Content area
Full Text
Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso 2011)
Swimming against the stream, Lucio Magri joined the Communist Party of Italy (pci) in 1956 and rose quite rapidly through the ranks until the expulsion of his Il Manifesto group in 1970 sent him into the revolutionary left for more than a decade (an evidently painful interlude about which he says little more than that he allowed himself to be deluded by ex- tremism). Returning in the 1980s, he resisted Achille Occhetto's successful liquidationist project that saw the pci re-launched in 1991 as the Democratic Party of the left, its historic connection to the Communist tradition of Gramsci, Togliatti, and Berlinguer severed. Magri helped form Communist Refoundation (rc), but abandoned it in 2004 to become a "living private archive, in storage." (17) The Tailor of Ulm, published in 2009 and now republished in English, is the fruit of Magri's research and experience.
The book's title was unwittingly be- queathed to Magri by the doyen of the pci left, Pietro Ingrao, who in the debate on the party's future recalled Brecht's poem, or parable, about a 16th-century tailor who plummeted to his death from a church tower after being challenged to prove his claim to have invented a flying machine:
The bells ring out in praise
That man is not a bird
It was a wicked, foolish lie,
Mankind will never fly,
Said the Bishop to the People.
Brecht appears to give the Bishop of Ulm a last triumphal word, but for Ingrao the moral was that the tailor was not wrong, just ahead of his time. Magri, asking Ingrao if "the tailor's bold attempt" had made any contribution to the history of aeronautics, rejected keeping...