Celebrating Mitteleuropa
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
LETTER FROM CIVIDALE Celebrating Mitteleuropa By Ruth Ellen Gruber ClVIDALE DEL FRIULI It was a warm Saturday summer afternoon. I sat with Italian scholar Claudio Magris on a café...
...The citizens of Cividale kept the bargain, more or less: They sent a cat—some say a rabid dog—across before any human being set foot on the bridge...
...Yes, I know it well," he told me...
...After World War II, the border with what was Yugoslavia, just a few miles away, marked the frontier between the West and the Communist bloc...
...The volume itself is a mixture of historical anecdote, intellectual commentary, travel writing, and rumination that is tantamount to a journey covering all of the region's diverse layers, the concrete, temporal and subjective...
...The audiences thus traveled along the great river from its source in Germany to its mouth at the Black Sea...
...MittelFest was launched after Communism's collapse not only did away with artificial divisions between East and West but sparked the feeling that Central Europe's unique identity could be recaptured...
...At another point, Hungarian goulash and schnapps were served in a medieval piazza...
...In 1661, rich Lombard tombs were discovered underneath what is now a paved plaza where the wedding party posed...
...Avantgarde music for flute and computer, and ancient liturgical melodies from the age of Charlemagne filled the air...
...Specific moments or historical periods can seem to merge or meet, he continued, so that the past may appear to run alongside the present, or even confront it head on...
...and Romanian gypsies joined dancers from Spain and India to show how Romany culture across Europe linked Indian dance and flamenco...
...Central Europe," he wrote at a time when most of it was stifled by Communism, "is not a state: It is a culture or fate...
...This blending of ancient and modern illustrates Magris' description of how time can be a disconcertingly "elastic measure" that makes distant events seem part of contemporary reality...
...The biggest Italian memorial is at Redipuglia, about a half hour's drive south of Cividale...
...inextricably complicated and at many points obscure...
...In World War I, the rugged limestone mountains nearby were the scene of bloody trench warfare between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...I told him I had visited Redipuglia...
...One of its aims has been to revive unity through diversity by presenting performances linked by common themes from a variety of countries...
...A monumental tomb that slants up the side of a hill like a giant white staircase holds the remains of more than 100,000 Italian soldiers, only 40,000 of whose names are known...
...It was almost as if they had paused to pay tribute to these witnesses of bygone centuries before stepping into the shiny limousine that whisked them away to their new life together...
...Over the centuries the Latin was corrupted into "Friuli," the designation eventually given to the surrounding region...
...Surrounded by friends and family, bride and groom posed for pictures against the dramatic backdrop of the bridge, the blue-green Natisone and the towers, turrets and redtiled roofs of the town on the other side of the rocky river gorge...
...Later, Cividale was ruled successively by Venice, Austria, France, and Italy...
...The Institute occupies an elegant palace in the heart of the city, about halfway between the wartime ghetto and the river...
...One of my uncles is among the soldiers buried there...
...A few days later I ran into Moni Ovadia, an actor and singer who played a maj or role last year in Danube...
...These included separate parts of what was known as Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia...
...I sat with Italian scholar Claudio Magris on a café terrace overlooking a narrow stone bridge that arches high above the Natisone River in the northeast corner of Italy...
...From our vantage point on the café terrace, the density of Cividale's overlapping physical and temporal layers was evident all around us...
...Aprofessor at the University of Trieste, Magris is Italy's foremost interpreter of the history, culture and intellectual traditions of Central Europe—or, as it is commonly referred to here, Mitteleuropa...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a correspondent for The New Leader, based in Italy...
...Tracing the 2,000 mile course took Magris "through an arena of bloody battles" as well as "among the chorus of a human race united, despite everything, in the variety of its languages and its cultures...
...The Miite/Feirproduction of Danube turned viewers into a river of humanity...
...Hungarian dancers offered a ballet based on Kafka...
...Magris and I had each come to Cividale for the opening of MittelFest, an annual festival of theater, music, dance, film, and performance art from Italy and Central European countries that has taken place in Cividale since 1991...
...Time thins out, lengthens, contracts, forms all but tangible clots or dissolves like fog banks into nothing," he wrote...
...Giorgio Pressburger, a founder and an artistic director of the festival, recalls that there was a sense of necessity in "the rediscovery of a cultural fabric which had remained intact in the face of decades of political divisions...
...The town was founded by Julius Caesar in about 50 BCE, and its history, according to a local guidebook, is "richly eventful...
...His writings have helped foster the ideal of Mitteleuropa as a landscape that transcends simple geography...
...The span over the Natisone is known as "The Devil's Bridge," thanks to a legend that claims Satan himself helped medieval builders with the construction in exchange for the soul of the first living creature to cross it...
...For more than three decades, he has explored its realities and its potent myths...
...Caesar called the place Forum Iulii...
...As we nibbled prosciutto and succulent melon in the late afternoon sun, we watched a stylish wedding party emerge from the Church of San Martino across the street...
...This year, as previously, the performers participating in the festival came from over a dozen countries...
...The Italian government is sending him back to Budapest to be director of its Italian Cultural Institute...
...Carrying portable chairs, they meandered through Cividale's piazzas and into and around its ancient buildings, as actors and musicians performed from windows, terraces and altars...
...A Jew born in Budapest, the Danube city par excellence, he survived in the World War II ghetto there as a child and ultimately fled Communist Hungary after the abortive uprising in 1956...
...On outdoor stages in the town's squares and in the frescoed naves of medieval churches, plays by Elias Canetti, Ismail Kadare and Pier Paolo Pasolini were presented, and the poetry of Paul Celan and Wislawa Szymborska declaimed...
...The church itself has an 18th-century facade that masks a much earlier structure whose original foundation may have been a Lombard military fortress dating back beyond the eighth century...
...The sort of friendly cultural exchange represented by MittelFest may be the rule at present, but the countryside around Cividale conjures a time when Europe echoed with the exchange of gunfire...
...When Charlemagne conquered the Lombards and Forum Iulii came under the Franks in the eighth century, its name was changed to Civitas Austriae, then evolved into Cividale...
...It is dotted with battlefields, museums and monuments to the fallen...
...Last year, the highlight of MittelFest was a dramatization of Magris' most famous book, Danube...
...The Danube dramatization was conceived written and staged by Pressburger, whose personal story also reflects Mitteleuropan history and culture...
...At one point everyone was led into a medieval church, where they were crowded together for a few moments—merely to give them the feel of the place—then led out the door again into the night...
...Cities," said one commentator at the time, "are like the beds of rivers, in which lives, figures, stories, flow through time, one after the other, emerging and disappearing...
...This fall Pressburger will close the circle...
...Today, both Cividale and Forum Iulii are used here on some road signs...
...It is apalimpsest of building upon building and culture upon culture, a crossroads of historical forces and personalities that encompasses dense layers of both conflict and legend...
...The town's heyday was between the sixth and the 15th centuries, when Lombard kings with fantastic names like Alboin, Clefi, Agilulph, and Liudprand held sway in the area...
...Originally built in the 15th century, the bridge served for hundreds of years as the only means of entering this ancient stronghold at the foot of the Julian Alps from the opposite side of the river...
...During World War I this was the Isonzo Front, immortalized in Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, where some half a million soldiers died between 1915 and 1917.1 took advantage of my stay to visit some of these sites...
...The exiled Czech author Milan Kundera expressed a similar sentiment in an influential 1984 essay in the New York Review of Books...
...He became an Italian citizen and a prize winning author of novels, plays and short stories—all written in his new tongue...
...They were followed by Frankish patriarchs named Popp, Eberard, Sigeard and Vodalric...
Vol. 81 • September 1998 • No. 10
