Finally competitive: The Italian transatlantic liner Princess Mafalda, which set sail on her maiden voyage in March 1909, was fast, she was luxurious – she could rival the ships from England and Germany. Even if the Princess Mafalda not on the North Atlantic route like this one, but commuted between Genoa and Buenos Aires. Because she was the most beautiful steamer in the Italian Navy, the mafalda In the First World War it was not used as a mere troop transport, but served as a residential ship for officers in the port of the Apulian city of Taranto.
In his “Biography of a Transatlantic Steamer”, the subtitle of his book “Principessa Mafalda”, author Stefan Ineichen is only marginally interested in the glorious and magnificent stories surrounding this very special passenger ship. He does not indulge in furnishings and menus that only the luxury class passengers have benefited from, but likes to climb down to just above the waterline where the third-class passengers were accommodated: Italians who left their homeland to embark in South America to start new life. During the war brought the mafalda many of these men then returned to Italy to fight for their fatherland. After 1918 the wave of emigration started again.
When Ineichen ventures into the higher passenger classes, it’s to weave a network of stories that stretch far beyond the deck of the Princess Mafalda reach out and always include more than a single concrete journey. The Vienna Philharmonic has traveled to South America on this ship, once with Felix Weingartner as conductor, the second time with Richard Strauss. The Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda attended many of the concerts – he himself was with the mafalda moved to South America to work as an engineer there for a few years. Gadda also watched matches of a tour of the Genoa football club – this team was also on board the Princess Mafalda.
Circles close again and again, there are cross-connections, Ineichen brings people, motifs and machinations together so that milieus emerge. One constant is the closeness of many protagonists to fascism. Last but not least, the namesake, Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian King Vittorio Emanuele III. and his wife Elena of Montenegro, played an inglorious role politically. She was married to Philipp von Hessen, a nephew of the last German Emperor, who distinguished himself as the liaison between Hitler and Mussolini.
Ultimately, Mafalda became a victim of fascism himself, despite all partisanship. Suspected of treason, she was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she died in a bomb attack. The ship named after her had been lying on the seabed off the Brazilian coast for 17 years. The Princess Mafalda was run down in 1927 and was to be scrapped. But before she was decommissioned, she sank due to lack of seaworthiness, hundreds of people drowned because the lifeboats were not seaworthy either.
The author describes a special time and a special way of travelling: Most of the passengers had no tourist intentions in the narrower sense. And from this particular perspective, Ineichen always looks to the horizon, i.e. to the political, economic and social history of Italy in the first quarter of the 20th century.
Stefan Ineichen: Princess Mafalda. Biography of a transatlantic liner. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2022. 256 pages, 34 euros.