The Case of Joseph Zoderer's Die Walsche Nóra De Buiteléir
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Austausch, Vol. 2, Issue 1, July 2013 Literary Production and Identity Politics in the South Tyrol: 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 Germany, Switzerland and Austria 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 Italy, 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 South Tyrol, 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 German language 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 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. 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 Trentino, 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 Bolzano 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 Rome 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