2024-04-29 21:52:31
“The crypt of the Capuchins”, the famous novel by Joseph Roth which says a definitive word on the end of the Habsburg Empire, now becomes a theatrical show as part of the path that will lead to “Go! 2025, Nova Gorica and Gorizia European Capital of Culture”. The project is curated by the Mittelfest Association on commission from the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region and created in co-production with the national theater of Nova Gorica, directed by Giacomo Pedini.
The occasion is a good one to reread the great Austrian author, born in Brody, Galicia, near today’s Lviv in Ukraine. An author also published in Italy by various publishers, and who had a moment of great popularity in the 1980s, when Adelphi launched him (someone will remember that a long story of his, “The Legend of the Holy Drinker”, was also based on movie).
Roth’s relevance today is still strong, considering the contradictory phase that Europe is going through. In fact, the analogies between the European Union and the great multinational empire which had Vienna as its epicentre, swept away by the explosion of nationalism (but also by the desire to redefine the spheres of influence on a global level, to the advantage of some powers and to the detriment of others) are quite obvious. Today’s Europe is an orphan to the West of the United Kingdom, which has gone its own way with Brexit. Russian imperialism is pressing in the East, with weapons also supplied by countries that are certainly not friends of Europe and democracies. While within it, conflicts of identity and values, combined with bleak economic prospects, undermine its cohesion.
Is there a new Roth in Europe today capable of telling all this? I really don’t know (although for example a twilight novel like “Tasmania” by Paolo Giordano in my opinion recalled certain atmospheres a bit).
Roth, of Jewish origins, journalist, exile in France after the advent of Nazism, who died in Paris in 1939, had many strings to his bow. First of all, the writing: clear, accessible, “horizontal”, far from the experimentalism of many modernist authors of those years. In “The Crypt of the Capuchins”, published in 1938, the story narrated (in the wake of another of his famous novels, “The March of Radetzky”) is that of Francesco Ferdinando Trotta, descendant of “the hero of Solferino”, a officer who, during that battle, saved the life of Emperor Franz Joseph. A carefree young man in the happy Vienna of the beginning of the century, that of Freud, of Strauss, of the cafés, Trotta also felt the call of the many outskirts of the Empire, populated by a varied humanity, humble and tenacious. Captured on the Eastern Front after the outbreak of the First World War, transferred to Siberia, he lives tumultuous experiences like those that Roth recounts in another of his unmissable novels, “Endless Escape”.
Upon his return home, he discovers that Greater Vienna, with its rites, its horizons, its monarchy, no longer exists. Trotta tries to adapt to “bourgeois” life, to the activities started by his wife together with a friend (who is more than a friend) in the unknown field of design for him. But everything slowly dissolves; at the advent of Nazism he seeks refuge in the Capuchin crypt, where the remains of Emperor Franz Joseph rest, together with those of an Empire now disappeared forever.
A warning: do not think from this brief summary that you are dealing with a nostalgic or a conservative. Roth had many lives, he also sympathized with socialism (even though he returned from Russia deeply disappointed), he was, in short, an all-round European writer, capable of bringing together many of the aspirations and contradictions of the Old Continent.
2024-04-29 21:52:31