ABSTRACT
Switzerland is indisputably present in Silone's works as a geographical location, a political, economic and historical reality, as well as a 'intellectual, spiritual entity,2 which held a particular place in his thought and in his creative imagination. His unpublished correspondence and that of those near to him show how Gennan Switzerland also became an intellectual home: he was not just concerned with Fascism's stranglehold south of the Swiss border, but was active in indigenous Swiss cultural and political life.3 This was due principally to the like-minded individuals he met. As Giuseppe Galasso comments, compared to the collective character and swift development of the later armed Resistance on Italian soil, 'the fuorusciti's activities developed from the very beginning by a gradual process of sedimentation of individual stories.,4 Switzerland was important to Silone because of its unique democratic history, and he honoured the ideal of freedom he still saw in modem-day Switzerland as guardian of his exile. Continually observed and regularly arrested in the 1940s following the outbreak of war, he showed cheerful stoicism, writing to Humm: 'Switzerland remains for me what it's always been, the country to which gratitude binds me more than any other.,5 However, both the detail and the extent of his attachment to Switzerland and to Zurich in particular are lost if a generalised idea of 'Zeitgeist' or of a Swiss national spirit are taken as their measure. As E. H. Gombrich writes, 'it is this belief in the existence of an independent, supra-individual collective spirit which seems to me to have blocked the emergence of a true cultural history [ .. . ] I hope and believe cultural history will make progress if it also fIxes its attention fmnly on the individual human being.,6
Klaus Voigt notes that the effect of Silone's works on Gennan exiles and Gennan speakers would have been unthinkable without the particular yet coincidental circumstances of his exile.7 He had not intended to remain in Switzerland, and through Tasca attempted to apply for asylum in France as late as 1937.8 However, his letters to Tasca and Carlo Rosselli, both resident in Paris, regularly assert his independence from the French fuorusciti parties and politics. He replies to Tasca's accounts of the antifascist 'Concentrazione': 'I intend to remain as I am, independent of all parties.,9 As he tells Rosselli, being free of party groupings is not necessarily an enviable position, but it is virtually impossible to fully express or comprehend fascism in all its effects from within a party. He claims that he prefers to remain 'he who is alone' ('colui che e sOIO,).IO
Like all Silone's major literary themes, friendship, or 'choice of comrades', is seamlessly part of his politics. In 'La situazione degli ex', he claims not to be saddened by the suffering of opposition groups under Fascism and Nazism, for these are the sacrifices of 'worthy and honest militants for a shared ideal'. The internal splits and oppression with the Communist Party itself are however 'something completely different and much more sinister, turbid and complex' ('qualcosa del tutto diverso e di molto piu oscuro, torbido e complicato'), a betrayal of friends and of the very ideal of fellowship. The analysis of this betrayal, however painful, is the duty of the ex -Communist; he owes it to his friends and former comrades, many of whom disappeared in the Stalinist purges, but also to the younger generation, looking for a cause to join. Nevertheless, just as Silone maintains his individual literary approach within the Zurich circles he moved in, he also insists on the individual nature of each ex-Communist's experience, whilst maintaining the first-person plural which denotes shared responsibilities and suffering throughout 'Situazione degli ex'. The exes' reasons for joining and leaving the party and the political course they will take in the future are all matters of personal choice, emotionally motivated in the first instance. They are essentially alone even in analysing the ~arty's failure, as a way to solve their personal identity crisis and to carry on living. 1 The party's suppression of critical thought produced uniform 'sleep-walkers' ; now, the exes are faced with making their own decisions and relating directly to the world: 'we bear exclusive responsibility for our own destiny.'22 Consequently, it is also clear that even this 'separate category' does not constitute a unified element within antifascist exile.
