“The Swallows of Montecassino”: Helena Janeczek’s novel. Review. – Culture

Three battles for Montecassino have already been fought in the first few months of 1944, when the description of the fates of others breaks off and the narrator reports of herself: She grew up in Munich, in the “city of movement”, which she found worth living in and seemed tranquil. She knew nothing about the great war and little about her parents’ Polish origins. “Because our house was in the city center, where there were no children, and almost all Germans lived in small families, to which I was later invited as a student to play with their daughters, I lived without being aware of a vacancy. ” One could think longer about this stylistically and logically unfortunate sentence (were there children in the inner city or not? Does living in the center mean not knowing anything about the wider area?).

But there are many such sentences in this book, and they are in the original Italian. Perhaps, the reader muses, the narrator’s belief that whatever happens “at a possible, dizzying, horribly objective crossroads” in the story is proving to be a strain on the syntax.

In any case, “Cowboys and Indians” were played in the courtyards of this city, whereby the narrator claims to have been the only one “who volunteered as a redskin”. From then on, it seems, the fate of the victims became her motive in life, on a world-historical scale and broken down into the experiences of individual people: This was the case in the first novel by the author Helena Janeczek, who moved to Italy at the age of nineteen (“Lezioni di tenebra” , “Lessons of the Shadow”, 1997), and so it was in “The girl with the Leica” (2017), her biggest success to date.

Without the religious orders there would not have been a Christian Occident

The battles of the Second World War are countless, and because there are hardly any survivors left, the memory of the battles is gradually becoming only history. The four battles for Monte Cassino are different, and not only because they lasted four months and cost the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers. Because up on the mountain, with a wide, all-dominating view over the valley of the Liri, lies an abbey: the mother monastery of the Benedictines, founded in 529, which, because the Christian religious order begins with the Benedictines, is the mother of all mother monasteries, with consequences to this day. The tradition of antiquity found its way into modern times via the religious orders, and not only the writings, but also the practical knowledge of the ancients, which applies to agriculture as well as to architecture. Without the religious orders there would not have been a Christian Occident.

The battles on Montecassino were fought for this mountain and this abbey, and whoever looks up at the white castle high on the mountain today knows about this story. And he also knows that the Wehrmacht wanted to protect the monastery and that it was bombed to rubble anyway, because the Allies mistrusted the Germans, or because the strategic importance of the facility was too great, or because the war was war.

Helena Janeczek’s book The Swallows of Montecassino was published in Italy in 2010 and it is not a historical novel, at least for the first half. It tells the story of the battles, from the first attack on January 19, 1944, which was supposed to bring a regiment called “Texas” to the foot of the mountain, to May 18, when soldiers from a Polish army corps penetrated into the crypt of the monastery. However, the course of events is presented from several, often oblique perspectives, the protagonists change, and other stories develop from their later biographies. Some actually happened, others are made up. And again and again the narrator intervenes, with the past of her own Polish-Jewish family or reflections on the war, life or storytelling.

“Nothing human is alien to you,” assures the narrator, “and one story is as good as another, but only in this sense: you have to be able to tell it like your own.” That means: not only with a recognizable personal narrative attitude, but also as a game with events that could have happened but didn’t happen. With such confessions, the narrator approaches a program of “metahistorical” fiction that was launched in the early 1990s: “New Italian Epic”. The most prominent representative of this trend was Roberto Saviano, the author of the world bestseller “Gomorrah” (2006). And if there hasn’t been much talk about her lately, it’s not because the “NIE” is over. On the contrary: the technology is no longer noticeable because many authors write like that. Incidentally, it was Saviano who popularized the novel “The Swallows of Montecassino”, with a euphoric review in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.

Open detailed view

The world-historical importance of the abbey corresponded, probably unintentionally, to the fact that the Allied soldiers had been brought in from many countries, some of them far away: Polish and French soldiers fought alongside the American and British divisions, including many North Africans. The global “whirlpool” created by the World War whirled units from India and New Zealand into wintery central Italy. The second chapter is dedicated to a young Maori who attends the commemoration ceremonies at the military cemetery on behalf of his grandfather. It expands into a basic course in the recent history of this tribe, including language instruction, an introduction to drinking habits, and a digression on the dubious consequences of importing live deer. “But I’ve never met a Maori, I’ve never been to New Zealand,” says the narrator, who nonetheless feels “terribly sorry for the poor animals” who were transported halfway around the world in the hold of sailing ships.

Open detailed view

Such sentences make the reader doubt the deeper meaning of “metahistorical” fiction. Certainly, it is not the problem of this novel that it leaves the reader in the dark as to where the line between fiction and truth is drawn. That’s how literature works. It’s also not his problem that the author fetches her mostly terrible material from all over the world. That’s how things are, especially in a world war. It’s not even a problem that she wants to empathize with Hirsche (although: too much empathy often means hardly letting the person you’re trying to empathize with get a say in it).

The problem is that this massive effort comes up with so little: who is to blame for the suffering of the deer? “The desires and interests of a few masterminds.” Who is responsible for the war? “An omnipotence craze spread across all continents for centuries.” What is the final verdict on the Soviet Union, the power that turned the victorious Polish army corps into a vanquished bunch when the homeland was ceded to the communist bloc? It should be noted that “the flags waved the most, the flimsiest and the dirtiest are red”. The problem with this book is the willingness to be outraged, the excited confirmation of views that at least half the world is already convinced are correct.