by Jan Morris
I am myself a racial half-breed (father Welsh, mother English), and I have experienced some of the lesser quandaries of a condition that has been so common here. Many a Triestine dilemma has also been endemic in Wales, where problems caused by the arrival of the English nearly a thousand years ago have never been resolved. So many upwardly-mobile Slovenes of Trieste came to use Italian that it became as much a badge of class as of ethnicity, and similarly it was far more posh in Wales, until a few years ago, to speak English than Welsh. How many Joneses have become Iwans, how many Ifors spell their names Ivor, how many chapel-goers migrated to the Anglican Church, specifically to declare an allegiance or get on in the world? Some of my own children have preferred to spell their names in the old Welsh way, Morys, and I would do the same if I hadn’t left it too late.
However there has been one fundamental difference between the Triestine and the Welsh circumstances. The native Welsh have resented the intrusion of the English not just on historical, linguistic or political grounds, but as a matter of instinct: they have disliked them as a people—the bloody Saeson, the Saxons. But for generations, it seems, problems of race did not disturb the Triestini. There was political antipathy between subjects and rulers, Italians against Austrians, perhaps religious prejudice too, but there appears to have been little purely ethnic bigotry. It does not arise in the Triestine literature I have read, and all the nineteenth-century travellers appear to have admired the easy inter-racial jumble of the place. There were entirely Slav quarters of town in those days, and nearby villages of the Karst were entirely Slovene in race as in language. Jews, Greeks, Serbs, Germans and British all had their own temples or churches. There were Armenians and Turks around. Yet one hears of no race riots or pogroms, senses no bigotries, and in 1908 the same man was choirmaster of the chief Jewish synagogue, the Greek Orthodox Church and the Serbian Orthodox Temple.
It was when the old empire collapsed that racial zealotry erupted. When the Italian government arrived in 1919, and wanted to make Trieste as Italian as possible, it banned all Slovene schools and turned a blind eye on violence against Slavs—the Balkan Hotel, the centre of Slav cultural life in the city, was burnt down by a mob with the connivance of the police. Conversely, when the Yugolavs arrived in 1945, and wanted to make the city entirely Yugoslav, they opened the Slovene schools again and obliged many Italians to change their names. There were violent race riots during the years of uncertainty, when nobody knew whether Trieste was to be Italian, Yugoslav or a Free City; in those times the world’s predominant image of the place was of furious mobs, flying one banner or another, swarming through the Piazza Unita shouting ethnic slogans.
Today the question of race seems to have lost most of its bitter force. Black street vendors from the old Italian colonies of Africa are familiars of the town, pressing newspapers upon passers-by, sitting over their invariable collections of leather goods or wandering into the Caffe San Marco, muffled in scarves and balaclavas, to sell lottery tickets. Chinese entrepreneurs have acquired many of the shops of the borgo teresiano, identifiable by the paper lanterns that hang outside them, and offering motley stocks of clothes, knick-knacks and probably under-the-counter substances. And the still substantial Slovene minority, 8 percent of the whole, has its own schools and cultural centres, its daily newspaper and its theatre. The Slovene language has official parity with Italian, making this formally a bilingual city, and although there is no longer a specifically Slovene quarter of town, still the further you walk out towards the perimeter of the city, the more Slav it feels.
Of course inherited antipathies are not dead. Seventy-five years after the event hundreds of Slovenes attended a ceremony to remember the burning-down of the Balkan Hotel. Many of the Italians who came here as dispossessed refugees from Istria, when the Yugoslav Croatians and Slovenes took over the peninsula in 1954, cherish an ineradicable resentment against all Slavs, just as so many of the French colons driven out of Algeria can never forgive an Arab. I am told there is latent anti-Slav feeling, too, among older citizens in general. When the laws guaranteeing equality of language were instituted I stumbled upon a neo-Fascist meeting of protest, and very unpleasant it was: to raucous music and fluttering flags a strutting demagogue shouted hatred into a loud-hailer—biligualism, he screamed, meant there was no future for Italians in Trieste, no jobs, no hope, and his skin-head lieutenants, in long shorts and running-shoes, offered inflammatory leaflets to passers-by.
They found few takers, though. It seems to me that such popular prejudice as there is in Trieste nowadays is much more diffuse. A rabbi told me once that although he did occasionally feel tremors of anti-semitism, he believed it to be only a symptom of a vague general suspicion of difference—“if I didn’t wear this hat and this beard, I’d probably never sense it.” The chief resentment I myself detect is directed against the flood of new settlers from southern Italy, on the grounds that they are changing the character of the city with their noise, bad manners and disorderly conduct.
For half a century now Trieste has been politically relaxed, and the vicious racism of the twentieth century has faded like a bora blown out. The later Cold War generally ignored Trieste. The wars of Yugoslav succession passed it by. Economically it no longer matters much whether you are Slovene or Italian by origin, especially as by now the chances are that you are a mixture of both, with perhaps some Austrian or Jewish thrown in, or an American or British gene left by a transient soldier long ago. I noticed the same at home in Wales—that when people felt they were achieving some degree of national fulfilment, racial bitterness subsided. Even that most intractable kind of racial antipathy, the mutual fear and distaste between people of different colour, fades when political and economic circumstances are the same for both sides. Could it be that racism is a sort of historical invention, a Satanic hoax?
Trieste remains, nonetheless, an ethnic enclave of sorts. It first became part of an Italian State as the result of a secret agreement during the first world war, when Italy was induced to join the western allies by the promise of Trieste, Istria and the Italian town of Zara, now Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast. Istria and Zara were transferred to Yugoslavia after the second world war, and if racial logic had then prevailed Trieste would not now be an Italian city either, but the port of Slovenia—Trst. The natural ethnic frontier (if one is to go by language, the only acceptably measurable standard) ran well to the west, half-way to Venice—the final eastern line between the Habs-burg empire and the kingdom of Italy. Trieste was just a predominantly Italian-speaking city in a Slav territory, no more anomalous in its setting than the heavily German city of Riga in Latvia or the Polish Vilnius in Lithuania, both alien urban centres with an indigenous peasantry all around. As it was, Yugoslavia was obliged to spend vast sums of money developing the port of Rijeka, formerly Fiume; and when Yugoslavia disintegrated, half a century later, Slovenia had to develop its own outlet to the sea—the port of Koper, quondam Capodistria, only just out of sight from Trieste itself.
REMEMBER that war memorial, up on the hill of San Giusto, with such an enigmatic variety of names upon it? I puzzled over that slab when I first went to Trieste because it claimed to honour the dead of the first world war, but neglected to say which country they had died for. Here, evidently, race and patriotism did not always go together. The father of that honoured Italian citizen Baron de Banfield-Tripcovich was a hero of the Austrian air force, fighting against the Italians in the first world war. He was called “The Eagle of Trieste,” and was ennobled as Baron of Trieste by the Dual Monarchy, but when the war ended and Trieste became Italian he was imprisoned as a traitor. There are still ancients in Trieste who parade with their medals and banners as veterans of Franz Joseph’s armed forces—I went to a church service of theirs once, and their solemnity and stately moustaches would have done credit to the lamparetti. On the Karst live many old soldiers who fought with the Yugoslav partisans in the second world war, and who carefully tend the village war memorials, still with the star of Co
mmunism on them, that remember once irreconcilable enemies of Italy. There are people in this city whose grandparents were born Austrian, whose parents came into the world as Italians, who were themselves born as citizens of a Free Territory and whose children are Italian again. A few miles away, just across the border, aged citizens have been governed in their own lifetimes by Austrians, Italians, Germans, Britons, Yugoslavs and Slovenians.
I thought it very odd, when I was young, and encountered the Trieste mélange of loyalties. I was a simple British patriot in those days—even Wales was subsumed in my idea of a benevolent and majestic British nation-state, benign suzerain of an unexampled empire, headed by a monarch everyone respected, led at that time by a charismatic champion, victorious as ever and destined to live happily ever after. I was not in the least chauvinistic; in fact I was everyone’s patriot, as easily moved by “La Marseillaise” or even “Deutschland Über Alles” as I was by “God Save the King.” I assumed that my contemporaries’ patriotism was as liberal as my own, only becoming suspect when it descended into the obdurate banality of “My country right or wrong.” In short my views were probably much like those of most Britons of my age and kind, at the end of the second world war.
No wonder I was taken aback by the muddled fealties of Trieste! There were Italians here then who were still proud of their Fascist State, or who were altogether disillusioned by it. There were Communist Slovenes who boasted of their new People’s Federation, and royalist Croats who utterly disowned it, and separatists who thought in terms of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia or Herzegovina, entities I hardly knew existed. There were old ladies forever recalling the lost glories of K u K in Trieste, and sure that nothing could ever replace them. When I realized that all these contradictory loyalties were perfectly genuine—when I worked out the meaning of those names on the war memorial—I began to see the idea of the nation-state in a new light. I already knew Dr. Johnson’s saw, about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. Now I glimpsed the fateful nonsense of nationalism, for which so many of my generation, and my father’s too, had fought and died.
TEN
The Nonsense of Nationality
One warm day in 1946 I sat down on a bollard on the Molo Audace, close to the Piazza Unità, to write a maudlin essay. The Yanks, Brits and Jugs (as we called each other then) still disputed the city, and Trieste was of no decided country, no particular allegiance, no certain ideology. The successor to its Austrian Governors and Italian Prefects was an American general, and up on the Karst Tito’s commissars held sway. British and American military officers did the work of the imperial and Fascist bureaucrats. The Royal Navy provided a Port Captain. The Hotel de la Ville was the American officers’ club, the Albergo Savoia Excelsior was ours, and where the soldiers of the Austrian 18th Infantry Division had sauntered, or the plumed bersaglieri swaggered, there was I, sitting on the jetty writing an essay.
It was a piece about nostalgia, but nostalgia for a place and condition I had never known: Europe before the convulsions of the twentieth century had upset all its assumptions. I had never been to continental Europe before the war, so my nostalgia was all hearsay, but was none the less pungent for that. I pined for a Europe that seemed in my fancy to form a cohesive whole, sharing values and manners and aspirations, and when I looked around me at the Trieste of 1946, I thought I could see the ghost of that ideal. Except for its docks the city had not been greatly damaged, and its buildings still offered an epitome of Mitteleuropa—of Europe distilled, as it were. It seemed to embody the very mixture of races and languages, the civilized continuity of culture, that I imagined for my lost continent as a whole. Students and artists still frequented its coffee-houses. Bookshops abounded. Wine flowed. A Smareglia opera was being performed in the opera house that very season, just as one had been performed there (so a programme note told me) in 1885, 1886, 1895, 1899, 1900, 1908, 1910, 1921, 1926, 1928, 1929 and 1930. Ships came and went, as they came and went from Hamburg and Marseilles, Oslo and the Piraeus. Steam trains laboured along the waterfront, as I imagined them criss-crossing European landscapes from Scotland to the Alps. So I sat there on my bollard like a figure in an allegory, sucking my pen and cogitating, and thinking up poignant adjectives.
But I was deluded, of course, in my nostalgia. The Europe of my dreams had never existed, above all because of nationality. If race is a fraud, as I often think in Trieste, then nationality is a cruel pretence. There is nothing organic to it. As the tangled history of this place shows, it is disposable. You can change your nationality by the stroke of a notary’s pen; you can enjoy two nationalities at the same time or find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. In one of his books Joseph Conrad (né Korzeniowski), knowing how artificial nationality was, likened it to “an accomplishment with varying degrees of excellence.” It is not usually racial prejudice that incites hooligans to bash each other in football stadiums, but particularly unaccomplished convictions of nationhood. The false passion of the nation-state made my conceptual Europe no more than a chimera: and because of nationality the city around me that day, far from being a member of some mighty ideal whole, was debilitated in loneliness.
NATIONALISM flared in Trieste when, during the nineteenth century, most of Italy became united in the passionate progression of the Risorgimento, and the kingdom of Italy under King Vittore Emanuele II came into being. It was not only an Italian movement. The libertarian risings of the 1840s happened all over the Habsburg possessions—one of Musil’s characters called them “all this tuppeny-halfpenny liberty-mongering of the Czechs and the Poles and the Italians and the Germans.” But the Italians set the pace of it, and by the 1870s Trieste remained the one foreign-held city that Italian nationalists claimed as their own. The new Italian frontier was only a few miles from Trieste, and regions that had long been under the city’s jurisdiction were now in a foreign country. But was it foreign? More and more Italians of Trieste did not think so. They found themselves caught in Garibaldi’s spell, and a word entered the political vocabulary that was specifically related to their city: irredentismo, irredentism, the condition of being un-redeemed. For thousands of Triestini it became a battle-cry, and the complacent nature of Trieste changed.
Now the political police had their hands full, and the lamparetti were kept busy chasing slogan-scrawlers and statue-chippers. Secret societies were formed; explosives were stashed; many of the cafes, so comfortably reminiscent of Old Vienna, became hotbeds of Italian dissent. All came to a head in 1882 when an exhibition was held in the city to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Habsburg Trieste, and it was announced that the Emperor himself would be visiting it. A young Triestine named Guglielmo Oberdan (originally, as it happened, Oberdank), who had fled to Italy to avoid serving in the Austrian army, returned to Trieste with two bombs and a revolver in his suitcase, and his mind on assassination. The authorities were waiting for him. He was arrested, tried for treason and hanged in the Austrian barracks of the city, crying to the end “Viva Italia! Viva Trieste Libera!”
So the irredentists of Trieste gained a martyr, and they used him well. Their cause boomed. The Italians of the city became ever more estranged from the Austrians, and vice versa. Few young Italians would go near the Caffè Eden, the favourite resort of Austrian officials; not many Austrians would venture into the hotly irredentist Caffe San Marco. Isabel Burton wrote that an Austrian would hardly give his hand to an Italian at a dance, and no Italian would attend a concert when an Austrian was singing. If Austrians gave a party Italians threw a bomb into it, she said, and members of the imperial family were greeted with “a chorus of bombs, bombs on the railway, bombs in the garden, bombs in the sausages.” A lodogno tree outside the doors of the cathedral, survivor of an ancient cemetery there, was adopted as an ostentatiously sacred symbol of Italianness, and the imperial secret police became ubiquitous—even transient visitors with the slightest claim to nationalist sympathies found themselves under surveillance.
Within Italy not everyone was much interested in Trieste: even the great Risorgimentist Giuseppe Mazzini had not claimed it for his State. In 1882 the Italian Kingdom itself, having got most of what it wanted from the Habsburg empire, seemed to abandon the city by concluding an alliance with Austria. But when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914 the Trieste italianissimi saw his killer as a reincarnation of Oberdan, and the consequent world war as a vehicle of redemption; and sure enough two years later the Italians switched alliances and declared war on Austria. In Trieste irredentism in all its aspects became treasonable, and what remained of the old civic equilibrium was shattered. The newspaper Il Piccolo, which represented all that was most Italian in the city, was summarily closed down. The Caffe San Marco was burnt out. The Verdi statue was destroyed. The sacred tree of San Giusto was dug up and replaced by one less full of meaning.