Visitors to the Miramare Palace near Trieste, many on the trail of the Empress “Sissi”, experience an abrupt change in style when they enter room XX. The Habsburg interior that had prevailed until then was replaced by the clear lines of Art Deco furnishings, with which the lords of the castle, Duke Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta and his wife Anna von Orléans, who moved in in 1931, wanted to show that they were in the Modernity had arrived. That included rationality, speed and expansion. The Duke, who had already taken part in Benito Mussolini's campaigns in Libya, commanded the air force division in nearby Gorizia in the 1930s and resided in the castle, which was built in a fantastic location on the Gulf of Trieste,that the unfortunate Archduke Maximilian (executed as Emperor of Mexico in 1867) and his wife Charlotte of Belgium, who was soon mentally deranged, had established themselves. In 1937, Duke Amadeo became viceroy of the Italian colony of Abyssinia, after Italy's defeat by British troops on the Amba Alagu, he was taken prisoner and died in March 1942 of malaria and tuberculosis in Nairobi. We come back to him.
A year later, Miramare was seized by the German Wehrmacht and used again for representative purposes, such as the reception for “Führer’s birthday” on April 20, 1945, which the most prominent Trieste writer, Claudio Magris, in his last novel to date, “ Procedure discontinued ”, painted in drastic orgiastic colors. Magris' topic is the collaboration between the Trieste bourgeoisie and the Nazis, who had opened a "police detention center" in a former rice mill in the south of the city, which was already unpunished in the title. The higher SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik from Trist, who had previously raged in the Treblinka extermination camp, became the camp commander of this Risiera di San Sabba. In the novel, he is one of the staff of the ghostly celebration shortly before the end of the war. In the Risiera,Today a memorial and the subject of other novels (such as Thomas Harlan's obsessive “Hero's Cemetery” from 2006 or Mathias Enard's breathless “Zone” from 2010), partisans and resistance fighters were tortured and murdered, Jews were rounded up for deportation to the extermination camps and looted property was stored.
Death is in the air
The former drying oven of the rice mill was converted into a crematorium by the designer of the crematoria in Treblinka and Sobibor, which was connected to a forty meter high chimney.
The pungent odor of corpses over Trieste plays an important role in Magris' novel, which mixes historical events with fictional elements.
The red thread in the book is an attempt by a collector to reconstruct the scribbled walls of prisoners on the cell walls of the Risiera that were whitewashed after the war.
Luisa Brooks, who is the curator of an anti-war museum (actually built in Trieste), is concerned with this failed project.
In the light of the current debate about similarities and differences between the Holocaust and colonial genocides, it is interesting how Claudio Magris, the outstanding historian not only of Trieste but all of Central Europe, establishes this connection in his book published in 2015. The side thread next to Luisa Brooks' story is about Luisa de Navarette, who is related to her name, a historical figure from Puerto Rico in the sixteenth century who was married to a white woman as a former slave and was accused of witchcraft, but escaped the Inquisition thanks to her intelligence. Luisa Brooks, on the other hand, is the fictional daughter of the Jew Sara, who lost her mother in the Risiera as a young girl, and of a black sergeant in the US Army,whom Sara had met as a translator at the Allied headquarters. Magris described it as follows: “It is the result of two exiles, the Jewish and the black - two people who had to cross the desert and cross the sea, unable to sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land , but they sang in spite of everything. "