Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (36 page)

Albert’s posting brought with it more disappointment. Not only was he not in the RAB, but he would not be working on intelligence on Germany at all. Instead, he was assigned to work with a group of Italians and immediately sent to Algiers aboard a Liberty Ship—by then, the campaign on Europe’s “soft underbelly,” in Winston Churchill’s unfortunate words, had started. Moreover, Private Hirschman found himself laboring as a translator and slipped into a state of undying boredom. There was nothing nail-biting about his service. Hirschman’s hands were filled with books, not a gun; instead of fighting, he spent the war years reading. Before his hurried departure from Washington, he did have enough time to locate a copy of Machiavelli’s
The Prince
, the sole book he could take with him for his campaign; he thought it a fitting tome for the Allied liberation of Italy—to ruminate on the prospects for a restored republic by reading Italy’s greatest republican thinker. The problem was, Private Hirschman stowed his copy of
The Prince
in his “B” bag in the hold, so he had to spend the passage to the Mediterranean riffling through the ship’s library, which had been endowed with a collection of tedious detective novels. During the voyage, he also had to put the final touches to the preface of his manuscript, which he did; the hardest part was figuring out how to thank Condliffe with words that conveyed gratitude without “making him the inspiration for my work.” He also thanked Peter Franck, though with a wince, “but it is only fair.”
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Hirschman spent seven months in Algiers, waiting as the US Army prepared to continue its assault on Italy and then inched its way up the peninsula. Whatever excitement had gone into figuring out how to beat the German and Italian armies in North Africa was long gone by the time Hirschman carried his gunnysack down the gangplank. The desert was turned over to the preparations for the Allies’ first assault on western Europe. The Italian campaign was a proving ground for the OSS’s ideas and practices in the field and were run out of the Secret Intelligence (SI) Branch. Notwithstanding the planning, there was chronic confusion and conflict over the role of intelligence in combat—and it took time, and some fierce fighting on the part of the enemy, for the army to make use of the SI information and analysis—until it hired Max Corvo to coordinate
the field operations. The Sicilian-born and Middletown-raised Corvo had a distinct preference for hiring Italian-Americans; field agents had to be Italian to function close or behind the line, he felt. Corvo took few enlisted men into the SI.
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By then it was clear what the OSS had in mind for Hirschman: to be an interpreter. During the Atlantic crossing he had been detailed as a French instructor, so he knew that it was his language facility that his officers prized. Hovering around the villa overlooking Algiers where the OSS had set up its base, he devoured Italian and French newspapers and prepared oral reports for his commanders. “I am working pretty well,” he told Sarah a month after his arrival, “of my own initiative, and if this is successful I may have a chance that they might let me continue, and I am not asking for more. I am absolutely free to work here as I wish.” Idleness afforded some time for petites idées; looking out over Algiers’ rooftops from the villa, seeing the city’s laundresses drape their wet linens over the line, Hirschman wondered whether “we have been building houses so that there might be some points to hang the laundry to dry.”
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On the whole, however, playful tidbits were rare; waiting was too anxiety inducing to foster mind play.

The real action was going on elsewhere. The RAB had dispatched units into liberated territories who sent back Field Intelligence Studies to OSS headquarters, which was run by Rudolf Winnacker, Donald MacKay, H. Stuart Hughes, and a group of “applied historians.”
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The inner circle of OSS men did the brain work. Boredom, war’s gangrene, soon set in and dominated the months in Algeria. “I am feeling a bit like a moron, because my work is so monotonous after a few days and I am not getting out enough.”
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OSS insiders irritated him: “A young American from Harvard whom I met in Washington has recently arrived and I might wind up working with him a bit. But he’s an insignificant guy though convinced enough of his own value. He poses stupid questions that make you want to die (stupid question = questions for which there is no intelligent reply) and rushes suddenly to judge everything with a sovereign tone while ignoring the country around him, its history, and its language.”
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At first, playing chess helped, and he squared off with a neighboring Austrian sergeant, though by the end of March he complained that “I have lost my chess game, and I absolutely don’t know why.”
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He kept trying to find a way out of his limbo, appealing to officers who expressed an interest in finding meaningful work, only to be told the next day that he would have to wait. At one point, he even caught up with his old friend, fellow Nazi-escapee and LSE student Hans Landsberg, who had moved from the National Bureau of Economic Research to the OSS for the Italian campaign. They dined together one night and Albert spilled his miseries. Landsberg promised to do what he could to help, but to no avail. Albert told Sarah that “I was at first angry with him because I thought he was doing nothing to help me get out of this impossible situation. But the truth is that there is little to be done. One must be armed with patience, but it’s not always easy.” In Montaignesque style he concluded that “I see myself objectively as a ‘case’ and can understand how this experience is terrible for me.”
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Restless and irritated, he tried to make the best of a miserable situation. One way to cope was to get away. Aside from Landsberg, Hirschman hunted for as many acquaintances as he could, in part for a ticket out and in part for company. He found a French inspecteur de finances, Jean de Largentaye, who had discovered John Maynard Keynes’
General The ory
on his own, and “while his English is not very good, he translated the book himself,” and it had been recently published by Payot. Albert “had a sumptuous lunch” with de Largentaye (“served by an Arab boy!”), and explained to him Abba Lerner’s recent insights on public finance; he was so “eager to hear the latest news about economics that I did not have the chance to complement him for the meal.”
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Another economist he tracked down was an associate of Robert Marjolin’s, and he spent five hours with “very intelligent and sympathetic” company.
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And there was also one of France’s most famous Algerians, Albert Camus, whose books,
L’Étranger
and
Le mythe de Sisyphe
had appeared in 1942, which Hirschman snapped up at a local bookstore. Camus himself was spending the war years in France; undaunted, Hirschman looked up his brilliant and fiery wife, Francine Faure, who was herself despairing at being separated
from her husband. She was the first, but not the last, to note the not unflattering physical resemblance of the two Alberts.

However, his closest associates were Italians exiled in Algiers who congregated at Umberto Terracini’s house, where Albert spent many evenings discussing the future of Italy now that Mussolini had been toppled. Terracini, a former Communist and friend of Antonio Gramsci’s, had been cooped up with Colorni and others on Ventotene. Freed in 1943, he had left for North Africa.

It was through Terracini that Hirschman filled in some missing pieces about Eugenio. On Ventotene, a group of prisoners including Eugenio, Altiero Spinelli, and Ernesto Rossi went to work on a manifesto for a postbellum Europe that would eclipse the destructive effects of nationalism by creating a federalist superstructure for all the European states. While a group effort, Rossi composed the final draft of “European Federalism,” wrote it on cigarette paper, and had his wife Ada smuggle the sheets out in the false bottom of a tin box, but it would not circulate until Eugenio later did an extensive revision.
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The nation-state—argued the manifesto—had ceased to be an effective way of organizing community life: its “desire to dominate” must now be placed under the guardianship of a federalist system to ensure the “highest level of freedom and autonomy.” Finished in late summer 1941, what is remarkable is how three prisoners could spend their energy envisioning a peaceful, democratic Europe when signs pointed toward a fascist victory, especially because Panzer divisions had begun to swarm into Russia in June. It is a testimony to their commitment to finding a source of light in very dark times.
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Eugenio was transferred from the island to an ancient and isolated town on the mainland, Melfi. A few were sent with him, such as Manlio Rossi-Doria and Franco Venturi. Here the conditions were even worse. Ursula could not stand the confinement, and her affections for Eugenio were so depleted that she took their three daughters and went north in April 1943 to join Spinelli and Rossi. By then, the Italian underground was swelling and organizing into political affiliations. The summer of 1942 saw the birth of the Partido d’Azione (PA) in Rome. Known as Actionists, the PA’s founders picked up the Justice and Liberty legacy of the “third
way” (
terza via
) to amalgamate socialism and liberalism. As German police clamped down on the underground, Spinelli left for Switzerland to work with a group of Italian exiles. Ursula joined him there. By early 1944, she was pregnant once more—this time, the baby’s father was Eugenio’s former coauthor, Spinelli. Albert got word of his sister’s paramour and pregnancy from his mother—which left him utterly dispirited. “The old difficulties that you know about,” he told Sarah, “have not been resolved, and this depresses me.” His mother’s letter left him in a “black mood,” for “I must now see that in my subconscious I had eliminated everything that we know, and I have been hoping for the reconciliation between her [Ursula] and Eugenio. But this news buries all these hopes.”
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Terracini filled in the aftermath. Colorni escaped to Rome in the spring of 1943 with a medical permit and slipped into clandestinity, from which he edited the European program for Partido Socialista di Unità Proletaria (PSUI). With Ursula and Altiero now together with his daughters, Eugenio poured his energies into the socialist underground in Rome. He edited the Ventotene Manifesto, wrote its introduction, and took over the publication of
Avanti!
which issued the treatise. This done,
Avanti!
called for a mass mobilization to ensure that a postwar Italy give socialist ballast to European peace. One of his underground tracts, issued in August in 1943, argued that “the Federation must not be a league of states but a republic of all Europeans; the citizens of Europe must participate in its political and administrative activities through direct representatives and not through the medium of their national governments.”
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Getting this news added to Hirschman’s anxiety to get into the field, behind the inching advance of Allied troops. Italy was the bloodiest of the western fronts. German forces under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring dug into the ridges and hilltops of the Apennines and ground down the Allied advance. Between January and May 1944, it took four major offensives to break the spine of the Gustav Line, which allowed American troops to liberate Rome on June 4. Florence was free by summer’s end; it took nearly another year for the German armies in Italy to surrender.

Daily dispatches relayed the advance to Algeria. As American forces neared Rome, Albert grew desperate to catch up with Eugenio. On
June 22, Albert went to celebrate his wedding anniversary at Terracini’s home. When he arrived, Terracini pulled him aside with devastating news. The Allied liberation of Italy electrified the
resistenza
behind the lines; partisans squared off against fascist bands—such as the Black Brigades, formed in the summer of 1944 to bolster German troops. The distinction between combatants and civilians evaporated. Eugenio became one of its victims. On May 28, 1944, a neo-Nazi gang (the Caruso-Koch band) spotted him on the Via Livorno on the Piazza Bologna as he was en route to a meeting of the PSUI’s military command. Two of the thugs approached him and demanded to see his papers; Eugenio shrugged in contempt. The assailants shot him point blank. He died two days later at the San Giovanni Hospital, a week before American troops entered Rome.
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Albert was shattered. He staggered back to his room overlooking the city to write Sarah an anniversary letter. Pure pathos came out. “It is pointless to describe to you what I feel—it is a great pain and a great loss.” A few days later, he confessed “that I can think of nothing else. I have the feeling that the wound this has caused me will only grow. It is only now that I realize what a fount of hope Eugenio still represented for me—what an example, what an idol I had.” Then came the self-incrimination, guilt, and anger at the army for holding him back: “I lacked the imagination I should have used to help him, to prevent him from exposing himself, and at least to find a way to see him again.”
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His losses were piling up—his father, closest friend, now his brother. Losing Eugenio was like losing a part of himself. “I am completely broken by the news of Eugenio’s death,” he confided to his diary on June 23. “A large part of any interest life held for me is now lost. I now see how much faith I had in him.”
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For a moment, the grief released some anger about his sister’s role in the tragedy. Albert confided to Sarah, in barely subdued words, that “I cannot prevent myself from feeling a certain bitterness toward my sister.” His diary captures a brother more torn between blame and empathy. “I ask myself anxiously what will be U’s reaction. Is she responsible? She will be to the extent that she feels responsible.” A bit later, the note shifted, albeit in wording that lends itself to more than one interpretation. “This
has all the elements of a tragedy. I have no hope for the denouement. I feel that there will be ill-will between her and me, unfortunately.” Thereafter, he kept his feelings to himself, withdrawing under the carapace of his silence. An implicit pardon was the price to pay for his sibling affection. On the heels of Italy’s liberation, he could finally write to Ursula in Switzerland asking for news of the girls, as well as this man, Altiero. “It is pointless to tell you how much I desire to see you again, and the more the barriers and impossibilities disappear the more this separation becomes insufferable and maddening.” Eugenio quietly slipped into the domain of personal memory. Decades would pass before Albert would speak of Eugenio to his sister.
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