La Storia – ‘novel of the century’ by Elsa Morante

On Saturday, 8 March 2025 at 12:30 pm, Rainer Beuthel will present the ‘novel of the century’ by Elsa Morante: La Storia.

Elsa Morante’s novel ‘La Storia’ was published in Italy in 1974 and made history in two senses. On the one hand, it reconstructed the dark chapter of Italian fascism and Italy’s involvement in the Second World War in an unprecedented way, a story of death and destruction, persecution and deportation of the Jewish population – but also heroic resistance against the German occupation. On the other hand, the publication of the book itself is a historical event. Morante had insisted from the outset that the novel be published in a paperback edition in order to make it accessible to broad sections of the population. As a result, 600,000 copies were sold in the year of publication.

The result was an intense social debate about the historical epoch depicted in the novel and our relationship to it. If the political right was uncomfortable with the topic itself, the left was disturbed by an allegedly too individualistic portrayal of events without the ‘right’ political line. The extent to which Morante has ‘struck a nerve’ in Italy to this day can be seen from the fact that the material was filmed twice: in 1986 as a feature film (with Claudia Cardinale) and in 2024 as a television series.

The central characters in the novel are the widowed teacher Ida Ramundo and her two sons Giuseppe and Nino, whom Ida tries to get through the difficult times in Rome. Ida is of Jewish descent and manages to keep this a secret, partly to protect her sons. The older of the two, Nino, initially joins the Fascist Black Shirts out of a youthful thirst for adventure, but during the war he joins the resistance, the Resistenza. The younger, Giuseppe, is the result of Ida being raped by a German soldier.

Often referred to as the ‘novel of the century’ of Italian literature, the book has been available in a new German translation since 2024. Rainer Beuthel presents it and reads selected passages from it. His interest in it arose not least from a connection between his own family history and the historical events.