Correspondance between Bernhard Marr and Carlo Leone Curiel. Part I: 1919-1920

Among Bernhard Marr’s correspondence about Casanova, some number of letters was written by Carlo Leone Curiel (1876-1933). Before and after World War I, he committed himself to foster the cultural contacts between Vienna and Venice. The Carlo Leone Curiel Archive, kept at the Museo del Teatro “C. Schmidl” in Trieste, contains a few letters sent by Marr to Curiel which can integrate the already known correspondence. Among the survived letters, there are those from Marr to Curiel. These letters begin exactly when Marr’s correspondence kept in Duchcov ends. The most interesting aspect in the Curiel – Marr correspondence is the description of how difficult was resuming studies on Casanova after the war, in a Europe completely changed at a geopolitical level. Their struggle to overcome material difficulties in order to find materials and documents – even writing paper – and in order to keep communicating reveals that the Casanovists’s activity meant, although maybe unintentionally, also reconstructing an ideal and cosmopolitan Europe which seemed lost.