Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013

Literary Production and Identity Politics in the South : the Case of Joseph Zoderer’s Die Walsche

Nóra de Buiteléir (Trinity College Dublin [email protected])

First published in German in 1982, Die Walsche is both Joseph Zoderer’s most acclaimed novel and by far his most reviled. The novel established its author – a member of the 300,000-strong German-speaking minority caught on the Italian side of the border after the First World War – as an international success, introducing him to a broad readership base in , and where even now, thirty years later, he maintains one of the highest public and critical profiles of any South Tyrolese writer. Meanwhile, Umberto Gandini’s 1985 translation, L’italiana, proved an instant bestseller in , where it has run to half a dozen editions and where Zoderer now ranks among the most-translated and widely published of all German-language authors.1 However, at home in the , the novel proved divisive. The aspects of the text that generated these mixed responses, and the various cultural, historical and political factors that shaped and conditioned them, present together a useful snapshot of the state of ethnic relations in the South Tyrol at a particular point in its difficult history. The investigation of identity in Zoderer’s work is, in common with that of other South Tyrolese authors such as Franz Tumler and Sepp Mall, a reasonably well-trodden scholarly path.2 Nevertheless, considering this theme in direct relation to the political landscape of the early 1980s, and specifically in relation to the ethnic policy debates that shaped the novel’s reception, opens up a broader perspective both on the text and on the evolution of the South Tyrolese question. This kind of historicised reading is not, of course, without pitfalls. Some commentators – most recently the director of a much-lauded 2010 stage adaptation3 – have bemoaned the critical instinct to read Die Walsche as some

1 By 2005, Zoderer could claim that he was second only to Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke in terms of popularity with Italian publishers. See public interview with Beatrice Simonsen, available to read at http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=5254, accessed 29 August 2012. 2 See for example Luisa Ricaldone, ‘« ...là dove ora ero di casa e dove però non ero mai stato prima » : considerazioni sull’idea di patria e di identità nazionale nei romanzi di Joseph Zoderer’ in Italies: Revue d’études italiennes (6), 2002, pp. 665-80 or Maria Luisa Rolli, ‘Heimat und die Südtiroler Schriftsteller J. Zoderer und N.C. Kaser’ in Antonio Pasinato (ed.), Heimatsuche: Regionale Identität im österreichisch-italienischen Alpenraum (Würzburg:Königshausen und Neumann, 2004), pp. 289-312. 3 “Die Walsche wollte in erster Ebene nie die Geschichte Südtirols beschreiben. Vielmehr bildet Südtirol lediglich die Folie, auf der allgemeinmenschliche Themen wie Fremdheit, Einsamkeit, Heimatsuche - also die Frage: wer bin ich und wohin gehöre ich? - abgehandelt werden. Hierin liegt wohl auch das grundlegende Missverständnis, mit dem Kritiker dem Werk begegneten.”

5 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 kind of treatise on the South Tyrolese ‘condition’, arguing that this approach is imbalanced and reductive and distracts from the text’s more universal themes and literary qualities. It is certainly true, as I will also show, that in the furore surrounding the novel’s publication in 1982 questions of artistic merit all but vanished behind political debates and ethnic sensitivities. With the benefit of thirty years’ distance, however, it must now be possible to read Die Walsche both as a linguistically complex literary artefact and as a historical document. The manner in which the South Tyrolese self-image is set out and problematized in the text can only be fully understood in the broader context of ethnic relations in the province in the early 1980s; this context is further reflected in the patterns marking the book’s reception, and in the established models of cultural identity it was seen to graze against and sometimes offend.

The Origins of the South Tyrolese ‘Problem’

While it would be naïve to assume that the birth of the South Tyrolese question neatly coincides with the transfer of the territory from Austria to Italy under the terms of the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919,4 much of the subsequent history of ethnic tension in the province can be traced back to this pivotal moment of trauma when an unwilling South Tyrolese population found themselves cut off from the rest of the German-speaking world and forced to deal with the realities of a new and unfamiliar political order. Subsequent efforts by the Fascist administration to supplement the existing Italian population through large-scale resettlement programmes – while at the same time seeking to eradicate and culture through oppressive, often brutal denationalization measures – further compounded the problem. These twin policies brought about the existence of two rival ethnolinguistic groupings with apparently irreconcilable interests: a resentful and harried German population determined to regain political clout in the land they still regarded as rightfully theirs, and a rapidly growing Italian minority equally set on asserting their rights to what was now,

Torsten Schilling interviewed by Jutta Telser, reproduced in “Die Walsche ist eine Liebeserklärung - Interview mit Schilling” in , 10 March 2010. Available to read at http://www.stol.it/Artikel/Kultur-im-Ueberblick/Theater/Die-Walsche-ist-eine-Liebeserklaerung- Interview-mit-Schilling, accessed 1 September 2012. 4 While many older histories show this tendency, more recent scholarship has questioned traditional assumptions about the supposedly homogenous Deutschtum of the South Tyrol by drawing attention to the linguistically diverse heritage of the Hapsburg alpine territories. For example, Hans Karl Peterlini’s Tirol: Notizen einer Reise durch die Landeseineheit (Innsbruck: Haymon, 2008), highlights the province’s close cultural and historical ties to the neighbouring , and shows how the phenomena of trade, migration and inter-marriage introduced and maintained an Italian presence in the South Tyrol generations before the annexation. Other scholars, meanwhile, have identified the roots of the South Tyrolese question in the germinating nationalist aspirations of both sides in the pre-war period, evident both in Italian irredentist claims on the territory - see Georg Grote, I bin a Südtiroler. Kollektive Identität zwischen Nation und Region im 20. Jahrhundert (Bozen: Athesia, 2009, pp. 42-7) -, and in the spread of pan-German aspirations among certain echelons of the German-speaking intelligentsia - see Leopold Steurer, “Option und Umsiedlung in Südtirol: Hintergründe – Akteure – Verlauf” in Reinhold Messner (ed.) Die Option (Munich: Piper, 1989, pp. 33-4.)

6 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 legally, Italian soil. The fall of Fascism and the restoration of Italian democracy in 1945/6 failed to improve matters. While the more obvious manifestations of Fascist oppression were lifted, the failure of the new Italian state to protect the linguistic and cultural rights of the German minority,5 along with the continued state-led resettlement of thousands of Southern Italian workers into the province, fuelled very real fears among the German community that they would be both culturally and demographically overrun. In 1953 the Dolomiten newspaper ran the following editorial:

Von Jahr zu Jahr sinkt so der Prozentsatz der einheimischen Bevölkerung steil ab gegenüber dem unheimlichen Anschwellen der Einwanderer. Fast mit mathematischer Sicherheit können wir den Zeitpunkt errechnen, zu dem wir nicht bloß innerhalb der zu unserer Majorisierung geschaffenen Region,6 sondern auch innerhalb der engeren Landesgrenzen eine wehrlose Minderheit bilden werden. Dies in einem Raume, in dem es noch vor kurzem die Italiener nur 3% der Gesamtbevölkerung ausgemacht hatten. Es ist ein Todesmarsch, auf dem wir Südtiroler seit 1945 uns befinden, wenn nicht noch in letzter Stunde Rettung kommt.7

Expressions such as Todesmarsch and Volk in Not rapidly established themselves in the minority’s political vocabulary as fears of cultural extinction intensified and ethnic relations further deteriorated. In 1957 nearly 35,000 South Tyrolese, led by the Südtiroler Volkspartei chairman Silvius Magnago, gathered at Sigmundskron Castle outside to protest against their treatment as a minority and to demand self-determination; soon afterwards a quasi-terrorist organisation calling itself the BAS (Befreiungsausschuß Südtirols) instigated a campaign of attacks against army barracks, electricity pylons, Carabinieri stations, Fascist-era monuments and other perceived symbols of the Italian state. After 37 pylons were destroyed on a single night in 1961 – an event that has gone down in South Tyrolese history as the so-called Feuernacht – a state of emergency was declared, houses were searched and over 150 suspects arrested. Stories of torture and police misconduct spread rapidly, particularly after two young South Tyrolese men died in custody under suspicious circumstances. International pressure eventually drove the government in to re-open negotiations with the South Tyrolese, finally resulting in the granting of a high

5 These rights had supposedly been guaranteed by an Agreement drawn up by the Austrian and Italian foreign ministers, Karl Gruber and Alcide De Gasperi, in September 1946. In reality, however, the sluggishness with which the Italian government implemented these safeguards, along with the calculated decision to subsume the South Tyrol into the greater Italian-speaking region of Trentino-, undermined any prospect of real political clout for the minority, leading many to feel that very little had changed under the new order. 6 The greater region of Trentino-Alto Adige was created in 1947. Because Trentino is (almost) entirely Italian-speaking, the South Tyrolese Germans found themselves in a minority in the region as a whole, with the balance of political power in the regional parliament pitched against them. This imbalance was largely resolved by the setting up of the autonomous province of Bolzano/Bozen under the 1972 Autonomy Statute. 7 Canon Michael Gamper writing in the Dolomiten, 28 October 1953. Reproduced in Grote, I bin a Südtiroler, pp. 158-9.

7 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 degree of political self-determination, and the guaranteeing of linguistic parity under the Autonomy Statute of 1972.8 Consequently, by the time Die Walsche was published in 1982, the South Tyrolese crisis had been largely defused, at least on a political level. Beneath the surface, however, resentments continued to simmer. Folk memories of past indignities, coupled with an overzealous determination to preserve the Deutschtum of the province and protect it from malign outside influences, helped maintain a lingering Italophobia both in certain political and media circles and in the wider German community. Among the Italian alto atesini, meanwhile – now making up a third of the total population of the province – there was widespread suspicion that the Autonomy Statute, with its emphasis on proportional representation and bilingualism, had been for the benefit of the German population only. Despite remaining Italian citizens on Italian soil, it seemed to many atesini that their ethnolinguistic identity left them at a marked disadvantage under the new South Tyrolese order.9 While it is clear then, that the 1972 Statute marked a watershed in South Tyrolese history, succeeding both in quelling the terrorist waves of the 1960s and in dismantling much of the legacy of Fascism, what it did not and could not achieve was the outright eradication of ethnic tensions in the province. It is these tensions, which continued to bubble right through the 1980s and ’90s,10 that set up the immediate sociohistorical context for both the writing and the critical reception of Die Walsche.

8 For more on the drawing up and implementation of the Autonomy Statute ( das Paket), see Grote, I bin a Südtiroler, pp. 215-24. A more long-term historical overview of the diplomatic wranglings leading up to the Statute, both within Italy and on the international stage, can be found in Antony Evelyn Alcock’s painstakingly detailed History of the South Tyrol Question (London: Michael Joseph, 1970). 9 See Alexander Langer’s reflections on this in his unfinished “Südtirol ABC”, reproduced in Siegfried Bauer and Riccardo dello Sbarba, eds, Alexander Langer: Aufsätze zu Südtirol/Scritti sul Sudtirolo 1978-1995 (Meran/: Alpha&Beta, 1996), pp. 351-2. 10 The extent to which these tensions continue to overshadow South Tyrolese life today remains a source of ongoing debate. On the one hand, there seems to be plenty of evidence to suggest that ethnic relations in the province have been steadily improving over recent decades. Since Austria and Italy approached the United Nations to declare their dispute over the South Tyrol to be officially ‘over’ in 1992, the province has seen a rise in mixed-language families, the opening of a bilingual university in Bolzano in 1997, the blossoming of the consciously interethnic Green movement, and the decision of the province’s two leading professional theatre companies (the Teatro Stabile di Bolzano and the Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen respectively) to bring their audiences together by moving into a shared performance space and initiating a number of bilingual collaborations. On the other hand, however, the reluctance of the provincial government to engage with the future possibility of bilingual schooling, and the political challenge posed by small but vocal groups of anti-autonomy campaigners on both sides (separatists such as the Südtiroler Freiheit on the German; various neo-fascist groupings on the Italian) both point to the fact that ethnic identity is still a central issue in the South Tyrol. Though now slightly outdated, Hans Karl Peterlini’s 2003 volume Wir Kinder der Südtirol-Autonomie: Ein Land zwischen ethnischer Verwirrung und verordnetem Aubruch (Bolzano: Folio Verlag, 2003) remains one of the best general introductions to the position of the South Tyrol in the new millennium. Peterlini is careful to take Italian and Ladin perspectives into account; a more extensive investigation of the Italian experience of autonomy can be found in Lucio Giudiceandrea’s Spaesati: Italiani in Südtirol (Bolzano: Raetia, 2006).

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The Text

Die Walsche opens with a separation. Travelling home to a remote mountain village for her father’s funeral, Olga, a young woman now living in Bolzano, refuses to let her Italian partner accompany her. By the time she arrives at her old family home, she is already filled with guilt:

Sie hätte Silvano das Mitkommen nicht verwehren dürfen zum Begräbnis ihres Vaters, für ihn aus dem Süden etwas Heiliges, Selbstverständliches, eine Sache des Respekts und der Ehrerbietung [...] sie hatte ihn nicht wie irgend jemand, schon gar nicht wie einen geliebten Menschen behandelt, sondern wie einen Walschen, der in dieser Welt hier, in der deutschen, nichts zu suchen hatte, der besser draußen blieb. (p.7)

What horrifies Olga here is not just the fact that she has mistreated the man she loves, but rather that she herself, in a time of personal crisis, has instinctively complied with the rules of ethnic segregation she has spent much of her adult life trying to escape. It is precisely the characteristics revealed here, a sharp self- awareness combined with a growing sense of helplessness, that defines Olga’s perspective for the rest of the novel. The story, though mediated through a third- person narrator, is seen only through her eyes. Over the course of the three days she spends back in the community into which she was born, Olga replays her own life story. As a young teenager she was brought down to the by her mother, desperate to escape her failed marriage and the tedium and claustrophobia of village life. She recalls the strange, sometimes thrilling foreignness of urban life, her mother’s death, her father’s descent into alcoholism, the beginnings of her relationship with Silvano, their life together running a bar on the Italian side of town, her efforts to adapt to his language, his friends, his culture. For the villagers Olga, in her city clothes and her high heels, has long ago become die Walsche, the unwelcome Italian,11 and only her crippled half-brother Florian, product of her father’s indiscretion with the school cleaner, shows any kind of solidarity towards her. Bubbling away behind a temporary veneer of respect for dead and for the bereaved, local resentment of Olga eventually bursts forth in the final, grotesque scene: stoked by the alcohol that Olga herself has paid for as part of her father’s funeral meal, one of the villagers pointedly selects an Italian song on the jukebox. Surrounded by staring, silent faces, Olga recognises that this is a swipe at her, punishment for her act of ethnic betrayal and a final seal on her excommunication from German-speaking society. She telephones Silvano to inform him that she is on her way, and leaves.

Contemporary Reception (1): Offending the Collective Self-Image

11 The untranslatability of the pejorative term walsch has caused inevitable problems for the novel’s transfer into Italian, as Gandini’s chosen title of L’italiana clearly lacks the negative associations of the German original. Zoderer has himself revealed his preference for the alternative title La Bastarda, although this solution, while clearly appropriately offensive, loses the necessary suggestion of ethnic tension.

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The reasons for the success of Die Walsche in the broader German- and Italian- speaking worlds are easily isolated. As a piece of literary fiction it is crisp and economically written; Zoderer’s strategy of eschewing direct dialogue and linear narrative produces a style that is both fresh and accessible. It takes on such universal problems as communication, finding one’s place in the world, and social alienation. The portrayal of the love story between Olga and Silvano – later pinpointed by theatre director Torsten Schilling as one of the central dynamics of the text12 – is refreshingly muscular and unsentimental. However, the reasons for the controversy generated by the novel within the South Tyrol itself are somewhat more complex. Objections were raised, not necessarily to the book’s finer literary qualities, but rather to the manner in which it was perceived to misrepresent certain cherished cornerstones of the South Tyrolese self-image. The first such sacred cow to be perceived as threatened by the novel was the myth of the homogeneity of the German minority. The 1972 Autonomy Statute emerged, as we have seen, in direct response to the political crisis of the late 1950s and 1960s. Central to the philosophy of the statute was the conviction that the cultural integrity of each of the two major language groups would be best preserved by maintaining a strict if respectful separation between them. “Je klarer wir trennen, desto besser verstehen wir uns” – a statement famously attributed to a speech made by the Südtiroler Volkspartei politician Anton Zelger in 1980 – encapsulates the ethnic politics of the late 1970s and ’80s. Autonomy achieved, ethnic tensions largely (if not entirely) defused and economic prosperity on the rise, the emergence of some kind of Italo-German Mischkultur suddenly became one of the provincial government’s greatest fears. Would ongoing personal contact with Italians and Italian culture – in school, at work, through the arts – gradually erode German-speaking culture in the province, blurring the lines between the two ethnic groups and perhaps eventually merging them completely? In 1981, just one year before Die Walsche was published, debates raged in the province over the inclusion in the census of an obligatory Sprachgruppenzugehörigkeitserklärung requiring every adult citizen to officially declare themselves as either German-, Italian- or Ladin-speaking,13 and in so doing, effectively ‘fixate’ him- or herself within a designated ethnic category. The official explanation for this was to provide the necessary demographic figures for proportional representation, another legacy of the Autonomy Statute, whereby the three ethnolinguistic groups in the province are allocated positions in public employment, housing and administration on the basis of their relative numerical strength. Objectors to the clause pointed out that this forced ethnic labelling left citizens with mixed cultural influences – either through background or by personal

12 “Es ist in erster Linie die Beschreibung eines Versuchs der Selbstverortung und eine Liebesgeschichte - die letztlich überall auf der Welt spielen könnte.” See “Die Walsche ist eine Liebeserklärung - Interview mit Schilling” in Dolomiten, 10 March 2010. Available to read at http://www.stol.it/Artikel/Kultur-im-Ueberblick/Theater/Die-Walsche-ist-eine-Liebeserklaerung- Interview-mit-Schilling, accessed 1 September 2012. 13 Ladin is the third official language of the South Tyrol and is spoken by just under 5% of the population. Rhaeto-romanic in origin, it is also exists in isolated pockets across a number of other northern Italian provinces.

10 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 choice – completely disenfranchised, and called for a general boycott. While the boycott failed, the political heat generated by the language declaration debates pointed to a failure on the part of the political mainstream, led by the ruling Südtiroler Volkspartei, to accommodate the possibility of bicultural identity within its vision of the post-autonomy South Tyrol. It is clear then that Zoderer’s foregrounding of the experiences of a mixed-language couple is, in the immediate aftermath of the language declaration controversy, consciously provocative. It was precisely these kinds of unions – and more acutely, the children they might produce – that the province’s either/or model of ethnic politics seemed determined to leave out in the cold. While this aspect of the novel inevitably caused discomfort among certain conservative sections of society however, the fact remained that mixed Italo- German relationships had long been a reality in South Tyrolese society and Die Walsche was not the first literary work to address this.14 Considerably more problematic was Zoderer’s dismantling of two of the most important tenets of traditional Germanophone identity in the province: the preservation of supposedly Germanic personal traits and virtues (as opposed to the shallow, degenerate lifestyles of the perfidious Walscher) and the survival of a sense of solidarity and enduring cultural unity with the long-lost German brothers to the north. Early on in the novel, it becomes clear that the only interest that most of the villagers have in their ‘brother Germans’ is as a source of easy income during the tourist season. Significantly, the only character ever described as having believed in some kind of abstract ideal of Germanness is Olga’s alcoholic, ultimately rather pathetic father, who is also the schoolmaster:

Wenn er angetrunken war [zeterte er] wie ein Feldwebel und hielt Ansprachen, in denen nicht nur Wir Deutschen und die Deutsche Heimat vorkamen, sondern auch Pünktlichkeit und Disziplin [...], ausgerechnet er, der höchstens zufällig einmal pünktlich in einer Klasse kam und schließlich nicht in Ausübung seiner Pflicht, sondern besoffen in einer Bachwiese den Schuldienst quittierte, hatte vor der Schank und daheim lauthals einen Schliff für die in den Tag hineinlebenden Italiener gefordert. (pp.21-22)

The image is a poignant one. The unhappier and more disillusioned he becomes, the tighter the schoolmaster clings to his Germanness, the ideals of which are completely at odds with his own increasingly chaotic lifestyle. No such ideals concern the rest of villagers, for whom the concept of being German more or less translates as not being Italian. Far from expressing some kind of ethnic solidarity, meanwhile, the presence of German tourists in the village is presented as an entirely negative one. In an era so concerned with preserving the cultural integrity of the German minority and so fearful that excessive contact with Italian culture might compromise or erode it, it is significant that the only real threat to the traditional Tyrolese way of life presented here would appear to come, not from

14 Among the earliest literary portrayals of a South Tyrolese mixed-language couple in either language is Gianni Bianco’s Una casa sull’argine (Rovereto: Fratelli Longo, 1965).

11 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 the enemy Italian, but from the German visitor. Not only are the locals flocking to abandon the land to open hotels and ski runs instead, but they are already starting to lose their native dialect and adapt the way they speak to that of the visitor. Women working in the guesthouses and hotels, we learn, no longer say schaun mr amol but rather the more standard German gucken wir mal (p.23). What is equally significant is that it is only Olga, now branded as a traitor and an outsider, who even seems to notice this. The most controversial element of the novel, however, and that which drew by far the most protest from cultural commentators, conservative politicians and newspaper letter-writers, is Zoderer’s portrayal of rural life. One Dolomiten reader spoke for many when she expressed her disgust at

…wie er darin unsere Leute, besonders die Landesbevölkerung, abwertend vorgestellt hat. Man hat dabei den Eindruck, als wäre unserer Südtirol von unterentwickelten Primaten bevölkert […] Ich war empört.15

In order to grasp why these sections of the book caused such mortal offence to so many readers, it is necessary to understand just how central a role the notion of the untainted rural idyll plays in South Tyrolese collective identity. The South Tyrol has always been an overwhelmingly rural society. After the annexation and Mussolini’s assumption of power in 1922, the Fascists’ furious push to industrialise the area around Bolzano and import Italian workers in their thousands left a legacy of sharp social and cultural imbalance. To this day, the bulk of the Italian-speaking South Tyrolese are city-dwellers. A minority in the South Tyrol as a whole, they make up over two-thirds of the population of the regional capital Bolzano, a demographic discrepancy that continues to hamper relations between town and countryside. The long-term effect on the collective mindset has been to lead many German-speaking South Tyrolese to equate urbanisation with Italianisation, while at the same holding up traditional rural communities as somehow ‘purer’ and more representative of indigenous culture. The fact that the economic upturn of the 1970s was partly based on the rise of tourism to these rural idylls – a financial boost denied to the province’s city- dwellers – only served to bolster this belief. To question the ideal of the rural South Tyrol then, was, in the eyes of many, tantamount to attacking the ideal of the German South Tyrol itself. And attack is precisely what Zoderer does in this novel, exposing the mountain village in which the story is set as small-minded, materialistic and brutalized. Not only is this a society shown to be entirely lacking in ideals – only too willing, as we have seen, to prostitute itself to tourism – but it is also marked by deep strains of alcoholism and domestic violence. We learn that Olga’s childhood friend Anna has made two unsuccessful bids to escape her abusive husband (p.14); most of the other women we meet in the village are hardened, defeated and silent. Even in physical terms the villagers are portrayed as grotesque: Helene, ironically the owner of the local beauty salon, is

15 Cited by Ruth Esterhammer, Joesph Zoderer im Spiegel der Literaturkritik (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2006), 31.

12 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 fascinatingly ugly (p.75), old women are filthy and dribbling (p.64 and p.91) and Olga’s own unfortunate half-brother Florian, though not an unsympathetic figure, has all of his various spasms and deformities described in excruciating detail. Even the schoolmaster’s old dog is crippled and hideous. The unrelenting emphasis in the text on extreme physical ugliness is troubling, as if hinting at some ancient undercurrent of incest and genetic mismanagement. We are left in no doubt as to the reasons behind Olga’s mother’s need to escape and Olga’s own determination to stay away. Her father, meanwhile, in many ways the tragic focus of the novel, is destroyed by his pitiful “Vorstellung von den unverdorbenen Menschen am Berg” (p.18), his determination to live out his life in an intolerant and philistine rural community that never really accepts him, an intellectual, a man of some learning and ambition. Recognising this folly might perhaps have saved him from the ignoble fate of drinking himself to death, but he this would have resulted in an unacceptable loss of identity:

Wahrscheinlich hatte sich ihr Vater nicht eingestehen wollen, daß ihm die Stadtmenschen und auch die südlichen Menschen viel näher waren als zum Beispiel diese Felswände ringsum, die ihm nichts als ein Schwindelgefühl einflößten, aber dennoch eine Art Rückhalt gewesen sein mußten für eine Hoffnung auf irgendetwas. (p.25)

Contemporary Reception (2): Exploding the Multicultural Ideal

The negative response of the conservative South Tyrolese mainstream to Zoderer’s starkly critical novel was entirely predictable. More surprising, however, was the extent to which Die Walsche caused disquiet among the Left, the post- 1968 generation of political dissidents with whom Zoderer had traditionally been associated.16 Dissatisfied with the model of coexisting but separate parallel ethnolinguistic societies laid down by the Autonomy Statute and doggedly implemented by the SVP-led provincial government, by the early 1980s voices emerging out of both the German- and Italian-speaking alternative scenes had started calling for the promotion of greater integration and cross-cultural exchange, working towards a long-term ideal of a uniquely bicultural, bilingual South Tyrolese identity drawing upon and balancing positive influences from both cultural traditions. It was this movement, spear-headed by the indefatigable Zusammenlebensapostel Alexander Langer,17 that had called for a general

16 Esterhammer, Joesph Zoderer im Spiegel der Literaturkritik, 11. 17 Alexander Langer (1946-1995) was a journalist, peace campaigner and environmentalist. Having first made a name for himself in the late 1970s as a Neue Linke/Nuova Sinistra member of the provincial parliament and a regular contributor to oppositional and bilingual publications such as die brücke, Tandem and Omnibus, Langer went on to become well-known right across Italy for his role in setting up the Italian Green Party. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1989 and again in 1994, and dedicated much of his parliamentary agenda to campaigning for peace in the former Yugoslavia. The term Zusammenlebensapostel was first coined by a member of the SVP and intended as an insult, but actually reflects Langer’s profound dedication to promoting tolerance and cultural exchange rather accurately.

13 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 boycott of the Sprachgruppenzugehörigkeitserklärung in 1981. Though unsuccessful on this occasion, Langer remained an impassioned and articulate opponent of the model of ethnic politics laid down in the Autonomy Statute. To the SVP, this model removed the basis for ethnic resentment and friction, allowing each language group to pursue its own social and cultural interests without fear of interference from the other. In practice, this meant not only the strict allocation of jobs, political representation and public housing according to the ethnic Proporz, but an insistence upon segregated schools and entirely separate media and cultural framework. To Langer, however, this insistence on demarcating ethnic difference could only further engender mutual distrust. As his biographer Florian Kronbichler explains:

Langers feste Überzeugung war: Das System Südtirol, so wie es im Autonomiestatut festgeschrieben ist und wie es von seinen Politikern gehandhabt wird, ist auf Trennung der Volksgruppen aufgebaut. Sprachgruppenzugehörigkeitserklärung und ethnischer Proporz würden das Gift des Gegeneinanders in sich tragen; die eine Gruppe würde versuchen, auf Kosten der anderen zu erstärken; „vita mea, mors tua“; Gruppenegoismus kontra Solidarität; Deutsche gegen Italiener statt Gesamt-Südtiroler; und die Dritten, die Ladiner, blieben ohnehin auf der Strecke. So sah es Langer, und er sprach […] von „Apartheid“ und von wechselseitigen „Todesmarsch-Psychosen“.18

As an alternative to this form of ethnic ‘apartheid’ Langer and his supporters – most of whom went on to join the newly-formed Italian Green movement in the mid-eighties – argued for cooperation and collaboration across the ethnic lines, “damit aus dem Nebeneinander ein dynamisches und wechselwirksames Miteinander wird.”19 If they were looking to find in Zoderer’s novel an expression of this multicultural ideal however, then they were sorely disappointed. Zoderer, for all his enthusiastic demolition of the wholesome, homogenous self-image of the mountain Germans, lays out in the experiences and struggles of his protagonist Olga a model of ethnic convivenza that is ultimately a hopelessly inadequate one. There is no question but that the Italian characters in the novel are, on the whole, portrayed in a more positive light than their rural German counterparts. There seems little doubt that Olga is considerably happier and more fulfilled living in the city among Silvano and his circle of Italian friends than she could ever be back among the silent, brutal community into which she was born. To conclude that she is happy and fulfilled with this arrangement, however, is to miss the point of the novel. In the opening lines of the text, as noted earlier,

18 Florian Kronbichler, Was gut war. Ein Alexander-Langer-abc (Bolzano: Raetia, 2005), p. 88. 19 Alexander Langer, “Warum ich die Italiener in Südtirol nicht mehr missen möchte?”first published in Skolast in December 1980, reproduced in full in Siegfried Bauer and Riccardo dello Sbarba, eds, Alexander Langer: Aufsätze zu Südtirol/Scritti sul Sudtirolo 1978-1995 (Meran/Merano: Alpha&Beta, 1996), pp. 60-3.

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Olga realises to her horror that she still, even after so many years in the city, instinctively recognises and applies the rules distinguishing deutsch and walsch. Several pages later we get the first of many passages in the book pointing to the fact that Olga still feels like an outsider in Italian society:

Wie oft hatte sie sich, wenn auch meist nur für Augenblicke, bei Silvano allein oder, noch öfter, mit ihm inmitten seiner lärmenden Freunde plötzlich fremd und ohne Halt, auf jeden Fall heimatlos gefühlt, als ob sie, Silvano und sie, nie ganz zusammenkommen, nie durch eine letzte Trennwand hindurch und mit den Köpfen endlich zueinanderstoßen könnten. Fremd, tatsächlich fremd hatte sie sich manchmal mit ihm im Italienerviertel gefühlt... (p.15)

Significantly, the passage then runs on to describe how she feels exactly the same kind of alienation upon returning to her family home, “wo ihr alles vertraut hätte sein müssen.” This is Olga’s dilemma. Having left one culture behind her – and having had it made clear to her by many in the villagers that this act of betrayal is irreversible – she finds herself living within a second culture without feeling that she can ever truly be part of it. On the one hand, she continually struggles with her efforts to express herself in what remains an alien tongue and finds herself slipping into the “Rolle der Sprachbehinderten” (p.87). Worse, this feeling of incapacity and frustration extends beyond the verbal and fundamentally distorts her perceptions of her own physicality:

[Es] war ihr, als ob sie sich mit der Vergröberung ihrer Sprachmittel auch körperlich veränderte, ihre unbeholfene Sprache schien auch ihren Körper unbeholfener, plumper und unförmiger zu machen, ihre Bewegungen wurden immer runder, immer ungenauer, bildete sie sich ein. (p.87)

The decision to move across ethnic lines, far from generating the “dynamisches Miteinander” promised by the multicultural lobby, has had the opposite effect, leaving Olga powerless and semi-paralysed, alientated both from her cultural roots and from the familiarity of her own body. At the same time, however, she notices with rising unease the subconscious presumption among Silvano’s friends – her friends – that she will behave as a German, that she will conform to their expectations as to how a member of the minority will look and act. At every turn then, Olga feels her identity been defined for her by others. In the village she has lost any semblance of individual identity, labelled as “nicht mehr die Olga, sondern die Walsche.” (p.10) Among the actual Walschen, of course, it is clear that that is what she can never be. Silvano’s friends are hopelessly drawn to a romantic, neo-colonial ideal of Tyrolese culture; with their delight in traditional wood-panelled farmhouses and rugged, silent mountain people and with their enthusiasm for Bergheillieder (which they insist on singing along to, even without knowing a single word of the original, often Nazi-tinged German lyrics), they seem almost as keen to promote this particular

15 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 cliché as the German-speaking right. Under different circumstances, this interest in understanding and in sharing in the indigenous culture might be interpreted positively, particularly in the light of the fierce efforts of earlier Italian administrations to eradicate these traditions completely. Olga, however, feels uncomfortable with this fetishization of the native, feeling under mounting (if unspoken) pressure to re-identify herself with this culture and become part of it. In one terrible moment of clarity, she realises that she will always retain certain exotic foreignness for Silvano’s friends, even if this sense of ethnic difference, unlike for the villagers, is to be celebrated as something positive rather than excluded as something dangerous and alien:

Sie war, wenn nicht für ihn, so doch für seine Freunde, auch etwas anderes. Obwohl sie eine Dunkelhaarige war, fühlte sie sich von ihnen zur Blonden gemacht, zu dem was sie als Klischee haben wollten, zur Blonden, die für die Italiener immer etwas Erotisches hatte. (p.54)

Olga has failed in her attempts to integrate into Italian society. Her life and outlook has not been enriched by her position between two cultures (in line with the political arguments put forward by the integrationist movement from late 1970s and ‘80s) but rather left insecure and untenable. The model of cultural exchange she represents is ultimately a pessimistic one. She belongs to neither culture. She is adrift.

Conclusion: From Olga to Eva

Reading Die Walsche in the light of the cultural politics of 1980s then, one could be forgiven for concluding that the outlook for the South Tyrolese German seeking to come to terms with his identity in the post-autonomy era was decidedly grim. The traditional cornerstones of German identity are exposed in the novel as hollow, outdated and corrupted. Attempts at fully integrating into Italian society are shown as futile; the prospect of forging happily integrated or hybridized identities, meanwhile, seems incredibly distant. To conclude, I wish to skip forward nearly thirty years and reconsider the relationship between identity politics and literary production in the light of another novel that explicitly engages with the South Tyrolese question, albeit in a radically different way, namely Francesca Melandri’s Eva Dorme, first published in Italian in 2010 and in German translation the following year. Comparing the various strategies employed by Zoderer and Melandri in depicting the complexities of the South Tyrolese situation, as well as how these strategies were received by the press and by the general reading public at the time, highlights once again the shifting sands of ethnic relations and cultural politics in the province. An ambitious, wide-ranging novel that covers almost ninety years of South Tyrolese history across four hundred pages,20 Eva Dorme weaves back and forth

20 It is, of course, tempting to speculate whether a ‘native’ South Tyrolese writer (Melandri is a Roman by birth) might have shied away from such an ambitious undertaking. While the author’s

16 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 between several narrative strands. The first is that of its eponymous protagonist, a German-speaking South Tyrolese in her forties who travels the length of Italy from Merano to Reggio Calabria in order to visit her mother’s former partner Vito, once a surrogate father to her, whom she has not seen in thirty-five years. A second strand follows the story of Eva’s family, moving from her grandparents’ suffering under Fascism to her uncle’s involvement with the terrorist campaigns of the 1960s, and her mother Gerda’s experiences of poverty, teenage motherhood and, all too briefly, genuine happiness with the Calabrian carabiniere Vito. Though the novel touches on much of the same thematic material as Die Walsche – parent-child relationships; interethnic relationships; the growing pains of autonomy – the manner in which it does so is markedly different. Indeed, on many levels it could be argued that Eva Dorme seems to work in direct response to many of the criticisms that were originally levelled at Die Walsche in the 1980s. It is meticulously researched, leaving little room for accusations of historical inaccuracy. Taking a long historical view and constantly shifting between various contrasting narrative perspectives, it is rigorously even-handed in its treatment of ethnic conflict, attempting to portray every aspect of society from the separatist bomber to the Italian policeman to the elite circles surrounding Silvius Magnago himself. Though Melandri shares Zoderer’s unease at the onward march of tourism – the unfortunate Gerda is deflowered in a newly-opened cable car, for example – her presentation of rural society is critical without being damning, exposing intolerance and parochialism on the one hand while pointing to the continued existence of human kindness and solidarity on the other. Her treatment of interethnic family and romantic relationships is, arguably, also more carefully balanced than Zoderer’s, examining as she does not one but several such relationships: Gerda and her partner Vito; Vito and his surrogate daughter Eva; the adult Eva and her lover Carlo. Above all, in laying out a narrative structure that moves across both historical time and geographical space Eva Dorme attempts a far broader exploration of South Tyrolese identities than did its predecessor. The love story between Gerda and Vito allows us to see the South Tyrol through Italian eyes; Eva’s train journey several decades later picks up on this by guiding us into seeing Italy through South Tyrolese eyes. In one crucial scene in which she gazes down from the train at the beauty of the Amalfi Coast, Eva suddenly catches herself ‘feeling’ like an Italian. Her perspective almost imperceptibly shifts from that of the tourist to that of the native. The closer she draws to her beloved Vito the clearer she realises that now, for the first time in her life, she can claim Italy as her own. It is here that the difference between the two novels is at its sharpest. Eva Dorme, for all its portrayals of individual and family tragedies and its often gruesomely graphic descriptions of violence and torture, is ultimately a positive book. It reaches a clean, satisfying resolution – Eva is both reunited with her lost

outsider status certainly allows her a certain objectivity, however, this must be balanced against her intimate knowledge of the province, having lived in Bruneck/Brunico for fifteen years and raised her children bilingually there. In interviews Melandri has herself frequently drawn attention to the fact that it is her fluency in German that has allowed her draw on the kind of crucial research materials generally inaccessible to monoglot Italian observers.

17 Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 adoptive father and reconciled with her mother. On both an individual and a historical level, then, the darker episodes and tensions in the narrative build up towards a largely positive conclusion. Magnago’s efforts pay off and peaceful autonomy is achieved. Eva’s journey pays off and she makes peace with her past. This final optimism reflects Melandri’s twin objectives in writing the novel: to educate her Italian readership about their largely unknown northern conterranei and to remind her South Tyrolese readership that their story, for all its historical bumps and tensions, is ultimately one of success.21 In the thirty-year gap between the publication of Die Walsche and that of Eva Dorme the South Tyrol has grown in political and economic self-confidence and is today frequently held up as a triumph of minority rights protection and a model for post-conflict societies across the world. Melandri’s protagonist reflects this new self- confidence, her difficult childhood and long journey to come to terms with her past mirrors, meanwhile, the turbulent path of South Tyrolese history. Eva Dorme was a resounding publishing success, both across Italy, where it has already run to several editions and won a slew of literary awards, and in the South Tyrol itself, where the province’s leading news magazine hailed it as “ein einmaliges Ereignis in der italienischen Literatur” and commended its author’s scrupulous even-handedness in exploring both sides of the ethnic conflict.22 This positive reception suggests that Melandri’s balanced but ultimately optimistic presentation of the modern South Tyrol harnesses and flatters the prevailing local Zeitgeist – the same Zeitgeist that Zoderer’s novel so gravely offended in 1982. Die Walsche, as we have seen, was criticized by some because its bleak pessimism was seen to undermine the South Tyrolese model of peaceful co- existence. Melandri’s novel, by contrast, seems to show that this model might just be viable after all. Where Olga is rootless and unhappy, Eva is dynamic and cosmopolitan, far better equipped, it seems, to represent a bilingual society looking towards the future. Comparing the very different fictional worlds projected by Die Walsche and Eva Dorme, and measuring the very different ways in which these models either meshed or clashed with the prevailing South Tyrolese self-image at distinct points in its recent history, highlights once again the various ways in which literature can both respond to and react against its immediate sociopolitical context. Eva Dorme’s widespread commercial and critical success should not lead us to presume, however, that it is set to in any way topple Die Walsche as ‘the’ definitive text of South Tyrolese literature. For all the accolades it has received on Italian soil, Melandri’s novel has, unlike its predecessor, failed to make any great impact on the greater German market outside of the South

21 “ […]ai lettori Sudtirolesi mi farebbe piacere invece se il mio libro li facesse ricordare che la loro, nonostante tutto, è una storia di successo. Un successo umano, quindi imperfetto come tutte le cose umane, però accidenti, guardiamoci intorno, pensiamo alle altre storie di minoranze etniche in Europa e nel mondo, e poi valutiamo se le cose non avrebbero potuto andare peggio, molto peggio di così.” Francesca Melandri interviewed by the Corriere dell’Alto Adige, 22 June 2010. 22 Georg Mair, “Von 0 auf 1397” in FF – die Südtiroler Illustrierte, 8 July 2010.

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Tyrol.23 Die Walsche, meanwhile, remains a much-read classic both across Italy and within the province, where an ambitious stage adaptation mounted by the Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen in 2010 played to packed houses and was hailed by many critics as the theatrical highpoint of the 2010/11 season. Whether Eva Dorme/ Eva Schläft will succeed in emulating such literary longevity remains, of course, very much to be seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alcock, Antony Evelyn, The South Tyrol Question. London: Michael Joseph, 1970.

Anon., “Intervista a Francesca Melandri.” Corriere dell’Alto Adige, 22 June 2010.

Esterhammer, Ruth, Joseph Zoderer im Spiegel der Literaturkritik. Vienna: LIT, 2006.

Giudiceandrea, Lucio, Spaesati: Italiani in Südtirol. Bolzano: Raetia, 2006.

Grote, Georg, I bin a Südtiroler. Kollektive Identität zwischen Nation und Region im 20. Jahrhundert. Bolzano: Athesia, 2009.

Kronbichler, Florian, Was gut war: Ein Alexander-Langer-ABC. Bolzano: Raetia, 2005.

Langer, Alexander, “Warum ich die Italiener in Südtirol nicht mehr missen möchte?” in Siegfried Bauer and Riccardo dello Sbarba (eds), Alexander Langer: Aufsätze zu Südtirol/Scritti sul Sudtirolo 1978-1995. Merano: Alpha&Beta, 1996.

Langer, Alexander, “Südtirol ABC” in Siegfried Bauer and Riccardo dello Sbarba (eds), Alexander Langer: Aufsätze zu Südtirol/Scritti sul Sudtirolo 1978-1995. Merano: Alpha&Beta, 1996.

23 It is not yet possible to conduct a formal comparative reception analysis here as Eva Schläft (translated by Bruno Genzler) has not really registered with the mainstream German press – no published reviews as of yet in the Faz, Die Zeit, Die Tageszeitung or the NZZ and only a passing mention in the Austrian Der Standard. Responses on various popular book websites and blogs such as lovelybooks.de, literaturshock.de, and reszensions-seite.de suggest, however, that many German readers found the book too ambitious in its historical scope, arguing that the emphasis on historical accuracy and even-handedness strangled the novel’s literary qualities. Interestingly, this is an almost exact reversal of some of the accusations pitched at Zoderer in the 1980s, namely that he had sacrificed historical accuracy for literary effect (See Esterhammer, Joseph Zoderer im Spiegel der Literaturkritik, 30-31).

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Mair, Georg, “Von 0 auf 1397: Interview mit Francesca Melandri.” FF – die Südtiroler Illustrierte, 8 July 2010.

Melandri, Francesca, Eva Dorme. Milan: Mondadori, 2010.

Melandri, Francesca, Eva Schläft, translated by Bruno Genzler. Munich: Heyne 2011.

Olivero, Dario, “Sotto la neve, tutto ecco il romanzo dell’Alto Adige.” , 28 April 2010.

Peterlini, Hans Karl, Wir Kinder der Südtirol-Autonomie: Ein Land zwischen verordnetem Aufbruch und ethnischer Verwirrung. Bolzano: Folio, 2003.

Peterlini, Hans Karl, Tirol: Notizen einer Reise durch die Landeseinheit. Innsbruck: Haymon, 2008.

Ricaldone, Luisa, “« ...là dove ora ero di casa e dove però non ero mai stato prima » : considerazioni sull’idea di patria e di identità nazionale nei romanzi di Joseph Zoderer” in Italies: Revue d’études italiennes 6 (2002): 665-680.

Rolli, Maria Luisa, “Heimat und die Südtiroler Schriftsteller J. Zoderer und N.C. Kaser” in Antonio Pasinato (ed.), Heimatsuche: Regionale Identität im österreichisch-italienischen Alpenraum. 289-312.Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004.

Simonsen, Beatrice, “Interview mit Zoderer”, public interview at the Literaturhaus Wien in 2005, available to read at http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=5254, accessed 29 August 2012.

Steuerer, Leopold, “Option und Umsiedlung in Südtirol: Hintergründe – Akteure – Verlauf” in Reinhold Messner (ed..) Die Option. Munich: Piper, 1989.

Telser, Jutta, “Die Walsche ist eine Liebeserklärung - Interview mit Schilling.” Dolomiten, 10 March 2010.

Zangrado, Stefano, “Il Sudtirolo e le sue richezze letterarie trascurate.” , 29 December 2011.

Zoderer, Joseph, Die Walsche. Munich: Hanser, 1982.

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