Vofluicht no amol!” Hermann burst out in a loud voice. “Vofluicht, scheisszoig!”4
The basket his master had given him to take to the market had fallen on the ground. All the wheels of gray cheese had rolled on the ground.
He hadn’t sworn in Italian, as demanded by the Fascist laws now in force, which dictated that only Italian be used in public. He hadn’t even used a blasphemy, which would have been frowned upon but not considered illegal, as long as it was in Italian. He had sworn, and sworn in German. And, to be more precise, in dialect. An employee of the Fascist land registry office, who was walking past, heard him and, wishing to defend the Roman spirit of Südtirol, now Alto Adige, struck Hermann right across the face with his ink-stained open hand, then decisively tore off his Bauernschurtz, the blue work apron.
No German to be spoken in public, no Tyrolean clothes, no dirndl or Tracht or Lederhosen. Nothing to imply that the new Brenner border wasn’t the holy limit of Italic land. It was the Fascist law. Among the peasants and Knechte at the market, nobody looked up or defended him.
Some time later, despite the slap and the humiliation, or perhaps for that very reason, the badge, the fasces pin of party members began to gleam on Hermann’s collar. The local party officials looked on this favorably and taught him to drive a truck. They entrusted him with the transportation of timber between the valleys, and turned a blind eye if he spoke dialect with the lumberjacks. In any case, up there among those forgotten crags, even il Duce wouldn’t have been able to hear them.
The years passed and one day, Hermann saw on the main road of the main town a group of Golden Pheasants—it was what they called the SA. Their eyes were like blades ready to cut down any obstacle to the creation of the magnificent Thousand Year Reich. They walked straight, impeccable, Aryan, infinitely German. Hermann thought they were beautiful demi-gods.
He decided to become one of them.
Maybe Hermann lost love completely just as he was deluding himself that he’d found it—when he saw Johanna, an eighteen-year-old girl with black hair, thin and pale, who never spoke but walked with her head down as though wishing the world would overlook her existence. Maybe having at his side a woman whose every gesture apologized for her being alive would make him forget the shame, powerlessness, anger, and loneliness. That’s what Hermann sensed, although he could not have said it. Therefore, even though he didn’t love Johanna, he asked her to marry him. She immediately saw the coldness in his pale eyes. However, she also thought she saw a hint of concealed tenderness convinced herself that she had discovered, in this tall man who walked so rigidly, an all-consuming truth that was reserved for her alone. It wasn’t true, or perhaps it could have been true, but that’s not what happened. In any case, she married him.
The first child, Peter, was born with his father’s saturnine temperament and his mother’s dark eyes. He was three years old when Hermann lifted him onto his bony shoulders and joined the crowd gathered where the highway met a valley-bound road. Perched up there, the child felt important, almost as important as Crown Prince Umberto, guest of honor at the unveiling of the monument to the Italian Alpine troops, which had been so keenly desired by the podestà. The statue was covered with a white cloth that was being lifted and lowered by the summer wind, like giant breaths. Peter thought it looked like a huge ghost, something inhuman yet alive, throbbing. After the formal speeches and the band playing, the cloth fell with an almost animal rustling sound, in a sinuous ectoplasmic movement. But there was nothing evanescent about what it revealed: that was very solid—almost obtuse—matter.
A granite Alpino with a thick neck and not very slender—appropriately Italic—legs, directed his grumpy gaze to the northern glaciers, to the spot where the new border had been for the past twenty years. The not exactly sparkling expression of the stone soldier symbolized the blind, obedient and ruthless force that Fascist Italy would unleash against anyone daring to state that Alto Adige did not belong to her. This was not a superfluous clarification, and not only because of the reluctance of many, too many, South Tyroleans to recognize their very Roman lineage. The Fascist government had a more pressing reason for needing this clarification: on entering Vienna only three months earlier, Hitler had declared Austria, through the Anschluss, part of the Third Reich. And Austria, the lost homeland, was right there beyond the glaciers.
But this, as the Alpino stated with his presence, and as the authorities gathered for the occasion repeated, this was Italy.
Mussolini’s project to Italianize Alto Adige had been thorough. However, he soon realized that to make the place “very Roman, Latin, imperial” it wasn’t enough just to prevent the peasants from speaking German and wearing traditional clothes. Nor was it enough to forbid school children to study their mother-tongue and force them, instead, to learn Giosuè Carducci’s poem about the serene, wholesome bull “Pio Bove” by heart. Besides, those poor women sent over from Caserta, Agrigento and Rovigo could only weep at the thankless task of trying to make these blockheads produce the musical sounds of the Italian language. Brave teachers throughout the territory carried on teaching German in Katakombenschulen,5 the clandestine schools. Italianizing place names hadn’t sufficed either. Now, people would look up at the bell towers to work out where they were: if it was bulb-shaped, they knew they were in Völs, if pointy, then in Blumau. As for “Fiè,” “Prato Isarco” and all the other names invented by Mussolini’s topographer, Tolomei, nobody used them except bureaucrats.
There was only one solution for truly Romanizing that beautiful, vertical land: allowing only Italians to live there. It was not enough that the flow of immigrants from other regions was motivated and supported by Fascism in the hope that, someday, German-speaking South Tyroleans would become a minority in their own land. No, they actually had to leave.
Hitler embraced this idea enthusiastically. Ensuring the purity of nations by moving (or erasing) larges masses of people across the map was his favorite occupation. So he promised Mussolini that if the Südtiroler wished to carry on being German, they would be welcomed with open arms by the Greater Germany, and by their brothers who belonged to the pure Aryan race. He would give each and every one of them a new maso as large as the one they’d left behind south of the Brenner Pass, the same size fields and pastures, the same number of cows and, so assured the propaganda, of the same color coat as those left in the hayloft by their ancestors. The Sudeten, Galicia, Styria and even Burgundy then, later on, the boundless lands taken away from the worthless Slav people: Tatras, in Poland, the immense Hungarian puszta, and soon also lush Crimea. Anyone who left Alto Adige would find fertile lands that only needed a virile German workforce to become paradise on earth.
Mussolini, at the same time, was threatening the Dableiber, those who remained, with forced Italianization: speaking German was totally forbidden, even in private, and anyone not adopting Italian—in fact, Roman (with a capital “R” on the flyers)—customs and practices would be deported en masse to Sicily, to grow prickly pears—what they were exactly, nobody really knew. The choice wasn’t between staying or going, but between declaring yourself to be either a Walsch or a Daitsch: Italian or German. You could not remain a German on Italian soil.
Whether or not you left was presented as a matter of free choice. However, the decision to leave, so said the Nazi flyers, would be rewarded as a clear sign of love and devotion to the Great Germanic cause. Whoever loved their Heimat was certainly ready to abandon it and rebuild it elsewhere, exactly the same, in the bosom of the Thousand-Year Reich. Remaining, on the other hand, was an unequivocal sign of betrayal, insubordination against the National Socialist cause, cowardice.
These were your options; actually die Option.
No peasant would have chosen to leave his maso but they all felt Daitsch, and the vast majority ended up doing just that. They opted to, as they used to say. Still, there were too many peasants who would whisper to their wives under the goose eiderdowns at night, wondering: but what about their field, deforested by their great-grandfathers with saws and axes a century earlier? Would they really never see it again? And what about those lands, where cows of the same color awaited, masi with the same extensions, the same number of trees as what they’d leave behind—were they uninhabited? And if they weren’t, then where would the inhabitants go?
Hermann enthusiastically took part in the persecution organized by the regime against the Dableiber. With the blessing of Fascist party officials, he maimed heavy draft horses. He killed guard dogs. He smeared his own excrement on the jambs of the doors of those who weren’t planning on leaving; then he’d go and wash his hands in the streams, feeling in his chest a strength he’d never felt before. During those moments he almost forgot the shame and solitude of the little Knecht who pissed himself in the freezing cold.
There was an old peasant who had been widowed for many years and had no children. He was born in the Stube of the maso where he was living and had never been more than just a few kilometers away. He hadn’t even gone to fight in the Great War because he was born blind in one eye. He had two cows, Lissi and Lotte, which he was reluctant to leave in the hands of strangers: one could say they were his family. In any case, he couldn’t quite make up his mind to hand in his Option form signed. Hermann and two of his comrades set fire to his hayloft. The old man spent all night running up and down with a small bucket of water, trying to bring the fire under control, crying with his good eye. The mooing of Lissi and Lotte, trapped by the fire, sounded like the wailing of two enormous babies. They fell silent only when the burning roof of the hayloft collapsed on top of them and, together with the smoke and the flying fragments, a delicious smell of steak wafted out. The old man let himself fall to the ground and did not get up again.
Hermann also took part in the ambush on Sepp Schwingshackl. Unlike so many of his fellow countrymen, his old schoolmate had never shared that pagan fascination with the Führer, and the way he had quietly and firmly declared that he would not be leaving his maso made him a very dangerous Dableiber. The Gauleiter ordered Hermann and two others to teach him a lesson—they could decide just how hard it should be. And so, even though he and Sepp had walked to school together every day when they were children, even though every time his truck had broken down while carrying a load of timber Sepp had always lent him his hand cart, Hermann went.
Sepp did not die after being ambushed. He remained with his hands shaking, slightly deaf, and with a white scar on his forehead, which lifted his eyebrows in a puzzled expression. As though the astonishment of seeing a childhood friend kicking him in the face was printed on his face forever.
A joyful crowd saw off the first Optanten, pioneers of the new Heimat. Very blond children (chosen expressly for the color of their hair) placed daisy chains on the heads of all those leaving. The red, black, and white of the swastikas stood out against the deep blue sky, the whiteness of the glaciers, the dark gold of larches in the fall. Everybody said it looked magnificent. When Hermann Huber got on the train with his family, Peter was four years old, and his wife Johanna was expecting her second child, Annemarie. Hermann wanted to set an example, as appropriate to a true Nazi, and was one of the first to leave.
Also one of the last. Just a few months later, Italy entered the war and the departures of the Optanten, even though these were the majority of South Tyroleans, were suspended. Those who left, instead, were men called up to the front. As for creating the German paradise on earth, the Daitschn Himml, everybody forgot about it.
The Hubers came back to the valley after the war. Nobody, including the Dableiber, wondered where they had been. On which front Hermann had fought, in which division of the Wehrmacht, if he had moved over to the SS, if he had murdered many civilians or only his uniformed counterparts, enemy soldiers whom it was right and moral to strike down—nobody asked him. And especially, nobody asked him to give an account of the paradise on earth promised by the Führer. In everybody’s eyes, he might as well have been finished.
The war cemetery of the valley’s main town had—and still has—plain wooden crosses in the midst of very tall larches: a small forest of the dead in the midst of a larger forest of real trees. On the crosses are written the dates and places they fell. Specific information, like Woroschilowgrad, Aletschenka, Jehsowetowska, Trieste, Cassino, Pojaplie, Vermuiza; or more general, such as the Caucasus, Finland, Normandy, Montenegro. In some cases there’s just the continent: Afrika, or the direction: im Osten, in the East. On many crosses there is also a photograph. Young men looking impeccable in well-pressed uniforms, striking poses. Almost no one looks straight ahead, but rather up to the side. Some have gentle expressions, others excited, others uncertain. It’s impossible to tell whether the expression in their eyes that has been fixed forever is consistent with the way they acted in this planetary slaughterhouse. Perhaps that lost-looking nineteen-year-old boy machine-gunned a pregnant woman. Perhaps that SS Unterscharführer with eyes like ice performed an act of mercy toward a prisoner. Of course, many had the opportunity to do both. But nobody wanted to know that. They were the sons, the fathers, the brothers of those who were now rebuilding the houses that had been destroyed. Nobody wanted to know if they had died as humble heroes, as cowards, or as torturers.
Optanten and Dableiber, once enemies, found themselves united by the wish not to give things too specific a name. Nazi, collaborator, informer, war criminal, Konzentrationslagerführer: these were not words but unexploded grenades around which you tiptoed so as not to trigger the worst kind of explosion—the truth. There was still too much war rubble to be cleared, too much hunger to endure, too many dead to mourn, too much loss they had all suffered. Even the monuments to the Italian Alpine troops had been erased by Allied bombs. No, there was no need to ask anyone anything, not even Hermann.
The agreement was made in silence, but it was respected by all.
Alberto Ruotolo, an employee of the railroads, was now occupying the house where the Hubers had lived before the war. Like thousands of other immigrants, Mussolini had called him up from Vomero in order to Italianize Alto Adige. Now, the new Republican government still needed him, along with the rest of the Fascist-era white-collar workers, to operate the country. Through the windows of the house where Hermann had conceived his first child, there now wafted the sour smell of tomato sauce; Ruotolo’s fat wife would summon their children to dinner in a very high-pitched voice, letting out a burst of truncated words. “Pepè! Ueuè! Totò”—that’s how her Neapolitan delivery sounded to South Tyrolean ears. The Ruotolos remained in the house and the Hubers had to go and live in Shanghai. Rücksiedler was what they called—and not affectionately—the cluster of houses on the side of the mountain in the shadow of the Medieval castle, assigned to those who’d returned to live there. It was now the most insulting name, given to the Hubers as well as all the ones who had opted and who’d come home. South Tyroleans seemed to have forgotten that at the time of die Option almost all of them had said they were ready to leave and the only reason they hadn’t was because the war had broken out, and that nobody had stood up for the Dableiber who’d resisted. All the ones who had signed “Ja” on the orange Option paper were now calling the few who had actually left “traitors to the Heimat.” The same people who had waved swastikas and flags at the departure of Hermann and his family were now calling him a bastard. That dark load that would press on his chest from when he used to piss on himself, as an eleven-year-old orphan, became even more oppressive.
Shanghai was nearly a mile away from the nearest shop and almost two from the center of town: its good inhabitants insisted on keeping their distance from the Rücksiedler. It was a cluster of low houses coated with a gray mixture of plaster and stones from the river. The sun would disappear behind the looming hill at the end of September and not reappear until May. During thunderstorms, water from the highway would come flooding in through the front doors and even in summer the washing would never dry. The Shanghai residents were considered good-for-nothing, treacherous, Communists.
Shanghai was also called Hungerburg—from Hunger, hunger—or Revolverviertel, the district of handguns, because of the continuous coming and going of customs officers, Alpini and Carabinieri, and not for patrolling. When, years later, Gerda was seen escorted by an Italian in uniform, some people said, “No wonder! She grew up in Shanghai.”
Peter was ten years old and didn’t have a single friend. He’d spent his early childhood elsewhere and spoke with a strange accent (a Bavarian accent: the Hubers hadn’t actually gone that far). No mother would allow a child of his age to go and play at his house in Shanghai. His schoolmates bullied him then said, “Don’t like it here? Well, nobody asked you to come back.”
Annemarie was old enough to help around the house, and Gerda was a baby. Johanna’s milk had dried up in Munich in the bombing, but Gerda learnt to digest Knödel before she was even four months old, and survived. You could already tell that she was nothing like her mother.
Johanna wasn’t old: she’d married Hermann at eighteen and was now about thirty. Nor was she ugly. She just looked even more mortified about being in this world than before. Perhaps it was the war, or perhaps the fact that her husband had stopped speaking to her since he’d returned.
“Ostfront,” is all Hermann would say to the rare people who asked where he had fought. The Eastern Front.
Gerda was growing up. Peter and Annemarie had inherited their mother’s black eyes, while hers were blue and almond-shaped like her father’s, and her cheekbones were high and Johanna, on the other hand, became more and more stooped, like a woman twice her age. As though there were a limited amount of vital force available in that house and that it was no longer for the mother but only for the youngest daughter. And that’s where it flowed in its entirety and with a vengeance.
Peter began spending more and more time on his own in the woods. Every step he took on the thick layer of humus, the billions of larch needles that had accumulated over thousands of years, made the live rock several feet deep resound like a drum; that light thud as he advanced gingerly, holding a sling, seemed to him the most welcoming sound in the world. That was his home, and the squirrels, foxes, martens, grouses, and magpies were his companions. He learned to kill them, of course, but first he got to know them, to watch them patiently, and wait for them for hours. He was an excellent shot and soon, with the money from the furs and feathers he sold to the milliners, he bought his first gun.
Although she was still very young, Gerda was to remember for the rest of her life the day Peter brought home his first stag. He loaded it on his shoulders, wrapping it over his neck and holding its legs almost tenderly. The stag’s head was bobbing up and down on his back, its mouth open, its tongue hanging out, like a bloody version of the Good Shepherd. Gerda was struck by the contrast between the inertness of the dull eyes and the fur still soft to the touch. The sickly-sweet smell of blood remained in her nostrils for a long time while Peter was skinning the deer, and also the stench of nerves and animal fat that emanated from the largest pot Johanna owned, and over the edge of which protruded long, elegant antlers. If Gerda hadn’t seen Peter cut the head clean off the animal’s body, she would have always believed that the stag was playing hide and seek in a pan with magic powers.
The skull was boiled and the flesh stripped off completely. Peter was planning to make good money by selling it as a trophy.
When they had left, those who had “opted” had renounced Italian citizenship, so now the Rücksiedler were stateless. Without documents, without work, and without respect, times were hard for the Hubers, at first, like for all the other Shanghai residents. The mother of the town dentist, a baroness, offered to take Johanna into her service but Hermann wouldn’t hear of it: as long as he was alive his wife would not be bringing money home. And so to top up the family income, at the age of twelve, Peter went to work in a sawmill. Annemarie started cleaning the stairs of the primary school when she turned ten, and was therefore still younger than the pupils in the final year. Their efforts weren’t in vain: after a couple of years driving other people’s trucks, Hermann managed to buy himself one.
Three years after the end of the war, with a merciful gesture, the Italian government made a clean slate of the effects of the Option: it gave back Italian citizenship to the Rücksiedler who requested it. The old Hermann could never have imagined the relief he felt the day he obtained once again, for himself and his family, the documents which declared them to be Italian Citizens.
Shanghai became once again part of what was now Republican Italy.
When Gerda was eight she began replacing her mother in the task of warming up the engine of Hermann’s truck. She would wake up at three in the morning, put on her coat without even washing her face, and go out into the winter frost when the night was at his darkest. Interrupting her sleep was even more painful than the cold slapping her drowsy face. At night, her father’s truck was parked outside the front door, and in order to start the engine in the morning you first had to scrape the ice off the crank on the front. Gerda’s hands were already as rough as a washerwoman’s. She would light a small fire with shavings and paper under the belly of the vehicle, taking care not to waste the matches. She stayed there in the cold, on all fours, to make sure it wouldn’t go out, spreading the fuel in a circle with an iron shovel. You had to be careful: if the flame was too high the oil tank and the entire truck would explode, and she with them. Once the starting crank was warm and the ice vapor that blocked it had melted, Gerda would go back home, pick up the cup her mother had meanwhile prepared on the wooden stove, and wake up Hermann with the coffee. While her father climbed into the truck and started the engine, Gerda would get ready for school.
One morning when it was still dark, Gerda handed her father the coffee but he didn’t wake up straight away. He was still dreaming. His opaque eyes opened with difficulty.
“Mamme,” he muttered.
His mother was back! And now she was there next to his bed with a cup of steamy white coffee for him, just like when he was ill, as a child.
Gerda got frightened: she had never seen him with this helpless, trusting expression before.
“Tata . . . i bin’s. Die Gerda,” she said.6
Hermann blinked and opened his eyes again. The same eyes, the same mouth, the same cheekbones as his mother; except that it was only his daughter. He realized what he had just called her and never forgave her.
In the summer, when the truck engine didn’t need warming up, Gerda would go to the mountain pastures with her cousin, to mind the cows of uncle Hans, Hermann’s eldest brother, the one who had inherited the family maso.
The pasture was half a day’s walk from the maso, too far to come back every night. Gerda and her cousins, Michl and Simon, who were more or less the same age, and little Sebastian, known as Wastl, would sleep on the hay in a hut. They would spend their days showing one another those anatomical parts that they didn’t have in common, stuffing themselves with blueberries, spitting juniper berries at one another, and carving twigs. Only when absolutely necessary did they run after cows that were wandering off. When it rained or, even better, when there was a thunderstorm, they would plunge into the warm hay and tell one another scary stories, with evil spirits of the mountain as protagonists. Three times a week, Hans’s wife would bring crisp rye bread, called Schüttelbrot, speck and cheese.
Gerda was the only one who never needed to use the stick with the cows, since they followed her around like huge lapdogs. Her cousins, too, would have followed her anywhere. Several decades later, when Simon and Michl thought back to those nights in the hay with Gerda, with little Wastl asleep right next to them, the memory of her sparse, blond pubic hair, revealed by her raised shabby dress, could still make the blood rush to their nether parts.
One of those summer mornings, an English mountain climber who’d lost his way saw her from afar. Gerda was sitting under a Swiss pine, her eyes half closed. She was emitting high-pitched whistling sounds, like glass, with a blade of grass held tight between her lips. Her bare legs and feet caked with mud protruded from a threadbare cotton dress, and her dirty hair was tied back with a string of braided bark. High cheekbones, rounded forehead, fleshy lips, elongated blue eyes. The Englishman thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. The thought of going away and never seeing her again seemed unbearable. He contemplated her for a long time before making his presence known. He forgot about his planned climb and remained all day at the hut.
The English climber shared his packed lunch with Gerda and her cousins. When he heard her laugh he decided he would do anything to hear that sound again. He began chasing after the cows, brandishing his Alpenstock, and barking like a sheepdog. He hung a cowbell around his neck and grazed, ruminating and actually swallowing the grass in the field. He mimed the solemn gait of young Queen Elizabeth, placing a crown of daisies on his head with which he then crowned Gerda, declaring her the one and only queen. However, when the moment came for him to leave, the Englishman respectfully asked her permission to take a photo. At the end of the summer, Hans’s wife handed Gerda an envelope addressed to her. Sender: John Gallagher, Leeds, United Kingdom. In it was Gerda’s photo at the age of ten, which Eva would one day put on her bookshelf. On the back, in large, spiky letters, was written: In eternal gratitude for the best day of my life. Forever yours, John.
During one of those summers, the monument to the Alpini had been rebuilt—a little more slender than the previous one, and a little less grumpy. At the solemn inauguration, the army bishop declared that this time it underlined the reconciliation between the Italian government and its faraway province. It symbolized defense, he stressed, not aggression.
However, the South Tyroleans didn’t change their minds. That was a Fascist monument and always would be, even though there was no more Fascism. Except for the authorities, none of them attended the inauguration. Not even Peter, who was now sixteen, or his father. Hermann didn’t want anything to do with these things anymore.
One night, a couple of years later, Peter came back home at dawn. His mother, who could never get to sleep until her firstborn was back, knew immediately: Peter hadn’t been hunting. His clothes didn’t smell of forest or gunpowder, but were soiled with red and white paint. However, Johanna asked for no explanation. The following morning, the Carabinieri surrounded the monument to the Alpine troops and closed to traffic the intersection where it had been erected. During the night, its granite pedestal had been painted red and white, the forbidden colors of the Tyrolean flag. Thus derided, it inspired more an almost ironic affection than fear or resentment. From that moment on, the town residents started calling it by the common diminutive, Wastl. The Carabinieri had to spend an entire day scrubbing it with brushes and soap.
Peter couldn’t find a job and got by on seasonal work. He picked potatoes, hired himself out as a laborer to peasants whose sons were conscripted when they needed an extra pair of arms to gather the hay. Only occasionally, when there was a particularly heavy load, he would help his father with the truck, but there was never enough money. One winter he found a good job as a custodian in the house of a noble family from Vienna that spent the summers in South Tyrol. His duties involved lighting the stoves three times a week so the pipes wouldn’t freeze, checking the windows, and sweeping the snow from the roof. The work wasn’t arduous but it wasn’t well-paid. Peter wanted to start a family. He was twenty-two now and there was a girl he quite liked. But at this rate he’d never be able to do it. That was until he heard that Falck steelworks in Bolzano were hiring workers.
Johanna was the only one in the family who could read and write in Italian: she was the only one to have gone to a Fascist school. Hermann had gone to primary school in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and suspended his studies when his parents had died. His children had gone to the schools of the Republic created by anti-Fascism, which had not returned South Tyrol to Mother Austria, as its residents had deluded themselves it would, but at least it had recognized their right to study in their own language. All the bureaucracy, however, was still in Italian.
It was therefore Johanna who helped Peter prepare all the documents: certificate of good behavior, dispensation from obligatory military service, a strong and healthy constitution. It was she who accompanied him to the various offices. There was no form or sign in German, no state employee spoke German; nobody understood German. The fact that the population that frequented these offices was German-speaking was totally ignored. Applications had to be written in correct Italian or you risked having to start from scratch. For Johanna, having to speak with these impolite clerks in a language that wasn’t her own was a source of anxiety and embarrassment but, in the end, Peter obtained all the certificates. She then ironed his Sunday suit, and one Monday at dawn Peter took the bus to the main city.
He remained in Bolzano for a few weeks. He stayed with a distant cousin of his mother’s in a tiny house with four children aged between two and eight. At night, Peter slept on the floor next to the stove, but he could not remain there during the day. Those were the days of the three Eis Männer, the ice saints in the middle of spring, the last cold and nasty stretch of winter, and the air was frosty. Peter had no money to go and warm up in a tavern so he spent his afternoons in the waiting room at the station. That’s where he saw them get off the trains.
They were mainly men. Although Peter didn’t know it, they were identical to those who during those same years were arriving also in Turin, Liège, Düsseldorf. They had peaked caps, checkered jackets, cardboard boxes tied with string and the odd leather suitcase. Every so often there would also be a woman between twenty and thirty, seldom any older, with thick black hair. She would get off the train alone or else with three or four children, but there was always a man waiting for her, with a face identical to those who had arrived alone though perhaps a little less hollow, a little less anxious, a little more self-confident: the face of a man who has a job and can now take on the responsibility and dignity of the head of the family.
Nobody had explained to the immigrants from southern Italy what kind of place they were going to, before they left. It hadn’t occurred to anyone in the recruitment offices in Enna, Matera and Crotone, where the Bolzano factories were obtaining their workforce, to let them know that they were about to go and live among people who spoke German, who did not eat spaghetti or even polenta, but things they called Knödel, Schlutzkrapfen, Spatzlan. They were still in Italy, weren’t they? That was all an immigrant needed to know.
When Peter arrived in Bolzano, wearing his Sunday suit all clean and ironed, he went to the Falck recruitment office. There, he left his job application and all the painfully obtained documents. Over the following days he also went to Lancia, then the railroad company and even the road company: the life of a road worker wasn’t great but it was still better than being unemployed.
Not one of his job applications was answered.
It took a while for Peter to understand. The economic miracle of the industrial area of Bolzano, with its social housing and almost acceptable wages, had been devised only for Italians. It’s not that they didn’t want a German-speaking worker. It was simply not factored in.
Yes, now you could teach in German once again in Alto Adige schools. There was no more need for Katakombenschulen for pupils and teachers to be able to speak and study in their own language. The new Italian Republic had not tackled the Germanness of South Tyroleans the way Mussolini had done. It had chosen to adopt a different attitude toward the problem: pretend it didn’t exist.
Peter went back home. Johanna was horrified when she saw the state of his suit: he hadn’t taken it off for three weeks. Peter did not explain why he hadn’t found work and nobody asked him. The following summer he remained in Switzerland for the entire season. He found a job as a herdsman and supplemented his income selling hunting trophies, especially chamois. Once, he got lucky and killed an ibex. Only German tourists bought anything from him. The few Italians who ventured in those parts weren’t particularly interested in trophies.
One November day, when Gerda was almost twelve, Peter suggested she go with him on an excursion near Bolzano. He said there would be lots of people, like at the church fair, Kirschta, only much bigger.
An excursion! Sometimes on a Sunday automobiles, carts or groups of bicycles would drive along the highway past Shanghai, and Gerda would hear people singing and laughing. On Sundays during the summer, her father’s colleagues would also load their families and friends on trucks and take them to the shores of the river that comes down from the glaciers, or to the fields at the start of the adjacent valley. The wind would carry to Gerda the smoke, the smell of grilled Würstel, waves of music, laughter, and she would be overwhelmed with longing at the joy of these strangers. Sometimes, without needing to go too far, there would be a party even in Shanghai, in the courtyard in the middle of the houses on the upper part of the road. At the end of the summer, that’s where they would pile up freshly-picked corn, then tear off its long, sharp, pointy leaves by hand: once dried, they would use them to stuff mattresses for the whole winter. The workers and the peasant women would set the pace with songs and jokes and afterwards, in the evening, when the heap of leaves in the courtyard corner was taller than the front door, they would start dancing to the sound of the zithern and the accordion. All the residents of the district would come, some with bottles of cider, others with a slice of speck, others with chairs for the elderly. Everybody came except for the Hubers. When Hermann heard singing during those light evenings that smelt of hay, his face would darken. “It’s alright for some who are rich and can afford to party,” he would say, “but I have to work tomorrow.” Then he’d go to bed.
Gerda had never heard the sound of her father’s laughter. On the other hand, she remembered exactly the last time she had seen her mother laugh. A pail with soapy water had been knocked over on the kitchen floor, Hermann had walked on it and slipped. The sight of her husband falling stiffly and hitting his behind entertained Johanna, and for a long time Gerda remembered her mother’s delicate laugh, in whoops and hiccups that shook her skinny chest. Hermann did not tell her to stop, did not shout at her, and did not make fun of her in his turn. But when he got up, he gave her such a look of deep contempt that laughter dried on her lips like a flower touched by a firebrand. Gerda never heard her mother laugh again for as long as she lived.
Gerda did not know her older brother Peter very well, either. He was ten years her senior and she had spent much less time with him than with her cousins. There was no intimacy between them: separated by sex and age, they had never had much to say to each other. They had lived under the same roof, eaten the same bread, but that was all.
Peter had become a tall, well-built young man but his movements were somewhat graceless, like his mother’s. More than uncertain, he looked furtive; like a hunter lying in ambush who has to conceal the power of his firearm. He had also inherited his mother’s dark brown eyes that didn’t reflect the light. There was something opaque in his eyes that had frightened Gerda as a child. Now that he was grown up, Peter looked nothing like Hermann, except when he spoke—which, like his father, almost never happened—and when he really had to speak he did so with his mouth half-closed, as though words were precious objects you could only part with reluctantly.
Peter had never even brought a friend home. The girl he would have liked to marry had never yet been to their Stube. He would visit her in the courtyard of the maso where she was born. He took her small gifts: the long antler of a stag, which he had carved with geometrical figures; a bunch of capercaillie feathers with a steely sheen; a handkerchief he bought at the market. Leni, the girl, would accept them with a smile that made them precious, just as a sunbeam lights up a cat’s eye and makes it look like a gold nugget. However, even with her Peter wasn’t very talkative.
No, the Hubers were not known for being good company.
An excursion. With Peter. Gerda wasn’t sure which of these novelties was more extraordinary. Tata and Mamme wouldn’t come, he explained, they weren’t interested. Nor would Annemarie: she worked as a servant in a family and had only half a day off on Sundays.
They left long before dawn. That year it was a mild fall, but it was still dark and cold. Gerda was surprised to see so many people in the street even though it was long before early mass. They were all going to the town center where a few trucks and a bus were warming up their engines. Gerda was wearing her confirmation dress. Twice already Johanna had let it out, but it was still tight over her chest and soon you wouldn’t be able to fix it anymore. Over it she wore a boiled wool jersey, gray with green borders; and she had a red handkerchief around her neck. Peter was wearing the same suit as when he was looking for work in Bolzano. Johanna had restored it to life with patient darning and cleaning.
They climbed onto one of the trucks along with a couple of dozen other people. Some were in Tracht: the women were wearing long skirts, heavy satin aprons with an iridescent glow and lace bibs, like on a HerzJesu parade; many men wore waistcoats with red and green stripes, embossed leather belts over Lederhosen, and felt hats with capercaillie feathers. Even those not in Tyrolean costume were wearing their Sunday best.
Gerda was the youngest there. When she got on the truck the men made room for her as if she were an important person, the women offered her rye bread and elderberry juice from aluminum flasks wrapped in felt. Never had so many people smiled at her all at the same time. When the column of vehicles started moving, the headlights formed a wreath of lights, which Gerda thought was more festive than an Advent crown with its candles. The people on the truck started singing and she joined in with her still childlike voice. They sang “Brunnen vor dem Tor, Wo der Wildbach rauscht, Kein schöner Land”: songs in which romantic love merges with the love of the Heimat. Gerda didn’t know the words: she’d never sung in chorus at a country festival. However, the melody took predictable, reassuring turns, and the notes resounded on the roof of her mouth and deep in her throat, as though she had always known them. The icy wind slammed in her face and she felt happy, even though Peter hadn’t told her why there were so many people, or where they were going. For the first time in her life, however, he bent down to his little sister and smiled.
Three hours later, when they reached their destination, Gerda was asleep, her head in the lap of the woman who had given her elderberry juice. The truck stopped with a tired moan of the brakes and she opened her eyes.
She wondered if she was still dreaming. She had never seen so many people at once. Not even at the HerzJesu procession, or at the funeral of the local nobleman, when the funeral cart, pulled by four black horses, had proceeded along the Medieval street with people on either side. Peter lifted her off, his hands in her armpits, and put her down on the ground like a doll. Gerda was surrounded by people who squeezed her, pushed, halted and, like a river going in the wrong direction, flowed up the slope that rose from the Bolzano valley all the way up to the dilapidated ruins of Castel Firmiano. Gerda held Peter’s hand tight, but she wasn’t afraid. On the contrary, she felt as though the crowd was a single organism, a living entity of which she was a part, and whose emotions and waves she sensed before they became also hers. Something she felt she belonged to and which gave even her, a girl who wasn’t quite twelve, meaning and dignity. She felt brave, enthusiastic, a believer even though she had no idea in what. Never again was Gerda to see such a crowd, except on television.
It was a mild day. It was mid-November but the sun was more like September and made people’s eyes glisten as they smiled and greeted one another, even strangers, even if they came from different valleys. Peter was right: this festivity in Castel Firmiano, Sigmundskron in German, was something that had never been equaled before in the whole of South Tyrol.
There were banners, signs. On many of them, Gerda, read: Volk in Not, a nation in danger. The rally was surrounded by two rows of Carabinieri, black as tar, with red stripes down the legs, which made them look like strange insects, their hands on machine guns. They watched tensely as the crowd went up to the ruins of the castle. They were young, some very young. They were more afraid of all that crowd than the crowd was of them, and Gerda saw that as soon as she caught the eyes of one of them. He was only a little older than her: eighteen, nineteen at most. He kept his eyes on hers as though finding comfort in them. Gerda had already realized that “they” were not a part of that thing she and Peter and all the others belonged to. On the contrary they represented exactly the “danger” her “people” were in. However, the boy in uniform, with his hat lowered too far down on his forehead, kept looking at her as though clinging to the grace of that little girl with dress that was too tight, in order to be able to bear his fear more easily. Gerda couldn’t help but smile at him. The red handkerchief she was wearing around her neck got untied and fell to the ground. Instinctively, the Carabiniere made to bend down, and the hand that wasn’t on the machine gun reached out to pick up the handkerchief.
The comrade in arms next to him turned abruptly and stared at him. He gave him a hard look, one that promised he would be reported to his superiors, or worse. The young Carabiniere’s smile stiffened into a mask tenser than before. He hesitated, then his trunk became rigid and straight again, and his hand returned parallel to his hip. Gerda looked away. She picked up the handkerchief by herself and carried on walking. Peter didn’t notice anything. The crowd was already pushing them ahead, to the top of the hill.
Bunches of people were hanging from the trees. They were gathered in the castle clearing, on the high ground around, on the battlements of the dilapidated bastions. It looked to Gerda that this field of people had germinated from the soil like gigantic grass made of flesh, clothes, hats, faces: you couldn’t see the ground in between the people. Only on the overhanging rocks, from which the ruins sprang like fairytale excrescences, could you get a glimpse of the blood-red porphyry in between people’s bodies.
There was a man on stage at the foot of the castle tower. Gerda couldn’t decide which looked more stripped of flesh—him or the crutches on which he was leaning. He wasn’t old, but he looked ill and very fragile. Gerda had seen many veterans who carried in their bodies the memory of the war that had ended just twelve years earlier: she immediately recognized the thinness of disabled people, those who had lost a leg, like this man who was now talking to the crowd, or a hand, or an arm. The part of them that no longer existed was in constant pain, which radiated and sucked the life out of what remained of the body, draining it like a vampire. The same man really looked as though he was prey to this phantom parasite: he spoke in a brooding, metallic voice that had nothing of the orator about it. Yet the crowd was listening to him in absolute silence. Only when he mentioned the then Minister of the Interior Tambroni did he have to interrupt his speech because of the hisses and boos. He did not lose his composure but waited, calmly, without betraying signs of impatience, and let the crowd boo the representative of the Italian government to its heart’s content.
A minute passed. The catcalls continued.
Two minutes. The soldiers and Carabinieri forming a cordon at the foot of the stage began to exchange looks, as though wondering if they should do something.
Three minutes. The hissing directed at the government minister to whom they answered gave no sign of subsiding. Gerda picked a blade of grass, dusty and trampled on by the thousands of feet that had walked on it. She raised it to her lips which the same gesture John Gallagher, from Leeds, United Kingdom, had seen at the hut. She blew and produced a very high-pitched whistling sound. For the second and last time in her whole life, Peter turned to her and gave her a pleased smile.
Four minutes. The hands of the younger Carabinieri were beginning to leave sweat halos on the machine gun handles. The man up on the stage calmly looked at the tens of thousands of people catcalling. He was in no rush to resume his speech. He was taking advantage of the interruption to calculate the turnout to the demonstration he had organized. He was pleased. There, before him, Silvius Magnano, on that 17 November 1957, at Castel Firmiano, there were at least thirty, forty thousand people. Seeing that the total population of South Tyrol was scarcely three hundred thousand, that meant at least one tenth, possibly more, was there. Like Gerda and Peter, they had left in the middle of the night on trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, tractors. They came from the outskirts of Bolzano, Oltreadige, but also from valleys farther away: Ahrntal, Schlanders, Passeier, Martell, Gsies, Vinschgau. From places where, in dialect, you count oans, zwoa . . . and also those where you say aans, zwa . . . And so they continued to hiss and boo, as though they never wanted to stop.
Five minutes. The Carabinieri looked at their superiors.
The skinny man onstage caught his breath and opened his mouth as though to resume his speech. Silence returned at once.
Silvius Magnago reminded the crowd of Canon Gamper di Bressanone. The clergyman, who had been persecuted by the Nazis, had launched an appeal a few months earlier: “Es ist ein Todesmarsch!” A death march was what South Tyrol was heading for, if things carried on like this: with forced immigration from Southern Italy, jobs being denied to the natives, the growing poverty and emigration. South Tyroleans would soon become a minority in their own land, before being finally swept out of History.
What he would fight for, promised Magnago, the head of the Südtiroler Volkspartei, the German-speaking South Tyrolean party, was an autonomous province that wouldn’t be attached to another Italian-speaking province, like Trento. A true autonomy that would allow South Tyroleans to take back control of their own land.
He ended his speech by shouting once, twice, many times: “Los von Trient!”—Away from Trento! Away from that region with an Italian majority where, once again, Germans were in a minority and unprotected. The crowd cheered, and seemed never to want to stop.
Suddenly, the sound of a sheet being beaten came from the keep of the dilapidated tower. Everybody looked up. Two young men had penetrated the ruins and now, leaning out of one of the slits, had deployed a long, red and white flag. Displaying the Tyrolean flag was still forbidden by Italian law: one of the many Fascist laws no one had bothered to repeal. A small group of Carabinieri started to run toward the tower. Before they were arrested, the two young men began to shout, “Los von Rom!”
Peter and the others, mainly young men, joined them. “Los von Rom!’ cried a small part of the crowd.
In other words: No to the autonomy of politicians, of diplomacy, of compromise. It’s not enough just to leave Trento. Leave Rome. Leave Italy.
Magnago pursed his lips as the activists were being taken away by the Carabinieri.
Just over a year later, the monument to the Alpine troops in the town where the Hubers lived was targeted once more. This time, there was no red and white paint, no student-like provocations, but an explosive device blew up the pedestal. However, Wastl, little Johnny made of stone, was not destroyed: the charge was faulty.
That day, Peter was in a nearby valley, helping his father with a load of timber. After a quarter of a century driving trucks, Hermann was starting to have back problems. His son’s help became necessary, even though that meant giving up the extra money Peter could have brought home from other work. In the evening, when they came back home, Johanna did not comment on what had happened to Wastl that morning. She felt sufficiently relieved that, this time, it hadn’t been her son.
One June day a couple of years later, a man from Merano came to see the Hubers. He was Daitsch but swore in Italian. All the South Tyroleans were now swearing in Italian everywhere, even in the privacy of their own homes. During Fascism, so many of them, like Hermann, had had to endure disapproval and even blows if ever they let exclamations slip in German dialect. So the entire population was therefore convinced that perhaps it would be better to swear in Italian even at home, just to get used to it. However, nobody can tell for sure if there wasn’t perhaps also the hope that the daitcher Gott, the German good Lord, might not be that well versed in foreign languages: perhaps He wouldn’t have entirely understood a walsche swear word, and would therefore have been less offended. Whichever way you decide to interpret this, the unanimous adoption of Italian swearing on the part of German speakers turned out to be, of all the Italianization imposed by Fascism, the only success story. But a lasting one.
The man from Merano had come to tell Hermann that he wanted his younger daughter to work in the kitchens of a large hotel. Tourists had only recently started coming back to Alto Adige after the war, so anyone looking for a job could now find one in tourism’s new frontier: the Dolomite valleys. The large pre-war hotels in the health resorts in the Adige valley were therefore short on staff. The man was offering a good salary, free bed and board, and an apprenticeship in a steady profession: cooking.
Maybe if Hermann hadn’t been a frightened little Knecht who wetted himself out of sadness; if he hadn’t spread excrement over the doors of the masi during the dark months of the Option; if he’d chosen a woman to marry out of love and not powerlessness; if he hadn’t done and seen things on the Eastern Front that nobody could talk about; in other words if Hermann hadn’t lost love a long time ago, too long ago, then maybe he would have taken into consideration the fact that the hard times were over, that his family was no longer grindingly poor, that his truck kept his children fed and clothed, nothing more than that, but at least that, and that everyone knew from many stories what awaited his daughter if she went (there was a reason they called young female cooks Matratzen: matresses).
And he would have said to the man: Wort a mol, wait a moment. He would have said Des madl will i net weggian lossn, I am not letting this little girl go. Her cheeks are still round like a child’s but she already has a woman’s shape, and slender legs, she is beautiful, very beautiful, she is exactly like her grandmother, but she doesn’t know it yet so I have to protect her, which is something only I can do, and must do, as her father. I will take her to dance the polka at the Kirschta’ in the summer, to show all the young men how desirable she is but also how protective and careful her father is and that he will never allow anyone to hurt her. So, no, I will not let you take her to hotels for foreigners so she can be called a Matratze.
Instead, Hermann said, “Passt.” All right.
Gerda was sixteen. She left.
The journey to the health resort wasn’t long but it was complicated. When she arrived at the train station in Bolzano, she was taken aback: she could hear only Italian spoken around her andcould see only dark complexions. This was, after all, the same city where, a few years ago, Peter had seen immigrants arrive from the South.
She was supposed to catch the bus to Merano, but she couldn’t see any. There was a wide, tree-lined avenue in front of the stairs to the station. She went there clutching the ticket on which the man had written the name of the hotel where she was going. The flowers of the chestnut trees on the avenue gave off a powerful scent. The man from Merano had told her to walk halfway up then turn left. Gerda walked, uncertain, intoxicated by the scent of the clusters of flowers above her, clutching the handle of the small suitcase containing her few possessions. The bus station was there. Gerda approached the driver but didn’t dare ask him for information: she was embarrassed to speak Italian.
“Schnell! Der Bus Richtung Meran fährt jetzt!”7 she heard a couple of elderly German tourists. She ran after them to a bus with the engine already started, and got on. She was lucky: just a few seconds later the driver closed the doors and drove off.