Book Review: Silvana Patriarca: Race in Post-Fascist Italy: ‘War Children’ and the Color of the Nation

and warm account of the everyday reality of the Schmidts’ life, that conveys the tragic core of the Schmidtian experience of the world. This brings us to a third justification of the length of this volume. Because Schmidt did not fit in, he became a caricature of himself in the media world he heroically resisted. He was reduced to a cluster of cliches behind which he became invisible, and which may, superficially, have contributed to the public acclaim that was accorded him. Hanuschek reverses this. He re-humanises and reclaims Schmidt not only by the immense detail with which Arno and Alice’s way of life is described, even to the point of giving us Alice’s recipe for preparing dried mushrooms, but by relaying the care shown him by colleagues and publishers, especially Ernst Krawehl, but many others too. It is particularly laudable that Hanuschek pays a great deal of attention, presumably on the basis of original research in the archive, to the many readers, from all walks of life and levels of education, who loved Schmidt’s prose and wrote to him about it. Here is justification indeed of this volume and of Schmidt’s titanic efforts. Despite its Schmidt-appropriate length, the volume is very readable, both unpretentiously written and impeccably organised. The scholarly apparatus is reader-friendly: rather than one unified and massive bibliography, the endnotes to each chapter are preceded by the relevant references which, together with a comprehensive system of abbreviations, means that it takes only a moment to discover the source of a quotation or fact. The book itself is beautifully produced by Hanser.