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Tag: Benito Mussolini

Ciao Ciao Bambina: Italy 1964.

Latest News:  Photos by Pete Grafton (Le Patron) and from his collection of acquired photos are now appearing online at the companion site

petegraftonphotos.com

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Ciao Ciao Bambina:  Italy 1964

Olive trees Calabria
Olive trees, Calabria

It is late August, 1964:  a  dusty deserted roadside in Calabria.  Either side of the road are olive trees.

Le Patron is hitch-hiking  north of Reggio Calabria, the mainland port and ferry crossing for Sicily.  His objective is another port, Bari, over to the east, on the Adriatic side of Italy.  It is late afternoon and there is little traffic on the road.  A pick and shovel repair gang a few yards up the road are occasionally pecking at  the road verge.  Le Patron is trying to understand a bus timetable tacked to a concrete shelter.  One of the gang saunters over to Le Patron.  He wears a dust stained vest and his trousers are held up by  a bit of string, improvising for a belt. Le Patron splutters out pidgin Italian, but before he can finish his incomprehensible sentence the Italian smiles and says in a perfect Brooklyn accent:  “Da bus goes at seven turty.”   Besides the British 8th Army, American army units also travelled this road in the summer of 1943, heading north.

allied troops nr. reggio c.
Allied troops, Cantabria, summer 1943.

Twenty one years before, almost to the month, Allied forces tanks, heavy artillery and jeeps would have jam packed the road, heading north, whilst up at Salerno the main allied thrust would have been taking place.   In 1943, before the bus shelter had been built, in the middle of what seemed empty countryside  children and adults would appear, cannily cheering the Allies on whilst asking for cigarettes and what ever else they could get, or barter for.  A significant commodity in the bartering system was sex.  (1)

He’s a youngish man,  in his early thirties.  He’s smiling and encouraging me by gesture to take a look at the black and white studio photo of his wife and two young children, that he’s just taken out of his wallet.  “My wife, Maria, my son, Roberto and my little girl, Caterina.”

near naples
American tank crew soldier, south of Naples, 1943.

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There’s a fearful, threatening black curtain hanging down from the sky, claustrophobically bearing down on the growing maize.

To the left there is a hurrying, receding blue sky.   The buildings on the outskirts of Bari look as if they will give no protection to the Apocalypse that is about to unleash.  And then it starts: the roll of thunder, the sheet lightning and goblets of rain smashing the windscreen of the Fiat family car, the wipers working manically to clear the sheets of water distorting the view of the road ahead.

In the twenty minutes it takes to arrive at a small block of flats in the centre of Bari the rain has stopped and the black shroud is moving on to put the fear of God into people and animals in the fields from where the car has just come from.

Le Patron had managed to get a lift into Bari with a youngish professional couple and their son.  The car was a new four door shiny black Fiat sedan, and at the front of the four storey brick built flats were two sodden palm trees, still dripping.  Around the flats was a low brick perimeter wall with high metal railings.  The entrance to the block was up two wide steps and then through a metal  framed door with a full length frosted glass panel.  There were buzzers for the eight flats and eight letter flaps.  Le Patron followed the small family up the stairs to the first floor and was shown in to the flat on the right by the husband, the attractive wife and their young son.  It was the first time he had been in an Italian home.

The floors were  shiny wood parquet, and the rooms were furnished in a spare, modern way.  Le Patron had never seen a home with parquet flooring before.  It was very foreign, in an interesting ‘cool’ way.  It was almost like one of the rooms in La Dolce Vita where Steiner, intellectual friend of Marcello Mastrianni’s character lived, or so he thought.

Dolce Vita flat
La Dolce Vita (1960).    Marcello in Steiner’s flat

The husband and wife spoke enough English for Le Patron to understand, the husband more so.  The wife prepared lunch, and then afterwards following the lunch the husband showed Le Patron into a room with two single separate beds for the siesta.  He and Le Patron occupied the room.  Unlike the husband, Le Patron couldn’t sleep.  Having a siesta after a meal was not something his 19 year old British body or culture could adapt to.   Lying awake he wondered where the son and wife were having their siesta.  There didn’t seem any clues as to whether this was a spare guest room or the son’s bedroom.

After the siesta Le Patron and the husband went through to the living room where the wife and son were watching Little Lord Fauntleroy, dubbed into Italian, on a television standing alone in the corner, on its futuristic stick legs.

Little-Lord-Fauntleroy-1936
Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936). Dolores Costello and Freddie Bartholomew as Little Lord Fauntleroy.

When the film finished there was a brief announcement, the logo of RAI – the Italian state TV – and the channel closed down.  It was late afternoon.  The TV service would begin again in the  evening.

Later that night in the Bari campsite where the family had kindly driven Le Patron, he thought about the wife telling him about the RAF raid on Bari during the war, asking why they had done it. She was not angry, but perplexed.    She had been 17, she said, working in the Bari Telephone Exchange when  with no warning – no siren – the bombs fell on the harbour area.

It was years later that Le Patron realised he had spectacularly misunderstood the circumstances of the bombing of Bari.  Looking back he realised she had been asking why the RAF didn’t prevent the bombing of Bari.

An estimated 105 Luftwaffe planes bombed Bari on 2 December, 1943, and in just over one hour sunk 27 Allied supply and cargo ships.  There were 1000 deaths of Allied seamen and service personnel, and also an estimated 1000 Bari people were killed,  although accurate figures for the civilian deaths are still unavailable as many Italians left Bari and went out to the countryside, staying with friends and family members, fearful of further attacks on the town, and some of those fleeing civilians died from gas poisoning.  What no one knew in Bari at the time of the immediate attack (including the skipper of the boat)  was that part of the cargo of the bombed U.S. John Harvey was  mustard gas.

Bari airraid
Allied ammunition boat exploding during German bombing, Bari,  December, 1943.
HighFlight-Disaster-at-Bari4
Burning Allied boats, Bari harbour, December, 1943.

In the first 24 hours medical staff in Bari did not realise that the injured they were treating had been gassed.  The full story did not become widely known until 1967.  Of 628 hospitalised military victims suffering from mustard gas poisoning 83 were to die.  It is believed the figures for those civilians who fled Bari, and subsequently died from mustard gas complications is higher.

Bari raid, civilians
Bari,  December, 1943.    Photo source: Al Saldarini, Ist CCU, from the Official Website, 450th Bomb Group Memorial Association.

The  RAF command covering the Bari area though it highly unlikely that Bari would be a Luftwaffe target, believing the Luftwaffe in Italy was too thinly stretched.  There were no RAF fighters based in Bari. The attack has occasionally since been referred to as a “Little Pearl Harbour”.

Mustard Gas was waiting to be unloaded as part of a potential Allied counter measure to German threats  to use gas in their Italian rear-guard campaign, although the alleged German threat is disputed in some accounts. (2)

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Fig trees, Italy
Fig trees south of Rome

Turning to dusk, somewhere on a country road to Rome, a long, long way south of Rome, the driver of an Alfa Romeo drops Le Patron off.  The earth is a terracotta colour.  During the drive  through olive groves and fig trees, every now and then and always suddenly,  out of nowhere, a lone boy would  leap out in front of the car with a fist of figs. “Fichi!  Fichi!“, and just as quickly and agilely leap back as the driver flicked him to one side, driving on.  It seemed a precarious and fruitless way to earn a few lire.

Shell logo225

Shell lItalia226

As Le Patron looked at his Shell filling station road map of the area he was vaguely aware of a small figure sauntering along the road towards him.  He seemed to have a Dick Whittington staff slung over his shoulder, with a bundle of belongings hanging on it.  As he came up Le Patron could see he was about 16.  In very good English, Oxford English, he asked where Le Patron was headed for.  “Rome.”  “I am going to Rome too!  My name is Ugo, and if we travel together we can stay in my Uncle’s flat in Rome.”   Wonderful. What luck! A young Italian who knows his way around, with a relative who has a flat in Rome.  It was too good to be true.  In the end, that’s how it turned out to be.  This was Ugo.

Le Patron never did quite work out how long he had been on the road.  He was certainly travelling lightly.  His technique for trying to hitch a lift was the same as the sellers of filched figs.  By now it was getting dark.   A set of lorry headlights approached.  “I stop this, Peter” he said and threw himself into the road, waving his arms in a crossing motion.  And with the agility of the fig sellers he jumped just as quickly back as the lorry bore down on him.  “Son of a bitch” spat Ugo.  Le Patron, a little fraught at the thought of being with this maniac until they arrived at the fabled flat in Rome, said he would try hitching the next vehicle.  This suggestion had to be negotiated, as Ugo said his technique was the one that worked.  He knew best.   Le Patron quickly learned that with Ugo, everything – the silliest, stupidest, daftest thing had to be negotiated.  Ugo always knew a better way, and couldn’t understand why you couldn’t see it.  It was so clear. It was  so obvious.  What was your problem?  And always mentioning the Uncle’s flat in Rome.

So, after a negotiation that was as frustrating  and brain exploding as a UN session running into the middle of the night on a contested sub-clause, with a shrug of the shoulders Ugo finally let the Patron hitch the next vehicle.

The next vehicle stopped.  Ugo said it was luck, and his method was the still the best.  We were dropped off about twenty kilometres up the road, near a small camp site and we set up for the night.  Le Patron had a spirit stove and soon the water was boiling and he made coffee.  Having just one aluminium cup, part of a compact army type set, he offered it to Ugo who took it, sipped and, with eyes opening  startlingly wide – cartoon like, as if he had been poisoned –  sprayed it out at high velocity.  “Ugh!   That isn’t coffee!!  That’s disgusting!  What do you call this!”

The thing was, when he wasn’t being totally exasperating he was amusing, and sometimes interesting, particularly as a gateway into some political aspects of Italian life.  Fascism, for instance.

A few days before, Le Patron had been amazed and  shocked to see in a village posters advertising a forthcoming Mass commemorating the life of Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had been captured in the north, and then shot by Communist partisans on the 28th April, 1945,  a few days before Hitler committed suicide. His corpse  was strung up, upside down, alongside that of his mistress in the suburban square of  Piazzale Loreto in Milan.  Le Patron mentioned the posters to Ugo and how surprised he was.

musso
Il Duce (The Leader) – Benito Mussolini

– “So?  Mussolini was good for our country.  He did great things. He was a great man”

– “But he was a fascist!”

–  “And?”

– “What about Hitler?  He was a fascist”

– “No, he was a National Socialist.”

mussolini and hitler in florence
Hitler & Mussolini, Florence, 1938.

– “What about Franco? He’s a fascist.”

– “Franco’s bad for his people.”

Musso and Papal reps
Mussolini with Papal representatives of Pope Pius XI, the Vatican, Rome, June 1929.

 

Slowly making our way closer to Rome over the next two days,  the clincher came when, out of the blue, and in sight of Rome Ugo informed Le Patron that he  would have to buy a suit – he too was going to buy a suit – if we were staying with his Uncle.  A suit!

A suit would instantly pauperise Le Patron.  His budget for hitching around Europe for three months was £4 a week, give or take: hard earned and hard saved  money  – £50 – from working on building sites as a labourer during the preceding 5 months.  A bloody suit!!

Le Patron had been aware that Ugo’s pockets seemed to be sewn up all the while Le Patron and he had been together.  The thought had crossed Le Patron’s mind once or twice that he was being taken for a ride.  On reflection, the truth, Le Patron thought, was that this 16 year old from a middle class background was used to other family members paying his way.  Papa, and Uncles.  The good Italian coffee that he drank at home would be made by his mother, or grandmother, or sisters or aunts. He’d probably never made a cup of coffee in his life.  And wouldn’t know how to.  He would be proud that he would not how – that was not man’s work.  This was Italy.  His father had probably already wired his brother – the Uncle in Rome – the money for a suit and shoes, and what ever else was appropriate.    Coming from this background – he didn’t get an Oxford English accent from nowhere – he would have no conception of a life lived differently, whether for a 19 year old from Britain, or a dusty Sicilian peasant with patches in the arse of his trousers.

Ugo could not understand why Le Patron could not afford to buy a suit.  Rationality did not enter in Ugo’s understanding of the world or people.  We were back to a late night session at the UN on a torturous sub-clause.  “Basta! Basta!”  Enough!  Le Paton had had enough.  It was time to part company, here and now, at the roadside.

Parting company was a melodramatic scene – How could I do this to him?  Weren’t we friends? etc, etc, over and over again.  And when that didn’t work, the reproachful look.  The long reproachful look.  The guilt inducing look.

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Another side of Italian politics, besides Italian fascism, was Italian communism.  Banned by the fascists in 1926, post 1945 the Italian communist party quickly became the largest communist party in western Europe.  It was the opposition party to the catholic Christian Democracy party (Democrazia Christiana), and at various times controlled many Italian town and city administrations.

togliatti-e-morto
l’Unita, daily newspaper of the PCI, the Italian Communist Party, announcing the death of leader Palmiro Togliatti.

 

On 22 August, 1964, Le Patron saw large posters with heavy black borders suddenly appear in towns and villages. The Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti had died on holiday in his beloved Socialist Motherland at the seaside resort of Yalta in the Soviet Union. The message was straight forward: “Togliatti È Morto“.   Communist Party members would  have been busy overnight, printing, distributing and pasting these posters.  “Profonda emotion in Italia e nel mondo” – “Deep emotion in Italy and the world“ – the Italian communist daily paper l’Unità” claimed the day after his death.  Outside Italy, apart from national communist parties and nervous strategists in the American White House, no one else would have heard of him, apart from maybe some followers of football who might have wondered if Togliatti had once played for Juventus or AC Milan.

The American strategists needn’t have worried too much about the Italian Communist Party and its leader destabilising the status quo in western Europe.  Since 1945 all the Communist Parties in Western Europe were following the Moscow dictated “Democratic Road to Socialism”.  No threat of revolution.  In hindsight Togliatti has sometimes been criticised, within Italy, for following Moscow’s line, rather than supporting local political and industrial actions by his own communist party members.

palmiro_togliatti_timbre_sovietique
The Italian Togliatti, a loyal supporter of the USSR, celebrated on one of their stamps.

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“The  Ties  that  Bind”

Another part of Italy, another side of Italy, another lift.  A young man, training to be a surveyor.  It had been a good ride.  As Le Patron gets out, he gets out too, to open the boot where Le Patron’s rucksack is.   As he hands Le Patron  the rucksack he asks how old Le Patron is

-“19!!  How is it you can travel around like this.  Don’t your parents object?”

– “No.”

He is astounded, and envious, and deeply frustrated bangs the roof of his Fiat.

–  “For me it would be impossible.  My Mother, she would say ‘How can you do this to me?  How could you do this to your sisters?  You can’t leave us!  For three months?’  It would never end.  It would go on and on.  You are very lucky.”

Madonna-And-Child-Early-Renaissance-Oil-Painting-LP01168

It took some time before Le Patron realised that there wasn’t an absence of husbands and fathers in Italian households – they  were so rarely mentioned. It was always the Mother, the Sisters, the Grandmother, the Aunties.   Had there been high casualties amongst Italy’s men during the Second World War?

Italian prisoners captured at Sidi Barrani are marched into captivity.
Italian prisoners captured by the British at Sidi Barrani, Egypt, are marched into captivity, December, 1940.

No. The answer was, of course, this was a catholic country:  Mother/Madonna ruled.

Amarcord
Italian family life gets too much for Aurelio (Armando Brancia).   Amarcord, Federico Fellini, 1973.

And the other side of the Madonna was the whore.  And the Madonna/Whore polarity was stark in the South, particularly in Sicily.  And in 1964 bringing shame on the family could end in an honour killing.  It would be a daughter, a sister, or a wife who would bring dishonour to a family.  A step down from honour killings would be ‘abductions’ and ‘kidnappings’, staged to circumvent dishonour to a family.  Pietro Germi covered this particularly in his stark Sedotta e Abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned) 1964, and in Divorzio All’Italiana (Divorce Italian Style) 1961, he shows a cynical Marcello Mastrianni using Italian law and the honour killing of his wife to marry his young niece.

S&A 3
Seduced and Abandoned, Pietro Germi, 1964.
S&A 2
Seduced and Abandoned. Father (Saro Urzi) and Daughter (Stefania Sandrelli)
D2
Divorce Italian Style. Pietro Germi. 1961.      Sicilian Communist Party meeting…..

 

D3

D5

 

D7
Divorce Italian Style.

D6

Dietrich 1964 photo Peter Basch
Marlene Dietrich, 1964.  Madonna or Whore?   Photo Peter Basch.

Le Patron’s planned hitch-hiking route in Italy, having crossed the Yugoslav border a few weeks before was to head for Sicily.  Sicily was a potent symbol of poverty and corruption.  In the Spring of 1964 he had read Danilo Dolci’s To Feed the Hungry.  It had left its mark on him.

to-feed-the-hungry
To Feed the Hungry, Danilo Dolci.  UK edition, MacGibbon & Kee, 1959.

Le Patron was very ignorant about Sicily.  Danilo Dolci had not mentioned Taormina in his To Feed the Hungary.  Taormina was where Le Patron had been dropped off  late afternoon having hitched from the port of Messina.  It was an old town but buying peaches he realised something was wrong.  They were double the price he had been paying elsewhere in Italy.  And then he saw a poster advertising that Marlene Dietrich was playing at the local exclusive nightclub.  Without knowing it, he had arrived at a favourite spot of the Med Yacht Set.  The near empty campsite was on a cliff edge.  Way  below, in a sparkling sea –  a holiday brochure blue – and so clear you could see the bottom and brightly coloured sub tropical fish, people with snorkels and flippers snorkelled, whilst in the distance Mount Etna puffed slightly threatening.  Le Patron was desperately bored with the holiday brochure setting.   He had come to Sicily looking for ‘authenticity’ and had ended up in a place that had as much relevance to Sicily as the English singer Cliff Richard had playing at the Sun City venue in apartheid South Africa. (Queen also played in apartheid South Africa and their lead guitarist Brian May couldn’t see what the problem was, when they were slapped down by the U.N. and the British Musicians Union).

But Le Patron was going to have to cut his search for authenticity in Sicily, and start heading back.  His finances were starting to run low.

The notion of “Authenticity” is tricky, difficult to explain, and probably shot through with dubious and naive emotion and intellectual inconsistency and sloppiness.  But for Le Patron in the Italy of 1964 it meant a tiny Fiat 500 stopping when he was hitching and the bulging family inside  – (there really was no room, and the occupants could probably have got into the Guinness Book of Records for how many people you can get in one car) –  apologising for not being able to give him a lift and pushing a bunch of white grapes into his hands for roadside sustenance until he got a lift, and waving him goodbye as they drove off; it meant a young lad telling him to hop onto the back of his Lambretta three wheel van with deliveries to a nearby campsite, and then insisting he takes some bread and  cheese and fruit from the deliveries when he arrived at the site.

Or being off the beaten track in a hilly, hot landscape in what seemed a deserted village on a slope of a hill, with noonday shadows as black as death and the light as white as phosphorous – the sort of high key lighting used in Fellini’s 8½ (1963), or that came naturally in the films shot in Sicily by Pietro Germi (Divorce Italian Style 1961, Seduced and Abandoned 1964) and by Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, 1962).

It was an afternoon and a weekend.  The street was very wide, with low, rudimentary white buildings on either side.   Looking up and along the main street – the only street the village seemed to have –  in the direction Le Patron would be travelling out of the place were Lombardy poplars stationed at the village cemetery and the cross and the statute of the Madonna.

There were no people, no cars passing through,  not even a sleeping dog in the shadows.  The prospects did not look good.  And then, from nowhere, he became aware of a group of middle aged to elderly men in their weekend best dark suits, hands behind backs as they passed him in the middle of the road, some talking, some nodding.  They didn’t seem to notice the stranger in their village.  They continued in the direction of the cemetery.  They reached the edge of the cemetery and then leisurely about turned and strolled back down again, passing Le Patron without  acknowledgement.

After they disappeared from view – did they go into the village’s one bar? – Le Patron can’t remember – a middle aged woman in widow’s black was quietly standing beside him, proffering a chair, indicating with a hand gesture for him to sit on it.  He smiled a thanks, she smiled back and he watched her disappear into a dark beaded open doorway behind him.  After a while (two vehicles had driven along the street and not stopped) she reappeared and beckoned Le Patrol to follow her through the darkened doorway. He was immediately in a low ceilinged room and at treadle operated sewing machines – Singer sewing machines – young girls and older women were efficiently working.  Another woman in widow’s black gave Le Patron a cool glass of home made lemon juice, and a small plate of home made almond biscuits, and there were smiles all around, including modest ones from the young unmarried girls.  There was little attempt at talk, smiles and gestures were enough.

One of the women in widows black was concerned that I got back to the chair, with my lemon drink and almond biscuits, in case I missed a car.  Le Patron can’t remember getting a lift, but he obviously did, and neither can he remember if or when the empty glass and plate was collected.  And typing this, he wonders how and where the young girls are now. They would be in their mid to late sixties now.  Did they vote for Berlusconi?

silvio_berlusconi_in_2015
Silvio Berlusconi. Billionaire businessman and longest serving post war Prime Minister of Italy.

When did sewage and piped water come to their village? And Indesit washing machines, which saved them the chore of washday slapping and lathering and rubbing of clothes in the communal wash trough?  How many married?  How many went into a convent?  How many are grandmothers?  Do any still sew?  Do they watch game shows on RAI, or soaps on Berlusconi’s Italia 1 channel?  How many have iPhones?

And the group of men who walked up to the cemetery are now in it, six feet under.

Where was that village?

Ciao ciao bambina.

_____________________

italy-map

______________________

Footnotes

1. see To Feed the Hungry, Danilo Dolci;  Naples ’44, Norman Lewis.

 2.  see online link to Air Raid on Bari . 

barga-june-2005-25-copy
Somewhere in Italy.     photo Pete Grafton.

 ________________

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Author petegraftonPosted on October 3, 2016November 22, 2016Categories Political & Social History, Second World War, Social HistoryTags 450th Bomb Group Memorial Association, Amarcord, Armando Brancia, Bari, Bari air raid, Benito Mussolini, Danilo Dolci, Death of Togliatti, Divorce Italian Style, Fedirico Fellini, Francesco Rosi, Indesit, La Dolce Vita, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Marcello Mastrianni, Marlene Dietrich, Mother/Madonna, Mustard Gas, Naples '44, Norman Lewis, Palmiro Togliatti, PCI, Pietro Germi, RAI, Reggio Calabria, Rome, Salvatore Giuliano, Seduced and Abandoned, Sicily, Sidi Barrani, Silvio Berlusconi, Taormina, To Feed the Hungry, U.S. John HarveyLeave a comment on Ciao Ciao Bambina: Italy 1964.

Godard, Cohn-Bendit & The Disappearing Cigar

Godard, Cohn-Bendit & The Disappearing Cigar

Godard with cigar andLisette ModelPNG
Hotel room, rue d’Orsel, Paris.   May 2010.

Former anarchist agitator Danny Cohn-Bendit, left and Agit-Prop Marxist film maker Jean- Luc Godard on the cover of Télérama, May, 2010.  These days Godard has swapped his proletarian Gauloises for the plutocrat cigar.  Now let’s see that again:

Godard with cigar_edited-1PNG

and again…..

Godard with cigar_edited-1PNG

and…..

Godard-CB

Whoops, something’s not quite right.  So back to the magazine:

Godard with cigar

and now the advertisement for the magazine in the Anver Metro station, Paris,  May, 2010:

Godard-CB PNG

Où est Le Cigare?

___________________

Freedom-daniel-cohn-bendit-1
Danny Cohn-Bendit, 1968.
godard-0-600-0-600
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960s

The anarchist of the 1960s, Danny Cohn-Bendit is a child of upper class parents.

The Marxist film maker, and Maoist (1968 – 1980) Jean-Luc Godard is also a child of upper class parents –  very wealthy parents at that.  His grandfather on his mother’s side was the founder of the Banque Paribas, now BNP Parabis that almost went under in 2015 and was restructured.  The group describe themselves as “Global Corporate and Institutional Banking and Retail Banking and Services”.

Jean_Luc_Godard Chines paper PNG

Le Patron would not normally draw attention to their background were it not for the contempt that Cohn-Bendit and Godard have shown for their own class.  In Soviet propaganda terms, or in a Moscow Pravda editorial they would themselves be described as classic “spawn of the bourgeoisie.”

For a while “Red Danny” (Cohn-Bendit) was almost as much a pin-up as Che Guevera.  A recent news item (December 2015) that claimed Cohn-Bendit had, at age 70, got married, prompted broken hearted responses from would be suitors.  They can recover their composure: it seems the story is  untrue.

Cohn-Bendit became one of the photographic images of the May Days in Paris, and his fame was cemented as much by government supporting opponents highlighting the German origin of his family, and his Jewish background.  The May, 1968 students took up the chant Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemande – ‘We are all German Jews’.  The chanting didn’t prevent him being expelled from France as a “seditious alien” on 22 May, 1968.

During the 70s, initially living in the family home in Germany, he continued to be involved in the ‘movement’: working in the Karl Marx Buchandlung bookshop in Frankfurt.  As most anarchists regard Karl Marx in the same way a Primitive Methodist would regard the Pope, it seems his theoretical ‘position’ was in flux.

He also worked as a member of a ‘radical’ nursery.  He got a lot of erotic pleasure being with five and six year olds and wrote about it in Le Grande Bazar (1975), talking about engaging in sexual activities with the young children.  The German Green Party into the 1980s had a tolerant attitude to paedophilia.  Since then Cohn-Bendit has unconvincingly excused himself by saying he was being ‘deliberately provocative’ in La Grand Bazar. If so – to what end?  To upset the ‘bourgeoisie’?  To stay in the spotlight?

Staying in the spotlight seems to be his emotional need.  It’s a Lights, Camera, Action scenario, whether on the Paris boulevards, or on a confrontation with a Czech president.  And where ever he is, he is sure to make sure the media knows where he is, and are briefed to what he is going to say and do.  His greatest love is himself.  His website  features  the toddler Danny, Danny the boy, Danny the teenager, Danny the young activist.  If he was in the nursery, instead of an adult having erotic feelings about a five year old, and was a child, a five year old,  he’d be the one elbowing the other kids out of the way  pushing himself to the front if the local media were visiting, or on a daily basis  creating an upset to get attention.

In the late 1970s Federal German melting pot of opposition to nuclear power stations and other ‘green issues’ Cohn-Bendit was drawn into the movement that would eventually result in the emergence of the Green Party in Germany.

________________

The film maker Jean Luc Godard who had had a left sentiment prior to 1968 went the whole horrible hog and stuck his colours to Chairman Mao, at a time of appalling repression in the People’s Democratic Republic of China.   This grotesque manifestation at this time effected some others in the ‘Arts’ in the West,  particularly the performing arts.

mao, re educationPNG
Re-education on the land: Xinsheng commune, Qingan county, 4 November 1969.   Photo  Li Zhensheng, from Red-Colour News Soldier.

If Godard had been in China in 1969  given his class background he would have found himself being ‘re-educated’: forcibly sent to work on the land.  He would be getting off lightly.  Other perceived enemies of the People’s Democratic Republic got shot.

china 3png copy
Photos Li Zhensheng, from Red-Colour News Soldier. ( 1.)

During the period of his support of Chairman Mao he denounced his former cameraman Raoul Coutard for being the cinematographer on a film that had American company backing. Raoul Coutard was one of the best things about watching Godard’s films in the early to mid sixties, for instance Pierrot Le Fou (1965). This was gesture, megaphone politics at its worst. (Is there any other kind?)

Cohn Bendit 2
Cohn-Bendit, megaphone operative.  May, 1968.
Cohn Bendit 2010
Cohn-Bendit, 2010, supporter of the E.U. bureaucracy.

In August 1968 when Soviet Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia, Cohn-Bendit was selling Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder in the Frankfurt bookshop, and Jean-Luc Godard was  reading the Maoist People’s Cause in Paris.

An estimated 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks (a higher figure of 5,000 tanks is sometimes quoted) invaded Czechoslovakia on the night of 20 August, 1968.  It was the largest use of military force against a European country since the end of the Second World War, even exceeding the Soviet military force that invaded Hungary in 1956.    The crime that Czechoslovakia had committed?  To have a little bit of what citizens (including Cohn-Bendit and Godard) in Western Europe took for granted: the freedom to travel,  freedom to express oneself, without being imprisoned, or having your passport taken away, or your children being prohibited from going to college. (Or in Mao’s China, being shot.)

Czech 7
‘A protestor holds a blood stained Czechoslovakian flag in front of a Soviet tank.’   Photo source   Czech Press Agency archive.

The loosening of the Marxist straight jacket had started under Alexander Dubček when he was elected First Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party.  Although he wanted the Czech Communist Party to be firmly in control of the State and the reforms – the economy was in a mess – the enthusiasm in the country for the change of direction was endangering the rule of the Communist Party.  Dubček was reluctant to use force to reinforce the central role of the Communist Party.  It was this that alarmed Moscow.  The period was known as the Prague Spring.  The winter came early, in August.

Czech10
‘Protestors throw stones at the Soviet tanks entering Prague’.  Photo source Czech Press Agency archive.

 

Czech 12
photo  Josef Koudelka  (2.)
r
photo   Josef Koudelka.
Czech 1
‘Soviet tanks are surrounded by crowds of Czechs protesting against the invasion on Prague’s Wenceslas Square, August 21.’   Photo source  Czech Press Agency archive.
Czech 8
‘Soviet soldiers try to extinguish a burning tank set on fire by protestors near the Czechoslovak Radio headquarters in Prague.’   Photo source Czech Press Agency archive.

At Radio Prague, journalists refused to give up the station and twenty people were killed before it was captured by the occupying force.  It is estimated that a further 100 protesting Czechoslovakians were killed by the occupying forces, upholding the power of Marxist-Leninists to continue the building of the Workers Utopia, not just in Czechoslavakia, but in the rest of central and eastern Europe and the Baltic.   As late as 1980 the Central Committee of the German Democratic Republic (East German) were urging fellow Warsaw pact members to use military force to invade Poland and put down the Solidarity movement.

Czech 11
Protester confronts Soviet Tank, morning of 21 August, 1968. Main Square,  Bratislava, Slovakia.   photo  Ladislav Bielik

Whilst Jean-Luc Godard remained committed to the Mao-ist version of Marxist Leninism, and Cohn-Bendit worked in the Karl Marx Buchandlung, the negatives of the photographs that Czech photographer Josef Koudelka took of the Soviet invasion were smuggled out of the country, and published anonymously in the British Sunday Times.

JK Prague photoPNG
photo  Josef Koudelka

Unaware that Josef Koudelka was the photographer who took the invasion photos, the Czechoslovakian authorities allowed him to travel to England on a 3 month working visa issued by the British government.  Once there he applied for and was granted political asylum.

Czechoslovakian New Wave film directors and scriptwriters, such as Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde, and The Firemens Ball) and Ivan Passer (Intimate Lighting) managed to escape to the West.  (Foreman happened to be in Paris when the Soviets invaded.)   The director of the Academy Award winning Closely Observed Trains, Jiri Menzel, was not so lucky.  During 1968 and early 1969 he was shooting Larks on a String, set in a Stalin era industrial scrapyard where the male and female civil and political prisoners were forced to work, and lived in overcrowded, barbed wire surrounded huts.  This was no political allegory.  This was the  reality of 1950s Czechoslovakia.

Larks on a String 1
Larks on a String, Jiri Menzel, 1969.

 

Larks on a string 3
Larks on a String, Jiri Menzel, 1969.

 

Jiri Menzel 68
Film director Jiri Menzel, circa 1968.  (3.)

 

Larks-on-a-String-30045_3
Larks on a String, Jiri Menzel,  1969

Once the film was completed it was immediately banned, and was not seen until 1990, following the collapse of the Communist regime.  In an interview recorded for the DVD release of Larks on a String Jiri Menzel said he was not able to leave the country – his passport had been taken away from him.

It was five years before he made another film, and seven years before he made Seclusion Near a Wood (1976).  In 1985 My Sweet Little Village was released.  These post Prague Spring years were the years of “Normalisation” as the Communist Central Committee, with First Secretary Gustáv Husák at the helm, called it.

Ostrava 74PNG
Normal.    Ostrava, 1974.   Photo Viktor Kolár  (4.)
Viktor Kolaf
The years of ‘Normalisation’. Ostrava, 1984.    photo Viktor Kolár.
My Sweet little village, PNG
My Sweet Little Village, 1985.   Jeri Menzil.

The Czech photographer Viktor Kolár covertly photographed the years of “Normalisation” in the industrial city of Ostrava, and the surrounding area, whilst earning a living, at one point, working as a labourer in the Nová Hut’ steelworks.

Jeri Menzil’s My Sweet Little Village still remains one of the Czech and Slovak Republic’s favourite films.  Menzil had the ability, almost in a Good Soldier Švejk way in the period of “Normalisation” to get one past the authorities, by re-affirming what is best about being human.   Both My Sweet Little Village and Seclusion Near a Wood are loving, and sometimes rye observations of human inter-action, irrespective of the political background of the time, typical of all his films from Closely Observed Trains onwards.  It is an approach that Jean-Luc Godard would, at best, not understand, and at worst would dismiss as either ‘bourgeois’ sentimentality or of ‘not facing reality’.

The writer on Film, Ray Durgnat, said about Godard in 1967:  “Godard keeps babbling on about the world being absurd because he can’t keep an intellectual hard on long enough to probe for any responsive warmth”.

Durgnat said a lot of pungent and insightful things about Godard in the essay the quote comes from Asides on Godard, in The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, Studio Vista 1967.  As much as Le Patron likes Ray Durgnat’s writing, in this instance it isn’t intellect you need for responsive warmth, but an open heart.  Godard’s shrivelled damaged little heart naturally leapt, a year later, into the sloganising Marxist-Leninist-Maoist rhetoric, where he found a sense of purpose, and with equally sloganising people, a sense of belonging.   Despite supporting a Maoist paper called The People’s Cause, he (and the paper) had no understanding of  ‘The People’ and loathed and rejected just about everything they, the people, enjoyed.

Theses days Godard is no longer a Maoist, but still identifies himself as a Marxist.

These days Danny Cohn-Bendit has travelled a long way from being a part player in Parisian street theatre.  In the journey the anarchist ideal of a bottom up democracy has been replaced by a top down authoritarianism.  Benito Mussolini took a similar journey, from Italian anarcho-syndicalism to the fascist corporate state. The journey that Cohn-Bendit embarked on in 1968 led to a grotesque position – equal to Godard becoming a Maoist – when, with other European MEPs he travelled in December, 2008 to Prague to meet and berate the Czech President Václav Klaus.  More of this in a moment, but first some details to where he had arrived at in the 1990s and beyond.

In 1994 he became a Green MEP in the European Parliament, and has remained one since. He is a significant politician within the French and German Green movements, and his belief in the necessity of the European Union to force policies  – environmental policies, for instance –  on member states is authoritarian.  In 2003 during the Convention that was preparing the text of the European constitution – which was to become known as the Lisbon Treaty –  he demanded that EU member countries who voted No in referendums to the conditions of the constitution should be forced to hold a second referendum.  If the result was still No, then those countries should be expelled from the E.U.  The planned constitution (The Lisbon Treaty) was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.  Irish voters rejected it in June 2008, but accepted it in a second referendum in October 2009.

There are some significant differences between the Green Parties in Europe.  The German Green Party, for instance, approved the rejection of Scottish Independence by voters in the 2014 Scottish Referendum on the question, at odds with the pro-independence position of the Green Party in Scotland.  And although the  Czech writer, dissident, thinker, and Czech President (1993 – 2003) Václav Havel supported the Czech Green Party from 2004, he remained committed to Direct Democracy, even though some Green Parties stance on environmental matters is  authoritarian.  A clash in democratic approaches resulted in Cohn-Bendit resigning from the French Greens.  More of that in a moment.

______________

At the invitation of the then Czech President Váklav Klaus a group of MEPs who were members of the “Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament” flew to Prague on 5 December, 2008.   To put what happened when they got there in a context, imagine any other President of an autonomous European nation – say Mary Robinson, President of the Republic of Ireland between 1990 and 1997 – getting this kind of drubbing from visiting politicians from Brussels.

Christopher Booker wrote about the extraordinary meeting for the British Daily Telegraph on 14 December, 2008.

“There was…… a remarkable recent meeting between the heads of the groups in the European Parliament and Václav Klaus, the Czech head of state, in his palace in Hradcany Castle, on a hill overlooking Prague. The aim was to discuss how the Czechs should handle the EU’s rotating six-monthly presidency when they take over from France on January 1.

The EU’s ruling elite view President Klaus….  with a mixture of bewilderment, hatred and contempt.  As his country’s prime minister, he applied to join the EU in the days after the fall of Communism in the 1990s. But now Klaus is alone among European leaders in expressing openly Eurosceptic views, not least about the Lisbon Treaty, which the Czech parliament has yet to ratify.

Klaus was an outspoken dissident under the Communist regime, and he has come to regard the EU as dangerously anti-democratic. But he compounds this sin with highly sceptical views on global warming, on which he recently published a book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles…….

So when Klaus was due to meet the MEPs, one of them decided this was a moment to display the Euro-elite’s hostility to him. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who is German born but lives in France, first came to prominence in Paris in 1968 as a student agitator. He is now leader of the Green MEPs. Talking loudly in the plane to Prague, he made no secret of his intentions, and briefed French journalists on how to get maximum publicity for his planned insults.

As Cohn-Bendit was aware, the only flag that flies over the castle is the presidential standard (though the “ring of stars” is much in evidence elsewhere in Prague, flown outside every government ministry).

As described to me by someone present, President Klaus greeted the MEPs with his usual genial courtesy. Whatever his own views, he assured them, his countrymen would conduct their presidency in fully “communautaire” fashion.  (Communautaire: supporter of the principles of the European Community.)

Cohn-Bendit then staged his ambush. Brusquely plonking down his EU flag, which he observed sarcastically was so much in evidence around the palace.  (Le Patron: News reports from many sources said that Cohn-Bendit went on to say that the European Flag should have been flying from the Presidential palace.)

(Cohn-Bendit) warned that the Czechs would be expected to put through the EU’s “climate change package” without interference.  “You can believe what you want,” he scornfully told the president, “but I don’t believe, I know that global warming is a reality.”  He added, “my view is based on scientific views and the majority approval of the EU Parliament”.

He then moved on to the Lisbon Treaty. “I don’t care about your opinions on it,” he said. If the Czech Parliament approves the treaty in February, he demanded, “Will you respect the will of the representatives of the people?”

He then reprimanded the president for his recent meeting in Ireland with Declan Ganley, the millionaire leader of the “No” campaign in the Irish referendum, claiming that it was improper for Klaus to have talked to someone whose “finances come from problematic sources”.

Visibly taken aback by this onslaught, Klaus observed: “I must say that no one has talked to me in such a style and tone in the past six years. You are not on the barricades in Paris here. I thought that such manners ended for us 19 years ago” (i.e when Communism fell). When Klaus suggested to Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the EU Parliament, who was present, that perhaps it was time for someone else to take the floor, Pöttering replied that “anyone from the members of the Parliament can ask you what he likes”, and invited Cohn-Bendit to continue.

“This is incredible, said Klaus. “I have never experienced anything like this before.”

After a further exchange, in which Cohn-Bendit compared Klaus unfavourably with his predecessor, President Hável, he gave way to an Irish MEP, Brian Crowley, who began by saying “all his life my father fought against the British domination [of Ireland]… That is why I dare to say that the Irish wish for the Lisbon Treaty. It was an insult, Mr President, to me and the Irish people what you said during your state visit to Ireland.”  Klaus repeated that he had not experienced anything like this for 19 years and that it seemed we were no longer living in a democracy, but that it was “post-democracy which rules the EU”.
On the EU constitution, Klaus recalled that three countries had voted against it, and that if Mr Crowley wanted to talk about insults to the Irish people, “the biggest insult to the Irish people is not to accept the result of the Irish referendum”…..

Everntually Pöttering closed the meeting by saying that he wanted to leave the room “in good terms”, but it was quite unacceptable to compare himself and his colleagues with the Soviet Union.  Klaus replied that he had not mentioned the Soviet Union: “I only said that I had not experienced such an atmosphere, such a style of debate, in the Czech Republic in the last 19 years.”

klaus_stbPNG
Czech Communist Secret Service (StB) surveillance files on future Czech President Váklav Klaus.  Source Radio Praha.  (Radio Prague.)

The hectoring nature of the meeting was reported in Czech media, and was a news item throughout the former Communist Eastern Bloc countries.  It is reported that across all political sentiments in the Czech republic the reaction was similar: that the comments of Cohn-Bendit and the other MEPs was an “undue interference in Czech affairs”.  The MEP and the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage went further and compared  Cohn-Bendit’s actions to a “German official from seventy years ago or a Soviet official from twenty years ago.”

______________

Cohn-Bendit’s  contempt for democratic processes continues.

French Greens’ Cohn-Bendit quits party in fiscal Pact row.

European lawmaker Daniel Cohn-Bendit revoked his membership of the French Greens on Sunday (23 September) in protest at the party’s decision to oppose the ratification of the European Union’s budget discipline pact.

The move threatens to rob the Europe-Écologie Party of one of its most recognisable deputies – known for his rabble-rousing during 1968 student riots in Paris – and may exacerbate tensions within the group, which supports France’s Socialist-led government and has two ministerial posts.

The French Greens voted overwhelmingly against the terms of the pact at a grassroots assembly on Saturday, concluding that it would not provide long-term answers to the EU crisis nor help foster environmentally friendly policies.

France is expected to ratify the pact early next month, though a major revolt within the coalition could force the Socialists into an embarrassing reliance on the conservative opposition.

“Yesterday’s federal council was dramatic. Dramatically pathetic,” Cohn-Bendit told French television station i-Tele.

“I’ve decided to suspend my participation in this movement. It’s clear to me that deep down, things are finished between me and Europe-Ecologie.”

Cohn-Bendit said the French Green party’s position on the fiscal treaty was “completely inconsistent” arguing that the party should pull out of the French government and vote against the budget.

“I don’t want to endorse this leftist policy drift,” the Franco-German MEP further went on.

Cohn-Bendit, nicknamed “Danny the Red” for his student activism, has served as deputy for French Green parties since 1999 and is co-president of the European Parliament’s Greens group.

  – Reuters, 24 September, 2012.

Just in case you missed it:  it was a collective decision taken by a meeting of grassroots members.  Paris, ’68 anyone?

______________

And, oh yes, that Disappearing Cigar.

Godard with cigar_edited-1PNG

Godard-CB

It’s marvellous what you can do with Photoshop.  Not only remove the cigar, but reposition the fingers.  In  France 2010 it was not permitted for advertising posters in public places to even inadvertently include cigarettes, cigars – (and goodness knows what has happened to Maigret’s pipe).   Cohn-Bendit the Green politician would not have a problem with the Photoshopping out of his pal’s cigar.  And Godard, like Cohn-Bendit is happy to comply with the distortion.  He is, after all, promoting the product: himself.   Anyway, as a Marxist who probably knows his Russian Revolution history, he will know that anything that offends the ruling elite gets removed.  Long live the Revolution, Comrades.

lenin addressing the troops, trotsky photoshopped out
Before: Lenin left, Trotsky circled right. After: Trotsky removed.

 

____________________

Sources and Notes

All photographs used in this Post:  Copyright the respective owners.

  1.   Li Zhansheng is a photojournalist.  He was a photographer with the Heilonjiang Newspaper, and photographed the Mao Cultural Revolution as part of his work with the newspaper.  However, besides allowed ‘positive’ images of peasant meetings, etc, he managed to secretly take photographs of the realities behind the Cultural revolution, including those forcibly sent to the countryside to help the ‘revolution’ (hard labour camps), and executions without trial.  These latter negatives he hid underneath the floorboards in his family one room flat in Harbin.   He and his wife, Yingxia, were themselves sent to a hard labour camp for two years, in 1969.
mao,li and family PNG
Li Zhansheng with his wife Yingxia and children in their Harbin flat, September 1972.  Taken with a self-timer.

The photographs he took during the Cultural revolution are published as Red-Colour News Soldier by Phaidon, 2003.  It is still in print.

2.  The photographs that Josef Koudelka took during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia are published as Invasion 68: Prague, Aperture, 2008.  It is still in print.

3.  Jiri Menzell’s  Larks on a String and Closely Observed Trains are currently available DVDs, with English sub-titles, and an English Menu.  51Ry0OwgLRL._AA160_Vesničko Má Stredisková (My Sweet Little Village) and Na Samoteu Lesa (Seclusion Near a Wood) are Czech DVDs, with English sub-titles and a Czech Menu. 51zKiBPcQ7L._AA160_  It is not too difficult to figure out from the Menu how to switch on the English sub-titles.  subtitlescafedalston.co.uk sell by post or in person Na Samote u Lesa (Seclusion Near a Wood) which is how Le Patron got his copy.  They also sell online a small selection of other Czech films, film posters and items.  All the DVDs are otherwise available from amazon.co.uk

4  The photographs taken by Victor Kolár in Ostrava, during the period of Czech ‘Normalisation’ are in Viktor Kolár, Torst, Prague, 2002.

Victor KolarPNG
Viktor Kolár, published by Torst, Prague, 2002.

Unfortunately only very expensive second hand copies of this soft back are presently available, although a search through ebay might yield copies cheaper than the current asking price on abebooks,  which varies between £111 to £207, at the time of writing (January, 2016).  Fortunately Viktor Kolár does have a website where some of his work can be seen.  victorkolar.com

________________________

 

 

Author petegraftonPosted on January 2, 2016March 15, 2016Categories Photography, Political & Social HistoryTags anarchist, anarcho-syndicalism, Anver Metro station, Aperture publishers, Benito Mussolini, BNP Parabis, Chairman Mao, Christopher Booker, Closely Observed Trains, Cultural Revolution, Czech Press Agency, Daily Telegraph, Danny Cohn-Bendit, Dubcek, Europe-Ecologie Party, Firemens Ball, French Green Party, Germany Green Party, Good Soldier Svejk, Gustav Husak, Harbin, Intimate Lighting, Ivan Passer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jiri Menzell, Josef Koudelka, Karl Marx, La Cause du Peuple, La Grande Bazar, Ladislav Bielik, Larks on a String, Left wing Communism an Infantile Disorder, Lenin, Li Zhensheng, Maigret, Marxist-Leninism, Mary Robinson Irish President, Milos Foreman, My Sweet Little Village, Nigel Farage, Ostrava, Paris May Days 1968, Pierrot Le Fou, Radio Prague, Radio Praha, Raoul Coutard, Raymond Durgnat, Seclusion Near a Wood, Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968, Subtitlescafedalston, Sunday Times, Telerama, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard Studio Vista, Torst Publishers Prague, Trotsky, UKIP, Vaclav Havel, Vaclav Klaus, Viktor KolarLeave a comment on Godard, Cohn-Bendit & The Disappearing Cigar
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