Lucio Magri,The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century

Reviewed by: Toby Abse, Goldsmiths, London, UK

Since this curiously titled book is not about the German garment industry, it seems best to begin by explaining that the Tailor of Ulm is a character in a Bertold Brecht poem, a German artisan who built a machine that he thought would enable men to fly. The tailor’s machine crashed to the ground, killing its inventor who had been challenged by the local bishop to use it. Brecht explains that centuries later men did indeed learn to fly. This story was invoked by Pietro Ingrao in 1989 to justify his continued commitment to communism when the Italian Communist Party (PCI) leader Achille Occhetto was urging the party to change its name. The analogy between attempts at building communism and attempts to create a flying machine is at the centre of Magri’s argument in the book.

Lucio Magri (1932–2011) was not a professional historian but a journalist and political activist who was, for two periods of his life (1958–69 and 1984–91), a member of the PCI. The PCI’s history, or to be more exact the PCI’s history between 1944 and 1991, is the principal subject of the Tailor of Ulm, the subtitle of which in its original Italian edition (2009) was ‘Una possibile storia del PCI’ rather than the slightly misleading ‘Communism in the Twentieth Century’ used in Patrick Camiller’s excellent English translation. Despite Magri’s long involvement with the PCI, his account is in no sense an official history of the PCI, unsurprisingly, given his expulsion in 1969 as part of the leadership of the Manifesto group and his subsequent 15 years of involvement in what he retrospectively called ‘extremism’. On the other hand, although there are occasional explicitly autobiographical references and some reliance on an insider’s knowledge of the party’s leading personalities and internal processes, the book cannot be seen as a personal memoir in the same vein as Rossana Rossanda’s rather more widely acclaimed work, The Comrade from Milan (2010), despite their shared experience in the Manifesto group.

Whilst Magri has a marked inclination to ‘counterfactual’ history, as he himself makes clear on several occasions in the text, this work is far less polemical in relation to the PCI leaders than his earlier writings might have led specialists in the history of Italian communism to expect – only Achille Occhetto is treated with outright contempt. The book was written in old age, after Magri had withdrawn from active politics and ceased to be a member of any political organization, so it shows as much detachment as he could ever muster. Nonetheless, it has a very clear viewpoint, that of what might best be described as left Eurocommunism (though the Eurocommunism of Pietro Ingrao, rather than that of Enrico Berlinguer). Despite this, Ingrao himself is criticized on occasions, whilst what Magri calls ‘The Second Berlinguer’ of 1980–84 receives quite sympathetic treatment (326–47). Magri had clearly read more widely than most political activists, even making some, albeit limited, use of material from both the Italian state and PCI archives, as well as drawing on both primary and secondary printed works, but the book lacks the referencing and bibliography of an academic work, so it is not always clear on what sources he is relying when discussing matters far outside his direct experience.

The book is at times very illuminating – for example in foregrounding Luigi Longo’s reservations about the Historic Compromise in the 1970s – but it is somewhat uneven. This is partly because of its highly ambitious attempt to contextualize the history of the PCI within the broader economic, social, cultural and political history of Italy, the history of the world communist movement, particularly Soviet Communism and, to some extent, the general course of world events in the twentieth century. Although it would have been foolish to write a history of the PCI without some reference to the history of the CPSU and USSR, it is hard to be convinced that Magri’s grasp of such matters is anything like as strong as his knowledge of trends in Italy’s economy, society, culture and politics between 1960 and 1991, the topics which form the real heart of the book.

While this book is not a personal memoir, its judgements are very much coloured by Magri’s own political biography. Although the older Magri seems to have achieved greater critical detachment from his late 1960s enthusiasm for Mao’s Cultural Revolution than Rossanda has ever managed, one still feels that China is being judged by a different, and much more lenient, yardstick than the Soviet Union. Given Magri’s belief that the PCI was not sufficiently consistent and vociferous in condemning the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslavakia in 1968, a belief which was the main trigger for his expulsion, it is revealing that he still seeks to defend the PCI’s endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. This stance, in turn, flows from his reluctance to make any major criticisms of Palmiro Togliatti – under whose influence the young Magri had left the Christian Democrats for the PCI in 1958.