THE FUTURIST MANIFESTO
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We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
Germany looked so beautiful and perfect in his dark uniform. His eyes were especially cold looking and sharp in it seine Augen sind blau. His hair was so bright under the black hat.
His actions were something Italy always wished he had the ambition fortitude courage bravery rashness to act upon. To overthrow his enemies in harsh battles full of blood and explosions, of mortal danger and immortal heroics! Turn and say to his European brothers "Who are you to look down and control me! To think me juvenile stupid! I'll destroy you and make sure you never forget!"
The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
Italy was as great a poet as he was a painter. He was just as avant garde as France, if not more so, and had those feelings of violence and bravado to back him up and push him further than the putain of Europe could ever hope to go. Was the Renaissance not of his creation? Had not Italy been the one to go against the greatest government of all, the Catholic Church, and told them "The world is round! Humans are masterful masters of their souls! We revolve around the sun! The planets are not perfect spheres! The human body is art!"
Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
His energy was endless. Italy ran from one place to another merely to enjoy the feeling of aliveness. Though he complained to Germany much, was it not also wonderful to know the feeling of body in movement?
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
It is just as great to know the feeling of body in impossible movement! To go faster faster faster faster knowing destruction is straight ahead, but brakes are worthless! Italy will crash right beside his German love in the violence they have borne.
We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
And after the crash, they will both come crawling out, seeing their forever while digging through the mud, lowly like snakes and greatly like kings.
The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
They will have sex everyday anyday today! Just to gather from each other their ultimate ecstasy, the only element worth taking whole. If Italy cannot completely approach all that he has fantasized to be, and can merely look at Germany and think him the completion of all that is important, then he wants to also drink from it, to feel from it. Germany running through his veins, fueling speedy mad crashing desires of violence from long kisses.
Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
And the only good sex is rough. His pained cries and wasteful tears, sudden bouts of melancholia and hysteria, wrestling with his people and his neighbors, tearing up their communions and cultures IS THIS NOT ART! ? THIS IS ART! Look at this Italian drama, this Italian opera and sing its sadness! It will sound like waves crashing, like the longest howls of suffering torn from the mouths of people! His most beautiful works are as tragic as Germany.
Send them all to their deaths while we play stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf . WAR for the sake of ART!
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
And everything still as fast. We have crashed already once, what is it to Italy to do so again? For that fraction beforehand, before the pain and after the thrill, we could see in each the fear, right Germany? So quick to vanish under the fast moving landscape, so quick to acknowledge the last time we broke ourselves, and then push away! So addicting to think this is the way it was meant to be, that speed seems eternal. Germany and Italy moving forever fast going nowhere and forward, but never to the past.
We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
Italy will kill himself beside Germany, with a smile on his face.
We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
To die beside a true futurist, Germany is a true futurist! To see him enter the graveyards of great art and take what he wished, burning the useless, stowing away the beautiful in gloom. He held in his hands all the wonders of mankind, suddenly made less immortal from Germany's mere look upon them. What would stay, what would decay? Your art is worthless or valuable in the eyes of Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland.
We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
I love you, Germany.
er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
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Historical Notes:
The Futurists: an artistic movement in the 20th century lead by F.T. Marinetti an Italian. The italic bold above comes directly from his manifesto, which if you google you will come upon. The futurist movement was the de facto school of art for Italy from before WWI until midway through WWII. It branched off into Europe, but was not as popular as in Italy. The only other country to embrace it well was the U.S.S.R. The Futurists were normally fascist, except Russian Futurists tended to be communistic. Marinetti was good friends with Benito Mussolini.
"seine Augen sind blau" - "his eyes are blue" Paul Celan's Todesfuge
Putain: whore, French
"stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf" - "prick deeper your spades you others play on to the dance on" Paul Celan's Todesfuge
"Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland." - "Death, death is a master from Germany." Paul Celan's Todesfuge
"er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft" - "He gives us a grave in the air" Paul Celan's Todesfuge
Todesfuge: DeathFugue a poem by Paul Celan about the Holocaust. Numerous really well done English translations are available for you to read, and in fact hear the poet read the poem as well! Look it up on Youtube! It is very chilling to hear it in the German.
I tried to capture an Italy that is not known by many, an Italy that for quite some time was very violent and angry. In Hetalia-verse this is not canon, in the real world, it is completely.
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