Apples and Oranges. Maarten Asscher

      On February 21st, 1822, near the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, the Italian writer Silvio Pellico, famous for his play Francesca da Rimini, was sentenced to death. Since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Austrians had been running the show in Lombardy and Veneto, the northern part of what forty years later was to become a united Italy, and they maintained their authority the hard way, with police interventions and active censorship. The literary and journalistic circles in which Pellico lived and moved were populated with freethinking anti-Austrian liberals, both independence activists and what we would nowadays call ‘critical intellectuals’. More or less secret meetings of like-minded individuals were routinely organized, and were soon branded as subversive ‘Carbonarism’ by the Austrian secret police, which followed up with heightened police readiness from 1819 onwards. Under the leadership of the brilliant Tyrolean jurist Antonio Salvotti, a special commission was established in Venice charged with tracking down, prosecuting, and condemning the participants. Dozens of arrests were made, and Pellico was among those to land in prison after being detained on Friday October 13th, 1820, on suspicion of high treason.

      Pellico’s death sentence was commuted to fifteen years carcere duro and later reduced to seven and a half years, but given the circumstances in which he was obliged to sit out his time—in the dark and dreary dungeons of Spielberg Castle in Moravia—it’s nothing short of a miracle that the fragile Pellico managed to survive. His renowned prison memoir Le mie prigioni (1832) details the period.

      Before being removed by gondola and then by coach to the sinister Spielberg on March 25th, 1822, Pellico was granted permission to write a few letters. He used the opportunity to pen a couple of lengthy missives to his father and an exceptionally groveling word of thanks to the infamous Salvotti, outrageously implausible in its hypocrisy. The same is true for the following passage from a letter dated March 23rd, 1822, addressed to the Sardinian vice-consul in Venice:

      To the consolation I ask you to convey to my parents, I request in addition that you adjoin the fact of which you are well aware, namely that I have always been treated here with the most generous kindness.

      I find it impossible to read this passage without being reminded of a similar declaration of farewell penned by Sigmund Freud as he was preparing to leave for England with his family, where he was to spend the last years of his life. After the Austrian Anschluss of 1938 the Freud family had become surrounded by the exuberant anti-Semitism to which the Austrian and German Nazis had now surrendered themselves as one. Before the authorities would let the elderly Freud go, they insisted that he—like so many others shamelessly harassed into leaving their country—make a statement confirming that the Gestapo had treated him with respect. Freud did indeed sign such a declaration, and in a fit of cynical humor he added the following in his own handwriting:

      I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.

      The question is whether we are actually at liberty to draw such a historical parallel, between Pellico’s farewell declaration and that of Freud. Pellico was a writer who objected to the foreign occupation of his country, something about which he conversed and corresponded with others; Freud was a Jewish doctor who maintained an extensive international network. Those were their only faults. Both were scandalously treated, a reality both denied in writing in the most incredibly polite terms on the occasion of their forced departure from their homeland. Clearly neither was free to write about the reality of the situation, although from alternative sources we are familiar with the details.

      These would indeed appear to be similarities, but the prevailing objection argues that such comparisons are lame, because the historical circumstances in which Pellico was transported to prison by the state police and the historical situation in which Freud was expelled from his country by the secret state police are too different. But what is it that would make drawing this comparison so inappropriate? Would it be morally objectionable? Does it run counter to academic principles? Is the objection based exclusively on the one-hundred and sixteen years that separate the events? On the fact that Austria in 1822 and Austria in 1938 are totally incomparable? So what do we mean when we say that a comparison is ‘lame’?

      The accusation of lameness is often leveled at comparisons, including those between peoples—Greeks and Turks, for example, or Jews and Palestinians—and books, such as the parallels drawn by American literary critics between De ontdekking van de hemel—The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch and the work of Homer and Dante. Those who venture such comparisons are destined to face fierce resistance and will have to fight their corner. The most ingrained resistance tends to be reserved for the historical comparison, and anyone proposing the comparative method is likely to find historical comparison the toughest nut to crack. But let’s try our luck.

      The Christmas 2010 edition of the Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland published an interview with Job Cohen, leader at the time of the Dutch Labor Party, in which he responded with ‘yes’ when asked whether present-day Muslims in the Netherlands were being excluded in the same way as the Jews had been at the beginning of the German occupation. His statement drew intense fire from various quarters. Writing in the national daily de Volkskrant, writer Joost Zwagerman labeled Cohen’s words ‘defamatory’, while Rotterdam rabbi Raphael Evers—an authoritative spokesman among Dutch Jews—suggested in the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad that Cohen’s comparison did an injustice both to Muslims and to the history of the Jews in the Netherlands.

Another historical comparison was put to the test a little earlier by Nexus1 front man Rob Riemen, who in an essay entitled De eeuwige terugkeer van het fascism—The Eternal Return of Fascism claimed that the ideas and political movement of Geert Wilders are strongly reminiscent of the early days of fascism. Vigorous rejections followed from both historians and politicians, arguing that such comparisons should not be made because the differences between now and then are too significant.

1. Nexus is an internationally oriented Dutch cultural think tank connected to Tilburg University.

      The more frequent and vigorous the opposition to historical comparison, the more I am convinced that drawing such parallels can