Umberto Eco / Features / Untitled Books

“The most dangerous enemy has no face, he’s a mysterious entity… I was educated under the fascist dictatorship to believe the English were the enemy who ate five times a day. It was only later that I realised that I ate like an Englishman!”

Photograph: © Lea Crespi

Umberto Eco

The academic and writer talks to Mark Reynolds about his latest novel The Prague Cemetery, the enduring legacy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other forgeries, taking offence, the search for truth, the power of the invented enemy, and about making an enemy of those in power.

The world is full of people who believe in conspiracy theories. I'm not fascinated so much by conspiracy, but rather the stupidity, the credulity of human beings. In this book I am dealing with the concoction of forgeries. Conspiracy theories can be a result of a given forgery, but not all forgeries are about conspiracy. But of all the forgeries that are centred around a conspiracy, the most tragic is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I have returned to this theme again and again - in Foucault's Pendulum and in many essays. Why? Because it's an intellectual and moral scandal. The Protocols are absolutely crazy because they are so contradictory. They are like Frankenstein's monster, made up of different pieces of human corpses. The contradictions are so evident, yet people took them seriously. And when they were demonstrated to be false by The Times in 1921, instead of that being the end of the story, they were published and republished, and believed all the more, across the Arab world and here in London, and they remain in circulation. Many important historical books have been written about this phenomenon - such as Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide - but those books are for academics, they reach perhaps 5,000 people. I had the idea that by telling the story in a narrative way, imagining how the Protocols came into being, the logic and psychology behind it, I could speak to a larger group of readers. This educational impulse is something a writer should never have, and I'm very ashamed of it: you should write for the pleasure of writing, not in order to educate someone. But step by step I was caught up in the pleasure of the narration, the pleasure of creating such an offensive character as Simone Simonini (the imagined author of the Protocols). And I hope the book doesn't come across like sermonising.

One or two reviews have taken offence at the clearly offensive views of Simonini, but my first defence is that a twelve-year-old on the internet can find the Protocols themselves and many other poisonous materials: they are out there. At least this novel explains the nature of racism. For reasons of political correctness we tend not to mention these things any longer, it seems impolite and a cliché. But these clichés always circulate below the surface, a lot of people share them, so it is important to say them aloud so you remember they are there. Not just among the Taliban, but here around you; among your friends. My second response is that one cannot control antagonistic readings of this book. The author does his best to keep the reader distanced from the character, to demonstrate that Simonini is a liar and a criminal and not to be worshipped or emulated. I showed the book to the Chief Rabbi of Rome and other members of the Jewish intellectual community before it was published and, while the Rabbi admitted that some may be seduced by Simonini, he liked the book, and the community has been generally supportive.

While writing this book and faithfully reproducing every aspect of 19th-century Paris, of course I was thinking of today. I was clearly seeing in my mind many Simoninis who are around us, doing the same things with the same absence of morality; journalists producing fake dossiers to destroy the enemy. If I was not afraid of being sued, I could mention names...

The book was published in Italy in October 2010, and Simonini has this particular idea that you cannot give the secret service information that they don't already know; you must never reveal something new. One month later the WikiLeaks affair blew up, and you could see for example that all the messages the American ambassador in Rome sent to the Pentagon were saying exactly what Newsweek had already published. They revealed nothing new; only press clippings. I don't know whether this is due to laziness, or to the fact that you really can't disturb those in power with unheard-of news, because it discombobulates them.

Men are believing animals; they have to believe in something. Religions exist as a way to fight against death. There's a famous line attributed to Arthur Rubinstein: "I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." We always need to see something more complex behind every easy explanation. Take the period of terrorism in Italy in the 1970s. Young men between 20 and 30 were living like wounded animals, hiding and killing usually innocent people, not even their great enemies, and they became fanatically convinced that they were realising a world revolution. The easy explanation is that there must be a 'big old man' behind it, il grande vecchio, directing the whole operation. But that is the gullible explanation, because to explain why all these people did what they did would cause a lot of pain to society. Why did 5 per cent of a generation decide to take this action? We were all responsible in a way, but il grande vecchio absolves everybody of responsibility. When they kidnapped Moro, it was an excellent military operation. They stopped three cars, killed the police and picked up Moro: job done. And immediately the response was that it's impossible that these young men were capable of organising such a precise operation - ignoring the fact that people in their thirties could become bank managers, journalists, writers, whatever, so it's very easy for a man of thirty to be able to do all that. But Il Tempo said no, there must be another explanation.

As Chesterton said, "when a man stops believing in God, he believes in everything." So as the great religions decline, all the small sects, associations and mythologies grow, people shift to astrology or even Satanism, we are ready to believe in anything. Otherwise why play the lottery? A gambler will always lose, whether in a Monte Carlo casino or on a slot machine in Las Vegas. It's written in all the statistical books, and still we do it. We need to believe that one time or another some divinity will protect us and we'll collect the jackpot.

The general conspiracy is based on the necessity of having an enemy. After the novel I published a collection of essays with the title Constructing the Enemy. Every human group designs an image of the enemy, and the pattern is always the same. The general model is the Anti-Christ in Judeo-Christianity and in Homer, who is crippled, has a big nose, pointed ears, deformed feet, and he stinks. Every enemy stinks. The early Christian heretics were supposed to eat babies. Same with the Jews and Communists, according to popular legend and propaganda. The enemy is always manipulated by dictatorships to keep the people united. It's like Orwell's daily ceremony of hatred in 1984.

The most dangerous enemy has no face, he's a mysterious entity. I was educated under the fascist dictatorship to believe the English were the enemy who ate five times a day. It was only later that I realised that, belonging to a middle-class Italian family, I myself ate five times a day. Once in the morning, then something at school at 10 o'clock, lunch at noon, another snack at five o'clock, then dinner. I ate like an Englishman! We saw images of Churchill, very fat with a cigar, but every rumour is always self-contradictory. Because any English spy or soldier who was captured was gaunt and thin.

The most powerful enemy is ungraspable. That's the great idea of German sociologist Georg Simmel: to have power you must possess a secret. I have power over you and I can blackmail you if I have some secret about you. But at a given moment secrets are discovered, so the most powerful instrument is an empty secret, because you can always use it but nobody can uncover it. The Protocols are more or less like that; a group of Rabbis meeting in a Prague cemetery, but who are they?

Even our national heroes are ungraspable. Garibaldi was a hero not only for my generation, but for the generation of my father. Like George Washington in America, he was the great hero that nobody could criticise or dispute. At a certain level, there was anti-Risorgimento literature saying that the Piedmontese occupation of the south was really an act of colonialism, not liberation: the reactionary version, like the Vendée against the French Revolution. It never became popular except among small groups in the south, but this criticism contains something. They were the resistance and they were repressed, and it is true that the Risorgimento was the initiative of an intellectual minority; not of the people.

In my book I try to give voice to both sides. When writing it five years ago I didn't know it would be published the same year as the celebrations of 150 years of Italian unification. It looked like I'd done it on purpose, but it was a mere accident. All this last year and still today there is a great discussion in Italy, a revisionism of the entire Risorgimento episode. Criticism of the incomplete Italian unity and so forth, even though at the time every country in Europe was striving to become an independent nation. Italy had to follow the general pattern. It would have been exceptional to have an Italy subdivided into ten different states. Today, curiously, it is the Northern League, not the south that is against the idea of a unified state.

When it comes to the new Italian government of Mario Monti, first of all I feel liberated because before, every time I went to speak on Aristotle or Plato's narrative the question was, "What do you think of Berlusconi?" It was terrible. If I spoke for two hours on Aristotle and then answered a question about Berlusconi, there would be a full-page headline saying I don't like Berlusconi. Italy is in economic crisis. The crisis is the public debt, but the Italian economy is still pretty strong because thousands and thousands of small enterprises are still working. We have the same problems as many other countries, and we have to solve them. The difficulty in solving them before was that our leader was not taken seriously in Europe. Now we have a serious person, a reliable person in charge. A month ago I was ready to accept anybody, right of centre or left, provided Berlusconi is no longer there. This technocratic government seems to be made of serious people, no longer motivated by political infighting. And objections raised by Berlusconians that this government is made up of people not elected by the public is absolutely stupid. All the deputies under Berlusconi were yes-men, linked to the leader who appointed them, and were not elected by the people. So at the moment I feel happy and confident. Of course it's possible Monti will commit many mistakes but at least he's not Berlusconi. He's not going around making jokes and vulgar gestures and is not motivated by private interests.

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The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco is published by Harvill Secker. Mark Reynolds is a freelance editor and writer, contributing editor to Untitled Books, and Literary Editor of The Drawbridge.
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Wednesday, 7 December, 2011

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Issue 41 / February 2012

“The most dangerous enemy has no face, he’s a mysterious entity… I was educated under the fascist dictatorship to believe the English were the enemy who ate five times a day. It was only later that I realised that I ate like an Englishman!”

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