Benno Geiger e la cultura europea

ISBN 978-88-222-6033-8

Geiger e la cultura europea
Edited by Marco Meli and Elsa Geiger Arié
Collana Linea veneta, vol. 21
Leo Olschki Editore, Florence 2010

This is a companion volume to the previously published Benno Geiger e la cultura italiana (2007), which presented material preserved in the Giorgio Cini Foundation concerning Benno Geiger’s role in 20th-century Italian culture. The latest book, on the other hand, completes his intellectual portrait in a European key. With a good deal of previously unpublished material, it offers an all-round image of his multifaceted interests in the European (especially French and German) artistic and literary world. A long introductory essay by Marco Meli focuses on Geiger’s close relations with German intellectuals. It is preceded by a foreword by Francesco Zambon and followed by Elsa Geiger Arié’s moving memory of her father’s last Venetian passeggiata a few days before his death. The same people dealt with in the introduction also appear in a selection of letters, transcribed and translated by the editors and Valentina Trambusti. This is a choice but significant sample of the at times prolonged and affectionate relations that Geiger enjoyed with writers like Ugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Rudolf Alexander Schroeder, Franz Csokor and Rudolf Pannwitz, and with artists like Emile Bernard and Oskar Kokoschka. The complete catalogue of all the Geiger letters held by the Foundation (around 1,300), edited by Giuseppe Marcon, and an index of names complete this book. The publication is further enhanced by photographs which are always of Benno Geiger, either snapshots from life or portraits of him in paintings by great artists, such as Emile Bernard; the cover illustration is in fact taken from one of his paintings.