Balestrini Nanni Balestrini

Carbonia (Eravamo tutti comunisti)(dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts, 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken # 070)
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-3-7757-3099-0
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Deutsch, Englisch, Band 70, 48 Seiten

Reihe: dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken

'30 years later we find that we are all still like we were in ’45.' Der Künstler, experimentelle Dichter und Schriftsteller Nanni Balestrini (*1935) beschreibt in fieberhaften Rückblenden die miserablen Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen im Nachkriegsitalien, sowie die grauenhaften und traumatischen Erlebnisse in einem SS-Kriegsgefangenenlager in Deutschland aus der Sicht eines desillusionierten, doch kämpferischen Überlebenden. Er berichtet detailliert und ohne Punkt und Komma. Nachdem er bei der Rückkehr in die Heimat wegen seiner politischen Gesinnung vielfach abgewiesen wird, findet er Arbeit in den Minen von Carbonia. Die rücksichtlose Ausbeutung der Arbeiter und die reuelosen Faschisten rufen Erinnerungen an den Krieg wach und entfesseln seine kommunistischen Ideale. Der Streik der Bergarbeiter von Carbonia wird 'sein Streik', denn für ihn ist der Kommunismus die einzige Möglichkeit, sich mit Kameraden zu vereinigen und das Schweigen zu brechen. 'Carbonia (We Were All Communists)' ist das Zeugnis eines Mannes der mehrere Leben in Sardinien, Deutschland und Australien gelebt hat und noch immer bedingungslos für Gerechtigkeit kämpft.
Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch

Autoren/Hrsg.

Balestrini, Nanni

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Einzelne Künstler: Biographien, Monografien
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunstsammlung, Museen, Ausstellungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert

Inhaltsverzeichnis

English / Carbonia (We Were All Communists)
Italiano / Carbonia (Eravamo tutti comunisti)

English / Carbonia (We Were All Communists)
Italiano / Carbonia (Eravamo tutti comunisti)

Leseproben

Nanni Balestrini
Carbonia (We Were All Communists)

Translated by Mike Harakis

1

I actually went to work in the mines in Carbonia to run away from a girl I had got back from prison camp on August 29 I had got back home from Germany I had a bit of a holiday at home I was really emaciated I was really down I stayed at home all the time I didn’t do anything I read some newspapers some books some stuff I found lying around I passed the time like that but then I needed money and I couldn’t find any work and so I went to sea I traveled around just about everywhere the first steamer I took was called the Gennargentu it did La Maddalena–Cagliari Cagliari–Palermo Palermo–Trapani it transported wine and passengers and that was the first steamer I went on

it was a ship that used to go up and down the coast but now the war had destroyed almost all the ships and the crossings they made us do out there were real adventures once we went 36 hours without contact we ended up who knows where we were off Sicily and then a storm a terrible storm that lasted for days pushed us back toward Cagliari she was a really old ship the Gennargentu initially only used on the Palau–La Maddalena service a short trip but we had to do some real voyages with an old ship like the Gennargentu

I went on other steamers after that I was stopping off in La Spezia on July 14 and I was walking with some soldiers whose ship was in dry dock when a ship is in dry dock if they lower the flag at the stern the ship is out of commission and when it’s out of commission the crew goes to the barracks on land and they take everything down but when it’s fit to sail even if it’s in dry dock then there’s still the radio and so at midday the captain receives the order to let the water back into the basin and set sail immediately and so the ship departed leaving nearly all the sailors on land apparently because the navy back in Rome had heard that something was happening apparently

shortly afterward the workers also received the news that there had been the assassination attempt on Togliatti and 13,000 workers walked out of the shipyards and the factories they all walked out and they crowded along the waterfront after a while a column of police arrived and was immediately attacked at three different points there was an enormous throng of people workers and sailors all together and all were in a fury the first five vans were rolled over and burned the police used their machine guns and two workers fell wounded but the police officers were immediately swept away and had one casualty and five wounded they ran away and barricaded themselves in the station they all ran away

the police force no longer existed the crowd assailed the offices of the DC and the Front of the Ordinary Man the doors and windows were smashed in people rammed them with tractors and then went in and destroyed everything red flags flew everywhere and all the roads were full of enraged people there were groups of workers and armed sailors wearing red neckerchiefs everywhere there was this great anger this desire to put an end to it once and for all and you could tell that the moment had come after all these years of defeats of disappointment of humiliation the moment had come to assert our will and we knew that this was what was trying to be done all over Italy assert our will

it was not because of Togliatti because Togliatti was only an opportunity because there’ll be other leaders but everyone had started on their own accord to put an end to it once and for all and the partisan brigades had quickly reorganized weapons were seen everywhere even machine guns anti-tank guns everything was being pulled out but then the next day the PCI MPs arrived bringing orders to stop everything and that’s how without an organization everything ended the weapons were laid down and everything ended all over Italy it ended with a lot of dead and wounded and a lot of people in prison that was my last crossing then I went to work in the mines my last crossing at sea

when this period here was over I went back to my hometown I didn’t have a job for a while then a friend found me a job in Carbonia so I went there but before going to work in the mines I worked for a while in the woods planting trees for the Forestry Department it would take too long to say all that happened in that period anyway I went to Carbonia mainly because I had to get out of marrying this girl that’s the truth in short this girl was expecting and I didn’t have any money I didn’t have a job I didn’t have any prospects I was also really tense very touchy I had been like that since I had got back from prison I was like that

I wasn’t very well I felt strange I was also drinking a lot if I didn’t drink I couldn’t have a good time I was always sad and it took years before I was really able to get over prison but the thing that really made me angry was the fact that when I got back to my hometown I found that there were still all these Fascists for example there were these people who used to play these Fascist records Faccetta Nera and songs like that there was a place where you could dance and all sorts of people used to dance there rich and poor there was a big hall and everyone used to go there then once there were some Fascists who played these records and I didn’t want them to play those records

I told them not to play those records anymore but they played them again and so I went round there and I smashed all the records and the gramophone too I smashed all the equipment all of it into pieces out of anger I made a real mess that time my blood boiled when I heard something that had anything to do with fascism with Mussolini with all those things because I’d just got back from the prison camp in Germany there were three of us in my town who had been in the camps two had been with the Wehrmacht but me I had been with the SS and the SS was something totally different

and there I still found all those people who were in charge before half Fascist and half Christian Democrat as they are called now after the end of the war they had filled my head with all that stuff that everything had changed that there were no more bourgeois masters and that they shouldn’t be in charge anymore and instead they were still there they had only changed from black to white but they were still in charge for Christ’s sake and they were the ones who told me you are a Communist and so because I was a Communist in the town I couldn’t find a job anymore and I had to leave my town because I was a Communist

but I had already become a Communist before Germany when I was sent to sea during the war in the navy because I had some mates who were Communists they were Genoese sailors and even though I was very young then I’d understood one thing I’d understood that we couldn’t win the war because it didn’t concern us that war was a war that the Fascists and the bourgeois masters made us fight that nobody wanted to fight and we had all understood that then as our navigation became more and more difficult and more and more dangerous the enemy airplanes could sink us whenever they wanted we no longer doubted that the war was by now lost nobody doubted it

once in Naples we were on the quay where there were the anti-aircraft batteries in Pozzuoli and there were some soldiers in these batteries who were barefoot they only had some cloth wrapped round their feet and they came to us with their frightened thin faces asking for something to eat then I remembered when we had picked up some British pilots at sea who weren’t in such a bad way because they were all well dressed with boots and they had enough to eat and so we wondered but how on earth can we win a war that nobody wants to fight and that we don’t have the equipment for we don’t have any of the things we need not even shoes we don’t have anything

then once during the war I went back to my hometown for a few days when I was given leave because the ship had been bombed and partially destroyed and there in my town there were these Fascists who were still saying these things about winning and that we were going to win et cetera but I knew that that was only foolishness because by then I had realized that we were heading toward a rout that it was all over and that that was the best thing and then there was the fact that I knew I really hated the Germans for example when there were some of them on board with us I couldn’t stand them I didn’t like them they made me edgy I didn’t like the way they behaved

one time for example when we were going to Tunisia we were going to Bizerte and there were seven or eight Germans and two who were engineer officers had embarked with some equipment that wasn’t called radar back then but were those devices to see airplanes from a distance and these Germans were putting on airs they always kept to themselves but then when we were attacked by formations of American torpedo bombers and bombers and the bombs were hailing down all around us then these German engineers huddled there the whole time white as sheets and crying from fear hugging their equipment and this made us laugh in a way because we were hardened to those things in a way

I had made love to a girl and I cared about her I had met her when she was very young I was also really young back then she was a nice girl she had knitted me a sweater but I was very edgy back then because of the prison camp I had been in in Germany and in that period my situation was definitely not that of someone who was comfortable...