15.2 - Robert Kaplan, "Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations"

Robert Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

 

Chapter 4 – Trieste

Suddenly the sea appears right next to the road as I near Trieste, so vast and with a blue so pale that it melds with the pallid winter sky and is like the gassy, opaque surface of a distant planet. The signature of the wind is written in the bended pines, even if the towering poplars appear stoic in their resistance.

The Mediterranean “is a complex of seas,” Braudel tells us. And the Adriatic, along with the Aegean, is the most geographically definable of them, a nearly enclosed channel 480 miles long and 100 miles wide. Going in a northwest-southeast direction, it is the liquid equivalent of the long Italian peninsula to its west, also serving as the gateway to the former Ottoman Empire on its wonderfully shattered eastern shore. So “deeply crenellated” is that eastern shore with its reefs, offshore islands, and indentations that if one could stretch that seaboard into a straight line it would extend well over 2,000 miles. At the southern end, heralded by Corfu and the Strait of Otranto, the Adriatic finally empties out into the Ionian Sea and the main body of the Mediterranean.

The Adriatic was the heart of the Venetian Empire, the Stato da Mar or “Territory of the Sea” as it was called, for without sea control over the Adriatic, Venice could never have gained Corfu, Crete, and Cyprus, not to mention other Aegean islands, as well as anchorages in the Holy Land itself. Because of the Stato da Mar, the Adriatic was always strongly Italianate, even as its Roman Catholicism was back then a fighting religion because Orthodox Byzantium and the Muslim Turks were palpably here or close by. The Levant spoke everywhere in the Adriatic through the trade of Venice, while Western Europe remained proximate, by virtue of the rival city-states of Genoa and Livorno (Leghorn) on Italy’s western shore. A frontier zone of races, cultures, and religions, yet intimate and homogeneous at the same time, the Adriatic basin also included, according to Gibbon, Braudel, and others, the so-called barbarians in the mountains of the adjacent Balkan peninsula. Precisely because of these contradictions, this sea guards a wild mystery all its own, helped, in the memorable words of Roger Crowley, by “the moon’s tug” at its northern “cul-de-sac.” Horace called the Adriatic “bad-tempered” and “unconscionable.” It is also a “sea of intimacy,” as enclosed as the Red Sea, and thus unlike any of the other Mediterranean seas, wrote the late Bosnian-Croat scholar Pedrag Matvejevic and the University of Miami academic Dominique Kirchner Reill.

[…]

I enter the cramped lobby in my hotel in Trieste in what by now is the gloomy dusk of a late winter afternoon. The décor is that of a private club where the average age of the members is seventy. I am embraced by faded oriental carpets in magenta hues on parquet floors, lots of heavy upholstery and brocaded curtains, glided picture frames, bronze sculptures and classical engravings. The walls are a lovely, dismal yellow. The tourists are gone. In 2016, Trieste has not quite yet been discovered by the travel business. I am experiencing it at a precious moment before the full onslaught of cruise ships and Chinese port building, which, in turn, will lead to even more development. I said goodbye to my wife in Venice as I continued my journey.

The hotel gives on to a vast square facing the sea and bordered by Austro-Hungarian architectural masterpieces in neoclassical styles, sand-blasted in various bright clay hues. Across this glassy well-lit expanse in the rain that has just started, I walk into a café straight out of Vienna and Budapest but with the expensive language of Rome, with a feast of rich pastries and loud, crackle-and-pop conversation, with people reading newspapers on wooden rods. An African waitress maneuvers between the massive cabinets, leather ormolu couches, and comfortable wooden tables and chairs. Lamps illuminate the heavy window curtains against the encroaching night. Trieste is Central European intimacy with an Italian-global spin.

The next morning the bora is blowing hard, furious and unrelenting. The sea has gone from the palest blue to the darkest inky color, flecked with waves. The immaculate Austrian veneer does not cease. The windows, the building façades, every single surface I see—the iconostasis inside the Serbian Orthodox Church of Saint Spyridon, or the wheel bases of the morning delivery trucks even—manifest a manic cleanliness. Graffiti is almost absent. I sense both a globe-spanning wordliness and a deep intimacy: Mitteleuropa.

I reach the Grand Canal. It is a close-cropped view that fits easily inside a camera frame. A narrow, straight, dazzling emerald-green panel of water, lined with small boats and stalwart nineteenth-century buildings, that begins at the sea and ends at the nineteenth-century neoclassical Church of Saint Antonio Taumaturgo (“Miracle Worker”), which evokes all the light and clarity that was the gift of Greece and Rome to the West. The canal, I think, the creamy Ionic columns, the dome, the café-lined street: this is like the whole world and cosmopolitan civilization crammed inside someone’s living room. Trieste is a city that does not sprawl. It is like a salon, a place without anonymity, as if everyone knows each other. While Venice is materialism writ large, Trieste is like a distinguished old aristocrat, a city of dark wools and shade with high bank deposits, where nothing glitters except the lights on the Christmas trees punctuating the main square: a statement of civic pride that defeats the winter darkness.

I step inside the Stella Polare Cafè, across the narrow street from Saint Antonio Taumaturgo, for a double espresso. This is the biggest harbor for the coffee business in the Mediterranean, I am told. The café is bustling with chic people standing by mirrored shelves of liquors, chocolates, and Cuban cigars. Later I learn that it was a favorite haunt of James Joyce, who read the early pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to his brother Stanislaus here.

[…]

Those who wrote about Trieste quote Chateaubriand’s rough statement: “The last breath of civilization expires on this coast where barbarism begins.” To call the proximate Ottoman Empire—an eclectic civilization in its own right—barbarous, is of course entirely wrong, a reflection of one’s own sense of cultural superiority. But Chateaubriand had a point in that Trieste signals a fault zone. It is a city that has hosted Romans from the West, Byzantines from the East, Goths, Venetians, Napoleon’s empire, the sprawling and multiethnic Habsburg Empire, Italy, Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, and Italy again since 1954. That last handover took years of diplomatic wrangling, as if to confirm that Trieste’s very location—on a spit of territory that could have been placed in either Italy or Yugoslavia—constitutes proof of Trieste’s unstable position on the map. The mid-twentieth-century American journalist John Gunther noted that between 1913 and 1948, Trieste lived under no fewer than five different occupations. The race between Allied and Communist Yugoslav forces for control of Trieste in May 1945 was arguably the first major confrontation of the Cold War, perhaps providing a “reference point” for President Truman in the later crises of the Berlin blockade and the Korean war.

Trieste marks the borderline not only between the Latin world and the Slavic one, but also between the Latin world and the German one. Indeed, this city of Italians, Germans, Austrians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and so on registers Mitteleuropa, with its own unparalleled cosmopolitanism, broadening out into an international civilization. Though, if this neoclassical, utilitarian, and commercial city has one cultural identity or spirit above others, it might be that of the Austrian Habsburgs, who ruled here between 1392 and 1918, except for a short Napoleonic interlude.

Trieste does indeed put empire on your mind. I visit the castle of Miramare, just north of the city, built with round porthole-like windows by Maximilian, the younger brother of Franz Joseph, who believed that the Habsburgs had no choice but to control the Adriatic. It is a monument to imperial delusion. Its gloomy, dark wood and red satin extravaganza is surrounded by sprawling Mediterranean seascapes on three sides, as if this entire overblown heap of boxy cold-weather furnishing has effectively appropriated the sunnier foreign environment, so far from the capital of Vienna. Maximilian, who believed deeply in liberal reform as a means of preserving and sustaining empire, was fated (of all things) to go to far-off Mexico in 1864 as its new emperor—encouraged by his wife—only to be executed by indigenous revolutionaries three years later, completing his dark and tragic imperial fantasy.

Trieste reminded historian and travel writer Jan Morris “poignantly of the passing of all empires, those seductive illusions of permanence, those monuments of hubris which have sometimes been all evil, but have sometimes had much good to them.” Because empires, by definition, are often multinational and multiethnic, it is when empires collapse that “racial zealotry,” in Morris’s words, can rear its head. When the Italians seized Trieste from the Habsburgs in 1919, they closed Slovene schools in the city and tolerated violence against the Slavs. When the Yugoslavs arrived in the city in 1945, they reopened the Slovene schools and forced many Italians to change their names. In 1946, when Morris first saw Trieste, the writer “pined” for a cohesive and “distilled” Europe, and imagined this city as “the ghost of that ideal.” But the “false passion of the nation-state,” Morris continues, “made my conceptual Europe no more than a chimera.”

History isn’t over, though. And as Morris says in old age, “one day the very idea of nationality will seem as impossibly primitive as dynastic warfare or the divine right of kings… a hobby for antiquarians or re-enactments societies.”

Indeed. In the present day, the port of Trieste will soon sign an agreement with Duisburg, the world’s largest inland port, located at the confluence of the Rhine and Ruhr Rivers in western Germany, with the aim of increasing traffic on the New Silk Road that China is organizing. Trieste will acquire through Duisburg access to the northern—land—part of the Silk Road that terminates at the Pacific; while Duisburg will acquire by way of Trieste access to the southern, maritime Silk Road that runs through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. A postmodern, multinational imperials system may re-emerge, this time supervised by the Chinese, and encompassing Trieste. A few months hence, I will get a message from a friend about “Chinese, Russian, American, and Mitteleuropean investors competing for bases in the port here—the second great opportunity after Maria Theresa,” during whose reign the city became a vibrant, multiethnic hub. Yes, Trieste always did prosper under a big project—this time maybe with the Chinese, who will make Trieste another imperial reference point.

 

Trieste serves as the guiding spirit of the most erudite travel book I know, Claudio Magris’s Danube: A Journey Through the Landscape, History, and Culture of Central Europe. Every spot along the Danube—every hillside baroque dome he sees—provides an opportunity for Magris, an academic from Trieste, to unleash a lifetime of learning on the page. After buying Magris’s book in a bookstore in Geneva in 1998, I became infatuated with it. Magris’s ruminations on Central Europe now constitute my entry into the spirit of this city. As with so many other authors I admire, I thought I would never want to meet him—for that would spoil the spell. I wanted to know him only through his precisely written words. And yet, as it would turn out, I would break my promise to myself, a full eighteen years since first encountering Danube, a riverine travelogue that commences in Central Europe and ends in Romania at the Black Sea.

[…]

James Joyce lived in Trieste between 1905 and 1915, scraping by as an English teacher and occupying a series of squalid apartments in the new section of town in its last years as an Austrian-controlled city. Here he wrote most of Dubliners and the whole of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and devised the outline for Ulysses. Trieste, in other words, was where Joyce became arguably the greatest writer in the English language in the twentieth century, though it would be decades before anyone became aware of this. This city with his polyglot and multiethnic population, which Joyce called “Europiccola,” inspired the development of his own cosmopolitan literature. Of course, inspiration does not equal happiness, and this was a decade of excruciating frustration for Joyce. There was the grinding poverty and dreariness mixed with the surging anger and self-doubt caused by his inability for years on end to find a publisher for Dubliners. It was an interminable period of near starvation and heavy drinking that led, in turn, to bouts of rheumatic fever. His wife, Nora Barnacle, though she loved him, did not understand him or his work. Once in a rage he threw the manuscript of A Portrait of the Artist into the fire, before it was quickly retrieved by his sister Eileen.

Only in 1913, after eight years of professional misery in Trieste, did he receive an unsolicited letter from Ezra Pound, who had heard about Joyce from the poet William Butler Yeats, and offered to help him in any way he could. The next year, indirectly through Pound’s support, Joyce found a publisher for Dubliners—it had taken nearly a decade. Pound’s moral and emotional support proved crucial in rousing Joyce to finish A Portrait of the Artist and begin Ulysses. Joyce seemed happy in Trieste more in retrospect, when he remarked that “the lax rule of the Austro-Hungarian emperor” was preferable to “democratic Utopias.”

While inspired by Trieste, Joyce never left Ireland in his mind. He held tight to his childhood memories as a form of sanity, almost. Yet he wrote about Ireland from an unimaginably objective distance, helped by Trieste’s own cosmopolitan neutrality. Joyce’ biographer Richard Ellmann notes, “Writing was itself a form of exile for him, a source of detachment.”

From the first page of Dubliners, describing the two candles that must be placed at the head of a corpse, Ireland, in its glowing, iron-dark madness and spectral intensity, as vivid as whiskey on the breath, enfolds you within a constricted and restrained narrative machine in which words have the musical precision of a Hadyn or Monteverdi. The stories are at once exquisite and mathematical, complete with the names of streets and squares. Trieste, so radically foreign to the land of his birth, evidently helped Joyce see Ireland under a magnifying glass: the snuff-stained priestly garments and tawny gold sky at dusk; the dusty lace, the beef-tea, and the wiry note of a harp; and the lamps like “illuminated pearls.” Meanwhile, there is the misery and pathos of common existence, in which the men drink and the women act bravely and suffer, all of them with their tragic flaws and narrow choices. Yet their absolution by the narrator, as cruel as some of these stories are, is as real and tactile as the tasteless taste of water on the tongue in church.

[…] The fusing of real people with mythical ones, of the ordinary with the extraordinary, begins with Dubliners and its mournful stories. Joyce’s urge to see the individual within the group, and endow him with mythic qualities, was of a piece with his own journey from an Irishman to a European. To be European was to be cosmopolitan, and thus freed of the shackles of religion, ethnicity, and other forms of group identity. This process reaches an apotheosis in Ulysses, which owes as much to Dante as to Homer, to say nothing of the Old Testament, Aristotle, Milton, Shakespeare, and much else. The novel’s hero, Leopold Bloom, is a total man: the totally average man, I mean, full of the commonplace. He is unreliable, middlebrow in his cultural judgments, “a pure amateur,” filled with bawdy sexual urges, and thinks about sundry things such as Jews, women, the advertising industry, and on and on. Bloom is a complete interstellar cosmos inside one human being, through whose voice Joyce realizes his most profound and humanist statements on existence. For Bloom is gentle through and through, even to a fault. He nearly always sees two sides of any issue. He has difficulty making up his mind: a quality that makes him, for Joyce, immortal. Through him, Joyce laments anti-Semitism, the human condition, all that makes history “a nightmare,” and to which the only answer is to assert one’s power as a rational human being who does not give in to fate. Trieste, with its intimacy and multiple identities, making it so hard to categorize, can reduce the mass to the quirky individual in the true Joycean spirit.

 

One student of Joyce in Trieste was the Swabian-born Ettore Schmitz, a successful middle-aged manager of a company that sold anti-corrosive paints for the hulls of ships. The Jewish Schmitz had a father who was Hungarian, just like Bloom in Ulysses. Schmitz, inspired by Joyce, became the path-breaking modernist of Trieste and the literary spirit of the city. Under the pen name of Italo Svevo (meaning “Italian Swabian”), his novel Confessions of Zeno, published in Italian in 1923, with its steely hard aesthetics and random refraction of memory, has almost attained the status of cult worship. Zeno reads not like a dream, but like the compulsive recounting of one, dominated as it is by racing thoughts with their comic, mechanical absurdity: “in the crowded Via Cavana,” he writes, “I had arrived more quickly at the truth than in the solitude of my study.” It is a rare admission, and one not even fully developed, since the Via Cavana is not really described at all.

Zeno is a completely interior book, nearly absent of both landscape and cityscape, and thus, inversely, it is a polished expression of the disjointed, post-territorial sensibility that is, at the same time, international, cosmopolitan, and European. Zeno Cosini, who enters psychoanalysis to cure a smoking habit, is a hypochondriac who proposes marriage to three sisters, the third of whom accepts. He is compelled to marry because he cannot cope with uncertainty. Yet his marriage—alas, a drastic cure for his melancholy—leads only to infidelity, as his mistress comes to dominate his conscious life. Zeno also finds it impossible to communicate with his father, even as he is later to be devastated by his father’s death. This entire book evinces the skeletal, chiseled nature of a patient’s monologue. There is the clinical flavor of the operating room about it, the odor of Freud and Vienna throughout, in which the blinding preposterousness of Zeno’s circumstances forces you to break out laughing.

Whereas Henry James, a tireless precursor of modernism, probes the surface of the inner life with his subtle rendering of consciousness, Svevo plunges vertically down into it, with all of its anxiety-ridden, obsessive-compulsive aspects, as turbulent as, he says, the life of Napoleon. James represents the Old World, whose natural elegance manifests a finished culture, while Svevo is something stark and alienating, like modern art or minimalist furniture. It is a world where bodily pain itself stems ultimately from a guilty conscience. Here is the lonely mind standing athwart the stability of bourgeois life: if not a prelude in the way that Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (choreographed in Paris in 1913) is to the civilizational crack-up of World War I, then it is an early reflection upon it. Indeed, at the end of the book, Svevo says that because technology makes men physically weaker, they must compensate with ever more viciousness and cunning, lading always toward earthly destruction. This, of course, is sheer prophecy.

 

To borrow words from Claudio Magris, the northeastern Adriatic is where “Venetian levity” is undermined by “Mitteleuropa gravity.” In Trieste “no one has any illusions that the original sin was never committed and that life is virginal and innocent.” There is a tragic, realistic mindset. Indeed, near Trieste at San Sabba, from 1943 to 1945, the Nazis ran the only extermination facility in Italy, where thousands of Jews and others were killed and more than 25,000 were deported to Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz, and other death camps. And yet within such realism born partly of such atrocities, there exists a mediocrity and emptiness, for what, suggests Magris, is Mitteleuropa now without the Jews?

Trieste has been a laboratory of ethnic politics, often not declared as such, which Robert Musil in his novel The Man Without Qualities dependably exposes in the manner of a surgeon. As he explains, this Hanseatic-like “Hamburg of the Mediterranean” was part of the Austrian Habsburg Empire and yet Italian hi its heart. “Not a single flag” flies except on the administrative buildings and army barracks on the emperor’s birthday, but on the birthday of the king of Italy, every clerk would have a flower in his buttonhole. And yet Vienna would do nothing about it, for fear of being ‘accused of Germanizing… after all, we’re not Prussians!’” Exclaims one of Musil’s Austrian characters. On the other hand, the large Slavic lower middle class “passionately contested the favored Italian upper class’s right to consider the city as its own property.” Still, if the word got out “’that we’re Germanizing, the Slovenes immediately side with the Italians’,” even as they hate doing so. For the real threat to peace within the Habsburg Empire was often the Austrian themselves. Empire was a tense negotiation among ethnicities, which ultimately could not contain their struggle for greater political freedoms. But it is an irony that the monoethnic modern states that succeeded Austro-Hungary would, in quite a few cases, be less forgiving of minorities than the very empire that they undermined.

 

“I feel very Mitteleuropean. I am Protestant. I have family roots in Hungary and the Hungarian part of Romania. My grandmother was half German, my maternal grandfather from Pula—to the south of Istria.” Thin, smartly dressed, with white hair and glowing blue-gray eyes—and with a café manner that goes with a perennial demitasse in his hand—Riccardo Illy, the scion of a family of coffee producers and a former mayor of Trieste in the 1990s, meets me, too, in my hotel.

Again, I just listen.

“Remember that we flourished as an imperial melting pot, which allowed for local languages and reached from the Mediterranean to Galicia in Poland and western Ukraine. Turks, Romanians, Jews, what have you, came to Trieste from all over Western Europe. Even today, look at the phone book, or at the population breakdown. We are an urban population of 200,000, but with only a third from Friuli, another third from Istria and Dalmatia, and the rest Slovenes, Hungarians, Croats, and so on.”

He continues:

“But that great Habsburg hinterland was lost after World War I. And after World War II; we found ourselves a small enclave backed up against the Iron Curtain,” when Trieste became a Cold War spy center almost like Berlin and Vienna. After all, though Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia was still part of the Communist bloc. So in the 1990s, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, Illy, as the new centrist-independent mayor of Trieste, began to encourage Slovenia’s integration with European institutions, as well as a reconciliation between Slovene-speakers and Italian-speakers in Trieste, in order to heal an ethnic conflict that particularly had its roots in the World War II atrocities committed by Yugoslav Communist partisans against the local Italian population. “You see,” he explains, “Slovenia practically surrounds us. So I thought, if Slovenia could get into the EU and NATO, and also into the Schengen border-free zone, then we could get back to our imperial hinterland,” with the European Union functioning as a de facto replacement for the Habsburg Empire.

Of course, that is exactly what happened. But Illy now worries about the political state of European integration, upon which Trieste, with more autonomy than any region in mainland Italy, depends. “This is a part of Europe where borders and sovereignties have always shifted. And they must not change again, at least not officially.” He explained that because Trieste’s geographical identity, much more so than other Italian cities, is multiethnic and thus truly European, a so-called return to history and hard ethnic borders following the happy decades of the Cold War and post Cold War could be disastrous. For Trieste’s whole raison d’etre has been to operate in a cosmopolitan world without borders.