By Carlo Barduzzi
The more or less superficial visitor who arrives in Bolzano today for the first time sometimes gets the impression of being in a city of certain German origin.
Houses with pointed roofs, sometimes covered with colored squamettes of very questionable taste, doors with very low polycentric arches (entrances of wide solemn majesty have never been a feature of German architecture), in short, asymmetrical, inharmonic, stocky and coarse structures with a widespread Tyrolean German aura everywhere, from the hotel, to the cafe, to the shop, overwhelmingly sloppy and openly contrasting with the graceful colorful beauty of the landscape, brightened by a sky at the threshold of the Brenner which has a fully Italian serenity.
And yet, Bolzano is not a city of Teutonic origin, and if the viewer observes with taste and attention, he will not miss those now-scarce palaces and houses which—with their simple and dignified lines, with their spacious interiors, with decorated hallways and Venetian mosaic floors—testify to their descent from the creative spirit of the Italian people.
Also, after consulting just a little history and the many documents that support it, the truth becomes more clear and unequivocal: the integration of Bolzano and the surrounding region into the German world dates back only a little more than a century ago and was a program of the imperialist government of Vienna, which encouraged and indeed directed a flood of Germans to pour into this side of the Alps.
This phenomenon of orchestrated migration is quite interesting.
Merano is an example of this: according to a predetermined plan, with the support of the State, a small agricultural center was transformed into a spa town. Its climate (certainly sweet, but not at all comparable to the climate of many other lesser-known places) was promoted to high rank, and Merano became a general among nursing stations, even without any healthy water and with a rain god who was anything but benign.
But the royal-imperial government—with astute foresight—willed it to be so, because then every year tens of thousands of Germans could unloaded themselves onto this side of the self-propagating Alps, making their presence known.
Alto Adige is undoubtedly a land of unique mountainous beauty; but Trentino also has magnificent natural aesthetic resources, and yet these were disregarded by the same enlightened government; they received no concessions, no roads, no financing. Because it was inhabited almost entirely by Italians, Trentino was forced to remain a small agricultural land, barricaded in an alley of sorts, with an inexorable border behind it and with an equally inexorable German pressure put on its chest.
Today the Pan-Germanists who reside in Alto Adige—and there are quite a few of them—are very busy trying to convince the whole world that Alto Adige is "rightfully German".
But history is what it is, and the Germans—whether they be Austrians, or Bavarians, or Prussians—have always committed the same psychological error for centuries: that of believing and wanting to believe that history and men are tailor-made according to their national aspirations.
The historical reality is very different, since the language of use in Alto Adige—and especially in its capital city—was the Italian language until the end of the eighteenth century, and only in the upper valleys near the Brenner and Dobbiaco passes did the Teutonic casting solidify itself some time earlier, due to the ease with which they could cross those passes.
Bolgiano and not Bolzano
The city was called Bolgiano, not Bolzano. The evidence? Here are but some of the many pieces of evidence, which is my personal field of expertise as Extraordinary Commissioner of the Chamber of Commerce of Bolzano...
Ever since September 15, 1635, at the behest of Archduchess Claudia, princess of Tuscany, a mercantile magistrate has existed in this city whose deed of foundation, written in German (the State language) and in Italian (the local common language), begins as follows:
"Privileges benignly granted for the Bolgiano Fairs by the Most Serene Archduchess Archduchess Claudia of Austria, princess of Tuscany. Chapters, rules and orders that must be observed in them and its most clement approbation."Therefore Bolgiano and not Bolzano! And the true Italian name for this capital city should be restored!
The "Privileges" were then always confirmed in both German and Italian by the successive Habsburg rulers: Ferdinand Charles I, Sigismund Francis II, Maria Theresa. This is well known to scholars.
Unknown to them, however, are the twenty-six codices and books reflecting the history and the legal-administrative management of the mercantile magistrate, all written in good Italian.
In Bolgiano, therefore, until the end of the eighteenth century, the language of use was Italian: a slightly Venetian Italian, but very good in style and vocabulary: an Italian which indicates the continued and appropriate use of the language, an Italian against which there were no complaints, since no one thought of trying to force the industrialists of Bolgiano to speak any other language than the one of their Italian forefathers! Even the emperor did not think to do this! A unique document from 1783 concerning a supplication of the traders of Bolgiano to Emperor Joseph II—written in the purest Italian language—is proof of this.
It was something which Emperor Joseph II must have found perfectly natural, since he does not appear to have punished or even so much as scolded those bold men of Bolgiano.
When extending concessions to the populations of Alto Adige, the Habsburg sovereigns themselves felt the need to use the Italian language as well. The Pan-Germanist zealots should embrace these good rules, since they were recognized by their own leaders.
The twenty-six volumes—which are only now coming to light—therefore constitute a massive and imposing documentary evidence. But I will return to them in greater detail shortly. Today they are in the hands of the Duce, who is a most acute scholar of national problems and especially of German problems, as is shown by that wonderful little booklet he wrote 1911, Il Trentino, which perhaps not many Italians have heard of, but which all the people of Trentino and Alto Adige should be familiar with.
The documents mentioned above, brought to light by that documentary wave resulting from the tenacious and incomparable work of the best connoisseur of Alto Adige and its history, Ettore Tolomei, must once and for all determine the end of the South Tyrol Question from the national point of view.
[...]
There is no greater folly than that of looking at the world through the colored glass of an innate prosopopoeia, and finding everything to be German, everything from creation itself to the sixth day of divine labor, believing it all to be the work of the triumphant Germanic race, i.e. of the perfect dolichocephalic, pale, blond-haired "Aryan" with a promising and well-formed skeleton.
'Il Trentino' by Benito Mussolini
One instantly becomes overwhelmed with sweet pleasure while reading the shining pages of that small but supremely expressive book by Benito Mussolini, Il Trentino veduto da un socialista ("Trentino as seen by a Socialist"), written in 1911.
Mussolini's veiled sarcasm informs the reader of the innocent and logical demands of the Pan-Germanists, as well as of the amazing theories of their "learned scholars" who, after applying a diligent analysis to the summits of other peoples history, at last discovered that everyone and everything is actually of German origin.
Just look at the assertions of one of their scholars, Woltmann, who among other things claims: Alighieri descends from Aigler, Giotto from Jotte, Donatello Bardi from Barth, Vinci from Vinke, Vecellio from Wetzel, Tasso from Tax, Buonarroti from Bouhroth, and so on and so forth.
And what would happen if we attempted to play this same game with Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Beethoven? The whole German people would rise up en masse to shout "Nonsense!"
But we would never do that, because we are men of good taste...
This cleptomania which aims at elusively stealing all the great men of every country would make us serenely smile if we did not realize that there are far too many people beyond the Alps who actually believe this and even wear it as a badge of national pride.
Now that the local wind is purifying it, Alto Adige sparkles with small Italian embers, which are not completely buried under the German volcanic ash. Soon this fire of yore will rediscover and destroy every superstructure made against God and against nature.
The Ladin villages of the upper valleys are fires that never lost their flickers.
As vestiges of Latinity, they kept our culture alive. The flame burns forever young through their clearly Italian artistic temperament.
The clumsy attitude of certain Tyrolean wooden carvings can also be appreciated from the artistic point of view, but who can deny that they are far inferior to those candid and truly heavenly Madonnas of Val Gardena and those saints with pure and ecstatic faces? What suave beauty, what kind expression were depicted by the rough hands of those mountaineers who had exquisitely Italian hearts and minds. Hands which were ancestrally experienced through sacred law transmitted by their forefathers.
But on the other side of the natural alpine borders, does not even the most casual of tourists notice that everything becomes more rigid, duller, sadder?
Art certainly draws lofty summits even through the path of tragedy. But we surely feel more humanely than the German people. When we look at the paintings of Egger Lienz, we can not help but wonder whether or not the power of expression can be achieved by them without debasing it with an almost cynical voluptuousness by using deformed faces and crippled limbs. Does not preferring such morbid artistic manifestations constitute a denial of the joy of living, and demonstrate a sickness of mind and body?
The artist who, with gloomy obstinacy, draws only inspiration from crippled or savage things, even though they are in nature, owes this unhealthy stimulus to the hazy mist that overshadows his darkened soul. His purely representational work, even if perfect, will never be educational, nor will it constitute any progress towards that spiritual perfection that dissolves man from earthly materiality and makes him a star of celestial spirituality.
Just listen to those poor vulgar Tyroleans from the other side of the border sing in their churches, especially when the feminine soul blossoms towards the hopes of a restful and healthy truce of daily labor. Their throats bring forth noises which sound like scraping metal; they moan like an imprisoned soul that has no momentum.
The life force of their people is like that of corpses: it is mass times speed squared. If a people form a large numerical mass, but have little intellectual speed, then its life force will be inferior to that of another people who are numerically smaller, but of greater spiritual vitality. In the racial struggle, the superior one will be that which has discovered the best balance of application between these two factors of success.
Germanism is and always has been based particularly on mass. This is why it has not risen to European domination at any point in its history.
Nor will it rise, not while they presumptuously delude themselves by taking credit for the great accomplishments of other peoples and adding them to their own history books, myopically forgetting that their major figures quenched their thirst from the free front of Latin wisdom and beauty.
To scrutinize a horizon and to indicate a goal, one can not have a foggy view of the real moral essence of human life. It is made primarily of feeling, and the prince of all feelings is always loyalty of thought and action, all the more valuable if courageous, as demonstrated by Fascism, which with its sole weapon of admirable clarity has defeated all its enemies one by one.
Il Trentino e l'Alto Adige
Austrian policy during the war intended to pursue a program of gradually submerging Trentino with Germans descending from Alto Adige, which was already practically submerged.
At that time she had a devoted collaborator, a vile and servile ally which—ignoring every national origin—was prepared to do anything to help Austria.
It was the clerical party of that time, which in the post-war period became one of the most fierce militant bodies of Don Sturzo's army.
Here is what Benito Mussolini wrote with lucid perception and typical descriptive effectiveness, in the same book mentioned above:
That People's Party—which had paralyzed every movement of the Italian-Trentine soul and had sucked every lifeblood from the country with its slimy tentacles—was the same one that in February 1921—when already in the squares of Italy young martyrs marked the dawn of the Fascist Revolution—announced a large gathering of 205 mayors in Rovereto in order to ask the cowardly government of the time to grant autonomy to Trentino!
A more cowardly outrage could not be made towards the Fatherland, which had given so much for the redemption of the country from German servitude. This most vilest outrage could not be made except by that party of so-called 'Italians' who devoted all their national sentiment to the Austrian oppressor!
No, they could not be children of Italy, if they refused to hug their mother! But then came the avenger: Fascism, created and led by a man who had the courage to shout in the face of his enemy.
Fascism drew them away from their centuries-old positions, and the people of Trento finally understood that from its sister regions came the true religion of the Fatherland, nourished by a sublime, unshakable faith: faith in the good blood of our people, faith in our own strength, faith in the great love for our beloved land, finally back in our hands, from the threshold of the Brenner to the Quarnaro.
Germanism is and always has been based particularly on mass. This is why it has not risen to European domination at any point in its history.
Nor will it rise, not while they presumptuously delude themselves by taking credit for the great accomplishments of other peoples and adding them to their own history books, myopically forgetting that their major figures quenched their thirst from the free front of Latin wisdom and beauty.
To scrutinize a horizon and to indicate a goal, one can not have a foggy view of the real moral essence of human life. It is made primarily of feeling, and the prince of all feelings is always loyalty of thought and action, all the more valuable if courageous, as demonstrated by Fascism, which with its sole weapon of admirable clarity has defeated all its enemies one by one.
Il Trentino e l'Alto Adige
Austrian policy during the war intended to pursue a program of gradually submerging Trentino with Germans descending from Alto Adige, which was already practically submerged.
At that time she had a devoted collaborator, a vile and servile ally which—ignoring every national origin—was prepared to do anything to help Austria.
It was the clerical party of that time, which in the post-war period became one of the most fierce militant bodies of Don Sturzo's army.
Here is what Benito Mussolini wrote with lucid perception and typical descriptive effectiveness, in the same book mentioned above:
"Anyone wishing to profitably study the formation, essence and tactics of a sincerely clerical party, should stay some time in Trentino. Here clericalism is not adulterated or masked by religion or by modernistic paints: it is genuine.
And it manifests itself above all as a vast and well-organized organization of profane interests, an organization that must preserve its political, economic and spiritual domination over the population. The maxim of the Trentine clericals is that of Pellizzo, bishop of Padua: "less churches, and more newspapers"! But fixed assets are needed in order to secure the newspapers; hence banks, cooperatives, industrial companies. The network of clerical interests is so thick that it suffocates Trentino. But this material subjection is united to a spiritual subjection. The clerical newspapers exert a kind of censorship over what citizens write and think; this censorship very often touches upon defamation and delation. For the Trentine clericals, the enemy is Italy. They are Austrophiles.
In their newspaper it says that if one wants to get something from the Austrian State, then one must be a loyal subject. In Catholic recreation centres they used to sing and perhaps still sing a song containing this verse:
With Garibaldi's skin
we will make many drums,
the Tyroleans can be sure
that Garibaldi is no more.
Last year, for the Hoferian feasts, the clericals organized bands of Trentines who — for a few dozen lire — marched in a parade before the emperor to show him that Trentino and Tyrol are a single indissoluble province. The bishop Don Celestino sent a circular to all the parish priests and deans, encouraging them to deliver a panegyric to Andreas Hofer from the pulpit, probably at the suggestion of the government. And since "the members of the clergy and the laity live in close union with their bishops" (according to an article in the old newspaper Voce Cattolica, now called Il Trentino), the clerical lay element held an equivocal attitude, condemning the anti-Tyrolean demonstrations and renewing their proclamations of devotion to the Empire and the State".He continues:
"For this reason — and this should interest the irredentist "regnicoli" — it must be pointed out that the clerical party in Trentino, which dominates the minds of the majority of the population, is openly pro-Austrian and anti-Italian.
If by some damn miracle Austria held a referendum among the inhabitants of Trentino asking them to choose between the Habsburgs or the House of Savoy, a caravan of priests would immediately arrive from the Vatican and begin claiming that union with Italy is contrary to religion and contrary to the wishes of divine providence.
Such a referendum — I am certain — would result in an overwhelming majority of votes in favor of Austria, because the only program that the Trentine Catholics want and hope for is Habsburg supremacy."And still treating the economy of Trentino:
"The economic future of Trentino is linked to its political future. Autonomy from Tyrol is the first condition for the development of the economic energies of Trentino.
The Government and the Province secretly and openly obstruct all private initiative, whether Trentine or Italian. Austria fears and does not want an industrialized Trentino. In fact its great natural forces remain unused.
In the last ten years, power plants have been built for 15,000 steam ships. However, its hydroelectric power is ten times that. But given the government obstacles and the rather shy character of Trentino, Trentino has very little capital invested in industries.
If the region's well-being has increased somewhat in the last twenty years, it is not due to a blood-sucking governmental regime, but to the work of Italian migrants, especially temporary ones.
This very strong export of arms is the greatest source of wealth in Trentino."And dealing with the relationship between Trentino and Tyrol, he says:
"They are two parts of the same province, two parts, not only different from one another, but the exact antithesis of each other. Tyrol is the master, Trentino is the subject. Trentino "suffers" from an administration composed largely of the clerical and feudal bourgeoisie of Tyrol.
The deplorable political and economic situation of Trentino derives from this forced marriage with the people from the other side of the Brenner.
The enumeration of the differences between the two regions and the two peoples could continue endlessly, as anyone can see, but it would not change the state of affairs!"This was the admirable assessment of Benito Mussolini in 1911, when Austria was firmly in control, and when only the prophetic spirit of the Duce could indicate the means of salvation for a region favored by nature in the exact delimitation of its borders like few others, and yet violated by German invasion.
That People's Party—which had paralyzed every movement of the Italian-Trentine soul and had sucked every lifeblood from the country with its slimy tentacles—was the same one that in February 1921—when already in the squares of Italy young martyrs marked the dawn of the Fascist Revolution—announced a large gathering of 205 mayors in Rovereto in order to ask the cowardly government of the time to grant autonomy to Trentino!
A more cowardly outrage could not be made towards the Fatherland, which had given so much for the redemption of the country from German servitude. This most vilest outrage could not be made except by that party of so-called 'Italians' who devoted all their national sentiment to the Austrian oppressor!
No, they could not be children of Italy, if they refused to hug their mother! But then came the avenger: Fascism, created and led by a man who had the courage to shout in the face of his enemy.
Fascism drew them away from their centuries-old positions, and the people of Trento finally understood that from its sister regions came the true religion of the Fatherland, nourished by a sublime, unshakable faith: faith in the good blood of our people, faith in our own strength, faith in the great love for our beloved land, finally back in our hands, from the threshold of the Brenner to the Quarnaro.
