B007HXL46C EBOK Read online

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  and for the opposing team, the mouths of cannons at the ready:

  o o o o o

  o o o

  o o

  o

  Walaschek’s Dream is a dream-dance on the brink: for all its playfulness, the book maintains its gravity, evoking the tremendous suffering of the era of 1938, and of those individuals who failed to survive it—for instance, the Austrian footballer Matthias Sindelar, the “Mozart of soccer,” a Jew who was found dead under mysterious circumstances following the Anschluss of Austria to Greater Germany in January, 1939.

  An Enduring Tension

  Alongside the many historical figures, Orelli brings forward a series of fictional characters, most notably the daughter of Walaschek’s coach in Geneva, and in Ticino one Giulia Sismondi, who befriends the crematorium employee Cesare Rossi and carries Klee’s ashes to his widow—a scene full of restrained poetry. Throughout the text, what captivates the reader is a parallelism and intertwining of caustic irony and pressing solemnity, sober precision and fantastical creativity, disturbing grotesquery and bewitching poetry. Which is why the book never allows itself to be pinned down to any particular genre: Is it a novel? An essay? A capriccio? A treatise? It has something of all of these, and in its density and plenitude fuses the cosmopolitan urbanity of a big-city novel with the alehouse tableaus of a village tale.

  This tension between transgressive expansion and retreat into a manageable smallness reflects the career of the author, who hails from a tiny village in the high-lying Bedretto Valley, near the Saint-Gotthard Massif, and was trained as a philologist and historian in the Northern Italian metropolis of Milan. Orelli feels far more at home in both of these places—high-altitude village and bustling conurbation—than in the little city of Lugano, where for years now he’s taught in a high school and worked as a literary critic.

  This fusion of cosmopolitanism and provincialism is on display in Orelli’s manifold work as a translator. Along with the Latin classics, he has translated Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas into his native dialect, that of the Bedretto Valley, rather than into standard Italian—not out of verbal conservatism, but a delight in experimentation, and because certain basic motives for human existence are better preserved in dialect’s archaisms and turns of phrase than in orthodox speech. Thus, in Walaschek’s Dream, the reader will rediscover numerous dialect expressions, the traces of an individuated manifestation of the Will—an enduring tension that, in its translation to a world language, will certainly not be lost.

  DANIEL ROTHENBÜHLER, 2012

  TRANSLATED BY AARON KERNER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Genia Walaschek’s biography comes directly from the forward of the 1940s Swiss national soccer team himself. I thank him, as well as another national player, Franco Andreoli, for the information they shared with me, and especially Sergio Grandini for providing me with the documents regarding Klee’s death. This work was written on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation, with the support of Pro Helvetia. It’s almost superfluous to add that there are numerous invented characters (such as the coach’s daughter, Silvia of Silenen, Giulia Sismondi, etc.) living (or trying to live) alongside the “historical” figures (from Walaschek to Klee, from Schopenhauer to . . .) mentioned in this book.

  But Pardon, gentles all,

  The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared

  On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

  So great an object. Can this cockpit hold

  The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

  Within this wooden O the very casques

  That did affright the air at Agincourt?

  O pardon: since a crookèd figure may

  Attest in little place a million,

  And let us, ciphers to this great account,

  On your imaginary forces work.

  Shakespeare, Henry V

  Attendi attendi,

  Magnanimo campion (s’alla veloce

  Piena degli anni il tuo valor contrasti

  La spoglia di tuo nome), attendi e il core

  Movi ad alto desio.

  Giacomo Leopardi, “A un vincitore nel pallone”

  The 1938 Swiss Cup final took place on April 18 in Bern. At the time, the unwritten rule was that the final had to be played on Easter Monday, and always in the capital of the Confederation. Christ was still risen on April 17, 1938, and so hearts could open (as they say) to hope, even if on that April 16 (Holy Saturday!) the newspaper reported that in the last three weeks, there had been 140 suicides in Vienna.

  Naturally, not everybody chose suicide. Many people led (as they say) normal lives, or nearly. Others lived on in the prisons. A correspondent from the News Chronicle reported that 12,000 people were still imprisoned in Vienna alone, and 40,000 others in the various provinces of the former Austrian state. That is, more than could fit in Bern’s Wankdorf Stadium, where the National Cup final was held.

  This digression on Vienna isn’t due to the fact that Vienna, unlike London, had made itself a virtual Academy of Soccer, as the cradle, the roost, the home of the famous Wunderteam, that sublime model of classical soccer, which the provincials (and that includes the Swiss) couldn’t take their eyes off of. Vienna was finished being capital of the Hapsburg Empire, home of the imperial eagle. Austria was finished, an appetizer for Adolf Hitler’s Germany. And the great Matthias Sindelar, star of the Wunderteam, was finished too.

  Before going back to the final in Bern, one last note about Vienna. The prisoners there were diplomats, members of the aristocracy, or Jews. And yet, with nary a trace of irony, a “Letter from Vienna” dated April 29, published as an “editorial” in a respected Italian-Swiss newspaper, the Corriere del Ticino, ended by saying: “Nationalism gives the Austrians panem et circenses. Isn’t that enough to ensure their welfare and inspire a sense of boundless gratitude for their liberator?”

  Yes, before returning to the green oasis that is the Wankdorf, we mustn’t fail to mention that, at least for those who weren’t yet born in 1938, on April 10, Palm Sunday, there was a plebiscite (called by Hitler) in Germany and Austria (excluding, of course, the Israelites) on the Anschluss to ratify public approval of Germany’s annexation of Austria, which had taken place that March. In the German Reich, out of 99.452% of all voters, 99.06% voted yes, and 0.94% no. In Austria, out of 53,996 voters of the ex-army, 53,872 said yes, 76 no. Hitler, the papers reported, was “satisfied.” On April 3, General Zehner, ex-head of the ex-Austrian army, killed himself.

  On April 18, the day of the Swiss Cup final in Bern, there was a strong wind, but the field was in excellent shape. Is it wind that ruffles flags, or is it flags that, like women’s skirts, stir up the wind? 1938 seems like a golden year for flags. Even on February 6 in Cologne (Köln), at the Germany-Switzerland game (soccer, of course! final score 1-1), “countless” Nazi flags “fluttered in the sun.” For Hitler’s visit to his great friend, Italy, planned for that spring in Rome, “the pillars on Via Nazionale were to bear sheaves (fasces) of flags, as would the tall pedestals on Via dell’Impero.” Flags everywhere, to accompany the notes of Lohengrin, Act Two:

  Der Rache Werk sei nun beschworen

  aus meines Busens wilder Nacht!

  (May the work of revenge be conjured up

  from the wild night of my breast!)

  Yes, the twentieth century is a century of flags. Later, long after 1938, a Russian said, “I think that the country would do a hell of a lot better if it had for its national banner not that foul double-headed imperial fowl or the vaguely masonic hammer-and-sickle, but the flag of the Russian Navy: our glorious, incomparably beautiful flag of St. Andrew: the diagonal blue cross against a virgin-white background.”

 
Switzerland, too, came to learn the importance of flags. Studying dividual and individual structural elements, the painter Paul Klee carefully examines the Swiss cross. He says: “I shall show you some cases, in which the problem is posed both concisely and cogently,” and then observes: “The individual pattern, called a cross, now agrees quite well with the structural aspect. The two mesh. Is this indeed an individual pattern? Yes, an individual pattern of the character of a regular cross. Structure has been shifted into a cross.”

  Even back in 1914, during a speech in Zurich on December 14 (remember that, unfortunately, World War I, as they call it, had broken out a few months earlier), Swiss writer Carl Spitteler—who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in literature—astutely noted that we Swiss “have in common neither blood, language, nor a ruling dynasty that could attenuate our contrasts and unite us on a higher level; we don’t even have a real capital. These are elements of political weakness, let’s not fool ourselves. We need a symbol that can help us overcome, help us transcend these elements of weakness. Fortunately, we have such a symbol. I don’t need to tell you: it’s the flag of the Confederation.” On a higher level: honor to Carl Spitteler.

  On the highest pole at Wankdorf, one flag would wave above the flags of Geneva and Zurich: the national flag.

  One year earlier—that is, in 1913, and this time in Zurich’s rival city (in terms of sports, economics, esprit), Geneva, home of Calvin and Rousseau, another bard, a member of a minority within a minority—in other words, a writer from Italian Switzerland—Francesco Chiesa, was asked to share his thoughts on that complicated mosaic that is our little land, speaking there in Helvetia’s main “Roman” city. He didn’t discuss the 3,000 plus pieces of that mosaic, our inherent resistance to everything that comes from the capital, or the conservatism in our blood. Instead he spoke—to great applause—about the camaraderie among the confederate peoples as a model for Europe and for the world. He ended with an analogy destined for posterity: the confederate peoples of Switzerland are like the columns of a Greek temple: “they all lean slightly, each imperceptibly tilting toward a single axis, in such a way that, seen alone, they seem straight on their bases, free in their bearing, just and perfect in their individuality; seen together, they appear—as they are—of one mind, in harmony. The eye doesn’t notice how those marble lines slant; yet following them upward, it unconsciously rises to the ideal vertex where the entire temple converges . . . The Greek temple is a pyramid whose tip we cannot see.”

  How high up is the tip? That ideal vertex? How far above the clouds? Up there with the astronauts? Next to God? Some Catholic newspapers, in fact, criticized Chiesa for sounding Platonic, not Christian. Tu platonicus es, non christianus.

  The Swiss Cup is more Aristotelian than Platonic. And the single-elimination tournament, which ended the day after Christ’s resurrection (in the capital, even if Bern—as Carl Spitteler rightly points out—is no Vienna, London, Paris, Madrid, or Rome), forms a perfect pyramid.

  At the base of the pyramid are all the soccer teams in the country, starting with the fourth division. Id est, not all three thousand of the country’s municipalities participate in the tournament. Some alpine villages would have to include the priest and the priest’s housekeeper to make an eleven-person team. They don’t have anything even resembling a football pitch. Maybe a patch for planting potatoes, as when the great Traugott Wahlen’s great plan was implemented, in the years when the country was completely surrounded by the Axis powers. But real soccer is something else entirely. For example, a town like Ossasco, in the High Ticino, on the south side of the National Redoubt (or in peacetime, the St. Gotthard Massif), is a miniscule community. It could only matter in the mind of a linguist studying such miniscule archaeologies, due to the fact that its name ends in –asco, which indicates Ligurian provenance. Ossasco would have to mobilize everyone aged sixty to ninety, borrowing players from the surrounding areas, including the priest, and import a half team or so of Brazilians to make up its eleven-man “Dinamo Ossasco”:

  Eliseo

  Djalma Santos Nilton Santos

  Franku ’t Zan Santisteban Gervàs

  Manuel Attilio Ademir Vincenzo Rico

  – With Eliseo at the goal? Isn’t he over seventy?

  Scribe O/17360 shrugged—what else could he do? When someone asked whether people in Ossasco got married anymore, they’d reply: – Bah . . . who knows? Maybe Eliseo, one day, one day—a passàn lè . . .

  Eliseo, on his bench in the corner, was silent. If someone had actually asked him to play goalie for Dinamo Ossasco, if that was what General Guisan wanted, he would have said, Yes sir! Just like during Carnival, when everyone dressed in costumes and told him, Play us a polka! he played a polka. The harmonica would practically disappear into his Nietzsche-esque mustache. He played quite badly, but tears still welled up in his eyes because polkas reminded him of the young lady who would eventually become his wife, Emilia del Carlone, since passed on, who’d lived just long enough to see the “frin-fron” (gramophone) in Ossasco, and for weeks on end had talked of nothing but the gramophone and what wonders man was capable of inventing.

  What did they invent in Germany, which was on the cutting edge of technology, on April 18, 1938? Emilia del Carlone had no idea—she didn’t even know the word “technology.” But the new gramophone at the Osteria dell’Angelo gave her an idea.

  So there’s no Dinamo Ossasco; Eliseo can keep on drinking his drink in peace. Only teams properly registered with the ASF, the Swiss Football Association, can play. It’s extremely rare for a minor team to reach the quarterfinals, though not out of the question. So, starting with the thirty-second (final), the newspapers report on the pyramid as it rises.

  In the same issue as an account of the speech given by Seyss-Inquart, Austrian Minister of the Interior, who proclaimed Austria’s freedom in Linz (on March 6), and a transcript of the speech by Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, appealing to Austrian Catholics (two days before the Ides of March), telling them to thank God for having enabled the great political changes in Austria to take place without bloodshed and to pray for a happy future for everyone (“All orders from the authorities must be willingly obeyed”), our local papers highlighted the endeavors (exploits) of the small district and village teams: Tramelan, Nidau, Sementina. A team of immigrants (the Dopolavoro: when they win they dedicate their victory to the Duce’s portrait in the hall of the Casa d’Italia; when they lose they seem to ask his clemency) would be completely content just to go up against the “titled” Servette (losing 3-0), just as a peasant would be happy for the rest of his days if he made it onto his party’s electoral list: there in alphabetical order, on the same level as a lawyer or entrepreneur . . . But who would, naturally, get clobbered by the competition—that is, in the words of the municipal clerk, who always carries a club (you never know)—clobbered like Dopolavoro by Servette—but that’s democracy!

  Once in a while, one of these minor teams miraculously manages to reach the top of the pyramid, which narrows more and more as the months pass. Mezzovico vs. Zurich! Until atop the summit of that Matterhorn risen from the process of fair elimination but a single flag will wave. Between March and April, tension mounts—people are, of course, placing their bets—until there are two semi-finalists who will face off on April 18 at the Wankdorf in Bern.

  When a minor team beats a titled team, public sentiment is divided between joy and sadness. Sadness due to the elimination of the favorite; but then, for some, a secret joy in seeing that, every so often—or every death of a pope, as we say (and some would say that popes never—or almost never—die)—David comes back and beats Goliath. The Davids of History: David himself, Finland, Sementina . . . And the Goliaths? In Finland’s case, there’s Russia—i.e., the devil. And as for Sementina? Sementina is each and every one of us, from the first day of the work week to the last. In theory, even a peaceful Acquistapace, a prayerful Diota
llevi, a hopeful Sperandio, oriundi from Brianza, or other recent arrivals to the motherland from an even more southerly parallel, naturalized in the ’20s, say in Pedrinate (the southernmost village in Switzerland), could theoretically be elected federal councilor, become President of the Confederation, reach the top of the nation, in the same way that a black man could also aspire, theoretically, to be world champion, like a Joe Louis who can show a Max Schmeling what’s what. A black man could even aspire, theoretically, to be President of the United States, Othello to be the Doge.

  And Julius Caesar knew very well that the life of a mountain village rests on a fierce battle for survival.

  In 1938 there were two teams, two big families with two silly names, that kept rising to the top: the Grasshoppers, from Zurich, and Servette (maids), the name of a district in Geneva. These are the two teams that supplied the raw material for the National team: six Grasshoppers, and four from Servette. The eleventh spot was filled from Lugano, a team that had reached the semi-finals, thus representing the “third” Switzerland, that of the Italic ethnicity, who—thanks to their whimsy and imagination—are always useful, especially in the penalty area (did Amadò leave Lugano for the Grasshoppers because the Grasshoppers, reportedly backed by the local Jews, offered him a substantial, well-deserved reward, the best position, with help from Firestone?). Thus, our football is a perfect antonomasia for the harmonious coexistence of people who differ in race, language, and religion: a powerful message, a powerful model for Europe, for the world over.

  The final score on April 18 was 2-2, after extra time.

  The next day, April 19, 1938 (though it’s not impossible that it was the 20th, or 21st, or . . .), there was a seemingly unimportant occurrence, one of the countless everyday occurrences that, in their banality, comprise the lives of human beings. One of the many degenerate (according to the Nazi aesthetic) painters, Paul Klee, took a page from the April 19 newspaper and used that page, instead of a canvas, to compose a painting. The work is called Alphabet I. It is further described as “Schwarze pastose Wasserfarbe auf bedrucktem Zeitungspapier,” or black paste on newsprint on cardboard. The newspaper was the National Zeitung, which, in February of that year—i.e., one month before the Anschluss—was seized in Vienna, along with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Paul Klee used page 13 (did Paul Klee believe in the magic power of numbers?), and this happened to be the sports page, the one reporting the results of the Final Cup from the day before. Klee, with swift hand, the hand of a divine thief (“Never has ‘o’ nor even ‘i’ been writ so quick”), his preparation for the painting entirely mental (“My tragedy is finished, all that is left to do is write it”), scrawled on that sheet of the National Zeitung a few letters of the alphabet, and a few hieroglyphics with the appearance of masks: signs of a “language no longer known”? The song of the birds, the flight of the sparrows, the language of the Spanish gypsies?