Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (18 page)

At this point, a determinate force entered his life. It came via Ursula, who, as Otto Albert turned more reclusive, became more and more his
sole source of companionship. In the spring of 1935, two years into Otto Albert’s sojourn in Paris, Ursula was clearly at a fundamental crossroads. Her romance with Mark Rein had never been a stable one, and it eventually gave way to a close friendship, though Mark himself never quite relinquished hopes of a rekindled love, which made Ursula feel awkward living under the same roof. Then the affair with Blücher was knotty and short-lived. Through friends, Ursula was introduced to Renzo Guia, a flamboyant and ebullient leftist from Turin, who in turn was introduced to OA. Guia became their tutor in Italian. But it was more than language he taught; Guia immediately disarmed Ursula with his humor and irreverence. He made fun of her Communist pieties, which brought forth his peals of laughter. This infected her—and she could not go back to the sobriety and certainty of her cell meetings and their rituals without smiling and shaking her head. Guia also told her about his own political affiliations, which he also conveyed to Otto Albert, who found them much more appealing than the old Germanic wardrobe he was shedding. At first, Guia struck Ursula as unserious—but Otto Albert found the humor—the dismissal of leftist conventions of highbrow moralism, “false activism,” and sterile polemics—instantly liberating. When Ursula once insisted that individual acts of resistance violated the norms of being “useful to the movement,” that it was better to wait for “objective conditions” to be ripe for action, Guia laughed back: “How important your language is for you! There is more value in one who rises and speaks out than in all your wise net of illegals [referring to refugees] who don’t open their mouths but murmur the news into each other’s ears.” Then came a fatal jab. When Ursula explained that the working class was defining the premises of revolutionary actions, he reminded her of the history of passivity wrapped in theory: “To hell with your working class! It seems to me the moment has come to lose a bit of faith.… Twelve million organized Socialists and Communists, the most powerful working class movement in Europe … then comes Hitler and all stand still, nobody moves! Is that your discipline? What is it worth?”
³⁰

Otto Albert did not need a direct challenge to be moved by Guia’s action-oriented philosophy. Though Guia’s voluntarism would lead him
to the tomb of the Spanish Civil War, where a Falangist bomb would kill him, there was a whole philosophy and movement behind it, called
Giustizia e Libertà
(Justice and Liberty), founded by Italian exiles in Paris in 1929 and whose intellects would soon occupy the space for Hirschmann that was once reserved for German idealism. But it was not Guia himself who would prove the determining influence.

To begin with, what prompted this interest in Italian? It was Ursula. Stuck in a morass of romantic and ideological impasses, she was withdrawing from the émigré circles. The prospects for returning to Berlin were dimming completely. At least her brother could immerse himself in Dostoevsky and his studies. These were not options for Ursula. In the spring of 1935, she wrote a confessional letter to Eugenio Colorni, in whose Berlin hotel room she and Otto Albert had composed their clandestine broadsheet in their final days of resistance to Hitler. Colorni was now in Trieste, a professor in a lyceum for women. This afforded him the time to write his major work on Leibnitz while frequenting the city’s cafes to join in the discussions with antifascist friends and colleagues, such as Bruno and Gino Pincherle and Giorgio Radetti. Behind the scenes, he was also active in the Italian Socialist Party, which was having some of the same kinds of debates as its German cousin. He was also engaged to marry the daughter of a well-to-do local Jewish family. Ursula’s letter, whose precise motives remain unclear, was potent enough to overturn Colorni’s plans. He replied with an invitation for her to visit Trieste, which she accepted immediately. By April, she was on his doorstep; within days they were in love and Colorni’s wedding was off. Ursula eventually returned to Paris, and from there a torrid exchange of letters ensued; Colorni visited Paris and introduced Ursula and Otto Albert to his exiled friends. OA was swept away by Eugenio’s warmth, liveliness, and the fresh air he brought to what was becoming an increasingly stultified milieu. Ursula wrote Eugenio upon his return to Trieste to convey how much “OA would like to be with you, it is strange how he says this and not I.”
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Colorni quickly became the colligative force in the Hirschmanns’ lives—Ursula’s, Otto Albert’s, and even the young Eva’s. Attractive, full of joy, a dispenser of uplifting and positive advice, a contrast to the gloom that prevailed over German exile circles, he was
the
person to whom they turned, as Eva put it.
³²
That summer, Ursula and Otto Albert joined Colorni at the family resort at Forte dei Marmi on the Tuscan coast, a two-story villa with marvelous gardens, tennis courts, and giant fig tree under which siblings, cousins, and their children would gather to eat and talk. There were also a lot of meetings: friends—as well as political coconspirators—would converge from Milan. Some of these gatherings would retreat from the fig tree to meet behind closed doors. Eva also joined the vacationing circle briefly, seeing her brother and sister for the first time after so many years apart. A photograph shows a teenage Eva shouldering her beaming brother. It was over the course of the summer vacations, on the Tuscan beaches and in the town’s small cafes, that Otto Albert and Eugenio would spend hours in conversation. Around the same time, Colorni proposed to Ursula; they were married in Milan in December. The family was acquiring a new centripetal force. In the course of a few months, Colorni gave the Hirschmanns a whole new set of personal, political, and, for Otto Albert, intellectual coordinates.
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Otto Albert on Eva’s shoulders, Forte di Marmi, 1935.

Colorni vastly expanded the horizons of his brother-in-law. For Otto Albert, Eugenio was to be the single most important intellectual influence. It began with the particular spirit of Colorni’s political convictions. Born in 1909, Eugenio Colorni was a son of Milan’s assimilated upper-middle-class Jews. He went to a distinguished lyceum and was enraptured by the liberal philosopher and historian, Benedetto Croce, who had published several monumental books about the nineteenth “century of liberty” and its legacies for the present. After entering the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Milan, Colorni began a career of writing essays on aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of science. It was his interest in Leibnitz that led him to the University of Marburg, where he studied under Erich Auerbach, the brilliant philologist who had recently translated Giambattista Vico’s
The New Science
into German and authored a celebrated study of Dante. In Marburg, Auerbach had turned to French authors of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries to prepare his classes, and one can presume that much of this rubbed off on the young Colorni, for his reading preferences bear important resemblances to the core of what was emerging as Auerbach’s magisterial effort to connect written texts with lived experiences and to treat people and writers as Historical creatures. Auerbach would himself be driven by Nazis to Istanbul, where he would compose his masterwork,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
, a work he had begun in Marburg. Later, he would become a professor of literature at Yale, where Hirschman would finally meet him several decades later, shortly before Auerbach’s death. “This afternoon we met a Polish friend of ours who teaches French here,” he told Ursula, “and we got to know Professor Auerbach there. After some talking it turned out that he was the one who let Eugenio come to Marburg—he was a full professor there for Romanic languages and then later went to Istanbul. He passed through Trieste in the year 1937 (with his wife) and they met you then.… He seemed
very nice, lively and intelligent, his wife apparently less so (and hard of hearing!).”
³⁴
It is one of the ironic features of the century of massive, involuntary social dislocations that Hirschman had no idea how indirectly Auerbach had influenced him. It is “a very beautiful and famous book,” he would tell Ursula many years later, when she was laboring on her own memoirs and wondered if her brother might help identify the mysterious Professor Auerbach to whom her Eugenio had gone for tutoring.
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Upon his reading
Mimesis
, there is no indication that Hirschman could see his own intellectual genealogy passing through Colorni back to Auerbach. It is hard enough for us to see—for there are only strong coincidences and notable echoes in the place of a direct, evidentiary paper trail. The critical link, Eugenio Colorni, would be killed by fascist thugs before he could leave behind a testimonial of his influence. It is not a stretch to observe a tie, however hidden, between Auerbach and Hirschman, for it was Auerbach who bequeathed a penchant for finding in classical works the origins of the present. To Auerbach, it was the divide between the Old Testament and Homer that set the stage for divergent traditions of literary realism. There was also the essayist style of criticism that Colorni adored and adopted, and his affection for long quotes as the basis for his
explication de texte
(which readers of Hirschman can find most developed in
The Passions and the Interests
). There was the great affection for the French novelists of the nineteenth century—Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal—whose work was the apotheosis of a brand of literary realism that would become a touchstone for Hirschman for the rest of the century. But above all, there was a kind of serene erudition that nowadays seems as remote as the classics that shaped it, a style that owes itself to a particular perspective. “One must be aware, it seems to me,” wrote Auerbach in 1953, “of regarding the exact sciences as our model; our precision relates to the particular.” The great breakthroughs in the “historical arts” were the result of a refined “perspectival formation of judgment, which makes it possible to accord to various epochs and cultures their own presuppositions and views, to strive to the utmost towards the discovery of those, and to dismiss as unhistorical and dilettantish every absolute assessment of the phenomena that is brought in from outside.”
³⁶
This eye
for particulars and their meanings imprinted itself on Hirschman, who was already questioning History’s “laws” and searching for a spirit that was more epic because it was open to chance and to choice.

The full effects of this inheritance would not take effect immediately; the picking up and devouring of the literary canon would have taken time away from other callings. As it was, Auerbach was about books, habits of reading them, and the passage of intellectual traditions. But for the younger generation of Colorni and Hirschman, there was another reality in the mix: the political present. Colorni did not write much about politics per se, but he was intensely political and very involved in clandestine activities. It was impossible to immunize even his wedding in Milan from clandestine activity. On the evening before the ceremony, in the midst of the rehearsal dinner, Eugenio pulled Otto Albert aside and explained that “you have to accompany me to the Central Station. We can pretend that we are observing the old custom of ‘burying the celibate’s life.’ ” They slipped out of the proceedings. At the station, Eugenio asked Otto Albert to wait for him—and if he didn’t return he was to notify “certain people.” A perplexed future brother-in-law stood by while Eugenio disappeared into the crowd to make sure his cousin Emilio “Mimmo” Sereni boarded the train for Paris. Sereni, a brilliant, prolific author, and one of Mussolini’s most trenchant Communist critics, was condemned to exile in Paris but had snuck back to Milan for the wedding and now needed to get out. Eventually, Eugenio returned from the platform, mission accomplished; the pair then dashed back to the wedding rehearsals.
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Paris became an active outpost for Italian exiles and their enemies, to the chagrin of French authorities. Thousands of Italian Communists fled to Paris, many of whom joined and became active in the French Section of the Communist International. This made Paris the site for expatriate political dueling. Between 1923 and 1933, twenty-eight Italian fascists were murdered.
³⁸
For Italians, fascism’s resilience was all too clear, and they could not help but shake their heads at German-exile expectations of Hitler’s imminent fall. Many had been in Paris since the mid-1920s. Some, such as the literary scholar Leone Ginzburg, the writer-painter Carlo Levi, and the political theorist Norberto Bobbio, worked underground
in Turin, Milan, and Trieste and would form the backbone of a resistance movement and the Party of Action when Mussolini was finally toppled, though Ginzburg himself would be tortured to death by Nazis in early 1944. Others, such as the Rosselli brothers, who staged a sensational getaway from prison on the island of Lipari, made Paris their base. They founded the
Giustizia e Libertà
movement as a cover for all progressives who were committed to ridding Italy of its despot.