Umberto Eco’s Novel The Prague Cemetery

The setting is as gruesome as the story that author Umberto Eco spins: A stinking sewer tunnel in which a corpse occasionally drifts, accessible through a trapdoor, is where his protagonist dwells – and Europe will soon have transformed itself into a decomposing realm of the dead with the stench of putrefaction and an unimagined number of victims. Precisely this protagonist plays a major role in the creation of this catastrophe.

Paris around 1897. The Italian Simone Simonini awakens without memories of the previous days. As a result, the 67-year-old begins to trace his – suppressed? – past and inches his way forward through the diary of  his childhood to the present. He was – and is – part of a dark story. Just as he remembers the recipes for the finest foods of French cuisine, he also knows how to fuel the rumor mill and stir up hatred. He has people on his conscience and apparently already lost his mind before his memory. The novel reveals the Italian in Paris as not only an unscrupulous forger and agent but also as an extremely dangerous anti-Semite. And as the co-author of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which has increasingly greater repercussions since this forged document is intended to prove the plot of a “Jewish world conspiracy” and will have fatal consequences. And at about the same time, a strictly guarded secret of the French military was supposedly betrayed to the German Reich and the secret services immediately believed they knew that the traitor could only be the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus. However, Simonini knows more about the entire affair than anyone else. He is in the service of one political power and then another as he skillfully meanders between the Freemasons and Jesuits, Republicans and church opponents, between the Russians and Bonaparte supporters. But then the opportunist finds himself increasingly entangled in the secret plots of conspirators as they plan an assault on the Paris Metro, which is the symbol of the modern age as such. And the bomb-builders have an eye on him, Simonini, of all people as the one who will carry out the deed. After some hesitation, he agrees to do it.

Based on True Events

In a virtuoso and ironically exaggerated manner, Umberto Eco plays with historic facts and literary fiction, with common prejudices and vicious clichés, with truth and forgery. However, all of the persons – with the exception of the fictitious Simonini – have been based on real people and even his main character is a conglomerate of authentic historic material. Eco weaves his story into the true events. Paris around 1900 was not just a cultural center for the poets, painters, and Bohemians but also the operational center of political camps and the hub for traditionalists and freedom fighters, schemers, and swindlers. Then “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which are intended to prove a conspiracy by the Jews, appear on the scene. Hitler also swaggered about this idea in Mein Kampf. These protocols, which were supposedly records of a Jewish secret conference, announced a plan to destroy the existing states and establish “global Jewish dominance.” Eco also describes how they are based on a document that was composed by the French author Maurice Joly in 1864, which was published anonymously in Brussels and directed against Napoleon III. This pamphlet, which definitely has ironic traits, was rewritten to target the Jews by Sergei Nilus, an official of the church’s Moscow synodic chancellery in his book The Great in the Small: The Coming of the Antichrist and the Rule of Satan on Earth in 1905. A new edition of 1907 contained the claim that the secret gathering of Zion took place in the fall of 1897 in Basel. Even though a number of trials – 1924 in Berlin, 1934 in Johannesburg, 1935 in Bern, and 1936 in Basel – had determined that the origin of the supposed meeting protocol was based on belletristic sources compiled from old writings, the “Protocols” were repeatedly used as the reason for anti-Semitic riots and more than ever at this time. They fuelled the Russian pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century and played an important role in the NS propaganda – and therefore probably in the minds of many current Holocaust deniers and anti-Semitic rulers.

Enemy Image of the Jew

The forged conspiracy protocols were circulated at the same time as the volatile consequences for domestic politics due to the Dreyfus Affair in which the French-Jewish artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus stood trial in a military court due to the accusations of spying that had deeply shocked France: As a result of improper proceedings, Dreyfus was found guilty of treason for the benefit of the German Reich in December 1894 and sentenced to lifetime deportation on Devil’s Island, the penal colony off the shore of French Guyana. The most important piece of evidence for the prosecution was a letter that was supposedly written by Dreyfus, but actually came from the Austrian Major Ferdinand under the war minister General Auguste Mercier as the mastermind, which was found in the German military attaché’s wastepaper basket in the Paris embassy and announced the delivery of secret papers. The first doubt about the guilt of the Jewish officer was suppressed by the military staff, which tried to prevent the appeal of the proceedings due to reasons of prestige. However, the appeal was finally forced due to public opinion based on revelations by the Alsatian senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner and writer Émile Zola with their open J‘accuse letter to the president. When a new document that incriminated Dreyfus proved to be forged, the sentence against him was revoked. However, the appeal ended with a new case of sentencing – now to ten years in prison. After the forgery was discovered, the director of the defense department of the French army intelligence – which attempted to prevent the declaration of Captain Dreyfus’ innocence with a forged document – committed suicide. Dreyfus was pardoned, rehabilitated without any restrictions in 1906, promoted to major, and distinguished with the order of the Legion of Honor. However, since the “evidence“ against the man who was supposedly guilty of high treason had turned out to be construed, the Dreyfus case became a dramatic dispute between the rightists who were faithful to the church and anti-Semitic and the anti-militarist leftists. The national crisis ended with a victory by the leftists; during the years 1899 to 1909, it led to the separation of church and state in France. Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist World Organization for the creation of a secured homestead in Palestine at the first Zionist World Congress in Basel in 1897 while under the impression of the Dreyfus accusation. The plans for implementing a Jewish state became increasingly concrete and self-confident following the subsequent congresses of 1898 and 1899, as well as 1900, and strengthened the Zionist movement in the years after 1901. And increasingly caused alarm in the eyes of the anti-Semites.

Symbol of Disaster

In addition to his anti-Semitism, Umberto Eco’s protagonist – who roams Paris during these founding years of Zionism – is bestowed with other traits: Simonini hates everything and everyone. He has something against priests and churches, Jesuits, and Freemasons. Against women. Against Germans. And, above all, against Jews. And this hatred “warms his heart.” Eco depicts his Simonini, who studied law, as just as confused, disoriented, and unstable as this period of upheaval in which the left fight against the right and everyone is against the increased power of the Jews. This unstable France is a fertile environment for a shrewd document forger: Simonini delivers to everyone who offers him enough pay: Consecrated communion wafers to the Freemasons for desecration rituals. Forged wills to anyone who asks, which was “fortunately the order of the day” due to the deaths caused by war, and this pleases Simonini. Or the drugs for cocaine-consumer Sigmund Freud, who was in Paris at that time and is seen by Simonini as a “sycophant.” The only thing that does not stink is money. Everything is a question of price, but not of the conscience. And it is just a matter of time until the secret services also become aware of the capable and unscrupulous Simonini. Initially working for France, Eco’s protagonist starts riots by order of the French government. Then he is involved in the Dreyfus Affair. And finally, he puts on the forger crown for his activities in relation to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”: Twelve delegates of the Tribes of Israel meet at the Jewish Prague Cemetery that gives the book its title and plan how they can wrench world dominion into their own hands. Simonini’s Russian client explains that the “Protocols” fulfill a purpose. A common image of the enemy binds people: “You always need someone to hate so that you feel justified in your own misery.” And the Russians should apparently hate the Jews from then on.

The Comfort of the Conspiracy

For those who believe in them, conspiracy theories have something comforting about them: The others are to blame for everything, whoever the others may be in the respective situation. Sent into panic by the major events, people make use of these theories in order to comprehend the upheavals. For their opponents, the Jews served as the symbol of the feared disasters that the future – which was threatening because it could not be controlled – or the modern age holds in store. After publication of the original Italian edition in 2010, the critics accused the best-seller author of the “voyeurism of evil” in which a murderer, woman-hater, and conspirator is extolled as the fascinating protagonist of the novel. Jewish voices were reserved after the publication of the English edition last fall. They said that Eco’s new novel was “ambiguous.” At the very least, it is nightmarish in many places – and not just when the topic is black masses, ritual murders, bomb-building, and plans for attacks. Umberto Eco, who was born in Alessandria, teaches at the University of Bologna. The 79-year-old professor for semiotics (a branch of philosophy that involves the variety of symbol systems) does not give his anti-Semitic protagonist any type of traits that are endearing. Eco exaggerates him as both a driven and disturbed man whose memory loss was preceded by a horrible deed of his own. As the author, Eco ultimately distances himself unmistakably from anti-Semitic positions through his satirical tone and caricatures that are strewn throughout the text. Nevertheless, his eclectic story with its many, probably intentional, labyrinthine flash-forwards and flash-backs is still shocking. And not just because it breaks countless taboos: For example, the chapter about the healing of his protagonist has the heading of “The Final Solution.”  Even beyond the instructions for building bombs and the assassination scenarios, Eco’s novel reads like a commentary on the present. Completely without irony. He reminds his readers that “evil” continues to threaten the Jews. ●

Katja Behling is a journalist and publicist. She lives in Hamburg.