In 1961, as the Berlin Wall was being constructed, Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was published in East Germany, despite its controversial portrayal of Garibaldi and a narrative misaligned with socialist ideals. Bernardina Rago’s Il Gattopardo a guardia del Muro explores how this unexpected publication slipped through the tight censorship of the time, navigating a complex bureaucratic system that often manipulated literature to align with political orthodoxy. Through a detailed and absurd battle of approvals, corrections, and ideological footnotes, the novel miraculously reached a print run of 10,000 copies.
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The prince’s novel and the struggles to overcome Communist censorship
by Eduardo Di Blasi
In 1961, as the Berlin Wall rose, marking the division of the socialist bloc from the rest of the world, the publishing house Rutten & Loening released Der Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The book came with a red cover featuring a blue crest (design and layout by Heinz Unzner) and was priced at 7.80 East German marks, nearly three times the average book cost. The afterword was written by Alfred Kurella, known as “the Kremlin’s man in Berlin,” an intellectual and polyglot, head of the Cultural Commission of the Socialist Unity Party’s Central Committee, and a personal friend of Walter Ulbricht, who had led the party and this part of Germany since 1950, after its liberation from the Nazis just a few years prior.
How Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] managed to bypass the sharp-eyed censorship and the massive bureaucratic machinery guarding it is the well-documented story Bernardina Rago tells in Il Gattopardo a guardia del Muro, published by Feltrinelli—the same publisher that, in 1958, brought out one of the world’s first “best sellers,” just a year after the death of its then-unknown author, a success further amplified by Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film adaptation.
To better understand the scenario, imagine what it meant for a socialist country moving toward isolationism to publish a novel where Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero of the Risorgimento and pre-socialist icon, was depicted as a “cuckold,” where the masses were portrayed as a ragged underclass, far from exemplary, and where the historical narrative saw the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the nobility. This book, written by a prince and first published in Italy by Gian Giacomo Feltrinelli—who had caused a political crisis with Doctor Zhivago four years earlier, even among the Soviets and Togliatti’s PCI, which had failed to block its publication—was dismissed by the PCI and some of its more or less organic intellectuals as a lightweight work, despite unexpectedly winning the Strega Prize in 1959.
To further set the scene, let’s immerse ourselves in the East Berlin publishing system of the 1960s. A place where even paper, before printing, was controlled. If you wanted to use tons of paper to produce literature, you had to take it away from historical or sociological series, which were the most valued by the system.
Publishing houses were directly or indirectly owned by the state. To ensure the publication of works that were both high-quality and ideologically aligned, the protocol required submitting the book’s proposal to the Ministry of Culture. The proposal had to include essential footnotes guiding the reader along orthodox lines, information on who would write the foreword or afterword, and, crucially, two editorial reviews that would allow for a more complete evaluation by the ministry. Without these two reviews, publication was impossible.
As if these measures weren’t enough, translations were sometimes softened or amended. In The Name of the Rose by Eco, for example, the Soviet invasion of Prague (“Six days later, Soviet troops invaded the unfortunate city”) was toned down, portraying Soviet tanks as rescuing Czechoslovakia from a counter-revolution. And in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was removed (an alliance with the Nazis? Never!). One book, ready for publication, was even withheld from printing because its author had said things displeasing to East Germany (not in the book, but in the West).
With documentation in hand, Professor Rago tells us the story of how such a brilliant yet ideologically misaligned novel managed to navigate the bureaucratic-industrial behemoth of real socialism’s publishing world.
Her book recounts, page by page, this absurd battle: the editorial reviews that almost killed the project, the increasingly complex approvals, the meetings, intrusions, corrections, the more than 70 footnotes added (compared to 25 in the Western version, mostly to explain babà cakes, tari, and caciocavallo cheese), and the climax, with East Germany’s incredible investment of precious foreign currency and an impressive print run of 10,000 copies. We won’t reveal the resolution, as the incongruous unfolding of events will leave readers with their own questions. Rago’s book also includes Kurella’s afterword, perhaps the best snapshot of that complex editorial process, showing how sometimes, in a twist of history, individuals and culture can lead the masses in surprising ways.
Il Fatto Quotidiano, September 6, 2024
