“OH, WE WILL NOT BE COMMENTING ON THAT” was the answer I got from a gallery representative at the opening of a show of furniture designed by the Italian writer and filmmaker Curzio Malaparte at Gagosian’s space on Park Avenue, New York. The “that” in question was Malaparte’s prominent membership in Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, a fact that is not mentioned in the press release. Instead, the text supplies euphemisms, calling him a “provocative writer” who was “notorious for his oscillations between the ideological extremes of the era.”The reason for this evasion is not hard to fathom: “Casa
Nationalist dreams and nightmares
Mike Macnair reviews Workers and nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918 by JS Beneš and The Fiume crisis: life in the wake of the Habsburg empire by DK Reill
Both these books are about nationalism and the break-up of a larger multinational state regime. Reviewing Jakub Beneš’s book, published in 2017, is perhaps rather belated, but it provides fundamental background to that of Dominique Kirchner Reill: Beneš’s book is about the growth of nationalism in the late 19th-early 20th century workers’ movement in Austria-Hungary; Reill’s is a microcosm-study of the disastrous consequences of the implementation of nationalist programmes.