Author’s Note to the 1934 Volume Berecche and the War [1]
How to cite this work:
Luigi Pirandello. “Author’s Note to the 1934 Volume Berecche and the War.” Translated by Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2025.
In this fourteenth volume of my Short Stories for a Year, I include the eight-chapter story “Berecche and the War,” written in the months preceding Italy's entry into the world war. It reflects a case I witnessed, at first with wonder and almost amusement, and later with compassion, of a scholarly man who was educated, as many were at the time, in the German tradition, especially in historical and philological disciplines.[2]
During the long period of our alliance, Germany had become for such individuals not only a spiritual, but also an emotional homeland, an ideal fatherland at the heart of their lives.[3] On the eve of our intervention against Germany, an intervention driven by the most vital and healthy part of the Italian people and eventually embraced by the entire Nation, these individuals suddenly found themselves lost.[4] And compelled at last by the very force of events to reclaim their true homeland within themselves, they suffered a drama that, from this perspective, seemed to me worthy of being portrayed.
Endnotes
1. Text translated from the edition: Novelle per un anno, vol. XIV (Milan: Mondadori, 1937).
2. This brief summary of the story’s dual tone resonates clearly with Pirandello’s theory of humor articulated in On Humor (L’umorismo, 1908). For him, humor involves not just laughter at something comedic but also a feeling of compassion at the suffering and tragedy that underlies that superficial comedy. Likewise, here, the man Pirandello is describing is at once a source of “amusement” and then of “compassion” as Pirandello understands the way his system of values has been uprooted and transformed by historical events.
3. In the decades before World War I, Italy was part of the “Triple Alliance” with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Prime Minister Agostino Depretis signed the original treaty in 1882, largely to counter France; Francesco Crispi, who was both prime minister and foreign minister in the 1880s–90s, was likewise a strong supporter of close ties with Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, tensions with Austria over contested territories made Italy’s commitment shaky, and by 1914 it declared neutrality despite the alliance.
4. Italy’s entry into World War I on the side of the Entente (France, Great Britian, and Russia) marked a dramatic reversal in its foreign policy, shifting away in a quick turn from the Triple Alliance, which had previously held them close to the Teutonic world. At the same time, however, intervention into the war was not immediate. When the Great War first broke out on July 28, 1914, Italy was still formally bound to the Triple Alliance; however, they declared their official neutrality on August 2, 1914, arguing that the alliance was defensive and Austria-Hungary had acted aggressively. What followed in the next months was a belligerent campaign by political and cultural figures to push for Italy to abandon neutrality and intervene in the war, hence the term “interventionism.” This was driven by nationalist intellectuals, journalists, and politicians—most famously Gabriele D’Annunzio—who argued that war was the only way to complete Italian unification by annexing “unredeemed” territories like Trentino and Trieste from Austria-Hungary. Though many Italians, including socialists and Catholics, favored neutrality, sustained propaganda, demonstrations, and pressure on the liberal government led to Italy’s entry into the war in May 1915 on the side of the Entente, completing the reversal in their alliances and also shifting the cultural axis in Italy away from its previous alignment with the German-speaking world. This cultural shift is the backdrop for the humorous perspective on Berecche, the main character in his long short story, “Berecche and the War.”