces DISSENT / Summer 2006 89 around the communists, with the participation even of influential representatives of socialist groups.' . . . The proceedings sequestered by the Swiss federal police contain much documentation on that political episode, whose gravity can only be appreciated by those who know what it means when a communist party manages to drag the other workers' organizations along into its orbit and to contaminate them with its spirit of demagogic hysteria...
...The unbalanced social structure of Italy is so grave that an Italian democracy is inconceivable without the working classes...
...With regard to contemporary events, their origins, and their importance, I had acquired a vision that superseded that of a superficial and simplistic politics, and I gave greater weight to other causes, more profound, more concealed, more fundamental...
...Because a writer is still a writer even though he may use the written word and his letters to justify, defend, propagate, and popularize his own vision of the world...
...given the new political perspectives that were opening in Italy, it was also a worrisome symptom, it was a threat that the Italian crisis then maturing would explode, pivoting on the dilemma of fascism or bolshevism...
...But World War II changed Silone's mind, and he slowly reentered the political struggle against Fascism and Nazism by working with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI...
...In Switzerland I became a writer...
...His phone calls, correspondence, and visits would be monitored by the Swiss police...
...The result was Fontamara, a tale of fascist repression and brutality, written in a deceptively simple style, that went on to be translated into twenty-seven languages and that was the most well-known work of antifascist literature of the 1930s and 1940s...
...Italian society suffers an acute and insupportable contrast between its spontaneous, immediate reality and its political organization...
...On the vigil of a grave political crisis in my country, my preoccupation was to inspire an avant-garde of workers with ideas of liberty, to rouse them for those ideas that are superior to the coarse and demagogic ideas of communism, in a way that they could become the guide and the salvation of our wretched country...
...Arrested under laws directed against anarchists and communists, Silone protested that he had worked for some time to prevent the fusionist wing of the PSI from completing a merger with the PCI...
...STANISLAO G. PUGLIESE is the author of Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile, Desperate Inscriptions: Graffiti from the Nazi Prison in Rome, editor of The Legacy of Primo Levi, and is currently writing a biography of Ignazio Silone...
...5. On my personal action within the Foreign Office of the Italian Socialist Party...
...it must bring together the political organization of the state with the real and living development of Italian society...
...3) on my political contacts with elements of the Italian political opposition since the middle of 1941...
...he begins to shout and command like a woman giving birth...
...I was silent, I lived a withdrawn life, I wrote my books, I abstained from all political movements and action...
...89-90...
...Usually, they have been read and passed around in English, German, and French editions, which, until 1939, could circulate freely...
...My intention with the present letter is .. . only to situate the acts of which I am charged with in their true light and context...
...Not coincidentally, the same day that the manifesto appeared, a broadcast from Radio Moscow went out over the airwaves of Europe, revealing the existence of a small cell of socialists working in Switzerland...
...Silone's memoir was written to explain his political and spiritual thinking at the time...
...My estrangement from politics may therefore appear, in the first place, as an imposition of external circumstances...
...He had been arrested for violating article 299 of the Swiss penal code, but the judge suggested a creative interpretation of the facts...
...Silone remained in his Swiss exile for fifteen years, not returning to Italy until 1944...
...My moral debt to this country is so great that I have no hope of ever repaying it...
...As Saint Bernard wrote in one of his books, there are men that God chases, persecutes, searches out...
...it is a historical problem, and it will have a historic solution, according to the relationship of forces, of faith, of will, of conscience of those who intervene in the struggle to determine our common destiny...
...Visiting Italian friends sought to convince me that the fascist regime had entered into a phase of internal decomposition...
...In his essay "Unpacking My Library," Walter Benjamin writes, "Habent sua fats libel1i...
...He changed his name while in a Spanish prison, under arrest for his political activities...
...Will I, with my friends, be put on trial...
...5) on my personal activities in the Foreign Office of the Italian Socialist Party...
...but I know that even typewritten and copied editions of the Italian originals circulate because of the initiative of persons totally unknown by me...
...Here, unlike in the two references earlier, I do not think Silone means "Christian" in a religious sense...
...Harry Zohn (Schocken, 1968), p. 61...
...to understand how, with that voice in one's soul, one can forget even promises made to the police...
...Olindo Gorni ("Giannini...
...He is professor of history at Hofstra University and a former fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University...
...My books have been the story of the uncertainties, the difficulties, the successes, of the victory of my soul in its struggle against that which was vulgar and merely instinctive in my earlier life...
...More important, Silone was anxious to clarify his own brand of socialism...
...During the interrogations, his political philosophy had been described as "social democratic...
...6) on the consequences of the present arrests and the destruction of the Foreign Office of the Italian Socialist Party...
...his mother died in the tragic earthquake of 1915 that destroyed the family home and many of the surrounding towns...
...Civil disobedience meant not paying taxes, or paying late...
...9 (b) The impulse that has prevented us from capitulating before the dictatorship is not classist, materialist, or intellectual in origin, but is essentially ethical: upon it we must reconstruct the socialist movement...
...In traditional socialism there lived, one next to the other, one within the other, the two figures of Christ and Barabbas...
...The persecutions can be beneficial to socialism if socialism is capable of freeing itself from the dross which over the course of its development has been superimposed on its primitive spiritual nucleus and if socialism is capable of once again becoming a movement for liberty...
...My arrest has put an end to an episode of my life that I myself have always considered accidental or transitory...
...7. Silone was actively working to thwart the efforts of socialist Pietro Nenni, who was seeking a fusion between the PSI and the PCI...
...Long years of study and meditation have enabled me to place these concepts within earshot of the simple souls of the workers, to vaccinate them against the communist psychosis, which in those documents I defined as "a species of red fascism...
...If he fails to understand it, perhaps those who a hundred or two hundred years from now, searching through these miserable papers, will understand enough to seize a spark of the great struggle of our time...
...All notes in this article are provided by the translator...
Vol. 53 • July 2006 • No. 3
