Not waving but drowning on an empty beach

The great Italian caricaturist Altan had a cartoon on the front of La Repubblica in recent days, in which an Italian is sinking below the waves, shouting: “I’m drowning!” On the beach, a fat man whose swimsuit sports the German national colours, says: “Zat is how you learn, zpendthrift!”

This was in a left-of-centre daily that is supportive of the crisis plan of Italian prime minister Mario Monti and has set its face against anti-German populism. The press of the right has been less restrained: A recent front-page photo of German chancellor Angela Merkel showed her with a hand upraised, perhaps to wave — but vaguely reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s minimalist Nazi salute, with the headline “Fourth Reich”. The article claimed that two world wars and millions of corpses were “not enough to quiet German egomania”. This was in Il Giornale, a Milan daily owned by the Berlusconi family.

I smiled at the Altan cartoon on an Italian beach, where I was last week, looking about for signs of desperation. They were not dramatic, but observable.