In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

282 CODES
For us, brothers! ... For us!" (16). Forzano's drama takes place during
the years between the end of the Great War and the Fascist seizure of
power in the fall of 1922. Its three acts-entitled "First Sacrifice," "Second
Sacrifice," and "Holocaust"-correspond to episodes in the life of
the hero, Orazio Romanis. Orazio must renounce his Communist father
(first sacrifice), give up his relationship with his lover, Anna, who is
likewise the child of a Communist (second sacrifice), and witness the
death of his uncle Antonio, a veteran of Garibaldi's wars of liberation,
due to a stray Fascist bullet (holocaust). But since none of Orazio's
multiple sacrifices has any direct impact on the Fascist revolution, Forzano's
plot makes transcendent sense only if one assumes the existence
of a divine power to whom these sacrifices are directed and who may be
favorably influenced by them.
Typically, the religious implications of political discourse remain on
this strange intermediate level. The distinction between an immanent
sphere and a transcendent sphere is so vague that readers can, if they
wish, discount it as merely a rhetorical effect. But they can also fill these
faintly contoured ImmanencelTranscendence dichotomies with their
own religious or ideological beliefs. The myth of redemption is as important
for Johannes Becher's Communist poems as it is for Forzano's
Fascist drama. Becher's "Proletarisches Schlaflied" ("Proletarian Lullaby")
is indeed constructed around a dream of redemption: "Sleep, my
dear child. / Let the colorful little rocking horses sway you! / Dancing
children surround you in jubilation, and you speak / Words of redemption,
revealed to you by the Creator of Light" (Becher, 26; also 33, 43,
88, 96). The understanding of this stanza largely hinges upon the discursive
status that the reader wishes to attribute to the "Creator of Light,"
who is revealing "words of redemption" to the child. A discursive relative
of Hegel's Weltgeist, Becher's "Creator of Light" can either be understood
as a deity (which would give this text a clear religious dimension)
or remain without any personalized reference. A similar alternative
exists with respect to the mythic national past. [see Present vs. Past] It
has become popular all over Europe to speak of "unredeemed lands"
(often actually using the Italian phrase terre irredente)-a phrase that
can either imply a prehistory in which divine punishment stripped a
nation of part of its territory, or be just a conventional metaphor for the
political situation of national minorities (Hinkepott, 772-775). [see Center
vs. Periphery] Hans Grimm's geopolitical novel Yolk ohne Raum