The Mafia Myth: Ulrich van Loyen’s “The Godfather and His Shadow” – Culture

A chicken wants to join the mafia. It goes to the mayor and says: “I would like to join the mafia.” The mayor explains to him: “There is no such thing as a mafia.” Then the chicken goes to the largest building contractor in the region and says again: “I would like to join the Mafia.” The contractor says: “There is no such thing as a mafia.” Finally, the chicken turns to the editor-in-chief of the local newspaper and repeats his wish. He sits down with the chicken in the visitors’ corner, offers him an espresso, spreads his arms and shouts: “But there is no Mafia!” Then the chicken returns to its chicken yard. The other chickens want to know if it worked. The chicken says, “There’s no such thing as a mafia.” Now the other chickens all believe the chicken is with the mafia.

This story could very well serve as the motto of Ulrich van Loyen’s book “The Godfather and His Shadow”, which is about – yes, what exactly is it? Certainly about the mafia; but not about the mafia as an issue to be fathomed through research, but rather as a mentality, as a literary construct, as something that results, like in a mirror cabinet, through mutually reflected expectations and reactions; as a phenomenon which, in revealing itself, shrouds itself all the more in mystery.

The cocaine dealer Cutolo became a poet in prison

The title is not chosen happily. Sure, Nietzsche is quoted here, “The Wanderer and His Shadow”, and thus a certain tradition of philosophical writing is invoked (especially since it was published in the series “Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft”). But when the godfather casts a shadow, there is no doubt about his physicality; it sounds like a Netflix series of the more melodramatic kind. In fact, however, this body only comes into being through attributions; So in a sense, it’s the shadow that casts the body. The murders and violence are real enough; and yet, as the book sees it, they have their roots, or at least their full social presence, in a phantasmagoria.

This book is best viewed as an essay, a type of text that takes the freedom of association and imagination and does not want to forego elegance. Because if you looked at it, for example, as a sociological or historical study, you would primarily notice its volatility and this as a defect. Again and again the author starts afresh. If you read it, you definitely get something from it, even if never a whole. And this method is probably really the best way to somehow deal with a phenomenon like the Mafia, the Camorra or the ‘Ndrangheta – the author carefully distinguishes between them.

Right at the beginning it says: “Ethnologists recently spoke of Mafiacraft, of a kind of aura, a dark mood, socially present through rumors, half-truths, and narratives, in and through which the Mafia operates. But what if the Mafiacraft is the beginning , the beginning of the mafia, which appears as if it were the beginning of everything? What if it starts with the great narrative, the characteristics of which we must first understand before we can really think about the bodies that feed off it? The following illustration tries this aura to historicize this mood of the Mafia. “

Now the mafia is by no means just a fluid and a mood. It remains to be seen whether this reversal of the classic view of base and superstructure will hold up, namely in such a way that the narrative superstructure can really “feed” the base. The fashionable category of “narrative”, as sympathetic as it sounds in its openness on all sides, stands in opposition to the truth. And the truth, the pure truth and nothing but the truth was what was at stake in the trials in which at least the Sicilian Mafia has perished since the nineties. It is not different “narratives” that the prosecutor and defense attorney pound each other on the ears, but at the end there is a judgment that is based on evidence. 10,000 years in prison were imposed in one of the giant trials with hundreds of accused, whereby the life prisoners have naturally not yet been included in this sum.

Open detailed view

The prisoners were allowed to tell stories and write poetry, of course, and they did it with a leisure that was not available to them in their earlier “malavita”, the stressful life of the villains (in contrast to the loose Dolce Vita it is written down as one word) . Van Loyen extensively quotes the poems of Cutolo, who revolutionized the cocaine trade in the greater Naples area, appeared as a star and folk hero together with the footballer Maradona and finally ended up in jail, evaluates and interprets them and recognizes them, with an overall mediocre poetic performance, but an interesting originality when Cutolo speaks of his hatred of the bitter white powder.

Italian society stood up against the leisurely amoral point of view

Van Loyen apparently sees at least the classic Mafia as a thing that has since been done for; it tones his tone a little wistful. “What happens in the Neapolitan way – in addition to eating and loving, robbery and murder – is already formatted as a cultural asset. For this reason, crime in Naples is always folklore, at least where it is publicly negotiated.” This is reminiscent of the composer Stockhausen, who declared the 9 September attacks to be a major art event.

In the nineties, Italian society rose against this comfortably amoral point of view. The murder of investigators Falcone and Borsellino had mobilized a wide public. The boss of the bosses, Totò Riina, known as “the beast”, convicted of at least thirty murders, died very old only recently after a quarter of a century in prison. Today the airport from Palermo is called Falcone, while Riina’s widow, still resident in the old Mafianest Corleone, has to live on a street that was renamed after a victim of her husband and where the statue of the Madonna delle Grazie is no longer in front of her during processions House is allowed to linger – a declaration of death in one’s lifetime. This is told succinctly, is ambiguous and has an emotional force that cannot be fully controlled by any of the interested parties. This is what stories look like beyond the narrative that are worthwhile.