At the commemoration seven years ago for Oberjäger Franz Höfler, the rifle company Lana, which he founded, gave a salute to the dead man, a wreath was laid, the song of the good comrade was heard, and the long-time director of the South Tyrolean State Museum for Cultural and Regional History celebrated in in his speech the pluck of the Tyroleans and their composure: “We must,” Siegfried de Rachewiltz admonished the congregation, who, like him, had appeared in the traditional colorful uniform, “keel and whet our intellectual scythes every day so that we can have the necessary ‘cut’ for gain new visions.” Before he started the celebration with “Schützenheil und Schützen Schneid!” finished, he quoted a poet: “What you love dearly will not be snatched from you/What you love dearly is your true inheritance.”
The speaker who called for this pacifist vigilantism did not name the poet, did not reveal to those present that he was referring to his grandfather, the poet of the century Ezra Pound. The name wouldn’t have meant anything to the shooters anyway. Finally, the ceremony was dedicated to a local freedom fighter, the courtier Franz, who was arrested by the Carabinieri after the Bolzano night of fires in 1961 and, according to reports, was tortured so brutally that he succumbed to his injuries.
He shortened TS Eliot’s great poem “The Waste Land” so drastically that the poet remained eternally grateful to him
That was a long time ago, and South Tyrol has long been an autonomous province. Even longer ago was the time when you were no longer allowed to speak German on the street on orders from Rome. In Meran, on the cathedral square, everyone is talking in different languages and only falls silent when a young tenor babbles in front of the museum and sings “Funiculì Funiculà”, the well-known hymn to the Vesuvius cable car. The sun shines because, as another poet said, it has nothing better to do, and it shines, as is its way, on the just and the unjust.
When the so-called “Bumser” attacked the central government in Rome with bombs on the electricity pylons, another terrorist had just arrived in the South Tyrolean mountains. In 1958, after his release from prison, Ezra Pound had moved to Brunnenburg, where his daughter and grandchildren lived. Pound was not a Tyrolean rifleman who was loyal to his homeland, but rather the midwife of the English-speaking avant-garde. He campaigned for the printing of James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and abridged TS Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land so drastically that the poet remained eternally grateful to him. In his dedication, Eliot praised his lector as il miglior fabbro, the superior artist. Ernest Hemingway, who rewarded him for his editorial advice on the use of adjectives with boxing lessons, praised the tireless windmaker, who devotedly looked after his friends, always found money, always found new patrons, mostly rich American women who were willing to buy magazines to be financed with conditions in the three-digit range.
The “Make It New” exhibition in Meran’s Palais Mamming am Dom reminds us of this heroic modernity, which reached its peak exactly one hundred years ago with the publication of “The Waste Land” and Joyce’s “Ulysses” and has already come to an end was. It is as if the aged poet had come down from the mountain and been young again. He looks completely transformed in the photos, the young shaggy anarchist in league with Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and the millionaire John Quinn. On the shelf behind the men is a picture by Fernand Léger, the original of which can also be seen in the exhibition.
Alvin Langdorn Coburn made a Vortograph of Pound in 1916, superimposed three exposures, an uninterpretable artist entrepreneur. Vorticism (after the Latin vortex for storm) into which Pound plunged in London with Wyndham Lewis was actually a whirlwind that knew only one direction: “Make It New”, everything – Imagism, Cubism, Futurism – should have been modern as never before. Pound was the best mind for it.
Pound spoke, ranted, sang, and philosophized in at least seven languages, none of which, scoffers remarked, he spoke
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska carved Pound as a Vorticist head, a priest-god in almost pharaonic form, the leader of a whole new religion, and one dedicated exclusively to art. Pound talked, ranted, sang and philosophized in at least seven languages, none of which, as mockers observed, he spoke, and as a marketing genius he found it only fitting to post an anonymous review of his first work, A Lume Spento (1908). , the poems are “original, imaginative, passionate and spiritual”.
A touching artefact the blue ticket that grants entry to blastDinner made possible: Pound and Lewis published in this magazine, which only saw two issues, Jacob Epstein, Rebecca West and Eliot. A “civil war among peaceful apes” was promised. The message that the “end of the Christian age” had come was also hopeful.
However, there is a small problem attached to the unrestrained Neuer Pound, which is bravely addressed in the text accompanying the exhibition: “During the Second World War he made radio speeches in which he accused the Allies of being the real culprits in the current conflict and in which there were no anti-Semitic tones were lacking.”
Raised in the best of Anglo-Saxon conditions in Idaho and Washington, Pound discovered early on that his personal enemy was the Jews. “We want nothing more to do with Jews and deportation,” he proclaimed in a poem in 1914 blast.
He never desisted from his anti-Semitism, it pervades and spoils his entire work. The Jews had brought the money into the world for Pound and then also the war, which must have been a life disaster for him. One of his breathlessly typed letters can also be found in the exhibition, which is richly furnished with items on loan from the family. It goes to Gaudier-Brzeska and trades in generous invective to those absent from Pound’s efforts to broker his friend’s work. The letter survives because it was returned to the author as undeliverable: the exemplary Vorticist had already fallen.
At least as conceited as Plato, who wanted to teach the tyrant of Sicily and who had him sold as slaves as a thank you, Pound traveled to Washington in 1939 to prevent a new war, but the American President Roosevelt did not want to see him. Benito Mussolini was different, he read the poet, exactly on January 30, 1933, the day on which Hindenburg elevated Hitler, who had been Mussolini’s pupil, to the position of Reich Chancellor. Pound gave his Cantos to the Duce, and he found them divergent, quite entertaining. This is how Mussolini became Pound’s “boss”.
Because he was too famous, he avoided the death penalty and was sent to Washington’s criminal insane prison for only 12 years
Pound realized too late, as his grandson Siegfried de Rachewiltz, who designed the exhibition together with Carl Kraus and Rosanna Pruccoli, “that he had lost his bearings and that his raft would crash on the cliffs of history”. The cliffs are to blame for the poet making himself a fool, if not a slave, of Mussolini and celebrating his March on Rome. Vorticist modernity may have appeared on the world theater in such a crushing manner, but politics was already overtaking the avant-garde, it was politics that made everything new. The March on Rome coincides with that annus mirabilis of modernity, it also took place exactly one hundred years ago, as Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre recalled at the opening of the newly elected Italian parliament. It was pointless, the first Mussolini pictures are already hanging in the offices of the new Meloni government.
From the late 1920s, Pound, who had moved from London to Paris and then to Rapallo, had been completely under the spell of fascism. The Meran exhibition unintentionally proves this closeness with the invitation to the Venice Biennale, which his friend Ernesto Thayaht sent to him in 1931 with the dedication “A Ezra Pound, with simpatia futurista” sent. The artist had fabricated a metal sculpture of Mussolini, which mechanized the Duce into a faceless but bronze ram’s skull.
The cliffs of history landed Pound in prison. His radio speeches on the fascist station were not only against the Jews, but against America. His compatriots locked the high traitor in the notorious kennel in Pisa, but because he was too famous, he avoided the death penalty and was put in a prison for criminals with a mental illness in Washington for twelve years. When he was released unhealed at the instigation of Hemingway and Eliot in 1958, he returned to Italy and raised his arm to greet the friends who awaited him at the port.
Pound has survived modernity and all his friends: Joyce had already died when Pound was imprisoned. Hemingway killed himself in 1961, Eliot was long lost to the High Church when he died in 1965. Her friend, promoter, propagandist became depressed. Oskar Kokoschka drew him in 1964 as unloving and rather confused. At the end of 1967, however, there must have been another upsurge. In October, he allowed two movies to be made with him (they’re playing on a TV upstairs). In one, Pier Paolo Pasolini reads the old man’s “Cantos” in Italian and speaks to him reverently about Walt Whitman.
At the same time, Allen Ginsberg showed up at Pound’s and reportedly absolved him. Ginsberg approached the 82-year-old as a “Buddhist Jew”, played the organ on his manual lyre and played Beatles songs for him, earnestly asking for his approval. Pound has never distanced himself from his radio fuss, but admitted to Ginsberg that “my worst mistake was stupid petty-bourgeois anti-Semitism”.
Pound wanted the “hieratic” head made of him by Gaudier-Brzeska on his grave, at home in Idaho. Along the way, the portrait was to be exhibited “each for a month” in Paris, London and Washington. “If you do it sensibly, the transport from Brunnenburg to Hailey can be financed.” Things turned out differently, Pound was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Venice in November fifty years ago. The head actually arrived in Washington and is in the National Gallery there. Art, no matter how subversive it may be, ends up in the museum.
What one loves dearly becomes the true inheritance. Even without Schützenritz, the Tyroleanization of the big Dengler is complete. The tenor is now on “Nessun dorma” and the tourists on the cathedral square are ordering another cappuccino. The sun, what should it do, laughs at it.
“Make It New”. Until January 6, 2023 at Palais Mamming in Meran. Unfortunately no catalogue.