Café Trento Bombing

The Café Trento Bombing was a timed attack on a café occupied by German soldiers in Genoa on 16 May 1944. Its immediate toll was two deaths and fourteen injuries; its wider consequence was a reprisal against twenty prisoners who had no involvement in the bombing. The novel’s account connects this wartime event to the later investigation of Hans Meyer and to the legal and historical questions raised at Fabrizio Collini’s trial.

Setting and Preparation

At eighteen minutes past ten in the evening, all fourteen tables in the Café Trento on Genoa’s narrow Via di Ravecca were occupied. The patrons were German soldiers, nearly all serving in the marines. An unnamed man in a lance corporal’s uniform entered with a bag weighing about a kilogramme, ordered a small beer, and left the bag partly under the bar before departing. He did not speak to anyone in the café.

The device was designed to detonate after a delay rather than immediately. Before entering, the man had crushed an ampoule in a brass tube; a copper chloride solution then began corroding an iron wire. The account explains that once the wire gave way, a spring mechanism would trigger the device. The chosen delay gave the man time to leave the café before the explosion.

The Explosion and Immediate Consequences

Eighteen minutes after the man left, the explosive detonated. Two people died immediately, and fourteen others were injured. The blast damaged the café’s interior, shattered its windows, and tore the door from its hinges, leaving it outside on the paving. The episode is rendered as a specific attack in a crowded café, not as an abstract incident in the wartime campaign: its timing, the soldiers’ ordinary evening gathering, and the delayed mechanism establish the sequence that made the bombing possible.

The passage does not identify the man who left the device or state that he belonged to a particular group. It does, however, make clear that the German authorities treated the bombing as an attack requiring a forceful response. An interpreter, already aware of earlier attempts against German soldiers, anticipated that the authorities would not accept the café bombing without retaliation.

Reprisal and the Meyer Investigation

The response described in the novel was the selection of twenty prisoners at Marassi Prison. At three in the morning, the interpreter was given a list and instructed to call out numbers rather than names. The prisoners were told they were being moved, but understood that they were to be killed. The account states that none of the twenty had anything to do with the bomb. Hans Meyer joined the journey from the prison, and the interpreter heard references to orders from Hitler and General Kesselring and to a reprisal ratio of ten prisoners for each German soldier killed.

Years later, the proceedings against Hans Meyer became part of the courtroom examination surrounding the case. Richard Mattinger established that the Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office had investigated accusations against Meyer but that Meyer had not been questioned, charged, or convicted. Dr Sybille Schwan confirmed that the proceedings were discontinued on 7 July 1969. The trial’s legal history therefore places the bombing and its reprisal in a longer sequence: the wartime killings were investigated, but the investigation into Meyer did not proceed to a judgment on his guilt or innocence.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The bombing is the initiating event for the reprisal described here, but the novel sharply distinguishes the attack’s victims from the twenty prisoners selected in response: those prisoners had no connection to it. That distinction exposes the human consequences of treating retaliation as an administrative measure, and it gives the café explosion significance beyond its immediate destruction.

The courtroom discussion also links the wartime record to Fabrizio Collini’s later dealings with the authorities. Leinen states that Collini had reported the name of the man who had his father shot, laid charges, and provided the evidence; proceedings were nevertheless discontinued under a law that came into force on 1 October 1968. The bombing account thus sits within a broader history of violence, reprisal, investigation, and legal closure, without making the attack itself a complete explanation of the later case.

The novel’s public afterlife further reflects that historical concern. In January 2012, a few months after the novel first appeared in German, the Federal Minister of Justice appointed a committee to reassess the Ministry’s legacy of the Nazi past, and the novel served as one of its points of reference.