The Tyrol

Late in the week the Chamber again rang with Fascist cheers. Time after time the deputies rose to their feet, stamped, exulted, wept. "Evviva Italia!" they bellowed, "Evviva Fascismo! E v v i v a ! Evviva!! Evviva MUSSOLINI!!!" High atop the Tribune, the Duce of Fascismo flayed the efforts of pan-German propagandists to hinder his Italianization of the pre-War Alto Adige, or South-Austrian Tyrol, which was ceded to Italy at the Peace Conference.

While even the occupants of the royal box appeared to incline a willing ear, and the public galleries seethed amid a pandemonium of approval, Premier Mussolini spoke with a venomous suppressed fury as follows: "Let pan-Germans remember that Italy is ready, if necessary, to carry her banners beyond her present frontiers but back? never! . . . The German anti-Italian agitation is nefarious and ridiculous. I call it nefarious because it is based upon a tissue of lies which the Germans themselves know to be lies. I call it ridiculous because the Germans have thought to frighten our young proud Fascist Italy, which is not in the habit of being afraid of any one! . . . We are sufficiently insolent and explicit to substitute a new formula for an old one, since we are furthering the cause of truth and civilization and even of peace. Our new formula is this: 'We exact the payment of two eyes for the loss of only one eye, and of a whole set of teeth for the loss of only one tooth!'

"We will apply rigorously, methodically, obstinately, with a system of cool tenacity which is typical of Facismo, all our laws to the Alto Adige. I refer both to the laws this Chamber has voted and to those it will vote in the future. We will render the Alto Adige Italian because it is Italian, both historically and geographically. The present boundary at the Brenner Pass is a frontier traced by the infallible hand of God!"

The Significance. Easy-going foreigners wondered vaguely, "Why all this fuss about the Tyrolese? Aren't they the people who wear those funny little hats?" To such paragons of unconcern an embittered Tyrolese might have answered as follows: "We of the Southern Tyrol have no great love for either the pan-Italians or the pan-Germans. Before the War 'our country,' rising mountainously on both sides of the higher reaches of the river Adige, was one of the most nearly autonomous regions in the Austrian Empire. The aged Emperor Franz Josef knew how to don our peasant garb and come among us, amiably pretending to be a Tyrolese and speaking our peculiar dialect, just as he used to perform this same gracious gesture among all of his subject peoples. The Habsburgs left us more or less to ourselves; now the Allies have turned us over to the house of Savoy, although every municipal council in our whole territory requested the Peace conference not to annex us to Italy. As to our race, we call ourselves 'Tyrolese.' To the pan-Germans we are German; to the pan-Italians we are Italian. We are all three.

"When the Italians first annexed us, they did not try to 'nationalize' or 'renationalize' us, as they do now. Then Mussolini came. We call him 'The Patron Saint of Painters,' because he first made us paint our street signs in Italian below the old lettering, which was mostly German, and then he made us paint the German out. He suppressed all our German language newspapers, and many of our old people can read only in that tongue. He invoked an old Austrian law which makes it a crime for any one to teach more than three children without a license. On the strength of that, Fascist police raid our homes and carry off German books, even fairy tales, because they charge that mothers with more than three children have been teaching them German without a license. Naturally we fight back against measures like these.

"We do not so much love the pan-Germans, who help us, as hate the pan-Italians, who force our children to attend schools conducted only in Italian and harass us in numberless ways. The truth is that we are a 'frontier people' too weak ever to achieve the independence we would like."