3 Languages Vying : Ethnic Fight Keeps Italy Area Boiling

The heir apparent of an old and wealthy landowning family in this picturesque mountain region of northeast Italy moved to Florence a few years ago and married the daughter of a noble family.

He recently brought his cultured and beautiful wife home to meet his parents and see the family properties that one day would be theirs.

But a few hours after meeting his new daughter-in-law, according to a relative who asked that all the names be withheld, the young man’s distraught father disinherited him and banished him from the family home.

Almost Perfect

“She was the perfect wife in every way, except that she spoke only Italian,” the relative said, “and when she told the old man that she would never learn German or teach her children German, he blew up and cut off his son forever.”

That’s how deep the feelings run among the German-speaking majority in the Alto Adige, the South Tyrol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The area has belonged to Italy since World War I but remains intractably Germanic, sometimes to the point of violence.

In mid-April, for example, anti-Italian extremists believed to be members of a 500-year-old secret organization called Schuetzen, or marksmen, bombed the post office of the small Adige valley town of Postal, about 15 miles from Bolzano.

The attack came late at night and no one was hurt. But it aroused painful memories of two years of hit-and-run bombings in the early 1960s, a period remembered here as the “War of the Pylons” because, although secession from Italy was the goal, pylons carrying electric power lines were the favorite target.

Took Case to U.N.

The War of the Pylons led Austria to place before the United Nations the question of Italian discrimination against the region’s German speakers. The result was an Italian-Austrian agreement in 1969 to balance the rights and privileges of the conflicting language groups.

(As a footnote to history, the agreement was signed by Aldo Moro, at the time Italy’s foreign minister, who was later kidnaped and killed by Red Brigade terrorists, and by Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian foreign minister who became U.N. secretary general and is presently under fire for his Nazi past.)

The agreement has not been fully carried out by Italy. The Schuetzen as well as other extremists have announced that they are fed up with waiting and have even attacked other German-speaking supporters of autonomy, whom they accuse of being too moderate.

Before tossing the bomb at Postal, the extremists smeared the walls of the post office with graffiti assailing Silvius Magnago, the governor of Alto Adige province for almost three decades. Magnago, 72, has spent most of his life pushing for greater Tyrolean autonomy while trying to help German- and Italian-speaking Tyroleans live together in peace.

Magnago was not attacked for lacking the proper Germanic credentials: He lost his left leg while serving with the German army in World War II, and has led the dominant and altogether Germanic Suedtiroler Volkspartei (South Tyrol People’s Party) since 1957. He is probably the region’s most persistent spokesman for the rights of German-speaking people.

Three Languages

He was targeted, he said, because he represents the forces of moderation, which have been seeking since 1919 to institutionalize what he calls legal equilibrium, under Italian rule, among the province’s three conflicting language groups.

The third language is Ladin, but its speakers rarely figure very prominently in the region’s linguistic conflict because most of them are trilingual and they represent only about 4% of the province’s population of 460,000. (Ladin is descended from Latin and several ancient Alpine languages, and is still spoken by small groups of people in Switzerland and northeast Italy.)

The search for equilibrium has been difficult, partly because there are still so many daily reminders in the province of past divisions and hostilities.

One of the most rankling is a monument built by the dictator Benito Mussolini in the 1920s that still stands in Bolzano. The controversial memorial, honoring Italian soldiers killed fighting against Austria in the surrounding mountains during World War I, depicts an angel shooting an arrow north against the Austro-Italian Brenner Pass, less than 50 miles away.

Offensive Inscription

“The whole monument is offensive,” Magnago complained, “especially the writing on it.”

The Latin inscription proclaims, “From this place we colonized the others with language, laws and arts.”

“Sometimes I think we are still an Italian colony,” a German-speaking official in Magnago’s headquarters grumbled, recalling how ruthlessly the Italian dictator tried to stamp out all traces of German here in the 1930s. The German language was forbidden. Names had to be Italianized, even on tombstones, and heavy pressure was applied to force German-speakers to emigrate as Mussolini’s fascists imported tens of thousands of Italian laborers from the south.

“They even invented 8,000 Italian names--every mountain, every stream, every village or group of houses, every street had to have an Italian name,” Magnago said. “It was a violation of history.”

As recently as 10 years ago, when provisions of two postwar international agreements designed to ease the linguistic crisis began to take force, residents were still applying for permission to readopt their Germanic names and drop the once-obligatory Italian names, and to restore Italianized family tombstones.

Autonomous Region

Today all public place names are displayed in both Italian and German, throughout Alto Aldige and Trentino, the neighboring Dolomite Mountains province to the south. Together the two make up a special autonomous region of Italy under the government in Rome.

Although Trentino is almost entirely Italian-speaking, it was politically integrated with the largely German-speaking South Tyrol when Italy assumed control 67 years ago, presumably to guarantee that there would always be an Italian political majority in charge. The result, Magnago said, is that “German speakers still feel like second-class citizens.”

The mixed-language Trentino-Aldo Aldige region is governed under the provisions of two post-World War II agreements between Italy and Austria, the second of which--the Moro-Waldheim agreement of 1969--calls for Italy to set a timetable for legally guaranteeing the rights of all three language groups. In 1972, the Italian Parliament approved a special statute setting a two-year deadline for carrying out a long list of changes.

Although some of the most far-reaching provisions of the law have been carried out, including the allocation of public jobs and housing to members of each language group according to its share of the population under the most recent census, some still have not, 12 years after the deadline.

sh Frozen Out of Jobs

None of the three groups is altogether happy about the provisions that have been established. For example, the city of Bolzano has an Italian majority even though the province is two-thirds German, but because they represent only 29% of the provincial population, the Italians have been frozen out of most of the public jobs and public housing in Bolzano.

Ladin-speaking people, with only a 4% share, get virtually nothing, which recently led Hilda Pizzinini, president of the General Union of Ladins of the Dolomites, to urge cultural unification with fellow Ladin speakers in Switzerland.

Until recently, a new Bolzano hospital was short of doctors because the Italian-speaking quota was filled and there were not enough German-speaking professionals to complete the staff. Local railway offices and the post office faced the same problem.

The language groups have had better luck with public education. Each has its own elementary schools, in which German and Italian are compulsory subjects.

Law a Sore Spot

But a major sore spot has been festering in law courts and police stations ever since the Waldheim-Moro agreement. The autonomy provisions call for a bilingual legal system but, according to Magnago, only 12% of the policemen assigned to the region speak German and few lawyers and judges, aside from some studious native German-speakers, are able to work in both languages.

“How would you like to be arrested by a policeman you can’t understand, charged in a court that can’t comprehend your side of the case and represented by a lawyer who doesn’t speak your language?” asked Paolo Magagnotti, an aide to the Alto Adige-Trentino regional president, Gianni Balzanella.

Magnago said, “Any minority group feels the most violated when it cannot use its own language.” He is urging quick approval by the Rome government of an agreement to use the German language in arrests, interrogations and trials in his province.

“Why are they dragging their heels?” he asked. “Can’t they assign German-speaking policemen and court officials? Before 1919, it was inconceivable that an Austrian gendarme sent to this region would not speak and understand Italian.”

Growing Impatience

While many German speakers have become impatient, so have a growing number of Italians, who fear that the Moro-Waldheim agreement gave away too much. A year ago, they showed their feelings in a local election that saw the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement become the largest party on the Bolzano City Council, with 22% of the votes.

The Italian Social Movement campaigned on a promise to try to repeal many of the concessions to German-speakers.

“They didn’t vote MSI because they had suddenly turned fascist,” Piero Agostini, a Bolzano broadcaster, said. “Its just that so much autonomy for the German-speakers has been presented to the Italians at a price they are not mentally prepared to pay.”

Agostini has written a book on the South Tyrol question entitled, “The Postponed Cohabitation.”

Andrea Mitolo, a spokesman for the MSI, said: “As long as the Germans equivocate about which country they belong to, they will be considered untrustworthy. Italians are tired of provocations, of criticism on racist grounds. We have a saying here: ‘Deal firmly with the Germans or you will end up bowing your head to them.’ ”