Germans Are From Mars, Italians Are From Venus

New York Times ^ | 2003-07-13 | By ROBERTO PAZZI

[Lessismore]

FERRARA, Italy -- The tension between Germany and Italy, unleashed in recent days by the incautious words of Stefano Stefani, our tourism minister, has played out since ancient times.

Long before Mr. Stefani, who resigned on Friday, accused German tourists of invading Italy's beaches and conducting burping contests, there has existed an ambivalent relationship of attraction and repulsion between our countries. Though this dynamic has stimulated culture, it has also brought about disquieting, even disastrous, political outcomes.

It all began with Rome under the emperor Augustus, when Varus's Roman legions were exterminated by the German forces under Arminius in 9 A.D. in the forest of Teutoburg. Unlike Gaul, Germany was never colonized. It remained a perilous wedge into the Roman Empire, another civilization. For this reason, Germania became an object of idealization and myth in the work of the great historian Tacitus. He recognized, with bitterness, in the customs of the Germanic barbarians a purity of strength that his Romans had already lost. Tacitus foresaw that the end of Rome would come from Germany, and this is what indeed took place with the barbarian invasions.

First empire, then religion. Germany and Italy were kept apart by the tremendous battles over the religious investiture of the feudal rulers. This tension peaked with the humiliation Germany received at the hands of Pope Gregory VII, an Italian, when he compelled Henry IV, the German emperor, to do penance for three days in the snows of Canossa, where he had come to beg for remission of his excommunication in January 1077. Later it burst forth with Luther and the subsequent division of Europe into two modes of religious observation, Protestant in the north, Catholic in the south.

The half-Spanish, half-German Emperor Charles V vainly spent the 40 years of his reign (1516-1556) to force history back into the shell of unified Christianity. The sack of Rome was the monstrous apex of this encounter when, in 1527, Charles V's Lutheran soldiers entered the eternal city, raping and murdering nuns and priests. The hoped-for union would never be recreated.

Later, with German Romanticism, the question blurs into literary and poetic mythmaking. Italy becomes the warm maternal center of Europe, the place where the egg of Greek civilization had come to be hatched. The ruins of Rome and Athens speak to those who interrogate them. Goethe idealizes the Mediterranean's force of attraction — the land where lemons grow — with his "Italian Journey." Of course, there's another side to this, too. Nationalists like the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist idealize a barbaric Germany, drawing on the Roman wars to write a tragedy based on the defeated Varus and Augustus.

As we know too well, this drama of sentimental ambivalence culminates in the equivocal, insincere, finally fatal friendship between two political colossi (not two innocuous poets, alas). The ruins of Germany and Italy left by World War II are still under the eyes of Italians, to remind us of the tragic fate of that unnatural alliance. Why unnatural?

Because Germans and Italians are made to love each other, but never to esteem each other. They are doomed to attract each other without mutual understanding. They fill the empty spaces in the others' mind. A military alliance between two such different peoples, apart from the representation of the two mad dictators in Chaplin's film, is unthinkable. The Germans are the people of Luther, Leibniz, Bach, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. Germany's psyche is tempted, as Thomas Mann warned us in "Doctor Faustus," by a Luciferine dream of the Absolute, an intoxicating dream in which the Self dissolves into the All.

Italy, however, cradle of Greek and Latin Mediterranean civilization, is still infused with the Euripidean assumption: character is man's destiny. Italians have always been incurable and marvelous individualists, resistant to any dream of the absolute, including the Christian one. Their Catholic faith is but a veil covering the pagan cult of beauty, imagination, youth, glory, etc. We call it success, but really it's the need of an exceptional Self — a Greek hero like Ulysses or a saint like Augustine of Hippo — to distinguish oneself from the crowd.

Just look at our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. He's a rich man who derides professional politicians and who has made millions of Italians dream of emulating his luck by voting for him. What better expression of the Italian individualistic soul could there be?

Certainly narcissism, that dreadful postmodern malady, is the not so latent risk of this habit of mind. Indeed, Mr. Berlusconi's reply to Martin Schulz, the German member of the European Parliament, likening him to a commandant of a concentration camp, shows the darker side of this sensibility.

Are these two nations fated never to understand each other, then? Where on earth can Germany and Italy meet and find a balancing point? Perhaps only in the course of constructing a united Europe, a dwelling that will depend on respect for diversity of character and attitudes. Until then, let us hope we can make it through the summer holidays — on the beaches of Italy and in the mountains of Germany — in peace.

Roberto Pazzi is author, most recently, of ‘‘Conclave,’’ a novel. This article was translated by Ann McGarrell from the Italian.

[decimon]

Are these two nations fated never to understand each other, then? Where on earth can Germany and Italy meet and find a balancing point? Perhaps only in the course of constructing a united Europe, a dwelling that will depend on respect for diversity of character and attitudes.

Yeah, right. Forcing some One-True-Way on people always leads to "respect for diversity of character and attitudes."

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