Nicola Chiaromonte
Grandi Opere
Opere di Francesco Saverio Merlino
Opere di Aurelio Saffi
Opere di Gaetano Salvemini
Opuscoli mazziniani
dal fondo Ami all'Istoreco di Forlì
Opuscoli socialisti
dal fondo Schiavi della Biblioteca Saffi di Forlì
Biblioteca della Cooperazione - libretti
Congresso per la libertà della cultura - libretti
tracce da seguire
Prima guerra mondiale
"L'Unità" di Salvemini
"Volontà"
"politics"
vai all'elenco completo
ricordiamoli
voci da ascoltare
pagine da leggere

"To read again the past"

crowdfunding for a public reading room

We are a small, very poor foundation, but we have a house.

The founders were a group of comrades who took part in the 1968 protests and young volunteers. For more than 20 years, they have been editing a magazine called una città. It is an activist magazine focusing on interviews - its motto is "questions come before answers”.

One day, we accidentally discovered there had been a massacre of Jews in our town. Just like the rest of the citizens, we knew nothing about it.

For this reason, the foundation bears the name of Alfred Lewin, a young, socialist Jew from Berlin who was shot in Forlì in 1944, together with his mother Jenni and seventeen Jewish boys and girls fleeing German racial laws. We decided to give birth to the foundation after meeting Lissi Lewin, who learned about the ceremony that would have given dignified burial for the Jews shot in 1944, and which included the names of her mother and brother. Before being interned, Alfred and his mother Jenni had convinced Lissi to leave them and move to England, where young Jewish girls were still received.
Once safe, she returned to the eastern Germany. Due to the Berlin Wall, for 56 years she was unable to discover how and where her brother and mother had died.
Lissi Lewin was the first President of the Alfred Lewin Foundation, whose main purpose is to maintain memory. This will help us keep an eye on the present, so that racial, ethnic or religious persecutions- such as those in Bosnia and Algeria - will never take place again.

Yes, we are a small, activist foundation, which may sound like a contradiction.

When people ask us: "Activists of what?” we usually say we do not know.

In fact, we do believe in something: we believe that humanitarian socialism (surely not scientific socialism) cooperativism, mutualism, people’s ability to be free and independent can be of help in such a difficult future. The secondary purpose of our foundation is to keep alive the memory of these ideals while reflecting upon their current meaning.

Our most important project is an open library, which focuses on the purposes cited above.

We came up with the idea of a library thanks to two donations: one by Gino Bianco, a libertarian socialist, activist and journalist and expert on British laborism who left us - in addition to his books - an important archive of papers, letters and manuscripts by Andrea Caffi. Caffi was born in Russia to Italian parents, he was a thinker and revolutionary socialist who experienced the czarist, Bolshevik and Nazi prisons. Moreover, he was a friend of Albert Camus, with whom he shared his office as a reader at Gallimard.

The second donation is by Miriam Rosenthal, who left us a great part of her husband Nicola Chiaromonte’s library. Together with Ignazio Silone, Chiaromonte was the thinker who gave birth to the Italian magazine Tempo Presente.

Our library is specialising in digitalising and publishing various online magazines and newspapers.

Already today, with our 46.000 pages, we can boast being one of the main Italian online newspaper libraries. You can browse and read entire collections of magazines, especially from the social-liberal, libertarian, democratic socialist and republican traditions – Giustizia e Libertà, Carlo Rosselli’s secret weekly magazine; Salvemini’s L’Unità; the libertarian magazine Volontà; politics, the American radical left magazine directed by the same group Hannah Arendt and Nicola Chiaromonte were part of; Alba de Céspedes’ Mercurio; Luigi Salvatorelli’s La Nuova Europa, and many others.

Today, thanks to the donation of a room next to our head office, the library has the chance to grow. Apart from opening a new, public reading room, we wish to host various activities, such as teaching politics, history and interviewing techniques to young and passionate girls and boys.

We would like to dedicate the library to Katharina Mahn, a young, German friend who passed away prematurely and whose mother donated her collection of 2800 books to us. Katharina was multilingual and graduated in Comparative Literature, she studied in Italy and had started a collaboration with the magazine una città shortly before falling ill. On our website, there is an interview she made about illness. She was a young, cosmopolitan person – as many are today. In her name, we trust in the hope of a new, united Europe. We seek to send a message to young people who are anxious for change: it is possible to be radical without being enemies, and it is possible to build a better world without destroying the current one.

We need help finishing the building work. The foundation’s members did what they could and the renovation is almost complete, but we also need furniture and computers…

We cannot make it on our own. Thank you.

(traduzione di Sarah Baldiserra)

You may also do a bank transfer:
Fondazione Alfred Lewin - IBAN IT15 G033 5901 6001 0000 0130 502 (Banca Prossima)
BIC BCITITMX

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