Hermione von Preuschen1854 – 1918

Works ›The Novel of My Life

Chapter 15International Press Congress in ItalyINTERNATIONALER PRESSEKONGRESS IN ITALIEN

draft

Machine translation, not yet checked. This chapter is a raw AI-assisted draft made from the public-domain German. Expect mistakes of fact and of tone; it is here to make the work readable in English, not to be quoted.

📖 This chapter with the German alongside →

Then I travelled to the “International Press Congress,”1 to Rome and Sicily. How I felt about it, with all the memories that came storming in on me!

In Rome I stayed with my friend Princess Baratov. The Bülows had long since gone — Maria, as I have already told, married to Professor von Scala in Innsbruck; her father dead.

At Syracuse, and indeed all over Sicily, we spent a wonderful time, an intoxication of festivities. And all the while I had to keep thinking of one of Konrad's last novels, “Tod den Hüten,”2 which describes the misery in the Sicilian sulphur mines so movingly. Immediately after his death it had appeared with brilliant success (“Abasso i capelli”) in the “Popolo Romano.” How little one noticed, amid all that official splendour in Sicily, the receptions at the Sindaco's, the lavish improvised buffets in the remotest mountains, of that screaming national misery!

Notes

Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.

  1. ↑the “International Press Congress,” — The congress of the International Union of Press Associations, which met at Rome in 1899 — so this chapter is 1899, and she is there as a delegate, in her own right, two years after her husband's death. It is easy to read past what she is doing. The Union's annual congresses were the professional gathering of the European press, and she attends this one as a working writer, is put up in a palace by a princess, and tours Sicily with the delegation. Congress proceedings of that period print delegate lists, and a German woman among them would stand out — a concrete place to look for her under Preuschen or Preuschen-Telmann. It also dates the chapter, which contains no year: Maria von Bülow married in 1898 and her father is dead by this page, so he died between the wedding and this journey.
  2. ↑“Tod den Hüten,” — “Death to the Hats” — and it is not a mistranslation or a misprint. In Sicily the hat and the flat cap were the two classes: the cappelli were the gentry and the landowners, the coppole the peasants who worked for them. So the title is a rising's slogan, which is what the book is about — Telmann took his subject from the Fasci Siciliani, the peasant and sulphur-miners' movement of 1893–94 that the Italian state put down with martial law and mass arrests. The sulphur mines were among the worst workplaces in Europe, worked in part by boys. Note what she is telling us in the same breath: the novel was serialised in the Rome daily Popolo Romano, in Italian, as “Abasso i capelli,” with brilliant success, immediately after he died. A German novel about Sicilian miners, running in an Italian paper — that is a findable run of newspaper issues, and the only one of his books we know reached an Italian public. (Telmann)