From border to front

Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno

pp. 40-65

in: Richard Robinson, Narratives of the European border, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

Italo Svevo's native Trieste was — debatably still is — a paradigmatic border city. A topographical map reveals the city's curious position: a Mediterranean port adjacent to Central Europe, it is on the upper rim of the Balkan Peninsula. A series of twentieth-century political maps confirms this confusion of place. The major port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trieste was incorporated into Italy after the First World War; made a Free Territory, which was divided into Italian and Yugoslavian zones under UN supervision, after the Second World War; and then passed back to Italy in 1954. Tito was still trying to claim the city for Yugoslavia in 1975. Like Fort Ross, Trieste "disarticulates' the nationalist histories it has suffered from. To Glenda Sluga, Trieste encapsulates and undermines "the presupposition that places [can] only be identified with nations": it is the site of anti-history.¹