The mafia has had a permanent place in pop culture for decades.
And because pop culture always needs pictures, when it comes to the mafia, many people think less of inconspicuous men who also do business in Germany than of tattooed crooks with undercuts who shoot around in Naples' old town.
Which doesn't mean there is no relationship between truth and fiction, between real mafia and TV gangsters.
You can see that from the fact that Neapolitan petty criminals know their own images on television and copy them back into reality.
Anna Vollmer
Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
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This observation is not new.
They already existed when “The Godfather” hit the cinemas in the early 1970s.
The anthropologist and literary scholar Ulrich van Loyen puts a steeper thesis ahead of his new book "The Godfather and His Shadow - The Literature of the Mafia".
He writes: “However, one could also consider that the origins of the Mafia are primarily staged, linguistically and literarily, in order to then put them into practice.
From this point of view, the mafia was an invention, a myth that subsequently asserts its truth. ”A consideration that van Loyen cannot clearly substantiate, if only because nobody really knows how the mafia actually came into being in the 19th century is.
Images, signs and stories
But “The Godfather and His Shadow” is not a history book. And so the crimes of the Mafia, the maxi trials with which the Italian public prosecutor took action against organized crime, are only mentioned in passing. Van Loyen's essay, which is erratic and at times extremely complex, is interested in “Mafiapoetics,” as he calls it - the images, signs and narratives with which the Mafia creates its own image. At first glance, this ethnological perspective does not sound appropriate to the brutal reality of organized crime. But it is a good way to tell not only about the mafia and how it sees itself, but also about our social relationship with it.
Van Loyen first considers all three large criminal organizations, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Calabrian 'ndrangheta and the Neapolitan Camorra, which he sharply separates due to their different organizational forms and histories. What they have in common, however, is that they make use of literature and legends in different ways. The examples given by the author are numerous. The lawyer of the Neapolitan boss Raffaele Cutolo brought out a collection of his poems and argued that such a sensitive man as this could hardly commit the crimes attributed to him. And when video footage surfaced a few years ago showing that future members of the 'ndrangheta were referring to the legend of three Spanish soldiers, Osso,Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, related, the 'ndranghetisti claimed at the trial that this was just a folkloric account. The attempt to "stage itself as a traditional amateur theater group" was mostly unsuccessful in court, writes van Loyen succinctly. In many other cases, however, the strategy worked.