Anti-fascism

In the summer of 1970, a group of West German radical activists flew from Berlin to the Middle East. They wanted to acquire the necessary skills to launch a campaign of urban warfare against what they considered to be the fascist regime in their homeland. This would be their contribution to the global struggle against imperialism and capitalism that they believed was under way worldwide. Thousands of western European left-wing activists travelled to the Middle East out of sympathy with the Palestinian nationalist cause in the late 1960s.

In 1984 Innocenzo Monti died after a short illness. He and the writer Lalla Romano had been married since 1932 and had met in the late 1920s in her native Piedmont. Romano – a poet, painter and the author of 19 novels – wrote the story of their life together in her 1987 book Nei mari estremi, rendered as In Farthest Seas by the translator Brian Robert Moore. The structure of the book – an auto-fictional memoir – is bifurcated. The opening, shorter, part deals with the first four years of the relationship, from the moment of their first encounter (he was ‘wearing hiking boots, we were in the mountains’), to their early sexual explorations. ‘Discomfort, effort, labour’ is luckily replaced by ‘bliss’ that was ‘beautiful, even a little exalting’.