Luigi Einaudi. Diary of exile 1943-44
A Creative Documentary by Villi Hermann (2000)

Further information

The base of the documentary is the diary itself, published 55 years later.
I start from the written text of Luigi Einaudi, maintaining also his chronology. I don't want to treat the whole war period, but I would like to show another war situation through Einaudi's diary and of his period spent in Switzerland.
The diary treats the years 1943-44 spent by Einaudi everywhere in Switzerland, in the Swiss-German, as well as in the French and the Italian part of Switzerland. Travelling a lot, with his wife Ida, Luigi Einaudi had the opportunity to discover the reality of our country and to gather the depth of the spirit and to look through the differences and the contradictions between the three linguistic communities, each with its own problems and mentality. In this sense his observations are sharp and pointed, as a "Swiss", I would say. I retain that the description, sometimes ironic and pendant, of this atmosphere and of the Swiss surrounding, could be accepted even today, integrally from a public that is sensitised from the recent events about history of the War World II. As a matter of fact, just during the last year this historical period was in the middle of a wide and inflamed debate, which involved the media and more in general the Swiss government and the public opinion of America and Switzerland.
Only now (thanks to the strong incentive that derives from the outside) our archives are opening, with a guilty delay, and researches are made in order to analyse this controversial historical period. The contents of the "film-diary" will give the opportunity moreover to describe how people lived the war period and surely would concur to consider the exiles condition, the military refugees and the immigrants from a "Latin" point of view, till here rarely treated on documentaries or in historical researches in Switzerland. My previous documentaries, as well as this, are made under the narrative purpose of "the memories of places", in particular landscapes and their habitants: an attentive method to the discovery of the human behaviour and enriched by historical sources visited again with a strong and affective investigation. We interviewed: Renata Aldrovandi Einaudi, Roberto Einaudi, Amedeo and Eugenio Mortara, Mario and Giovanni Ferro, Saverio Tutino, the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano, Lucetta Jarach Guastalla, Edgardo Sogno, Zaccaria Aldo Curtaz, Mario Ansermin, Gérard Bolla, Ariberto Mignoli, Giorgio Bocca, Ruggero Comminotti, Paolo Della Valle, Federico Hindermann, Giuseppe Salto, the princess Maria Gabriella di Savoia, Francesca Pometta, and others. It was my intention to realise an "author-video" starting from an "author writer-witness", with all the respect that I have for the history and for his narrator Luigi Einaudi. Through this film I would like to show an unknown Switzerland, unknown not only for me but for many others also. The "Einaudi diary" gives me the opportunity to share this different vision of Switzerland and the atmosphere of the war period to an extensive public, and I do hope not only Swiss. We think to prepare a English version of the film in time.