The friendliness that characterized him in dealing was not upbeat. Anyone who saw Luigi Reitani on a podium quickly realized that she was looking for clarification. His rhetoric, like his voice, was of a rather quiet nature, and it owed its urgency to the sharpness of thought. The elegance with which he switched from German to Italian and vice versa gave an inkling of the translator who was in him.
He was a lot at the same time in personal union, professor of new German literature in Udine and moderator at book fairs, guest professor in Klagenfurt and Basel, Hölderlin editor in Italy, from 2015 to 2019 director of the Italian cultural institute in Berlin, organizer of exhibitions and colloquia, member of Scientific Advisory Board of the Free German Hochstift in Frankfurt am Main. This seemingly effortless diversity makes little fuss of the industry that went into it.
Luigi Reitani was born in Foggia in Apulia in July 1959. He learned the craft of philology in Bari, where he wrote his dissertation on Arthur Schnitzler in the early 1980s. He then went to Vienna for several years. He must have rejected the scholarship, which is closed in on itself, early on. The Viennese professor Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, for his part a scholar who was not afraid of the public, may have contributed to this.
Freedom and equality can only be enjoyed in the frenzy of madness
Reitani remained loyal to Austrian literature all his life, wrote essays about Italy in Ingeborg Bachmann’s poems or the music in Thomas Bernhard’s “Untergeher”, at the same time he was an important connoisseur of German literature since the 18th century. In his studies on Goethe he was a worthy successor to Giuliano Baioni within the great tradition of Italian German studies, and sometimes it seemed as if he had the mediator between Germany and Italy, to which he was increasingly becoming, as an alternative to the pedantic, unsuccessful one Intermediate from Goethe’s “Elective Affinities”.
When he came to Berlin in 2015 at the Italian Cultural Institute on the edge of the Tiergarten, he had shortly before published the essay “Germania europea, Europa tedesca” (2014) in Italy, in which he did away with the Italian clichés about Germany that have existed since the financial and the euro crisis blossomed. The essay appeared at the same time as a concise introduction to an Italian translation of Goethe’s work “The Roman Carnival”, a prime example of the ease with which he understood how to open the philological view of detail to the whole of culture and anthropology.
The first text by Goethe, who returned from Italy, published in May 1789, turned out to be a dense description and at the same time a reflection of an order threatened by eros and death, which culminated in the evocative anti-revolutionary formula “that freedom and equality can only be enjoyed in the frenzy of madness can be “.
When he returned to Udine, he kept his residence in Berlin
German readers can gain an impression of the energy and precision with which Reitani worked during his Berlin years on the completion of his two-volume Hölderlin edition, which began in 2001, in the volume “Hölderlin Translate. Thoughts About a Poet on the Flight” (2020). The edition itself, also published by Mondadori in 2020, set international standards, for example through the new dating of Hölderlin’s small text “Judgment / Being” or the order of the drafts for the unfinished drama “The Death of Empedocles”.
The philologist Reitani never lost sight of the present as well as contemporary literature. He responded to the refugee crisis of 2015 in German with the volume “Flucht in der Literatur – Flucht in die Literatur” (2016). His articles and essays on German literature from Grass, Böll and Christa Wolf to WG Sebald to Ingo Schulze and Herta Müller appeared in Italian in the volume “Il Racconto della Germania”.
When he returned to his chair at the University of Udine in autumn 2019, Luigi Reitani kept his residence in Berlin. He died in a Berlin hospital on Sunday, much too early, at the age of 62. Despite having been vaccinated twice, he succumbed to a Covid 19 infection. He left behind a large group of mourners in Italy and Germany, who will miss him long-term as a great stimulator, mediator and good European.